You would think that after nearly twenty years together, it would be easy to find the perfect gift for your husband on his birthday.
Peter insists that this trip is enough. That we’ve spent so much money we should cut back where we can, but more than that, he claims there’s nothing in the world that could top a week on a luxury vacation with the people he loves most.
“Things are just things,” he told me. “I never liked things that much in the first place, and as I get older, I like things even less.”
This, of course, is not entirely true. There are things Peter likes. He likes good bourbon. He likes a good pair of socks. He likes fancy chocolate, the darker the better. He likes big doorstopper books about military history. He enjoys a cigar every now and then. None of these things fits the occasion. Peter is turning fifty. These things are just things. And anyway, with the exception of the socks and maybe the chocolate, these things proved problematic to pack along on an international trip.
So the short of it is, I have nothing. Nothing to give my husband on his fiftieth birthday.
The best birthday gift I ever gave Peter was when he turned thirty-one, the first of his birthdays we spent together. We were already living in a Spanish-style duplex in West Hollywood planning a wedding nobody knew about yet.
We spent nearly every minute together in the days that followed that night at the bar in New Orleans. Everything about Peter Carlson took me by surprise. I hadn’t come to New Orleans to hole up in a hotel room with a man I’d just met, but he had a beautiful smile and he barely took his eyes or his hands off me and I’d never before been the focus of such intense, intoxicating attention. I loved the way he smelled and his sunburned arms and I loved his white hair and the thin trail of darker hair below his belly button. I liked how he worked as a designer for a magazine—it seemed edgy and sophisticated and very adult. Despite all of this I told him I was just getting out of a relationship and that whatever was happening between us wouldn’t go anywhere. This wasn’t a ploy to make myself more desirable, and yet there was no denying Peter’s desire.
We skipped the music. We never went to another bar. We ate from stands where you ordered food on the street so you could continue on with the revelry, which for us meant having sex, nonstop sex, and talking. We told each other everything. The entire story of the years that led up to the night we met.
We bonded over being the children of divorce, and discussed how my experience made me unsure if I ever wanted to get married while his made him want to have the kind of marriage that eluded his parents. He held my new bangs off my forehead and put them back again so he could weigh in on which look was better. (The bangs.) He loved my raspy voice and made me read aloud from the Bible he took from the hotel nightstand. My job with teens in foster care impressed him, and hearing myself describe it to him, I felt real pride in the work I was doing. I told him I wanted to write, and he asked me why I didn’t, and I said I didn’t know how to be a writer, and he shrugged and said I guess you just have to sit down and do it. This is still the best piece of advice about writing that I’ve ever been given.
The friends I’d come to New Orleans with were having their own wild adventures, and Solly didn’t mind Peter abandoning him because Solly meets people everywhere he goes, and there was no shortage of young, beautiful, unattached women in town for Jazz Fest.
As we lay naked on one of the nights or mornings or afternoons, Peter told me about the View-Master he’d lost when he was nine. I’d had one, too, as a child, the red plastic toy into which you’d slip a white cardboard disk of tiny photographs to click through. I had some assortment of cartoon character disks, Mickey Mouse or maybe Snow White, I couldn’t remember. But Peter remembered his very well. He had a collection of travel disks, from Saudi Arabia, Kenya, Antarctica and less exotic locales like Washington, D.C., and Yosemite. He used to lie in bed and look at these places and fantasize about visiting them with his sister, who didn’t give him the time of day, and his parents, who were in the midst of a spectacularly bitter divorce. Somehow, in the back-and-forth between his boyhood home and his father’s new apartment, Peter lost his View-Master. Each parent blamed the other parent for misplacing it. Neither parent offered to buy him a new one.
So for his thirty-first birthday I tracked down a vintage seventies View-Master. This was just around the time eBay was getting started, but I didn’t yet know about eBay, and so I spent months searching antique shops before I finally struck gold at a tiny place in the Valley. Then I found a film developer who took a series of photographs I had of Peter and me from our first year together and converted them onto a white cardboard disk that fit into the View-Master. He charged me four times what the vintage toy cost, but it was worth every penny. Peter cried when I gave it to him. It was the first time I’d ever seen him cry.
I knew I’d never top that gift, and that seemed just as it should be: You put your best foot forward, give the greatest gifts at the beginning of your love story, so that you have something to look back on and say, “Remember that time . . .” But now, twenty years later, I wonder if I had it wrong. If maybe we should save our best gifts for the middle, for the times when you both need reminding that you are special to each other.
When Solly arrives at the breakfast table with a gift-wrapped box for Peter, I’m livid. This isn’t fair, I know. Peter didn’t tell Solly not to buy him anything. He didn’t tell Solly that this trip was enough. How could Solly know that to Peter things are only things? That as he nears fifty he cares less for things? Only a wife would know that.
And what did Solly get him anyway? Not bourbon. Not cigars. I can tell by the shape of the box that it isn’t a book.
Solly puts the present down at the empty place where Peter will sit when he’s done with his morning bathroom routine, a routine that has gotten longer and louder over the course of our stay in Mexico; also something only a wife would know.
“How nice,” I say. “What’s in the box, Solly?”
“You’ll see.” He smiles at Ingrid. She knows, too. I’m the only adult in the room who doesn’t.
“What did you get him, Mother?” Clem asks. I know that Clem knows that I didn’t get him anything. She was there for the conversations about how this trip was to be his big fiftieth birthday present from all of us.
“This trip is his gift,” I tell her. “You know that.”
“You didn’t get him anything? Nothing to open on his birthday?”
“Did you?” I ask her.
“No. But I’m not, like, married to him.”
“So? You’re his daughter. You could use the occasion to give something back, considering how much he’s given you every single day of your extraordinarily charmed life.”
I know that the last thing Peter wants for his birthday is to show up to breakfast to find his wife and daughter bickering, but sometimes Clementine can be so selfish.
Clem leans closer to Malcolm and says something to him under her breath to which he shows no reaction at all. He smiles at me weakly.
Peter enters the dining room and everyone applauds. He takes a theatrical bow. He looks happy. Content. Wanting for nothing.
He slides into the seat in front of the wrapped box. “I thought we said no gifts.”
“Nobody said anything to me about no gifts,” Solly says. “And for the record, I would like gifts on my fiftieth birthday. Many gifts. No expense should be spared. And no joke gifts, please.”
“Duly noted,” Peter says.
Enrique comes to pour Peter some coffee. “Feliz cumpleaños,” he says.
“Thank you, Enrique.”
“Here in Mexico we have the tradition of la mordida. Where you go to eat the cake with your hands behind your back like this”—Enrique mimes eating without hands—“and then your family, they shove you into the cake so that you get it all over your face and in your hair.”
“As inviting as that sounds,” Peter says, “I think I’d like to start with some eggs over easy.”
Enrique takes the empty plate from his place and heads toward the kitchen. “As you wish,” he says.
Peter studies the box. He picks it up and gives it a little shake.
“Careful,” Solly tells him.
“So it isn’t a snow globe?”
“Right. Nor is it a pair of maracas.”
“What could it be?” Peter says as he tears into the paper, revealing a black box, which he opens on its hinges. The inside of the box faces him, so the rest of us can’t see its contents. “No. Way,” Peter says. “No way!” He turns the box around. It’s a watch.
Peter has never worn a watch for as long as I have known him.
“This is amazing, Sol. Really.” He takes the watch out of the box and straps it onto his wrist, the one on which he isn’t wearing the string bracelet I gave him, and he stares at it. I think, though I find it hard to believe, that I see tears in Peter’s eyes.
“So when we were in college,” Solly starts, “I used to wear this watch. It was from my father’s business. It said Solomon Mattress Company on the face. I still can’t figure out why he had them made. They weren’t for sale. And what employee would want one? I guess he made them for family, a reminder of the ship our good fortune sailed in on. Anyway, Peter used to make fun of me for wearing it. He thought it was terribly bourgeois, though he never used that word, because as you can probably discern, bourgeois is a word beyond the limits of Peter’s simple vocabulary.”
Peter lets loose a sharp, staccato laugh.
“Someday, I told him, maybe you’ll be lucky enough to own a business worthy of a watch face.” Solly reaches over and takes Peter’s wrist and turns it so we can take a closer look at the watch. On its face: the logo of Boychick Bagels.
“This is . . .” Peter takes his wrist back and stares at the watch again. “Amazing.”
“But wait,” Solly says. “There’s more.”
Of course there is. With Solly there is always more. With Solly enough is never enough. He reaches into his pocket and he retrieves three more watches. He straps one to his wrist, hands one to Malcolm and one to Clementine.
“It seems only fitting that our progeny should wear them, too. Like I wore the watch from my father’s mattress company. And if anyone tells either of you that you are bourgeois for wearing it?” He wags his finger at the teenagers. “You be sure to tell that person to go fuck himself.”
“Ding dong,” Ivan says. “Go fuck himself.”
“You tell ’em, Ivan.” Solly pulls Ivan onto his lap; he quickly wriggles out and retreats to his mother, who is doing little to hide her disapproval.
“Thanks, Solly,” Clem says, fiddling with the band. “I love it.”
Clem is particular about everything she wears, careful to never make a fashion statement someone else didn’t make first. I don’t know if watches are in among Clem’s peers, but I doubt it given that they’re never more than arm’s reach from their phones.
“Don’t worry, baby,” Ingrid coos at Ivan. “Daddy had one made for you, too.”
Ivan shrugs. “I don’t care.”
“We’re just saving it to give it to you later, when you’re a little bigger.” She strokes his hair. “Because you’re his progeny, too.”
I SPEND SOME TIME on the website for the restaurant Solly booked us for Peter’s birthday dinner.
It’s the opposite of what I pictured. Not to sound like Clem with my gross generalizations, but I imagined a palapa roof, colorful tablecloths, massive margarita glasses, maybe a wandering mariachi band.
Instead the restaurant is modern and rustic. Sleek and simple. It looks like one of the many hipster places that have popped up over the last few years in downtown L.A. where Peter and I always talk about going, but then we consider traffic on the 10, and the lines to get in, and we just go to the same Italian restaurant in Westwood we’ve been eating at for years.
I imagine Solly would have selected this restaurant for its name alone, even if it hadn’t come so highly recommended by Roberto, and even if it didn’t have reviews in Bon Appétit, Sunset magazine and a mention in the New York Times.
It’s called El Cabron Suertudo: The Lucky Bastard.
All of the text on the website is in Spanish; they promise una experiencia gastronómica. There are a few photographs of the food—definitely Instagram worthy. It’s the kind of restaurant my father would call “schmancy.”
I close my laptop and head downstairs to join everyone else at the pool. It has returned to postcard-perfect vacation weather.
There are six loungers and every one of them is occupied. I expect Ingrid to tell Ivan to move to make room for me, but she doesn’t. She is reading a book to him as he lies in the lounger next to hers. Malcolm and Clem have pulled their chairs close to each other and Peter and Solly have done the same. They are all lost in their own conversations. Their own little universes of two. I sit at the shallow end of the kidney and dangle my feet in the water.
I stand up and say, “Well, I guess I’ll go for a walk on the beach.”
Peter is the only one who responds, which he does without looking my way. “Okay, honey. Have fun.”
I WALK NORTH, toward town, though I have no intention of going that far. I don’t have my wallet. I don’t even have on any shoes. Just my bathing suit and the gauzy pink cover-up I thought was cute when I first bought it but now plan on leaving behind.
I round the bend to the three villas. Nobody is on the beach. Nobody swims in the glassy water out front. Nobody stands on the balconies. Is it siesta time?
In front of Villa Perfect a hammock hangs between two trees, completely still, with no wind to move it. I don’t remember seeing this hammock. Its U shape is a smile, beckoning me.
Come, it says. Lie here in the shade of these trees. Rock back and forth like a baby in my cradle.
I oblige its call and climb in. I’m weightless like in the ocean. It’s heavenly.
I close my eyes. Maybe a siesta will finally rid me of this nagging, lingering hangover. It’s Peter’s birthday. I will need to toast him tonight. I will want to toast him tonight. He is fifty. We have spent two fifths of his life together.
I reach my toes into the sand and kick the ground so my hammock swings side to side, side to side, rocking me back and forth, back and forth.
I think about how when Clementine was a baby, she loved Johnny Cash. His was the one voice we could count on to soothe her. His version of “You Are My Sunshine” was nearly foolproof, even in the midst of a catastrophic meltdown. I never understood why such a gloomy song became a favorite lullaby, not only of my daughter’s but of generations of children.
In my state of almost sleep I see Solly’s face. He opens his mouth and out comes Johnny Cash’s voice. He sings the forgotten verses in which it becomes clear that this child’s lullaby is about infidelity. It’s about the narrator’s pain and desperate loneliness in learning that Sunshine has been cheating. He or she—it never is clear—is willing to forgive and forget if Sunshine will just leave the new, undoubtedly younger and more attractive love object and come back home again. No questions asked. The song ends before we know what happens, but, let’s face it, the melancholy melody gives us a big fat clue about what Sunshine decides to do.
Fucking Sunshine. What an asshole.
“Jenna?”
It’s Maria Josephina.
I open my eyes and try sitting up, but that’s no easy feat in a hammock. I pull my pink cover-up down over my exposed thighs.
Was I singing along with the Solly / Johnny Cash mash-up?
God, I hope I wasn’t singing out loud.
“Oh, hello!” I climb out of the hammock with less grace than I’d like. “I’m sorry. I just saw this hammock here and there was no chair left by our pool and I guess I was more tired than I realized and—”
“You are welcome to it. The hammock is here on the beach and the beaches belong to everyone.”
“Thank you.”
“Tell me,” she says. “Did your husband like the bracelet?”
“Sure. But it was just a little gesture.”
“A tchotchke.”
“Ha. Right!”
She sits down, with her legs crossed, and rests her back against the trunk of the palm tree that holds up one end of the hammock. She is wearing a beige linen skirt and white T-shirt straight out of a Clorox ad. I sit near her in the sand. I can feel it sticking to my bare legs. We both face the ocean.
“Today is his actual birthday,” I say. “Peter, I mean.”
“Your husband.”
“Yes. I didn’t buy him a gift.”
“Other than the bracelet.”
“I just . . . I guess I thought this trip would be enough.”
“And it isn’t?”
“It should be, shouldn’t it? But I don’t know. He turned fifty. And I’ll be fifty soon. In three years.” I have no idea how old Maria Josephina is. She could be thirty. She could be sixty. It’s nearly impossible to tell. I’ve barely seen her without her huge black sunglasses.
“Fifty is not the end of living.”
“No. I don’t suppose it is.”
We watch a flock of birds land at the water’s edge and then quickly take off again just as a small wave threatens to lap at their feet.
“Have you been to the Malecon?” she asks.
“I don’t think so. What is it?”
“It is our boardwalk. By the sea. With many not very nice shops. But still it is lovely. There is a sculpture, there are several, but my favorite is one by Sergio Bustamante. It is called En Busca de la Razón. Searching for Reason. You should go and see this sculpture.”
“Maybe I will.”
“It is of a ladder. And on this ladder two figures climb, and one stands on the ground, arms open. Maybe to catch the climbers if they fall. Maybe to say, Come back, it is safer here on the ground in the life we already know. When I see this statue I think that I would like to be one of the climbers. Even if I do not know where this ladder goes. I always want to keep climbing. To keep moving toward whatever is next.”
“It sounds beautiful.”
“It is.”
I’m not sure who I am in this sculpture. I think neither the one on the ground with open arms nor the one climbing into the unknown. I’d probably be the one checking each rung of the ladder to make sure it isn’t about to break.
Maria Josephina sighs. She looks up at her perfect villa. “And now, I think it is time for a glass of wine. Would you like to join me?”
I would. I would very much like to join her for a glass of wine. “I can’t,” I say. “I should go back to the others. Back to Peter.”
“I understand. Perhaps there will now be a chair available by the pool.”
Perhaps. But I suspect they’re still ensconced in their universes of two. I suspect that they will hardly notice I’ve been gone.
WE EAT A LATE LUNCH because our dinner reservation isn’t until nine o’clock.
Ingrid is far from thrilled with this plan.
“That’s when Ivan goes to bed,” she says. “I don’t understand how you couldn’t have taken that into consideration.”
“Because, my darling,” Solly tells her, “it was either nine o’clock or five o’clock, and though Peter is fifty and I will be soon, we are not quite ready to feast on the early bird special with the rest of the blue-hairs.”
“So what are we supposed to do about Ivan?”
Solly shrugs. “Make him take a nap.”
“Ding dong,” Ivan chirps. “No nap.”
Ingrid gives Solly a told you so look.
“So, he’ll stay up later than usual. This is a special occasion. We’re on vacation. We’re celebrating. This is a party. You like parties,” he says to Ivan. “Right, champ?”
“I like parties,” Ivan says.
“That’s the spirit.”
Ingrid shifts in her seat so that her back is to Solly. “We’ll just have to see how it goes.”
Ingrid and Solly rarely quarrel. Not publicly at least. I always attribute this to the newness of them, though at seven years into their relationship, they can be considered new only from the vantage point of someone who has been with her husband for twenty years. It makes me like Ingrid a little bit more when I catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of her losing patience with Solly.
Roberto, who has been making the rounds with seconds of avocados stuffed with chicken, bravely wades into the controversy. “In Puerto Vallarta it is more better going to dinner late. It is when the town is busy. The streets, they fill with people. And the restaurants, too. People will be going to the clubs for dancing. And during Semana Santa it will be even more like celebration.”
Ingrid manages a smile at him.
“At five o’clock”—his voice is apologetic—“it is not good. At nine o’clock it is much better.”
Solly slaps his back a little too hard; Roberto almost loses his grip on the tray of avocados. “Thanks for backing me up, amigo.”
“Dancing could be fun,” Clementine says. “At one of the nightclubs?”
She is looking at Malcolm. The invitation is for nobody else but him.
He nods his head. “Totally.”
“I will tell you where is the best one,” Roberto says. “It is not far from the restaurant where you go to eat.”
Clem looks at me pleadingly. Don’t say no. Don’t kill the fun. Don’t wield your parental power arbitrarily like you do.
I decide to try out Ingrid’s line. “We’ll just have to see how it goes,” I tell her.
INGRID ASKS ME if I’d like to go to town with her early to look around a bit before meeting the others at the restaurant.
“I’ll let Solly be the one to wrestle Ivan into his nice shirt,” she says. “I love him, but I haven’t had a minute away from him since we got here and I think I could really use the space.”
Is she talking about Ivan? Or is she talking about Solly?
Roberto calls us a taxi. We are two people: by his earlier calculus it should be safe for us to walk, but when you factor in that we are two women, and that it is getting dark out, and that Ingrid is wearing heels even though she’s already annoyingly tall, a taxi makes sense.
We get dropped at the main square. It’s lit up with colored spotlights and a nine-piece band plays salsa or samba or some kind of music in the gazebo. Couples dance. Men get their shoes shined. Old women feed pigeons. Children chase each other in zigzags.
“Isn’t this fabulous?” Ingrid puts her arms out and spins around. “It’s so nice to be out and unencumbered.”
We wander around the periphery of the square and then onto the smaller streets, where the shops are still open and vendors sell food, sweets, toys and souvenirs from carts. Ingrid links her arm through mine. It’s a friendly gesture and practical, too—cobblestones aren’t easy to navigate in heels.
We stop so she can buy a bottle of water. Back on the sidewalk she opens it, takes a long drink like she’s just run a marathon and then fixes me with a look.
“So how are you, Jenna?”
I try to figure out what she’s trying to ask. I’ve been with her around the clock since Saturday, so this isn’t just your default conversation opener. Is she wondering how I’m recovering from drinking too much last night? Is this about my writer’s block? My breast cancer? My shame over not buying my husband a birthday gift? My unease with Clem’s sudden and increasingly obvious infatuation with Malcolm?
“I’m good,” I say with a little too much pep. “I’m great.”
“Good,” she says. “That’s . . . good.”
“Why do you ask?” To this she just shrugs her shoulders. “I mean,” I try again, “why do you ask like that? Like things maybe shouldn’t be good?”
“Oh, no. No. I don’t think that. I’m just . . .” She takes my arm again and we continue our slow stroll. “I guess, I’m just, I’m not very good at this, am I? At this friendship thing? I’ve always been a little intimidated by you. Or maybe in awe of you. And I used to think you hated me, because, you know, of how Solly and I got our start and Maureen and everything. But now, I feel like we’re friends. We are friends, right?”
“Of course we’re friends,” I say.
“Good. That’s how I feel, too. So I guess I was just trying to be a good friend. I was checking in with you. I’m afraid I’ve done all the talking on this trip about my manuscript, and the stuff about Malcolm, and dealing with Ivan, and I just wanted to make sure that I took the time to see if there’s anything you wanted to talk about. You haven’t said much about yourself or how things are going for you.”
This would be a whole lot easier if Ingrid would just have a drink. Then we could go to a bar rather than wandering through the streets with her arm in mine like I’m her doddering old grandmother. We could pull up some stools and settle in for a real conversation. It’s been ages since I’ve done anything like that. Life is so busy. There’s hardly time anymore for friendship. And maybe Ingrid could be a real friend. Maybe I could finally forgive her for banishing Maureen to the opposite coast. Maybe I could finally see her for who she is: a mother like me, a wife like me, a writer like me, a woman trying to make sense of it all like me.
But if Ingrid is a real friend, then what to do with what I know about Solly?
“And you’re feeling well? After all the . . . you know.”
“Treatment? Radiation? Cancer?”
“Yes. That. You’re back to your old self?”
“Pretty much.”
“That must have been so hard. Even though your prognosis is good, it doesn’t make it any less scary, does it?”
“No. It really doesn’t. Thank you, Ingrid, for recognizing that.”
“I just . . .”—she shakes her head—“think you’re amazing.”
“Well, that’s very nice of you to say.” It is nice. Ingrid is nice. She’s so, so nice.
“You’re such a great mother. And of course you’re such a great writer, too. How you’ve managed to raise a child and write four books—”
“Three,” I correct her. “I’m still working on the fourth.”
“Fine. How you’ve managed to raise a child and write three books is beyond me.”
“Wait a minute,” I say. “You’re raising a child and you’ve written a book. Sounds like you’re on the same track.”
“Yes, but I’m just messing around. It’s a hobby. I’m not an author, like you. I have no idea what I’m doing.” I don’t think Ingrid is fishing. Her undervalued opinion of her own work strikes me as genuine. As does everything else about Ingrid. “Ivan, yes,” she continues. “I’ll take credit for him. He’s a good boy. I’m managing to do that part well.”
I stop. I take her arm out of mine and I turn her to face me. “Ingrid,” I say. “Your book is great. You are going to find an agent and then you are going to find a publisher and that publisher is going to have to win your book in a bidding war because everybody is going to want it.”
She looks confused. “What?”
Given what she is going to have to face in her own marriage, it can’t hurt to give her a little sliver of hope about her future as a writer. “I finished it. I love it. It’s so, so good.”
She puts her hands up to her face. “No.”
I nod. “Yes.”
She reaches over and she puts her arms around me. It’s a big, strong, Solly-style hug. “You aren’t just saying that? Remember, I told you no good will come from protecting my feelings.”
“I am not protecting anything. What I’m doing is telling you I think your book is really good.”
She squeals. “I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”
We start strolling again. This time when she links her arm through mine she pulls me closer, like we’re lovers. “This has been such a great trip, Jenna. I know how hard you worked finding the house and setting everything up and I just want to say thank you. Thank you from all of us. You’re our captain, and I fear you don’t get enough credit.”
“I don’t need credit,” I say.
“Oooh, look!” She pulls me toward a brightly lit jewelry shop. “Let’s do a little browsing, shall we?”
We go inside. The woman who owns the place is a painter as well as a jewelry maker and the walls are lined with her paintings of dogs and chickens and children. They’re bright and fanciful and not at all cheesy, though they so easily could have gone in that direction. Ingrid heads straight for a case of necklaces.
“Por favor?” Ingrid says. “Can I see this one?” She points to a big chunky necklace of silver and some sort of red stone, not clear like a gem, but solid like a rock.
“Of course,” the woman says in perfect, unaccented English. “This is one of my favorite pieces. You have a good eye.”
“Do you make these yourself?” Ingrid asks.
“Yes,” the woman answers. “Most of what I sell here I make. I have a workshop in my home. Some of the pieces, not this one, but some of the others I buy from artesanos, local artists. For those I only keep five percent of the sale price.”
“Oh, good.” Ingrid says. “I don’t mean to be nosy, but it matters to me where and how things are made.”
“I completely understand,” says the woman. “It matters to me, too.”
Ingrid holds the necklace up to me. “With this outfit?” she says. “It is perfect on you.”
I take a quick look at the price tag. “I don’t think so,” I say. I’d spend that kind of money on the painting of the chicken that everyone in the family could enjoy before I’d spend it on a piece of jewelry for myself.
“I’m getting it for you,” Ingrid says. “And I’m getting something for me, too. I’m not going to argue with you about it. Everyone else got a watch today and what did we get?”
She points to another necklace in the case, a similar one but with green stones cut into round rather than square shapes. The woman hands it to her and she fastens it around her neck. It looks like she’s been wearing it forever.
She pulls out her credit card and hands it to the woman.
“Ingrid. Wait.”
“Nope,” she says. “No arguments.”
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The necklace isn’t something I ever would have picked out, but I have to admit, I love how I look in it.
“Thank you, Ingrid,” I say. “You’re too nice.”
SOLLY NEVER DID MANAGE to get Ivan into his good shirt. Nor into a pair of pants. Ivan arrives at the restaurant in pajamas with cowboys and cacti on them.
“This is what the boy wanted to wear.” Solly looks at him proudly. “And when I say wanted, I mean insisted.”
“But I packed that shirt special for tonight,” Ingrid says. “When is he going to wear it?”
“I’m going to go out on a limb and say . . . never.”
“Dammit, Solly. I asked you to do one thing.”
We’re still waiting to be shown to our table. The area by the hostess stand is small and cramped and I’m quite literally in the middle of Solly and Ingrid’s argument. Clem has already acquired the wi-fi password and she hunches together with Malcolm looking at something on her phone. Peter catches my eye and rolls his, just a little. Not enough for anyone but me to know what he’s trying to say: Look at Solly and Ingrid bickering over a shirt. Remember when we used to do stupid shit like that? Now we’re better. We fight only about things that matter. And right now we aren’t fighting about anything at all. Yay us!
He reaches over and pulls me into him.
“You look beautiful,” he whispers into my ear.
“Thank you,” I whisper back. It’s probably the necklace. “I hope you’re having a great birthday.”
“It’s the best. It couldn’t be any more perfect.”
We follow the hostess into the large, loud, crowded dining room. The ceiling is tall, the floor is concrete and the walls are white and covered with bottles of wine on old wooden shelves. The Californian in me can’t help but look at this decor and imagine the nightmare earthquake scenario.
We’re shown to a round table. I sit in between Clem and Peter.
“So, Mom.” She throws an arm around me. “The club Roberto told us about looks really cool. Check it out.” She hands me her phone. She’s pulled up the Yelp page. The club gets four-and-a-half stars. I had no idea you could Yelp a Mexican nightclub.
I hand her phone back to her.
“Well?” she asks. “What do you think?”
“About?”
“About me and Malcolm going there after dinner. It’s only three blocks away. It looks super fun. Please, Mommy?”
“Don’t ‘Mommy’ me, Clementine.”
She does a pouty face. “It’s just that it really looks fun. And I really want to go. And this vacation has been great, don’t get me wrong, but we haven’t done anything for, like, people our age.”
“How old do you have to be to go to this club?”
Clem and Malcolm exchange a look. “Well,” she says. “Technically you’re supposed to be eighteen, but online and in the reviews and stuff they say that nobody in Puerto Vallarta checks ID. They don’t care.”
“They may not care, but I do.”
“Why? What do you think is going to happen? I just want to go hear music and dance and stuff. I swear we aren’t going to drink or anything like that. I promise you. Right, Malcolm?”
“Totally,” he says. “We won’t drink. You have my word.”
“Or anything else?”
Malcolm puzzles over this, eyeing me, like I’m the one who’s been caught selling drugs. “Or anything else,” he says.
Now that the three of us are in conversation we’ve attracted attention from the others at the table.
“Dad says it’s fine with him if it’s okay with you,” Clem says. “Right, Dad?”
I glare at Peter. He gives me an apologetic shrug. He’s set me up.
“Aw, come on, Jen,” Solly chimes in. “Let the kids go have a little fun. I’d offer to chaperone, but I’m afraid I’d slip a disk, or tear a rotator cuff, and anyway, let’s face it, the music is going to suck.”
Now it’s a full-on ambush. I’m not left with much of a choice.
“Fine,” I say. “But this doesn’t mean you should rush through your father’s birthday dinner.”
Clem leans over and kisses me on the cheek. “We won’t. I swear. Thanks, Mom.”
Malcolm and Clem grin at each other. They look like they’re in a toothpaste commercial.
“What are we eating tonight?” Solly asks, opening his menu.
“What are we drinking?” I reply, gesturing for the waitress.
AT 11:15 IT’S JUST Solly, Peter and me left at our table. Clem and Malcolm have headed off to the nightclub against my better judgment and Ingrid took Ivan home before dessert, which did not make him happy.
We’ve stayed to drink a final toast to Peter.
I watched Solly walk Ingrid out to the street and help her into her cab. I watched him hold her hand and stroke her hair. I watched him act contrite about the shirt fiasco, ever the doting husband.
I never had to watch Solly put on a fake show for Maureen while he cheated with Ingrid because I found out about the affair after Maureen did. Now I see why Peter kept that secret from me and tried keeping this one: it is excruciating to watch a woman whose husband is cheating when you know it and she does not.
Why does Solly always covet the new, shiny object? Why is he never happy with what he has? Maybe I should feel sorry for Solly: who wants to live in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction?
I watch as he puts his hand on the waitress’s forearm while he orders our round of tequila. Get your hand off her, Solly, I want to say to him. Not everything is yours for the grabbing.
When the tequila comes, Solly holds up his glass.
“Peter,” he begins. “You have been my best friend for thirty-two years. I cannot fathom why the powers that be in freshman housing conspired to pair us together, unless it’s that they’d watched too many episodes of The Odd Couple.”
Solly turns to me and adds, as an aside: “In case it isn’t clear, I’m the Oscar in that scenario.”
I don’t say anything. He waits. I manage a fake smile.
He continues, “You have made my life richer in every way. And let’s be honest: I was plenty rich to begin with.”
Big belly laugh here.
God, I hate Solly.
“So I make this toast to you,” he says. “My best friend, my brother. You make turning fifty seem like a walk in the park. And I look forward to following you, as following you is something I have always done, in one way or another, since the day we first met. L’chaim.”
Solly throws back his shot of tequila. Then Peter does the same. They both stare at me, waiting. I glare at Solly. There is fire in my cheeks. I know this probably isn’t the right moment, but when is it ever the right moment to call someone out for being a fucking pig?
I take my shot of tequila. It burns going down, an exquisite, delicious sort of burn.
“Solly.”
He looks at me inquisitively. Peter is looking at me, too, with no admonition, no pleading—he has no idea that I’m about to confront Solly. This will infuriate Peter, whose first allegiance is not to me but to his best friend. He will see this as a betrayal of my trust, a trust that’s shaky to begin with. If Peter really trusted me I wouldn’t have had to squeeze the information about the affair out of him, or the truth about Malcolm’s troubles. Peter might say this is none of my concern, but he’d be wrong. This affair isn’t only about Solly and Ingrid, it’s also about the business. Our business. Solly is jeopardizing all of our futures.
“Solly,” I repeat. “I—”
Solly isn’t listening to me. He’s no longer paying attention. He’s looking out the window to the street. He’s like a kid with ADHD.
“What’s going on?” he asks, but he isn’t asking me. This isn’t about what I’ve been building up the courage to say. This is about what’s happening outside the restaurant.
The sidewalk is full of people, as it has been all night, but now the people are running. The people are shouting. You could easily mistake this sort of action and energy for revelry, for a celebration in the streets, but if you look more closely you see that there’s no order, no sense. It’s chaotic. Pure panic.
The noisy restaurant gets suddenly, eerily quiet. Sirens wail in the distance. Competing from all directions.
The check is on the table. Solly picks it up, looks at it, reaches into his pocket, pulls out four hundred-dollar bills and throws them down.
“Let’s get out of here.”
We follow him outside, leaving the quiet for the chaos. There are others like us, standing on the street, dumbfounded, trying to make sense of what is happening. And there are those who run. They are running in both directions. I can’t tell who’s running away from the danger and who’s running toward it.
We try shouting at strangers. “What’s happening? Why is everyone running? Please? Someone? Anyone? Tell us what’s going on?”
The sirens are drawing nearer to us and nearer to one another. They no longer sound like they’re coming from all directions, they sound like they’re gathering to our right, to the east, at least I think it’s the east, as it’s the opposite direction from the bay.
“The nightclub,” I say. “Which way is the nightclub?” How did I not get the address of the nightclub from Clementine?
“I don’t know,” Peter says.
“It’s that way—” Solly points in the direction of the sirens. He grabs a man who is moving quickly past where we stand in front of the restaurant.
“What’s happening?” he screams at the man.
The man looks more frightened than annoyed that a stranger would put his hands on him like that.
“Un secuestro! Ha habido un secuestro!”
“What?” Solly shouts. “I don’t understand you.”
The man wrenches his arm free and runs away, and we start running in the opposite direction, toward the club, toward the screeching sirens.
We make it two blocks before we have to slow because the crowd is getting thicker. I take Peter’s hand and he takes Solly’s and the three of us worm our way through the sea of people, nearer to the flashing lights of the police cars.
I pull out my phone with my free hand and call Clem. Straight to voice mail. I text her with my shaking thumb: where r u call me now
We’ve made it as far as we’re able. Police are blockading the street and there’s already crime-scene tape going up around the perimeter of a big white building with tall windows. People are filing out of the open doors, slowly and calmly, but they are holding on to one another, and some of the women are crying. The people are young and attractive and dressed to reveal as much skin as possible.
“Is that it?” I scream. “Is that the nightclub?”
Solly and Peter have their heads close together. They are speaking so I can’t hear them.
Peter lets go of Solly and puts both of his hands on my shoulders. “Yes,” he says quietly. “But don’t panic. Look. Look at me.” I focus my eyes on his. “The police are here. All those people are coming out of the club and they’re fine. We will find them.”
We push farther through the crowd until we reach a line of police officers in helmets holding machine guns.
I try asking them, shouting at them—what is happening and I need to find my daughter—but they stand still, shoulder to shoulder, and stare straight ahead, as if I don’t exist. They part to let people through who are coming from the club, but the flow goes in one direction only.
We cannot get any closer. I scan the dozens of faces moving toward us for my pale daughter and Solly’s dark-skinned son. My eyes are darting everywhere, trying to see everything at once, desperate to put things into order, to make some sense of what is happening.
Time is both racing forward and moving in slow motion.
Time is collapsing.
Peter has stopped a young man who has made his way out of the club and he’s trying to ask him what’s happening, but Peter is shouting, and he sounds angry and threatening, and the man just wants to get away, to keep moving. The man says the same words: un secuestro.
If my hands weren’t shaking and my heart wasn’t racing and if there was wi-fi in the middle of the street or if I’d paid for a fucking data plan I could look up un secuestro on my phone, but none of these things is true, and so I shout to nobody, I scream into the electric night air: “WHAT IS UN SECUESTRO?”
“A kidnapping.”
I turn. There is a young woman standing next to me. She is tiny and looks no older than Clementine. She is holding on to the arm of a young man who appears far more upset; she is calm and she speaks clearly.
“There has been a kidnapping. Inside the nightclub. It happened very fast. Inside it was very frightening. There were gunshots fired. Into the air. I do not think anyone was shot. The police arrived after it was over. After they got away.”
“A kidnapping?” I say, only inches from her face. “Who did they kidnap?”
“I don’t know,” she says and she holds on to my arm. Her touch is gentle. She’s barely more than a child and yet she’s trying to comfort me. “There was a large group of men. All dressed in black. With masks on their faces. They took many people. It all happened very quickly.”
“My daughter,” I scream. “My daughter was in there.”
“I do not think they took your daughter,” the woman says. “They seemed to know who they wanted. They took people from the VIP section of the club. People who were together. It did not seem random. And I think they took only men, but I can’t be sure.”
“My son,” Solly says. I didn’t know that he’d been listening to us. “My son was in there, too.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I have to go now. My family will be worried. You will find your son and your daughter.”
She turns and, with the young man on her arm, disappears into the crowd. I wish I’d hugged her, if only so that I could be sure that she’d been real. Without her in front of me I can’t be sure of anything.
The flow of people from the nightclub has stopped. Now it’s only the police swarming the building and the sidewalk out front.
I move along down the barricade and Peter and Solly follow. I try again with a different officer.
“Please,” I say. “I am trying to find my daughter.”
Nothing.
I try another officer. And then another. I know I am screaming. I am not being polite. I am not behaving with respect. I am not showing deference to their roles, nor to their culture, nor to their language.
“PLEASE,” I shout.
Nobody will help me. I turn around to scream at Peter and Solly because I need to scream at somebody, but the bodies next to me that I thought belonged to Peter and Solly belong to strangers. They look nothing like Peter and Solly.
Where are Peter and Solly?
The crowd isn’t thinning, if anything it is growing, it is swelling, and now I can’t find my husband. I don’t see Solly. I am totally and completely lost.
I pull out my phone and call Clem again. Voice mail. I call her again. Voice mail. She must have turned her phone off, or put it on airplane mode, or maybe she’s been separated from it, from this essential piece of her.
I am separated from her, this essential piece of me.
I move back through the crowd to where I can be certain I last stood next to Peter and Solly. Can I be certain? When was this? Minutes ago? Hours? I remember there was a woman. She was young and beautiful and she told me that everything was going to be okay. She told me the kidnappers did not take my daughter. Where did she go? I would like to find this woman again.
“CLEMENTINE,” I shout. “PETER.”
The crowd is closing in on me.
I used to claim I had claustrophobia because I don’t like elevators packed with people. Who likes elevators packed with people? I was only being dramatic. Assigning a diagnosable condition to a mild dislike. Now I close my eyes. Everything swirls around me. A tornado made of noise. Light. Heat. Breath. Fear.
This is claustrophobia. I have to lie down. I am going to lie down. I cannot hold my body up any longer. I am falling down. The pavement will cool my skin. I need to feel the ground.
But no. Instead of falling, I am lifted up.
I feel arms around me. In this cluster of people, there are helping hands. Strangers’ hands. They are holding me. They are guiding me through the tornado.
In my ear: “It’s okay. The kids are okay. We found somebody who knows. This way.”
I know this voice. It is Solly. My old friend Solly.
And there is Peter. He is standing with an officer who holds his helmet under his arm and has slung his machine gun onto his back. His posture is peace. Succor.
“There you are,” Peter calls out to me. Solly delivers me to Peter’s embrace. “This is Officer Delgado. Officer Delgado, this is my wife, Jenna.”
He nods at me. Peter is squeezing me so tight now I’m having trouble breathing. In his effort to comfort me I can feel his fear.
“Officer Delgado says the kidnappers are from a drug cartel and the men they abducted are from a rival one. They entered quickly, fired some shots, grabbed the men, loaded them into waiting SUVs and were gone before the police arrived. Nobody in the club was hurt. And everyone who was taken was a member of the rival cartel.”
“Yes,” the officer says. “This is true. There are no injuries. There are no innocent victims. These men who were kidnapped, they were here for celebration, for Semana Santa, but they are not innocent.”
“So where’s Clem?”
“We still don’t know. But Officer Delgado assures us that everyone made it out safely. Nobody was hurt. The club is empty now. Maybe we just missed them in the crowd. They probably headed home.”
“You should go back home now,” the officer says. “And you should stay there. We are still looking for the men who did this, and we ask that, for now, everyone stay inside.”
“How do we get home?” I ask. Nothing seems possible.
“We ask that everyone stay inside and that is for taxi drivers, too. Can you walk?” Officer Delgado asks. “Is it very far?”
“No,” Peter says. “It’s not far. We can make it. Thank you for your help.”
They shake hands. Officer Delgado extends his hand to me and I hold it in both of mine and I tell him the words of Spanish I know. “Muchas gracias.”
“Let’s go,” Solly says, putting one arm around Peter and one around me. “My kingdom for an Uber.”
We start off on the long dirt road to Villa Azul Paraiso.
No place ever has seemed so far away.