The Ten-Year Nap (30 page)

Now, years later, it might look like anything. It might have sprouted wings by now; she really had no idea. He was no longer hers.

O
NE MORNING
on St. Doe’s, Penny accompanied her to the gift shop to look for a present for her mother, Antonia, who would be staying in the apartment this week, and would still be there when they returned from their trip. The gift shop was a little hut filled with expensive glass and beaded and silken things. A tall black woman in a batik blouse stood behind the rush surface of a counter as Amy and Penny browsed among the long rippling scarves, the bottles of lotion with tropical scents, and jewelry and items that would probably have been classified as “miscellany.” “This is pretty,” Penny said, pointing to a paperweight that contained branches of pale blue and green coral, along with a whirl of turquoise trapped inside. “Your mother could keep her manuscript pages under it.”

“Well, it’s not like she sits and writes in a windstorm,” said Amy, but after the woman behind the counter unlocked the glass case and drew out the dome, she saw the way Penny held the object in her hand, turning it around to see it from all angles. Somehow the rotation of the piece of delicate glass made Amy able to appreciate it. She felt as though her mother would appreciate it as well. “It
is
nice,” she conceded.

“Two hundred tirty-tree,”
pronounced the woman, without seeming at all scandalized at the price.

But it
was
a scandalous price. Still, did Amy have to make every moment refer once again to money? Did that have to be her only theme, she thought, her little repeating aria? The scale was off here; you had to get used to it, just the way you had had to get used to the scale of life in New York City, and just the way you had to get used to the scale of modern life, if you hoped to survive in the world. She smiled and nodded to the woman, and the transaction was completed.

It was on day four of the six-day vacation that the boys took their surfing lesson with the handsome, masculine Pierre. She watched as he waded into the surf with a board under his arm, the boys following behind. Later on, Amy would remember the surfing lesson as if it were representative of the last moment of beauty and ease: the boys and the man roaming in the loose waves.

Leo was there too, lying on the chaise on Amy’s other side with
Doctor Faustus
by Thomas Mann, but he was unable to stay still and read for very long. Every few minutes he would spring up to get a drink or fix the angle of the umbrella or stand by the shore and watch the surfing lesson. It was as though he, who had always been a great reader, had forgotten how to read. Like most people, he’d somehow recently lost patience for the slow unraveling that took place in novels, the need for the reader to wait in order to find out what happened in the end. Oddly, she realized, the boys were the ones who could still read long novels; this was the one trace of the previous world that they had inherited and that their parents were starting to shed.

“Are you okay over there?” Amy asked Leo.

“Fine. Why?”

“You keep getting up. It’s like you have adult ADD.”

“I’m just not used to the idea of rest anymore. It doesn’t suit me very well,” he said.

Penny drew herself up from her chaise on Amy’s other side. “I’m going to take some pictures of the boys,” she announced. “I brought my camera out with me today for the surfing lesson.” Amy watched as Penny went down to the water’s edge and began taking digital photos of Holden and Mason. Leo remained behind them, eating fried conch and trying to read but not really reading. A few yards away, by the bamboo counter where towels lay in warm, waiting stacks, a Frenchman and his female friend spoke quietly and, it seemed, ardently. The sound of gamelan was sprinkled like pollen through the quiet morning, and waiters brought drinks to the voluntarily helpless figures. Amy thought of the expression “This is the life.” As though there were one life, as though you would really want to stay here like this for eternity, inert and being tended to, and passively regarding beauty.

A few minutes later Greg Ramsey wandered down from the bungalow. Sleep creases striped one side of his face. “Penny, I need batteries for my recorder,” he said.

“I assumed you brought them.”

“They ran out. You were the one who packed.”

“I didn’t think about your little tape recorder, Greg,” said Penny. “It was the last thing I thought about when I was packing. You have an assistant, you should have asked her.” She paused. “What size do you need?”

“Triple A. Can’t you take the batteries out of something else?”

“I have nothing that runs on triple A. Sorry.”

“What about your camera?”

“I’m taking pictures at the moment. The boys’ surfing lesson.”

“But I have to dictate.”

As he reached for her camera, Penny drew her hand away from him, and they squabbled in a low-level, ugly, married way. Amy wondered how frequently batteries were the subject of American marital arguments.

“Look up there, Chloe,” said one of the West Coast husbands, walking past with his adolescent daughter. He pointed far into the sky, where two figures hung suspended on harnesses from their parafoils.

Amy briefly watched the figures in the sky too, looking at them as everyone was meant to do. Their plumage was bright, one red, one yellow. There were endless possibilities here for the dangerous, the risky. The boys, out in the surf, likely possessed the gene for risk taking that supposedly you were either born with or not. They swam out farther, and Amy felt herself clench a little, wanting to pull Mason back as though he were attached to her by an invisible, electronic dog lead. But he was uncollared, in the water up to his neck. Again and again he and Holden rose up and pulled themselves onto their knees on the smooth planes of their little starter boards.

“The trick,” Holden had explained this morning over breakfast, lecturing Mason at the table though he was a surfing neophyte too, “is in getting up and staying up. Lots of guys wipe out. But it’s all about positive thinking. You have to think you can do it, and then you can.” Mason listened to his friend as if Holden Ramsey were a motivational speaker, and one day, Amy thought, he would be. She pictured the boardroom and the way that grown-man Holden Ramsey would puncture the air with an index finger and how all the businessmen and businesswomen around him would take notes.

But now, in the water, Holden could barely get onto his knees on a surfboard. Everything was difficult, Amy thought, watching the lesson, though up above, the two paragliders seemed to move around effortlessly. “They’re so pretty,” the teenaged Chloe said to her father, and as she spoke the yellow paraglider jerked at an unnatural angle and swooped out over the water, heading rapidly down toward the beach on a steep diagonal, as if on a rope line.

Some of the people on the shore took notice, standing with open, helpless hands as he bore down in their direction. It happened quickly. Amy instinctively reached up and protected her head, as if he might crash on top of her. Down he came, this figure with the yellow canopy, strumming the sand at first, then decisively landing, snapping down harshly, smashing onto his back with the harness making a loud whipping sound. Immediately he began to scream. “Fuck!” he cried, holding the syllable.

There was no time for anyone to do anything, for the wind continued to pull him along. He was dragged forward, his parafoil sucking inward and outward in jellyfish locomotion. A line of people, everyone shouting, began to run after the paraglider as he banged and skidded on his back along the shore. When he did stop, several people formed a circle around him, and Amy could not see anything, though she could hear shouting in a few different languages. “Do not move him!” she heard. “Do not touch him!” And, “Is he alive?” And, “Sir, can you move your arms and legs?” The second paraglider made a neat and perfect landing nearby, frantically explaining in a French accent that he was the instructor, that he had been giving a lesson, and that the student had apparently lost control.

Amy was only vaguely aware that Penny had pushed into the circle of onlookers too, but suddenly she heard her cry out and back away. Greg came up to his wife and said, “You’ve seen accidents before.” She just shook her head, her hand to her mouth, then turned and started running toward the bungalows, Greg following behind her.

So Amy had to go see what Penny had seen too. She joined the circle of people shouting instructions to one another and to the fallen man, and she looked down directly into the freckled white face of Ian Janeway. His eyes were closed. He wore a helmet, his curling hair pressed inside it, giving him the appearance of someone alien, perhaps an early cosmonaut who has touched down on the wrong side of the world. His mouth formed into an expression of primitive pain. Just as Amy had felt that she should not be here, he should not have been here, either; she could not believe that he had come. She wanted to cry out too, as Penny had automatically done.

But as astonishing to her as Ian’s nervy and inexplicable presence here was the fact that Penny had turned and fled. She hadn’t automatically screamed and knelt down beside him. Instead, she was already running down the path toward the bungalows with her husband beside her, the argument about batteries forever forgotten. Penny must have been shocked by the violent fall of this stranger, Greg Ramsey probably thought. She would continue to let him think this. She would go back to their bungalow, and Greg would tend to her. He knew his wife was highly sensitive and emotional sometimes. This, apparently, was one of those times. She was also strong and tough and good with acquisitions and at dealing with the demands of the trustees. But Greg Ramsey had probably always admired complexity. It might have attracted him to her when they were young and unencumbered and not yet rich, and not yet in possession of the knowledge about what their marriage would be like over time.

Amy and Leo stayed in the circle with the others as two of the staff members came racing up with a stretcher and a contraption that was meant to brace Ian Janeway’s head and neck. The boys were there too now, having left the water, along with Pierre and various guests, all of them speaking words of upset and disturbance in their own languages.

In the middle of it all, Amy Lamb said to anyone who was listening, “I know him.”

“You do?” said Leo. Then, presumptuously, “No, you don’t.”

“Yes, I do.”

B
ECAUSE SHE DID
know him, at least a little, she was asked to come to the infirmary and answer questions, following the men who carried Ian in. There was much activity in the small medical building that abutted the main lodge: blurted, hysterical landline calls and cell-phone calls and walkie-talkie conversations in French and English, as though spoken by a simultaneous interpreter. Arrangements were made for the transport of the injured man from the island to the Hospital del Maestro in San Juan. The in-house doctor on the island and two guests who were also physicians stood around Ian behind a curtain, and a hurried, muted discussion was conducted about whether he had damaged his spinal cord, perhaps irrevocably, or had instead bruised or badly damaged the vertebrae.

One of the guests drew something on a piece of paper for Amy. “This is the spinal cord,” he said in a strong French accent. “Imagine it as toothpaste packed in her tube.” She remembered “her tube,” but she couldn’t remember much more of what he said. She understood that Ian urgently needed an MRI and might well have to have surgery, which could be performed in San Juan as soon as he was airlifted there. He might also need an injection of a steroidal drug called Medrol, but it would have to be within the next several hours, the doctor warned, or it would have no effect. Anyway, if his spinal cord had been completely severed, there would be no hope of recovery; the lower vertebrae controlled the legs, and he would never have use of them. Hearing all this, she chewed the inside of her mouth furiously, willing Penny here, as she should have been.

Amy was taken into the next room and asked to quickly fill out a form with all the information she knew about the injured man: name, age, occupation. She told everyone that she hardly knew him and that she didn’t remember his address or his telephone number. Really, she didn’t know Ian Janeway at all.

She could hear Ian’s brief, stuttering cries as the doctors tried to assess him. A sedative was administered by needle; he would be unconscious soon, and one of the staff said that if “Mrs. Buckner” wanted to go see her friend, she ought to do it now. Perhaps it would be comforting to him. Amy knew that Ian had obviously come to St. Doe’s on a lovesick prank for Penny’s benefit. She thought of his lovesick nature and how because of it he had been seriously injured and would perhaps be in debt for years and maybe never able to walk again. Maybe he would even die. Maybe this would be one of those stupid, leisure-time deaths that occur because of parafoils or snowmobiles or the Plunge of Doom at an amusement park, entirely unnecessary and frivolous and leaving behind no residue of meaning.

She didn’t want to go in and see him—she’d already been so shocked when she first saw his pale, recognizable face after the accident—but the doctor asked her to, so Amy went behind the curtain to where Ian lay pinned to the stretcher, his neck braced, his entire body wrapped in some sort of laced canvas, his face white and frightened.

“Ian,” she said. “It’s Amy.”

He rolled his eyes toward her. “Where’s Penny?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Shit.”

Ian’s eyes closed, and his mouth opened slightly in a morphine hangdog expression. Someone put a hand on Amy’s shoulder and told her she should go.

She circled the Ramseys’ bungalow, but she could see nothing through the curtains. No one ever knocked on anyone’s door on St. Doe’s; everyone maintained a certain, agreed-upon distance. Maids slipped in and out during the day, and so did discreet masseurs with massage tables folded under their arms. There was no sign of movement from the bungalow now. It was very late in the afternoon, still hot outside, the time of day when everyone, lightly sun-sickened, usually returned from the beach and disappeared into their darkened rooms to recover. Today, almost everyone had gone inside early.