Suitable Precautions Read online

  PEOPLE WERE LEAVING THE ISLAND any way they could. The fat German asked Mairin to come with him. He was flying to Toronto, then Berlin. Had she ever seen the Reichstag? he asked her seductively.

  “I’m not that keen on empire,” Mairin said, nailing plywood over one of the hotel dining room’s ocean-facing windows. There were several more windows to do and the sky was already pale lilac. She imagined fish flying like birds into the glass. Starfish spinning deadly cartwheels of orange and purple. Palm fronds as giant whips, lashing.

  “Maybe you are just playing hard to get,” the German said, his hand on her arm.

  “No,” Mairin said, tapping one of his fingernails with her hammer, “I’m more playing hard to like.”

  Mairin helped organize the water and the canned food. She watched television with the hotel staff in the manager’s stuffy office, José translating for her as though the picture of the swirling cloud, enhanced so as to appear pink on its edges, purple at its centre, wasn’t enough information.

  “They are saying it’s early this year. Hurricane season. They are saying it’s going to be bad.”

  “Yeah, José,” Mairin said, sipping a rum and Coke, “I got that from the picture.”

  The travel agent who sold Mairin her plane ticket had shown her pictures of white beaches and children in snorkel gear. Of pineapples and smiling men and bikini-clad women. There had been no mention of hurricanes. The woman had simply punched Mairin’s information into her computer with square, red fingernails and asked, deferentially batting her spidery eyelashes, would Mairin be travelling with a companion, which would qualify her for the couple’s discount package?

  “No,” Mairin said, her legs crossed.

  “Good for you,” the travel agent said with conviction, her dangly earrings clanking with each head shake. “Young girls like you need to go out there and go a bit crazy.” She shook her hands side to side when she said “crazy,” as though it was a new kind of spastic dance.

  “I guess so.”

  “And besides,” the travel agent said quietly, eyeing the back of her supervisor’s head, “the things I hear about Latin men. You wouldn’t believe.” She licked at the chocolate crust on her lip.

  “Oh,” Mairin said.

  “Tracey, over there,” the travel agent pointed to a young woman in a black turtleneck sweater, “she’s gone down south on a couple of our promotions, and the things that come out of her mouth when she comes back.” The travel agent looked at Mairin with conspiratorial prudery and then winked. “Let’s just say it’s nothing compared to what went in it.”

  Mairin shifted in her seat.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m in a bit of a rush.”

  “Well,” the travel agent said, tossing back her blonde hair, “I see.” She ignored Mairin for several moments while she clicked needlessly on her computer keyboard. Eventually she looked at Mairin again over the frame of her glasses. “And when would you like to travel?”

  “Tomorrow,” Mairin said.

  “Tomorrow?” she blinked quickly, her fingers already typing. “That’s lovely.” She looked back at the screen. “I’m not sure there’s going to be anything available so quickly. Are you sure you wouldn’t want to wait a bit? We have some packages next month that are very reasonably priced.”

  “No,” Mairin said, her hands folded in her lap. “It’s tomorrow or nothing.”

  There was more typing, more blinking.

  “Well, here’s something, but the flight is very early in the morning. First thing.”

  “The plane will be cleaner.”

  The ticket came in an envelope that featured a picture of an aquamarine ocean, the word “Heaven” in elaborate script. Mairin had clutched the envelope during her flight, sweating until the ocean rippled and her hands were smudged with blue ink that no amount of scrubbing with pink airport bathroom soap would remove.

  Her hands were still stained two weeks later as she and José stacked the chairs in the hotel dining room, tying them together, then to the support beams, José showing her the fisherman’s knots he’d learned from his father.

  “No, no, like this,” José corrected, his hands on hers, the coarse rope between their fingers.

  “Oh.”

  “You should really try to get that ink off your hands,” he said, stopping to hold her hand and rub the ink stains with his thumbs. “I’ve heard it makes you sick. Gives you cancer.”

  Mairin packed six more peach floral seat cushions into wicker baskets and shrugged. “What doesn’t these days?”

  “You know,” José said, “hurricanes are powerful storms.” He stared out into the grey ocean, speaking to it before one of the cooks nailed a plywood board over the window. “People die in them.”

  “People die all the time, José.”

  “Maybe you should go. I could take you to the airport.”

  But they both knew that the wind had picked up. The rain had started.

  “I’ll take my chances,” Mairin said, walking to the supply cupboard for another length of rope.

  She had a chance, the specialist told her. After all, she was young and a non-smoker. She exercised, ate spinach, meditated. She avoided red meat and too much sun. Her mother, except for an arthritic hip, was in excellent health. Mairin did not use vaginal deodorants. She had never had a sexually transmitted disease. In many ways, the doctor had said as she lay bleeding very slowly on his examination table, she was an excellent candidate for aggressive treatment. She had nothing to lose.

  “Thank you,” Mairin said automatically.

  “Absolutely excellent.”

  The doctor’s voice came to Mairin from behind the pale green sheet a medical student had told her to drape over her thighs. She wondered what she looked like, the parts of her warmed by the incandescent bulb of the swing-armed lamp the doctor had turned on and angled low as he’d asked her to breathe out, relax a little. Mairin had turned her eyes to the ceiling, browned in the corner by some long-forgotten water damage, and focused on a picture from a magazine that someone, the kindly nurse, maybe, had taped there to distract people.

  “We need to act quickly,” the doctor was saying as he scraped a tissue sample from, it felt, the underside of Mairin’s belly button. “I’ll put a rush on these tests, and once they come back we’ll be in a better position to consider your options.” He looked at her and the glare from the lamp reflected white in his glasses, giving him the appearance of blindness. “And I want you to know you do have options. We’ll discuss them tomorrow. I can fit you in very early, first thing.”

  Mairin looked at the picture on the ceiling. At the white sand like sugar that dissolved into the dark blues, then greens, then blue-blacks of the soft and nearly still ocean as the setting sun bled pink and orange into the water, the rivulets of light coursing slowly back to the deserted shore.

  “Some new studies involving targeted radiation therapy have proven very encouraging,” the doctor was saying. “Depending on these results, we may also want to consider chemotherapy. And there is the option of surgery.” He scraped again. “I wouldn’t normally recommend that for a woman your age. Have you thought about children?”

  The palm tree was almost a silhouette against the ash-blue sky. The ripples on the water and the motion of the fronds made Mairin think unspoken words that rolled around on her tongue like glass bottles on the ocean, letters inside: Tropic of Capricorn. Tropic of Cancer.

  “Yes,” she said. “No.”

  Mairin shifted, her bum sticking to the sweaty paper sheet beneath her.

  “Is the light getting a little warm?” the specialist had asked, swabbing.

  Mairin, eyes on the picture, thought about lying on the beach at night and soaking in the sun as it leaked back out of each grain of sand.

  “No,” she had said. “It’s great.”

  Mairin came back to the dining room in time to see José nail the last window shut.

  “See, Mairin?” he said, knocking on the wood. “You’re go
ing to be fine.”

  MAIRIN WAS ALMOST ASLEEP, drunk and with a headache, on the floor of the manager’s office. It was the only place in the hotel with a heavy wooden door and no windows. José had found her a pillow and a blanket and tucked her in beneath the manager’s desk, telling her not to worry, that the storm was glancing off the east side of the island and would likely spin back out to the ocean. “You might get some time on the beach after all,” he said, untwisting the bathing suit strap on her shoulder.

  “I’m on holiday,” Mairin slurred.

  And she was. The carpet beneath her felt cool like silica, and the rattling fan in the corner sounded almost like the wind rustling in palm fronds. The underside of the plywood desk was her beach umbrella, her shelter from the sun, from the storm. She had stopped bleeding.

  She felt like a child, taken care of and planned for. Her mother. Where was her mother? Her mother in a yellow dress, swearing in the kitchen as she tried to spell “Happy Birthday Mairin” in chocolate frosting. Multicoloured balloons and bean bag toss games, ribbons curled with the sharp edge of kitchen scissors, boys pushing other boys into girls who stood shyly in their party dresses and patent leather shoes, in tears. Palm trees, suddenly, in the backyard by the swing set, a lilac sky and rain. Her mother, shouting, Come on in, kids. You’re gonna catch your deaths! And Mairin swinging higher and higher, tilting in the blackness of the afternoon, her head back as she pumped her legs and felt the rain spatter against the fire from her hot bones.

  The wind split itself open. It became a mouth. It bit at her party dress and gnashed the shoes from her feet, hurtling them into the windows of the house. The sound of the glass breaking was lost in the swirling howl, but Mairin could hear the shards fly back at her, humming in the rain like exotic and deadly insects, stinging her bare arms and legs, her cheeks, making her bleed. A single piece of white-hot glass in her eye, another in her mouth, so that she saw white nothingness, so that when she tried to scream, a waterfall of white sand poured out of her.

  The wind licked her hands away from the swing set chains and Mairin fell backwards into the ocean that appeared beneath her, the splinters from floating plywood boards finding ways into her fingertips, the sting of salt in her hands as she sank through the layers of water, dark blue, then green, then blue-black, until Mairin was numb, until she was frozen in her green and blue party dress at the bottom of the ocean like a small, beautiful stone.

  She woke to the sound of the rattling fan. The rain had stopped and the birds—what happened to birds in a hurricane? Mairin wondered. Where did they go?—were silent. Mairin folded the blanket and fluffed the pillow that had creased her cheek and went to look for José. To return the bedding. To thank him for the rum and Cokes. To give him a hug. A hundred American dollars, maybe, if he would take it.

  Mairin walked through the dark hotel. Plywood covered all the windows, protecting her from the sight of wrecked beaches and upended palm trees, of dying sea animals stranded on sand, dying people. She thought about her options. She did have options.

  She thought about staying on the island, with José and Isabella, maybe, until she figured something out. She might work at an orphanage, caring for hurricane orphans, if there were any. She imagined waking up every morning and pouring night-chilled water into a chipped ceramic bowl, splashing awake her skin, pale under her tan. She pictured her greasy hair tied in braids under a blue and green head scarf, and the babies with their little fists in the hollows of her collarbone, gurgling along as she sang to them in English: Love is a feeling like a warm, dark stone. She would wear loose cotton blouses and long flowered skirts, work in a vegetable garden and have dirt under her fingernails like some kind of saint. She would learn Spanish, how to say, “You’re welcome” without meaning “It’s nothing.” There were worse things a person could do with the rest of her days.

  But she was already turning down the shadowy hallway that led to her room, led to her suitcase and her clothes, to the airport and her mother and her childhood bed of thick grey sheets that smelled of flowers, not of bleach or strangers’ skin. Mairin remembered waking up in that bed, eight years old and afraid, the taste of rotten lemons in her throat as she called out for her mother in the darkness. She remembered opening her mouth. I threw up, Mairin had said stupidly. I’m sorry. Shh, was all her mother had said as she cuddled Mairin, the heat of her body radiating through her thin nightgown. Mairin had fallen asleep, knowing for the first time that anything could be forgiven. The bad inside of her, spilled out across the clean white carpet.

  MONKFISH

  NEXT TO VICTOR IS AMELIA, who is worried that it still looks like she has pissed her pants. When she arrived at Kevin and Sharon’s house, coincidentally at the moment that Jeremy slammed the door of their Volvo with his knee, one hand holding his tie, the other the bottles of wine, she had hopped off her bike and trotted up to him for a kiss, but he held his mouth away and looked at her crotch and said, Jesus, Amy, you look like you pissed yourself. Learn to drive, for fuck’s sake.

  It was almost a joke, the way he meant to say it.

  There was no opportunity to fight, even though Amelia felt like beating Jeremy with her U-lock and watching him hold both hands to his nose like he was trying to push the blood back in. Kevin has a sixth sense about dinner guests, and he opened the door before they knocked. Kevin, Amelia hammed, you scared the piss out of me. Kevin hauled the bike in beside the jogging stroller. They discussed the trouble of vinyl bicycle seats while Amelia shifted back and forth in an effort to dry off. Both men smelling her.

  Kevin is next to Amelia, to go along with Sharon’s rules of boy girl boy girl, no spouses beside each other. Everybody but Sharon thinks that rule is pretentious, and besides, Victor messes up the system, so why bother? But Sharon is particular about her ideas. Her friends will get drunk in a respectable way and enjoy themselves at these parties. They will dress up, or at least funky. What a fun dinner party club, they’ll say, toasting each other on their jobs and babies and renovated houses and funky clothes. On the eggplant and steamed pea shoots. It will make them all feel better.

  Sharon, who has Jeremy on her right, has a big ass, the kind that justifies the word rump. Kevin has the idea that women should be horse-like in the way they walk: one hip bone rising as though independent of the other, proud and heavy, before dropping in a slow curve of muscle and sex. Attractive women, Kevin thinks, should make you think about childbirth, but in a sexy way. Of sex that could possibly lead to childbirth, but sex without that purpose behind it. They should smell the way Amelia smells. On his right.

  Amelia’s smell, more particularly Amelia, is a problem. At Amelia and Jeremy’s dinner last fall, Jeremy came back from the bathroom and accidentally bumped into Kevin. Kevin, leaning against the recently refinished stairs, sloshed port on himself, staining his funky shirt. Kevin told Jeremy to watch where he was fucking going, fucking idiot. What the fuck did you say to me in my own house? Jeremy said back. Things got nasty from there.

  Sharon, pregnant with Max, her swollen feet jammed into a pair of old flats, told Jeremy to back off, and Amelia (jealous of Sharon’s pregnancy) told Sharon to back off herself, and the conversation of drunk or pregnant adults degenerated: Kevin telling Jeremy, You don’t appreciate Amelia; Amelia telling Kevin, Kevin shut up, you’re drunk, and also telling Jeremy, Kevin’s drunk, don’t listen to him; Sharon saying she felt crampy and wanted to go home (Max born the next afternoon, Kevin hung over); and Amelia, smoking with Victor, crying that all she wanted, fuck it, was to have a baby, but not with Jeremy, who was turning out, five years on, to be a total prick. Exhale.

  Joe and Shirley were in Portugal on their belated honeymoon and missed everything.

  Shirley is on the other side of Kevin, which makes Sharon feel better. Sharon doesn’t appreciate Kevin and Amelia sitting beside each other, even though the whole thing, the fight, whatever it was, was almost a year ago, and everyone just wound up blaming it on the wine and then going ga-ga over M
ax. But still.

  Sharon has the idea that Shirley tells her everything, but Shirley has not told her that Joe’s doctor found a lump on his prostate. The doctor waggled his finger in my ass, Joe said. Waggle. It was ridiculous. The word kept him from crying.

  Shirley is of the opinion that men don’t cry unless they are dying. She saw her father cry before his quadruple bypass surgery, and her brother, naked and bleeding from the wrists, bawled into her shoulder when she broke into his apartment and found him on the floor, fistfuls of pills scattered like confetti.

  Joe (on Sharon’s left) doesn’t think he is dying, but he is scared of the surgery, which can cause impotence. He’s heard people say that once you’ve been married for a while, a long while, all a person really needs is a best friend. Someone to hold hands with during movies and share the sudden orphaning that happens when parents die. Ridiculous.

  Joe told Victor that making love to Shirley is the only time he’s ever completely happy. They were smoking on Kevin’s refinished deck. (Sharon checking on Max. Shirley stirring the sauce for her. Jeremy coming from work, Amelia on bike.) Do you know what I mean, Vic? Joe asked. Did you ever feel that way, you know, about Cathy?

  Victor shook his head, and Joe resolved to sit next to him during dinner.

  About Victor:

  Victor’s appendix burst when he was nine years old. His mother thought he was faking so he would miss a math test. He almost died.

  Victor snaps a photograph of himself naked every morning. He slips it into an album. He has almost five thousand photos.

  Victor’s ex-wife, Cathy, is now dating a black man, and this makes Victor feel inadequate, sexually, and also racist.

  No one knows any of this.

  Dinner is four hours long and all they talk about is the monkfish. It is a new recipe. The monkfish is steamed and not particularly delicious, despite what everybody says.