The Ten-Year Nap

by Meg Wolitzer

  Leo was there too, lying on the chaise on Amy’s other side with Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann, but he was unable to stay still and read for very long. Every few minutes he would spring up to get a drink or fix the angle of the umbrella or stand by the shore and watch the surfing lesson. It was as though he, who had always been a great reader, had forgotten how to read. Like most people, he’d somehow recently lost patience for the slow unraveling that took place in novels, the need for the reader to wait in order to find out what happened in the end. Oddly, she realized, the boys were the ones who could still read long novels; this was the one trace of the previous world that they had inherited and that their parents were starting to shed.

  “Are you okay over there?” Amy asked Leo.

  “Fine. Why?”

  “You keep getting up. It’s like you have adult ADD.”

  “I’m just not used to the idea of rest anymore. It doesn’t suit me very well,” he said.

  Penny drew herself up from her chaise on Amy’s other side. “I’m going to take some pictures of the boys,” she announced. “I brought my camera out with me today for the surfing lesson.” Amy watched as Penny went down to the water’s edge and began taking digital photos of Holden and Mason. Leo remained behind them, eating fried conch and trying to read but not really reading. A few yards away, by the bamboo counter where towels lay in warm, waiting stacks, a Frenchman and his female friend spoke quietly and, it seemed, ardently. The sound of gamelan was sprinkled like pollen through the quiet morning, and waiters brought drinks to the voluntarily helpless figures. Amy thought of the expression “This is the life.” As though there were one life, as though you would really want to stay here like this for eternity, inert and being tended to, and passively regarding beauty.

  A few minutes later Greg Ramsey wandered down from the bungalow. Sleep creases striped one side of his face. “Penny, I need batteries for my recorder,” he said.

  “I assumed you brought them.”

  “They ran out. You were the one who packed.”

  “I didn’t think about your little tape recorder, Greg,” said Penny. “It was the last thing I thought about when I was packing. You have an assistant, you should have asked her.” She paused. “What size do you need?”

  “Triple A. Can’t you take the batteries out of something else?”

  “I have nothing that runs on triple A. Sorry.”

  “What about your camera?”

  “I’m taking pictures at the moment. The boys’ surfing lesson.”

  “But I have to dictate.”

  As he reached for her camera, Penny drew her hand away from him, and they squabbled in a low-level, ugly, married way. Amy wondered how frequently batteries were the subject of American marital arguments.

  “Look up there, Chloe,” said one of the West Coast husbands, walking past with his adolescent daughter. He pointed far into the sky, where two figures hung suspended on harnesses from their parafoils.

  Amy briefly watched the figures in the sky too, looking at them as everyone was meant to do. Their plumage was bright, one red, one yellow. There were endless possibilities here for the dangerous, the risky. The boys, out in the surf, likely possessed the gene for risk taking that supposedly you were either born with or not. They swam out farther, and Amy felt herself clench a little, wanting to pull Mason back as though he were attached to her by an invisible, electronic dog lead. But he was uncollared, in the water up to his neck. Again and again he and Holden rose up and pulled themselves onto their knees on the smooth planes of their little starter boards.

  “The trick,” Holden had explained this morning over breakfast, lecturing Mason at the table though he was a surfing neophyte too, “is in getting up and staying up. Lots of guys wipe out. But it’s all about positive thinking. You have to think you can do it, and then you can.” Mason listened to his friend as if Holden Ramsey were a motivational speaker, and one day, Amy thought, he would be. She pictured the boardroom and the way that grown-man Holden Ramsey would puncture the air with an index finger and how all the businessmen and businesswomen around him would take notes.

  But now, in the water, Holden could barely get onto his knees on a surfboard. Everything was difficult, Amy thought, watching the lesson, though up above, the two paragliders seemed to move around effortlessly. “They’re so pretty,” the teenaged Chloe said to her father, and as she spoke the yellow paraglider jerked at an unnatural angle and swooped out over the water, heading rapidly down toward the beach on a steep diagonal, as if on a rope line.

  Some of the people on the shore took notice, standing with open, helpless hands as he bore down in their direction. It happened quickly. Amy instinctively reached up and protected her head, as if he might crash on top of her. Down he came, this figure with the yellow canopy, strumming the sand at first, then decisively landing, snapping down harshly, smashing onto his back with the harness making a loud whipping sound. Immediately he began to scream. “Fuck!” he cried, holding the syllable.

  There was no time for anyone to do anything, for the wind continued to pull him along. He was dragged forward, his parafoil sucking inward and outward in jellyfish locomotion. A line of people, everyone shouting, began to run after the paraglider as he banged and skidded on his back along the shore. When he did stop, several people formed a circle around him, and Amy could not see anything, though she could hear shouting in a few different languages. “Do not move him!” she heard. “Do not touch him!” And, “Is he alive?” And, “Sir, can you move your arms and legs?” The second paraglider made a neat and perfect landing nearby, frantically explaining in a French accent that he was the instructor, that he had been giving a lesson, and that the student had apparently lost control.

  Amy was only vaguely aware that Penny had pushed into the circle of onlookers too, but suddenly she heard her cry out and back away. Greg came up to his wife and said, “You’ve seen accidents before.” She just shook her head, her hand to her mouth, then turned and started running toward the bungalows, Greg following behind her.

  So Amy had to go see what Penny had seen too. She joined the circle of people shouting instructions to one another and to the fallen man, and she looked down directly into the freckled white face of Ian Janeway. His eyes were closed. He wore a helmet, his curling hair pressed inside it, giving him the appearance of someone alien, perhaps an early cosmonaut who has touched down on the wrong side of the world. His mouth formed into an expression of primitive pain. Just as Amy had felt that she should not be here, he should not have been here, either; she could not believe that he had come. She wanted to cry out too, as Penny had automatically done.

  But as astonishing to her as Ian’s nervy and inexplicable presence here was the fact that Penny had turned and fled. She hadn’t automatically screamed and knelt down beside him. Instead, she was already running down the path toward the bungalows with her husband beside her, the argument about batteries forever forgotten. Penny must have been shocked by the violent fall of this stranger, Greg Ramsey probably thought. She would continue to let him think this. She would go back to their bungalow, and Greg would tend to her. He knew his wife was highly sensitive and emotional sometimes. This, apparently, was one of those times. She was also strong and tough and good with acquisitions and at dealing with the demands of the trustees. But Greg Ramsey had probably always admired complexity. It might have attracted him to her when they were young and unencumbered and not yet rich, and not yet in possession of the knowledge about what their marriage would be like over time.

  Amy and Leo stayed in the circle with the others as two of the staff members came racing up with a stretcher and a contraption that was meant to brace Ian Janeway’s head and neck. The boys were there too now, having left the water, along with Pierre and various guests, all of them speaking words of upset and disturbance in their own languages.

  In the middle of it all, Amy Lamb said to anyone who was listening, “I know him.”

  “You do?” said Leo. Then, pres
umptuously, “No, you don’t.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  BECAUSE SHE DID know him, at least a little, she was asked to come to the infirmary and answer questions, following the men who carried Ian in. There was much activity in the small medical building that abutted the main lodge: blurted, hysterical landline calls and cell-phone calls and walkie-talkie conversations in French and English, as though spoken by a simultaneous interpreter. Arrangements were made for the transport of the injured man from the island to the Hospital del Maestro in San Juan. The in-house doctor on the island and two guests who were also physicians stood around Ian behind a curtain, and a hurried, muted discussion was conducted about whether he had damaged his spinal cord, perhaps irrevocably, or had instead bruised or badly damaged the vertebrae.

  One of the guests drew something on a piece of paper for Amy. “This is the spinal cord,” he said in a strong French accent. “Imagine it as toothpaste packed in her tube.” She remembered “her tube,” but she couldn’t remember much more of what he said. She understood that Ian urgently needed an MRI and might well have to have surgery, which could be performed in San Juan as soon as he was airlifted there. He might also need an injection of a steroidal drug called Medrol, but it would have to be within the next several hours, the doctor warned, or it would have no effect. Anyway, if his spinal cord had been completely severed, there would be no hope of recovery; the lower vertebrae controlled the legs, and he would never have use of them. Hearing all this, she chewed the inside of her mouth furiously, willing Penny here, as she should have been.

  Amy was taken into the next room and asked to quickly fill out a form with all the information she knew about the injured man: name, age, occupation. She told everyone that she hardly knew him and that she didn’t remember his address or his telephone number. Really, she didn’t know Ian Janeway at all.

  She could hear Ian’s brief, stuttering cries as the doctors tried to assess him. A sedative was administered by needle; he would be unconscious soon, and one of the staff said that if “Mrs. Buckner” wanted to go see her friend, she ought to do it now. Perhaps it would be comforting to him. Amy knew that Ian had obviously come to St. Doe’s on a lovesick prank for Penny’s benefit. She thought of his lovesick nature and how because of it he had been seriously injured and would perhaps be in debt for years and maybe never able to walk again. Maybe he would even die. Maybe this would be one of those stupid, leisure-time deaths that occur because of parafoils or snowmobiles or the Plunge of Doom at an amusement park, entirely unnecessary and frivolous and leaving behind no residue of meaning.

  She didn’t want to go in and see him—she’d already been so shocked when she first saw his pale, recognizable face after the accident—but the doctor asked her to, so Amy went behind the curtain to where Ian lay pinned to the stretcher, his neck braced, his entire body wrapped in some sort of laced canvas, his face white and frightened.

  “Ian,” she said. “It’s Amy.”

  He rolled his eyes toward her. “Where’s Penny?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Shit.”

  Ian’s eyes closed, and his mouth opened slightly in a morphine hangdog expression. Someone put a hand on Amy’s shoulder and told her she should go.

  She circled the Ramseys’ bungalow, but she could see nothing through the curtains. No one ever knocked on anyone’s door on St. Doe’s; everyone maintained a certain, agreed-upon distance. Maids slipped in and out during the day, and so did discreet masseurs with massage tables folded under their arms. There was no sign of movement from the bungalow now. It was very late in the afternoon, still hot outside, the time of day when everyone, lightly sun-sickened, usually returned from the beach and disappeared into their darkened rooms to recover. Today, almost everyone had gone inside early.

  Amy climbed up onto the porch and knocked. Soon Gabrielle Ramsey came to the door. She was a beautiful fifteen-year-old girl, tiny like her mother, but with her father’s wide mouth. A minuscule piece of silver pierced the flesh of her nose.

  “Hi, Mrs. Buckner,” she said. “My parents are both lying down.”

  “Oh.”

  Amy imagined a large bed, identical to hers and Leo’s, draped with netting, on which a husband and wife lay together in the heat under a single cold white sheet. “Tell your mom I stopped by,” she said, and she left the family to themselves.

  Leo was waiting for Amy in their own bungalow. “I have to say that I’m a little hurt,” he said when she had told him everything, “that you kept this to yourself.”

  “Would you have really wanted to hear about it?” Amy asked him.

  She walked into the bedroom and he followed her there. She sat down heavily on the bed, parting the netting and lying back. Above her, the fan spun slowly, and she lay looking at it, not moving her head at all, imagining what it would be like to be permanently fixed in position like this.

  “You always used to tell me things,” Leo said, as though it were proof, somehow, that he had been wronged. Amy rolled her eyes toward him, but could only see the edges of his face. She sat up.

  “I know,” Amy said. “So did you.”

  “I tell you things,” he insisted.

  Their arguments were never protracted. Instead, in short bursts they usually stated their case like lawyers who had been told by a judge to wrap it up. Not like lawyers; they were lawyers. She still had her degree and her license from the New York State Bar buried somewhere in a drawer with all the other reminders of the past that she had held on to. So the small argument began and then mostly ended as the sun lowered over the Virgin Islands, and later on they heard the stuttering of the helicopter landing, but neither of them remarked on it. Amy knew that Leo was a little upset and even baffled, but that he would get over these feelings by morning. They were left with two more days here with the Ramseys, during which, in public, they apparently could not discuss Ian Janeway in any other way except as “the guy who had been in the paragliding accident.”

  Even Penny would barely discuss the subject that night before dinner, when Amy approached her alone on the steps leading to the outdoor dining room. Amy whispered, “I went to see him.”

  “Thank you.” Penny looked around to make sure no one was listening and continued to walk up the steps with Amy beside her.

  “He was in a lot of pain, but they gave him something. He was going to have an MRI and maybe surgery in San Juan. I came by your bungalow to tell you, but you were sleeping.”

  “I’m glad you saw him.”

  “A few minutes ago,” Amy went on, “I asked at the infirmary if they could put through a call to the hospital. You know, find out his status? They said they would, but there’s nothing yet.”

  “I appreciate it.” Then Penny added, “But I can’t talk about it anymore. Obviously.”

  “I know. I won’t say anything else here. We can take a walk on the beach later.”

  “No. I mean I just can’t. Not anymore.”

  “Ever?” Amy laughed, because it seemed comical in that moment. What would they do, forever keep silent about it? Maybe, she thought, the theme of “Ian and Penny” would shift to become “Injured Ian and Penny”; the two women would adapt their conversations accordingly. Except Penny was saying no even to this.

  Penny shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  “How can we never discuss it?” Amy asked. “This thing happened, and he’s alone in some hospital, and he might be paralyzed. I know it’s an awful situation,” Amy went on. “But shouldn’t you see him again or call the hospital and have them tell him you called or something?”

  “I have to figure it out. I’m in a fishbowl here. I’m very confused.”

  Another waiter approached them now to take their drink orders. Penny tilted her head up toward him with relief, and in a small voice she described the way she would like her margarita prepared.

  At dinner a little later in the torchlight, Greg Ramsey brought up the subject of the accident they’d witnessed,
while beside him Penny sat and ate a piece of some kind of broiled white fish. Amy could almost not bear sitting there like this, yet they would have to endure several more meals until the vacation was over. She’d inquired at the hotel desk whether it was possible to leave early—she would have made some excuse and just gotten them out of there—but she was told that all the flights out of St. Doe’s were booked. So here they were. “I never thought of paragliding as dangerous,” Greg said easily. “I tried it last spring when we were on Turks and Caicos, and it seemed pretty straightforward to me. You can get in trouble with the thermals and with wind shear, but you’re supposed to have a hook knife ready. I don’t think that guy knew what he was doing at all.”

  “When I’m twelve I’m going to be allowed to paraglide,” Holden announced to the table.

  “Can I do it when I’m twelve?” Mason asked his parents.

  “No,” said Amy.

  “It scares the women,” Greg said. “Penny’s been keyed up about the accident all day. But I’ve seen much worse. I once saw a terrible water-skiing accident. It was really something.”

  A great deal of wine was drunk that night all around the outdoor dining room. The other families and couples from their various scattered points on the globe ordered more alcohol than usual. They had all seen something today that was disturbing to them, and the excitement of it had taken them by surprise too. Someone at another table could be heard talking about freak accidents: how an errant wind could send a vehicle tumbling, a parasail blowing, a body falling.

  The next morning, Penny came out onto the beach and positioned herself on the chaise beside Amy. Amy waited, but Penny did not bring up the subject of Ian. She didn’t say anything at all, and so Amy didn’t either. Regardless of what now happened to poor Ian Janeway—whether he recovered, or died of an infection after his surgery, or became a paraplegic—this would be the way it was. The accident was the end, the message sent to Penny about how unstable Ian was: Imagine appearing like that on St. Doe’s when her family was with her! She would let go of him swiftly, and she and Amy would talk of other things.