“Not as safe as here.”
“We need to slow down. We all need to slow down. You need a break from researching vaginas. This child needs a break from school, from secret keeping, from Aggie, from this whole situation. This family needs a break from all the weight and drama—”
“And you need a break from me,” said Penn.
Rosie closed her eyes. “And I need a break from you.”
He watched her behind her closed lids and said nothing for moments that stretched on like Wyoming highways. Then he walked away. So she was able to coincide heartache with international air travel as well.
*
She didn’t call Carmelo until she was actually at the airport. She didn’t want to be talked out of it. Predictably, her mother was full of being a mother.
“What about malaria?” she led off.
“We took drugs.”
“What about typhoid?”
“More drugs.”
“What about that tropical fever?”
“Dengue?”
“Yeah, dengue.”
“We’ll use DEET.”
“Isn’t DEET bad for you?”
“Not in small quantities.”
“Are small quantities enough to prevent mosquito bites?”
“We brought long sleeves.”
“Won’t it be hot?”
“You live in Phoenix, Mother.”
“What about the boys?”
“They’ll be fine.”
“How long are you going for?”
“I don’t know.”
“What about Penn?”
Ah. There was the rub. “He’ll be fine without me.”
“But will you without him, dear?”
A perfectly reasonable question. “He’s just … he’s writing a story instead of living our life.”
“Maybe he’s doing both.”
“He can’t do both, Mom. Both isn’t an option. They’re irreconcilable. Our kid is an actual person and therefore can’t be a character in a story. Penn thinks everything that’s wrong is just prelude to the magic, and one day soon, we’ll all get to forget what’s past and live happily ever after.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Fantasies always do.”
“Penn’s never been a realist, sweetie.”
“Not being a realist doesn’t make reality go away,” Rosie shrilled. “The transformation on offer here isn’t magic. It isn’t instantaneous, and it isn’t painless. It’s years and years of frog kissing. It’s frog kissing for the rest of your life. It’s frog kissing with nasty side effects and unpredictable outcomes you can’t undo if you change your mind that results maybe in your being more princess and less scullery maid than before, but not quite in your being all princess and no scullery maid.”
“What does Poppy say?”
“Nothing.” The name was growing strange again to Rosie’s ears already. “Poppy’s gone, Mom. He wants to be Claude again.”
“Wants to be?” Carmelo asked.
“Wants to be. Has to be. Thinks he is. Thinks he should. Thinks he must. I don’t know.”
“Have you asked her?”
“Him,” Rosie corrected.
“Have you asked?”
“I’ve tried, Mom. He can’t tell me. Maybe he doesn’t know. He’s very sad.”
“Isn’t that your answer then?” Carmelo wondered.
“I don’t know either,” Rosie said, and then, softly, because she was trying to be an adult and not cry on the phone to her mother in the airport, “I’m very sad too.”
Carmelo said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “What about elephant attacks?”
“Elephant attacks?”
“They have elephants in Thailand, dear, and they’re not repelled by DEET.”
It seemed telling to Rosie that getting trampled by a five-ton animal came last on her mother’s list of concerns.
But if she shared (some of) Carmelo’s worries, she was still finally going to Thailand, fulfilling a promise she’d made to her sister most of a lifetime ago. If she was unhappy about how she’d left things with Penn, about wanting, for the first time since they’d met, to be apart from him, she was still flying to far-off Asia with her youngest child. If she was worried about leaving the boys in their own precarious state, about choosing Claude over them again, about abandoning them to negotiate their daily lives without her for a little while, she was still road tripping with her baby. And if it wasn’t a road trip so much as transnavigated international journeying via hope, imagination, panic, and plane, that was also good, and she had learned over the years to take what she could get. She’d been dreaming of the trips she’d take with her daughter since her sister died, and if it wasn’t quite Poppy anymore and she came home with Claude instead, a prodigal son, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.