They would have needed a new wardrobe anyway. The clinic did not allow skirts. The clinic did not have air conditioning. The clinic, the whole jungle really, was plagued by mosquitos. These few, small facts they managed to glean combined with the one that was readily available—that highs would hover in the mid to high 90s every day—meant they both needed all new clothes, and those clothes proved fortuitously androgynous: long cotton pants, breathable shirts with long sleeves, walking sandals, sunhats. The night before they left, Rosie packed for both of them, then knocked on the turret door.
“So. Are you ready? Are you excited?” Rosie felt neither but tried to sound both, and when she got no response turned instead toward the practical. “I packed for you.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anything special you want to bring with us?”
“No.”
“I mean, I have all the essentials, but maybe you want to bring Alice and Miss Marple?”
“I’m not a baby.”
“Or a picture of your friends.”
“I have no friends.”
Rosie winced but plowed on. “I think I have all we need but one thing.”
“What?”
Rosie sat on the edge of the bed and took her baby’s hands and said as gently, gently, gently as she knew how, “I don’t know what to call you, my love.” Her love looked slapped but spellbound by something just over Rosie’s head. “Should I call you Claude or Poppy? Should you be my daughter or my son? You can be either one, and you know we’ll all support you. You know we’ll love you no matter what, no matter who. You have only to tell me: who do you want to be?”
“It doesn’t matter who I want to be.”
“Nothing matters but,” Rosie insisted.
“It only matters who I am.”
“And who is that?”
“Claude.” He spat the name. “I have to be Claude.”
“You don’t, sweetheart—”
“I do. Claude is my punishment.”
This child is only ten, Rosie’s breaking heart implored the universe. “What are you being punished for, my love?”
“For lying to everyone. For pretending to be something I’m not.”
“You aren’t lying. You aren’t pretending—”
“Not anymore,” said Claude.
* * *
In the thirteen days that had passed since Rosie’s midnight text, Claude’s stubbly bald head had sprouted weak downy shoots, but he still looked like a cancer patient, and that’s what everyone assumed he was. Rosie had learned during Poppy-her-sister’s first round of chemo, and a thousand times since, that once one of your identities is sick, that’s the only one that matters. She knew the sympathetic looks she was getting were only because everyone assumed her child had cancer, but she didn’t care. She felt deserving of the kindness of strangers, in fragile need of a little extra space and succor, so she was grateful for their blessings, however misguided. Whether Claude could see everyone around him assuming he was dying, Rosie wasn’t sure, but that didn’t matter either. Claude felt like he was dying, so he’d have appreciated the conjectures, had he raised his eyes from the ground long enough to take them in. He did not.
Rosie thought eighteen hours on an airplane was the perfect occasion for heartbreak anyway. Into every life, a certain amount of misery must fall, and if you could get some of it to coincide with the eighteen cramped, queasy hours you had to spend in coach, so much the better. Claude stared out the window with swollen red eyes, waved away all proffered food, chain-sipped ginger ale, and garnered sympathy for his mother.
Rosie had sold the trip to Penn and Claude together. It’ll be an incredible opportunity, she’d said, to travel somewhere new, to see the world, to help those less fortunate.
“No one is less fortunate than me,” said Claude.
“Than I.” Penn did not care for “than” as a preposition.
“You are healthy and strong and able”—Rosie felt there was more at stake here than grammar—“with food enough and clean water, a safe neighborhood, a secure home, indoor plumbing, medicine when you need it, family and friends who love you, a world-class education, and a very cute dog. You are more fortunate than many, many people.”
Claude rolled red-rimmed eyes. “If it means I don’t have to go back to school, I’ll go anywhere.”
“That’s true too.” Rosie tried not to seem too eager. “This trip would allow you to take some time and perspective, to take a break from here.”
“From here or from me?” Penn said.
Claude looked up, alarmed. His parents didn’t fight often enough for it to be no big deal when they did. On the one hand, Rosie was gratified to see him notice something, anything, that wasn’t happening inside his own head. But this wasn’t a conversation to have in front of him, and they both dropped it. Later though, Penn said, “Thailand is a long way to go just to get out of an argument.”
“That’s not why I’m going.”
“Sure it is.”
“I need to do something to mollify Howie.”
“You never have before.”
“That’s why. We can’t afford for me to lose this job.”
“It’s never going to come to that, and you know it.”
“It’s a good cause, Penn. The clinic serves Burmese refugees, undocumented residents, people from the hill tribes. It’s important work—”
“In which you’ve shown no interest until this moment.”
“It’s not that I wasn’t interested. It’s that it was never possible before with the kids and school and—”
“What part of that has ceased to be true now?”
“It’ll be good for her—him—whomever to see a little bit of the world,” Rosie stumbled. “Thailand is friendly, safe—”
“Not as safe as here.”
“We need to slow down. We all need to slow down. You need a break from researching vaginas. This child needs a break from school, from secret keeping, from Aggie, from this whole situation. This family needs a break from all the weight and drama—”
“And you need a break from me,” said Penn.
Rosie closed her eyes. “And I need a break from you.”
He watched her behind her closed lids and said nothing for moments that stretched on like Wyoming highways. Then he walked away. So she was able to coincide heartache with international air travel as well.
* * *
She didn’t call Carmelo until she was actually at the airport. She didn’t want to be talked out of it. Predictably, her mother was full of being a mother.
“What about malaria?” she led off.
“We took drugs.”
“What about typhoid?”
“More drugs.”
“What about that tropical fever?”
“Dengue?”
“Yeah, dengue.”
“We’ll use DEET.”
“Isn’t DEET bad for you?”
“Not in small quantities.”
“Are small quantities enough to prevent mosquito bites?”
“We brought long sleeves.”
“Won’t it be hot?”
“You live in Phoenix, Mother.”
“What about the boys?”
“They’ll be fine.”
“How long are you going for?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Penn?”
Ah. There was the rub. “He’ll be fine without me.”
“But will you without him, dear?”
A perfectly reasonable question. “He’s just … he’s writing a story instead of living our life.”
“Maybe he’s doing both.”
“He can’t do both, Mom. Both isn’t an option. They’re irreconcilable. Our kid is an actual person and therefore can’t be a character in a story. Penn thinks everything that’s wrong is just prelude to the magic, and one day soon, we’ll all get to forget what’s past and live happily ever after.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Fantasies always do.”
“Penn’s never been a realist, sweetie.”
“Not being a realist doesn’t make reality go away,” Rosie shrilled. “The transformation on offer here isn’t magic. It isn’t instantaneous, and it isn’t painless. It’s years and years of frog kissing. It’s frog kissing for the rest of your life. It’s frog kissing with nasty side effects and unpredictable outcomes you can’t undo if you change your mind that results maybe in your being more princess and less scullery maid than before, but not quite in your being all princess and no scullery maid.”
“What does Poppy say?”
“Nothing.” The name was growing strange again to Rosie’s ears already. “Poppy’s gone, Mom. He wants to be Claude again.”
“Wants to be?” Carmelo asked.
“Wants to be. Has to be. Thinks he is. Thinks he should. Thinks he must. I don’t know.”
“Have you asked her?”
“Him,” Rosie corrected.
“Have you asked?”
“I’ve tried, Mom. He can’t tell me. Maybe he doesn’t know. He’s very sad.”
“Isn’t that your answer then?” Carmelo wondered.
“I don’t know either,” Rosie said, and then, softly, because she was trying to be an adult and not cry on the phone to her mother in the airport, “I’m very sad too.”
Carmelo said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “What about elephant attacks?”
“Elephant attacks?”
“They have elephants in Thailand, dear, and they’re not repelled by DEET.”
It seemed telling to Rosie that getting trampled by a five-ton animal came last on her mother’s list of concerns.
But if she shared (some of) Carmelo’s worries, she was still finally going to Thailand, fulfilling a promise she’d made to her sister most of a lifetime ago. If she was unhappy about how she’d left things with Penn, about wanting, for the first time since they’d met, to be apart from him, she was still flying to far-off Asia with her youngest child. If she was worried about leaving the boys in their own precarious state, about choosing Claude over them again, about abandoning them to negotiate their daily lives without her for a little while, she was still road tripping with her baby. And if it wasn’t a road trip so much as transnavigated international journeying via hope, imagination, panic, and plane, that was also good, and she had learned over the years to take what she could get. She’d been dreaming of the trips she’d take with her daughter since her sister died, and if it wasn’t quite Poppy anymore and she came home with Claude instead, a prodigal son, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.