2
Their first date was Chili’s.
Or TGI Fridays—he always got them confused.
He was nervous and overdressed, unsure about his top button. Was it too much chest if he left it unbuttoned? He was too buttoned-up if he buttoned it…
She was relaxed. Unflappable. She repeated the waitress’s name back to her and used it throughout dinner, saying things like, Thanks, Sarah , and It’s delicious, Sarah , and No problem, Sarah, I’ll just take the vinaigrette then .
When the bill came, she offered to pay. Not pretend-offered like a lot of the other girls, who rooted around in their purses like their debit cards had slipped through a side pocket and into the Mariana Trench. She really offered, slapped her card down before Dan could even pry his wallet from his pants. He didn’t let her. He said he was a feminist, but not an asshole, and that made her laugh, and he laughed too. She threw her head back when she laughed, like a Pez dispenser.
He used the opportunity to unbutton his top button.
After dinner they went to the park. The same park he’d taken girls to since sophomore year of high school because he never moved away, the one with the wooden dock that split through the lake like it was slicing a cake. They ate cake, actually. Sarah the waitress had slipped them a free dessert to go. It was really dry and really carroty—Dan hated carrot—but he ate it because, you know, free cake. He’d never been given anything free in over two decades of visiting restaurants, so this was something. He could tell it was a regular occurrence for Mara though. She had the type of face you wanted to feed things.
He wanted to draw her face. It was a weird thought, probably, but the way the moonlight stretched across the woods and then the lake and then rested on her face—like it’d traveled 40,000 miles just to illuminate her—made him want to draw it. He was terrible at drawing. His houses looked like fire trucks, and his fire trucks looked like dogs. But that night, staring at that olive face framed by that raven hair, he thought maybe all these years, he’d just lacked the proper muse. He drew her on a blue sticky note the next day at work, using a picture from Instagram for reference. The tiny profile picture—he hadn’t worked up the guts to follow her. When he finished, it was grotesque, more Crypt Keeper than Priyanka Chopra, and he threw it away and never mentioned it to anyone.
After the cake she wanted to skip rocks. Her dad had taught her how to skip rocks, she said, growing up camping, and she missed that and him. Her eyes grew when Dan told her he’d never skipped rocks before. They didn’t go camping, he explained, they had an aboveground pool, and he once got in trouble for tossing rocks in it. She was excited to teach him and screamed and hugged him when he made one bounce three times—three times!—because that was awesome for a beginner, dude. She called him dude. Was that a good sign or a bad sign? Dan called the cashier at the gas station dude. He did like him though.
Then he picked up another rock, confident now, and just as he was prepared to unleash the Foster fury, she lunged forward and caught him. The rock fell to the ground and she scooped it up. No, she said, you can’t throw this one. Look at the wavy pattern on it. See? Means this rock has seen some shit. Probably worked really hard to get to where it is, on this shore, tonight, with us, so you can’t just throw it back in. It’s really good luck to find a rock like that.
Dan felt the smoothness of that rock in his swim trunks and stood over Mara while she cried into the recess between the pillows in their resort room. He looked for the moon through the sliding glass door, but it was pointless. You only see the moon because it reflects light from the sun, so that might as well have disappeared too. He’d never again see the moonlight on Mara’s face, and that made him feel worse than anything so far.
He tried to fix it, because that’s what men do—fix things that break, even if what breaks is the universe. He pounded his laptop awhile, but Wi-Fi was still out. He went out on the balcony and shouted to some guys down in the garden, but they didn’t know either. They just squinted up at the black sky, said, “We must be missing something here,” and then eventually threw their arms up like, Yup, well, the sun exploded, I guess. Dan said to Mara they could get a flight out early, get home to her mom, who he was sure was fine, but then he stopped talking when he realized he didn’t know how to book a flight without the internet. Do planes still fly when the sun explodes?
He sat on the edge of the bed and listened to Mara weep. Then he reached out and held her hand, something he knew how to do without internet access. They stayed that way for a while, and she quieted down, and it was quiet. Somehow even quieter without the sun, though Dan was pretty sure it never made any noise.
Mara sniffed, her voice muffled by the mattress. “Danny?”
“Yeah, babe.”
“Did you get the travel insurance?”
“What?”
“The travel insurance.” Mara tugged her hand free from his and rolled over, sat up. She wiped her eyes with the insides of her wrists. Women always use the inside. “On travel sites, when you book the trip, there’s a little box at the bottom where it asks you if you want to protect your trip with travel insurance. Did you do that?”
Dan racked his brain. It’d been months since he booked the trip. “I don’t remember seeing a box.”
“There’s always a box. It’s, like, a little extra money, but it protects your trip in case the flights get messed up, or you get sick, or if the nearest star blows up.” She shook her head. “You really didn’t get the travel insurance, Danny?”
Was she serious? Life as they knew it had just been fundamentally altered, or even canceled, and she was worried about whether they’d recoup twenty-five hundred—oh. She was smiling now, because Mara had a good poker face, but there was a timer on it. She could only hold it for a little while before whatever she was feeling burst through the surface like it’d been holding its breath. She laughed, he laughed, and that was Mara for you. Devastated one second, cracking jokes the next, a slideshow of emotion that Dan loved scrolling through. They laughed for a while and then held each other in bed.
“I’m worried about my mom,” Mara said, her eyes closed. She didn’t need to say it, Dan knew she was. She always was. Mara’s mom, Ami, had a pair of no-good kidneys, just real deadbeats, and she was on dialysis three times a week back home in Memphis. Mara’s older sister, Raveena, was in charge of getting her to appointments while Mara was away in the Bahamas, but Mara already didn’t like that because Raveena once tried to microwave her phone after she read online that it charged the battery faster. Raveena wasn’t smart like Mara, or responsible like Mara, or pretty like Mara, though Dan could never say that part aloud.
But she could handle taking Ami back and forth to the hospital for two weeks , Dan had said, and finally Mara had agreed. But then half an hour ago everything changed, or thirty-eight minutes ago if the guy on the stairs knew what he was talking about, and they both knew Raveena couldn’t handle the apocalypse and getting her mom to the hospital on time.
“Her kidneys can fail in a couple weeks,” Mara said, squeezing the sheets. “If she doesn’t get to dialysis, Danny, she—”
“We’re going to figure this out,” Dan said, because that’s what a man says in emergencies, even if it doesn’t mean anything. He’d been the one to push this trip, the one who saw the ads on Facebook during his lunch break, the one to say Building B would be nice. It’s not Building A, of course, because we’re not Kardashians, but it’s certainly not Building C either, because we’re not vagrants. If Mara’s mom died while they were on this trip, on Dan’s trip, then Mara’s hand might not fit inside his the same way ever again.
“We’re going to figure this out,” Mara repeated, and she slid from the bed and went to the mirror above the vanity and looked at her face, puffed her cheeks, and sighed. She put on eyeshadow. She didn’t need it, but Dan knew better than to stop her, because Mara liked to feel like she was in control, and she could totally control a smoky eye.
There was a pounding on the door, and they both jumped, but Dan played off his jump like he happened to be hopping from the bed at that exact moment, what a coincidence. He cautiously peered through the peephole first. Could have been NASA rounding up brave young men to shoot into space to poke around. But it was only Julio, the kid with the flat nose and white teeth who was working the Sola Pool yesterday. Julio loved Dan. Dan was so generous with him, tipping singles because he was quick with the drinks and because weren’t dollars in the Bahamas worth a lot more than back home? And after a few coconut rum and pineapple juices Dan started tipping Julio two singles per drink, because what the hell, and he kind of felt like Oprah.
“My man!” Dan said as he swung open the door, but Julio’s expression was vacant. Dan pushed his thumb into his chest, then over his shoulder back at Mara, and said, “Coconut rum and pineapple juice!…Sola Pool?”
“Alright now, hey,” Julio said, but his eyes were cloudy, and Dan thought, What a waste of some perfectly good singles.
Mara joined him. “Do they know what happened?”
“Mr. Sheridan wants all guests to meet at the Adobe Amphitheater on the Great Lawn in ten minutes.” Dan noticed Julio was sweating now and short of breath, like he’d sprinted the length of the resort. He was gone as quickly as he appeared, banging on the next door and the next, and soon people congregated outside their rooms, murmuring and worrying and saying “This is ridiculous, isn’t it?” like somehow the resort was responsible for a supernova. Dan and Mara were swept up in it, washed from their room and pushed downriver like rocks with waves on them.
Neither knew who Mr. Sheridan was. They knew it sounded official though, so Dan shrugged at Mara, and his face said, Well, if Mr. Sheridan wishes to see us, my goodness, we better get a move on, hadn’t we.