Get in Trouble: Stories

The Lesson

The fight starts two days before Thanh and Harper are due to fly out to the wedding. The wedding is on a small private island somewhere off the coast of South Carolina. Or Alabama. The bride is an old friend. The fight is about all sorts of things. Thanh’s long-standing resentment of Harper’s atrocious work schedule, the discovery by Harper that Thanh, in a fit of industriousness, has thrown away all of Harper’s bits and ends of cheese while cleaning out the refrigerator.

The fight is about money. Harper works too much. Thanh is an assistant principal in the Brookline school system. He hasn’t had a raise in three years. The fight is about Thanh’s relationship with the woman who is, precariously, six months pregnant with Harper and Thanh’s longed-for child. Thanh tries once again to explain to Harper. He doesn’t even really like Naomi that much. Although he is of course grateful to her. Why be grateful to her? Harper says. We’re paying her. She’s doing this because we’re paying her money. Not because she wants to be friends with us. With you. The thing Thanh doesn’t say is that he might actually like Naomi under other circumstances. Let’s say, if they were stuck next to each other on a long flight. If they never had to see each other again. If she weren’t carrying Harper and Thanh’s baby. If she were doing a better job of carrying the baby. They have chosen not to know the gender of the baby.

The point is that liking Naomi isn’t the point. The point is rather that she grow to like — love, even — Thanh and, by association, of course (of course!) Harper. That she sees that they are deserving of love. Surely they are deserving of love. Naomi’s goodwill, her friendship, her affection, is an insurance policy. They are both afraid, Thanh and Harper, that Naomi will change her mind when the baby is born. Then they will have no baby and no legal recourse and no money to try again.

Anyway the cheese was old. Harper is getting fat. The beard, which Thanh loathes, isn’t fooling anyone. Thanh has spent too much money on the wedding present. The plane tickets weren’t cheap, either.

Naomi, the surrogate, is on bed rest. Two weeks ago a surgeon put a stitch in her cervix. A cerclage, which almost sounds pretty. How did we end up with a surrogate with an incompetent cervix? says Harper. She’s only twenty-seven!

Naomi gets out of bed to use the toilet and every other day she can take a shower. Her fellow graduate students come over and what do you think they talk about when they’re not talking about linguistics? Thanh and Harper, probably, and how much Naomi is suffering. Does she confide in her friends? Tell them she thinks about keeping the baby? It was her egg, after all. That was probably a dumb idea.

Thanh keeps a toothbrush at Naomi’s apartment. Easier than running upstairs. Their building is full of old Russians with rent-stabilized leases. The women exercise on the treadmills in high heels. They gossip in Russian. Never smile at Thanh when he comes into the exercise room to lift weights or run. They see him go in and out of Naomi’s apartment. Must wonder. Sometimes Thanh works at Naomi’s kitchen table. One night he falls asleep on the bed beside her, Naomi telling him something about her childhood, the TV on. Naomi watches episode after episode of CSI. All that blood. It can’t be good for the baby. When Thanh wakes up, she is watching him. You farted in your sleep, she says. And laughs. What time is it? He checks his phone and sees he has no missed calls. Harper is probably still at work. He doesn’t like me very much, Naomi says. He likes you! Thanh says. (He knows who she means.) I mean he doesn’t really like people. But he likes you. Mm, Naomi says. He’ll like the baby, Thanh says. You should hear him talk about preschools, art lessons, he’s already thinking about pets. Maybe a gerbil to start with? Or a chameleon. He’s already started a college fund. Mm, Naomi says again. He’s good-looking, she says. I’ll give him that. You should have seen him when he was twenty-five, Thanh says. It’s all been downhill since then. Hungry? He heats up the phoga he made upstairs. His mother’s recipe. He does the dishes afterward.

He accidentally saw a text on Naomi’s phone the other day. To one of her friends. The short one. I AM HORNY ALL THE TIME. They should have used a donor egg. But that would have cost more money, and how much more money is there in the world? Wherever it is, it isn’t in Harper and Thanh’s bank account. They went through catalogs. IQs, hobbies, genetic histories. It seemed impersonal. Like ordering take-out food from an online menu. Should we have the chicken or the shrimp? Naomi and Harper have thick, curly blond hair, similar chins, mouths, athletic builds. So they decided to use Thanh’s sperm. Harper says once, late at night: he thinks it would be harder to love his own child.

Thanh wants to tell Harper about the text. Maybe it would make him laugh. He doesn’t. It wouldn’t.

Eventually the fight is about the wedding. Should they cancel? Thanh thinks if they leave town now, something terrible will happen. The baby will come. He can’t say this to Harper. That would also be bad for the baby.

At this stage of a pregnancy a fetus’s lungs are insufficiently developed. Should Naomi go into labor now, the baby will live or the baby will die. It’s fifty-fifty. If the baby lives, the chances are one in five it will be severely disabled. Harper wants to go to the wedding. He won’t know anyone there except for Thanh and Fleur, but Harper likes meeting people, especially when he knows he never has to see them again. Harper likes new people. Harper and Thanh have been together now for sixteen years. Married for six. Anyway, when will there be another chance for adventure? The next stage of their life is slouching over the horizon.

Naomi says go. The tickets are nonrefundable. Everything will be fine. Thanh’s mother, Han, agrees to fly in from Chicago and stay with Naomi. Han and Naomi have become friends on Facebook. Han doesn’t understand anything about Thanh’s life, he has understood this for a long time, but she loves him anyway. She loves Naomi, too, because Naomi is carrying her grandchild. Naomi’s own mother is not in the picture. Harper’s parents are both assholes.

They go to Fleur’s wedding.

Fleur was always in charge of parties. Always threw the best parties, the ones that people who have long since moved out to the wealthier suburbs — Newton, Sudbury, Lincoln — still talk about, the parties that took days in darkened rooms to recover from. Fleur was, in her twenties, thrifty, ruthless, psychologically astute. Able to wring maximum fun, maximum exhausting whimsy, out of all gatherings. And now Fleur has not only filthy improvisatory cunning, but money. Who is paying for all of this? Fleur’s fiancé David’s family owns the island. He does something that Fleur is vague about. Travels. There is family money. His family is in snacks. A van picks up Harper and Thanh, two other couples, and two women from Chula Vista. Friends of Fleur. Fleur moved out to Point Loma a few years ago, which is where she met David doing whatever it is that he does. The women are Marianne and Laura. They say David is nice. Good with his hands. A little scary. They don’t really know him. They know Fleur from Bikram yoga. The air-conditioning in the van isn’t working. The wedding guests are taken in the van from the tiny regional airport where everyone flew in on tiny, toy-sized prop planes to an equally tiny pier. Everything snack-sized. The boat that goes over to Bad Claw Island has a glass bottom. How cute, Marianne says. The pilot, a black guy with the greenest eyes Thanh has ever seen, is gay. Indisputably gay. Down here the Atlantic is softer. It seems bigger. But maybe that’s because everything else is so much smaller. There’s a cooler on the boat; in it, individual see-through thermoses filled with something citrusy and alcoholic. In a basket, prepackaged snacks, crackers, and cookies. Fleur spent her twenties as a bartender in various Boston bars. She and Thanh met at ManRay. ManRay has been closed for a long time now. Thousands of years.

Han has sent Thanh a text. Everything is fine. Okay? Fine! Great! She and Naomi are watching Bollywood musicals. Eating Belgian fries. Naomi wants to know all about Thanh and Harper when they were young and dumb. (Not that this is how Han puts it. Nevertheless.) Don’t tell her anything, Thanh texts back. I mean it.

Harper is in one of his golden moods. Rare these days. He looks a hundred years younger than this morning when they caught the cab. He solicits information from the two couples. Which side of the wedding party. Where they are coming from. What they do. Everyone here is a friend of Fleur’s, but no one has as long and distinguished a claim as Harper and Thanh. Harper, saying he has a bad back, lies down on the glass bottom of the boat. Everyone has to rearrange their feet. No one minds. He tells a story about the time Fleur, inebriated and in a rage, who knows what brought it on, kicked in the front of a jukebox at an Allston bar. The Silhouette. All of those early nineties alt-rock boys in their dirty black jeans. Legs like toothpicks, jeans so tight they could hardly bend their knees when they sat down. Thanh used to marvel at their barely-there asses. Allston rock butt. A U2 song is playing on the jukebox when Fleur kicks it in. Harper, nimble spinner of the spectacular untruth, improvises a story. Bono once jerked off on her little sister when she fell asleep backstage after a concert. After that, Fleur gets free drinks whenever they go to The Silhouette. She even works there for a few months.

Is this the kind of story you are supposed to tell to strangers on your way to a wedding? Better, Thanh supposes, than the one about the albatross. The best part of Harper’s story is that Harper wasn’t even at The Silhouette that night. It was just Thanh and Fleur, on some night. Thanh was the one who made up the story about Bono. But there is no story that Harper does not further embellish, does not re-embroider. Thanh wonders if that story still circulates. Did anyone ever tell it back to Bono himself? Maybe Thanh should Google it. You can see the lumpy profile of what must be Bad Claw Island, maybe half a mile away. Tide’s out, the pilot says over the intercom. You can wade over from here. Water’s maybe three feet deep. You can swim! If you want. Harper jumps up. His back good as new. Absolutely, he says. Who’s in? Harper takes off his shoes, jeans, shirt. There’s that fat, hairy belly. Leaves his briefs on. He goes over the side and down the ladder. Two men and a woman named Natasha join him. All in their underwear.

Thanh stays put beneath the white canopy of the boat. Little waves slap pleasantly at the hull. There’s the most pleasant little breeze. He likes the way the water looks through the glass bottom. Like a magic trick. Why spoil it? Besides, he forgot to collect the laundry out of the dryer before they caught the plane. He isn’t wearing any underwear. The boat gets to shore first, but before Thanh steps off onto the dock, Harper swims up under the glass. Presses his lips up. Then, suggestively, his wriggling hips. Here I am, Thanh, having sex with a boat. See, Thanh? I told you we would have a good time.

Fleur is on the dock, kissing her friends. The boat pilot, too. Why not? He’s very good-looking. Fleur’s wearing a white bikini and a top hat. Her hair is longer than Thanh has ever seen it. She’s let it go back to its natural color. I’m the wedding party, she says, still giving those loving kisses. Exuberant kisses! She smells like frangipani and bourbon. Representing both the bride, me, and my groom, David. Because he’s not here yet. He’s delayed. Look at you, Thanh! Both of you! Has it really been two years? My God. Come up to the lodge. Everyone else has to sleep in a yurt on the beach. Well, everyone except the old people, who are staying over on the mainland. But you and Harper get a bed. A bed in an actual room and there’s even a door. Remember the apartment in Somerville? The girl who came over from Ireland to visit her girlfriend and got dumped before she even landed? We put a mattress behind the sofa and she stayed all summer? Have you seen Barb? Is she still in Prague? Do you know if you’re having a boy or a girl yet? What’s this woman like, the surrogate?

She never stops talking. Kissing, talking, Fleur likes to do both. The other wedding guests are sent off to claim their yurts. Fleur’s sister Lenny takes them away. Thanh has never liked Lenny. He hasn’t seen her in over a decade, but he doesn’t like her any better now. Harper puts his pants back on and they follow Fleur up the beach. Did you ever sleep with her? Harper said once to Thanh. Of course not, Thanh said.

Bad Claw Lodge is an ugly wooden box done up in white gingerbread trim. Two stories. A listing porch, a banging screen door. Little dormer windows tucked under the flaking, papery eaves. The island is probably worth three million, Fleur says. The lodge? Some day it will blow out to sea, and I will get down on my knees and thank God. How big is the island? Harper asks. Two miles. Something like that. You can walk around it in half an hour. It gets bigger after every storm. But then the mainland is getting smaller.

There are buckets and pans set out on the painted floor of the lodge. On counters. On the mildew-stained couch and in the fireplace. It rained all night, Fleur says. All morning, too. I thought it would rain all day. The roof is a sieve. She takes them upstairs and down a hall so low that Harper must duck to get under a beam. Here, she says. Bathroom’s next door. The water is all runoff, so if you want a hot shower, take it in the afternoon. The catchtank is on the roof. There’s space enough in the room they’re sleeping in for one twin bed, shoved up against the window. There’s a three-legged table. On the bed is a Pyrex mixing bowl with an inch of rainwater at the bottom. Fleur says, I’ll take that. On the little table is a piece of taxidermy. Something catlike, but with a peculiarly flattened, leathery tail. It has an angry face. A wrinkled, whiskery snout of a nose. What’s that? Harper says. A beaver? Fleur says, That thing? It’s something native down here. They had poisonous claws, or laid eggs, or something like that. They’re extinct. That’s worth a fortune, too. They were such a nuisance everyone just eradicated them. Shot them, trapped them, cut them up for bait. That was a long time ago, before anyone cared about stuff like that. Anyway! They never bothered to come up with a name for whatever they were, but then after they were gone they named the island after them. I think. Bad Claw. That thing is definitely worth more than this house. Thanh checks his phone again. There’s no signal here, Fleur says. You have to go back to the mainland for that. Harper and Thanh look at each other. Is there a phone in the house?

There isn’t.

Thanh and Harper fight about whether or not Thanh should go back to check messages, to call Han and Naomi. Whether they should stay on the mainland. We could have a real bed, Thanh says. Fleur will understand. I want to stay here, Harper says. And we are not going to say one word about this to Fleur. It’s her wedding! Do you think she wants to have to pretend to feel worried about something that probably isn’t even going to be an issue? Fine. Then I’ll go in the boat the next time it’s bringing people over, Thanh says. Call and make sure everything is okay, and then come right back. No, Harper says. I’ll go. We’ll tell Fleur it’s a work thing.

It turns out that Harper can swim/wade back to the mainland. The tide will be in later on, though, so he’ll get a ride back on the boat. He puts his cell phone, with a couple of twenties, inside two plastic baggies. Fleur takes Thanh aside as soon as Harper is in the water. What’s up? she says. Everything okay? We’re fine, Thanh says. Really. Fine. Okay, Fleur says. Come help me mix drinks and tell me stuff. I need a quick crash course in marriage. What’s sex like? Well, to start with, Thanh says, you need good lube and a lot of preparation. I also recommend two or three trapeze artists. And a marching band. The marching band is essential. They make drinks. People gather on the porch. Someone plays Leonard Cohen songs on a guitar. There are oysters and hot dogs and cold tomato halves filled with spinach and cheese. More drinks. Thanh says to Fleur, Tell me about David. He’s a good guy? How am I supposed to answer that, Fleur says. She’s gotten some sun. There are lines on her face that Thanh doesn’t remember. She’s doing what she used to do, back in the old days. Picking up abandoned drinks, finishing them. David has a terrible job. Did you know they had me vetted when we moved in together? To see if I was a security risk. We’re at different ends of the political spectrum. But he’s good to me. And he’s rich. That doesn’t hurt. And I love him. Well, Thanh says. He takes the empty glass from her hand.

It’s nine at night by the time Harper gets back. People are playing Truth or Dare. Or, as Fleur calls it, Security Risk or Do Something Stupid Because It’s Fun. There are other people on the boat with Harper. Thank God, Fleur says. He’s here. But it isn’t David. It’s three men and a woman, all in knife-pleated pants, white shirts. Are those the caterers? someone asks. Fleur shshes them. Friends of David, she says, and goes down to the dock to meet them. No kisses this time. Thanh, Harper says. Let’s go somewhere and talk.

They’re at the top of the stairs when Thanh sees a plastic bowl, rainwater in it, on the landing. Hold on, he tells Harper, and pukes into it. Takes the bowl into the bathroom, dumps the vomit and rainwater into the toilet. Rinses it. Rinses his mouth. Okay. He’s okay. Harper is in their room, sitting on the little bed. They’re okay, he says. They’re in the hospital. She was having contractions. They’ve given her something to stop the contractions. And something else, uh, Dexamethasone. I looked it up on the phone. It’s a steroid. It increases surfactants in the lungs. Whatever those are. So if he’s born, he’ll have a better chance. He, Thanh says. Oh, Harper says. Yeah. Naomi spilled the beans. Sorry about that. We need to go back, Thanh says. Thanh, Harper says. We can’t. There are no flights. No seats. Not tomorrow anyway. I called. Han’s there. The contractions have stopped. Tomorrow morning, first thing, you can go over to the mainland and talk to them. Thanh lies down on the bed. He doesn’t undress. There’s sand between his toes. He’s cold. Harper lies down beside him. Harper says, It’ll be okay. They’ll be okay. They’re almost asleep when Thanh says, I don’t know about this David guy. I rode over with some of his work friends, Harper says. Bad news, those guys. I asked what exactly David did, and they started talking about the lesson of 9/11. Thanh says, Someone asked if they were the caterers. Caterers, Harper says. Like you’d want to eat anything they served you.

There are noises in the night. Thanh, Harper says. Do you hear that? Hear what? Thanh says. But then he hears it, too. Little rustling noises, dry leaves’ noises. Little scratchings. Harper gets out of bed, turns on the light. The noises stop. Harper turns off the light. Almost immediately the noises start up again. Harper gets up, the light is turned on, the noises stop. When it happens a third time, Harper leaves the light on. The taxidermied Bad Claw watches them with its glassy eyes, lips forever lifted in a sneer. There is nothing in the room except for Harper and Thanh and the Bad Claw, the table and the bed and their suitcases. Thanh checks his phone. There are no messages, no signal. The bed is too small. Harper begins to snore. He didn’t used to snore. There are no other noises. Thanh only falls back asleep as the sun is coming up.

In the morning, Fleur and a bunch of other people are making a lot of noise on the porch. There’s yelling. Little cries of delight. Has David arrived? They make their way down. Go on, Fleur is saying. Try them on. Everyone gets one. Everyone’s a bride today. She is taking wedding dresses out of a set of oversized luggage. Remember these? she says to Thanh and Harper. Remember when I won all that money at the poker game in Somerville? She tells everyone else, I didn’t know what to do with it. The next week was the wedding dress sale, Filene’s Basement. It’s famous, she tells her California friends. Everyone used to go. Even if you never, ever planned to get married. You went to watch grown women fight over dresses, and then there you are, buying a dress, too. So I went and I got kind of fascinated with the dresses that no one else wanted. All of the really horrible dresses. At the end of the day they’re practically paying you to take them. I spent all my poker money on wedding dresses. I’ve been saving them ever since. For a party. Or a wedding. Something. Here, she says to Harper. This one will look good on you. I was saving it just for you.

So Harper takes off his shirt. He steps into the dress, yanks it up over his chest. There are cap sleeves. Fake seed pearls. Fake buttons up the back. Was there really a time when women wore dresses like this and no one thought it was strange and everyone pretended that they looked beautiful and cried? How much did Fleur pay? There’s a tag still attached. $3,000. A line through that. More prices, all crossed out. Fleur sees Thanh looking. You know I didn’t pay more than fifty bucks for any of them, she says. Harper and Thanh were married in a courthouse office. They wore good suits. Red boxers, because red is lucky. Luck is necessary. Here’s marriage advice Thanh could give Fleur. Be lucky.

How are the yurts? Thanh asks the woman from the van. Marianne? Or Laura. Whatever. The yurts? Really nice, the woman says. I’ve always wanted to stay in a yurt. Me, too, Thanh says. He’s never entertained a single thought about a yurt in his entire life. Here, the woman says, will you zip me up? He zips her up. You look nice, he says. Really, she says. Yes, he says. It suits you somehow. But she doesn’t seem pleased by this, the way she was pleased about the yurt. Maybe because it’s such an awful dress. The (un)caterers are playing Hearts on the steps. Harper says to Fleur, I need to go back over to the mainland again. Work. Fleur says, Tide’s in. I don’t know when the boat is back over. It’s already come once this morning, with groceries. Maybe after lunch? First we’re going to go on an expedition. Put on a dress. (This to Thanh.) You guys, too. (This to the caterers.) Think of it as information gathering in field settings. Everybody needs coffee, grab coffee.

Everyone is amenable. Wedding guests in wedding dresses grab coffee and fruit and premade breakfast sandwiches. They put on sunblock, or hats, and troop off after Fleur. Thanh and Harper go along. Everyone goes. Even the caterers.

The center of the island, at least Thanh assumes it’s the center of the island, is uphill. Laurel and pine. Loamy soil flecked with sand. There’s a sort of path, pocketed with roots, and Fleur tells them to stay on it. Poison oak, she says. Sinkholes. Pines crowd in until the procession must go single file. Thanh has to hold up the train of his awful borrowed dress. The path becomes slippery with old needles. There’s no breeze, just the medicinal smell of pine and salt. No one talks. The caterers are just in front of Thanh, Harper behind. He bets the caterers have a working phone. If the boat doesn’t come soon, he’ll figure out how to get it. Why did they sleep so late? Han will be no use to Naomi if things go wrong. She will be no use to Thanh and Harper. But then, what use would Thanh and Harper be? Nevertheless, they shouldn’t be here. Here is of no use to anyone. The wedding party emerges into a clearing. At the center is an indentation, a sunken pocket of what Thanh realizes is water. A pond? Hardly big enough to be a pond. There’s an algae bloom, bright as an egg yolk. So, Fleur says. We’re here! This is where David’s family comes every year, so they can each make a wish. Right, Sheila, Robert? She is addressing an older couple. Thanh hasn’t even noticed them until now, although they are the only people in the clearing who aren’t wearing wedding dresses. This should make them stand out, he thinks. They don’t. They could set themselves on fire, and you still probably wouldn’t notice them. There’s a cairn of pebbles and shells and bits of broken pottery. Fleur picks up a pebble, says, You make a wish and you throw something in. Come on, everyone gets a wish. Come on, come on. She tosses her pebble. Wedding guests gather around the mucky hole. Is it very deep? someone asks Fleur. She shrugs. Maybe, she says. Probably not. I don’t know. Someone picks up a shell and drops it in. People make wishes. Harper rolls his eyes at Thanh. Shrugs. Picks up a pebble. People are making all sorts of wishes. A man in a watered silk dress with a mandarin collar, really it’s the best of the awful dresses, wishes for a new job. Fair enough. The caterers make wishes, secret wishes. Even caterers get to make wishes. Marianne thinks, Let my mother die. Let her die soon. And Fleur? What did she wish? Fleur wishes with all of her heart, Please let him get here soon. Let him get here safely. Please let him love me. Please let this work. Thanh doesn’t want to make a wish. He is suspicious of wishes. Go on, Fleur says. She puts a piece of shell in Thanh’s hand. And then she waits. Should he wish that the baby inside Naomi stays inside a little longer? What would be the cost of that wish? Should he wish that the baby will live? If he lives, let him be healthy and strong and happy? He could wish that Naomi will not wish to keep the baby. He could wish to be a good father. That Harper would be a good father. Would that be a good wish? A safe wish? It seems dangerous to Thanh to make demands of God, of the universe, of a muddy hole. How can he anticipate the thing that he ought to wish for? Fleur is waiting. So Thanh throws the bit of shell in, and tries with all his heart not to make any wish at all. Even as he tries, he feels something — that wish, what is it, what is it? — rising up from his stomach, his lungs, his heart, spilling out. Too late! Down goes Thanh’s bit of shell with all the other pebbles and bits, the other wishes. Harper sees Thanh’s face. He wants that look to go away. What can be done? He wants to get back and see if the boat has come in. He’ll go over to the mainland again if Thanh will let him. Harper doesn’t believe in wishes, but he drops his pebble anyway. He thinks, I wonder what was making the noise last night? He holds Thanh’s hand all the way back down the trail. The dresses are ridiculous. The kind of fun that they used to have is no longer fun. Now it seems more like work. David’s parents are just in front of Harper and Thanh. They didn’t make any wishes, but perhaps they have everything they want already. Thanh wonders. What kinds of things did they wish for their son? Harper decides that if the boat isn’t back, he’ll swim over in the ridiculous dress. What a great story that will make. He isn’t thinking about Naomi and the baby. He is making every effort not to think about them at all. What a waste it will all be, what a disaster it will be if things go wrong at this stage. Will Thanh want to try again? They won’t be able to afford it. Somehow all of this will be Harper’s fault. They shouldn’t have come to the wedding.

A baby born at twenty-four weeks may weigh just over a pound. The boat is at the dock. David has not come in on it. Thanh says, I should go this time. No, Harper says. You stay. I’ll go. You should stay. Have some lunch. Take a nap. Really, Thanh should go, but Harper goes instead. He doesn’t wear the dress. Before you are allowed to enter the NICU you must wash your hands and forearms up to the elbows for no less than two minutes each time. There is a clock and you watch the minute hand. This is to keep the babies safe from infection. Fleur suggests various games. Frisbee, Capture the Flag, Marco Polo in the water. The caterers play all of these games as if they are not playing games at all. Your wedding ring will fit around the wrist of a twenty-four-week baby. All of the wedding dresses have been bundled up in a pile on the beach with some driftwood. There will be a bonfire tonight. Lunch has been delivered on the boat. Thanh doesn’t want any lunch. In a male baby born at twenty-four weeks, the scrotum and the glans of the penis have not yet developed. The skin cannot hold heat or moisture in. They have no fat. No reserves. They are stuck with needles, tubes, wires, monitors. Astronauts in the smallest diapers you have ever seen. Their ears don’t resemble ears yet. They are placed in nests of artificial lambswool. Pink like cotton candy. Thanh doesn’t want to play Capture the Flag. Fleur has made pitchers and pitchers of Bad Claw Island Ice Tea, and Thanh downs drink after drink after drink. He sits on the sand and drinks. Fleur sits with him for a while, and they talk about things that don’t matter to either one of them. Fleur drinks, but not as much as Thanh. She must wonder. Does she wonder why he is drinking like this? She doesn’t ask. David’s mother sits down beside them. She says, I always wanted to write a book about this place. A book for children. It was going to be about the Bad Claws, before people ever lived here. But I couldn’t figure out what the lesson would be. Children’s books should have a lesson, don’t you think? You should always learn something when you read a story. That’s important. Premature baby girls have better outcomes than premature baby boys. Caucasian boys fare worst of all. Nurses have a name for this: Wimpy White Boys. Fleur says, I’m getting married tomorrow. If David doesn’t show up, I’ll marry the Bad Claw. The one in your room. Put that ring right around that poisonous little dewclaw. That would be funny, wouldn’t it? Just watch. I’ll do it. Eventually Thanh is sitting by himself, and then, later, someone is standing over him. Harper. Hey there, Harper is saying. Hey there, buddy. Thanh? What? Thanh says. What. He thinks this is what he says. He is asking a question, but he isn’t sure what he is asking. Harper is telling him something about someone whose name is William. The eyes of a twenty-four-week baby will still be fused shut. He can be given around five grams of breast milk a day through a gastro-nasal tube. Every diaper must be weighed. Urine output is monitored. Heart rate. Weight gain. Growth of the blood vessels in the retina. Lungs will not fully develop until the thirty-seventh week. Oxygen saturation of the blood is monitored. Everything noted in a binder book. Parents may look at the book. May ask questions. A high-speed oscillating ventilator may be required. Sometimes a tracheotomy is required. Supplemental oxygen. Blood transfusions. There is a price for all of these interventions. There is a cost. Cerebral palsy is a risk. Brain bleeds. Scarring of the lungs. Loss of vision. Necrotizing enterocolitis. The business of staying alive is hard work. Nurses say, He’s so feisty. He’s a fighter. That’s a good thing. Harper goes away. Eventually he comes back with Fleur. The bonfire has been lit. It’s dark. You have to eat something, Fleur says. Thanh? Here. She opens a packet of crackers. Thanh obediently eats cracker after cracker. Sips water. The crackers are sweetish. Dry. Nurses don’t necessarily call the premature babies by their names. Why not? Maybe it makes it easier. They call the babies Peanut. Muffin. What an adorable muffin. What a little peanut. Parents may visit the NICU at any hour, day or night. Some parents find it hard to visit. Their presence is not essential. There is no vital task. Their child may die. There is no privacy. Every morning and every evening the doctors make rounds. Parents may listen in. They may ask questions. Parents may ask questions. There will not always be answers. There are motivational posters. Social workers. Financial counselors. A baby born at twenty-four weeks is expensive! Who knew a baby could cost so much? Fleur and Harper help Thanh up the stairs and into bed. Harper is saying, In the morning. We have standby seats. Turn him on his side. In case he pukes. There. The first twenty-four hours are the most critical.

Harper is snoring in Thanh’s ear. Is this what has woken him? There’s another noise in the room. That rustling again. That cellophane noise. Do you hear that? Thanh says. His tongue is thick. Harper. Harper says, Ungh. The noise increases. Harper says, What the hell, Thanh. Thanh is sitting up in bed now. He’s still drunk, but he is piecing together the things that Harper tried to tell him a few hours ago. Naomi has had the baby. Harper, he says. Harper gets up and puts on the light. There is movement in the room, a kind of black liquid rushing. Beetles are pouring — a cataract — out of the Bad Claw onto the table and down the wall, across the floor, and toward the bed and the window. Something urgent in their progress, some necessary, timely task that they are engaged in. The lively, massed shape of them is the shadow of an unseen thing, moving through the room. Scurrying night. There will be a night in the NICU, much later, when Thanh looks over at another isolette. Sees, in the violet light, a spider moving across the inside wall. Every year, the nurse says when he calls her over. Every spring we get a migration or something. Spiders everywhere. She reaches in, scoops the spider into a cup. “Christ on a bicycle!” Harper says. “What the fuck?” He and Thanh are out of the room as fast as they can go. Down the stairs, and out of the house. They stumble down the rough beach to the dock. The lumpy yurts silent and black. The sky full of so many stars. God has an inordinate fondness for stars and also for beetles. The small and the very far away. Harper has the suitcase. Thanh carries their shoes. No doubt they’ve left something behind.

They sit on the dock. Do you remember anything I told you last night? Harper asks. Thanh says, Tell me. We have a son, Harper says. His name is William. Your mother picked that. William. She wanted him to have a name. In case. We’ll call when we get to the mainland. We’ll get the first flight. If there are no flights, we’ll rent a car. We could swim, Thanh says. That’s a terrible idea, Harper says. He puts his arms around Thanh. Breathes into his hair. It will be okay, Harper says. It may not be okay, Thanh says. I don’t know if I can do this. Why did we want to do this? Harper says, Look. He points. There, far away, are the lights of the mainland. Closer: light moving over the water. The light becomes a boat and then the boat comes close enough that the pilot can throw a rope to Harper. He pulls the boat in. A man steps off. He looks at Harper, at Thanh, a little puzzled. This is the bridegroom. He says, “Were you waiting for me?” Thanh begins to laugh, but Harper throws his arms open wide and embraces David. Welcomes him. Then David goes up the beach to the house. His shadow trails behind him, catches on beach grass and little pebbles. What kind of person is he? Not a good one, but he is loved by Fleur and what does it matter to Thanh and Harper anyway? Even caterers get married. There’s no law against it. They get on the boat and ride back to the mainland. Fish swim up under the glass bottom, toward the light. Harper pays the pilot of the boat, whose name is Richard, a hundred bucks to take them to the airport. By the time they are on the prop plane that will take them to Charlotte where they will catch another flight to Boston, Thanh is undergoing a hangover of supernatural proportions. The hangover renders him incapable of thought. This is a mercy. Waiting for flights, Harper talks to Han, and once to Naomi. Thanh and Harper hold hands in the cab all the way to Children’s Hospital, and Han meets them in the main lobby. “Come up,” she says. “Come up and meet your son.”

On an island, Fleur and David marry each other. There is cake. The wedding gift, which cost too much money, is opened. Days go by. Months go by. Years. Sometimes Thanh remembers Bad Claw, the procession of wedding dresses, the caterers, the boat coming toward the island. The place where he picked up a pebble. Sometimes Thanh wonders. Was this it, the thing that he had wished for, even as he had tried to wish for nothing at all? Was it this moment? Or was it this? Or this. Brief joys. The shadow of the valley of the shadow. Even here, even here, he wondered. Perhaps it was.

There is a day when they are able to bring the boy, their son, home from the NICU. They have prepared his room. There has been time, after all, a surplus of time to outfit the room with the usual things. A crib. Soft animals. A rug. A chair. A light.

One day the crib is too small. The boy learns to walk. Naomi graduates. Sometimes she takes the boy to the zoo or to museums. One day she says to Thanh, Sometimes I forget that he didn’t die. Things were so bad for so long. Sometimes I think that he did die, and this is another boy entirely. I love him with all my heart, but sometimes I can’t stop crying about the other one. Do you ever feel that way? Harper still works too much. Sometimes he tells the boy the story about how he was born, and the island, and the wedding. How Harper’s wedding ring fit over his wrist. How Harper, wearing a wedding dress, rode over in a glass-bottomed boat, and was told that their son was born. Han gets older. She says, Sometimes I think that when I am dead and a ghost I will go back to that hospital. I spent so long there. I will be a ghost who washes her hands and waits. I won’t know where else to haunt. The boy grows up. He is the same boy, even if sometimes it is hard to believe this could be true. Thanh and Harper stay married. The boy is loved. The loved one suffers. All loved ones suffer. Love is not enough to prevent this. Love is not enough. Love is enough. The thing that you wished for. Was this it?

Here endeth the lesson.