The children took trays and each got exactly what they wanted: Chinese noodles for Penny, chicken fingers for Sebastian, nori rolls for Marcus, taquitos for June. Watching them eat, Liv felt her mind relax, easing its calculation. Feeding children, even when you had all available resources, took so much planning and forethought. The low-grade anxiety about the next meal started when you were cleaning up the last. But for two weeks there would never be any question about what was for dinner, or lunch, or snack. That roving hunter-gatherer part of her brain, which sucked a lot of power and made the other lights dim—she could just turn it off.
The trip had been Liv’s idea. Nora’s mother died of pancreatic cancer in early summer: swift and painful. After the death, Nora had been flattened by waves of sadness, sobbing jags where she couldn’t breathe or speak. Her mother had been problematic, borderline, sometimes absent. When they were eight, she’d sent Nora to live with Liv’s family, because her new husband didn’t want children around. The cousins had shared a bedroom for two years, until the new marriage failed and the prodigal mother came back. Nora had always been wry about her mother’s flakiness, and trenchant about motherhood in general. No one had predicted that the loss would hit her so hard.
Nora had called Liv in October in despair about Christmas plans. She didn’t want to go to Philadelphia to stay with Raymond’s parents when she felt like such a mess. She didn’t want to be with Liv’s parents, the adoptive family of her abandoned childhood. And she didn’t want to be home in LA, where the clear blue skies and the empty freeways would make her feel even more isolated and exposed. She wanted to be with family but not with family. She wanted to have Christmas but not have it feel like Christmas.
Liv was pragmatic, a problem-solver. She got it from her mother, a flinty Colorado litigator. She believed in finding a third way, when the options seemed intolerable, and she believed in throwing money at problems, when it was possible. She found a two-week cruise down the coast of Mexico and Central America, poking into the Panama Canal long enough to watch the locks work—bait for her engineer husband—and then heading north to LA again. It would be just the two families, Liv and Nora and their husbands and kids. They wouldn’t have to fly, they could board in San Pedro. Raymond was between movies, and Liv’s office was deserted over Christmas. Benjamin could make his own schedule as long as he kept pace on his projects. They could all take Nora away.
“You always said cruises were tacky,” Benjamin said when Liv suggested it.
“They are,” she said.
“And an environmental nightmare.”
“That’s why it’s such a good idea,” she said. “My parents won’t want to go because of fossil fuels and norovirus. Your parents want to go to Cuba. So no hurt feelings. It will be just us, and it will be different. It’s just what Nora wants.”
“And the fossil fuels?”
She felt a little shudder of guilt. “The ship is going anyway?”
Benjamin said yes, and Liv called Nora, who started to cry again, and then they went online to look at cabins.
The kids would have each other to play with, their second cousins. When Nora had been crying on Liv’s couch over the summer, she was also worrying about Marcus. At five he’d known every country and every capital in the world. (Penny, at the same age, had known Colorado, Disneyland, and Santa Monica, where her modern dance class was.) Certain things, like the emergency horn, were intolerable to Marcus, but he didn’t meet all the parameters for a diagnosis. Nora had been looking for a school that would understand her son’s strengths and his difficulties. Raymond wanted one where there might be other black kids. Liv had talked them into trying Penny and Sebastian’s school. It was small, progressive, and at least working on diversity. Their late application was accepted, and Marcus seemed happy there. His teacher created a special geography project for him, and let him read what he wanted.
So now Penny and Marcus were in sixth grade at the same school, and they would grow up together almost as their mothers had. For most of history, the two sets of children would have been betrothed to each other from birth, and Liv would have been happy with that. Sebastian and June adored each other like two puppies, even though June was younger. Sebastian, sweet-tempered and pliable, could grow up and be drawn in by some damaged girl who would blame him for her pain. Liv would have loved to promise him to funny, curious June, and seal it now.
At the buffet table, Nora studied the ship’s schedule. There was an evening movie in the Kids’ Club, one of the Madagascar sequels. The ship started to move, and the children ran out on deck and leaned on the varnished honey-colored rail. The bow thrusters churned the blue water white against the dock. Liv hoped Benjamin was watching from the balcony. It was majestic, the stately movement out of San Pedro, the lacy trail of wake behind them, the tiny boats below.
When they were out to sea and had explored the ship—skirting the clanging casino and gaping at the terrible paintings for sale, of martinis and cars—the kids settled in to watch the movie. The chaperones seemed reasonably sane. A New Zealander named Deb promised to sit near Sebastian in case his monitor went off, and Liv and Nora went to change for a grown-up dinner.
When she got back to the cabin, Benjamin was stretched out on top of the bedcovers, waking up from his nap. “Wait, so we can just shunt them off to the Kids’ Club?” he asked.
“Good, right?”
“And they’re fine with it?”
“They’re watching animated animals. They don’t love us that much.”
“Oh my God,” Benjamin said, rubbing his hands in his hair. “This is amazing.”
“Did you see the bow thrusters as we left?”
“Not if they weren’t on the backs of my eyelids.”
Liv showered and put on a cotton dress, and Benjamin took her place in the bathroom. The panoptic mirrors in the cabin left no secrets, and she wished she were thinner, and then wished she didn’t wish that. Her hair was looking a little straw-like these days. She tucked the short strands behind her ears.
At dinner, Raymond ordered champagne from the Russian wine steward. “To Liv,” he said, “for the best idea since Velcro kids’ shoes.”
Liv made a demurring noise but held her glass up anyway.
“And for generally running my life much better than I do,” Nora said.
Liv smiled. “Not everyone will let me run theirs.”
She had introduced Nora to Raymond. He’d played a marine lieutenant in the first movie Liv ever developed, and was nominated for an Image Award from the NAACP. Liv had invited Nora to the party and loaned her a dress. Nora wore her hair up in a dark sweep, and on her narrow shoulders the neckline of the dress hung fetchingly low. She had a heart-shaped, Quakerish face, and an adorable smallness that made Liv feel like a Norwegian giantess, especially in heels. As the three of them stood at a cocktail table eating passed appetizers, Raymond had turned to Nora with the full light of his dazzling actor handsomeness, and Liv had realized she was superfluous and gone off to get a drink.
The Russian wine steward brought them a bottle of rosé as soon as they finished the champagne. His name tag said YURI. “You were that astronaut in that movie,” he said, pouring the first taste for Raymond.
“He was,” Liv said. The astronaut movie had been hers, too.
“I knew it!” Yuri said. “I watch a lot of movies in my cabin.”
“She made that film happen,” Raymond said, indicating Liv, but the steward wasn’t interested in development, only in stardom.
Caviar and toast arrived, with sour cream and egg and chopped onion in little silver dishes.
“A token of my admiration,” Yuri said with a little bow. “Caviar from my country.”
Liv took a bite, the salty beads bursting on her tongue. There was soup, and fish, and lemon tart. She got slightly, pleasantly drunk, as she and Benjamin never did at a restaurant in LA, where they’d have to drive home.