nosing into her, she stares out the window to the exposed reef. Sun glints from the half-filled tide pools. Out there you can find black sea slugs as big as cucumbers and blue-green moray eels the size of pythons and white undulous fist-sized anemones with their stinging tendrils and jelly fish no bigger than sandwich bags but so venomous that a single brush of their nearly invisible tentacles would stop your heart within an hour.
Later, stepping inside her trailer—what do we call it? she asked Erik in jest, a home? a trailer home?—Alison catches a whiff of the mildewed, canned air-conditioned stink that everyone on the island has grown accustomed to, a smell she always forgets after five minutes of being inside. The place is its usual wreck: a spill of mesomorphic action figures in front of the TV, which is still on, a small dirty white sock in the hallway, and, farther on, a pair of small white briefs and a T-shirt; video game joysticks on the kitchen counter, but an empty sink, thankfully, the garbage pail crammed with dirty paper plates and plastic cups—surely the sign of slovenly mothering—and more mess on the floor: a battery-operated flying saucer, a remote-controlled dump truck, a rubber ball that looks like it’s been chewed.
She, Doug, and Stan live in one of the 335 mobile homes on the lagoon-side of the island, among the service sector, low-level technicians, and younger teachers. Their neighborhood is called “Silver City.” Products of the nineteen sixties, the trailers are aluminum boxes that were no doubt better built than the things manufactured nowadays. They have real wood paneling and stainless steel trim. But they weren’t meant to last, especially in a corrosive climate like this. Housing Maintenance is frequently coming by to re-attach panels, staple seams, reinforce floors, re-caulk windows.
The more accomplished citizens live in white-washed cinder-block triplexes or duplexes nearby or, if really well placed in the island’s hierarchy, one of the new pre-fabs on the landfill near the high school. None of it looks particularly attractive. But there’s the irrepressible tropical greenery that half-disguises the decay—banana plants and coconut palms and car-sized ferns left over from the Jurassic age. When they first arrived on Kwajalein, Erik said, “You should draw some of these things.”
As a child, Alison loved to draw—doodling mostly, hours on a page of curlicues and flowers. “You could design fabric,” her mother offered as encouragement. Why would I want to do that? Alison wondered. For her twelfth birthday, her parents started her with a private art teacher. On looking at Alison’s portfolio, the teacher said with undisguised dismay, “These are . . . doodles.” Yes, exactly. “What about the world?” the teacher asked. Fanciful doodles were Alison’s world. She had no inclination to draw the reality around her. She was trying to create in her drawings the kind of place she couldn’t find in real life, elbowed by an older sister and brother in a small brick house at the back of a Milwaukee suburb, her father an auto salesman, her mother a checker at K-Mart. It’s not that Alison was unhappy, she was simply dissatisfied with the world as it was. It needed more color, more light, more surprises.
Only in college did the question of a career begin to weigh on her. Clearly she wasn’t talented like some of her classmates, who painted soulful portraits and stunning landscapes. “Vision!” her art professor lectured. “You can’t make work that matters without a vision.” Alison’s vision of swirls and angles and starbursts and filigree and latticework and curlicues and circles within circles wasn’t what the professor had in mind. “Your drawings,” he declared, “are as intricate as Victorian wall paper and just as useless.”
“Well,” her roommate concluded, “you can always teach.”
Teaching suited her, she discovered, because she is good with kids and she likes the simple self-contained lesson plans that accommodate even the least motivated student: Today we’re going to paint sky—big blue watercolor swaths across 50-pound paper. It could be frustrating, like the time Samuel Espinoza painted both of his hands red with tempura, or the day Kaitlin Overby used a fresh tampon to paint her landscape, the class tittering through the lesson until Alison discovered the prank. But mostly her relations with students were peaceful because an art teacher occupies fairly neutral ground.
After a quick shower, Alison mixes a blender of frozen strawberries and orange juice with a handful of ice cubes and a cup of rum. A “smoothie,” she calls it. Some mornings she’s so fatigued and frightened and hung-over, she fears she won’t be able to stand long enough to steady herself against a chair, then a wall, as she paws her way to the kitchen. Her head hammered with heartbeats and flash card images of Erik smiling, Erik yawning, Erik smoothing down his early morning cowlick, she grinds her coffee while Doug and Stan watch Nickelodeon on TV, just beyond the counter that separates dining from sitting in their cramped mobile home.
Tomorrow is Doug’s birthday.
“Bake me a cake, if you want,” Doug said two weeks ago at dinner.
“You want more than a cake,” she teased, hoping for his wince of a smile.
But Doug, her dutiful, somber elder son—ten tomorrow—gave her his usual come-off-it look. He’s the son who looks nothing like his parents. Alison used to joke with Erik that Doug was the incarnation of a Puritan ancestor. The boy has never been happy. The best he can manage is a middling satisfaction. She and Erik fretted about him for several years and finally consulted a psychologist who concluded that Doug is hard-wired that way: “We can’t all be Ronald McDonald, can we?”
She, Doug, and Stan were eating at the kitchen counter. She had microwaved a frozen pizza. Stan was picking off his pepperoni and stacking them in a tidy pile at the edge of his paper plate. Stan has Erik’s pretty eyes, Alison’s mischievous smile, and more than a fair share of confidence and coordination. Already he’s a star on his grade school’s soccer team. And it’s clear he can’t fathom his older brother’s reluctance to grab life by the shoulders and give it a good shake.
Stan said, “When I turn seven in November, you can throw me a extra big party, like combining two parties.”
“We’re talking about Doug’s birthday, not yours,” said Alison.
Stan appeared wholly occupied with straightening his pepperoni slices. Alison thinks he might be an artist. “All he wants is cake, he just said.”
“We’re going to do more than cake,” she said.
His mouth full of half-chewed pizza, Doug said, “Whatever.”
“I want to make you happy!” said Alison.
“I’m happy,” Doug said glumly.
This made her laugh.
She wants the boys to know that life goes on, that even without Erik they can have a reasonably good time. She isn’t sure, though, that she believes this herself. Their loss of husband and father threatens to unravel the comforting simplicities they took for granted. It’s not fair, she wants to shout at Erik, what were you thinking? Always, her protests make her feel guilty. Erik fucked up. But it wasn’t like he ran away to start a new life.
Or was it?
Right here, in this single thought, which she has entertained countless times, she sees a chink of light, like sunshine seeping through one seam of a locked cellar door. She dare not pry or push at it because it would lead her to the most fantastic speculation: that Erik did indeed run off—that he faked his death so that he could start a new life in Thailand or Malaysia.
She knows this thought is nothing but a perverse, ridiculous kind of solace. If he ran off, at least he’d be alive and the boys would have a chance of seeing him again. But then she has a second thought. What if he went into that shipwreck with no intention of coming out? This thought is pure horror. It would mean that she never truly knew Erik, wouldn’t it?
She can’t go there. She should never go there. But she does go there too often.
She sits on her disheveled couch and drinks her lunch and cruises through the 42 satellite channels, the world disgorged from the TV screen, its numbing variety of comedy and drama spilling onto the stained rug of her cramped “family room” and its scatter of action figures and DVD video games.