The Vacationers: A Novel (14 page)

They’d cooked and eaten dinner without her—Charles delivered a plate to her bedside and returned when Franny had taken a few bites. Carmen was eager to help with the dishes, even more so in Franny’s absence, but Jim shooed her away from the sink. He pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and
turned on the faucet. “You go on,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Jim spoke with authority, and Carmen backed away, hands raised.

“You wash, I’ll dry,” Charles said, setting out a dish towel on the countertop. Bobby had vanished into his bedroom, and Sylvia was sitting at the dining room table, hypnotized by her laptop. The house was as quiet as ever, though outside the wind was picking up, and occasionally branches tapped against the windows.

Jim dampened the sponge and dove in. They worked silently for a few minutes, an assembly line of two. At the table, Sylvia gave a loud snort and then a louder laugh. Both Jim and Charles turned to her for an explanation, but her eyes stayed glued to the screen.

“I do not understand the Internet,” Charles said. “It’s a giant void.”

Jim agreed. “A limitless void. Hey, Syl,” he said. “How’s it going over there?”

Sylvia looked up. She had the crazed expression of a child who’d stared directly into the sun, blinking and temporarily blind. “What are you guys talking about?”

“Nothing, dear,” Jim said, laughing. Sylvia went back to the computer screen and started typing quickly.

Charles shrugged. “At least she could always get a job as a typist.”

“I don’t think those exist anymore. Administrative assistants, maybe, but not typists.”

“Franny seems okay.” They made eye contact for a moment while Jim handed off a dripping plate.

“Does she?” Jim wiped the back of his wet hand across his forehead. “I really can’t tell anymore. You’d know better than I.”

Charles clutched the plate in both hands, turning it over and over until it was dry. “I think she does. That bump isn’t pretty, but it’ll heal.”

“Do we need to sue that tennis player, whatshisface? I never liked him. That awful ponytail, now this.” Another lawsuit would balance out his own, force them to band together. Jim imagined himself and Franny striding into a Mallorcan courtroom, the bump on Franny’s head now the size of a tennis ball, hard proof of Antoni’s negligence.

“And how are you?” Charles asked. He purposefully looked toward the dishes, now dry and ready to be put away, and toward his wet hands, which he toweled off.

Sylvia had started playing a video, the sound of which blasted out of her tinny computer speakers. She was off in teenager land, content and miserable in equal measure, oblivious to the trials of any human heart that wasn’t her own. Jim turned the sink back on, though there were no more dishes to wash.

“I have no idea,” he said.

Charles placed his hand on Jim’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. He wanted to tell Jim that everything would be fine, and that his marriage was as solid as it had ever been, but lying seemed worse than offering a small show of sympathy.

THE PREVIOUS EVENING’S THREATENING WIND HAD
blossomed into full-on rain. Gemma hadn’t warned them about the possibility of inclement weather, and Franny was furious. She hobbled from the bed to the window and watched skinny raindrops ping against the taut surface of the swimming pool. It was Saturday, one of their few weekend days in Mallorca, not that there was much of a delineation between the week and the weekend. Still, Franny felt cheated, and planned to go downstairs and complain. First, she hobbled back around the bed the long way and into the bathroom, where she was so shocked by her own reflection that she actually yelped. After waiting a moment to make sure that no one was coming to her rescue—another thing to complain about—Franny moved closer to the mirror.

She had somehow managed to hit herself with her racquet,
that much Franny understood, hard enough to knock herself to the ground. The bump rose out of her center part, a lone volcanic mountain in an otherwise peaceful valley. “Ugh,” Franny said. She tied her black robe more tightly around her waist, as if that would distract anyone, and swanned her way down the stairs as slowly as Norma Desmond, wishing for the very first time that she’d thought to pack a turban.

The chest in the living room had been well stocked with board games: Monopoly and Risk, Snakes and Ladders. Charles had made a brief but impassioned speech in favor of a game of charades but was quickly shot down. They decided on Scrabble, and Lawrence was winning, being the best at math, which everyone knew was all it took to truly succeed. He knew all the two-letter words, the
QI
and the
ZA
, and played them without apology, even when it made the board so dense that it was difficult for anyone else to take a turn. Bobby, Sylvia, and Charles all stared hard at their letters, as if simple attention alone would improve their odds.

“I’m pretty sure you’re cheating,” Bobby said. “I wish we had a Scrabble dictionary. Sylvia, go look one up on your computer.”

“Screw you. You’re just mad you’re losing,” she said, rearranging the tiles on her rack. She had two
O
’s.
Moo. Boo. Loo. Fool. Pool. Polio.
Sylvia always played the first word she
saw, and didn’t care if she set up the next player for a double word score. She laid down
MOO
. “Give me seven points, please.”

Lawrence rubbed his hands quickly over his face, up and down. “Sylvia, sweetheart, you’re driving me crazy. You can do better than that, I know you can.”

“Let her play how she wants to play, Lawr,” Charles said, swatting him affectionately on the wrist. “Now, let’s see . . .” He played
BROMIDE
, crisscrossing Sylvia’s
MOO
, a bingo. Charles and Sylvia both cheered.

“You so don’t get it,” Bobby said.

Carmen was not a fan of word games, or of board games at all, and she’d been sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, flipping through Sylvia’s airplane magazines. She’d read them already, and knew the pictures by heart—this television star was looking skinny, this one was looking fat, and they were wearing the same bikini! Every few minutes she would get up and slowly walk behind Bobby to look at his letters, and the board, and then circle back to her chair like a discontented house cat. The last time they’d gone on vacation, two winters previous, Bobby and Carmen had gone to an all-inclusive resort called Xanadu. The resort was on a Caribbean island, and because all the food and alcohol had already been paid for, they felt like high-rolling celebrities, exactly as the resort’s brochure had said they would. They had six margaritas at once at one of the swim-up bars, and when Bobby later threw up all over their
hotel room, they didn’t particularly mind, because it had all been free, and they weren’t responsible for cleaning it up. They rented Jet Skis and went parasailing. They had sex in a cabana at the far end of the beach—twice in one day. The other people at Xanadu had been great—all other couples like them, ready to dance until dawn and maybe slip a tongue down someone else’s throat when their girlfriend or boyfriend went to the bathroom. It was just
fun
. Nothing serious, nothing boring. Even though mostly they’d just sat around on the beach, it still felt like doing something. They were tanning, they were drinking, they were dancing. That was a real vacation. Being locked up in this house on Mallorca felt like the day in the fourth grade when Carmen’s mother had forgotten to pick her up at the library after school.

“Bobby, can I talk to you for a minute?” she said, standing up again and letting the magazine flutter from her hand to the floor.

Bobby looked at the board, and at Lawrence, and at his sister. “Play slowly,” he said, and followed Carmen out of the room and into the kitchen.

“Did you talk to your parents yet?” she asked, once they were out of earshot.

“What?” Bobby looked over her shoulder, making sure no one else was close enough to eavesdrop. It had always been one of his sister’s talents.

“About the money. It’s really not that much. And if you
could just pay it all off now, the interest . . .” Bobby stopped Carmen by clamping his palm over her mouth. “Hey,” she said, and peeled it off.

“Listen, they’re my parents, okay? I know how to talk to them.” Bobby crossed his arms over his chest and blew an errant curl off his forehead.

“Okay, if you say so,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve already been here awhile and you’re sort of running out of time. And why didn’t you tell me about your father’s job? I didn’t realize he was really leaving the magazine, like, for good.”

“Yeah,” Bobby said, “me neither. I mean, I guess my mom told me, but I wasn’t really listening. It’s fucked up. I don’t know, maybe now’s a bad time.” A great chorus of shouts carried over from the living room. “We’ll talk about this later, okay?” He didn’t wait for her to respond, and pushed past her back into the living room. Carmen sat by the window and watched the rain, all the while trying to figure out a way to make a bolt of lightning go through the window, through the walls, and directly into Bobby’s chest. She was only trying to help. They never spent more than an afternoon with her family, and they were twenty minutes away. Carmen thought she might make a list of everything she did for him, just to have it written down on paper so that she could actually see it in black and white. The Posts weren’t that great, if they’d never taught Bobby how to treat a girl. The rain didn’t stop until after the sun went down.

Bobby needed to get out of the house. After the Scrabble tournament (Lawrence in first place, Charles in second, a reluctant Jim in third after a single high-scoring game, Bobby in fourth, and Sylvia in a distant fifth) and a low-key dinner, Franny was in high gear about a movie marathon starring someone Bobby had never heard of and was sure he couldn’t give two shits about. He needed to get out of the house. Carmen was ignoring his little touches, still irritated, and so he asked his mother for the keys.

“Sylvia,” he said. The thought of a night out alone in Palma was intoxicating, but he didn’t know where to go. “Send your tutor an e-mail and ask him where the best bars in town are. Somewhere fun.” Across the room, he saw Carmen’s eyebrows flicker upward, but he chose not to acknowledge it. She wasn’t invited.

Joan was quick—he sent over a list of three spots in a place called Magaluf, a town just outside Palma known for its clubs. They were for tourists, he said, but when there were really good DJs, all the Mallorcans went, too. The best one, Joan said, was called Blu Nite, and tonight there would be a DJ called Psychic Bomb. Sylvia begrudgingly admitted to having heard of him, and Bobby had seen him spin lots of times at home.

Bobby didn’t like going out by himself—in Miami, if he
wasn’t with Carmen, he’d be with a whole posse of his boys from the gym, other trainers and some select clients, or sometimes even his college friends, though he didn’t see them as much as he used to. Some of them had gotten married, and one had even had a baby.
No, thank you
—that was Bobby’s philosophy. The idea of Carmen coming along and harping on him without his mother around to muzzle her up was so awful that Bobby really had only one choice in wingperson. It was hilarious how the Posts all probably thought that Carmen was mute, when all she did was tell him what he was doing wrong. At the gym, at the laundromat, in bed.

“Syl, you want to come with me?”

Sylvia was locked again into her computer screen, marveling at the thought of Joan somewhere nearby doing the same thing. Bobby had never asked her to do anything with him before, except maybe order burritos from the place around the corner, and she wasn’t quite sure she’d heard him correctly.

“You want to come with me?” he repeated himself.

“Um, yeah, sure,” Sylvia said, slowly closing the lid of her laptop. “Give me a minute to get dressed.” She hurried upstairs and threw open her suitcase, rooting around like a pig in hopes she would find a treasure trove of things she hadn’t actually packed. The thought occurred to her that she could find something truly perfect to wear to a cheesy nightclub if she snuck into Carmen and Bobby’s room, but Carmen had been acting like a freak all day, and if she wasn’t going with them, something must be weird. So Sylvia picked out her tightest jeans and
a T-shirt she’d had since the fifth grade with a picture of the Jonas Brothers on it and hoped for the best. She hadn’t even meant to pack it, but it was small and tight, and she hoped the Spanish were as into nostalgic irony as she was.

Blu Nite was on a corner, down the block from a sushi restaurant and a bar that promised karaoke. Sylvia was wearing her nicest shoes, a pair of black ballet flats, and she couldn’t help but notice that every other woman she saw was stalking around on a pair of stiletto heels like they were trying to irrigate the sidewalk. It had stopped raining, but the streets were still slick with water, with lots of little reflective pools just waiting to soak your feet. Bobby didn’t seem to notice that Sylvia kept leaping over puddles, and was hurrying to keep up with him.

“Do you have a fake ID?” he asked, barely turning around to look at her.

“I only have to be eighteen. Which I am. So, no.” Sylvia jogged for a few strides until she was next to him.

Bobby was wearing what he would wear out in Miami—a nice pair of dark jeans, an untucked button-down shirt with the top two buttons undone, and a silver necklace that Carmen had given him for Christmas. He glanced at Sylvia, clearly regretting his decision to invite her along, and then nodded toward the door of the club. “Whatever. Let’s go in. I need a drink.”

Blue neon tubes lined the walls, which struck Sylvia as a little bit too obvious of an interior decorating choice. It was still early, and so the crowd was fairly thin, but there were several clumps of girls dancing together in the center of the large room.

“Is this all a club is?” Sylvia asked, but the music was loud enough that her brother either couldn’t hear her or could ignore her without seeming rude. She’d been expecting a light-up dance floor like in
Saturday Night Fever
, or, at the very least, a velvet rope. Blu Nite was one giant room with black leather sofas along the walls and a cluster of high glass tables near the bar, where the single men seemed to congregate. They were all dressed like Bobby, with shirts covered in printing at odd angles, as if all the clothing in Spain had gotten mangled in the printing machine, and now the logos were creeping over everyone’s shoulders instead of being square in the middle of their chests. It was the classic Euro look—shiny and well groomed to the point of New Jersey. She was still looking around when she realized that Bobby was across the room, belly up to the bar.