The Brink (5 page)

She removed her gloves and pulled me to her. “There's so much world left to see,” she said, and let it hang there, between us, the line from the game, until I finally understood. “How about a tour?”

I got on my knees. I didn't know the name of a single plant in the row.

“Show me,” I said.

On their first morning in what was the most spectacular place she'd ever been—rampant sun, palms everywhere, bungalows planked on top of the water—Haley and Mac paddled (Mac doing most of it) one of the resort's outrigger canoes to the raft in the lagoon (
lagoon
,
outrigger
, when would she get to use these honeymoon words again?) where, probably because he'd lost seven pounds since the ring sizing, Mac's wedding band just slipped off.

“Tell me you're kidding,” Haley said. She sat upright, her left arm covering her breasts. She'd been on the raft, sunbathing topless for the first time ever, feeling pleasantly retarded from the mai tais they'd had at arrival the night before and then, because fuck it, again at breakfast. They'd flown for twenty-two hours, in a blur of deplaning and re-planing and magazines pulped down to their acrostics, to this crumb in the Pacific. She was not awake enough for an emergency.

Mac treaded water next to the raft, scanning the water, his snorkel mask askew.

“It's right below us,” he said. “I watched it go.” The ocean was pristine here. She could see forty feet down, to the ridges of sand that looked like the piping on corduroy. Bits of coral
and kelp drifted in the current. But she couldn't see the ring, the white gold band they'd debated over forever that now had become, suddenly, a six-hundred-dollar piece of sea glass.

“Can you dive for it?” she asked.

“It's too deep. I tried.”

Haley shivered. “Shit, Mac, someone could take it.” Suddenly, the water seemed vast and rioting with threat. She thought of sharks and rays—the flappy mouse pad ones—and the Portuguese men-o'-war, which, she learned from the travel book she'd checked out from the library, were translucent brains with stinging hair.

“Mermaids might take it,” Mac said. “For their merriages.”

He was not nearly worried enough. “You're always in problem-solving mode until the moment I need you to be in problem-solving mode,” Haley said, and worked her arms through the straps of her top.

Mac climbed onto the raft. “Hang on. Just let me boot up.”

He lay down and whirred and clicked and sliced his hands through the air like a robot. Mac worked in advertising; he could only be serious after he'd riffed a little. Haley noticed the wet hair on his scalp made a land bridge from one side to another; the bald spot was progressing. The bald spot would need to be acknowledged and accommodated. His threadbare, beloved T-shirt (Madison High School Class of '99) was glazed to his chest; he wore it even in the water
.
He was shy about his scars on his belly, from a childhood surgery, but Haley felt, and she'd said something and then knew to drop it, that wearing a T-shirt while swimming made them both
look like they didn't belong at the resort, like they'd won the trip on a game show.

“The ring's not going anywhere,” Mac said. “I promise I won't take my eyes off it. But let me just say your breasts look fantastic right now.”

“See, you just did take your eyes off it.” Haley eyed the beachfront, the crescent of folding chairs and umbrellas. The other honeymooners at the resort, French girls with punky breasts who made Haley feel prissy for even bothering with a top, were nowhere to be seen. Last night, the place seemed overrun with young French newlyweds. She'd seen them all cramming into a hotel shuttle bus to the bars. But now the walkways that bridged between bungalows were empty. Haley untied the outrigger. She'd get help and she'd leave Mac out here if she had to.

“What the hell is that?” Mac asked.

And then Haley saw it too, the plume of black smoke in the sky, toward town. Something big was on fire. But they had other things to worry about.

In the breezy hotel lobby—it was a wind tunnel, open on both ends—the concierge gave Haley the worried expression she was hoping for. He had hazel skin, jet-black hair, and blazing white teeth, with a British flag pinned to the lapel of his white tuxedo.

“There are divers yes?” Mac asked, dripping on the tile. “We pay dollars. Many dollars.”

When Mac said it, Haley realized she didn't even know
yet what the currency was here. Francs? Sand dollars? Mac's ring was probably worth a half year's labor. As soon as word got around that the ring was in the lagoon, everybody would be diving for it.

“No diving this day,” the concierge said. “I am sorry.”

“Not one?” Haley asked. “Not even, like, a guy with an air tank?”

“Tomorrow,” the concierge answered. “Tomorrow, everything.”

One of the French girls slow-walked through the lobby. She pressed a gauze bandage to her head with a crust of blood at the fringe. Too much fun? Haley thought vindictively. The girl's brown mane was clumpy and uncombed. She carried an ice bucket and barely picked her flip-flops off the floor.

“What happened to her?” Haley asked the concierge.

The concierge studied them both, as though this were a test of his congeniality. Then he handed her an island newspaper, a crudely printed broadsheet with all the weight of a shopping circular. “Beach Bombings Kill 23.” Haley read the headline and saw in her mind the French girls thrown into the air, an explosion of brides.

Mac and Haley retreated to two rattan chairs to devour the paper. The previous evening, explosions had destroyed a restaurant on Jimbaran Beach, the tourist zone three miles up the sand. She tried to visualize the street. They'd taken the shuttle from the airport, through narrow streets of low-slung shacks and surf shops, with mopeds darting through every opening in the traffic. The route depressed her. Countless
black wires crosscrossed above the road; did the whole island run off stolen cable? She saw the water in snatches between the buildings and eventually closed her eyes until they passed through the gates of the resort.

“Did you hear anything?” Haley asked.

“I thought I heard sirens,” Mac said, but he often claimed special, unverifiable knowledge. Apparently, the bombs were crude, pipes stuffed with shrapnel and ball bearings, stashed in backpacks. None of the suspects had been found. The article said the majority of the victims had been islanders, and Haley allowed herself a small, guilty relief. The brides had been spared. On the second page was a photograph of a white man in a ruin of splintered benches and tables. Beside him, she could just make out a leg in the sand. A brown leg, without a person.

“Who
does
something like this?” Haley asked. Mac shrugged. She wanted someone to explain the facts to her. She was smart, she could hold it in her head, but this newspaper was toilet paper.

Bali had not been Haley's idea. She'd been thinking four-poster beds and long echoing halls of stone. Impressively, Mac had kept the honeymoon location a secret until the airport. Standing at the destination gate, Haley felt ambushed. In an instant, she knew exactly who had given Mac the idea. It was as though Saul had followed her here, into her privacy.

Saul was Mac's best friend from college, a curly-haired Virginian with a barking laugh and prominent chipped tooth that
had somehow, despite his pedigree, eluded dentistry. Saul had spent a year island-hopping in Indonesia, lugging two surfboards in a giant duffel. Five months ago, he'd returned to the States and crashed on their couch in Rogers Park to see if “Chicago was next.” He was one of those people who appeared to live exclusively outdoors, on a mysterious trickle of cash. At different points, Saul had taught snowboarding, led wilderness adventures for deaf teenagers, built rustic log cabins for millionaires in Montana.

“Will he make me feel pathetic for not having some amazing life?” Haley had asked on the way to the airport to pick him up. She visited housing projects and patches of dirt she called “gardens” on all the forms. Her job for the foundation depressed her, would have depressed anybody, seeing that much rebar and broken concrete and kittens in tires. Often, when she pulled up to the curb, she'd have a moment of pure terror, when the idea of opening the car door and “leaving the bubble,” as she called it, felt like a burden too great to shoulder.

“He can't make you feel anything, sweetheart,” Mac said. “But I do tend to feel fat and pale around him.”

Saul arrived in sandals and grimy cargo shorts and sick with stomach flu. He slept for two days. She found sand, fine as flour, on the bathroom tile. They left him the apartment during the day, and odd books, pilfered from their shelves, appeared on the counters. Haley and Mac came home to elaborate meals Saul had made using every possible kitchen implement. Cans of coconut milk mounted in the sink. More than
one fresh pineapple lay quartered on the cutting board for them in the mornings. It was clear Mac loved Saul, or loved how Saul made him remember himself, but Haley found Saul's restlessness unsettling. She felt like he was going through every drawer while they were at work, looking for something they did not have.

Once, after a dinner Saul had made for them, Mac asked him about his walkabout in the South Pacific. Mac was good at making other people's stories interesting. Few people ever asked him about his work at the ad agency. If they did, he'd say, “It's all just a matter of deciding where to put the puppy.” Mac hadn't traveled much, and as Saul spoke, Haley finally understood why Saul liked him—it was the same reason she did. He was precisely where you left him.

“So wait, where was that amazing beach again?” Mac asked from the bathroom, the door open while he peed. Saul brought out the insouciant boy in him. Soon, the cigarettes would be released from their cryogenic hold in the freezer.

“I'm telling you,” Saul called back. “You two will not want to come home.” He leveled his hand over the candle flame. “I almost didn't.”

“But you did,” Haley said. “You
did
come back.”

Saul sighed and looked out the window. He'd tied his hair back in a ponytail. His features were big and American, a face that belonged on a coin. “You're right. And I'm still trying to figure out this whole slam.” She understood Saul had lost the plot. Snow made drifts on the windowsills. Saul would not be staying in Chicago for long.

From the bedroom, Mac called out, “Hal, what happened to the goddamn atlas?” Because they still had an atlas. In fact, the whole Rand McNally set, spines unbroken, on the bookshelves next to the bed, Mac's contribution to the nostalgia fetish of their times.

She went to fill Saul's wine glass, but he put his hand over the rim and stared at her. “Is everything okay?”

She realized she had been avoiding eye contact with him, afraid of what he might draw out of her. It wasn't that Saul was beautiful. It was that he was utterly alone and had made a strength of it somehow, and that threatened her. She'd run from the solitude of her twenties, the stir-fries she ate alone, the solo trips to museums, the nights she called college roommates to check in. Mac had ended the anxiety, but it came with a sense that she'd avoided some essential encounter with herself.

“I'm fine. Why?” she said.

“Good,” he said. “I wasn't sure. I want you to like me, Haley.”

Of course she liked him. He was Saul's best friend. “It's just that sometimes I feel bad for not having adventures,” she said. “Like you.”

Saul just watched her. “I'm sleeping on your couch without a job,” he said. “Welcome to the adventure.”

The following morning, Mac off to work, Haley sat next to Saul on the couch to explain the television remotes. Saul, logy from sleep and wrapped in a sheet, took her hand and pulled her into a kiss. He was going to ruin her.

On the deck of their bungalow, Haley chewed her fingernails, nibbling away at the wedding lacquer. It was afternoon now and a busted upholstery of gray clouds rolled toward them at the horizon. The glassy lagoon stretched before her and water gently lapped the bamboo pilings underneath. From here, from the furthermost bungalow, Haley couldn't see another soul. Mac had gone to an Internet café—of course, they'd left all their devices at home except for Mac's phone, which had no bars, no network connection—to let their family know they were alive after the bombing, to look into the possibility of flights home, and she felt bereft. They'd paid for the remoteness, and now Haley desperately wanted others around.

She wondered if it was possible to keep these disasters from becoming the story of their time here. A friend had been married on a cruise ship in New York Harbor in the summer of 2001. Every single one of her wedding photos had the Twin Towers in the background. They were divorced now, and the only thing people saw was the wreckage to come. That must not happen to her.

While she watched, two brown-skinned islanders paddled out to the raft in an outrigger. They tied up and peered through the water. Haley drew a sharp breath. The taller of the two dove, his hands steepled over his head, and did not surface. Her chest tightened. They were diving for the ring.

Haley rushed along the walkway toward the hotel lobby, her eyes locked on the figures. She passed a hotel worker, a short, chubby woman. “Out there, bad things,” Haley said, and the woman smiled warmly. Haley wanted to scream. At
the concierge desk, she banged the silver bell. The concierge came wiping food from the corners of his mouth.

Haley pointed. “What are they doing?”

The concierge gazed outside, black eyes squinting. “These men work in this place.”

“You ask them to get our ring?”

“We ask,” the concierge said, which wasn't even an answer.

Haley waited while he located a whistle. The concierge blew it out on the deck and the pair paddled back to the shore. They were both teenagers. The shorter seemed terrified to be noticed at all. But the taller figure, the one Haley had watched dive, was pretty and unafraid. His muscles looked like they had been scored into clay with a knife. He was lighter-colored than the concierge, almost caramel. Like the others, he seemed to have no body hair whatsoever, a flawless envelope of skin. His age was impossible to guess, maybe eighteen, maybe thirty, there were no wrinkles to judge. Standing in wet swim trunks, he scanned Haley as much as she judged him. She realized she was wearing one of Mac's vintage T-shirts that read, “South East Asian Community Pride!” Please God let them not read English.