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"Visit?" Mariel asked. "Varda who?"

"Nan's father," he said, as if it were obvious that he had canceled a meeting, flown home early, spirited a phone number and a relationship out of the air, and now knew the injured girl's whole family by their first names. "She's at Children's Hospital. Sixth floor. Meet me there and then we can pick Finny up together after school."

"Right now?"

David waited, exhaling. Mariel looked at the mess on her desk. "All right," she said. "I'll meet you in the main lobby in an hour."

N the full-length bed with its metal side rails, Nan Gnundatridgida seemed to be half the size of Finny, her limbs no larger than sticks. So small,Mariel thought. The girl's thick black hair lay uncombed against the pillow; a tube invaded one delicate nostril, and bruises up and down her forearm indicated multiple attempts to start an IV. Mariel wanted to collapse at the very sight of her, to kneel at the foot of the bed and press her forehead to the floor.

In the hallway David had introduced himself to Varda, giving him a two-handed handshake-embrace all the way up to the shoulder. David was an ideal presence at any sickbed; calm and friendly and soft-spoken, he never threatened to fall apart or cry. Now he swept the black bangs away from Nan's forehead. "She's beautiful," he said, and in fact she was. He wrote their phone numbers on the back of a get-well card.

The worst moment of the visit came when the little girl's mother walked through the door, carrying a doll and a cup of coffee. There I am, Mariel thought, and now I've walked into a room and caught sight of the monsters that did this to my child. She wanted the other mother to throw her coffee, or shout, or try to push Mariel out a window. Instead the woman barely looked at them or spoke; she sat in an orange-vinyl chair beside the bed, put down the coffee and the doll, and began to stroke her daughter's arm. She didn't have time for anything but this, Mariel thought, even if the whole world went to hell; she had time only to coax her daughter back from the strange new territory she had entered on her own, to summon Nan back and see her healed.

Later David tried to downplay the mother's reaction. It was probably part cultural difference, he said, part sleep deprivation, part language barrier. The important thing was that the doctors felt Nan was getting better. It was definitely a concussion; and yes, she'd had a seizure. But she was periodically waking, and the signs were good. One of the nurses had offered to keep them informed.

Still, Mariel felt poisonous, depressed. "We won't tell Finny we were here," she said, spying their separate cars in the parking lot.

David looked shocked. "I already told her. I stopped by her classroom on the way over and got her to make a little card for when Nan wakes up. I left it on the nightstand. I thought it would make everyone feel better."

What a strange idea,Mariel thought. A piece of construction paper as a means of healing. David talked on and on, describing his conversation with Finny's teacher. Mariel watched his lips move, interpreting the words as they left his mouth. She had heard about people who took their young children to wakes and funerals to expose them to death and mortality, people for whom every hideous and painful aspect of life was a teachable moment. She wondered if David would want to do that, and whether he would be capable of turning the whole unpleasant mess with Finny and Nan into some kind of fuzzy cultural-awareness lesson. Sometimes Mariel felt amazed that she had married -- what an odd custom, joining forces for life with an alien being.

"You said you weren't worried," she said. "But here you are, home early."

David walked her across the parking lot. As she drove away, she saw him looking up at the sixth-floor windows, one hand in his jacket pocket, the other absently tapping the roof of his car.

N Friday afternoon David spoke to Varda again; Nan was slowly improving, and she had eaten soup and toast. Having made up her mind to do so, Mariel made a speech in bed that night. She was grateful, she said, that David had made contact with Nan's family. She was ashamed of herself for not setting such a forthright example for Finny.

David rolled toward her under the covers. "I wasn't doing it only for Finny."

"No, but it's a good thing," she said. "It was a good thing to do no matter why you did it."

David's hand navigated the tangle of flannel sheets and found her hip. He was vacillating, she knew, between harbors: sex on the one hand, and the rocking cradle of sleep on the other. She decided to wait, to see what he would choose.

The hand twitched once and then trailed away. "It even occurred to me," he said, "that friendly communication could help discourage a lawsuit."

"A lawsuit?" Mariel said. "What do you mean?" Astoundingly, she had never even thought about a lawsuit.

"I doubt it would happen," David said. He kissed her and thumped his pillow. He didn't often talk about his personal demons (maybe he reasoned that acknowledgment alone would afford them a kind of reality or power), but lying awake as his breathing slowed, Mariel knew that they were waiting in the dark regardless of whether she understood them, or whether she discerned their ragged shapes in the midnight air.

HROUGHOUT the trip the next day, in the cab, in the airport, and in the plane, Finny insisted on sitting close to David -- maybe because she had missed him, Mariel thought, or maybe because her mother had proved to be useless during this stressful week.

During takeoff the fact that Nan was still in the hospital made Mariel clench her teeth in dread. It seemed to be tempting fate to indulge in a luxury vacation while the poor girl lingered in the hospital; it was tantamount to begging the gods to strike them down, to hurl bolts of lightning at their very section of the plane. For Finny's sake she forced herself to offer bubbly comments about the week to come. Finny was quiet; it was hard to know whether to attribute this to motion-sickness tablets or to depression. She fell asleep over New Orleans, flopping across an empty seat, and Mariel hoped that someone would look at her in disapproval, or ask her to move her bare feet farther from the aisle -- Mariel would personally rip out that person's hair.

At the airport in Cancun the heat and light entered them. Mariel felt transported. Travel always gave her that sensation -- of stepping through a door into a new, exotic compartment in which she would eat someone else's food and sleep in someone else's bed, while her own life lay flat and uninhabited at home.

They spent the night in town and then rented a car and drove south, the highway littered with billboards and trash and wild hibiscus, wrinkled women selling pots and tortillas at the edges of the smaller roads. The resort that they had come back to was out of the way and subdued, a quiet beach without college students or discos, just a few miles of white sand and phosphorescent blue water. Their room was a separate little thatched-roof structure halfway between the tiled swimming pool and the Caribbean; the year before, Finny had wandered dreamily between the two bodies of water every day.

Mariel wondered if this year would be different. Let there be pleasures in life that I receive without earning or deserving them,she thought; let some of these unmerited pleasures remain the same.She unpacked all their clothes, reciting fervent agnostic prayers in the stifling room, while David walked Finny down to the beach. Mariel took it for granted that neither of them would have thought to apply sunscreen.

"What do you think?" David asked her that night, as they watched the sun melt into the exuberant flowering trees that flanked the pool.

Mariel contemplated her drink -- she had lost count of what number it was -- and answered absently that she'd seen too many plants, too many birds, too much water, for one location. Everything here existed in abundance, as if to point out the stinginess of their own uninspired northern landscape.

"No, I meant Finny," David said, and instantly Mariel was alert. What about her? What did he think? How could she have let her mind wander?

Finny was asleep on a cot in the room behind them, the door propped open with a stone.

"I think she loves it here," he said. "I think she was born for this kind of climate."

"She's already sunburned," Mariel said.

"I mean temperamentally. She loves the sun, the heat. I think winter makes her pinched. Down here she can be more open."

Mariel often wondered if David analyzed Finny the way she did -- if he spent an unhealthy amount of time reviewing her strengths, her foibles. "She didn't play with any of the other kids," she said. "She spent the whole day by herself."

"She likes being by herself. Those kids were jerks."

This was true. The other American children, all of them skinny and loud and absurdly normal, more like ads for children than the real thing, had screamed and cavorted and plunged obnoxiously into the pool all afternoon, while Finny, ten feet away, had methodically made slits in the center of several dozen leaves, inserting a stick and two blades of grass into each leaf and laying the altered flora on the sand in an intricate pattern. At such moments Mariel suffered dual and opposite visions of Finny's future: she might end up a lumpkin, an eccentric in a hillside cabin; or she might be a visionary with a sense of humor and compassion, a pioneer.

"Did you get through to them on the phone?" David asked, without looking in her direction.

Mariel stared into the crushed ice in her glass.

"I saw you take the phone card out of your wallet after lunch."

"Spy," she said.

David reached into his own wallet and took out a piece of paper with a number on it -- the same number she had called that afternoon. "I figured I'd let you do it," he said. "And maybe you'd let me know if there was any news."

"I tried and tried, but I couldn't get through."

David put down his drink and walked to the blue-tiled steps that lead into the water. He turned to face her, but Mariel couldn't see his expression. He might have been welcoming or reprimanding.

"Of course I would let you know," Mariel said.

But she had probably spoken too late. David submerged himself in the water, disappearing into the thick and fragrant shadows at the edge of the pool.

E didn't ask about any of her other phone calls. He played Frisbee with Finny, and took her snorkeling, and haggled over an ankle bracelet in the square. Meanwhile, Mariel struggled with unidentifiable coins, credit cards, phone cards, and Spanish recordings she couldn't understand. Finally, on the third day of the vacation, a margarita in hand though it was only noon, she heard a small miracle in the receiver: "Children's Hospital. Where may I direct your call?"

Mariel could see the ocean, two hundred yards away. The sun on her arms was a blessing. She closed her eyes to deny herself the beauty of the view. But there was a second miracle to come: Nan had been discharged and was now at home. Mariel spelled and respelled the family's name. Yes, the nurse was sure, the little girl with the concussion, she had definitely been discharged. Mariel spilled half the margarita onto herself with joy and then drank the rest of it in a swallow. She walked down to the beach to share the news with David.

"That's great," he said. Shading his eyes and smiling, he looked up at her from his chair.

"Don't you want to celebrate?" Possibly she had been obsessive and preoccupied; now, at last, she was ready to relax.

"I thought we werecelebrating. We're drinking and eating out every day and sitting on a beach and spending money with abandon. What else do you think we should do?"

"I don't know," she said. "Something."

"Do you want to tell Finny?"

Of course she wanted to tell Finny. Finny would be relieved. Wouldn't she be relieved?

David pulled his lounge chair into the shade of a drooping palm.

Mariel sat down. Finny would be happy to know that Nan was fine, but she might still feel the same fear, the same sort of doubts about herself. She had still caused damage to Nan, whether or not the damage was undone.

Mariel felt her skin burning. She would talk to Finny in a little while. David was reading, the tip of his nose only inches from his book. She took two aspirins from her bag and watched the Mexican lifeguards under their thatched-roof palapas. At a distance they reminded her of something Finny would like to play with -- mobile little figures in tiny houses on the sand. Two of the guards were gazing around at the scenery with binoculars, probably zeroing in on topless bathers. Mariel was formulating a cynical remark along these lines so that she could pass it on to David (he wasn't a cynic himself, but Mariel suspected that he secretly appreciated cynicism in other people) when two of the guards leaped down onto the sand and sprinted up the beach and into the water. Mariel stood up on her towel to watch. Just a few hundred yards away someone was waving from a raft. People were pointing and shouting in Spanish. She could see the two guards swimming furiously through the turquoise water; they were headed toward a second raft that seemed to be drifting out past the plastic buoys.

A lump rose in Mariel's throat -- how ridiculous, to get choked up in total ignorance, no idea at all what was going on. Walking toward the water, she could see that the guards were pulling the more distant raft to shore. Was someone on it? Abruptly she felt panic crack open like an egg inside her: Finny. Wildly she looked around at the gathering crowd of gawkers on the beach until finally there was Finny, completely apart, facing away from the action, standing in the water up to her ankles, oblivious, poking at the brilliant smooth sand with a piece of driftwood. Her lips were moving; she was talking to herself. The shouting up the beach was getting louder. In just a few moments, inevitably, Finny would hear or notice the excitement, and she would be frightened all over again, struck by the dangers inherent in being alive. Mariel wanted to run to her and cover her eyes with a soft cloth, carry her up to the pool surrounded by pink hibiscus, such an unreal setting, and buy her a dish of mango-flavored ice cream and offer to paint her nails. She started toward her.

But David materialized out of nowhere and took her hand. Without looking at him, she understood. Let Finny go. Let her see what we're capable of: terror and rescue, all the evil and the good. Finny was turning around, the bright blue water a moving mirror at her feet. How can such a perfect place exist? Mariel wondered. Let Finny find the answers. Let her step alone into the small compartment, cast a final glance back at her mother, and close the door.

Copyright © 1999 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; November 1999; Passengers - 99.11 (Part Three); Volume 284, No. 5; page 92-102.