Are You Here For What I’m Here For?

THEIR HOTEL RESEMBLED a pink many-layered cake encrusted onto the side of the hill. As they drove up under the portico, Gina heard music and saw a man shouting through a bullhorn and gesticulating. The man resembled Moammar Qaddafi and wore wraparound sunglasses, salmon trousers, and a Liberace shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest. “Welcome, ladies, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to paradise!” he implored through the bullhorn in an indeterminate European accent, helping Gina and Harry and the other passengers down from the shuttle. A festive merengue song blared tinnily. Staff members appeared bearing yellow daiquiris. Gina accepted one, her throat parched, as bellhops made off with the luggage. The Qaddafi figure exhorted the travel-weary guests to form a conga line and, in this way, pass into the lobby dancing.

“Sun Club! St. Ri-ta! Sun Club! St. Ri-ta!” the impresario chanted through the bullhorn, pumping his fist to the beat.

“This isn’t very relaxing,” Gina whispered to Harry, but he couldn’t hear her. She kept a big midwestern smile plastered on her face, glancing embarrassedly at the hotel guests who paused to observe the new arrivals shaking their rumps and shuffling along in their rumpled airplane clothes.

Their room was on the fourth floor. They stepped onto the balcony and took in the view: the moon-shaped cove with its crescent of white beach, coral reefs like cloud shadows lurking under clear water. At the far end of the cove, a ruined fort atop rocky cliffs. Windsurfers languished on the unruffled sea. Scattered white umbrellas pocked the beach. Directly below their balcony, multiple terraces staggered down the hill, flights of limestone steps overhung with bougainvillea and hibiscus, ornamental gardens of volcanic rock and flowering cactus.

All of it shimmered in the sun; it wasn’t quite real. A shriek issued up from the pool deck, the sound a crystalline miniature. Gina’s head felt glasslike.

“Not too shabby, eh?” said Harry, wrapping his arms around her from behind, nuzzling her neck.

IT WAS 1985 AND THERE WERE TWO POSSIBILITIES: Gina Maisley was dying, or Gina Maisley was not dying. The very ground she walked on felt ungroundlike. Her days were a tightrope over the winking, beckoning void. Really this was nothing new: dying had always been with her, a secret Idea. Recently, after a string of low-grade fevers and lingering odd infections, she’d gone to Andy Cerbone, family friend and physician, the way a young girl goes to the priest: to unburden herself, to feel concerned for, to go home corrected and reprieved.

She was fifty-two years old and this had always been her ritual. Her illness—whichever it might be from one year to the next, a grim succession of -omas, each born out of some novel twinge or swelling—was an Idea. You had to believe somehow in your Idea in order for it not to be true, just as you shouldn’t quite believe in the best things: your looks and good fortune, your husband’s fidelity, your children’s health and talents, all so precariously real.

It was a kind of spiritual camouflage: you disguised yourself in a cloak of misfortune to trick fate into passing you over. It was a kind of dark magic performed in the corner of your heart. It was vaguely shameful, and Gina knew better. But you stuck with what seemed to work.

She’d gone to Cerbone with her Idea, and instead of brushing it off, Cerbone had ordered bloodwork. When the bloodwork came back he grew sober, alarmingly thoughtful. His lower lip protruded and his moist black eyes, behind large glasses, looked involved in esoteric calculations. He spoke of the emergence of a pattern we can no longer afford to ignore. He invoked the Disease That Dare Not Speak Its Name. It left his lips like a profanity. It squatted between them like a toad.

She suddenly felt like she’d asked for it. Like a child who whines and begs for a prize, then abruptly gets it. But I don’t want this prize.

“I shouldn’t have gone there in the first place,” she told her friend Gwynn on the phone. “I should have stayed out of doctors’ offices.” Of course they couldn’t know for sure without a biopsy, the kind with the big needle.

“It won’t be the bad thing, honey,” said Gwynn. It was probably something murkier, something nebulously autoimmune. The kind of thing to keep an eye on, maybe for years; a shadow passenger, along for the rest of the ride. Hadn’t Cerbone conceded as much?

“It’s just this house,” she told Gwynn. “I can’t stand it here.” She loved her house. It was as if the phone might ring and the news break in like a troop of gibbering weirdos, tracking mud or dog shit through each of her rooms.

And poor Harry. The day she’d come back from her appointment and tried to explain what Cerbone had said, Harry broke out in hives. He’d been planning, she thought, to make some gentle joke about yet another of Gina’s false alarms. That night she woke up and he wasn’t in bed. She found him at the kitchen table, hunched over the medical encyclopedia, with his broken reading glasses and his book light, his tongue in the corner of his mouth, his finger moving slowly down the page. She’d surprised him, and he gasped and cast her a guilty look.

“Don’t overthink it, sweetie,” said Gwynn. “It’s complicated, with these autoimmune things. What you need to do is focus on your healing. Get out of here! Go to St. Rita. Forget your troubles. Fall under a spell.”

“Go to who?” said Gina.

“It’s enchanted.”

“Is that a hospital?”

“It’s an island. One of those Sun Club resorts. They have Sun Club Bee.”

Gina misheard this as Sun Club B, as in a second-tier version of Sun Club A. An alternative for travelers willing to accept a slightly shabbier accommodation, or a second-best view of the cove. What Gwynn meant was SUN CLUB BE*. As explained in the back of the brochure, SUN CLUB BE* offered “An experience for our guests whose journey includes a health challenge.”

Was it experimental treatments? Health tourism? Gina pictured herself in a high-rise hotel that was actually a hospital, attended by nuns in starched habits, a Caribbean breeze blowing in at the window.

“The funny thing is,” Gina said to Gwynn, “I don’t feel like I’m dying.”

She wanted her friend to say, That’s because you’re not.

What Gwynn said was: “That’s the right attitude, Gina. Go to St. Rita and work on those healing thoughts.”

Harry took vacation time—they would fly out of O’Hare on a Monday. Cerbone had assured them the results would be in no later than Friday. On Friday they would come home.

Harry had wanted them to call the kids, to tell Christopher and Becca what was going on. Gina forbade it. “It’ll make them sick with worry. Let them live their lives. What would we tell them? We don’t know anything yet.”

So she agreed to a deal: by the time they came back it would all be settled, and they would tell the kids whatever there was to tell.

On the plane she thought of her little sister Frances, somewhere down there in the panhandle of Florida, by herself in the mobile home, or maybe with her friends at church. She had meant to confide in Francie before they left.

THEY WERE WAITING FOR THE ELEVATOR to take them down to dinner when a yellow-haired woman in a skirted bathing costume came sauntering past, bearing an exquisite piece of red coral like a brilliant calciferous bouquet.

“Oh. Do they sell those in the gift shop?” Gina asked.

The woman halted. “My coral?” she said.

“Yes—where did you get it?”

The woman brightened. “In the sea!” she said, gesturing at the door behind her, as if the sea were in that room.

“But how . . .”

“Go snorkeling,” whispered the lady.

Remarkable, thought Gina. She wondered if it was legal. She felt she had to have a piece.

In the elevator she said to Harry: “I really think she must have bought it in the gift shop.”

The gift shop was closed.

In the dining room, she noted with pleasure the Prussian blue carpeting, the white tablecloths with pots of orchids. Most of the guests were dressed nicely, even if some wore brightly colored loungewear and a few of the men wore shorts. (They always said sick people let themselves go, but she wondered if the opposite was true: you wanted to wear your nice outfits while you still had the chance, those blouses you really liked but for some reason had neglected.) The dining room was buffet-style. Gina and Harry loved buffets. She filled her plate with small portions of many things: snapper fillet, gratin potatoes, blackened shrimp, asparagus. The Qaddafi host made his rounds among the tables like the father of the bride. She heard him chatting with a couple in French; the three of them burst into laughter.

“Who is he?” Gina whispered, because Qaddafi was coming their way, still in the wraparound sunglasses.

“Russell,” said Harry. “Russell or Raoul.” Harry had eaten too fast again. He was muttering about a bad conch fritter, the heavy dough. Gina remembered how uptight she used to get when Harry drank and acted silly. He no longer drank. She didn’t miss that, but sometimes she missed the silliness.

Russell/Raoul came up and said: “Cloudya!”

“Who?” said Gina. “No, I’m Gina Maisley.”

“But of course Gina, how could I forget you, lovely Gina. You are here with your father, yes? Heh-heh. The show may not proceed without Gina. But of course you will be my date to the show?”

She held her face in a rictus of mirth, tugging her hand free of his grip. She couldn’t shake the notion that behind the sunglasses Russell/Raoul had a milky white eye or a ghastly scar. “Then we shall see you in the theater,” he declared.

Harry looked confused; his brow was beaded with moisture. On their way out of the dining room he made a move for the elevator, but Gina was anxiously torn. She didn’t have high hopes for the show, but she feared future run-ins with a jilted Russell/Raoul. “I promised him I would go.”

“Who?”

“Russell. The guy with the glasses.”

“That jackass?” Harry said. He didn’t look well, but she was reluctant to go alone. From the entrance to the Calabash Room came an upwelling of music and a garbled voice booming from the speakers. Gina coaxed him toward it, whispering assurances.

The theater was dark and laser lights played over the seats, many of which were empty. She led Harry to a pair of seats in the middle. Onstage, dancers in Day-Glo outfits lip-synced to a pop song. She understood that the volume and lights and razzle-dazzle were meant to distract you from observing that the show was sparsely attended and the content was poor. Russell/Raoul served as emcee, lingering at the edge of the stage with his microphone, firing off quips at the performers and encouraging the audience into weak hails of applause.

After the lip-sync dancers, a comedian was introduced. He told jokes about the foibles of resort life, marital gags with sexual innuendos, potty humor.

“This is very tasteless,” Gina hissed in Harry’s ear. It was her way of apologizing, of letting him know he was right in not wanting to be there.

When the comedian took his bows, the emcee introduced a hypnotist.

“He is the superb Dr. Cline,” proclaimed Russell/Raoul. “But I know him as ‘Sly,’ or, as we say, the régulière. So let us give it up for Sly!”

“Who is it?” said Harry, but Gina just shook her head: she was focused on the hypnotist—a bald white man in a black shirt, silver tie, and black pants—who, she saw to her horror, was stalking up the aisle, selecting participants from the audience. When the man made eye contact with her—he was close enough that she could see a vein on his forehead—she sent him a telepathic message: Don’t you dare; I am a sick woman.

His eyes slid off her and landed on a handsome young man across the aisle to Gina’s right.

She felt an ice-water trickle in her chest. The young man rose hesitantly, grinning, against the silent objections of a middle-aged woman (his mother?) with whom he was sitting. Something in the carriage of his shoulders, the way he held his head, even the swells of his tanned calves as he stepped into the aisle to follow Dr. Cline, struck some intimate chord in Gina’s heart. Who did he remind her of?

“Enough,” rumbled Harry, hoisting himself up.

Gina gripped his arm and held him down: “Wait a minute. Please. I want to see something.”

“What I am doing, ladies and gentlemen,” said the hypnotist, “is putting these good people into a deep trance.” The participants, about eight men and women, were seated onstage in a row of folding chairs. The hypnotist strode back and forth, touching the heads of the men, saying sleep. “When they awaken, they will believe they are contestants in a beauty pageant.” The men, feigning grogginess, rose and began to mince around the stage, preening and striking poses. The handsome young man went gamely along, cocking his hips, flipping back his pretend hair.

Gina was riveted, seized with embarrassment for him. It was all a fake, of course. And it gave the hypnotist a cruel advantage. He barked out instructions and the men had to play along. The hypnotist held them hostage, not with mesmerism, but with emotional blackmail: You wouldn’t dare expose my act, would you?

But even behaving in this demeaning way, the young man looked stylish and becoming, while the other, older men looked like maundering fools.

Dr. Cline put the men back to “sleep” and turned his attention to the women. When he counted to five, he said, they would feel sexy, ten times more sexy than they’d ever felt with their husbands.

“Okay,” said Gina, “I can’t stand this. Let’s go.”

That night she couldn’t sleep, aware of bass thumping up through the floor.

HARRY WAS ILL IN THE MORNING. Then Gina revealed that she, too, was feverish. Harry emerged from beneath a mound of covers, tumbled and smelly, crooning sweet things. Gina rebuffed him, but he was mawkish and grave, fumbling at her, blubbering. He wanted to call Dr. Cerbone. He wanted to summon the hotel doctor. “Stop it!” Gina screamed. “No one can do anything!” She watched herself lash out at her husband as though he were Sickness itself. She was a passive spectator, chiding herself to stop it. They sank into silence, went back to bed. Later she called for yogurt and ate half of it on the balcony. It was a brilliant sunny day. Guests milled about on the terraces. In the big pool a volleyball game was under way. Out on the water, the tiny prostrate bodies of the snorkelers. She closed her eyes, warming her face in the sun. When she opened them a lizard was poised on the railing. It was so still she thought it must be fake. Then she saw the crepe sac of its throat puffing in and out. Its eye was fixed on her, granular and unblinking, as though waiting for her to make a move.

Gina took her temperature, tried to read, returned to the balcony. Down below, a Jeep taxi was parked near the entrance. She saw the young man from the theater and the older woman standing next to the Jeep.

So that’s who he is, she thought. The young man was the spitting image of Eddie Marinowski, the lifeguard in Waukesha. She’d obsessed about him all summer when she was fourteen, willing him to notice her, pretty Gina, hidden behind cat glasses and buck-teeth and adolescent gangle. She made a deal with herself that she’d talk to him by Labor Day if it killed her. Labor Day came; all afternoon she waited for her moment, sending him mental messages, ignoring her little sister Frances, her charge. The sky clouded over; a wind kicked up. Most people had already left. Frances was impatient to go home. Gina watched Eddie’s well-muscled body in profile, talking to another boy, fondling the whistle that hung on a cord against his stomach. Frances whined, teeth chattering. The moment didn’t come; Gina was crestfallen. She felt ugly. They left. Then the bus didn’t come and Frances caught a chill. Then she got sick, lost use of her legs; they burned her toys in the backyard. She ended up in that school for damaged children, sweet Francie among the mongoloids and midgets, the floozies and delinquents. Not long after that, they moved away. Gina’s mother had never let her forget that day at the pool.

A staff member was loading luggage into the back of the Jeep. So the young man and the woman were leaving. She went inside and tried to nap. Instead she cried quietly, bitterly. Harry was snoring. She held vigil on the balcony as the sea turned dark. Bats swooped in the dusk.

“I want to go home tomorrow,” she said to Harry when he woke up from his nap. “I want to change our flight.” Normally he wouldn’t have believed her. He would have urged her to wait and see. It alarmed her that now he just looked defeated.

That night she took two sleeping pills. As the drug drew her into its orbit, she saw the pale hands of the hypnotist, the blood-red coral, the face of the young man. She plunged to the deeps.

When she came up in the morning, a lightness lapped over her. She waited, doubting it, but realized she felt superb. There was no explanation. She took her temperature: perfectly normal.

Harry felt worse. He asked her if she still intended for them to go home. Gina said she hadn’t made up her mind. She showered, did her hair, chose an outfit of white clam diggers and a silk print blouse over her bathing suit top, and drifted down to the dining room, where she assembled for Harry a plate of pastries and fresh fruit. She found herself meeting the untroubled gazes of the women she passed and wondering, Are you here for what I’m here for? To all appearances, it looked like a normal resort, a pretty classy one. She hadn’t seen a thing about the SUN CLUB BE*. If there was some wing where the ill sought refuge, Gina wasn’t aware of it. Maybe it had nothing to do with her. Maybe she was fine, and was just here to enjoy herself. She peeked into the gift shop but didn’t see any of that exquisite red coral.

After she’d persuaded Harry to drink some juice and eat a little cheese Danish, she read the whiteboard easel in the lobby. There were pool aerobics, intermediate windsurfing, the botanical gardens (shuttle provided), a calypso luncheon, a sunset booze cruise . . . she saw nothing that might be related to SUN CLUB BE*.

At the concierge desk she asked about the snorkeling. The clerk was a pretty, freckled, heavily permed girl. She shook her head: “The class has already gone out.”

“Oh shoot,” Gina said. “Well.” She thought of Gwynn. Leaning toward the girl and lowering her voice, she said: “I’m not sure how to put this. I was wondering about the bee. You know, the SUN CLUB BE*.”

The girl regarded her blankly. She pointed to the activity chart on the easel.

“I’ve already seen that. I can’t find what I’m looking for.”

A second staffer, seeming to overhear, came up and took over. This woman was beautiful, with warm brown skin and welcoming eyes. She said discreetly, in a mellow West Indian accent: “They’ll just be starting the workshop, dear. Down that hall to your left, in the Manchineel Room. They recommend you wear a loose, comfortable clothing.”

Gina was no good at walking into rooms full of strangers, but who was? She peered through the ajar door: the Manchineel Room was cube-shaped, with mirrored walls. A dozen people—mostly her age, a few elderly—were seated or lying on tumbling mats. The young man from the theater was not among them. Because none of them had caught her looking, she was able to slip away.

She struck up a chat with a friendly younger couple in the elevator, who assured her that you didn’t need a class in order to snorkel, there was nothing to it. Their easy confidence emboldened her. She didn’t get off at her floor, but rode the elevator back down. She made her way to the dive shack on the beach. The pro set her up with a mask and fins. He didn’t even charge her. Minutes later she was floating on the Caribbean Sea.

Taking breaths underwater felt unnatural. It defied the body’s logic, sucking air through a plastic tube while chilly seawater pressed against your face and throat, touched into your armpits and groin, sloshed across your back. At first she kept standing up to pop out the snorkel. The man from the dive shack had told her to float face-down so the snorkel pointed up, to simply breathe and look. Gradually the chill faded; the calm water became a neutral medium, buoying her. She quit thrashing her fins. Her breathing grew less panicked. The mask formed an airtight seal around her eyes. If she raised her face so that her mask was half-submerged, the world split in two: bright air above, blue shadows below.

The sun warmed her back. She drifted into deeper water. From a distance the reef looked like heaps of rubble. But up close, you saw the rubble was clothed in an infinitely variegated patchwork of substance, repulsive and alluring. Everything seemed to resemble something else: chalk and cheese, velvet and slime, needles and sponge and coarse nubbling. Her eyes grazed over jeweled deformities, stealthy lumps that quivered into motion. At the sense of her approach, tiny vermilion feathers waving atop barnacles sucked themselves down in their holes.

And the fish! A zebra-striped saucer with a big wary eye on each side. An oblong lurker, half violet half canary, darting out from a crevice. Peacock spots on transparent skin, dorsal spines tipped with gold. She watched a smiling, blunt-snouted fellow rooting like a pig in the coral, its eye tiny, its flank tessellated in emerald. A cloud of silverfoil butterflies parted around her, flashing spangles of light as they turned.

Life down here was so clear and nameless, resounding with an inhuman song. She yearned to keep some piece of it, an artifact of this dream. She touched the edge of a purple fan and recoiled at its slime. It looked rooted to the rock. She wondered how the woman in the hotel had come back with her treasure, so fragile and intact. Gina perused the sea floor and found a smaller, grayer fan lying on its side in a sandy shallow area. It wasn’t exquisite, but it was something. She snatched it up—it weighed almost nothing.

She stood, feeling the weight return to her knees and hips. Liquid glugged out of her ears and the metallic lilt of reggae music drifted from nearby. The sky was clouding over; a breeze cooled her back and arms, and she wondered how long she’d been out in the water. She glanced around, disoriented, and realized the current had carried her to the far side of the cove. The cliff loomed over this end of the beach; she could see the ruined fort at its peak.

She waddled out of the listless surf in her clown shoes. She stopped to pry a flipper off her foot. Balancing on one leg, she tripped and fell on her butt. Sitting in the wet sand, she removed the other flipper. When she glanced up, her young man was grinning over her, shirtless. She’d dropped her piece of coral; the young man nudged it with his toe.

“Oooh,” he said reprovingly. “Did you touch that one?”

Gina began to speak and realized she was still breathing through her snorkel. She spat out the mouthpiece and peeled the mask off her face. Her lips were shriveled from the salt water, her mouth chalk-dry. “Yeah,” she said. Her teeth hurt. “I found it.”

“They call it ‘weeping-eye,’” said the young man. “It’s a sea nettle.”

“Oh!” said Gina.

“It blinded a girl. A young girl . . .”

Gina gaped at the young man in horror.

“No no!” he said. “It was only for a few minutes.”

“The blinding?”

He nodded. “She’s fine now. In fact, she is the daughter of a professional tennis star. They’re in Luxembourg.” His voice was deep and soft, like an actor’s, with a trace, she thought, of the genteel South. Sun had honeyed his hair; the treasure trail of darker hair below his navel disappeared in the waistband of his trunks.

Gina looked past him to the cluster of chaise longues and white umbrellas. The older woman was nowhere to be seen. But on one of the chaises was a black man with long dreadlocks. He wore a white linen suit with a black tie, and chewed on a stub of cigar. At his side was a boom box playing the chunka-tink chunka-tink of a reggae song.

“Thanks,” she said as the young man helped her up. He introduced himself as Steffens.

“But I thought you guys had left,” said Gina.

“When?”

Gina wished she’d kept her mouth shut; she didn’t want to seem like a snooper. “That Jeep taxi,” she murmured.

“Oh!” said Steffens. “Just a visit to the botanic garden. For Chloris’s sake.”

Gina nodded. “You did a nice job of playing along last night. Or was it two nights ago? I’m sorry—I haven’t been well. In the show, I mean.”

Steffens looked puzzled. “Playing along?”

“Oh come on.” Gina blushed. “I felt embarrassed for you. It didn’t seem fair.”

The young man raised his eyebrow: “What did I do? He put me in a trance. I have no memory at all.”

“Oh, you’re kidding me,” said Gina. “Well, what about the lady you were with . . .”

“Chloris?”

“Didn’t she tell you what happened?”

The young man shook his head.

“You pretended to be”—she could barely say the words—“a beauty queen. You had to—I don’t know—prance around.”

“I pranced?” he said, delighted at the word. He turned and began to bunny-hop away from her. “Like this? Is this a prance? Is this embarrassing?”

Laughter erupted from her mouth and butterflies swarmed in her stomach.

The Rastafarian man on the chaise longue bellowed in laughter that might or might not have been kind.

Steffens stopped hopping and shrugged. “I don’t know how else to explain it to you. Dr. Cline’s suggestions are powerful.”

“They didn’t seem powerful to me. He was making fools out of people—I don’t mean you. He made a fool of himself. I felt like a fool, watching.”

“But you weren’t up there on the stage,” he said. “With the lights on you. And all those eyes on you. Gina.”

“How do you know my name?”

Steffens shrugged again. The Rastafarian man roared with laughter. Gina cringed. She wondered where the older woman, Chloris, was. A raindrop touched her cheek.

“Good-bye, then,” Gina said. Traipsing back along the beach, raindrops prickling her shoulders, she wanted to stop and turn around. When she’d reached the dive shack, she looked back across the emptying beach. She’d left her fan of coral on the sand.

HARRY WANTED TO KNOW WHETHER GINA had been to a treatment center, had received some type of treatment.

“You mean the SUN CLUB BE*?” said Gina. “Or what are you talking about?”

“I was under the impression that this resort had some kind of a treatment center. Like a spa or something.” He was camped under the covers, spooning sherbet into his mouth, watching a grainy broadcast of a rugby match. “Isn’t that why we came here? To St. Rita?”

She felt her chin quivering. Sometimes she got so exasperated with Harry’s thickheadedness that she didn’t feel like explaining. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She might have wanted to regale him with descriptions of her snorkeling adventure, but now found she felt disinclined to share it with him, that strange, separate world she’d discovered. Nor did she feel like telling him about her encounter on the beach. Nor the “workshop,” which she hadn’t joined because she was scared, or lonely. She didn’t understand what SUN CLUB BE* was, nor what it could supposedly do for her. She felt angry at Gwynn. They had only come here for distraction, to run out the clock.

“I can’t figure out the rules of this game,” noted Harry. “But these sons of bitches are tough. Look at those legs. And look—no helmets.”

She dressed up in her best outfit and went alone to dinner.

ON THURSDAY MORNING, GINA PRESENTED HERSELF at the Manchineel Room. She knew it would be her last chance.

The workshop leader, a perfectly bald man in his forties, caught sight of her lingering in the doorway and rose from his mat. He was barefoot, in a loose T-shirt and Spandex pants. It struck her that he resembled Dr. Cline, the guy from the stage show. She even noted the vein on his scalp. But he clasped her limp hand in both of his and introduced himself as Joel.

Joel’s hands were moist and warm. He had a slightly lazy eye. (Had the hypnotist also had a lazy eye?) Pasted over Joel’s left breast was a stick-on name tag that said

HELLO, MY NAME IS

—and below this, printed in black magic marker:

It is safe to be a man.

“I don’t think I’m in the right place,” said Gina, stepping back.

Joel laughed appeasingly; touching the nametag he leaned in and whispered: “Some of us find it helpful to wear our affirmation. It’s up to you, of course.” Gina saw that everyone else was wearing the name tags.

Joel installed her on a mat close to him, at the front of the group, but in the course of the stretching and movement—they breathed while circling their hips, shook stiffness from their hands, hissed like snakes at Joel’s bidding—Gina managed to recede back into the thicket of bodies.

For the next exercise Gina found herself paired with a lanky middle-aged fellow with a mane of wavy hair, wildly flared nostrils, and sensuous lips. Gina tried to mirror him, bending deeply to the left, then to the right, but the man was extremely flexible and she couldn’t reproduce his contortions. He stood on one leg and raised his hands in a V, grinning, fixing her with his gaze: the dilated nostrils gave to his blue eyes an appearance of crazed intensity.

She tripped, or her leg gave out—her butt hit the mat hard. She sucked in her breath. “Oh,” she said. The nostril man began to help her up. “Wait a sec,” she said as her vision dimmed and blurred. Through the glitter of her head rush (she hoped it was just a head rush) she saw Steffens in the mirror, threading his way blithely through the group, dressed in madras shorts and a seashell pink polo, against which his thin arms looked smooth and well browned. She hadn’t expected him to be here, but she saw (with chagrin and excitement) how keenly she’d anticipated it. His presence in the room gave her a shimmery sense of wish fulfillment, of a magical thought realized.

There was a brief, whispered conferral between Joel and Steffens before the latter assumed his place on a mat.

Joel was jouncing on his bare feet, clapping, gathering himself to address the class. “I feel a lot of surrendering going on in this room. I’ve said it before, folks: I can’t beat my illness unless I am willing to surrender.” The others chorused in on this last phrase. “And I can’t surrender until I know that my body is a safe place for me to be.”

Gina heard murmurs of assent.

“I can feel in this room a yearning for wholeness. You’ve paid your hard-earned money to come to St. Rita, the most beautiful place on earth. For a vacation. For re-creation.”

The murmurs grew more enthusiastic.

“But what are we re-creating? Every man, woman, and child in this hotel—has anyone see a child in this hotel?”—there were titters here; in fact Gina hadn’t seen one—“every person in this hotel is yearning for wholeness. But every person in this room”—Joel finger-scanned the guests, pausing on Gina—“has found the courage to ask themselves, Am I willing to heal? Am I willing to make the choice to take control of my healing process? I’m seeing some nods. I’d like for us to reaffirm that choice this morning. We have some new friends and some old friends with us. What I’d like for us to do is share with a partner something about the journey that brought you here to this room today.”

The group began to mingle and pair off. Gina looked for Steffens, but someone grabbed her hand—it was Joel: “Will you partner with me, Jean?”

“I’m Gina. Gina Maisley.”

Joel shut his eyes, inhaling deeply. They sat cross-legged, knee-to-knee, uncomfortably close. Joel raised his hands and invited her to press her palms to his.

“This all must seem very new to you,” Joel began.

Gina blushed. “I guess I thought it would be a little more like a spa,” she admitted.

Joel nodded, seeming to reflect on this. “Are you well today, Gina?”

“I guess so,” she said uncertainly. “Maybe not? The problem is it’s all so complicated—”

“Is it really, Gina?” Joel smiled. “Let me tell you a little bit about my journey. Years ago I learned to ask myself, What story is my body trying to tell me? Have you ever listened closely to your body’s story?”

“Oh I have, I have,” said Gina. She was having trouble deciding which of Joel’s eyes to focus on. “But it’s a little murky right now . . .”

“It isn’t murky at all.”

“No?”

Joel shook his head. “It couldn’t be more clear. Gina, let me ask you a question. What happens when you hold on to resentment? When you hoard it inside and don’t let it go?”

“Gee. It eats away at you.”

Joel clasped his hands and raised his eyes to the ceiling as if in praise: “I couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Gina blushed again. It felt good to get the answer right, even for someone like Joel. She glanced in the mirror and locked eyes with Steffens—his half smirk, his wink. His partner was a heavy-jowled woman with a severe gray bowl cut and enormous culottes.

“I chose,” Joel continued, “to hold my anger inside. The things in here”—he tapped his head, right on the vein—“became the things in here”: he smoothed his palm down his chest and belly, over his pelvis and groin.

“I won’t deny, Gina, that all of the work I’ve done—and I’ve been doing this work for years and it has saved my life—all of this work doesn’t make it any less hard for me to share with you that I am a cancer survivor.”

“Oh,” Gina said.

“In the testicles,” said Joel.

“Oh my Lord,” murmured Gina. Did he mean both of them?

“What are the testicles?” Joel said. Gina opened her mouth to venture a guess, when Joel answered himself: “They are the principle of manhood. In my journey, I have had to teach myself that it’s safe for me, personally, to be a man. And that I don’t have to keep my fear of my father, and my resentments of my father, snarled up in here.”

“Wait—are you saying you think that—”

“I’m saying I don’t believe that I’m sterile, Gina. Why? Because for a long time I resisted the process of life, and the process of needing to go through the parenting experience. Whereas now I trust in the process of life. I am always in the right place, doing the right things, at the right time. I welcome my children. I know that when they are ready, if I am holding open the door for them, they will come into the world. I welcome them.”

Gina was appalled, but the tears welled up in her eyes. When he asked her if she thought she could find the courage to name the place where she’d been wounded, she found herself nodding weepily. By the time she walked out of the Manchineel Room, she was wearing a sticker that said

HELLO MY NAME IS:

I am safe and loved and totally supported.

She stood in the lobby in a daze as people dispersed around her. The air was thick with the smells of lunch. A woman seated in a wing-back chair was smoking and glaring at her with watery bug eyes. It was the young man’s companion, Chloris. She had the air of a ruined southern belle, Gina thought, resigned and defiant in her red lipstick, floral-print frock, and white mules. She stubbed out her cigarette and rose from the chair just as Steffens brushed past Gina. Before he and Chloris walked off together, Gina noted the nametag on his polo shirt: I am part of the Universal design.

“Lunchtime!” cried Russell/Raoul, clapping his hands. “Chop-chop! Gina! Lunch! We got to feed you pretty girls . . .” He swept past her toward the front entrance, where the same festive merengue song was playing. Another new group of arrivals, climbing down from the Jeep, getting coaxed into the conga line.

IT WAS A BRIGHT, WINDY DAY WITH SCUDDING CLOUDS and the agitated rustling of palms. From the balcony, she had seen how the cove was flecked with whitecaps—they’d looked motionless, as in a painting. The man in the dive shack had warned her: “I’d wait till tomorrow.” But she couldn’t tomorrow. It was her last chance to have this experience. Plus she was thinking about that coral.

So the water churned and heaved, jostling Gina’s body like an impatient mob. Waves broke over her, flooding her snorkel; she came up gagging, spitting salt water, sucking air. Underwater, the landscape was turbid, murky. She tried to float close enough to the reef to see it but found she had to kick her fins fiercely just trying to stay in one place. The swells shoved her forward—her face right up to the coral, a dazzle of color—then yanked her back, stealing the picture away.

It thrust her over a shallow part of the reef, so she had to suck in her stomach to keep it from grazing the coral; then it surged her over the reef edge, into the clear, and she found herself in a deeper place with only sand below, like the floor of an empty room.

As she floated over this desolation, she stewed. Joel had said she was sabotaging herself. But why would someone do that? Did she want to die? It was a scary thought, and shameful—she loved her children madly. Why should she want to die, when she wanted so badly to live? Yet how easy it would be to suck a breath of water. It would fill her lungs like cold lead; she’d subside into numbness. But she wouldn’t subside. She’d choke and cough it out, her body would struggle viciously toward the air.

Out of the dim blue background a form emerged, a humungous drifting thing. Shark, she thought, releasing her bladder, the slight genital sting, then the warmth pooling against her belly and thighs. It was bigger than she was, and seemed to move with prehistoric slowness. She brayed into her mouthpiece, her voice vibrating in her ears. It turned, coming at an angle, like a stone statue, alert, impassive. Its body, she saw, was mud-colored and speckled, as large as a cow’s. Gill fins bigger than dinner plates waggled blackly. The fish—for it was definitely a fish—frowned at her, its lips thick as bicycle tires, its eyes small nacreous beads. She felt an abyss opening beneath her and around her, the closeness of something immense and indifferent. She thrashed her feet and growled into her snorkel. In a blink the fish turned and sailed off into the shadows.

When she slogged out of the surf, shivering, she could hear the reggae music. Water had gotten in her mask, and when she pulled it off her eyes stung. Up ahead, the dreadlocked man in the white suit was sitting on his chaise under an umbrella. He saw Gina and beckoned. Steffens was nowhere to be seen.

The Rastafarian appeared to be in a heated discussion with a man she hadn’t seen before—he looked like Woody Allen, but older and grayer, in an unkempt white undershirt. He seemed not to notice Gina, but was gesturing and pacing back and forth beside the dreadlocked man. “Oh yeah, oh yeah,” he was saying, “that’s just great, Thomas, just great. All the little flowers in the garden, right? Isn’t that your trip? What a little fascist.”

Who were these people? Gina wondered. Were they guests at the resort?

The dreadlocked man just laughed, seeming to goad his associate. “Yeah, I said it,” the older man exclaimed in a whiny tone. “You know who you are. Go ahead and laugh, fascist.”

The Rastafarian man, ignoring him, grinned and waved to Gina. “You a look fi yuh likkle fren?”

She smiled and shrugged; she didn’t understand. The Woody Allen figure had stopped ranting; he studied her coolly.

“You cyah see seh ’im no want yuh?” continued the Rastafarian. “’Im a battyman—mi nah tell lie! ’Im head mess up. You tink ’im look good? You no waan fi touch dat. A dem tings ah di wages ah sin.”

He threw back his head and laughed. Gina blushed, not knowing if it was a joke or an insult. The Woody Allen figure seemed to be leering at her. Then he, too, began to laugh, a wheezy chuckle and snort that joined the rich bellowing of the other. The edges of the white umbrellas shook and snapped in the wind. Gina grabbed her gear and fled, mortified. At the dive shack she found she had only one flipper to return.

HARRY WAS PROSTRATE IN A SUN CLUB BATHROBE, reading glasses perched on his nose, peering at her with alarm over the top of his Robert Ludlum novel.

“There’s something wrong with my eye,” Gina said.

She’d noticed the jagged sensation while climbing the steps from the dive shack. Sure enough, she’d peeled out her contact lens and seen that it was torn. But even after she was free of the damaged lens she could still feel an irritant, like a loose eyelash—what her optometrist would have called a foreign-body sensation.

Harry came alive with concern, as if her discomfort had infected him. With his thumbs he pried her lids apart, looking for the offending particle, a grave expression on his face. He wanted to take her to the hotel infirmary.

“Leave it be,” she said. “It’ll go away on its own.”

“Maybe we should call Cerbone,” Harry said. “It couldn’t hurt.”

This enraged her. “Don’t you think he’ll be calling us soon enough? Don’t you think I have bigger things to worry about?”

She had a cry in the bathroom and took a long hot shower. When she came out in her bathrobe, she found a bunch of newly purchased products arranged on the desktop: two kinds of Visine, a tube of sty ointment, an eye-wash cup with sodium solution, and a ghoulishly white eye patch in plastic wrapping.

It flooded her with anguish. “Where did you get this stuff?” she cried, but Harry was out on the balcony, hunched in a chair, his back to her.

He was so single-minded and stubborn, like a big dumb compassionate beast. When all she wanted was a little sympathy, he took it as a call to set about trying to fix the problem. Harry guessed at the recondite transactions of her inner life; he dwelled on the periphery with tenderness and caution but couldn’t really fathom it, could never enter.

He showered and got dressed up for their last dinner. He smelled nice but he looked like a wreck—she could see that he knew it—so she made him undress, and called up room service, and they ate their meal together in the bed.

THE WIND CALMED, THE PALM FRONDS SETTLED, stars filled the tropical sky. Tiki torches lit up the main pool deck, where a limbo contest was under way. Russell/Raoul kept up a continuous, suggestive commentary through his megaphone; each time a contestant fell or tipped the bar, he announced, in a matter-of-fact tone: Sorry, but you lost! It was the catchphrase of the night, and with each repetition it drew more hilarity from the guests. Gina watched from her balcony. She could also see, on one of the smaller terraces—above the pool deck but below her—Steffens and Chloris, seated at a small table beside a potted mimosa. She watched, filing her nails, until she saw them get up from their chairs. Good-bye, she thought; good-bye for the second time. But after the pair exchanged a few words, she saw Chloris exit the balcony and Steffens sit back down.

Harry was sleeping. Gina applied her makeup and slipped out to the elevator. She got off at the second floor, thinking this was how you got to the terrace, but it turned out to be wrong. She had to backtrack twice, and was sure she would lose her chance. But when she emerged onto the terrace, the young man was still there. When he noticed her, he smiled as if he’d been expecting her.

“Is it on account of that stinging nettle?” he said.

She frowned, touched her eyelid. “Is it still red? I tore a contact. Something like that isn’t funny—an injury to the eye.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “That little girl I was mentioning before—well, it wasn’t from a nettle. But she really did go blind. And she isn’t in Luxembourg. The last I heard she was in Storm Lake, Minnesota, on her grandmother’s farm.”

“Awful,” murmured Gina. Steffens had risen and extended his hand. When she gave him hers, he leaned over and kissed it. “You have old-fashioned manners.” She glanced up at the hotel facade, as if Harry might be watching from the balcony.

The young man shrugged. “You’re looking at the last scion of the DuBrays.” He chuckled weakly. “Steffens is just a family name.” His upper lip curled winsomely, half-mockingly.

“It’s a nice name,” she said.

He took a sip from his liqueur. The blue liquid looked medicinal. He asked Gina if she wanted one, and when she said she did (“But what is it?”) he disappeared for a minute and returned with a waiter bearing two curaçaos. The drink looked fruity, but when Gina tasted hers it was bitter.

“I saw your friend on the beach,” said Gina.

“Chloris?”

“No no,” said Gina, “the black man in the suit. With the music.”

“That’s Thomas,” Steffens said.

“I had just come out of the ocean. I went snorkeling by myself and saw an enormous fish. I’ve never been so terrified in my life! I thought it was a shark. When I made a loud noise, it swam away.”

Steffens asked her to describe it. “Goliath grouper,” he said. “They call it a jewfish. Hulking old girls. But harmless.”

“It was really scary,” said Gina.

The sounds of calypso, the murmurous laughter and applause drifted up to them from the pool deck. In the faint light of the terrace—the fluorescent bug zapper; the glowing red glass of the votive candle between them—the young man’s face didn’t look so much like Eddie Marinowski’s. Though it was a handsome face. His eyelids had a slight fold, which gave them an Asiatic tinge, and the eyelashes were lush and black in contrast with his honey-colored locks. It was a pretty, slightly strange face. He had a long jaw and a dimpled chin.

“Was it scary being in the workshop?” he asked. “It must all seem very new to you.”

Gina cringed at the thought. “A little,” she conceded. “I didn’t know what to expect.”

Steffens grinned. “I go practically every day.”

“That name tag he gave you,” said Gina. “Something about the universal something?”

“My affirmation.”

“I’m sorry, this is none of my business,” said Gina. “But I’m not sure I understand. Why you were there, I mean. You don’t seem . . .”

“Ill?”

Gina lowered her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Steffens said. “You see, Gina, I’m . . . I’m what they call a sex deviate.”

His words were like a slap to the face. Steffens held her gaze, his lips pursed, cheeks dimpled, black eyes glistering. “Does that offend you?” he said. “Or disappoint you?”

Gina shook her head, although it did both. She gulped down the rest of her curaçao. Steffens signaled to the waiter for more.

The DuBrays, he explained, were the last of the old Catholic families in their county. His father and mother were dead. He’d been brought up in a decaying manor house called Rountree. It was himself, Chloris, and a cook named Deedee. After the cook died when Steffens was thirteen, they’d survived on pizza and Chinese delivery. Chloris suffered from crippling hypochondria, and let him out of the house only for Mass. His boyhood was suffused with the funereal reek of lilies and the acrid breath of his home tutor, a dissolute cadaver named Spales. He’d been a lonely, silent boy—a “romantic virgin,” as he put it—dreaming of Shelley in a walled garden overgrown with clematis. At seventeen he fell in love with a pizza delivery boy named Carter Holkins, who initiated him in the dark arts of male love. He endured a moonless August night of torment and bliss on a moldering picnic table in the walled garden. It was, he said, as though an angel had descended—but a saving angel, or an angel of destruction? Were they one and the same? The delivery boy wanted Steffens to come away with him; he said they would go to New Orleans and rent a room. But Steffens was afraid. He let Carter Holkins go. His heart was broken. Chloris never knew a thing. Then, last Christmas, he’d started getting fevers, night sweats. . . .

Gina gazed on the boy with mortification and pity. Gwynn had a nephew who was this way. Was that what he meant? She’d seen them on the news looking skeletal and horribly exposed in their paper gowns. She looked at Steffens’ hands, his lips, and the hollows of his cheekbones in the candlelight, as though he were a kind of saintly creature—magical, dangerous, suffering.

“You must feel so unlucky,” she said, fumbling in her purse for a tissue. “So betrayed.”

A wince passed over Steffens’ face. “On the contrary,” he said. “I feel grateful. I feel forgiveness.”

“Toward the pizza boy?”

“Toward myself.”

“But why would you need to forgive yourself?” she asked (though she had an answer in mind: For your mistake).

“Because feeling guilty is what got me into this mess in the first place.”

“I don’t understand,” said Gina, shaking her head.

“I’m talking about thoughts,” he said, tapping his temple. “Subconscious patterns in the mind.”

“Are you saying you made yourself sick? From thinking?”

“That would be blaming myself,” said Steffens.

“But you are sick,” said Gina. “Very, very sick.”

Steffens grinned implacably. “If I say, I am sick, what I’m really saying is, I believe I am sick. But why would I believe such a thing, unless I wanted it to be true?”

“That sounds so sad,” said Gina. “So terrible and sad.”

“It shouldn’t be,” said Steffens. “It should be joyful. No matter how long you’ve been doing it—the thought patterns, I mean—you can change it today, this very minute.”

“And how do you do that?” said Gina coolly.

“I say I am powerful and capable. I say I love and appreciate myself. I say”—the young man coughed—“I say that I was loved as a baby.”

He turned aside and coughed repeatedly into his hand. When he recovered, he said: “I say that I am part of the Universal design.” He smiled wanly. She thought he might be wearing a bit of rouge.

“You need treatment—real treatment,” said Gina. “At a hospital. Not some place like this. It could mean your life.”

“This is my life, isn’t it?” said Steffens.

Gina was thinking of Joel, directing a beam of hatred at the image of his bald head. He was the hypnotist, she thought. It was a bunch of hocus-pocus. Of course the most desperate people were the most gullible. SUN CLUB BE*. Joel and his cancerous testicles. What had he said? Resentments. You stored them up and they ate away at you, and that was the cancer. Wherever Joel had gotten that malarkey from, it wasn’t his —she knew because she’d heard it before. It was an old idea, that cancer was shameful, a sign of bad character.

But it had always made her wonder. If feelings could accumulate deep in her bones, worm their way into the very code that made the marrow new.

She thought of Frances in her nightie, draped over her crutches, a woman the size of a girl, gazing at the portrait of Jesus above the sofa. And she pictured a tiny flame of anger burning underneath the nightie.

It was Jesus who reached out and touched that flame; it burned His finger, and that was what turned it into love.

She shook her head. The eyes of Joel appeared in her mind, his eyes when they’d pressed hands; now she could see the wound there, and the hope when he welcomed his children.

She shivered. The blue drinks had made her head feel muzzy.

“I haven’t been such a great person,” she said. “Not all the time.”

“But you have a good heart,” said Steffens.

Gina nodded. “I think I might have made myself sick.”

“You have to tell yourself,” he said, “that you don’t deserve to be.”

“It’s not a matter of deserving. I’m going to get some news tomorrow. Some very, very bad news.”

“Hey, hey now.” Steffens reached out and took her hand. “The only thing that matters is what’s in your mind. You can change it now. This moment.”

Gina cast a leery eye on him, then let her gaze fall. “I’m so ashamed,” she said. “Not at being sick. I’m ashamed at being so afraid to die. It’s the clinging. The regret.”

“What? No,” he said gently, taking both her hands and raising her up from her seat. The head rush rained sparks across her vision. He guided her to the edge of the terrace.

“Look!” he said. “What fun.” Below them, the tiki torches blazed. The Qaddafi man incanted through his bullhorn. A heavy woman in a knee-length T-shirt took a running leap and cannonballed into the pool. “What life!”

Gina wept. “That’s it,” urged Steffens, “it’s the fear. Just don’t be ashamed.” She looked into his Asiatic eyes. She wanted that angel of bliss or destruction, whatever he’d called it. It was crazy, an impossible thing. He bent to put a kiss on her cheek, but she turned so that his lips brushed hers—there—and his hand poked her breast. Had Steffens ever been with a woman? Maybe he was a creep and a liar, prowling the resort for desperate women. Maybe she wanted him to be that, instead of a sick, confused boy. “Don’t be ashamed, Gina,” he repeated.

“I can’t believe I’ve said all this to a stranger.”

“Am I a stranger?” said the young man, smiling.

THE CALL CAME BEFORE NINE A.M. First Harry spoke to Dr. Cerbone, then Gina. The results, he said, were ambiguous. Which, considering the options, was the best news they could have hoped for. Better than the best. (Gwynn, it turned out, could have been onto something with her idea about an autoimmune factor. Who knew?) They would have to monitor it, of course—he’d like to see her back in his office in six months’ time. The upshot, he said, was that Gina was a healthy woman. Something was a bit odd about those numbers, of course, but . . . sometimes numbers were odd. Everybody, he conceded, was different. For the time being, it was important not to worry. They should be vigilant, yes, but not worry. She should relax. Enjoy her summer. Were they going on vacation? Oh of course, they were already on vacation. Well then. Nice timing.

Harry and Gina had a good cry and then, borne along on the flood of release, made love for the first time in months. In her passion, Gina thought of the young man’s kiss, its small, unsavory thrill, faint as on the other side of a dream. They breakfasted in their room, scarfing rolls with mango butter, and then made love again, then showered and packed.

Harry was at the front desk, checking them out, when Gina turned and noticed Chloris watching her from the corner of the lobby. The woman stubbed out her cigarette in a potted palmetto and approached with a haggard look on her face. Gina quickly assembled a pleasant expression. It wasn’t hard: she felt ebullient.

“Annabelle Duggan,” said the woman in a smoky southern voice, shaking Gina’s hand stiffly.

“No—no, my name is Gina Maisley.”

The woman smirked. “I don’t know who you are, lady. I am Annabelle Duggan.”

“I thought you were Chloris,” said Gina.

“I don’t know what you thought, or what that boy told you,” said Annabelle, lowering her voice. “He’s a sick boy. But not in the way you think. Like I said, I don’t know what he told you. But you listen here—”

“My friends!” cried Russell/Raoul. “Gina and Annabelle! The sexy girls!” He put a hand on each of their backs, grinning from face to face. Annabelle gave Gina a hard look.

It gave Gina pause. He’s a sick boy. She thought the kiss could not be contagious. It couldn’t, could it? The question, that tickle in her chest, brought back the feeling of the deeper, colder place, like the floor of an empty room, where a shadow drifted toward her slowly, at an angle. She imagined Dr. Cerbone calling back with a careful apology—he had told them wrong; there was something else, which had gotten overlooked—but as quickly as the fish had darted away, the dread feeling left her.

“Gina,” crooned their host. “I weep, Gina. I weep for the loss of you. Why do you leave us like this. You will come soon back to us, no?”

Gina giggled and aw-shucks’d him, casting her eye toward Harry, who had finished his business and was beckoning her toward the Jeep.

WHEN THEY LANDED IN CHICAGO, Harry broached the topic of their deal. They were to call the children, to tell them what they knew.

“Tell them what?” said Gina. What would happen, she said, was that in trying to explain the good news, they would only make the kids worry. “And it’s all so complicated, anyway.” Harry agreed that that was true. Francie, though, she would call. She would say as much as she could. As soon as she got settled back in. The cleaning lady had come during the week: the foyer smelled like polish and the carpeting bore the fanned traces of the vacuum. The rooms of their home felt ordered and replenished.

She met her old friend on a gorgeous spring Tuesday, at the place that had their favorite onion soup. They were to lunch outside on the patio, under the cherry blossoms, with the fresh breeze off the lake. Gwynn was already seated; when she saw Gina coming, she rose and stretched out her arms. As they embraced, Gina was taken aback by the sharpness of Gwynn’s shoulder blades, and in the spring sunlight the smaller woman’s face, though smiling, looked a bit pinched or wan. Gina wondered if her friend could be ill.

“So how was it?” said Gwynn.

It was paradise, Gina admitted. The entertainment was on the tacky side. But the view. And the coral . . .

(She had never gotten her coral. It had all gone by so fast, like a whirlwind.) “I must have been under a spell,” Gina said.

But was it healing? Gwynn wanted to know.

She felt better, Gina observed. “We had good reason to worry, of course. But a lot of it, it turned out, was just in my head.”