Bed

Three-Day Cruise

After they euthanatize the poodle, they go on the Bahamas cruise. After that, the dad dies of a brain tumor that no one knew about. The mom, then, at Cocoa Beach, teaching herself to swim, drowns; and the son, Paul, too, dies, when he one night sees a car crash happening, is looking, passing by, but then has a dull thought — some sudden vapid mood that almost puts him to sleep — yawns, and swerves, in an abstractly wanting and participatory way, toward the crash. He accelerates, misses, and drives into a pole.

The daughter, Mattie, goes on living. She sometimes shuts her eyes, tight, and then opens them again, placing herself in next week’s Sunday. It’s a kind of time travel. Something make believe, for kids. Though of course, Mattie knows, she is not a kid. She is in her thirties, in Florida, where she grew up. She has returned. She sometimes feels as if there is a quick-person, five minutes ahead of her, living her life before she gets there. There is one week in all the others when she joins a gym, buys expensive facial creams, and sits sipping broth in the food courts of shopping malls. It is not a bad week. She remembers that week. Then she doesn’t remember it. She remembers nothing. All her memories go to noise, go satirical and loud and uncontrollable — they fly like teeth and balloons from her brain to the open bones of her eyes, and clang there, lodge and impact and burst there. The months accumulate like houses in the middle of nowhere. And her sense of irony, finally, her cheap way of paradox, of that self-blanking kind of truth and calm, of easing, sometimes, into the sarcastic haze of living — it goes bad, like an awful, leaden, jam-packed something in her head. Mattie is eating a sandwich. She is scribbling poems on envelopes. She is distracted, she is old. She is dead from something that makes her forget what it is before it kills her.

Mattie is twelve. She feels, today, for the first time, that happiness is something behind her, something mousy and slick and sliding away, into some hole, into some hole of that some hole.

“Do you ever feel sad?” says Mattie. She and Paul are at the supermarket. She is looking at a blow-dryer box, the woman on which has her hair in such a way that she must, Mattie thinks, be flying.

“What’s happier,” says Paul. He is six. “The most happy rabbit in the world? A man that is normal happy? A cookie? Between one and a hundred how happy is a cookie? A green one.” They are at the supermarket for AAA batteries.

“Forty,” says Mattie. “Wait. A green one?” She’s looking at the blow-dryer box. “I can’t see out my right eye,” she says. “It’s blurry. Oh, now I can.”

“Oh,” says Paul. He giggles. “What kind of batteries won’t rip you off? This one has Michael Jordan on it. Michael Jordan is funny.”

“This lady is flying. This is … unacceptable,” says Mattie. She’s thinking about dirt — dirt on the ground, in hair, dirt in the sky. She had a dream about dirt. “I hate … school.”

“Why?” says Paul. He looks stricken for a moment, a little horrified.

“I’m twelve,” says Mattie. “I’m twelve years old!”

“Michael Jordan is strange,” says Paul.

They buy Energizer batteries. The parking lot gleams from all the cars. They cross the street, into their neighborhood. Some older kids are gliding around on rollerblades, playing street hockey. One little girl has a baseball bat and is chasing a few of the others. It is sunny and October and breezy. “The air tickles,” says Paul. He has Michael Jordan in his head, and can’t stop giggling. He blocks the wind from his neck with strangling motions and says, “My hands tickle!” In front of their house, he cartwheels onto grass. He runs at Mattie and jump kicks the air in front of her. Mattie pats his head. Paul goes and hops, circuitously, over a red flower plant. He looks at Mattie and then runs into the house, the front door of which is open.

The mom is in the side yard, watering a palmetto with the hose. Her dress is a bit wet, and her hair too. She waves at Mattie. Their toy poodle is sitting very still on top of the mailbox. He is overheated, but has retained good posture. He looks content in a once-wild way.

Mattie waves at her mom and carries the poodle into the living room.

On the sofa, Mattie pets the poodle until it is dark outside. She lies down. She stares sideways through the sliding glass door, at the sky. In third grade she told some classmates that their teacher, Mrs. Beonard, looked like a dolphin, even though Mrs. Beonard looked very much like an owl. She surprised herself then, and liked it.

Mattie sits up, carries the poodle into her room. She arranges it so they lie facing each other on the bed. The poodle is submissive and inaudible. Mattie closes her eyes, and sees her own face. A nerd, she thinks. Someone at school had called her a nerd. She tries not to think about dirt. Her dream about dirt wasn’t a good dream. She sneezes. Her head rings — resonates, like a padded bell. The poodle stands. Mattie pets him until he is flat again. She keeps her hand on his body. She sneezes again, hard, the hardest sneeze she has ever sneezed, and this time there’s an exquisite, high-pitched squeak from the pappy center of her head, and then she feels perceptually enhanced — honed and lucid as a tiny, soap-washed moon. She closes her eyes. She hears new things. She hears her own shouldery hipbone, low and curving, sounding purly, cello tones. She hears an ant, in the yard, walking up a blade of grass. She falls asleep and wakes up early in the morning, wide-eyed and alert, four hours before school.

The dad goes around one Saturday with a notepad, taking orders for lunch. He goes out, comes back. “Who ordered the toy poodle?” he says. He’s holding, in a manhandled way, an apricot-hued poodle, who is a girl. He points at his notepad. “Says here …”

“I ordered that!” says Paul. He is eight. He is taking all the credit for this, in case of future situations. “I knew to order something good like that.” He looks around. The world, he feels, is becoming less, is closing in, trying to detain him, clamp him like a bug. He takes the apricot poodle and runs away.

The mom is going around the house, watering her many potted plants.

Mattie comes out from her room, gets the other poodle, goes back to her room.

In bed, the dad says, “It’s fair.” He’s thinking about the poodles. It’s a few years later. “One poodle per child. One male, one female.”

“Yes,” says the mom. “Fair.” She has discovered, going through the trash, envelopes postmarked Nevada, from someone named Scarlet Leysen. The dad had taken a business trip there. Two females per male, the mom thinks. “Life isn’t fair,” she says. “So we should comport extra fair, to compensate.” She used to say, “Life isn’t fair, but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make it fair,” but changed it one day while eating a peach, when she was twenty.

“I know,” says the dad. “I agree.” He goes to pat the mom’s shoulder, but pats the bed instead. He moves his hand through the dark and pats it down again, on the mom’s face. Her lips and teeth are wet; she has just licked them. “Sorry,” says the dad. He gets up, washes his hands, goes out into the rest of the house.

The mom dreams of the dad, dreams that he descends through a trapdoor, into a room that spins. He crouches, leaps, pushes a button on a wall. A rope ladder appears. He catches it, helicopter-style, climbs it, and is back in the bedroom. He lies down. He rolls over, toward her. His head is snoring and fat and looming, and she is afraid. She wakes up and there he is. His head is snoring, but not fat or looming; he is smiling a little.

In the morning, the mom goes looking for the envelopes. She doesn’t find any. She sits down with a microwaved waffle, a bowl of dried cranberries, a canister of whipped cream. She plays back the dream in her head. She likes the rope ladder part. She holds the whipped cream vertically down, as it says to on the canister.

Over time, the mom makes herself forget the envelopes, which works, until one day, going through mail, she finds that she has been looking for a very long time at this letter from Nevada with Smurf stickers all over it — Smurfs dressed in pink, Smurfs smooching. She throws a pencil and a wristwatch into the swimming pool. She frowns and paces. She throws a muffin on the floor and doesn’t clean it up. This is her little rampage. She locks herself in her bedroom and sits very still on her bed. The world sits beside her, the size and intelligence and badness of a cupcake. In her head, there is a steady, clear-voiced scream, pitched in middle C. It is not unpleasing. She listens to it for some time and then lies down.

The dad is made to sleep on the couch. He buys his own blanket from Kmart, a green one, and a pillow that is supposed to be for dogs. He sleeps with a box of sugar cookies on his chest — something, he knows, that he has always wanted. Instead of toothbrushing, he has mints.

The mom misses the dad. She does not speculate on Scarlet Leysen. She destroys Nevada out of her head, the entire state. She makes it have a lava-y Earthquake. She mostly forgives the dad. Still, though, she knows, the dad should be punished. She begins to make dinner only for herself, Paul, and Mattie. She tries not to look at the dad when they are in the kitchen together. Once, though, she glances and sees that the dad’s mouth is moving and that he is lining up three uncut pickles on a piece of bread. They make eye contact and his mouth keeps moving, noiselessly, and then he loudly says, “—and I’m competent.” The mom looks away. She grins. She leaves the kitchen. She is a little giddy. Control yourself, she thinks. Each day of punishment is a delay of gratification, an investment towards better, future love.

“Tell your mom to stop being angry at me,” says the dad one night to Paul. He is at the fax machine, on a stool, has his head turned around to Paul, who is on the sofa watching TV.

“You,” says Paul. He is eleven. He has changed. He is somewhat fat, and his head has grown, he thinks, too big. Some nights, in bed, he spreads his fingers evenly over his skull and pushes inward and counts to one hundred. He has to do something, he knows, contain it — not unlike braces for teeth, which he has. Sometimes he looks in the mirror and imagines a team of dwarves, swarming, smacking at his body. Once, he dreams this. “Hey now,” he says in his dream. There is a doorway and the dwarves keep rushing in. “Hey,” he says. “Why?”

“She listens to you; not me,” says the dad. He moves his face close to Paul’s. It is a bewildered, distracted face — the face of someone clearly without secrets, but still somehow untrustable. “She doesn’t listen to me,” he says. He has just invented a new laser, that afternoon. “You need to tell her. Say to her—”

The fax machine begins to make noises and the dad attends to it.

“You,” says Paul. He bites in half his cream-filled Popsicle. He makes a face. His favorite thing to do, now, is to eat something concocted and sludgy — cherry pie-chocolate syrup pudding, marshmallow-maraschino cherry soup — and then, sweet and sticky mouthed, lie down for a nap. He likes to be sleepy, likes the keen apathy and warm coolness of it.

After a few weeks the dad is allowed back in the bedroom.

He is smiling and clear-eyed. “That was terrible,” he says. “You were so angry. I tried to impress you by eating healthy.” He chuckles. “You were so angry!” He smiles and moves to her and hugs her.

Weekends, the dad puts on swimming trunks, swims two or three laps, then gets distracted and goes, dripping, into the house, to find the poodles. He enforces direction and speed as the poodles are made to swim repeatedly from the deep end to the shallow end. He mock screams at them. The mom has the camcorder. She encourages Paul and Mattie to swim. After the poodles, the dad spends time — too much time, everyone agrees — with the long-handled scrubber, scrubbing at all the fey and faint patches of pool algae.

For dinner the dad is made to eat a bowl of steamed vegetables. He has high cholesterol and is not allowed to eat shrimp or egg yolk. He sometimes complains, but is generally docile and obedient. “Poodles are natural water dogs,” he says. “In France, they live in the rivers. Caves of them. Lined up and ready. They ascend one by one. They bob skyward, like penguins. They paddle carefully, heads up, barking at a polite and tactful volume and timbre. People toss them food.” The dad chuckles. He has amused himself. “A river crammed with poodles,” he says. “Imagine that. Have salmon, then have poodles instead of salmon.” He falls asleep on the carpet by the television. He sleeps with his mouth open. His teeth are crooked in a lightly shuffled way and smell of hot summer weeds.

Christmas, the mom has her camcorder. The poodles have their own presents. Neon flea collars, a rubber cheeseburger, a rubber foot! The Christmas tree is plastic and has, mysteriously, over the years, turned from a dark green to a bright and fiery orange. The dad is sheepish and aloof. He has never bought anyone a present. It is just something that he doesn’t do; something about his childhood. He doesn’t seem to understand. He is an inventor. He leaves the room for a moment. He comes back carrying a big gift-wrapped thing. He sets it on the ground. “Hurry,” he says. “Who’s it for?” says Paul. “You,” says the dad. Paul opens it. It is their two toy poodles. The poodles look around, then move carefully away. The dad almost falls to the carpet. He laughs a kind of laugh that none of them have heard before.

Mattie goes to college in New York City, where she takes too many creative writing courses.

She dislikes enjambment, symbolism, the Best American Poetry series. She writes indignantly, with a kind of whirlpooling impatience. Though sometimes she imagines that her hair is white and fluffy, and then she writes cutely, with many l’s, as if to a future granddaughter of hers — some mute and dreamy girl, in a future, enchantless world, without trees or sidewalks.

In Mattie’s head, she critiques other people’s critiques of her work.

“I have no idea what I’m doing here,” she says to classmates. “In college, I mean. Do you?”—here, she likes to lean in close—“Do you know?” One night, she steps off the curb into the street. There is a breeze and her hair sweeps across her face. The street is calm and quiet; there seem to be no other people around. She closes her eyes. A bus that is two buses, swingy and accordioned, comes at her. The bus does not honk. She very slowly opens and closes her eyes, and then crosses the street. She sometimes wonders if she died that night. She remembers the wind, the lightless blacktop, the phantom bus that does not honk.

After college, Mattie stays in New York.

Paul is now in Boston, for his own college education. “I used to walk home to my apartment thinking about crying,” he writes in email to Mattie — the mom has encouraged her children to email one another—“three in the morning. Carrying bags of groceries. Finally, I’d cry a little. It was a long walk. I’d put everything into the refrigerator including the plastic bags and go to sleep. In the morning, I’d eat four bowls of Frosted Flakes, go back to sleep. But that gradually stopped. That time of my life. Today, I am changed. Tolerance, life, it moves you to the center of things. How have you been?”

“Then it kills you,” writes back Mattie. She likes Paul. They get each other. They do. “It moves you, then it kills you. It says, ‘Move here,’ then kills you. It puts its hands on your shoulders, moves you, kills you.”

Once, they see each other. In Barnes and Noble by Union Square. Mattie sees Paul first, a passing glimpse, the recognition coming a few seconds later. She becomes confused — Paul should be in Boston — and, for a long while after, does not trust herself, feels vaguely that she has suffered some kind of cosmic accident. Is she in Boston? What does that mean? To be in Boston? Later, Paul sees Mattie as she is going down the escalator and he is going up. They seem to look each other in the face. Mattie has an abstract expression, and Paul thinks of screaming her name, but then thinks that that would be a bit ridiculous. Later, he thinks of just saying her name, at a normal volume. Of course, he thinks. They don’t ever mention this to each other and, over time, begin to doubt that it happened.

The dad is one day accused by the government of having released false and misleading press releases. It has to do with the company he has founded for his inventions.

In the courtroom, the jury is working-class, weary, and stadium seated — to one side, like one of those multiple missile launchers. The dad’s lawyer has not had a good childhood, and now, in adulthood, is often depressed, shy, and nervous — nevertheless the dad trusts him.

The government lawyer is daunting and loud.

In low-security federal prison camp, the dad is productive and healthy. He makes many friends. The inmates are sanguine and witty; ninety-percent are in for drugs. They debate, cook, play poker and ping-pong, watch TV, work out, plan future criminal activity, make criminal connections, study law.

The dad is to be there for seventy months.

The mom visits twice a week. It is a two-hour drive. “Did you feed the dogs?” says the dad. “Dogs are people too.”

They talk on the phone. “Don’t tattle,” says the mom. She has written down a list of things that the dad should not do. “Don’t complain, don’t spread rumors.” She goes to sleep very early now. Her dreams undergo change. They begin to occur nightly — fully formed, with beginnings, middles, and ends. They have subtle plotting and good dialogue.

In the daytime, the mom walks around the house with a new excitement. In emails to her children, she expresses amazement at her own brain. She feels a bit powerful. “I dream every night,” she writes, “how about you?” In one dream, the family goes on a Bahamas cruise, has a great time. The mom swims in the dream, though she cannot swim in real life. At dinner in the dream, the mom glances across the hall, notices a girl who has very small teeth, goes over there, asks the girl to open her mouth, and wow! The girl has many layers of teeth — thousands! The mom tells her so, and everyone laughs.

In the morning, the mom looks into and buys four cruise tickets, for when the dad is released from prison.

She and the dogs, walking around the house, sometimes cross paths. They look at one another, make sure not to collide, and continue on to where they are going. Though sometimes the mom blocks the dogs, shunts them into corners — or follows them, at a distance. Mostly, the mom finds, the dogs just walk from one room to another, where they then lie down, sphinx style — a style they have recently taken to for some reason.

Summer nights, when it is black and hot and humid outside, the mom gets a little confused. She gets a panicked feeling that the dad, Mattie, and Paul have all, a long time ago, run off with Scarlet Leysen. She forgets the names of the days of the week. She feels ageless and illusory. She is afraid that she will wake one night and find that her pillow is a dismembered torso, that she has murdered a person! She fears the poodles, that there are two against her one, fears the team of them, the ready conspiracy of them. One night, she hears noises. She turns on all the lights, moves quickly to the sofa, lies on her side, turns the TV to the Weather Channel — the least scary channel, she knows — and thinks hard about Mattie, Paul, and the dad, gets them all talking in her head, then calls softly for the poodles.

In prison, the dad has obtained three patents, published eight papers — through collaboration with the mom — and begun to read Chuang Zhu, other Eastern Philosophers, and books on death. He writes to Mattie and Paul. “I am doing an aerobics class two times a week. I am in charge of a team of people. We dig up grass, plant grass, do things with grass. My daily routine is—” and it says his daily routine.

The mom text messages Mattie, “Just saw a reporter blown away by wind on TV.” She emails Paul, “This morning I yelled ‘scumbag’ and the dogs came running from their rooms with eyes so big, anticipating, they must think scumbag is something delicious.”

The apricot poodle is found to have diabetes. The mom is to inject her with insulin twice daily, which goes okay for a while, until one morning, when the apricot poodle is dead. The mom has been injecting her with air instead of insulin. She buries the dead poodle in the backyard. She carries around the other poodle — who can barely see anymore and sometimes walks into walls — the rest of that day and forgets to feed him.

The prison doctor one day says that the dad’s kidney is engorged, but it turns out to be nothing.

For a year, no one hears from Paul. Then they hear from Paul. He claims to have lived in Canada for some time. He has read a book called “Into The Wild,” in which a boy graduates college, donates his money to OXFAM, wanders the country alone, hitchhikes into Alaska, writes in his journal that happiness is only real when shared, and, wrapped in a sleeping bag, then, inside an abandoned bus, nearby a frozen river, dies. It’s a non-fiction book and Paul recommends it.

The dad is released.

The remaining poodle has begun to twitch. He has cataracts and his gums bleed. He stops eating. Mattie flies home. They broil a pork chop and set it in front of the poodle. The pork chop smells good. It is hot at first but quickly turns cold. The poodle looks at it but does not move.

They all, except Paul, whose plane is delayed, bring the poodle to the pet hospital and have it put to sleep.

Paul arrives in the night, by taxi. He has gained more weight. He looks generally less effective, as a person. He has a friend with him, Christine, who looks worried, and keeps touching her hair.

The cruise is underbooked and overstaffed. It has the casually terminal feel of a nice retirement home — something of zoo-animal complacency and over-the-counter drug proliferation. The railings and walls are clean and shiny, but in an enforced and afflicted way that seems a little sarcastic.

Still, the food is excellent and the passengers are all very happy.

The staff is inspiriting and Filipino.

At dinner, Christine sits alone at a table on the other side of the dining room. She insists on this, says because she isn’t part of the family. She eats slowly and carefully — in open view of the family’s table — with her face down, and worried. No one seems to know how or when she bought a ticket.

The next day, there is a lunch buffet on the sun deck.

“Let’s take five minutes before we eat to think about death,” says the dad. They are seated adjacent the pool, which is covered, for now, with a gleaming white tarp. “What it is. How to defeat it. Strategies, options. What are we dealing with? After, we’ll share.”

The mom likes this about the dad. As a child, she’d always had what she imagined were fascinating thoughts, but didn’t ever say them. Once, as a little girl, at recess, she thought that if she ran very fast at a pole and then caught it and swung quickly around, part of her would keep going, and she would become two girls. That same day, sitting on the monkeybars, she also had an idea for a movie — a mystery/horror movie. Someone would wake one morning and find that their pillow had been replaced with a dismembered torso!

“Okay,” says the dad. He points at Christine. “You first.”

“Death is a toad,” Christine says loudly. She makes a defeated face. “A toad … in outer space. It has a cape.” She opens her mouth. She seems stunned. “Besides the cape, it’s a normal toad.”

The dad looks at the mom.

“Death is the end of the dream,” says the mom. She blinks. She enunciates carefully. “When you wake up finally, you find that there was nothing real after all.” She brings her fruit punch to her mouth, looks down into it, and sips.

“Death is the plural of deaf,” says Paul. “It’s when everything goes deaf.”

“Oh,” says Christine. She stands up, sits back down.

“Death is an emotion outside all the other emotions,” Mattie says, looking at Christine, who has a worried expression on her face. “A comet, blackblue, fast as ice.” She is quoting one of her poems. The next line is a non-sequitur, the men look two inches into my forehead, as are the next couple of lines, i ask for no receipt / but am given a receipt / forced to take it home / unfurl it / like a scroll / staple a wall to it. There are more lines, a rant on the bronze dirtiness of pennies. It is a long poem. Mattie skips to the end. “Death is a highly polished thought.” She feels dazed and shy and occult.

“Is that one of your poems?” says the mom. She smiles.

Mattie nods carefully. There were more lines, actually, she now remembers, life is the sarcastic joke of death / and death is the sarcastic mouth that eats the ironic food / the organic water / the life that fills with teeth / the pecans you like, the nuts / the hardened brains of smaller animals. It just kept going, that poem.

“Death is the end of the fear of death,” says the dad. “To avoid it we must not stop fearing it and so life is fear. Death is time because time allows us to move toward death which we fear at all times when alive. We move around and that is fear. Movement through space requires time. Without death there is no movement through space and no life and no fear. To be aware of death is to be alive is to fear is to move around in space and time toward death.”

They arrive at port in the Bahamas. There are five other gigantic cruise ships. There is the sun-toned city of Nassau, with its conch divers, horse-drawn carriages, cool-black men and women — all in view, yards away — but the tourists are funneled onto a ferry and taken to some other island, where there is a buffet, a pavilion, a long, pragmatic beach, and an inner-tube hut.

They sit facing the ocean. Christine sits straight-backed on the edge of a lounge chair. Mattie lies on an adjacent lounge chair. Paul and the dad are on the pier — there is a low, kid-sized pier — observing some fish. The mom is standing back, on a grassy area, drinking a tropical drink. She is thinking about in her dream, when she was swimming. It was here. Was it here?

“Why are you worried?” Mattie asks Christine. “You seem worried, I mean.”

“I’m …” Christine touches the back of her hand. “The sky … it begins immediately off of our skin. It goes forever, past the stars. Anything beyond can reach down, grab us, pull us off the planet.”

“You’re just improvising, aren’t you?” says Mattie. “When you talk. Each moment, you’re just making up stuff. I mean, that’s what we all do, I guess. I’m not critiquing.” She looks at Christine. A lot of time seems to pass. “It’s okay, It’s good, I like what you say; the toad thing. I’m not attacking. No; not at all.”

Christine stands abruptly up. Her chair makes a noise. She falls to the sand and stands back up. “I’m …” she says. She points wanly in some direction, then goes there, touching her hair and pointing.

That night, they are taken to a hotel that is also a casino and a fish aquarium. There is one wall that is a fish tank of only piranhas. They are the color of mangoes and have flat, koala noses. They all face in one direction, and are all very still, except for a few up top that tremble and look a bit anxious.

“Where’s Christine?” asks the mom. Paul shrugs. No one seems to know. They don’t dwell on it. They play roulette. Paul later says, “Christine told me, she said, ‘I’m not sure, but I might be disappearing into the islands of the Bahamas.’ If anyone’s wondering about that.”

They sleep on their backs. The ship leaves the Bahamas in the night.

The third day is a day at sea.

At dinner, the dad and the mom sit facing Mattie and Paul.

The mom looks over at Christine’s table. A different woman is there. Older, with chandelier earrings, a lot of make-up. Her glass of water is empty and on the edge of her table.

Mattie reads the menu in her head, “… a bed of carrots, broccoli, and four other green,” then out loud, “red, healthy, steamed vegetables.” She looks up.

“You’re the sarcastic one,” says the dad. He’s looking at Mattie. He brings his hand up from under the table. He points at Paul. “You. What are you? You’re sarcastic too, aren’t you?”

“I’m the outwardly depressed, inwardly content one,” says Paul.

“He’s the sarcastic-sarcastic one,” says Mattie. “Two sarcastics.” She flips her menu over, looks at the back of it.

“I’m the outwardly depressed, inwardly content one,” says Paul.

The soup is green and good. The salad is crunchy, with water droplets all over and in it. Mattie has ordered the steamed vegetables. She eats most of it. She crushes a carrot by pressing down hard with her spoon, which then squeals against the plate. I’m the stupid one, she thinks. She grins a little. She reaches for the sugar, changes her mind, moves her hand to her water, changes her mind, brings her hand to her head, scratches behind her ear.

“I saw that,” says the dad. “I saw starting with the childlike behavior with the carrot.” He looks at Mattie, at Paul. I made you two, he thinks. He stands and reaches across the table and pats Mattie on the head. He pats Paul, too, on the head. He sits back down. He pats the mom on the head. The mom pats the dad on the head. She smiles. She turns and looks quickly over at Christine’s table again.

“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t know why I keep looking.”

That night, after the farewell show in the Moonbeam lounge — a dancing, singing, juggling thing — there is the midnight buffet. It has three ice sculptures. A swan, a bear, a dolphin. The foods are also sculpted. There are owly apples, starfishy cheeses, cookies shaped esoterically like ocean sunfish. People take photos of their plates. They eat cautiously at first, then, having realized something, violently, biting off heads and fins and limbs, grinning. The mom runs down to their room and comes back with the camcorder.

After the buffet, they go up to the top deck. The air is cool, and the ocean, all around, is black and smooth. The stars are rich and streaky, as if behind water. They go down one deck, into a glass-enclosed area. It is late and there are just a few other people here.

There is a ping-pong table. The dad challenges Mattie and Paul. The mom starts up her camcorder, which is digital. “If I lose,” says the dad, “I’ll buy you both cars.” The mom zooms wildly in on the dad’s face. She pans back and steps in closer. Paul’s body is languid and cascaded, chin to chest to stomach, but his arms are speedy and graceful. The dad stands rigidly, up close to the table. He does not bend his back or twist his hips. He tosses his paddle from hand to hand. “Ambidextrous,” he says. He is winning. From his time in prison, he has become an expert at ping-pong. He flips over his paddle and serves with the handle end — a slow, high lob to Paul. Mattie chops the ball down massively, tennis-style, and, while doing that, knocks Paul to the floor. The ball bounces hard and loud and high. The dad leaps and tosses his paddle into the air. The paddle does not connect with the ball. The dad catches his paddle. “Mattie,” he says. “Mattie!” The mom’s hand is shaking a little. She tries to keep the camcorder steady with both hands. She hears Mattie laughing and Paul saying, “What the hell was that? What was that!” She tries to zoom in on Mattie laughing. She pans back and sees Paul on the floor still. His face is startled and young. He has taken off a shoe. He throws it at Mattie. Mattie whacks the shoe at the dad, who pivots and whacks the shoe behind him, where it goes spinning over the railing into the dark. The mom pushes the camcorder at Mattie’s chest. Mattie is laughing and she looks and takes the camcorder. The mom runs off, into the fore of the ship — a dark, open area with lounge chairs, railing, the sky, the ocean. Mattie sets the camcorder down on the ping-pong table. She runs and follows her mom. There is a cool breeze and it is very calm and quiet. The floor is wood. The mom is at the railing. Her form is small and vague.

Mattie goes closer, hears that her mom is weeping, and hesitates. She stops smiling and feels that her cheeks are tired. She glances away, turning her ear flat to the sandpapery roar of the wind, then looks back, quiet again. The mom has turned a little. Mattie has a sudden bad thought and is about to say, “Mom, wait,” but the mom now turns fully around. She is crying loud and wet. She steps slowly toward Mattie. She cries with her arms at her sides. “Mattie,” she says. She flings a fist up to her shoulder, pushes it back down to her side. There’s a contrary draft of wind and the mom’s hair sweeps, diagonal, across her face. The ocean behind her is pooling and dark and quietly moving. The sky is black and close. “Oh, Mattie,” she says. Her voice is loud and clear. “I’m so happy.”