Or that night was the first night on the trip I was nauseous. I ran for the bathroom in the middle of fighting. He crouched beside me while I dry heaved, brushed one strand of hair out of my face and then another, never grabbing the whole bunch.
Because I felt sick sex that night would be off the table, and maybe that’s why we curled into each other, the heat of him wrapped around me itchy as wool, my eyes on the shadowy hotel wall and its green and white stripes. We held hands and he worked his nails against my palm. The feeling gave me goose bumps at first, but his nails lost track of me, got stuck in their own rhythmic rut of scratching. And then he told me that Ruth had cancer, that she needed a hysterectomy. It did not look good, but she had time. Enough time to drink and paint all day, and to see her sisters.
Ruth didn’t talk during the drive the next day. I wiped the thread of drool that hung from Luke’s mouth. I listened to the brassy tap of Jay’s class ring on the wheel. In Georgia, we pulled toward a sign with a painted peach. I pretended to be asleep as Jay paid for a bushel. Ruth had her head tipped to the side as though she were also asleep, but when I glanced over I could see the whites of her eyes through her dark glasses.
“For you, my Georgia peach,” Jay said to her, passing the hard peaches around. Jay and I gnawed their woody white flesh, working them down to their pits. We threw the stones out the windows. Ruth nibbled hers, then peeled at its skin. Luke put his peach between us and it rolled onto the floor, where it would pinball around for days before lodging under the seat to fill the car with sweet ripening, then rotting.
* * *
The thruway to the beach house had ocean on either side. Luke woke and begged Jay to pull over. The sedan jittered onto the rumble strip. Luke pulled me out to the breezy breakdown lane.
He dashed across the street and his head dipped out of view below a mound of blown sand. I slid sideways down the plunging dune, but he was already yards ahead, tacking toward the water, so I stopped chasing and gathered his trail of stripped clothes. There were crabs everywhere, skittering in my peripheral vision, tiny curls of quicksand where they burrowed. He ran into the water and swells washed over him.
“Get in here!” he cried. My pain had returned and morphed into a diffuse throb in my pelvis, stretching awake now that we were out of the car.
I was in up to my ankles when Ruth came running from behind me, and teetered into the surf with a wild crashing and laughter, too recklessly, I worried, and she was too small, the white froth at her knees.
“Watch it, Mom!” Luke yelled. He was way out in the water, bobbing like a blond buoy. A wave was coming for her.
She was in up to her chest. It took me so long to run for her, through the water. I wrapped my arms around her waist and held tight. Her hands went up against the wall of the wave before it slammed down, pitching us apart. When I surfaced she was back in the shallows, still lipsticked, smiling loose and wide.
The beach house was crowded with aunts. They came at me with flabby arms to fold me into hugs. They had the pillowy busts of nurses. With her clothes slicked to her skin, Ruth looked like a little boy beside them, all ribs and hip bones and her tiny breasts. She flapped her collar, trying to hide the sheerness of her wet blouse. Jay squeezed her neck as though he were scruffing a kitten. My little mermaid, he called her. The aunts brought her a satin robe and she sat draped on the arm of the couch, her glass fogged by chilled white wine.
Ruth’s sisters arranged that Luke and I sleep in separate beds. I stayed on the first floor, on a pullout couch in front of a television and video console. On the days it rained Luke’s little cousins lay on my bed all afternoon. They left behind a dusting of sand, peeled sunburn, and chips that I’d shake from my sheet before sleeping.
Luke’s bedroom was on the fourth floor. He swam in the ocean, or he tossed a Frisbee, dashing back and forth on the hot sand. He was a fast runner, and he tanned, and grew a patchy beard while I watched from the shore, achy and overwarm, my body shaded by an umbrella and wrapped in a towel. Ruth sat with me and watched the swimmers and the water.
Luke and I had sex once, in the outdoor shower while the aunts and cousins beat each other with bright foam noodles in the pool. The shower stall walls were made out of splintery compressed woodchips. It smelled the way my gerbil’s cage used to smell. The water, from inside the sunning garden hose, was only warm for the first few moments. When I made a noise he put his hand over my mouth. Someone had left a hot water bottle full of sweet tea to brew on the edge of the bench inside the shower, and when I knocked the bench it flopped to the ground and wiggled there.
Lying on the couch reading with him end to end, I reached out and found his earlobe with my toes and held it. When I was little I used to thread my blanket between my toes so I could fall asleep.
We ate Cajun shrimps. Ruth sat across from me at the dinner table, picking apart her shrimp carefully while the rest of them got sauce all over their bibs.
The aunts cackled around us, stirring up bowls of different sour cream — based dips. A projector whirred overhead. Luke held me between his legs, and Jay took a picture. I still have that picture, his sunburned face next to my pallid face. Someone switched the lights off and a hazy old film began to play on the wall. The film was sped up, and the family was rushing around the campfire, storming into the lake, the teeter totter moving frantically up and down, and everywhere the aunts, as girls, in stripes and bobs, flashing smiles.
The movie was silent, but a chorus rose in the room each time a new girl stepped into the frame.
“That’s me!” one aunt shrieked, and another said, “No, that’s cousin Wanda, what an awful haircut. She was with us that summer. That’s that yellow bathing suit, remember?” Wanda, her face a blur, dashed from the camera into the lake and dove under, but before she could surface the camera swung away. The older girls scattered and the little girls hammed into the lens, and in the distance was dark-haired, smudge-eyed Ruth in a pastel-green shirt worn as a dress. First she was leaning against the trunk of a tree with big leaves and later I caught her behind the crowded campfire, dipping plates from a white stack into a basin of water.
“Where’s Ruth?” yelled the aunt who had mistaken herself for Wanda. “Ruth, do you see yourself?” But Ruth wasn’t sitting on the couch where she had been. I didn’t know where she had gone, and I didn’t say anything about recognizing her because maybe it wasn’t her after all, though I knew how she leaned into her hips and how her hair must have fallen then, limp and wavy, over one shoulder.
The film stuttered and the yellow tinge and quiet of the sixties clicked to a different reel with a downpour that sounded like a swarm of wasps. A man with a big red beard walked on-screen carrying a blond baby in a slicker, and the man was Jay, though his face was fatter, and the baby was Luke, probably two years old. Jay sat Luke on an inflatable raft inside a thin, swift stream of rainwater that ran through a flooded lawn. The baby laughed as the raft bounced on the water, away from the camera, and Ruth’s voice off-screen said, “Please, don’t hurt my baby, don’t hurt my baby.” Whoever was behind the camera had a low laugh that shook everything.
And then the scenes kept changing. In one there was cake, and dated poufs of hair in scrunchies, a woman with acid-washed jeans scooping ice cream. I realized I was going to be sick.
The upstairs hallway was carpeted and dark, and, away from the shrieking family, I could hear the waves coming in. Outside it was raining, harder and harder against the window. I put my hand to my mouth and bolted for the bathroom and there was Ruth, sloshing to cover herself in the tub.