THEY ARRIVE AT SUNSET, slipping beneath pastel clouds as the sun slips into the sea. For a moment it seems to Alison that the plane, too, will slip into the sea, but the tarmac rushes beneath them just in time. As the plane brakes down the runway, a ghostly whoosh fills the cabin. The minute it subsides, her parents and the majority of the white passengers unbuckle their seat belts and stand to retrieve their things from the overhead compartments: carry-ons, rackets, straw hats. Her dad edges out another dad in the aisle. A third dad edges out her dad. The pilot comes on the intercom and requests that everyone remain seated, but he is ignored. Heaven forbid their vacations start thirty seconds later. Once the plane door opens and people begin to move, her dad looks back at the black woman he had been seated beside on the flight; “Welcome home,” he says to her, before hurrying along. When they get to baggage claim, the carousel is empty and motionless. Everyone prowls around it, staking out the most strategic position. Ten minutes pass. A guy with a winter coat unzipped to reveal a Hawaiian shirt walks past her muttering, “Unbelievable.” She smiles. Let these dopes wait.
“You know that woman next to me on the plane was a lawyer?” her dad says to her mom on the walk to the arrival gate, once their luggage finally arrives. “She’s from here. She was just in New York on vacation.”
“Huh,” her mom says.
“Imagine that, Dad. They have lawyers here,” Alison says.
The shuttle to the resort is late, too. Alison’s family stands on the curb with two other families, next to a white sign with gold letters that say INDIGO BAY, for quite some time. Everybody grouses and makes small talk. The other families are from the Upper East Side and Bedford Hills. The irony of traveling over a thousand miles to spend the week talking to other people from the New York metropolitan area does not seem to be dawning on anyone. The moms talk to the moms. The dads talk to the dads.
“How old are you?” Alison’s mom asks a girl who must have changed out of her winter clothes in the airport bathroom—she is wearing bike shorts and a cropped T-shirt with a rhinestone heart.
“Twelve,” the girl says wearily.
“She’s on a birthday trip!” her mother says.
“Mom, why are we waiting?” the girl asks.
“I don’t know, sweetie. Daddy booked this vacation.”
When at last the shuttle arrives, the driver begins to load their suitcases.
“Is all of this going to fit in there?” a dad says, looking skeptically into the back of the van.
“Not a chance,” Alison’s dad contributes.
They are wrong, everything fits, and soon they are pulling away from the airport. On the drive to the resort, the small talk continues, but Alison doesn’t hear it. Her face is pressed to the window. She sees scruffy dogs and houses with rebar sticking up out of the roofs. Three goats bite at the dirt outside of a small white building with a shingle out front: CENTRE FOR DENTAL AESTHETICS. Everywhere she sees piles of … stuff. Rubble? Junk? Supplies of some kind. There are houses with porches but no railings. A white concrete staircase ascends out of the scrub, the top step touching only air. As she watches the world pass by, she is filled with disquiet at her inability to parse the things she sees. Are the diminutive chickens pecking at the side of the road malnourished, or are they some breed of chicken she has never seen before, or is this what a chicken is supposed to look like? Do they belong to someone or no one? Is this place in the process of being built or unbuilt or rebuilt or none of these—maybe something is happening here that she lacks the experience to comprehend.
The van trundles past a girl standing in a yard along the road; she wears a purple T-shirt and yellow cotton shorts. When they drive by, she runs into the road and chases after them. Then she plants herself in the middle of the road, puts her hands on her hips, and thrusts out her tongue. The shuttle judders on over the uneven road and the girl disappears into the haze of dust and twilight.
Alison is mortified to be in an air-conditioned van with her family and her fellow resort guests driving past it all. In her Global Justice class, she learned that two billion people, more than a third of the humans on earth, live on less than two dollars a day. (Are the people on this island those people? Are the things out the van window poverty, or just people living their lives? She doesn’t know how she would even begin to know.) Anyway, it’s not like she didn’t know people were poor before—she isn’t a complete idiot. In high school she volunteered at a soup kitchen. But her lasting memory of that experience is not of bearing witness to poverty, or of any good she did; it’s of the men … looking at her, calling her pretty with their ruined mouths. “You’re coming home with me, little girl,” a man in a giant tan parka told her one night. He pointed his index finger at her, then curled it toward himself and laughed madly. She felt afraid, though she was pretty sure he was messing with her, making himself into a caricature to mock her—like, Boo! The acrid smell of male bodies and the simultaneous unease and pleasure she felt in their gaze—this is what she has kept.
So the things she sees out the window do not raise her awareness, or whatever. They just mortify her. An old woman limping down the road. The accusation of that little girl’s sharp pink tongue. That girl is really millions of girls. You cannot permit yourself to forget that. How is she supposed to square millions of these girls with her own life? And how, in turn, to square millions of girls with a trillion trillion stars? She has been born on the one temperate, unhostile planet in the universe, in the richest country on that planet, into a family whose wealth places them at the tippy top of that country. It is a disgusting amount of luck. You could never be forgiven for such good fortune. Sometimes, when she thinks of her teeny-weeny life and how obsessed she is with it, she feels physically sick.
She is also mortified that she will spend the next week darkening her skin on a chaise lounge alongside other oil-slathered tourists, while people whose skin is darker than hers will ever be (and darker than she wants hers to be) bring her beverages and fresh towels. And she is mortified that her parents see nothing wrong with the whole arrangement. No, that isn’t exactly right. They do see something wrong with it, but they think something along the lines of, We’re fortunate, they’re unfortunate, and it’s neither our fault nor theirs because we are all part of something that is beyond any of us, and we just as easily could have been born them and they just as easily could have been born us, but we weren’t, so here we are. Welcome to paradise. Honestly? She doesn’t even want to be here.
HER FIRST night at Indigo Bay, after her sister is asleep, she walks out onto the balcony to look at the stars. The warm breeze ripples against her skin. Venus burns a cold, clear blue. She unzips her dress. Just because she can. You can stand on a balcony and have an utterly ordinary moment, or you can let your dress fall to the cool terra-cotta tiles, unhook your bra, and offer yourself up to the night. Possibilities are everywhere, hidden in the fist of each moment, yet most people don’t see them, or they see them but leave them untouched.
She wishes she could see the picture she makes with the white curtains billowing behind her, hair fluttering in the wind, breasts lit by a fingernail of moon. She surveys the resort grounds below her. No one. This pleases her, not because she would be embarrassed to be seen, but because it means this is a secret moment. Hers alone, then, poof! Gone. When she thinks of all the secret moments locked within this instant—of all the people on earth doing things no one will ever know—her heart feels so full it could crack.
She looks at the starry sky, the dark shimmering sea, and tries to savor the beauty of it all, but she can’t get herself to really feel it. The view from the balcony bleeds together with too many other views on other vacations in other paradises. Which island had the pink sand beach? Which one had those zippy orange birds? Where was it you could wade out a quarter mile from shore before the water deepened? Somewhere she saw a sunset like a bloody sacrifice and a woman tossing white petals into the surf. She is eighteen and beauty already seems such a cheap thing. She can behold it and behold it without feeling a thing.
SHE SLEEPS late, then spends an embarrassing amount of time appraising herself in the mirror in the marble bathroom before making her entrance on the beach. When she finally emerges, her family is already set up, with a row of four chairs with white cushions in the shade of two white umbrellas. These resorts often have an obsession with white. White buildings, white floors, white linens, white uniforms. Like they’re trying to convince you you’ve died and gone to heaven, or like you’ve arrived at some hedonistic sanatorium because you’re afflicted by something and you didn’t even know it but now you will heal.
Her parents start talking at her. Cruise ship, slide, something, something. She pulls one of the lounge chairs into the sun and lies down. She takes out her Walkman and lets “Big Poppa” drown her dad out. A minute later her father hails one of the beach waiter guys like he’s a cab. Awful. But the guy doesn’t seem to notice, or care, or something. She turns up the volume on her Walkman and pulls the headphones down around her neck, hoping he’ll hear what song she’s listening to. He introduces himself. He’s Edwin. He is skinny and super-friendly with her parents, like all his life he’s dreamed of meeting the Thomases of Westchester, who are totally eating it up. Her dad orders her a fruit punch, which … she guesses he can inhabit whatever alternate reality he wants.
When Edwin comes back, he’s hunched under the weight of a tray of excessively garnished cocktails and she wants to disappear, because lying on this chaise lounge while he labors is so uncomfortable. The thing she can’t figure out is, if she is honest with herself, she does not find this arrangement uncomfortable because a person is doing something for her, but because a black person is doing something for a white person. Which doesn’t mean she doesn’t want him to have his job. So what does it mean, exactly?
When he asks if she’ll come play in the volleyball game in the afternoon, she shrugs, tells him maybe.
“More of a sunbather, are we?” he says.
Her entire body flushes. Not me! she wants to tell him. I’m not just some ditzy sun worshipper. But there is no way to convey this without protesting too much and coming off even worse.
He winks at her and continues down the beach.
Her fruit punch, actually, is delicious. The sun on her skin is delicious. Maybe she is wrong to have such a stick up her ass about the whole situation. Maybe she should, as a general thing, just shut up and be grateful. But lately she is beginning to suspect that gratitude (as an emotion, as an action) is a colossal scam. Rich, poor, it doesn’t matter—everyone is expected to be grateful for what they have, whatever that is. Once, in high school, she snuck into the city with her girlfriends to smoke clove cigarettes in Washington Square Park and try to get invited to an NYU party, and on the way downtown from Grand Central they had a taxi driver who’d been a chemical engineer in Pakistan. When she asked if it frustrated him to do what he did now, he said no, just the opposite, he was grateful. It was a familiar story. In my country I was a lawyer, I was a doctor, I was a professor, but I’m grateful to drive this taxi in America, I’m grateful to bus these dishes in America, I’m grateful to clean up the vomit of fraternity brothers in this dormitory at an Ivy League university in America. Meanwhile, Alison is expected to be grateful for her Audi, and for she doesn’t even know how much her parents pay for her college tuition, and for their beautiful vacations and the beautiful teeth she possesses after years of orthodontia. So what is gratitude, really, but reverence for a system that gives and deprives at random? No, not at random. The non-randomness is exactly the point, right?
THAT AFTERNOON when she hears Edwin yelling about the volleyball game, she pushes herself up from her chaise lounge. She will show him who she is.
“Want to come watch me play, Clairey?”
Her sister’s face lights up at the invitation. Sometimes her power to make her sister happy terrifies her.
She’s nervous when she pulls her tunic up over her head. Though she knows she’s pretty, cute, arguably even sexy in a girl-next-door way, she is always nervous when she reveals her scar to people for the first time. She isn’t insecure about it, exactly; it’s more like the nervousness she feels at a dance recital just before she leaps onto the empty stage.
When her torso is exposed, it happens like it always does. Her teammates stare with the obviousness of cattle. When she catches them at it, they avert their eyes oh-so-politely. She loves catching people looking at her scar, shaming them with a glance.
As the players manage the ball back and forth over the net in sequences of sloppy bumps and sets, she imagines them imagining what happened to her. A wash of dark scenarios projects like a movie montage against the limpid blue sky. She sees herself thrown from a car onto one of those boggy meadows beside the highway, gnashed by a neighbor’s Akita, cut open on a surgeon’s table.
The real story is her favorite, but she guards it closely, not wanting to dull it by too frequent visitation. She was four. It was summer, and her family, which did not yet include Claire, was at a campground on a lake. They went every summer, and she never liked it. The bottom of the lake was soft, like stepping in dead things. It was night. She was sitting around a fire with her parents roasting marshmallows. Her parents turned away for a moment and when they looked back, she was in the fire. Her father dove in and scooped her out—she was in the flames for only a few seconds, just long enough to be marked by them forever. At the hospital, when her parents and the nurses asked her what happened, she just shook her head, unable to explain. As her parents tell the story, it is a mystery: whether she tripped and fell or whether, dazzled by the flames or propelled by some wild impulse, she jumped.
“I could have died,” she told Drew the first time she let him see it. When he touched the smooth, pink surface of the scar gently with his fingertips, as if it might still hurt, she loved him. It’s true—she could have died. In a way, her whole life grows out of that moment. Edwin will begin to see it now: she is a person to whom things have happened.
A woman on her team is talking through the earth-shattering conundrum of whether she and her husband should go on the excursion to the old sugar estate and rum distillery. “I wanted to go, but I’ve heard it’s a drag. Apparently it’s mostly about the history of sugar cultivation on the island, the plantation system and that stuff?”
That stuff, i.e., slavery? Alison purses her lips to indicate to Edwin that she does not approve of the woman’s comment. She hears everything her teammates say twice—once as herself, and once as she imagines he hears it. The woman’s husband, a man with dolphins on his pink swim trunks, serves the ball into the net.
“Almost, honey,” the woman says. “I would just like to have a week here where I don’t have to think about how awful the world is. I’m a defense attorney. I know it’s awful.”
Fair enough? Alison isn’t sure. You don’t get to decide, do you, when to care and when not to care, when to see the big picture and when to zoom in so super-close on your own life that your desire for a massage fills your entire field of vision?
There are a few other college kids playing, and they set about the unavoidable business of identifying the hall mates, teammates, bunkmates that connect them. “Small world,” remarks a boy who initially says he goes to school in Connecticut, and only when prodded lets “Yale” cross his lips, a confession he makes with an irreproachable mix of sheepishness and élan. Small world. Small world. Like it is some crazy cosmic coincidence, rich people overlapping with other rich people. If he weren’t so cute—yellow-haired and tall, with a certain anemic quality she finds appealing—she would be done with him already. Instead, she flirts.
The other girl her age squeals when the ball comes near her. She adjusts her bikini top to maintain just the right revelation of boob. She says, “Did I do good?” in a baby voice when she sets up a spike for one of the guys. Alison doesn’t get it. Okay, fine, she gets it. In a way you can hardly blame the girl, because it works. The boy with the hemp necklace is eating it up. But can someone please explain to her the appeal of a guy who can be reeled in by that kind of thing? What you want is a guy who is a little afraid of you. And you want to be a little afraid of him, too.
While the other girl swats the scary ball away, Alison leaps and spikes and pushes off powerfully from the sand. She can feel eyes on her—Connecticut boy’s, Edwin’s. A vacation is its own world, compressed and powerful, like a planet with stronger gravity. If you play it right, it can teach you things about yourself you can’t learn the other 358 days of the year. It is her first day here and already it is happening. The vacation is finding its promise.
When the game is over, Connecticut boy approaches her. She can smell his sweat. It makes her think of Drew, salty and nice. He tells her about the bar in the white marble lobby where the liquor is watered down but where he’ll be, anyway, tonight, around ten P.M. He touches his hand to her shoulder, then trots off down the sand.
I MIGHT have it all wrong. Maybe Alison did not stand naked on the balcony on our first night on Saint X. Perhaps she did not play volleyball with such vim and vigor in order to impress a boy from Yale, on the one hand, and a local employee, on the other. Perhaps the scar on her stomach was not her most sacred vanity. I’m trying to triangulate the truth, to inhabit my sister’s mind. Impossible tasks, to be sure.
What I can say is this: While the details of this story may be products of my imagination, I trust its broad strokes and core themes. I believe that for my sister, our family vacation coincided with one of those brief, intense intervals of identity formation we all experience from time to time in our lives. She arrived at Indigo Bay at that critical moment when the girl cuts herself on the shards of her own reflection and watches, baffled and thrilled, as the blood begins to flow.
ALISON WEARS her pale pink slip dress. Her “fuck-me, I’m-a-baby” dress, as summarized by her friend Dan, who was in love with her but not something enough for her to consider a viable romantic option.
Connecticut is already there.
“Hey,” she says, exquisitely low-key.
“Hey.”
He is drinking a rum and Coke. He is even cuter than she remembered from earlier. He has one of those old-fashioned faces, the kind you can picture in black-and-white. For a moment she sees him in an army uniform and one of those little caps. The image excites her—a young man in the trenches, the secret personal sufferings of war, but also the part where she takes him and implants him in this scene while he sits here next to her in his button-down and has no idea that in her mind his face is smudged with dirt and he is living on rations of tinned meat.
She orders a tequila shot. She opens her throat and drinks it in one go, and though it burns she does not permit herself to react. She is a girl in a tiny pink dress, downing tequila like a champ.
They talk. In addition to playing cello in the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Connecticut is a German major.
“Why German?” she asks.
“I wanted to be able to read Rilke in the original.” He rolls his eyes at himself, which she recognizes as the correct move. Nobody likes a snob, but everybody likes the discernment that allows for snobbery.
“How do you say, ‘You must change your life,’ in German?” she asks, raising her eyebrows like, Of course I read Rilke. Actually, she doesn’t—she remembers this quote from a paper she wrote freshman year of high school comparing and contrasting Rilke and, for some reason, Keats. She got an A. Mr. Conti put the paper up on the projector as a positive example.
“Du musst dein Leben verwandeln,” Connecticut says. “Or something like that. So what about you? Do you know what you’re going to major in?”
“Probably something that will drive my parents crazy.”
They talk awhile longer, letting the thing build. He asks if she wants to go for a walk and she says yes. He charges her drinks to his room, which would be romantic if his parents weren’t obviously paying for it. They leave the bar for the beach. They kick off their shoes. The sand is soft and cool as cream. For a few minutes they walk along the water’s edge, their fingertips brushing against each other’s, letting their banter slow and the force of the night and this thing they are creating together fill them. When they reach a cabana he gestures at it, she nods, and he takes her hand and leads her in. Easiest thing in the world.
She has kissed quite a few boys since Drew, and Connecticut is particularly enjoyable. He does not use his tongue a lot, which she likes, because sometimes in the midst of making out with a boy she will think about what a tongue actually is and feel paralyzed. He kisses her neck a lot and she likes that, too. It is all very, very nice. But there is something about this niceness that doesn’t sit right. She feels it like a cold gel applied to the moment. She is moving through this scenario the way she would work through a math problem she knows she will get right.
She knows why it is so easy for her, this and so much else. She knows the substance of the reserves inside herself that make the world a comfortable place to navigate. It is her mother and father loving her like crazy. It is the dappled lawn of her childhood home with its soft mown stripes of green and darker green. It is “fantastic insight!” written in a teacher’s delicious cursive in the margin of an essay. It is the gothic magnificence of the Princeton campus, through which she strolled all autumn in mesh shorts and flip-flops and a messy ponytail. It is every witticism she’s ever tossed off in a circle at a party and the impressed faces of the people who heard it. It is the people she knows and their reserves—their happy childhoods, their bright memories, their educations, all the beauty they have seen, out and out like ripples on the glassy surface of a pool in a secret glade they carry collectively within them. They are spinning it together, she and Connecticut, good fortune igniting on itself under the tropical stars. Is there anything more obvious in the entire world?
When he touches her thigh under her dress, she freezes. Not actually freezes. She keeps doing what they’re doing. But inside. She is not very experienced, truth be told. She was with Drew forever, but she’s learned in the past few months that all that experience is actually just one experience. They were babies when they started dating and they figured everything out together, and what if they figured it out weird? She hasn’t had an orgasm with anyone else and she knows it’s because she’s afraid that if she does, the guy will look at her funny because her orgasms are weird and she didn’t know it. She doesn’t want to be here anymore. She wants to take the nice kissing with her and leave.
She presses a finger delicately to his lips. “I should go,” she whispers.
“Are you sure?” He strokes her thigh higher up this time. It is the first thing he does that she doesn’t like. He looks down at his lap, where his boner pushes against his khaki shorts. Her stomach flips. Back in her room with her sleeping sister—that’s where she wants to be.
“I’m sure.” She scrunches her nose, cute as a button.
He wraps his arms around her waist. “But I want to kidnap you,” he says, and buries his face in her hair.
“Not tonight,” she says.
“Tomorrow?”
“We’ll see.”
She stands, smooths her dress. He reaches for her hand, and she holds his for a moment, then lets it slip through her fingers as she turns and walks back toward the lights of the resort.
“TELL ME something,” her father says the next day, as Clive gathers up the french fries he spilled in the sand. “Where do you recommend for some local food? You know, something authentic.”
Alison winces. Her father asks this every year, at every resort, on his bullshit search for some local color, the Real Wherever. She can’t stand how pleased he is with his question, like he expects Clive to be super-impressed by his desire to get off the beaten path. (Does he think Clive wants his favorite local spot to be invaded by hordes of tourists?) Her father wants to be able to say, Now, this is delicious, of the conch creole at some hole-in-the-wall, whether or not it is better than the conch creole served at Indigo Bay. Her mother wants to tell the cook on the way out, You have a beautiful restaurant, with her sweet little smile, when the truth is if she thought folding chairs and ceiling fans instead of AC were so great, she’d eat at places like this back home, too, which of course she doesn’t. Then her father wants to take his mediocre photos of the place and blow them up and hang them on the living room wall so their friends will inquire about them at dinner parties and he can tell them about this amazing little spot he discovered.
That isn’t fair. As parents go, hers aren’t so bad. Isn’t it better at least to have the inclination to leave the bubble? Well, maybe better for them, but shouldn’t the people who live here get to keep some places to themselves? But maybe the people who live here want people like her parents to come to their restaurants; maybe her notion that they’d rather the tourists and their money stay away is just that, a naïve little notion. She could go around like this forever, trying to decide.
“People like Spicy’s. Their roast crayfish is quite popular,” Clive says.
“Roast crayfish,” her father says. “Fantastic.”
LATER THAT afternoon, Alison finds Edwin standing behind the open-air restaurant. “Hey, Mr. Carnival Sandcastle Champion.”
“Watch out. The girl’s feeling frisky today.”
She snorts.
A cook calls out from the kitchen, “Order up!”
“Duty calls?”
“Nonstop till three.”
“What’s at three?”
“Break. I usually take it down there, past those rocks at the end of the beach.”
WHEN THE hour comes, her parents are snoozing away. She tells her sister she’s going to the bathroom. At the jagged black rocks that mark the end of Indigo Bay, she scrambles up and over, stumbling, then regaining her footing. She crests the rocks and sees Edwin sitting in the sand. He looks up.
“What are you doing here?” he says sternly. For a moment she worries she misunderstood. Then he tosses back his head and laughs.
“Ha ha,” she says. “You’re hysterical.”
The beach here isn’t groomed like it is around the resort. You can barely see the sand, it’s so covered in stuff: green beer bottles, nests of odorous seaweed studded with cigarette butts. Three tires tied together with yellow rope. An old cardboard campaign poster with a picture of a woman in a blazer, the blazer still bright red, the woman’s face so faded she looks like a ghost. She has to step carefully as she makes her way to him. He’s eating fried fish out of a grease-spotted paper bag and smoking a cigarette.
“You know those will kill you,” she says as she sits down beside him.
“Only if something else doesn’t kill me first.”
She nods at the cigarette with her chin. “May I?”
“I insist, miss.”
She rolls her eyes at this word. Miss. She likes the way he calls her this with a subversive smile, like they’re in on something together. He passes her the cigarette and she takes a slow, assured drag. As she exhales, she looks out at the water and tries to work her face into an expression that suggests she finds something very personally meaningful there. She passes the cigarette back to him.
“If you’re looking for something more, me and Gogo usually lime in the car park for a bit after work. Smoke some herb, you dig?”
“Oh, I dig.”
“Maybe we’ll see you there sometime.”
She shrugs. “Maybe. Anyway, I should get back before they send out a search party.” She stands and brushes the sand from her legs.
“You’re bleeding,” he says.
She looks at her calf. She must have cut herself when she stumbled; a few long scratches bubble with red blood. She shrugs again.
“Tough girl.”
“Oh, yeah. So tough.”
“How did you get that?” He is pointing at her scar. She feels filled by a gust of bright wind. It is happening so right, his eyes riveted to the pink glaze on her stomach.
“I don’t like to talk about it.” It’s like the words find her. She turns and walks back the way she came. She doesn’t glance behind her once.
AT THE end of the day she makes her way to the parking lot. She finds Edwin and Clive leaning against a shabby, eggplant-colored car.
“Miss! What a fine surprise to see you here!” Edwin says.
She rolls her eyes. “Right. What a coincidence. What are you two upstanding gentlemen up to, I wonder?”
Clive stiffens.
Edwin slips a joint from his pocket. “Nothing much.” He twirls it in his fingers.
“Mind if I do nothing much with you?”
ALISON’S FATHER summons Edwin to their chairs.
“What can I be getting for you this afternoon?” Edwin asks.
“How’s the penne?” her father asks, which makes Alison want to crawl into a hole and die.
“Excellent, sir.”
They place their lunch orders.
“And to drink, a Red Stripe for me and a rum punch for my wife. Girls?” her father says.
“Sprite,” Claire says, then adds in a whisper, “with a cherry.”
“Your wish is my command, little miss. And you?” he says to Alison. He doesn’t use her name, as if he doesn’t know it.
“I’d love a daiquiri.”
“Virgin,” her father says.
“Of course,” Edwin says, at the same time as Alison says, “I thought that was implied, Dad.”
When Edwin returns with their order, Alison takes a delicate sip of her daiquiri. It’s full of rum. She looks at him. He has his eyes on her, steady. He puts her father’s tip in his back pocket and continues down the beach.
“I NEEDED that,” she says later, when she finds him beyond the black rocks.
“You’re most welcome, miss,” he says.
“Stop calling me that,” she says, and leans her body playfully against his.
It’s a clear day. Faraway Cay appears unsettlingly close.
“So how are you enjoying your holiday?”
“It’s fun I guess,” she says. “My parents are driving me nuts.”
“Family’s always that way. You need a break.”
“Seriously.”
“Come out tonight. With me and Gogo.”
“Out where?”
“We lime at a place in the Basin. We can pick you up in the car park. Eleven P.M. Just make sure it’s all right with your parents, okay, miss?” His eyes twinkle.
“Right. I’ll be sure to secure their permission.”
“You’ll come, then?”
A hermit crab scuttles across the sand. She picks it up and holds the shell close to her lips, then blows gently across the opening, drawing its legs out into the air.
“We’ll see,” she says, with a sly smile she thinks irresistible on her lips. She stands and begins to walk away. When she reaches the rocks, she glances back. He has his eyes on her, watching her go.
ONCE HER sister is asleep, she changes out of her pajamas and into the outfit she decided on that afternoon, her yellow dress with the plunging neckline. She glances one last time at her sleeping sister before closing the door quietly behind her and stepping out into the warm night. The resort late at night is a vacant place—lounge chairs stacked six feet high on the sand, the fertile scent of washed clay rising from the tennis courts, everything dark save the dim illumination of lanterns along the gravel footpaths. The water has changed, too; the ocean is glossy and black as oil, the pool glows ghostly green. Every surface echoes her nervy energy back at her.
She can hear the distant sounds of chatter and merriment at the hotel bar. So satisfied with their margaritas and Marley. She imagines Connecticut sitting at the bar, looking over his shoulder frequently to see if she’s coming. She feels his lips on her neck, dry and nice like warm stones. She sees his blue eyes under the thick fringe of his lashes. She shakes the image away. It is to be expected, this residue of desire, this lazy craving.
What does she want from tonight? She’s not totally sure. She knows only that she wants these men to take her somewhere new, out past the familiar borders of her life. She is only waiting in the parking lot a few minutes when the eggplant-colored car pulls in.
“Look who decided to grace us with she presence,” Edwin says.
“It was a tough decision. There are so many fun things to do at the hotel at night.”
She climbs in the backseat. The car smells strongly of body odor and air freshener. The seats are upholstered, and the fabric is held together with tape where it has ripped open to reveal beige foam. In her head, she’s sitting on her bed in her dorm room, telling Nika, Then I snuck out with them and we went to this great local dive. She loves the feeling that she is doing something she probably shouldn’t with men who scare her a little. Life is about escalation: men instead of boys; a wilder wild night; more and more and more. In her mind, she sends the image of her in the car with these men to Drew. He sees her and is worried, and his worry makes her swoon and long for him. But the feeling passes quickly, and then she pities him. She has left him so far behind that he is nothing but a nice little memory. Besides, what could possibly happen to her on a tiny island where everyone knows everyone?
“What’s this place we’re going to?” she asks.
“Paulette’s,” Edwin says. “Best dance spot on the island.”
“Do you dance, Clive?” she asks playfully.
Edwin palms Clive’s head with his hand and rubs it. “Gogo’s a fantastic dancer. Just you wait to see his moves. Isn’t that so, mate?”
Clive turns to look back at her and makes an expression that is a smile but not really.
Paulette’s is more of a shack, honestly, the exterior strung with orange Christmas lights. Inside, there is a plank floor covered in sawdust, speakers spitting tinny music, the smells of sweat and liquor, an old mutt sniffing the ground for scraps. There are maybe twenty people, some dancing but most just talking. Alison sees a woman she thinks she recognizes as a waitress at the resort restaurant, but she isn’t positive—black people do look similar to her; it’s embarrassing but it isn’t her fault, is it, that she’s been raised in a white place and made white friends and had sex with exclusively white men? Well, three of them, anyway.
Nobody seems surprised to see her here with Edwin and Clive. It occurs to her she is probably not the first girl from the resort they’ve brought here, but did she think she was? She did not. She isn’t an idiot.
“I’ll get drinks,” Edwin says. “You keep the Goges company.”
She stands with Clive at the edge of the dance floor, which isn’t an actual dance floor but an area marked off with yellow electrical tape. She smiles warmly at him and he smiles uncomfortably back.
“Do you guys come here a lot?” she asks over the din.
“Quite often, miss.”
“You don’t have to call me ‘miss,’ you know.”
“I’m sorry, m—” He looks down, shakes his head at himself.
“It’s fine. Seriously.”
He looks out at the dance floor, like it is an absorbing show he doesn’t want to tear himself away from. She knows he’s just trying to fill the time until Edwin gets back. He doesn’t know how to talk to her.
“I brought you something special,” Edwin says when he returns. He hands Alison a shot glass filled with something murky—it looks like the water in Claire’s fish tank when she hasn’t cleaned it in too long. “See if you can guess the secret ingredient.”
Alison holds the glass up to the light. “What is it?”
“Do you trust me?”
Does she?
“Yeah,” she says coolly. She snaps her head back and takes the shot in one gulp. “It just tastes like grass.”
He claps his hands. “That’s a fact. Vodka infused with fine Jamaican ganja.”
“It’s not bad,” she says. She laughs. “It’s actually pretty good.”
“You going to drink any fool thing he hand you?”
She turns. A woman is standing a few inches away from her, looking at her critically. She wonders if the women here all watched her gulping down the mystery drink and thought, Dumb, dumb, dumb.
The woman breaks into a laugh. “I’m just playing,” she says. “He’s all right. He’s real sweet.”
“This is Paulette she self,” Edwin says.
“Nice to meet you,” Alison says reflexively.
Paulette smirks at her, amused. God, she feels clueless.
“She’s bent all the time to messing up my game,” Edwin says.
“Is this your game?” Alison says, eyebrows raised.
Paulette laughs. “She’s a live one.”
She is doing it. She is really doing it. A live one.
“Do you want to dance?” Edwin asks.
“With you?”
“Sassy.”
She takes his hand and pulls him onto the dance floor.
I SEARCHED for Paulette’s Place online but found no trace of it. It must have closed sometime in the intervening years. I do not know what the bar where Alison was seen with Edwin and Clive really looked like. I know only that it was in the Basin and that, according to several witnesses, Alison was there four nights in a row, including on the last night of her life. But I have a mental picture of the place to which, in this version of things, Alison reacts. When she sees my Paulette’s, she is pleased by its shabby authenticity, which affirms that she’s found the real fun to be had on the island, something better than the lame hotel bar where empty-nesters stay up past their bedtimes slinging tequila and laughing at their milquetoast naughtiness.
Is the bar I’ve created a terrible cliché? If so, how much does it matter? What happens if you replace the wood floor coated in sawdust with a proper dance floor? What if you nix the mutt and add a cocktail waitress, sub a sound system for the tinny speakers on the bar? Now what does Alison think, say, do? What quantity of truth resides within a story’s details?
ALISON SITS on the putting green at Indigo Bay in her purple bikini and watches Connecticut drive golf balls into the lagoon. They are alone, at the far edge of the property. On the putting green there is a golf bag stuffed with clubs and a tin bucket of balls, special ones that float. At some later time, Alison assumes, a staff member will go out onto the water in a boat to collect them. So much effort so that they may have this moment.
The lagoon is a wide stretch of shallow water separated from the ocean by dunes and a thicket of sea grape. This spot feels private, secret. She understands this is why he has brought her here. She recognizes the strategy of this, but she can still feel the place working on her. It’s quiet. The only sounds are the swoop of the club, the crack as it makes contact with the ball and, after the passage of an impossible number of moments, the distant plunk of the ball slipping into the water.
“You’re good,” she says. She sits with her legs straight out in front of her, leaning back and propped up on her elbows.
“I’m just okay,” he says with a shrug that makes her heart skip.
She feels him taking in the inches of her. It’s so easy it makes her want to wring the sky—his wanting and her not giving and his wanting more.
It begins to rain. The first drops cool her sunburned shoulders.
“Should we go back?” she asks.
“A little rain never killed anyone,” he says. She can tell he likes how it sounds. He swings and sends a ball whooshing out over the water.
When it begins to pour, he slots the club back into the bag and sits down beside her. He tucks a wet strand of hair behind her ear. He leans in to kiss her, and she kisses him back. Then she pulls away.
What’s wrong with her? Why can’t she give this to herself? Ivy boy and Ivy girl, la-di-da, easy peasy, ashes ashes we all fall down. It makes her … what? Embarrassed? Ashamed? She could kiss him, and then they could have sex in a secluded corner of a resort on a tropical island as the rain falls around them. For a moment she wishes with everything she has that she were a different girl, one who would see this possibility as the pinnacle of something.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Whatever.”
SHE SEEKS out Edwin and Clive more frequently. In the afternoons, she sneaks away to meet Edwin past the black rocks. She wakes at dawn and swims in the ocean while they set up the lounge chairs on the beach for the day. Before they depart in the evening, she finds them in the parking lot and they pass around a joint. She learns that they have a sideline keeping the guests of Indigo Bay supplied with marijuana and, occasionally, harder stuff—cocaine and Ecstasy, mostly.
“Sometimes we forget to pass on a small amount to our customer,” Edwin says one afternoon.
“So technically this joint is the property of a stockbroker from Millburn?” she says.
“Maybe so.”
“So are you, like, stoned all the time at work?”
“Not all the time, miss,” Clive says with a grin—the first time she’s seen him actually smile.
Her whole body feels charged with the delicious secret they’ve divulged. She has been chosen, brought to the other side of the wall that separates tourist from local. They tell her about the soca band that will be playing at Paulette’s later that week; about the cup of spittle Nestor the bartender keeps under the bar, next to the maraschino cherries. When Clive asks, Alison declares college “pretty boring.” When Edwin prods him, Clive recounts the story of a guest who crashed a Sunfish into a fishing boat in the bay.
“Tourists,” Alison scoffs, then blushes.
Edwin asks her about New York. He tells her he has a cousin there, in Queensbridge.
“Cool,” she says with an air of native authority, as if she has any clue where Queensbridge is; as if, when she was a kid and the school bus took them through Harlem en route to midtown for field trips—museums, Broadway—she didn’t press her face to the bus windows with the other kids and stare at the spectacle of a world of black people. “I was born in the city,” she adds after a pause. “My parents lived in this tiny apartment on the Lower East Side. It’s this immigrant neighborhood.”
Clive and Edwin nod blankly in response. Her face burns. She wanted them to know her family hasn’t always been filthy rich, but it didn’t land how she wanted. What’s wrong with her, bragging about how her parents were poor for, like, five minutes, before she was even born? She’s been doing this kind of thing at college, too. Just the other day she told Nika a story from last summer at her family’s “cottage” at the shore, and now she’s stuck, because she wants to invite Nika out there to visit this summer, but then not only will Nika see just how rich Alison’s family is, she will also know that Alison is the kind of person who refers to a huge freaking beach house as a cottage, which is even worse than the huge freaking house itself. It’s not just her, though. Every rich kid at college does this. They all have a “cottage,” or forebears they seem very keen to talk about who came to America from some shtetl or Irish potato farm, or they’re “from Chicago” when really they live in Winnetka. (In the past three months she has learned the fancy suburbs surrounding all of the major cities in the country.) They are pathological minimizers, telling their half-truths and hoping for some kind of credit.
“It drives me nuts that my parents moved out of the city to raise us,” she says, changing tack. “I mean, you’re in the greatest city on earth, and you leave for some lame suburb?”
“But isn’t New York quite dangerous?” Clive asks.
She shrugs. “You just have to pay attention.”
ONE EVENING when she is standing with them in the parking lot after work, Clive proposes they go down to the water for a swim.
“I’m game,” Alison says.
“Nah, nah. My boy’s stalling,” Edwin says with a mirthful shake of his head.
“Am not. The water’s just looking nice today.”
“Gogo has to go see he baby boy and take the shit from he lady,” Edwin says with a gleam in his eye.
“You have a kid?” she says. She’s been hanging out with them for days and this is the first she’s heard of any baby. The information tickles her. In her head, she tells Nika, Then Clive had to go take care of his son, as if it doesn’t ruffle her at all.
Clive’s face has gone blank. Maybe he doesn’t care about the kid. Or maybe he does care about him and he’s ashamed to be standing here getting stoned with Edwin and some girl while his child waits for him and he doesn’t want to think about it.
“He’ll make three soon,” he says softly.
“Wait. Are you married?”
Clive shakes his head.
“Relax, Goges.” Edwin claps a hand on his friend’s big shoulder. “If Sara never consents to marry you, more time to lime with me.”
Clive nods, his face empty. She can hardly bear it, and at the same time cannot look away from it, his gentle, pained way of being in the world; he reminds her, in a way, of Claire.
She touches his arm. “She don’t know what she’s missing.”
“She don’t know what she’s missing. You’re turning into a proper island girl, now,” Edwin says.
EVERY NIGHT, after her sister is asleep, she crosses the dark resort grounds and meets them in the parking lot and they drive to Paulette’s Place, where they drink and smoke and she and Edwin dance while Clive stands near them on the dance floor, bouncing his large body not quite to the beat. At times it seems clear to her what Edwin wants—he flirts, manufactures opportunities to touch her. One night, his crotch grazes her hip as they dance and she feels that he is hard. Her skin turns to gooseflesh. His erection scares her. Well, Drew’s scared her, too, at first, didn’t it? Connecticut’s hand on her thigh scared her. But she knows it is not the same.
Suddenly she sees John the gardener’s face—his soft lamb’s-wool hair, his dark skin. Is that all this is, what she’s doing with Edwin? An attempt to absolve her frightened child self? And she still can’t do it. She feels him against her and she tenses.
But nothing comes of it. When the song ends, he buys her another round at the bar, complimenting Paulette on her dress while they wait. He is loose and jovial again, as if their pressed-together dancing didn’t happen. She is starting to see something new about him, a controlled aspect simmering just beneath his charming surface. The moves he makes—letting her feel his hardness, then striking up a conversation with Paulette when she fully expected him to lead her off to some dark corner—seem, beneath the offhandedness with which he executes them, studied, like there is nothing he says or does that he hasn’t thought through. Maybe this will go where she thinks it’s going. Or maybe nothing will happen. When she considers this possibility she is humiliated but also, in some way, relieved.
ON A rainy day, after picking up a puka shell necklace for Claire at the gift shop, Alison finds Edwin taking his break behind the restaurant. “No beach today?” she asks.
“Can’t.” He points out at the black rocks. Waves crash against them, sending spray high into the air and blocking the path to his usual spot.
“We could swim there,” Alison says.
“You crazy? Look at that water.”
“Bet you two joints I can do it. Around the rocks, to the beach, and back.”
“I’m not betting your death sentence, miss,” he says with a laugh.
“Suit yourself.” She walks down to the water. She peels off her tank top and shimmies out of her shorts, revealing the new bikini she got for this trip, blue with white flowers.
“What are you doing?”
She dives in. The waves are swollen, but it isn’t as bad as it looks from shore; besides, she’s a strong swimmer. She strokes through the waves, keeping her head when she sees them rise up above her. When she is out past the rocks she begins to arc around. She swims until her limbs are stiff with exhaustion and every part of her tastes salt. She loves this feeling, the rush of hanging off the edge of your comfort zone but still knowing you have a solid grip on it. When she returns to shore she hands Edwin a shard of green sea glass.
“Proof,” she gasps, breathing hard but trying not to show it.
That afternoon in the parking lot, he gives her the two joints she has won. “I think I’ve been underestimating you,” he says.
“Is that right?”
He nods. “You’re a dangerous girl.”
ON THE last night of vacation, she can’t help herself. She goes looking for Connecticut. She finds him by the bar in the lobby. He wears khaki slacks and a blue-and-white-checked shirt. He is freshly showered. His blond hair still holds narrow ridges from the tines of a comb.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
She reaches into the pocket of her jean skirt. “Want to?” she says, revealing the joint in her palm. Easiest thing in the world. Connecticut grabs one of the Indigo Bay matchbooks from the glass bowl on the bar. She leads him to the parking lot. She puts the joint to her lips. He strikes the match. When she exhales, she coughs.
“You okay?” he asks, a hand to her back, a show of rather than actual concern—he is a good guy and wants her to know it. It’s nice, though, his hand there.
She nods and passes the joint to him.
“How’d you manage to get this?”
“Let’s just say I have my ways.”
He leans closer, whispers in her ear, “I like your ways.” He kisses her neck. Her body shivers, but she shakes the pleasure away. When they have finished the joint, she drops the roach on the ground.
“You’re really not going to tell me where you got it?”
“Well…,” she says.
“So secretive, Alison.” He twists a strand of her hair around his finger.
“It’s no big deal, really. Edwin gave it to me.” She says it like it is the least interesting fact in the world.
“Oh,” he says, stiffening. “Well, lucky us. We’ll have to thank him.” He pulls her hair away from the back of her neck and kisses her again.
“I have to go,” she says. She pecks him, quick and delicate, on the lips.
“Come on, why don’t you—”
“Shhh,” she says. She is the star in a script she knows by heart. “Later. I’ll find you.”
She begins to walk away, but he holds on to her hand.
“Where?” he asks.
She smiles coyly. “I promise.”
DOES ALISON seem awful to you? I admit that, as I channel my sister, I sometimes have an urge to shake her. I find her incessant judginess toward our parents and her fellow resort guests self-righteous and bratty, especially the judgments she renders on the blond boy, who is practically her double: bright, privileged, attractive, and tasteful enough to know to be self-deprecating about such things. Equally frustrating is the way she exempts Edwin and Clive from her judgment. How desperate she is for their approval, their special attentions, how badly she needs them to know that she is more than, better than, all the basically decent people from her world.
What I can’t figure out: Was Alison insufferable in a perfectly ordinary teenage way, or was something darker at play? Was her behavior typical or troubling? What destiny lay ahead of her as she toyed with the blond boy and danced at Paulette’s Place and swam out beyond the black rocks in the rain-swelled surf? Who was she?
AS THE eggplant-colored Vauxhall Astra (how she loves that name!) rumbles down Mayfair Road, she sees her last night on Saint X spread above her like a sky dense with stars. She feels the night’s promise in the itch of the upholstery against the backs of her thighs and in “Boombastic” blasting from the radio. She wears a turquoise halter top and a short jean skirt; she is an island girl, flying away from Connecticut at the speed of light. I think I’ll stay in tonight. Honestly, Nika? These campus parties just feel very tame to me lately.
It is hot inside Paulette’s Place. Sweat gleams on skin. “Buy me a drink,” she tells them. She takes a shot of rum, then another, and struts onto the dance floor. She sways her hips and presses up against Edwin, then spins away to uncertain Clive, back and forth. Irresistible. She sees herself from outside herself, from somewhere up in the mantle of stars, like the story of her life is already burned in light and she has only to navigate by it to make herself into herself.
Once Clive is a few drinks in he is not so hesitant. When she dances with him, he holds her hips.
“Check you out, Goges!” Edwin hoots.
Clive grins.
She winks at Edwin and moves in closer to Clive.
His hands, so clumsy and searching, stir something in her. As they dance, his eyes wander from her breasts to the floor to Edwin to the ceiling, never settling anywhere, as if looking at any one thing too long is just asking for punishment. An image comes to her, a baby boy with damp black curls and eyelashes to the horizon.
It’s then she understands. It isn’t only Edwin she wants. It is the two of them together, the power of two men so different from each other, and all eyes on her. They will dance a few minutes longer, and then she will say, “Let’s get out of here.” They will go to some deserted beach, or they will sneak into an unoccupied hotel room at Indigo Bay, or maybe they will only make it out behind Paulette’s, to the scruffy patch of sand and grass at the edge of the parking lot, hidden from view by an old junked van. Things with Edwin will reach their natural conclusion. Even as she does it, she will be telling Nika, It was pretty good. Not, like, earth-shattering or anything.
Then she will turn her attention to Clive. She will push onto her tiptoes and kiss him on the mouth. He will surprise her. She will expect him to be timid and awkward, but he won’t be. He will hold the back of her head and kiss her hard, so that the whole weight of him is contained in his kiss. He will take her ponytail and squeeze it in his fist like a rag. He will take her hand and thrust it down his pants. The more afraid she feels, the more she will want it.
He will lay her down on the ground. The stars will wheel overhead, fine and white, and in them she will see herself, years from now, looking back at her as she is in this moment, beautiful and reckless as a young woman ought to be. She will have this night forever. She will carry it like her scar, a thing she can always feel, even when she isn’t touching it. He will move over her like she isn’t precious at all, like he is barely aware of her beneath him. She will feel so small in his arms, and she will like this so much it will suck the air out of her—the way she disappears, the way she becomes nothing at all. She will finally feel like she is in this place without herself, and maybe that is all she ever wanted, for her little life to vanish right out from under her.
She will stare into the sky. The stars will rush at her across time and space like spears. They will slash her up with their cold white light.