Sometimes it was pleasant to sit in silence with a near stranger, both of you lost in your own thoughts. Once the pressure to speak was gone, the quiet could hover for hours, covering you in a sort of gossamer cloak, like two people staring out a moving train’s window. Both Lawrence and Carmen found that they liked each other far more than they imagined they might, and they quite happily sat together without speaking until the sunset was complete.
Franny was in bed with an ice pack on her head, where a large goose egg had already formed. Antoni had driven her home himself, a ride that she dearly wished she remembered for more than just her own throbbing skull. Antoni tried to explain to Charles, who answered the door, what had happened, but there wasn’t much to say. She had hit herself in the head with the butt of her tennis racquet and briefly knocked herself unconscious. She would be fine, Antoni was sure, though he admitted that he hadn’t seen it before, not such a direct hit on one’s own scalp. Antoni had been very sweet about the whole thing—when Antoni had his sunglasses and baseball hat off, Charles could see what had made Franny’s heart go aflutter. He was still gorgeous, and spoke so quickly with his beautiful mouth, Charles almost didn’t even care what he was saying, just so long as he kept talking. She had a strong swing, Antoni said, and smiled. They would reschedule, if she wished, and he would call to check on her. Antoni wrote down the name of his personal doctor for Charles and then left, getting into a waiting car driven by one of his employees, who had followed them up the mountain.
They’d cooked and eaten dinner without her—Charles delivered a plate to her bedside and returned when Franny had taken a few bites. Carmen was eager to help with the dishes, even more so in Franny’s absence, but Jim shooed her away from the sink. He pushed his sleeves up to his elbows and turned on the faucet. “You go on,” he said. “I’ll do it.” Jim spoke with authority, and Carmen backed away, hands raised.
“You wash, I’ll dry,” Charles said, setting out a dish towel on the countertop. Bobby had vanished into his bedroom, and Sylvia was sitting at the dining room table, hypnotized by her laptop. The house was as quiet as ever, though outside the wind was picking up, and occasionally branches tapped against the windows.
Jim dampened the sponge and dove in. They worked silently for a few minutes, an assembly line of two. At the table, Sylvia gave a loud snort and then a louder laugh. Both Jim and Charles turned to her for an explanation, but her eyes stayed glued to the screen.
“I do not understand the Internet,” Charles said. “It’s a giant void.”
Jim agreed. “A limitless void. Hey, Syl,” he said. “How’s it going over there?”
Sylvia looked up. She had the crazed expression of a child who’d stared directly into the sun, blinking and temporarily blind. “What are you guys talking about?”
“Nothing, dear,” Jim said, laughing. Sylvia went back to the computer screen and started typing quickly.
Charles shrugged. “At least she could always get a job as a typist.”
“I don’t think those exist anymore. Administrative assistants, maybe, but not typists.”
“Franny seems okay.” They made eye contact for a moment while Jim handed off a dripping plate.
“Does she?” Jim wiped the back of his wet hand across his forehead. “I really can’t tell anymore. You’d know better than I.”
Charles clutched the plate in both hands, turning it over and over until it was dry. “I think she does. That bump isn’t pretty, but it’ll heal.”
“Do we need to sue that tennis player, whatshisface? I never liked him. That awful ponytail, now this.” Another lawsuit would balance out his own, force them to band together. Jim imagined himself and Franny striding into a Mallorcan courtroom, the bump on Franny’s head now the size of a tennis ball, hard proof of Antoni’s negligence.
“And how are you?” Charles asked. He purposefully looked toward the dishes, now dry and ready to be put away, and toward his wet hands, which he toweled off.
Sylvia had started playing a video, the sound of which blasted out of her tinny computer speakers. She was off in teenager land, content and miserable in equal measure, oblivious to the trials of any human heart that wasn’t her own. Jim turned the sink back on, though there were no more dishes to wash.
“I have no idea,” he said.
Charles placed his hand on Jim’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. He wanted to tell Jim that everything would be fine, and that his marriage was as solid as it had ever been, but lying seemed worse than offering a small show of sympathy.
Day Eight
THE PREVIOUS EVENING’S THREATENING WIND HAD blossomed into full-on rain. Gemma hadn’t warned them about the possibility of inclement weather, and Franny was furious. She hobbled from the bed to the window and watched skinny raindrops ping against the taut surface of the swimming pool. It was Saturday, one of their few weekend days in Mallorca, not that there was much of a delineation between the week and the weekend. Still, Franny felt cheated, and planned to go downstairs and complain. First, she hobbled back around the bed the long way and into the bathroom, where she was so shocked by her own reflection that she actually yelped. After waiting a moment to make sure that no one was coming to her rescue—another thing to complain about—Franny moved closer to the mirror.
She had somehow managed to hit herself with her racquet, that much Franny understood, hard enough to knock herself to the ground. The bump rose out of her center part, a lone volcanic mountain in an otherwise peaceful valley. “Ugh,” Franny said. She tied her black robe more tightly around her waist, as if that would distract anyone, and swanned her way down the stairs as slowly as Norma Desmond, wishing for the very first time that she’d thought to pack a turban.
The chest in the living room had been well stocked with board games: Monopoly and Risk, Snakes and Ladders. Charles had made a brief but impassioned speech in favor of a game of charades but was quickly shot down. They decided on Scrabble, and Lawrence was winning, being the best at math, which everyone knew was all it took to truly succeed. He knew all the two-letter words, the QI and the ZA, and played them without apology, even when it made the board so dense that it was difficult for anyone else to take a turn. Bobby, Sylvia, and Charles all stared hard at their letters, as if simple attention alone would improve their odds.
“I’m pretty sure you’re cheating,” Bobby said. “I wish we had a Scrabble dictionary. Sylvia, go look one up on your computer.”
“Screw you. You’re just mad you’re losing,” she said, rearranging the tiles on her rack. She had two O’s. Moo. Boo. Loo. Fool. Pool. Polio. Sylvia always played the first word she saw, and didn’t care if she set up the next player for a double word score. She laid down MOO. “Give me seven points, please.”