The Vacation

by T. M. Logan

  “Sean,” I said, “I don’t think that was how it—”

  “I saw what he did,” Sean said. “Grabbing at her.”

  Alistair, drying himself with the towel, cocked his head slightly to one side and gave Sean a concerned smile. His counseling face, Jennifer had called it once.

  “I don’t think that’s quite how it happened, Sean.”

  “Fuck off! I saw you do it.”

  Ethan climbed out of the pool and Jake followed him, both keeping an eye on their dad in case punches started being thrown for real.

  I could see that Alistair was in an impossible situation. What was he supposed to say? It wasn’t me who grabbed your daughter’s breasts, Sean, it was my son. And I was trying to stop my other son from punching his lights out, OK?

  I put a hand on my husband’s arm.

  “Sean?”

  He seemed not to notice, jabbing the smaller man in the chest with his forefinger. Once. Twice.

  “You’re full of shit.”

  Alistair looked down at the finger.

  “You know,” he said, his voice shaking slightly, “technically that’s assault.”

  “I tell you what, you put your hands on my daughter again and I’ll show you what assault is. I’ll technically take your fucking head off, how about that?”

  Russ stood up and put both arms between them, shifting the two men apart slightly.

  “Lads, lads,” he said, his voice slow with alcohol. “Let’s all step back and take a minute, shall we?”

  Sean was immovable, a solid six-foot wall of anger.

  “I’m warning you,” he said, jabbing his finger at Alistair. “You stay away from her.”

  Russ put a hand on each man’s shoulder.

  “Lads, we’re supposed to be on vacation, having a lovely jolly old time. Not challenging each other to fistfights.” Almost to himself, he added, “However entertaining that might be to watch.”

  Alistair turned away, slipping his glasses on.

  “Come on, boys, into the villa now I think.”

  Jake and Ethan, heads down and absorbed in their phones, had already begun walking away toward the villa. Towels over their shoulders, faces lit by the glow of phone screens. Abruptly they both stopped, frozen in place.

  Looking at each other, then back at their phones.

  54

  Russ

  Russ held the book in his hands, but he didn’t really need to: he had read The Tiger Who Came to Tea so many times he knew the words by heart. He thought Odette probably did, too, but she was finally drifting off now. It was her third Daddy story of the night and she was just about surrendering to sleep, her blinks getting longer and longer as he sat on the floor by her bed and turned the pages.

  At the end of the story he sat with his daughter a moment, watching her breathe, feeling himself sobering up a little. Feeling the familiar pang of guilt because he liked this part of the day, he liked it when she went to sleep—but shouldn’t he prefer it when she was awake? Why couldn’t he be better with her during the day, more patient? Why couldn’t he make the most of spending quality time with his only child?

  He resolved, as he always did, to do better tomorrow.

  Kissing her gently on the forehead, he backed slowly out of the room and dimmed the light.

  He went downstairs and grabbed a fresh bottle of Kronenbourg from the kitchen, dumped a large bag of tortilla chips into a bowl, and carried them both out toward the balcony.

  “Russ?”

  He turned toward the voice, squinting into the shadows at the far end of the living room. Alistair was there, sitting on his own, hunched in one of the big armchairs.

  “Hey, Alistair.”

  “Have you got a second?”

  “Sure.” Russ walked over to him. “What’s up?”

  “About … what happened earlier. I just wanted to say thank you for stepping in.”

  “Oh, that?” He shrugged. “No worries, it was nothing.”

  Alistair circled a fingertip around the rim of his almost-empty wineglass.

  “All the same, I appreciate what you did.” Speaking more softly, he added, “I’m not sure it would have ended well for me if you hadn’t got involved.”

  Russ studied him for a moment, hearing the slight tremor in the older man’s voice.

  “Much ado about nothing,” Russ said with a grin, checking over his shoulder to make sure no one was listening in. “Are you … all right, Alistair?”

  “Oh yes, of course. Right as rain. Never better.”

  Russ picked up the wine bottle from the table and topped off Alistair’s glass without asking.

  “Thanks,” Alistair said. “It wasn’t what it looked like, you know. In the pool, I mean. I didn’t do what Sean—”

  “I know, buddy. I saw what happened. Ethan just needs to…” Russ struggled for the right words. “You know, learn, mature, whatever. You can talk to him about this stuff, he’s still a young lad, isn’t he?”

  Alistair took a large sip of red wine.

  “He has a lot of violence in him.”

  “Ethan?”

  “Sean.”

  “You think?”

  “We all saw it earlier, didn’t we? There’s a great deal of tension there, unresolved anxiety seeking a violent outlet.”

  “More like the booze and the heat making everyone snappy,” Russ said.

  “Aggravating factors, perhaps.”

  “I mean, there’s violence in all of us, isn’t there? If someone pushes the right buttons.”

  Alistair shook his head. “It shouldn’t be that close to the surface. Sean is on a perilously short fuse this week, from what I’ve observed.”

  Russ drank half his beer in one long pull, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  “Tell me something,” he said. “Do you analyze everybody you meet?”

  “Occupational hazard. Sorry.”

  “So what’s your analysis of me?”

  “Well, if you really—”

  “Actually, you know what?” Russ held a hand up, cutting him off. “Forget I said that; don’t think I want to know. Let’s just have a few more drinks and enjoy the evening, shall we?”

  “That sounds like a good plan.”

  “Are you coming out onto the balcony? We’d better rejoin the ladies.”

  Alistair nodded reluctantly.

  “Yes,” he said, standing up. “I suppose we should.”

  55

  Thankfully, Sean didn’t react when the other two men reappeared on the far side of the balcony. I sensed him looking over, his eyes following Alistair and Russ as they sat down with drinks and snacks from the kitchen. Sean tensed, but didn’t make a move, didn’t say anything that might reignite their confrontation from a couple hours earlier. After a moment he went back to the cards he was shuffling, mechanically dealing out another hand of trumps to Rowan, Jennifer, and me.

  A voice cut across us, coming from the vineyard gate.

  “Guys? Can I get a little help, please?”

  All eyes turned toward the sound. A couple had appeared at the edge of the garden, arm in arm, but deep in shadow. One much taller than the other, making painfully slow progress up the hill toward us.

  Jennifer moved first, stumbling toward them.

  “Jake?” she said, her voice rising. “Jake, is that you?”

  The couple stepped into a pool of light at the edge of the garden. Izzy, her arm slung awkwardly around Jake’s skinny waist. A third figure—Ethan, I realized—trailed after them before lying down flat in the grass.

  Jennifer broke into a run, with me close behind.

  “Jake?” she shouted. “Oh my God, Jakey, are you all right?”

  He groaned in reply, his head lolling from side to side. Jennifer and I reached him and took an arm each, as Izzy disentangled herself.

  “They were down in the gorge,” she said.

  “Jakey?” Jennifer said again. “Talk to me. Are you ill?”

  Jake groaned aga
in, put his hands on his knees and vomited noisily into the grass at his feet.

  He was in a bad way. Jennifer and I led him to a lounger where he sat heavily and retched again, the stench of spilled wine and fresh vomit surrounding him like an overpowering cologne. Alistair wandered over, surveying his elder son with a rueful smile.

  “Oh dear,” he said. “Bit of overindulgence, Jake? Still, a useful lesson learned for you and your brother, eh? I’ll get some water from the kitchen.”

  He headed off back toward the villa.

  Jennifer knelt down, putting her hands on Jake’s knees. “Talk to me, honey, what happened? Are you hurt? Did you fall down, did you bang your head?”

  Rowan and I exchanged a confused glance. It seemed painfully obvious to me why her son was as sick as a dog.

  Jake groaned, a deep guttural sound like an animal in a trap. Jennifer didn’t flinch.

  “Oh dear, Jakey, what are we going to do with you? Was it something you ate at dinner?” She turned to the rest of us. “What did we have for dinner, the pasta and chicken? Maybe the chicken wasn’t fully cooked through?”

  Izzy sighed and spoke up. “It’s not the chicken, Jennifer. It’s the St.-Chinian. Two empty bottles of wine down there with them in the gorge, and Jake had the lion’s share, apparently.”

  Jennifer scowled up at her. “We don’t know that for sure, do we?” More quietly, she said, “Have you been taking your medication, Jakey?”

  He gave another noncommittal grunt.

  “Oh, you poor boy,” Jennifer said, rubbing his back. “You poor, poor boy.”

  I went to check on Ethan, lying a few yards away. He was stretched out on the coarse grass, flat on his back, eyes open to the night sky. I knelt down next to him.

  “Are you OK, Ethan? Your dad’s gone for some water. Do you want to be sick?”

  He turned his head, looking at me coolly.

  “M’all right.”

  “You sure?”

  “Just going to have a little sleep.”

  “How much did you have?”

  “Only a bit. Maybe half a bottle.”

  “Really?”

  “Jake had a lot more than me.” He blinked slowly. “The wine.”

  “He’s brought most of it back up again, apparently.”

  “Hmm.” He snorted, looking back up at the canopy of stars overhead. “He was on a mission.”

  “Looks like you both were.” I thought back to my teenage years, booze smuggled out of my parents’ house to drink in the park; laughing at anything, everything, laughing until it hurt, until tears came. Jake and Ethan didn’t look like they’d been laughing. “What was the mission?”

  A long, slow blink. Then another. He mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

  I leaned closer. “What, Ethan?”

  He closed his eyes. “What’s that word again? That Bastille song?”

  He wasn’t making sense.

  “What song, Ethan?”

  The word came out slowly, one syllable at a time.

  “Oblivion.”

  I looked across to Jake, motionless on the grass. Mission accomplished, it seemed to me. Whatever Jennifer had said to him about the incident earlier today—with Daniel being left on his own in the villa while the brothers went for a joyride—I guessed that Jake had had an extreme reaction to being told off. Or maybe it was something to do with the water polo incident.

  “Just stay here, your dad’ll be back in a minute.”

  Ethan gave the slightest of nods. “No hurry.”

  I headed back up the hill, where Jennifer, Izzy, Russ, and Sean now made a semicircle of concerned adults around the stricken Jake, lying on his side in the recovery position.

  “I don’t think Ethan’s as bad as…” I indicated his older brother. “Nothing a good sleep and a couple of Tylenol won’t sort out.”

  No one spoke. I was suddenly aware of a strange, charged atmosphere, a weird tension between the two women.

  Jennifer nodded at me and gave a tight smile before returning her attention to Izzy.

  “It just seems to have taken an awfully long time for you to get back here, that’s all I’m saying.”

  The note of accusation in her voice was unmistakable. Izzy put her hands on her hips, frowned.

  “A simple ‘thank you’ would suffice, you know.”

  “Thank you,” Jennifer said grudgingly. “But what were you doing all that time?”

  “What do you think we were doing?” Izzy said. “We were walking back up from the gorge, the three of us. I tried calling to let you know but the phone signal kept dropping out.”

  “It’s not a half-hour walk, though.”

  “Have you seen the state of him? He’s absolutely plastered. And every time we stopped for him to be sick, he wanted to have a chat.”

  Jennifer looked up sharply. “A chat? With you?”

  “Yes. With me.”

  “About what?”

  “All kinds of stuff. Drunken stream of consciousness, mostly.”

  “Lots of garbage, most likely.”

  “Some.”

  “Probably best ignored.”

  Izzy gave her a strange look—something like pity, or concern, or disappointment—just for a second. And then it was gone.

  “Probably,” she said.

  Sean put his hand on Izzy’s arm. “The most important thing is, Izzy found them and we’ve got them back now, right? That’s the main thing. How about we get these boys inside now?”

  Seeing Sean touch her so casually, so easily, I felt a sharp pang of jealousy.

  How quick you are to defend her, to be on her side, to touch her skin. Even in front of me. Even when I’m standing right here next to you both. How can you be so brazen about it, so obvious? How did you think I wouldn’t find out, sooner or later?

  Alistair reappeared, with two pint glasses full of water.

  “Here we go,” he said breezily, handing the glasses to Jennifer. “Now, who’s going to help me carry the patient indoors?”

  Russ held a hand up, lighting another cigarette.

  “Not me, pal, I’ve only just got past shitty diapers. I don’t do puke-stained teenagers, not yet.”

  Alistair turned to my husband, as if nothing untoward had happened between them this evening.

  “Sean? Could you lend a hand?”

  Sean glared at him, the anger still etched on his face.

  “Aye,” he grunted. “Come on, then.”

  With each of the men taking an arm, they propped Jake gently on his feet and began walking him back to the villa.

  56

  Daniel

  Daniel couldn’t get off to sleep. He’d tried all the things his dad suggested—counting backward from a thousand, making his Christmas list, imagining the highway journey to Grandad’s house in Reading—but none of them worked. There had been too much noise, for one thing. Voices that sounded like they were laughing or having one of those really loud and long and boring conversations that grown-ups seemed to do a lot when they drank wine. Then there had been the shouting.

  He swung his legs out of bed, took the package from his bedside drawer, and padded across to the door, the tiled floor cool against the soles of his bare feet.

  The corridor was dark, just the little night-light glowing near the stairs. He walked across and two doors along, hoping that her door would be open a little bit. But it was shut. He stopped and listened, pressing his ear to the smooth wood. Nothing.

  Please don’t be locked.

  When he was small he would sometimes do this when he had a bad dream, when Mum and Dad weren’t in bed yet. He would creep across the landing and climb into his sister’s bed, and she would make up silly stories that made him forget the bad dream so he would be able to go back to sleep again. He always woke up in his own bed again the next morning, which was kind of a bit like magic. She hadn’t done it for a long time, though, not since she started getting tall. That was when she’d started locking her bedroom door. He was
n’t even allowed in her bedroom at home anymore—it made her go properly mad. But they weren’t at home, so maybe she wouldn’t mind.

  He pushed down on her door handle and it opened with a soft click.

  Daniel stood in the doorway, one hand behind his back. It was quieter on this side of the villa, away from the swimming pool. The room was dark, the only light from the soft glow of a phone screen.

  “Lucy?” he whispered.

  There was no reply. As his eyes began to adjust to the light, he made out the line of her back, turned to him as she lay in the big double bed. She was glued to her phone. As usual.

  “Lucy?” he said again.

  She shifted slightly, so he could see the left side of her face illuminated by the phone’s pale glow.

  “What?” she said sharply.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Obviously not.”

  “I couldn’t sleep with the grown-ups all shouting downstairs.”

  “What do you want, Daniel?”

  He started toward her bed. “It’s a surprise.”

  “Did I say you could come into my room?”

  He stopped. “I’ve got something for you.”

  She sighed. “What?”

  He came over to stand by her bed.

  “I’m sorry about doing the film of you the other day, with Dad’s camera. I didn’t mean for you to be so upset.” He brought his hand out from behind his back with a flourish, holding out a bag of strawberry bonbons. “I got you these. To apologize.”

  “Oh.”

  He stood there, holding out the bag for what seemed like a long time before she reached up a hand and took it from him. He smiled and put his hands in the pockets of his pajama trousers, feeling glad that he had made the effort, even if it had cost him half of his vacation pocket money.

  A funny thing happened then.

  Very softly, very quietly, his big sister started to cry.

  Daniel frowned in the dark. That wasn’t what he had meant to happen; she was supposed to be happy.

  “Don’t you like them?” he said. “I thought you liked those ones. They’ve always been your favorites.”