MAMMALS

April 1993

THEY WERE NOT gamblers, but the resort had a small casino, and that was where they spent the first two days. Kay and Jack: the trip was a reward for two hard years, the rough waters they had crossed together, and though they had imagined it as time together as a family, empty days lounging in the stolen sunshine, they had barely stepped outdoors. They left to eat and sleep and check on Mia and the boys, but always they returned-both winning and losing, yet always winning a little more-and by the morning of the third day, after a twelve-hour run when they had not gone to bed at all, they were ahead four thousand dollars, enough to pay for the week-long trip.

It was Kay who decided to stop. Ten A.M.: she’d just won three hands in a row-another sixty dollars-when an overdue exhaustion washed over her, a sense of absolute completeness, like the last bite of a meal. She understood at once that she was done.

“You know, I think I’ve had it,” she said.

Jack nodded, but kept his eyes on the table. His cheeks and chin were dusted with stubble the color of ash. He signaled to the dealer, a young black man with dreadlocks and a fine, copper-colored nose, that he was in. Expressionless, the young man dealt the cards: a ten, and an eight on top. The dealer drew a deuce. Jack waved a flat hand over his cards to say that he would hold where he was. His bets were small, ten or twenty dollars, but many times just five. He gambled carefully but also with a bemused wonder, like a man puzzling over a problem that seemed to work no matter what he did. He was an economist, but his work was very theoretical; when it came to actual dollars, he had no head at all. It was Kay who balanced the checkbook and paid the bills and kept the ship on course. She watched as Jack won again.

“Jack? Are you listening? Let’s cash in.”

He kissed her quickly on the forehead. “Go get some sleep if you want.”

The idea made her yawn. Four thousand dollars: not a fortune, she thought, but certainly a reason to be cautious. She had friends from college who had real money now: the bankers and lawyers who were just making partner, the doctors whose loans were finally paid off, even a novelist whose books did well. She read their news in the alumni bulletin and felt a stab of envy. To such people, she knew, four thousand dollars would seem like nothing at all. And yet it had taken Kay and Jack most of a year to set aside that sum, stealing a few hundred dollars here and there from his salary at the college.

Now the same amount sat before them on the table, neat rows of blue and red chips with the name of the resort etched at the center-a windfall that had cost them nothing. What was it about these chips that made them so pleasant to the touch? As tired as she was, still she longed to hold them in her hands.

“Seriously, Jack. How can this last?”

“I don’t know how it’s lasted this long.” He placed his bet on the table, and the dealer laid out fresh cards. “See? Twenty-one.” It was: a king and an ace, she saw. The dealer paid out.

She was too exhausted to press. “Come soon, then.”

Alone, she stepped from the casino, into the blazing light and building heat of the morning. The air smelled of flowers and the sea. The resort was like a compound, encircled by high fencing that made a U around one side of the bay and a beach of perfect white sand. The brochure had mentioned the casino almost in passing-it was just one more diversion, like the tennis courts and scuba lessons and limbo contests on the patio after dinner-and the two of them had joked about it. What kind of idiot would go to the Caribbean and fritter the time away playing cards in a dark room? But now the trip was half over, and they’d barely done anything else.

Their condo was empty, the beds rumpled and unmade. Searching from the windows, Kay found the boys down on the wide empty beach, and Mia, reading a book, her long, blond form stretched out in one of the lawn chairs that the resort staff put out each morning. Sam was nine, Noah six. She wondered if they felt neglected, but knew this wasn’t so: Sam wanted only to do as he wished, and Noah wanted nothing. It had been the hardest thing, to realize that she could only offer him comfort, that she would never really know him at all-that to be with Noah was, in some sense, to be alone.

She showered, dressed in a bathing suit-modest, matronly, one of those awful things with a skirt, but that was all they sold to women like her, women who were supposed to be older-and examined herself in the mirror. Thirty-six years old: her hair, a rich chestnut, had begun, here and there, to gray. She had never been a small woman, but now, after the boys, there was a wideness to her hips that was, she understood, a permanent rearrangement of the bones. And yet, looking at her reflection, she knew she was still, somehow, pretty. Her features were delicate and expressive; her legs were sturdy and lean, roped with muscle from the long walks she took now each day; her eyes and teeth were bright. The year of her illness-that awful year, they called it-had made her skin seem thinner somehow, almost translucent. Now, eight months later, her strength had returned, like wind filling a sail. The suit, with its high neckline, betrayed nothing.

The boys were making sandcastles, splashing in and out of the waves with buckets. They had no impulse to accumulate: all they built they destroyed at once, even Noah, who followed his brother’s lead in everything.

Sam took her hand and pulled. “Mia says we can go sailing if you say okay.”

“Did she?” The resort kept a fleet of rickety day-sailers on the beach. She tousled Sam’s hair, stiff with salt and sunshine. “After lunch, we’ll see,” she said.

“We want to go sailing now,” Sam declared. “Mia said she’ll take us.”

She knelt before the two of them. Their bodies were thin, absolutely without fat, and after three days in the sun, as brown as new pennies. Sam was tall for his age and hazel eyed, all knees and elbows and sharp angles, like his father; Noah, under a thatch of brown hair, had a wide, chunky face that on a different boy, one who smiled and laughed, would have been a constant barometer of his feelings. But his smiles, when they came, seemed like accidents. One eye, his left, did not look straight at her but just slightly away, a degree of misalignment that only someone close to him would notice. The condition was known as Brown’s syndrome, and was sometimes associated with autism. It was Noah’s eye, looking up at them from his cradle, that had first alerted them that something was wrong.

“Daddy’s made enough money to pay for the trip,” she told them. “What do you think of that?”

The littler boy wrinkled his brow and tipped his face to look at her. “Playing cards?”

“That’s right, playing cards. Grown-up cards. Mommy made some money too.”

“Can we buy a boat?” Sam asked.

“It’s not enough for that.”

“I found a jellyfish,” Noah announced. His world was a series of encounters with animals of all kinds; almost nothing else interested him. After a series of unhappy experiences with stray cats and wounded birds, they had tried to domesticate this compulsion with a menagerie of small pets: fish, turtles, a pair of lop-eared rabbits named Dopey and Doc. He seemed closer to these creatures than to any actual person, caring for them with complete devotion, and yet when they died, he seemed not to notice.

“Where was that?”

He pointed purposefully. “Over there. On the sand.”

“It was a dead jellyfish,” Sam said, scowling with boredom. “Big deal.”

Noah’s eyelids fell closed, like twin windowshades coming down. “Jellyfish. Any of various marine co-el-enter-ates of a soft, gelatinous structure, esp. one with an umbrellalike body and long trailing tentacles; medusa. Two. Inf. A person without strong resolve or stamina.” He pronounced the abbreviations exactly as he had seen them written in the dictionary. His face as he spoke was a perfect, emotionless blank.