A Small Fortune

I don’t know why I’m awake. I set the alarm before I fell asleep but it hasn’t gone off. It’s dark outside. The smell of fresh rain sifts beneath the mottled windows of our hundred-year-old Victorian. The clock reads 5:57 a.m.

My first thought is that I have to fix something, and fix it fast. My second thought is that I can relax. My husband Jonathon, the King of Organizational Protocol, has already seen to the details of our trip to Mexico—passports, tickets, arranging the cab. But he’s also the one who’s shut the alarm off and let me sleep in.

I shove the duvet from my legs. We need to leave for the airport in twenty minutes.

Oliver appears in the doorway. “Why are you still in your pajamas?”

“Where’s your father?”

“I can’t find my flip-flops.”

“You can buy new ones when we get there,” I say from the bathroom as I slip into my white linen pants, the first sign I’m about to trade in the Portland rain for a week of sultry, hot sun. Maybe the alarm
did
go off and I never heard it. I stayed up too late copyediting the latest volume in Dee Dee Dawson’s Legends of Lust series. I’ve only had four hours of sleep, and most of that was spent dreaming of my red pen scratching in and out of
primal
,
sultry
,
hot
, and
moist
.

“I’m not walking around in new flip-flops!” Oliver yells from somewhere in the house. “The place between my toes will hurt!” That edge in his voice. I look forward to the day he sheds this surly sixteen-year-old who dislikes me more than he dislikes all the other things he dislikes in the world. I keep hoping for the return of Ollie, a boy who adored me.

I snatch up the last of my toiletries, and I’m midway down the stairs when drums pummel two floors up from the basement. I take a deep breath. Led Zeppelin, “Immigrant Song,” if I’m not mistaken, which is one more thing Oliver dislikes about me. I listened to Zeppelin as a teenager, too, and one would think that’s a good thing, to have this in common, but Oliver assures me I’ve never listened to Zeppelin the way
he
listens to Zeppelin, and drives the point home with an eye roll.

“Jonathon, where are you!” I yell, as if he can hear.

I pull out my cell. Oliver keeps his phone on vibrate in his back pocket and will feel it even if he can’t hear it.
Get your ass up here
, I text. I’ve never sworn at him in a text before.

The drumming stops with the final crash of a cymbal.

I make it to the front hallway just as Jonathon appears at the front door with the tote bag from last summer filled with suntan oil and flip-flops and what must be mildewed towels from the coast, all of which we tossed into the garage months ago. He looks as if he’s been awake for hours, all smiles and coordination. He’s wearing a white T-shirt and jeans, his blond hair soft and uncombed around his face. I haven’t seen this side of him in ages. His expression has been set on fatigue for so long I’ve forgotten how it’s supposed to look. He appears younger. Happy. He hasn’t shaved, and the stubble gives his mouth a brawny kind of sex appeal.

“Where have you been?” I ask. The double meaning isn’t lost on me.

He smiles, digs the flip-flops out, and hands them to Oliver coming up the basement stairs. Then he kisses me on the lips—with intention—slow and soft. A kiss that says we’re on vacation now and he couldn’t be happier. A kiss I don’t want to ruin by mentioning the alarm.

Oliver slips into the flip-flops, and the smell of mildew fills the foyer. The flip-flops are at least a size too small.

“You’re not going to wear those on the plane, are you?” I ask, sounding more critical than I mean to.

Oliver rolls his eyes, plugs his iPod buds into his ears, lugs his backpack over his shoulder, and is the first to head out the door and into the cab.

It’s been years since we’ve taken a family vacation. One might assume being married to the president of a bank means my life is lined with cash and jewels and exotic vacations. But these days banks are failing, and Jonathon’s is only a small local outfit to begin with. Pacific Savings and Trust, “The People’s Bank” written in small letters beneath the name on billboards. I once made a joke about it being a subliminal reference to China, the nation with all the cash. Jonathon didn’t think it was funny.

My mother’s interest in playing the stock market and then her subsequent death is what brought Jonathon and me together eighteen years ago. I may be my mother’s daughter in many ways, but investing in the market isn’t one of them. The world of finance doesn’t interest me in the slightest. What interests me is the fact that Jonathon, who never plays loose with the family budget, who likes to remind me we’re in a recession every time I purchase a pair of shoes, has arranged this last-minute vacation, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. He didn’t say so, but I’m sure it has something to do with how on edge I’ve become. I’ve tried hiding it. I’ve tried writing it off as fatigue, work stress, PMS, any excuse I can think of, hoping it will disappear on its own. It hasn’t. I work out twice as hard at the gym, but it’s only a temporary fix for the stress buzzing beneath my skin. I’ve tried yoga, then meditation, but my mind journeys off to more anxious corners in a dark room full of sweaty people than it does when I sit alone in my kitchen with a cup of coffee and the glassy voices on NPR.

“We’re due for a change, a vacation,” Jonathon said over dinner just a week ago. “It’s spring break. What do you think about Mexico?” More than anything I wonder if this trip is his attempt to give our marriage the jumpstart it so badly needs. I would have packed that night if he asked me to.

But the day has come so quickly that it feels as if we’ve been instantly transported from our kitchen chairs to a Mexican cab without seatbelts, speeding through the crowded, lumpy cobblestone streets of downtown Puerto Vallarta.

A glare ricochets off everything. Especially harsh on eyes from the Pacific Northwest. I try deciphering Spanish storefronts, but even without the glare I have no idea what anything means. I minored in German, which seems the opposite of Spanish—all somber quotes and fairy tales where eyes are plucked out, bellies cut open, a boy forced to live with scissors for hands. “
Verstehen Sie die Auswirkungen?
Do you understand the implications?” my professor liked to shout at the front of the room. “The poor child bloodied everyone he came close to.”

That seems like a century ago.

Gutierrez Rizo, a sign reads, and I whisper it on my tongue.

An ancient-looking man waves a Polaroid camera on a corner next to a donkey in a sunhat. I start to point it out to Jonathon, but he’s pecking on his BlackBerry in the front seat. I watch for several minutes. He doesn’t look up. Not once. It’s as if he’s been to Puerto Vallarta before. He hasn’t.

Oliver mopes behind aviator sunglasses in the backseat opposite me. I can hear the tinny music through the headphones in his ears. He’ll be deaf by the time he’s twenty. A good mother would make him turn the music down. He presses his forehead against the window.

“It’s dirty here,” he says.

“Look at the ocean,” I say. “It’s beautiful.” How would my favorite author, Joella Lundstrum, describe it? Peacock blue. Undulating. A sensual invitation. I’m afraid that sounds more like something out of Dee Dee Dawson’s Primal Pleasures series.

“Maggie says you can’t even drink the water,” Oliver says with that edge again. Maggie is his girlfriend of three months.

I find myself aching for the younger version of him, for the son I no longer have. A mix of longing and rage spread like a stain through my chest, and I suddenly burn for the days even before that, the days before marriage and motherhood when my work with literary novels felt serious and important, when the prose I combed through halted my breath, stunned me with clarity, articulated feelings for which I had no words. My days seemed grounded, purposeful, charged with forward momentum. The future was still unknown to me. Whom would I marry? Where would we live? When would I become a mother?

“Maggie doesn’t have to drink the water,” I say, stupidly. “And neither do you.”

He rolls his eyes with a slow, scornful headshake.

I roll my eyes with a slow, scornful headshake. Sometimes mockery gets a small laugh. This time it doesn’t.

Last night I slipped out of bed when I heard Oliver slam the door on Maggie’s Honda. I looked down from the bedroom window to see him stomp up the walkway with fists at his sides. Maggie jumped out and caught his arm. Oliver turned and whispered angrily in her face. She rose up on her clunky boots and did the same. Then Oliver raised his hand to her cheek. Gently. It rested there as he leaned into her ear. Maggie lifted her arms around his neck and they kissed. It went on long enough to make me squirm. They stopped, and one, then the other, laughed.

“Celia. Come to bed.” Jonathon’s voice had been startling and strange in the dark.

I had slipped into bed, thinking we had a flight to catch in the morning. For the next week the three of us would squeeze into a two-bedroom condo, share all our meals, sit side by side at the beach, swim together, walk the promenade at sunset. What on earth would we talk about? If ever I needed to rest up for something, this was it.

But Jonathon’s hand slid onto my breast. I started to turn away. “I love you,” he whispered, and the shock of his tone held me beneath his cupped hand. How long had it been since he’d said it like he meant it? How long since I’d said it that way myself?

I’d turned toward him and touched his cheek, resisting the impulse to pull away. I lifted off my camisole and kissed him with more passion than I was used to mustering. He tasted like toothpaste. My own breath was probably sour after hours of working with clenched teeth. I kissed him like I meant it anyway. There was nothing wrong with me. This was what I repeated to myself, going through the motions—hands, tongues, lips. I tried picturing a scene from Legends of Lust. The heat, the undoing, the explosion wild enough to leave a room soaked and in shambles. I was a slender nymph who could not get enough. More, more, more. I wanted others to see us, to feel our lust. Yes, yes, yes.

It was no use. Our lovemaking, at best, is like well-rehearsed theater. A quick performance carried out with exactitude in the dark. At worst, it comes to a halt during intermission, the final act never to be seen. Jonathon has begun to suffer periodic episodes of impotence. I can’t help but feel it’s because of me.

Afterward, I sat on the toilet near tears, waiting to pee in the ghoulish orange glow of the nightlight, frustrated at a world that’s done nothing to me. My husband is a decent man pushed to the brink by an industry he has no control over. My son, a teenager doing what teenagers do, which in a sense makes him perfectly normal. What reason do I have to be so upset? Why am I so often teetering on the verge of rage and tears?

The front door had opened and closed. Oliver’s heavy footsteps, like a stranger’s, creaked the stairs. He’s already taller than Jonathon, and thicker across the chest, but his face and coloring are identical to mine. Anyone can see he’s my son. Same gray-blue eyes and dark wavy hair. Same narrow jawline. Same button-white teeth and that trademark dimple that came from my mother’s side of the family. When Oliver was a baby and smiled for the first time, it was that dimple that helped me move beyond the strangeness of becoming a new mother and into more familiar territory. It made me miss my mother more than ever, but at the same time I felt her presence in the face of my beautiful boy. It was the most extraordinary gift Jonathon could have ever given me. I thought about this as I curled into the reading chair, opened my laptop, and began working quietly while Jonathon slept soundly across the room.

I draw in the stale cigarette smell of the cab, look at Oliver moping beside me, and let it go. The truth is, I don’t really mind getting paid for the guilty pleasure of combing through racy romance novels. I’m grateful for the distraction, not to mention the paycheck. These books are recession-proof, barreling through like a million sexy warships keeping the publishing world afloat. And at the end of the day, Oliver’s a good kid, a really good kid, on the honor roll every term since he began high school.

“I know it looks less than pristine here,” I say. “But keep in mind you’re coming from Portland. The whole world looks dirty compared to that.”

Oliver sighs and checks his phone. He snaps it closed and throws me a sad little smile, that rare crack in the sullen armor that means he feels bad about something he’s said or done to me, or feels bad about something that’s been done to him. He’s checking in like a boy on a playground, making sure his mother’s still close. And that’s the thing. I am. I always will be. All he has to do is ask.

“I’m going to squeeze fresh orange juice for breakfast in the morning,” I say, patting his leg. “You’ll love it. I’ll make omelets. After that, take your pick. We can swim at the beach or the pool. I’m looking forward to a run on that beach.”