When the gurneys had been dismissed and all the other boat guests relocated, the Feldmans sat in a circle in silence. David’s nose had stopped bleeding. Mitch said his shoulder felt better. Rachel’s lips didn’t swell up. Everybody had stopped crying for the time being. The cruise director had fled the scene of the crime.
Annette was feeling so many emotions it was hard for her to discern which one was the most overriding. There was shock about learning Freddy was a millionaire, and in the drug world, no less. There was anxiety about Elise, since clearly the cockamamie diabetes app she’d told them about was a fiction, covering up something much worse. Disappointment toward her son-in-law for not realizing he should have consulted with his wife before making a gigantic career change. Concern about Rachel, who she suspected was hiding more than her relationship with Freddy. Compassion for Darius, who seemed the most innocent of the lot, though couldn’t he just write his damn essay already? Worry that she might have outed David’s illness when he’d been so perfectly clear about his wishes to keep it a private matter. Embarrassment in front of that handsome cruise director and all the other passengers, who had stared at them like they were a bunch of wild animals thrown into a cage together for the first time. And guilt, of course, because she was the one who’d engineered this whole trip, who put her family into a crucible and lit the burner.
She had been so foolish to insist on the cruise. Instead of bringing them closer together, they were in a worse position than when they started. The status quo had not needed tampering with. She and Elise spoke once a week. Facebook allowed them to see that Freddy was alive and healthy. The grandchildren called for her birthday and knew enough to thank her for the gifts she sent them. David probably would have been better off at home. The doctor who said a trip might do him good clearly didn’t realize she was throwing him into a tempest. His weekly radiation appointment was more soothing than the Ocean Queen.
Annette knew she should be the first one to speak. She was still the team captain, even if she desperately wanted to abdicate the role.
“Well, this evening certainly didn’t go as planned,” she finally said.
Mitch crossed his arms across his chest. Elise was nervously tying and untying the lace ribbon on her dress.
“It’s okay, Mom,” Freddy said, putting a hand on hers. His touch sent a shiver down her spine. The last time she’d felt his open palm, it had been soft and bare. He’d probably been a boy no older than thirteen and she was still forcing him to hold hands when they crossed the street. Now his hands were rough, with hair on the knuckles, and so much bigger than hers. “I should probably explain some things.”
“Let me do it,” Rachel said, looking at her uncle. Freddy nodded for her to go ahead. Her granddaughter looked like a human Pandora’s box.
“I went to visit Freddy last spring when I said I was in Guatemala.” She spoke in a sprint, as if she couldn’t free herself of the admission fast enough.
“She was the best house guest,” Natasha interjected.
“She wasn’t supposed to be a house guest. She was supposed to be building houses,” Mitch snapped.
Natasha pretended not to hear him. “You should be proud of Rachel. She was also quite the hostess to us.”
“Hostess?” Elise asked Freddy. “You went to visit Rachel at Stanford and didn’t think to tell us? We live an hour away—I’d have thought you might have told us if you were in the area, considering we haven’t laid eyes on you in—I don’t know—three or four years.”
“Well, it was sort of last—” Freddy started to say, throwing an exasperated “How could you?” look at Natasha.
“Uncle Freddy, it’s fine,” Rachel said, putting her hand on his arm. “Thanks for helping me, but I need to come clean. I got arrested in April and Freddy bailed me out.”
“Arrested?” This Annette simply couldn’t believe. Freddy was some kind of superstar drug dealer and now her granddaughter was in trouble with the law? She longed for the days when the worst she thought of all the Feldmans was that they were distant and self-involved. “Was there some kind of protest on campus?” Annette remembered her roommate at George Washington University going from one sit-in to another. Sometimes it was civil rights; other times, the women’s movement. There was always the risk of arrest and Annette just couldn’t ever bring herself to join in, no matter how strongly she believed in the causes. To defend her family, she would chain herself to a fence or face a wrecking ball, but for people she didn’t know, whose problems were real but remote, she didn’t have that kind of courage. Maybe Rachel did.
“No, it was nothing like that,” Rachel said, taking another gigantic slurp of her soda.
I really ought to review table manners with that child, Annette found herself thinking despite the tumult.
“I had a little too much to drink and got into it with a police officer. Well, it was campus security, but apparently they have arresting power.”
“‘Got into it’?” Mitch prodded.
Natasha giggled out of nowhere.
“Something funny about this?” David said to her. He was sweating and his fists were still clenched. Annette had to get him out of here. This was too much stress for him to take. But she knew it would be difficult to extricate him with all of these truths about their family being laid bare. They still hadn’t gotten to the matter of Elise being broke or Freddy’s supposed millions.
“Natasha is laughing because of what happened,” Rachel explained. “There was this thing called a Porn Party on campus, which sounds worse than it is. You just dress up in a ridiculous outfit, something sexy. I got this idea to make a skirt out of balloons only. And then, I guess I had a little too much Tito’s, and I went over to this campus security guard and asked him to pop my balloons.”
“Rachel!” Elise gasped.
“That was it?” David asked. “They arrested you for that?” David had always hated law enforcement and was known to scuffle with the security guards at the hospital over what he felt were overly tedious searches at the metal detector.
“Well, when he said no, I tried to take his handcuffs. He brought me down to the local precinct and Freddy bailed me out. There are more details, but those are the broad strokes. And I’m really, really sorry about it. I knew you would freak out and be so disappointed in me and I just couldn’t face calling you.” She put her head in her hands and dropped it between her knees.
“Rachel, your father and I will discuss this privately and address it with you later,” Elise said. Annette was proud of her daughter for managing to keep her cool. She’d never had that kind of composure when it came to Freddy. Maybe that spared Elise from being called a “fucking bitch” behind closed doors.
“That’s right, Rachel. We need time to digest this,” Mitch said. “Elise, can you please explain why you said we have no money? I was under the impression we were far from broke,” Mitch said.
Annette watched the panic spread across her son-in-law’s face. This new development was surely going to impede his professional plans. Timing was never Elise’s strong suit. She quit medical school a beat before Annette and David’s twentieth anniversary party, which had brought on a string of irritating questions all night long.
“And what does all of this have to do with you starting a business?” Mitch continued.
“I’d like to understand that myself,” David said.
“Me too,” Freddy said quietly.
“Kids, why don’t you go to your cabin,” Elise said. “Or to the teen lounge. I think there’s a silent disco tonight after the dinner.”
“OMG, I’ve been dying to try a silent disco,” Natasha said. “Look at these pics of the girls from work at Cloud Nine.” Natasha started to pull up images on her phone.
“Will you please put away that fakakta thing?” Annette said. “You’re worse than the teenagers.”
“Mom!” Freddy said, putting a protective arm around Natasha, who looked like she was about to burst into tears.
“That’s because the kids don’t have the Wi-Fi plan,” Mitch explained to no one in particular. “Trust me, they’d be on them incessantly if they did.”
“Why are we talking about phones?” David said. “I want to understand why my daughter has no money.” He lowered his voice dramatically. “I would also like to understand how—and why—my son is involved in the illegal drug world.”
“Legal,” Natasha and Freddy said at the same time.
“Kids, you need to leave,” Elise repeated.
“You keep telling me to act like an adult, Mom,” Darius said, speaking up for the first time. “There is obviously something serious going on and I’d like to know what it’s about. You can’t send us off to some kids’ dance party and think we’re going to forget what we heard.” Annette saw the determination in his face and wondered what he already knew.
“Fine. Just fine. You want to stay, you can stay. Listen, I’m not proud of it,” Elise said, speaking slowly, her voice in a timid staccato, “but I’ve developed something of a shopping problem. It started small. A new dress, some shoes. A set of dishes. But things spiraled out of control rather quickly.”
“I went to the attic,” Darius said quietly. “I found your stash.”
“I heard you on the phone with your therapist,” Rachel added.
“Why am I the last one to know anything that is happening under my roof?” Mitch demanded.
“I wouldn’t start if I were you,” Elise said, raising her voice. “You left your job without telling me. You announced your plans in front of my family so I couldn’t object or disapprove. Well, I don’t care what they hear anymore. You shouldn’t have quit without consulting me. If you had told me your plans, perhaps I would have shared my situation and told you why you couldn’t leave the Bee now.”
“You’re shifting blame, Elise,” Annette said, instantly regretting her interjection. She ought to be a silent spectator, but it was just so excruciating to sit back and watch her children say and do all of the wrong things. Perhaps that was what her husband had felt all these years about their daughter’s choices, like a steaming pot that can’t keep its lid.
“Stay out of it,” everyone seemed to say to her at once. Fine, she’d quiet down. Who was she anyway, except the reason all these people even existed?
“You shouldn’t lecture anyone on keeping secrets, by the way,” Elise said. “I saw all the meds in your room. I know why we’re on this cruise even if you don’t want us to know.”
Before Annette had a chance to formulate an answer, Freddy interrupted.
“Mom isn’t sick, Elise. Dad is.”
“What?” Elise’s question came out as a squeaky gasp. Annette watched her daughter process the information. Not only had she been wrong about who was sick, her brother was more plugged in than she was.
“Why do you say that?” David asked Freddy, obviously unwilling to let go of the charade.
“Your mouth sores. Your eyebrows. The way you’ve been walking,” Freddy said. “Should I go on?”
“Is it true, Dad?” Elise said.
“It’s true,” David said matter-of-factly. To Freddy, he asked, “How do you know all those things?”
“I suppose that brings us to yet another family secret, which Mitch alluded to earlier. I’ve built a largish business in Colorado. I own marijuana farms and retail stores. Many of our customers are on chemo and the pot really helps ease the side effects. Dad—if you wanted—I could help you find the right strain.” He then turned to Mitch. “How did you know?”
“It’s best we discuss that later,” Mitch said firmly and it seemed Freddy caught his meaning. Annette could hardly guess what there was left to say that couldn’t be said in present company.
Before any further conversation could ensue, a lone waitress appeared with a trolley of desserts.
“Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen,” came an accented voice from behind a massive cheesecake with a triangular wedge missing. “Your cruise director, Mr. Julian, has asked me to bring you a selection of sweets since you are missing tonight’s feast. Can I offer anyone a piece of cake? Perhaps you like chocolate mousse?”
All eyes gladly redirected their focus to the dessert cart, where the mousse, a glossy brown foam, jiggled in a gleaming silver bowl. Partially carved cakes, the shortest one ten inches tall, tempted in carrot, cheese, chocolate chip, raspberry truffle, and pistachio fluff. Descriptions were scrawled in neat handwriting on tented cards. Annette fantasized that if they each took something and focused on spooning bite after bite, then all the ugliness of the past half hour could dissolve as easily as the sugar on their tongues.
“I’m allergic to sesame,” Rachel said to the waitress. “Do you have anything you’re positive has no sesame in it?”
The waitress, a hearty woman with a white blond chignon, seemed excited by the question. Annette squinted to read her name tag: Ekaterina, Ukraine.
“I’m very glad you asked, miss. Our specialty is the baked Alaska. No sesame—I prepare fresh for you. It is a delight for the eyes. Perhaps you have seen our baked Alaska presentation on the YouTube?”
Annette saw Darius smirk.
“We have not,” Annette said. “Please tell us.”
Ekaterina looked as though she didn’t fancy herself up to the task. Whether it was a question of her English language skills or the sheer weight of describing the rapture that was supposed to be the baked Alaska, Annette wasn’t sure.
“Oh, it is spectacular. We do a parade. Our biggest baked Alaska—it goes on the float, I think you say—is three meters tall,” she said.
Meters, not feet. It was just one of the many differences between the staff and the guests. There was kind of an Upstairs Downstairs thing happening on the boat. Annette had gone for a stroll the other night after David had fallen asleep again before nine. The medicine made him so tired, as though it was preparing her in stages for what life would be like without him. She’d made her way below deck to where the staff cabins were located and all she saw was merriment—waiters playing cards, dancers twirling with the croupiers, engineers building houses of cards with tented Deep Blue Digests. Annette had stood out of sight for as long as she could, tucked behind the open door of a supply closet filled with barf bags, wondering if things really were better below deck.
A common theme among the crew—almost a universal truth—was that they were far away from their families. There were the occasional husband-wife pairings (porter/cleaner or bartender/waitress), but most of the workers were oceans away from their families, sending money home, breaking their backs to provide their children and spouses with schooling and clothing. But still when Annette came upon them, they were smiling and laughing. She wondered if it was easier for them to be distant, shielded from the daily insults of family by miles of ocean.
“For you, though, I have a small sample. But don’t worry, it is enough for you to share. On the Ocean Queen, we do everything big.” Ekaterina smiled and reached under the trolley, where a tablecloth was obscuring a mini refrigerator. For the next few minutes, the Feldmans watched in silence as the ceremony of the baked Alaska unfolded. A thin layer of pound cake was pressed into a pan and topped with four generous scoops of vanilla ice cream. A meringue with remarkable adhesion (Annette could never get the egg whites to peak when she beat them) was then draped on top like a cloak. Finally, Ekaterina poured a generous amount of rum around the perimeter of the plate.
“And now, the magic moment,” she said, reaching for matches. She struck a match against the book in one graceful swoop. Annette struggled sometimes with the flimsy matches from restaurants, but these looked long and sturdy, oversized like everything else on board. Ekaterina touched the flame to the alcohol pooling around the dessert and, voila, a blue ring of fire was formed. The flames worked their way up the meringue, toasting its edges to golden brown. The smell was evocative and Darius said, “Rach, this is like toasting marshmallows at Camp Lackawanna.”
Lackawanna was the overnight camp on the East Coast that the Connelly kids went to for five years straight, where they learned to sculpt jugs on potter’s wheels, windsurf, pitch a tent, and all manner of skills practical and impractical. In a gesture of generosity, Annette and David had offered to pay for their grandchildren to attend. Freddy and Elise had been to a similar camp, Camp Topanga, which had since been disbanded over ugly rumors about the camp director fraternizing with the female counselors. Annette didn’t want her grandchildren to miss out on the camping experience, which had been so formative for Elise and Freddy. It was on the clay courts of Topanga that Elise had mastered her tennis serve and in the nature center where Freddy had developed his fondness for the outdoors. (He’d lasted four whole summers at the camp until he was kicked out after being caught with a clove cigarette.) Not only did she wish her grandchildren to experience camp life, she didn’t want to sit out when all of her friends discussed what to send in the care packages and mock complained about the schlep to the boonies for visiting day. Now she thought about all that camp tuition money that would have accrued interest, carving a sizable dent into David’s medical expenses. She shook off the thought. There was no sense living life planning for doomsday. And besides, apparently her grandchildren were skilled in marshmallow toasting. Could she really put a price on that?
She looked back at the flaming dessert. The white of the meringue was starting to blacken, but the fire was still going strong.
“Excuse me, are we supposed to blow out the fire or wait until it burns out?” Annette asked Ekaterina, but she was already out of earshot, rolling the trolley out of the ballroom toward the galley.
“You’re supposed to blow it out,” Elise said firmly. “I’ve made baked Alaska before.”
Really? thought Annette. Anytime she’d been in the Connelly house, the closest Elise came to baking was slicing from a premade cookie dough roll. Even her meals left something to be desired. She’d have thought her daughter might have invested in a cooking class after all these years of phoning it in.
“No, you haven’t,” Rachel said, confirming Annette’s suspicions. But now her annoyance shifted to Rachel. Her granddaughter still hadn’t passed into that stage of adulthood where she realized that her parents sometimes did things when the kids weren’t around and that didn’t revolve around them. It reminded Annette of how both of her kids thought their teachers slept in school until Elise’s fourth-grade teacher brought her daughter to work one day and blew everyone’s minds. She would love to discuss this with Elise, but her daughter could be so prickly about how she raised her children, as though she and Annette were on different teams.
“I don’t think so,” David said. “You’re supposed to let the alcohol burn out and the flame will extinguish on its own.”
Annette looked at her husband. He was a man of science, but then again, Elise claimed to have made this dessert before.
“Blow it out,” Elise said again, this time more urgently. “The whole thing is burning.”
“No, your father’s right,” Annette said. “If we had to blow it out, Ekaterina would have told us to. And she just left.”
“Who?” Darius asked.
“Ekaterina. The waitress who brought the dessert,” Annette said. She eyed the dessert with growing concern. The flames weren’t growing taller, but they showed no signs of subsiding either. And the meringue had gone from golden brown to crispy black. Still, David usually knew what he was talking about. Why trust Elise? She wasn’t in her right mind.
“You’re going to burn the ship down,” Elise said, standing up from her chair and leaning over the baked Alaska, lips puckered and ready to blow.
“Do it, Mom,” Rachel said. “I want to try it before nothing’s left.”
“Why? You don’t even eat anymore. Is it because of Austin?” Darius said.
“Who’s Austin?” Mitch asked, his eyes moving between his children.
“Rachel’s married boyfriend,” Darius said.
“You are the worst, Darius,” Rachel said. “Just so you know, Mom spent all your college money. So you’re probably going to have to come work for me one day. Bet you wish you’d known that before you ratted me out.”
“Guys. The dessert is really smoking now,” Natasha said. “Like, more than I think it’s supposed to.” Her doe eyes were washed with concern. She was so Bambi-like it was ridiculous.
“The alcohol needs to burn off,” David repeated, like he was telling a nurse to back the hell off with her IV bag. “If you blow it out, it will taste like straight Bacardi.”
“This is ridiculous,” Elise said. Like she was blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, she moved her head in a dramatic circle and blew hard to beat back the flames. But then, before anyone could push it aside, a lock of hair escaped from her bun.
“Owwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!” Elise let out a virulent shriek. “Help me! Help me! Help!”
For a few seconds, nobody moved while they tried to grasp what was happening. Then the smell, noxious and forceful, made it obvious. Elise’s hair was on fire, her reddish locks singeing and crisping. Freddy jumped up first, dumping his water glass on Elise’s head. It helped, and a reassuring fizz sounded. But then Elise shrieked again and it was obvious her hair was still smoldering.
Freddy grabbed Rachel’s glass and flung it at Elise.
“No!” Rachel screamed, but it was too late. Elise’s hair sizzled and the smell grew even more lethal. “That’s vodka! I’m so sorry.” Rachel began to cry.
Natasha appeared with a large pitcher of water (when had she even run off to get it? Annette wondered) and poured the whole thing on Elise’s head in one quick motion. The stench of burning hair finally began to subside.
Annette watched as Elise slowly lifted her hand and brought it to her head. In patent disbelief, she grasped at the clumps of her hair, assessing the damage while biting down hard on her bottom lip.
“Elise—” she started to say, wanting to comfort her daughter. She knew her hairdresser Antonio could work magic on anybody, and there was no doubt if Elise was willing to make the trip, Antonio could fashion a flattering bob out of the remains. Truthfully, Annette had always thought Elise should cut her hair shorter. So maybe this was a blessing. “If you want, I can ask Anto—”
“I. Am. Going. To. My. Cabin,” Elise said and nobody dared to convince her otherwise. She turned her back on the group and headed toward the exit, her fist still grasping a clump of her sopping wet hair. Mitch, dutiful, followed quickly behind.
When they were gone, Freddy, Natasha, David, Rachel, and Darius all looked to Annette for instruction. They only treated her like the matriarch when convenient. She rubbed both her eyes, even though she knew it would drag the coal of her eyeliner toward her temples. It was rare she was this tired.
“What are you all waiting for?” Annette finally said. “Time for bed.” She honestly didn’t want to hear another word out of any of them. The following day she was turning seventy. Surely nobody had thought to bring her a gift. So she would give herself a present: a deep and dreamless night’s sleep, compliments of another one of David’s Valium.