Ten years ago in December, as the Mayan Long Count calendar appeared to begin another five-thousand year cycle, Ian sat at a café drinking a succession of espressos. He had been anxiously awaiting something. For the end of days. For the aliens to come. When the day rolled by uneventfully enough, he decided to finish his anthropology degree and give his wife another baby. He would quit being at odds with everything. Stop resenting the world.
He told Zoë all of this on a date, right after speaking with the police about the town transient known as Matthew, whom they glimpsed from the window of their usual cocktail bar leaping into the street and brandishing a mangled tree branch at cars and passersby. She’d looked at Ian with some awe and remarked she wouldn’t have interfered, not in a million years. Ian rattled the block of ice in his Old-Fashioned, musing. Five-thousand years ago, the stone age ended. Sumerians and Egyptians developed writing, launching the beginning of recorded history. Individual choices stack up. When you are presented with a problem, who do you decide to be?
The police drove away, leaving Matthew to his stick.
Bringing children into the world was an act of faith, Ian said. It takes courage to carry out the proposition that the world is good. Because the evidence that the world is good is ambivalent. At some point, you just had to stare into the abyss and make that fundamental statement of faith. Make a commitment, a priori. How do you know if the world is good? By binding yourself to it. The tighter you bind yourself, the more evidence you see.
Zoë loved and feared this about him. Ian would issue these challenges. Not out of pretense, but genuine searching. He’d bound himself to life and wound up a single dad. He had three sons. The end.
Zoë gazed at the back of Ian’s head as he drove. He was intent on passing the camper van slowing their progress over the mountain pass. She’d switched seats with long-legged Charlie and climbed in the back passenger’s side. Toby was in the middle since he was the littlest and William sat behind the driver’s seat.
Ian had made a point of inviting her to the mountain for the weekend of Charlie’s fourteenth birthday. They didn’t need her, they wanted her. “I think if you got to know them more,” he encouraged, “they’re wonderful boys. They really like you. And, I mean, we’re kind of a package deal.”
Vacations were about wasting time, and time was her enemy. She just needed more of it. To make up for some things. For only just discovering Brazilian waxing and for being divorced. Beauty still visited after coffee and a shower, but barefaced in a fogged mirror her looks were more refrigerated than fresh. She wasn’t the kind of person to cut or freeze any parts. She couldn’t fool herself and it only suggested that something had gone wrong. She was a par-baked loaf. A house in studs. Life was a perpetual construction project, and she’d done partial renovations. Among the scattered planks were her PhD, children, and other endeavors she’d delayed for lack of conviction, imagination, or money.
Since meeting Ian, she’d begun watching other parents. They were exhausted as far as she could tell, love-limp and seething. Children were basically tattoos from another phase and attitude. Everyone was jealous of their tenuous little lifetimes. But sure, she could try it, bind herself to life. She could flirt with her wildest ideas, as any man did.
“Sorry, Zoë,” Charlie said.
In the front seat Charlie was reading a snowboarding magazine, his nervous, rawboned fingers curling around the pages. He was going out for goalie.
Ian’s car was a brand new company EV. The upholstery was smudged with shoeprints and picture books and markers slid around her feet. Will and Toby smelled like hot dirt. She’d agreed, separating the boys would make the long drive more bearable for everyone. Two boys were manageable but three had a multiplicative effect, like the weather, or a science experiment. Shifting valences, switching alliances, testosterone bursts, things were bound to blow up.
Ian reached back and swatted the air. “Will, stop kicking the seat.”
Will tugged a hank of Toby’s shaggy blond hair.
“I want it long,” Toby said. “I want a man bun.”
“Man roll,” Will said.
“Male brioche,” Charlie added without turning around.
“Male ball.”
Ian let out a gusty burst of laughter.
Charlie twisted in his seat. “I can’t see Zoë playing sports. She’s so calm. You have to be aggressive.”
Will and Toby turned to her in unison.
“Well, I did,” she said, boringly. “Tennis.”
“That doesn’t count.”
As a kid, she fantasized about being raptured from the middle seat on the drive home from church. The middle seat was her unjust reward for best behavior among her siblings, for remaining inert in three-way skirmishes. She feared the temperamental threats her father fired over his shoulder as their mother washed her hands of them.
“How much longer, Dad?”
“Read, bud. We’re almost there.”
Will spread his book in his lap. “At first, the wave was tiny. It was just a ripple in the huge Pacific Ocean. But it moved quickly, faster than a jet.”
“Quietly, please.”
William was reading a kids’ series. I Survived the Japanese Tsunami. I Survived Pompeii. Some nights when Zoë slept over, Ian showed the boys disaster compilation videos on the internet before bedtime. Earthquakes in Turkey. Hurricanes in the Caribbean. People battening the hatches, running for their lives. “We know how it’s going to turn out,” Charlie groaned, “can’t we watch something funny?” Ian was drawn to seeing how people behaved in extreme situations, with everything upside down and sideways. Zoë wondered if it ever gave the boys bad dreams.
“We’re not making a habit of this,” Ian sighed contentedly, groping around the seat to squeeze Zoë’s knee. “But this sure is nice.”
They did need her.
* * *
The mountain resort was a once-tumbledown logging town, remodeled during hard times into a quaint Bavarian hamlet, surrounded by fir forests that rose above gingerbread rooftops to a crown of snowy peaks. Around the town, sweaty tourists tumbled from doorways painted like cuckoo-clocks. The grassy picnic area steamed in the heat and a folksy wooden sign painted with wreaths of edelweiss read Please pick up your trash in blackletter.
When Zoë returned from the Pretzel Haus with lunch, the scene looked like a lineup for the firing squad. The boys were seated three-in-a-row on a bench. Ian stood over them with his arms crossed. Zoë braced herself and set the heap of soft pretzels on the picnic table.
“I get back from the bathroom and they’ve massacred an entire colony of ants.”
Near the picnic table was a demolished dirt pile. Good, Zoë thought, it was only ants.
Ian looked from son to the next. “They decided to use their human superiority to bully something little. Which is just incomprehensible. My sons? It makes you guys seem like aliens to me.”
The boys stared blankly at their food. Toby’s face was dashed on one cheek with green marker.
“I want you to think about how to make peace with those ants before you take one bite.”
Zoë poured a pitcher of iced tea over an anthill as a child and remembered the tiny apocalypse it unleashed, how the liquid lifted the pine needles like felled timber and spun the ants in crazy whirlpools. She’d wanted to watch them carry away their dead.
Ian drew a deep breath and exhaled through his nostrils, ending their arraignment. Charlie bit into his pretzel and ate with his mouth open.
“Don’t even ask,” Will whispered to Toby.
“Can we have root beer?”
“No.”
“Told you.”
Zoë chewed on the whorl of carbohydrates and Ian drew her near in a one-armed hug.
“What did you think of the photograph? I’ve been peeing in front of that photograph my whole life,” he said.
Zoë looked at him quizzically.
“You didn’t notice? I guess you wouldn’t if you don’t stand to piss.”
She’d seen the photograph in the bathroom at the Pretzel Haus while studying herself in the mirror. It was a jumble of old-timey loggers in wool and suspenders, posing with a jagged-toothed saw. They looked like grimy gods bearing a bolt of arcane wisdom. According to Ian, every man saw the picture hanging over the toilet while reliving himself and searched for his own image among the faces.
“Some men sit to pee,” Zoë said.
“Only at home,” Toby cut in.
Charlie grinned, a lump of wet bread spackling his molars. “Zoë, you’re not supposed to sit with us while we eat. In traditional Polynesian culture girls are not allowed to eat with the men.”
“Charlie,” Ian reproached.
“It’s true. Dad read it to us.”
“Yeah, Zoë,” Will giggled, “you’re sapping our mana.”
“Women have mana, too.” Ian ordered the boys to finish eating and go play. Then they’d walk to town for souvenirs.
“And root beer,” Will said.
“Get back here,” Ian pointed at their trash.
When they were gone, Ian slumped forward and rubbed his unshaven chin. “I know it’s just ants, but nothing upsets me more than cruelty.”
Zoë reached out and stroked a wave of his hair.
Ian sighed. “They’re really kind, wonderful little humans.”
He’s into opposites lately, Ian explained earlier, when Charlie called her grandma. “He says good morning at night and goodnight in the morning. He calls me old all the time.”
Zoë was only thirty-eight. She plainly saw the peach fuzz on Charlie’s upper lip, his swelling calves and curdled attitude. She massaged the lines in Ian’s forehead. “Okay?” There were violet blurs under his eyes. He spent his weekdays as a commercial project manager and all weekend making waffles and shuttling between team practices. He compared single parenting to a firehose in the face. “It’s a goddamn siege sometimes.”
Ian took her hand away and kissed her palm. “I’m just wrestling with my demons.”
“The boys?”
“Oh, I resent the hell out of them.”
On their walk into town, Toby burst from the trees clutching a big rock and charged after a fleeing squirrel.
“Dad, Toby’s trying to hunt,” Charlie tattled flatly.
Ian laughed and shook his head. “If things go tits up, Toby will feed us all.”
“Can I have a sword?” Toby asked, skidding to a stop.
“Charlie’s getting one because it’s his birthday. When you turn fourteen you can have one, too.” Ian planned a picnic and a drive into the mountains where Charlie could give the sword a few swings. Will and Toby had to content themselves with Ian’s handmade foam weapons.
“I want a crossbow.”
“Nope.”
“Brandon lets me play with his.”
“I’m not Brandon.”
They called Brandon their stepdad, though he was only dating their mother, Jessie, as Ian never failed to correct. Jessie was heiress to the Jennings Commercial fortune, North Carolina-based fine-flooring manufacturers. Brandon liked to hunt and fish. Brandon drove a Tesla. Brandon lived in Jessie’s mansion with his son from a previous marriage, and he didn’t even work.
Ian had complained to Zoë in private before, worried that Brandon was taking advantage of Jessie. “It’s way too early. I would never have done that to her. Started dating in the middle of our divorce.” Ian’s finances were clobbered. He sold the house he built and moved to a cramped rental with an overbearing landlord, who insisted he use only Jennings Premium Hardwood Floor Cleaner.
Ian hated being blindsided. He knew for a fact that Jessie and Brandon had looked at property in Montana. “The other day we went golfing and Charlie said, ‘This course isn’t as nice as St. Andrews.’ A thirteen-year-old. I mean, Jesus, these kids are going to be millionaires. Then I find out this boyfriend of hers is taking Charlie to our club. He could go anywhere, and he goes there? He spends sixty percent of the time with my children and I only get forty? I pay child support, and this asshole gets to take my kid to Scotland?”
“Dad hates Brandon,” Will informed Zoë.
“I don’t hate him.”
“He hates guys who drive Teslas.”
“I don’t hate anyone,” Ian shot back. “I just think they’re posers.”
“Dad, when’s mom calling?” Charlie asked.
Jessie was on vacation with Brandon in Belize. She would miss Charlie’s birthday but promised to call.
“I don’t know, bud.”
Some part of her was jealous, Zoë had to admit. The woman was a black hole of her own possibilities. Jessie had secretly reneged Plan B and informed Ian too late of their third, unplanned and unwanted child, which sent him in terror and fury to a clinic for the snip. The alarm of a fourth, which later turned out to be false, and a sense that he must be a target of some cosmic mockery sunk what remained of their marriage.
Zoë herself would probably never experience the special chemistry nature furnishes mothers to prevent them drowning their young. Motherhood was probably beautiful and boring. Instead, Zoë praised the boys’ growth spurts and free-throws and washed and folded their underwear. She scrubbed syrup from towers of Saturday breakfast dishes surrounded by cups and clothes and books and family photographs, every inch of space occupied, every blank filled in. Was this what Jessie wanted? Women talked about disappearing. Certain animals disintegrated after giving birth. Salmon. She’d seen them in fish hatcheries, silvery and sclerotic, swimming in circles in netted pens as ribbons of skin and flesh streamed from their bodies like electrical currents. The kitchen drain with its pinwheeling porridge of soggy pancake augured oblivion.
The fact was that biology was undefeatable. The man she’d chosen already did everything and his children already had everything. They would never love her. Maybe she would never love them.
The boys dashed ahead on the boardwalk through the village. “Twenty dollars,” Ian called. “That’s the limit. And it can’t be candy.”
How many children had been spoiled by a mother’s excessive adoration? The whole poetry of motherhood was sticky sweet. Hysterical. But, maybe it had to be? You’re born, you’re issued a starvation portion. You carry it off to war in your pocket. How else would you survive?
The boys dragged them through a series of identical tchotchke shops looking for cheap pocket knives. Toby was obsessed with hunting. He’d seen a survival show on TV and wanted to build his own shelter and be a wild man.
Zoë felt something graze her arm and Will slipped his hand into hers. He wanted a Nerf gun. She offered to take him to the shop around the corner. Will pulled her down an aisle crammed with toys, nearly toppling from the shelves. They found the gun and pawed through rows of packages in screaming colors for the corresponding foam bullets. The kindly-looking woman standing behind the counter smiled at their joyful frenzy. Zoë looked at Will appraisingly. There was something about him she recognized. His cleverness. The way he asked insightful questions and watched everyone was unlike the other two. Something about being the middle child. He wore basketball jerseys and gold necklaces and though he was only nine, was begging to learn Italian and wanted to be in the NBA.
Zoë overspent Ian’s souvenir limit and crumpled the receipt. It was their secret. “Don’t tell, okay?” She had an idea. “Let’s pretend,” she whispered, with a cartoonishly wicked smile. It would be her small contribution. They were making memories. Will grinned, his mouth full of big pumpkin teeth.
Zoë turned to the woman at the register and took Will’s hand, beaming at him with all the scarcely concealed pride of a mother. No one ever suspected she wasn’t. “Ma’am, my son would like to know if these are the right bullets for this gun.”
Will thrust her hand away and staggered backward, aiming the gun at her sternum. “Help, help, she’s trying to kidnap me!”
The lady laughed.
They reconvened on the sidewalk in the glaring sunlight. Ian tried to pass her a twenty and she waved it away.
“Zoë paid thirty-three dollars and ninety-seven cents,” Will said.
Toby jump-kicked a brick wall, parting the stream of tourists. His new pocketknife clattered to the ground and he whimpered and sat on the curb to slip off his shoe.
“Baby,” Will scoffed.
Ian knelt to inspect Toby’s injury. “Toby has a higher pain tolerance than either of you. If he says it hurts, then it hurts.”
Toby looked up from his foot. “Dad, can we go to Mexico, too?”
“They’re not in Mexico, dummy,” Charlie said, “they’re in Belize.”
“You don’t have to be a jerk.”
Will ripped the plastic from his package of foam bullets. “Zoë, are you and Dad getting married?”
“Awkward,” Charlie chirped.
Ian chuckled, not meeting her eyes.
* * *
Their hotel was styled after a Teutonic hunting lodge with heavy wood, painted scrollwork and misty mountain views. In a lobby alcove, a stuffed bobcat flared a paw to strike. Up the polished double staircase on the mezzanine was a stone fireplace and a bank of leather couches overlooked by the massive shoulder mount of a seven-point bull elk.
“That’s really sad,” Toby said. “Why would you want just the head?”
Zoë gazed into the elk’s glassy eyes. Something penetrating and judicial in its wide-set glare demanded an honest reckoning.
Ian had booked a single suite with two king beds, a rollaway for Charlie and an adjoining living room. On the boy’s bed was a mass of stuffies, Ian’s ratty childhood gorilla and Lorn Neil, a Cabbage Patch doll they’d outfitted with a cardboard VR headset and strapped to his yarny head. Zoë offered to watch Will and Toby while Ian and Charlie played basketball. “Do what Zoë says,” Ian advised.
“I wish you had kids we could play with, Zoë.” Toby flopped across the bed and stripped off his dirty socks. “If you and Dad get married, you can go on your honeymoon to Mexico.”
“Mom’s on her honeymoon right now,” Will said.
Zoë paused. “Your mom got married?”
Toby nodded. “Last year on Charlie’s birthday. In the backyard.”
“Dad knows,” Will said, unprompted, halting the question in her mouth. “I don’t remember how he found out. But maybe don’t bring up that we talked about it.”
Why hadn’t Ian mentioned it? At first, Zoë wondered if Ian was like the other parents hovering around the kids’ Waldorf school—carefully correct, decent, boring. Their meeting had been completely organic. Magical. Probably her last chance at a thing like that. They talked about travel and philosophy, and Ian recommended a book called After the Ecstasy, the Laundry, written by a monk. “It’s mostly laundry,” he laughed.
Zoë had more complicated feelings about Ian after viewing the contents of his safe. He brought her to his garage one day and showed her a gold bar, a crypto-key and a small armory: two pistols, a rifle, a machete, an antique revolver, various knives, a crossbow and a potato gun. He was trained and licensed with a concealed-carry. She fingered the ornately decorated revolver. Everything in the safe was something she never thought about or avoided. “What, are you planning an uprising?”
“I just like toys,” he shrugged, hefting a pistol. He’d been on the qui vive since youth. At nineteen he was pistol-whipped and robbed in Costa Rica and had to get an emergency rhinoplasty. With children around, he never carried anymore. “Everything becomes a nail, et cetera.”
Toby picked up Lorn Neil and flew him over the bed. “I wish Dad and Brandon would just be friends. They both like cars. They’re both really nice. I wish we didn’t have secrets and everyone says everything and are honest.”
Will interrupted Toby. “Dad says he doesn’t want to hear anything about Brandon when we’re home with him.”
“Like, if we say, we went in the Tesla with Brandon and he let Charlie drive—”
“Then Dad gets really mad at Charlie and Charlie just stands there. Dad takes it out on him. So we don’t talk about Mom’s anymore.”
Her money, Ian had told Zoë—they’d just throw it at their problems. Her money stripped him of purpose. Jessie stuffed her purchases in drawers, under the couch. As a toddler Charlie would find them, a year’s supply of vitamins and shopping bags full of unworn clothes.
Toby plunked Lorn Neil on the nightstand and the doll slumped over lifelessly. “Before I was born, Dad didn’t want me.”
“Toby, that’s—” Zoë started.
“It’s true,” Will said. “When Mom and Dad got divorced, she went away to an apartment. Dad didn’t talk for a week. He just laid in bed and made us breakfast and gave us hugs. I know a lot more about it than Charlie and Toby because I woke up in the middle of the night because I heard them yelling.” Will glanced at Toby. “I don’t know how you slept through that. I hid under the table and listened but I didn’t understand everything.”
“I didn’t understand it.”
“You were only three.”
Toby made a fierce face and tried to mimic adult fighting. “But you said, oh, you said, meh, meh, meh.”
“Dad says Brandon just sits around the house, but that’s not how it is. Brandon takes us golfing and swimming and does things for Mom. I wish Dad could see the best in people. It’s hard for him, because he and Mom were married for ten years. He doesn’t process these things very well. I wish he would just let it go.”
“Dad doesn’t like change.”
“He didn’t tell me any of this,” Zoë shook her head.
Will sighed. “He doesn’t tell you everything because he’s trying to protect you. He’s protective of us and Mom.” Will raised his arms over his head like he was lifting a heavy rock. “He doesn’t realize that other people are carrying things, too.”
Zoë was amazed. Nine year-old boys didn’t talk like this.
Toby seized the opportunity and sucker-punched Will in the stomach and the conversation was over.
Suddenly, Zoë’s phone screen lit. It was Jessie’s number. She took the call in the hallway.
“Sorry, Ian’s phone is off. I’m looking for Charlie.”
Zoë explained. She could hear the boys pillow fighting through the door. “How’s Belize?”
“Wonderful, thanks for asking. We’ve been pretty busy with the missions work and everything. The food’s incredible.”
Zoë felt an urge to corner her but the woman was genuinely nice, someone Zoë might seek out as a friend. She hung up and went back inside. A lampshade had been dented and pillows dolloped the rumpled beds like a wrecked dessert. Ian and Charlie returned sweaty, filling the room with stagnant brume. Zoë opened a window and reported Jessie’s call.
“What did she want?”
“Dad?” Will and Toby were wedged in a corner armchair bickering over a handheld video game.
“Zoë,” Charlie said, “would you let me join the air force? I want to be a fighter pilot. Dad says I can’t.”
Ian toweled off his face. “I told him it’s not a good idea. The whole point is they strip your individuality so that you can take orders. I think you just want someone to show you who’s boss.”
“You can read about it,” Zoë shrugged, clearly, her opinion solicited only to reanimate an argument.
“But you learn how to be a team. I can become an individual afterward.”
“Babe, what did Jessie say?”
“Dad!” Will screeched.
“No. You guys need to learn to solve your own disputes.”
“But he changed my username to toiletface!” Will shut himself in the bathroom and wept bitterly.
“I need ten minutes of quiet.” Ian collapsed on the bed.
“Wear them out proper,” Ian winked, snugging plastic cups and a bottle of rosé under his beach towel.
“Mom doesn’t let us swim after we eat,” Toby galloped down the carpeted hallway in swim trunks, his ribcage protruding beneath his thin chest.
“Shh, Tobes, people are getting ready for bed.”
There were only a few people at the pool and the lights were low. Broad tropical leaves cast ornate shadows and the atmosphere was lush with a thick, mineral calm. Zoë soaked her ankles while Ian and the boys played chicken. Charlie flipped a back-handspring into the pool and surfaced partway to ogle a lithe young woman in a low-cut navy suit with his crocodile eyes. He swam toward Zoë and heaved himself up on the slate, baring his teeth. She could make out the dark glints of several gold fillings.
“Look, Zoë, I’m rich.”
“You’re not rich,” Will said, “Gigi and Papi are rich.”
Toby swam over, tonguing a loose tooth. “Number seven,” he bragged to Will.
“Who cares? I’m still eighteen months older than you.”
“Ugh, Charlie stinks.”
“Because he’s going through poverty.”
Zoë dried off and stretched on a deck chair.
“Poor Charlie,” Ian laughed, arranging himself beside her. “We were so young and dumb. It was right after the honeymoon. We just didn’t think it would happen to us. And then we didn’t know you had to brush babies’ teeth.” He lowered his voice. “Half of them rotted out before he was two. When he got older I couldn’t bear to tell him the truth and I said it was genetics. He thinks he’s got some kind of problem.”
Ian gazed at the boys. “William we planned. You can tell.”
The young woman in the navy suit walked to the chair beside Zoë and began toweling her hair. The boys watched her from the hot tub. She wrapped herself in a robe and gathered her things, smiling at Zoë. “You have a nice family.”
Zoë smiled back and tossed her head toward Ian. “It’s all him.” As she tracked the woman’s thongs squelching across the wet tiles, her blunder began to dawn on her.
“Out of the pool, guys,” Ian called, reaching for the towels. It was time for adult swim. Ian turned to her. “You could have said thank you,” he said stonily, “it is a nice family, thank you. Jesus. Sometimes I feel so alone.”
Zoë tried to rise and accidentally kicked the forgotten bottle of wine. It rolled with a guttural complaint across the tile and she rescued it from the edge of the pool. Ian draped towels around the boys and Zoë trailed behind as they walked back to the room. They barely had time to look each other in the eye. It would be days before they’d have a chance to really talk.
Someone knocked on the bathroom door just as Zoë flumped on the toilet seat. “Give me a minute,” she called, feeling harangued but feigning cheer. There was Charlie at the door, tall and skinny in mint-green underwear.
“Do you have any face oil?”
They never asked about womany things. Zoë unzipped her toiletries case and gave Charlie a squirt of expensive vitamin serum. She left him sitting on the edge of the tub, studying the glop in his palm.
On the bed, Ian had Toby and Will cuddled under each arm, riveted by something on his phone. Ian patted a place beside them and Zoë tucked in close. Will’s book had tumbled to one side. Ian was showing them a disaster video. The screen displayed a wintry, listless river running through a nondescript town. The audio track rustles with wind shear and muffled voices call out in Japanese. A few teenagers with backpacks are loitering near a deserted playground. The camera pans the river as it reverses direction and begins to crest its banks. The voices crescendo to sharp, exclamatory barks and the camera jerks and ascends, still trained on the shuddering panorama. With indescribable force and majesty the wave demolishes a bridge and rams debris, trees, cars and buildings inland. For several minutes the horrific ballet continues, dirty water slowly spinning the broken city. Several stranded people begin to sing in a dark room lit by phone screens. In the distance, billows of smoke and pink flames wreathe the city.
“Wow,” Will whispered.
When the bathroom door opened, Ian shielded his eyes against the light. “Jesus H. What’s on your face?”
Charlie emerged from the doorway wearing a beauty mask. “Mom gave it to me. It’s Black Pearl.” He patted his cheeks.
“You’re fourteen man, you don’t need that.”
“It smells good.”
Toby flung back the covers and bounced out of bed. “Can we try?”
Charlie stripped off the mask and wiped the residue on his brothers’ faces.
“Zoë! Feel!”
She gently smacked their cheeks. “Tight as a drum.”
Will rubbed the moisture between his fingers. “Dad, is this made of real pearls?”
Ian sank against the pillows and tried to speak through a stifled yawn. “I don’t know, bud. I know you think I know everything in the world but I don’t.”
In the middle of the night Will woke with a nightmare. Ian switched on the bedside lamp and scooped up his middle child, shaking all over. “It’s okay, buddy,” Ian said softly. Will was breathing hard and whimpering. “Want to tell me about it?”
“It felt so scary,” Will mumbled, “I got fouled, and we lost.”
Ian snored through Zoë’s earplugs. She bedded down on the leather sofa beneath the watchful mezzanine elk. Too many lights on in the lobby. Too many antlers. Her eyes settled on a fire extinguisher hooked to a wood-paneled wall. The instructions had little pictures, probably to help someone in a blind panic. Natural instinct so often gave the lie. She used to think you just tossed water on fire and it stopped, because they were opposites. She learned later there were different kinds of fire, and water actually made some fire worse.
* * *
“By some miracle, you’re still here.” Ian kissed her at breakfast. “I need an ally.”
In the hotel parking lot the boys charged the car. “Shotgun, it’s my birthday,” Charlie called. Ian body-blocked him and opened the front passenger door for Zoë. As soon as they hit the mountain highway Ian cued an audiobook about a pilot who flew during the Second World War in the British Royal Air Force.
“Once I’m trained, I’ll fly an F-35 Lightning II,” Charlie said. “Know how much those cost?”
“Shh. Listen, please.”
“Eighty million.”
“I don’t understand what’s going on,” Toby complained. He’d strapped Lorn Neil into the seatbelt with him.
Will was making clicking sounds with the Nerf gun.
“Will, I shouldn’t have to tell you. I’m driving.”
They stopped for groceries and Ian brought back a boxed carrot cake and bottled water. “No soda. You guys are jacked up enough already.”
As they left the parking lot, Will leaned out the open window and yelled. “Child abuse! Help, we’re being kidnapped! Our dad won’t give us soda!”
Ian backed up the car and wrenched around in his seat, his voice low and controlled. “William. What did I say? I don’t want to hear that joke again. It isn’t funny.”
They reached an unmarked Forest Service road and Ian unfolded a paper map to navigate. Zoë could see his mood lifting. The car jounced on the rough gravel and tree branches slapped the windows. They finally pulled off the road and parked near a shaded clearing carpeted with pinecones and dry needles and the boys leapt out and ran into the trees to pee. Zoë stretched her legs and wandered around. Beyond the clearing was a sunny mountainside covered in trees and old stumps from the logging days.
When she came down the embankment, Will was standing in the road facing the direction they’d come, his hands raised over his head. “Those are my orders,” he shouted, and brought his arms down in a swift chop. “Save the women and children!”
“What are you doing out there, bud?” Ian called.
“Just playing a war game.” Will left the road and trotted toward the car, dusting off his hands.
Ian opened the trunk and rooted among piles of sleeping bags and hiking boots. Zoë wrote Charlie’s name in blue icing on top of his cake and sliced apples and dry sausage with a butterknife while the boys gulped lemonade and tried whittling twigs into spears. Ian handed Charlie a clumsily wrapped package and embraced him in a hearty, back-thumping hug. “I’m proud of you. Happy birthday, young man.”
Charlie unsheathed his new sword and ran a finger along the flat of the blade. Will and Toby watched enviously.
“Always make sure people are far behind you,” Ian instructed.
Charlie walked a few paces away and began lopping off the tips of some overhanging branches. He dropped the sword by the hilt from his fingertips and the blade slipped easily into the dirt and stayed erect.
“Charlie, can I try?” Toby said.
“No, Tobes. You have your knife and the foam swords in the car.”
Will twisted his whittled stick into the dry ground where it stuck for a moment, then fell over. “Are you going to shoot your pistol, Dad?”
“We’ll see.”
“You brought a pistol?” Zoë frowned. Ian gave her a knavish look.
“Why not? It’s just us.” He rummaged behind the driver’s seat and produced an earmuff and a stumpy black gun. The boys circled him, gawping. He laid the pistol flat in his palm and opened the magazine.
“Is it empty?” Toby asked.
“Of course. You never store it loaded.” Ian lifted his shirt and deftly snugged the gun under his waistband at his lower back. “Now, where do we shoot?” He pointed at a scrubby meadow beyond the trees. “Why don’t we want to shoot that way?”
“Because you can’t see what’s back there?” Charlie said.
“Exactly. Only shoot at targets you can clearly see.” Ian instructed Charlie to fill an empty water bottle with dirt. He walked to the hillside, set the bottle on a crumbling stump and loaded the magazine with five cartridges. “This is a forty-five caliber. That means the size of the bore, the hole inside the gun.”
“Can we hold it?”
“Absolutely not,” Ian said, mildly.
“Can I touch it?” Will’s small hand passed over the gun and Ian brushed it away.
Ian put on the earmuff and faced the hillside. He positioned his feet wide, left foot forward, extended his arms and leveled the sights to his eyes.
“Get behind me and cover your ears.”
Zoë backed up to the edge of the meadow.
“You okay?” Ian called to her. She nodded. She was looking at the boys and thinking of their small skeletons, the moment when boys get power.
Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.
The sound was more savage than she expected. She could almost feel the trees recoil. Ian lowered his arms and removed the muff. The boys dropped to their knees to search for the shells in the grass.
“I’m rusty,” Ian laughed and shook out his hand. He retrieved the water bottle and turned it over in his palm, and the boys leaned in to inspect the mangled strips of plastic. “Now you guys know I can protect you from all manner of water bottles. Man, that felt good.”
Zoë approached them warily.
“Want to hold it?”
“No. It’s still loaded.”
“You always treat it like it’s loaded. Here.” Ian gave her the gun. It was much heavier than it looked. He tapped her feet into the proper stance and positioned her hands on the grip. Before Ian, she had never touched a gun. She didn’t trust it, the inky plastic and malevolent geometry. She looked doubtfully at Ian.
“Keep your finger off the trigger.” Ian dropped his hands and backed away. Zoë steadied her aim at the stump.
She could make something happen, too. Right now. Because of her, something could happen. But now she saw—this was dangerous. She shouldn’t be here. She was upsetting a balance. She was no longer sure what made a balance. If she’d just kept her distance, things might have been okay.
“Dad, you should buy Zoë a pink gun,” Toby said. “They have those. Black for boys, pink for girls.”
“Some boys like pink,” Will said.
Ian wolf-whistled. “How’s that feel?
Shoot. Do it. Just pull it. Just shoot a gun.
“Shoot!” Charlie yelled.
But the frenzy passed. Instinct prevailed. Zoë lowered the gun. She set it carefully on the ground and stepped back. It lay like a rabid animal, worn out and possessed by something it didn’t understand. Ian strode toward her. She turned to face him and spoke under her breath. “Why didn’t you tell me that Jessie got married?”
He stopped short. “What?”
“Will told me.”
Ian exhaled raggedly and knelt to pick up the gun. “Because I didn’t know.” He carried it back to the car and sent the boys to the woods to play with their toys. “It’s just like her,” he fumed. “I’m always the last to know.” Zoë could see him running worst-case scenarios. Brandon would move the family to motherloving Montana and Jessie, oblivious as ever, would somehow force his hand.
Zoë’s phone vibrated in her pocket. Jessie, again. She showed Ian the screen and walked a few paces away.
“Ian’s not picking up.” Jessie sounded pained. “Actually, do you have a minute? I wanted to speak to you. Will called me on Ian’s phone late last night. I’m really, really sorry you got put in the middle of all that. I feel sick about it. I have a hard time telling people difficult things. Here I am almost forty, and I’m still working on it full-time. I realize my actions have impacted you and I feel terrible.”
Zoë had stumbled right into the middle of an old marital spat. Some things never got resolved. You just lived with it. How had this happened? When had this family bound itself to her?
Jessie invited her for coffee sometime. “Thanks for being so dear to the boys.”
“Give her to me a sec,” Ian said, extending his hand. Then someone screamed. Ian turned sharply, gauging the alarm. Another scream. Zoë panicked and hung up the call.
Toby.
Ian tore past her into the forest. She went after him, following the wailing. In a clearing they ran right into the boys. They were shirtless and toys littered the ground. Will was laughing like a maniac. Charlie stood frozen, the sword dangling limply from his hand, and Toby was curled into a crouch, clutching himself between the legs and crying hysterically.
Ian dropped to his knees.
Toby roared, pointing at Charlie. “He threw the sword at me!”
Ian leapt up and screamed in Charlie’s face. “What the fuck did you do?” He pitched forward and stopped himself, scooped Toby into his arms and jogged toward the car. Charlie and Will stumbled aside, dazed.
“Why did you laugh?” Charlie shouted, his voice breaking.
“I didn’t,” Will said, meekly.
“Stay here,” Zoë said and followed Ian back to the car. He laid Toby in the back seat and shut the door.
“Is he bleeding?”
“No.” Ian strode toward the trees as Will and Charlie emerged. “Come with me.” He seized Charlie by the shoulder and marched him back into the forest.
Zoë climbed in the backseat where Toby lay bawling. There was no blood or cuts, only minor scrapes and bruises. “Here, Tobes, let’s get you cleaned up.” She sponged away the dirt with baby-wipes and rubbed Toby’s legs until he stopped crying. Will climbed in beside them and Zoë pulled the door shut. Charlie’s cake perched on the hood, melting in the sun.
“I saw Dad push Charlie, like this,” Will said, and shoved her on the shoulder.
“It’ll be okay,” Zoë said. “They’re working it out.” Will burrowed the crown of his head into her ribcage and wrapped his arms around her waist. She cuddled him and patted Toby’s leg. “They’ll be back soon and we’ll have some cake.” She had no idea what would happen. But she would be there.
“I’m not really worried,” Will poked his head up and shyly smiled, “but I don’t think we’re getting any cake.”
Zoë glanced out the window, where Charlie slumped defeatedly against a stump. Ian opened the rear door and leaned his head on his forearm.
“I’m sorry I shouted like that. I’m sorry I scared you. But Toby, you didn’t say Charlie hit you with the foam sword. If you’d been more clear with your words, I would not have reacted like that.”
Toby took that in, his mouth agape, eyelashes jeweled with tears. Ian thanked Zoë mechanically and ushered the boys out of the car. He pressed his palms to his eye sockets and winced. “Shit. I forgot to unload the cartridge.”
While he finished the job, Zoë poked birthday candles in the thick white cake frosting and the boys milled around aimlessly. They sang happy birthday and Charlie blew out his candles, divvying them with his brothers to lick. They ate too-sweet bites from floppy paper plates. Ian gathered the unfinished slices and slid them into a trash bag with the rest of the cake and slung the whole mess into the trunk.
The boys drowsed in the backseat on the highway back to the village.
“Dad, when can we go to the lake house again?” Toby asked, sleepily.
“It’s not our lake house, bud. Remember, it was rented. Gigi and Papi paid for it.” Jessie’s parents used to rent a beautiful lakeside property for everyone to stay when they came to visit. Ian leaned toward her. “I lost the lake house in the divorce,” he whispered, smirking. Zoë was relieved to see his good humor returning.
“But can we go?”
“No, because we’re not going to pay that much money to stay fifteen minutes away from our house.”
Zoë twisted around and gave Toby a little consolation smile. Charlie was slouching in his seat, asleep or pretending to be.
“In two days,” Will said to Toby, “I’m going on the plane all by myself to North Carolina to Gigi and Papi’s. I’ll go to golf camp and go swimming in the pool, and you’ll stay here and play with Dad.”
Toby looked at Zoë in alarm to see whether this bad news were really true.
“You’ll go next month, Tobes,” Ian said.
Zoë reached back and ruffled Will’s hair. “Great life, huh? It’s just one vacation to the next.”
“Well, with our mom and our stepdad we go on a lot of trips,” Will said. “But not really with Dad.”
“Things are different now between our home and Mom’s. Mom’s parents pay for all your trips.”
“No, we pay for it,” Toby interjected.
“No, bud, you don’t. I know how it is. Don’t worry about it, okay?”
“No, I know how it is,” Toby insisted, “because I’m the one who goes.”
Zoë heard a sharp POP and in her periphery caught Will aiming his Nerf gun into the back of the driver’s seat.
POP. POP.
“What are you doing?” Charlie shouted.
There was a peeling sound and a sensation of slowed time as the car swerved and righted, swerved and righted, and their bodies swayed in unison.
* * *