Читать книгу Missile Paradise - Ron Tanner - Страница 11

THREE

Seven degrees north of the Equator, every day is summer. That’s the problem, Alison decides. Who can concentrate? Her students do little more than tolerate their time in her class. If they ever look at her with wonder when she wields a brush like a conductor’s baton or tangos across the front of the room in her enthusiasm, it is only to say that she is other, as strange as the giant squids that reportedly dwell in deep waters just north of Kwajalein.

Slouched in their plastic bucket-seated school desks, they seem all but naked, bare legs crossed, flip-flops dangling from their delicate toes, everyone in shorts and halters or tight-fitting tees, the fair ones bronzed from sunning, hair highlighted, skin gleaming with perfumed lotions. They can barely keep their hands away from each other, barely disguise their mutually-consuming appetites, barely suppress their smirks as they consider all that they’re into and all that their parents don’t know about them.

Cosseted, cajoled, and comforted by their parents at every turn, it would never occur to these children that they’d be lucky to achieve the same level of mediocrity enjoyed by the grownups they find so pitiable.

“It’s not your job to beat them down,” Erik used to tell her. “They need all the encouragement they can get.”

Don’t we all? she thinks now.

Erik meant that life would beat the kids down soon enough.

When the lunch bell sounds, they stream around her, a whitewater rush of laughter, squeals, insults, and jests. Leaning into the second-floor railing to keep herself clear, Alison hears a few check themselves when they see her standing there: Ms. Spence, the Art Teach. Then they spill by, a torrent of great hope and mild anxiety, leaving behind the confused scent of sugary perfume, citrus cologne, body odor, bubble gum and herbal shampoo.

Their patronizing, dismissive glances make her wince. And angry. Here’s the searing irony of her life among school children: they pity her not because she lost her husband in a scuba diving accident fifteen months ago but because, at 34, she is old already. In their world view, there’s nothing left for her but to raise her two boys, then get out of the way.

Now, alone on the annex balcony, Alison peers to the lagoon’s sun-hammered surface and regards the noon ferry returning from Ebeye. She and Erik came to Kwajalein to get away from it all. Unloading their house and car payments saved them from certain ruin. They were deep into the suburban dream—double mortgaged and maxed on credit cards—and couldn’t understand where they had gone wrong. Housing is free on Kwajalein and grocery prices, like everything else, is subsidized because Kwajalein is an American military base sans the military. With the exception of a few officers and intelligence types, everybody here is civilian—mostly engineers and programmers. They’ve got a bowling alley and two swimming pools and four baseball fields and a two free movie theaters and, yes, summer year round. The Country Club of the Pacific, they call it.

That might be an exaggeration. Kwajalein looks great in photos but, mostly, it’s a frowzy beach town of whitewashed cinderblock triplexes built in the 1950s. It seems a perfect place for kids. But live here a while and you begin to have second thoughts about that too. Stan and Doug can’t wander away or get kidnapped, it’s true, but they could easily drown like their father. Or get stung by a lion fish. Or pick up a rusted piece of metal that turns out to be an undetonated mortar shell from World War II.

No place is safe. That’s one bit of wisdom Alison’s thirties have taught her.

When she gazes at the lagoon, she finds herself shaking her head in disbelief. It makes no sense. Erik is still down there, caught in the bowels of the Admiral Tokiwa, a 7-ton Japanese destroyer that sunk during World War II. The Colonel, the island’s governor, has sent divers down twice to search the wreck, but so far they have found nothing. A sunken ship, she has learned, is a treacherous place, cave-black inside. The silt inside a wreck, once stirred up, obscures light like a sandstorm. That’s why all wrecks are off-limits. So why did Erik leave his diving buddy to enter the Tokiwa?

Some days she can hardly contain her anger at him for this. It makes her tremble until she wishes her heart would burst, anything to silence the screaming in her head. She tries not to think of the several, miserable visits she’s made to the Colonel, who is always polite but firm in his refusal to “put at risk” his divers. When the Hono divers visit for their 6-month inspection of the Meck installation, he’ll send them down again, he has promised. Only the Hono divers are trained for this kind of task. Lately Alison has asked herself what she would do if one of the divers died while trying to recover her husband’s body. And now, nearly a year and a half after his disappearance, she toys with the possibility that she should stop insisting that he be found.

She has become a cliché—a widowed youngish mother, her life torn with tragedy. She’s drinking too much. She’s forgetting dates and meetings. She’s late with her class reports. And she’s started an affair with the island’s senior GP, Emil Timmerman, who is notorious for his affairs. Nobody knows what to do with her. But she can’t stop herself.

“You can leave,” her therapist told her. “Go back to Milwaukee.”

“Without my husband?”

“They’ll send him back,” she said. “After they find him.”

Alison shook her head no, no, no. The therapist’s office, one of three tiny rooms partitioned in a long, narrow trailer, was as cold as a meat locker. Behind her tiny metal desk, she had hung a print of Van Gogh’s “Old Man in Sorrow,” depicting abject grief, the subject hunched over in a chair, his face buried in both hands. Did the therapist know that its subtitle is, “On the Threshold of Eternity”? Why would she display something like that?

Alison said, “They’ll never find him if I don’t stay to make sure they do.”

The therapist seemed surprised to hear this. She said, “Oh, that’s it, isn’t it!”

“Is this a revelation to you, that I feel trapped? As trapped as my husband in that sunken ship?”

“No, it’s no surprise, Alison.”

Then why the fuck are you acting surprised? Alison stared sourly at the therapist, Eva, a woman who seemed younger than she and untouched by trouble. Eva was, she decided, no better than a tourist, a sightseer in the land of tragedy.

“May I be frank?” Eva said.

“Are you saying you haven’t been frank so far?”

Eva smiled a patient smile. “You know what I mean.”

Alison nodded okay, okay, sure, she knew what Eva meant.

“You’ve got to slow down,” she said. “You want everything settled. But nothing will be settled for a long time.”

“I just want him back,” said Alison. “His body. I need him back!”

“You’ll get him back,” said Eva. “But it’s going to take time.”

“I don’t have time!” Her teaching contract runs for another year.

“Greek widows are expected to mourn for five years. Five years, Alison.”

“Fuck the fucking Greek widows!”

“Is that what you told her?” Emil asks later. He is on his knees, on the floor of his office, waiting for her to begin. His office—on the hospital’s third floor—overlooks the moonscape of the lowtide reef. Waves pound at the reef’s edge a quarter mile away.

“Yeah, I told her fuck it, I’m done,” Alison says. “I’m an jerk, aren’t I?”

“No,” Emil corrects. He turns to smile up at her slyly. “I’m the jerk! Don’t for get that.”

Emil is 45, surprisingly pale, but tall and trim. He speed-walks to stay in shape, wearing a sunhat with baggy shorts and a tight-fitting T and gobs of sunscreen. He has a bright, birdlike face, narrow with a beakish nose. He’s nothing like Erik. But that’s the point.

“Say it,” Emil commands.

Alison complies: “Jerk.”

“Say it like you mean it.”

“You’re such a jerk, Emil.”

Then she remembers she’s not supposed to use his name. Still, he nods his satisfaction. “I shouldn’t be giving you orders,” he reminds her.

“Then shut up, fuckhead, and take off your clothes.”

He grins this time and starts undressing. That’s more like it.

“Faster,” she says.

He has been training her, bringing her along slowly, as if she were a virgin. At first, she didn’t care. She told herself she’d do anything. This isn’t love. This is something else. Their scenarios have gotten more bizarre and only recently has she put a name to it. The realization that she could do this, that she could be one of these people, shook her. It’s sick shit. But it makes her feel. And now she’s so deep in, why would she, how could she, get out?

Naked, prostrate—bent forward in the yoga “pose of the child”—Emil is whimpering in anticipation. Hoarsely he says, “Be merciful, mistress!”

When she smacks his pale back with his broad leather belt, she feels a sickening thrill, like taking a sudden plunge in a roller coaster. Her head spins, she salivates, she flails again and hates herself. God, she hates every single cell of her body! Emil knows this. He says, “I’m such shit, aren’t I? I’m such stinking shit, I don’t know how you can stand the sight of me.” It’s a taunt. It sounds like the voice in her own head.

“Fuck you,” she says.

“Yes!” he says.

She flails again. A sudden stripe of blood appears on his back. It startles her. She swallows a gasp and a sudden urge to weep. The belt edge must have caught him. If she asked, All you all right? he would mock and scold her. She’s got to be stronger. Hasn’t Emil told her this every day? I’ll help you get the strength you need, Alison.

“Mercy please,” he moans. It’s a lie—there is no mercy.

She flails again.

“You know I deserve it,” he says. “What am I?”

“You’re shit, you’re an asshole, I hate you—you know how I hate you!”

Then he’s sobbing and her moment’s hesitation makes him implore, “Show me what shit I am!”

Trembling, nearly retching, she drops the belt. Her hand hurts. She gulps for air, as if drowning. “Turn around,” she commands. This voice isn’t her voice, it’s a stronger woman’s voice, a woman who knows what she’s doing.

Blubbering, Emil is on his knees, facing her, eager to do her bidding. “Anything,” he begs.

She says: “You’ve got five minutes to make me come.”

As he begins, unbuttoning her skirt, nosing into her, she stares out the window to the exposed reef. Sun glints from the half-filled tide pools. Out there you can find black sea slugs as big as cucumbers and blue-green moray eels the size of pythons and white undulous fist-sized anemones with their stinging tendrils and jelly fish no bigger than sandwich bags but so venomous that a single brush of their nearly invisible tentacles would stop your heart within an hour.

Later, stepping inside her trailer—what do we call it? she asked Erik in jest, a home? a trailer home?—Alison catches a whiff of the mildewed, canned air-conditioned stink that everyone on the island has grown accustomed to, a smell she always forgets after five minutes of being inside. The place is its usual wreck: a spill of mesomorphic action figures in front of the TV, which is still on, a small dirty white sock in the hallway, and, farther on, a pair of small white briefs and a T-shirt; video game joysticks on the kitchen counter, but an empty sink, thankfully, the garbage pail crammed with dirty paper plates and plastic cups—surely the sign of slovenly mothering—and more mess on the floor: a battery-operated flying saucer, a remote-controlled dump truck, a rubber ball that looks like it’s been chewed.

She, Doug, and Stan live in one of the 335 mobile homes on the lagoon-side of the island, among the service sector, low-level technicians, and younger teachers. Their neighborhood is called “Silver City.” Products of the nineteen sixties, the trailers are aluminum boxes that were no doubt better built than the things manufactured nowadays. They have real wood paneling and stainless steel trim. But they weren’t meant to last, especially in a corrosive climate like this. Housing Maintenance is frequently coming by to re-attach panels, staple seams, reinforce floors, re-caulk windows.

The more accomplished citizens live in white-washed cinder-block triplexes or duplexes nearby or, if really well placed in the island’s hierarchy, one of the new pre-fabs on the landfill near the high school. None of it looks particularly attractive. But there’s the irrepressible tropical greenery that half-disguises the decay—banana plants and coconut palms and car-sized ferns left over from the Jurassic age. When they first arrived on Kwajalein, Erik said, “You should draw some of these things.”

As a child, Alison loved to draw—doodling mostly, hours on a page of curlicues and flowers. “You could design fabric,” her mother offered as encouragement. Why would I want to do that? Alison wondered. For her twelfth birthday, her parents started her with a private art teacher. On looking at Alison’s portfolio, the teacher said with undisguised dismay, “These are . . . doodles.” Yes, exactly. “What about the world?” the teacher asked. Fanciful doodles were Alison’s world. She had no inclination to draw the reality around her. She was trying to create in her drawings the kind of place she couldn’t find in real life, elbowed by an older sister and brother in a small brick house at the back of a Milwaukee suburb, her father an auto salesman, her mother a checker at K-Mart. It’s not that Alison was unhappy, she was simply dissatisfied with the world as it was. It needed more color, more light, more surprises.

Only in college did the question of a career begin to weigh on her. Clearly she wasn’t talented like some of her classmates, who painted soulful portraits and stunning landscapes. “Vision!” her art professor lectured. “You can’t make work that matters without a vision.” Alison’s vision of swirls and angles and starbursts and filigree and latticework and curlicues and circles within circles wasn’t what the professor had in mind. “Your drawings,” he declared, “are as intricate as Victorian wall paper and just as useless.”

“Well,” her roommate concluded, “you can always teach.”

Teaching suited her, she discovered, because she is good with kids and she likes the simple self-contained lesson plans that accommodate even the least motivated student: Today we’re going to paint sky—big blue watercolor swaths across 50-pound paper. It could be frustrating, like the time Samuel Espinoza painted both of his hands red with tempura, or the day Kaitlin Overby used a fresh tampon to paint her landscape, the class tittering through the lesson until Alison discovered the prank. But mostly her relations with students were peaceful because an art teacher occupies fairly neutral ground.

After a quick shower, Alison mixes a blender of frozen strawberries and orange juice with a handful of ice cubes and a cup of rum. A “smoothie,” she calls it. Some mornings she’s so fatigued and frightened and hung-over, she fears she won’t be able to stand long enough to steady herself against a chair, then a wall, as she paws her way to the kitchen. Her head hammered with heartbeats and flash card images of Erik smiling, Erik yawning, Erik smoothing down his early morning cowlick, she grinds her coffee while Doug and Stan watch Nickelodeon on TV, just beyond the counter that separates dining from sitting in their cramped mobile home.

Tomorrow is Doug’s birthday.

“Bake me a cake, if you want,” Doug said two weeks ago at dinner.

“You want more than a cake,” she teased, hoping for his wince of a smile.

But Doug, her dutiful, somber elder son—ten tomorrow—gave her his usual come-off-it look. He’s the son who looks nothing like his parents. Alison used to joke with Erik that Doug was the incarnation of a Puritan ancestor. The boy has never been happy. The best he can manage is a middling satisfaction. She and Erik fretted about him for several years and finally consulted a psychologist who concluded that Doug is hard-wired that way: “We can’t all be Ronald McDonald, can we?”

She, Doug, and Stan were eating at the kitchen counter. She had microwaved a frozen pizza. Stan was picking off his pepperoni and stacking them in a tidy pile at the edge of his paper plate. Stan has Erik’s pretty eyes, Alison’s mischievous smile, and more than a fair share of confidence and coordination. Already he’s a star on his grade school’s soccer team. And it’s clear he can’t fathom his older brother’s reluctance to grab life by the shoulders and give it a good shake.

Stan said, “When I turn seven in November, you can throw me a extra big party, like combining two parties.”

“We’re talking about Doug’s birthday, not yours,” said Alison.

Stan appeared wholly occupied with straightening his pepperoni slices. Alison thinks he might be an artist. “All he wants is cake, he just said.”

“We’re going to do more than cake,” she said.

His mouth full of half-chewed pizza, Doug said, “Whatever.”

“I want to make you happy!” said Alison.

“I’m happy,” Doug said glumly.

This made her laugh.

She wants the boys to know that life goes on, that even without Erik they can have a reasonably good time. She isn’t sure, though, that she believes this herself. Their loss of husband and father threatens to unravel the comforting simplicities they took for granted. It’s not fair, she wants to shout at Erik, what were you thinking? Always, her protests make her feel guilty. Erik fucked up. But it wasn’t like he ran away to start a new life.

Or was it?

Right here, in this single thought, which she has entertained countless times, she sees a chink of light, like sunshine seeping through one seam of a locked cellar door. She dare not pry or push at it because it would lead her to the most fantastic speculation: that Erik did indeed run off—that he faked his death so that he could start a new life in Thailand or Malaysia.

She knows this thought is nothing but a perverse, ridiculous kind of solace. If he ran off, at least he’d be alive and the boys would have a chance of seeing him again. But then she has a second thought. What if he went into that shipwreck with no intention of coming out? This thought is pure horror. It would mean that she never truly knew Erik, wouldn’t it?

She can’t go there. She should never go there. But she does go there too often.

She sits on her disheveled couch and drinks her lunch and cruises through the 42 satellite channels, the world disgorged from the TV screen, its numbing variety of comedy and drama spilling onto the stained rug of her cramped “family room” and its scatter of action figures and DVD video games.

Doug’s request for a cake was a joke, because Alison doesn’t cook, much less bake. Erik was the cook, inventive and fearless. Casseroles were his specialty. Tuna-chicken-parsley lima and black bean. Brussel sprout potato-potroast-apple parmesan. Green-pepper-ham-salsa-corn-chip-cheddar and rice. He made the kind of mess the boys might make if they were given free reign in the kitchen. But she’d rather clean up than cook because she has no patience with recipes, just as she had no patience with the strictures of art class in college. So now she and the boys eat heat-and-serve meals, none of it particularly good or healthy. But it will do for now. Everything about their life is similarly provisional, qualified by the unspoken “for now.”

She hates that she has let this happen. Which is why Doug’s party matters. It’s got to be right.

Pounding on her trailer door startles her. Before answering, she sets the half-empty blender carafe in the sink, then surveys her chaotic surroundings, which elicits from her one long sigh. There’s too much to clean up so she won’t even try. When she opens the door, she is surprised to see her best friend, Gayla. Tall and full-figured, Gayla has the broad shoulders of a swimmer and the gold-brown complexion of her Jamaican grandmother, though she herself grew up in Evanston, Illinois. She is the high school vice principal.

Right, Alison remembers: school.

“You know what time it is?” Gayla asks.

The day’s heat roars through the open door.

Alison glances down at her own unadorned wrists. She used to own a watch but can’t recall what happened to it. “Lunch time,” she says at last, sounding as mindless as one of her students.

“An hour ago,” Gayla says. “I don’t know why I still cover for you.”

“Because you love me, Gayla.” Alison attempts a smile.

“I can’t love you that hard, girl. Not like this. Let’s go.”

“It’s one of those days,” Alison says. She locks the door behind her.

“Don’t even start,” Gayla says. She opens her bamboo-handled sunbrella, then sets the pace with a determined stride, her braids swinging.

The roadways among the trailers are sandy and half-shaded with palms. Alison has always liked them for a stroll with her boys.

“You see your therapist this week?” Gayla asks.

Alison listens to the lap and crush of waves returning on the tide. Some mornings the lagoon is as calm as a lake. She says, “I quit therapy.”

“Oh, that’s smart!”

“Be nice to me,” Alison says.

“I’m being too nice and you know it. Keep on like this and you’ve got maybe one more warning before you lose your job.”

“They’d fire me at this point in the semester?”

“It’s been done before.”

“I won’t let that happen,” Alison says quietly.

“Won’t you?” Gayla sounds hurt, nearly in tears, which isn’t like her. Wonder Woman, Alison has called her in jest. She is very much like Alison’s bother, Eddie: focused, self-directed, authoritative, accomplished. Gayla is the woman Alison will never be. But Alison can make Gayla laugh. She is the yin to Gayla’s yang. Their husbands worked together at the weather station.

“No, I won’t let that happen,” Alison says. “I’ve got plans.”

“Plans?” Gayla turns a curious gaze to her.

“Yes!” Alison lies. “I’ve applied for a masters program in Art Ed.”

Gayla’s voice skids into falsetto: “Since when?”

“I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure.”

“What school?”

“Online, through the University of Wisconsin.” These answers come unbidden, easily, and the lie brings a thrill similar to her abuse of Emil: the world’s possibilities open in perversely gratifying ways. Oh, how she hates herself!

“You’ve been accepted into the program?” Gayla asks.

“Yes!” Alison says matter-of-factly. “I start studies at the end of the month.”

“Well, that’s a good thing,” Gayla says cautiously. They step onto the asphalt of Pacific Drive. “You’re excited, right?”

“Of course I am! “Alison lies, lies, lies. “I’m getting some focus, I’m marching into the future—progress is my middle name!”

“Smart ass.”

Suddenly Alison pictures herself spanking Emil’s hairy white ass.

She hears a sudden pop behind her, like a hand smacked across someone’s face. When she turns for a glance, Alison sees that a gull has just dropped a slate-colored crab to the asphalt. Miraculously, the crab has survived. Dragging one damaged leg, it scurries into the shade of nearby weeds. Then the gull touches down on the asphalt, tucks its wings in, pivots its gleaming white head, but can’t find its lunch. Head bobbing, it waddles to the shoulder of the road and blinks its beady eyes in confusion.

“Did you see that?” Alison asks. “Look back there.”

Gayla looks. “It’s a bird, Ali.”

Alison is about to explain the mini-drama she’s just witnessed but then decides there’s too much she can’t explain already.

“Want a mint?” She offers the roll to Gayla.

Gayla eyes the mints, then Alison with glum disdain. “You think that’s going to cover the alcohol on your breath?”

Alison feels a trickle of sweat spill from her scalp. She smells the ocean’s salt spray and the fish-stink of sun-baked coral and something else—maybe it’s the smolder of her burning heart. She says, “Sorry. I know I’m fucking up.”

Gayla lets her sunbrella collapse and steps into the shade of the school’s portico. “So you’ve told me about twenty times, hon’. I’m not asking for excuses, just don’t insult my intelligence.”

“I’m sorry!” Alison says quickly. “You know I love you for helping me.”

“Love isn’t enough, Ali. I’m risking my own job. Can you teach today or not?”

“I’m fine.” Alison attempts a smile. “Really.”

“Then get up there and do it. I’m not coming after you again.”

“Thanks.” Alison reaches for Gayla’s hand but Gayla is already walking away.

Yes, Alison thinks, that’s what I deserve. I’m shit.

When everyone on Kwajalein first learned of Erik’s “disappearance,” they swamped her email with condolences and crowded her kitchen with grilled chicken and potato salad and teriyaki steak and hummus and tabouli and cheese balls and three-bean salad and spinach lasagna. They approached her tentatively and spoke softly. She must have seemed as delicate to them as a kite caught in a tree. Alison was grateful for their time and attention but then, after a couple of months, when depression began to slow her down like a low-grade fever, she wondered about the growing distance between her and the rest of the world, especially those she thought were her friends. What did she have to offer anyone except her crushing tragedy? No wonder she felt so isolated, even shunned. She scared people, she realized. She was a drag.

“I’ve ruined it,” Alison told Gayla just five months after Erik’s death. “That’s what it is. I’ve ruined it for them!”

“They just feel awkward,” Gayla said.

“No,” Alison said. “It’s like I’ve smashed the windows of their tidy houses. They can hardly stand to look at me.”

“It’s a terrible tragedy, Ali. Nobody knows how to handle it.”

“You know,” Alison said. “You treat me like I’m still alive.”

Gayla nodded her head in sympathy.

“I don’t want to be the Object of Pity!”

“It will pass,” Gayla said. “Give it time.”

“I don’t have time,” Alison said. “I’m thirty-three!”

Gayla laughed. “And I’m thirty-nine. We’ve still got time, hon’.”

But that was a year ago. Today Gayla has made clear that Ali has run out of time. She has fallen so fast and fallen so low, it stuns her even as she watches it happen day after day. If she didn’t have her boys, she might kill herself. Really, she might. How’s that for low?

Her classroom is 60’s-era: high-gloss linoleum floors, celery green cinder block walls, and a single row of six windows nearly white from the afternoon sun. The air conditioning is always too cold, the wall clock always too slow. She has missed one class already but is nearly on time for this one. When she enters, twelve juniors regard her with mild indifference. She’s the Art Teach, after all. Back in the States, a lot of schools don’t even teach art any more.

Alison draws a breath. Her rum lunch is just now hitting her, the room going wobbly. She says, “Today’s lesion—lesson—is a watercolor wash.” She begins to sort through the brushes on her desk, stalling for time.

Red-headed, freckled-faced, adenoidal Chase Sadowski says, “We did this last week.”

Alison looks up sharply. She surprises herself by smiling. “Aren’t you willing to humor me, Chase?”

He grimaces and half shrugs. “I just don’t want to be bored.”

“None of us want to be bored!” she says. “Show of hands, please. Who wants to be bored?”

Spacey Britney Losinger raises her hand eagerly before she realizes it’s a joke. The others laugh.

Alison picks up a long-handled brush, then aims it at Chase. “We’re going to watercolor wash—again—because anything worth doing once is worth doing twice. Don’t you think?”

“Depends if you teach it better than last week,” Chase says.

This wins a few titters.

Children don’t know their limits. That’s why they’re testing out their cruelty all the time. They have felt too little pain in their short lives. Already Alison sees mean streaks in her two boys. Doug didn’t want to invite Arnold Arnold to his birthday party. “You have to invite Arnold,” she told him. “He’s in your class.”

“He’s a loser,” Doug said glumly. “He’s gonna suck the fun out of everything.”

“You’re lucky you’re not the loser,” Alison said. It secretly pleases her that Doug and Stan are popular. Not team-captain popular, but popular enough to avoid the persecution poor Arnold Arnold suffers. Maybe his parents thought that giving him such a name would make him a stand-out. It has only made him a target.

Arnold Arnold—known to his classmates as “The Bug”—is slump-shouldered and pencil-limbed, with a head too large for his body.

“It looks like he lives under a rock!” Stan said.

“If you don’t invite him,” Alison said, “there will be no party.”

“Not fair!” Doug said.

“That’s bullshit!” said Stan.

“Don’t use that language,” Alison said. “Or you won’t get a party either, Stan.”

“Fine, invite him,” said Doug, “it’ll be a sucky party anyway ‘cause we don’t have the Stone Deaf Death Rangers video.”

“What’s that?” she asked.

This made Stan laugh in disbelief. “You haven’t heard of the Stone Deaf Death Rangers?”

“It’s game they made into a movie,” says Doug. “It’s so popular nobody can get it.”

He meant nobody out here in the middle of the Pacific could get that highly prized video.

With a knowing smile, Alison said, “I might be able to get it.”

“No way!” the boys said in unison.

“Way,” she said.

Wide-eyed, they regarded her with suspicion and wonder.

Yes, that’s more like it, she thought: Super Mom!

Alison asked Emil to buy her the DVD while he was in Hono last week. No problem, he said. But she forgot to get it from him at lunch today. Isn’t that why she went to his office in the first place?

She phoned April Arnold a week ago to invite Arnold to Doug’s party. Alison doesn’t particularly like April, who is as petite as a twelve-year-old, is fond of wearing pink, avoids the sun at all costs, and seems to take great pride in being a native of Atlanta, Georgia, as if she were an Old South debutante. But Alison likes her troubled son. Arnold has the quiet, watchful demeanor of a talented painter she used to know, a boy who could draw anything he saw. She suspects that Arnold is “special” in a good way like that.

April said, “You’ll make sure nobody bullies him, right?”

“I hate bullying,” said Alison. “I want him to have a good time.”

“You know his allergies?”

“Peanuts and milk products, shellfish and cured meats, and what else?”

“All nuts,” she said. “And no cheese, of course.”

“I think I said no milk products.”

“Some people forget that cheese is made of milk.”

“I won’t forget, April.”

“He’s a good boy, you know.”

“Yes, I know. Are you going to send him?”

April’s silence, pondering the risks to her odd little boy, was the kind of agony Alison wouldn’t wish on any mother. At last April said, “I’ll send him. He’d like a party.”

So everything has been arranged. Alison ordered a double chocolate cake from Rosalia Velasquez, the best baker on the island. Tonight she’ll clean up. It will feel like Christmas Eve, the boys giddy with anticipation. Tomorrow she’ll get the video and the cake. By the end of the evening tomorrow, she and the boys will be exhausted and gratified, even grateful and perhaps surprised at their good fortune. So she was half right when she spoke to Gayla earlier: she is getting some focus.

“Water is the most difficult medium,” she tells her class.

“Yeah, I remember,” Chase says. “It’s unpredictable.”

“Like life!” Brittney quips.

They gather around Alison’s easel to watch as she strokes a one-inch Grumbacher over the textured paper, soaking but not drenching it. To her peripheral left, she sees Chase snaking his hand into Cook Butler’s shorts, though Cook affects a poker face; to her peripheral right she sees Britney gazing out the window, where the cumulus clouds are rolling by as big as white elephants. Someone is wearing too much nutmeggy cologne. At her right elbow, Dana McGinty is whistling softly what sounds like “If I only had a brain.”

“See how quickly the paper absorbs?” Alison says in her singsongy teacher’s voice.

Someone—Steve Richardson?—says, “That’s cool,” and Alison feels a surge of satisfaction warm her face as she lets the deep blue bleed from one stroke to the next.