It turned out there were seven missed calls from Matt’s cell, and he’d left four messages. Karen stood frozen as she listened to the first one, a constricted feeling in her chest. “Please call me,” he said. That message was followed by “Can you please call me, wherever you are?” And then “Jesus Karen, I don’t know where you are but please for the love of Mary, call home—it’s an emergency.” And finally, “This is fucking ridiculous. Where the fuck are you? I’m so sick of this bullshit. Do you even care that your daughter is in the emergency room? Yes, that’s right. She had an accident on the monkey bars this morning and got taken away in an ambulance, and you’re completely AWOL.”
Karen felt as if her head had become detached from her body. “Oh my God—this can’t be happening,” she said.
“What can’t be happening?” asked Clay from across the room, his eyes still mostly closed.
“Ruby—my daughter—she’s had some kind of accident in the playground, and she’s in the ER.” Karen grabbed her clothes off the floor and began struggling frantically to fit her arms and legs into the appropriate holes.
“Oh—shit,” he said, lifting himself up onto his elbows and half opening his eyes. “What happened?”
“She fell off the play structure or something. I don’t know.”
“What’s a play structure?” said Clay.
“You know—a jungle gym,” said Karen, swallowing her words. Socially conscious parents didn’t use the term anymore; it was considered retro, if not vaguely racist, though Karen wasn’t entirely sure why. But Clay probably wasn’t up on stuff like that.
“Kar—I’m sure it’s not that bad,” he said.
“Why are you so sure?” she said, shimmying her skirt over her hips.
“Kids fall all the time. That’s, like, the whole point of being a kid.”
“Clay, she got taken away in an ambulance!” said Karen, fitting her feet into her sandals while she tried and repeatedly failed to button the top of her skirt. “I’ve got to go back to the airport.”
“Karen—wait—you’re panicking for no reason,” he said.
“Of course I’m panicking!”
“But, I mean, isn’t your—husband there to deal with it?”
“Yeah, but I’m her mother!”
“Okay but—”
“But what?” Karen paused to search his face.
Clay grimaced, looked away, sighed. “It’s just—we have a whole day and night left.”
Did he really expect her to fit in a last day of kite-surfing or beachcombing before she left? “Clay, I’m really sorry,” she said. “I’m disappointed too. But I can’t stay.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do here all alone?” he said, sitting upright and sounding almost—was it possible?—peeved. As if she were letting him down, ruining the weekend. It was all about Clay, even when it was about someone else. And this was apparently Clay in a crisis, looking out for his own interests.
Or maybe those were the only interests he was able to recognize. “I don’t know—pick up one of those tiki-bar waitresses at the other end of the beach,” Karen shot back.
“Gee—thanks for the permission,” Clay replied, his tone sarcastic.
But Karen had more pressing concerns than her married lover having to fend for himself for twenty-four whole hours. She dialed Matt from the side of the pool, her heart thumping so hard it hurt. The phone rang. Please let Ruby be okay, she prayed to an old man with a white beard, just in case he turned out to be real.
Matt picked up on the third ring. “Where the hell are you?” he said. She hadn’t even said hello, and he was already screaming at her.
Karen couldn’t entirely blame him. “I’ll explain in a second,” she said. “But please tell me about Ruby first.”
“She swung off the monkey bars and landed on a fucking bike rack—don’t ask me how. But she’s in horrible pain and asking for Mommy.”
“Oh my God, my poor baby,” said Karen. She started to choke up. “I’m going to get the next flight out of here. I just don’t know when that will be. There aren’t that many flights.” A mosquito landed on her arm, and she swatted it away.
“Out of Miami? You can’t get a fucking plane out of Miami?” cried Matt. “Or are you even in Miami? I called you like six times and you never answered. I even called the Ritz-Carlton in Key Biscayne, and they said no one with that name ever checked in.”
Her time was up. Karen saw that now. Matt would hate her forever, but at least she’d be telling the truth. She took a deep breath and found that she felt strangely undaunted by the task ahead. Maybe it was because, in that moment, her husband knew so little about what was actually going on in her life that he might as well have been a stranger. He wasn’t the only one she’d pushed away. When your whole life was a lie, you had no choice but to keep others at bay, lest they get too close and learn the truth. Karen saw that now too—that she’d become an island unto herself. “I’m—I’m actually in the Grenadines,” she told him. “I never went to any conference in Miami.”
There was silence. In the distance, she could hear the ocean swelling, then receding. “You’re having an affair,” Matt said. When Karen didn’t deny it, he burst out laughing. And Karen experienced the honking guffaws that came out of his mouth as more excruciating than any amount of yelling could ever be. He laughed as if her very existence were a joke and therefore not even worthy of anger. Maybe he was right.
“Yes,” Karen finally answered and gulped out, “with Clay Phipps, the hedge-fund guy.” Clay himself was only fifty yards from her, but their association had already begun to seem unreal. “He invited me away for the weekend and I accepted. Before this weekend, we’d slept together only one other time. I tried to put a stop to it after that night. But then at some point I stopped trying…If you want to leave me, I understand. Though I hope you don’t.”
He was laughing again. Then he let loose an exaggerated sigh and announced, “Classy, KK. A really classy conclusion to our decade of marriage. In the meantime, while you’re busy sucking off your billionaire friend in Tahiti, or wherever you are, our daughter had a bad accident. So can you please come home and comfort her?”
Karen cringed at Matt’s crudity. But she deserved it, didn’t she? “Of course. I’m packing right now,” she told him in a whisper.
There was never even a discussion about whether Clay would take Karen back to the city a day early in his own Jetstream. He never even offered. He didn’t offer to help pay for her return flight either. Apparently, they didn’t have that kind of relationship. And the revelation—both of Clay’s stinginess and his selfishness—came as a shocking corrective to the fantasies of domestic harmony that Karen had been busy weaving for the previous twenty-four hours. Angry and worried, she packed her bags and, with a forced smile, said, “Thanks” and “It was fun.”
“I hope your daughter is all right,” Clay told her on her way out, his hands in the pockets of his shorts. But even as he wished her well, he continued to sound hurt. As if Karen were walking out on him. Maybe she was.
Karen took a taxi to the island’s tiny airport and paid an astronomical sum for a one-way ticket on a hopper to Barbados. Fittingly, it was the most nauseating flight of her life. As the plane shook and bounced up and down and from side to side, Karen gripped the seat in front of her, half convinced that she was about to fall out of the sky. When they landed, she felt lucky to be alive.