The Sunshine When She's Gone: A Novel

by Thea Goodman

  John woke feeling sticky. He sat up to check on Clara. She looked as if a vanilla milk shake had been spilled over her chin and chest. The once-fragrant air smelled sour. He watched helplessly as her tiny body heaved and more of the white substance oozed out of her mouth. A sickening doom filled his chest. She could not be ill. He could not fail. He sat the wobbly baby upright and tried to wipe her off with the sheets. Her sweet head lolled to one side with exhaustion. Her head seemed so large on her neck, like a cantaloupe on a thread.

  It must have been the cow milk from last night. He remembered Ines and Veronica speaking with authority about the horrors of cow milk, how it was the hardest milk to digest. Formula, they decreed, was even worse. It was an idea that implied that what they—all four of them—had consumed as infants was not good enough. Arthur and John had merely glanced at each other to note their shared resignation.

  Now John was alone with Clara and she was sick from cow milk. He picked up her small, lightly trembling body. He’d never seen her this sick. Her limbs were frail as kindling in his arms. He undressed her, placed a thick towel in the sink, and laid her in it. He rinsed her skin with handfuls of warm water. “Dada,” she said mournfully. Her skin was silken, and she looked up at him with a tight line of energy that implored him to stay with her, to help her. When Clara was clean, he wrapped her in a fresh towel and held her close to stop her trembling. Her cheek was fiery against his. In the diaper bag, he found the pink liquid medicine, filled the dropper, and gave her a dose. Veronica had insisted they keep some Tylenol in the diaper bag. Alone, he could see that she often knew best.

  Frangipani was Veronica’s flower. The one time they’d been here together, she snapped a blossom from the tree and tucked it into her bun. Later, when she left his bed—for they were unmarried, guests of her parents, and not permitted to share one—he’d found the flower bruised and damp against the white sheet.

  At the breakfast buffet, he wore his dark glasses and stepped into line. They had to have goat milk; there were goats surrounding this place. He gave Clara some papaya, which Veronica had told him was good for digestion, and she ate it off his fingers hungrily. A good sign, he thought. Then he went to the cereal buffet with Clara on his hip. “Do you have goat milk, by any chance?” he asked a server.

  The man smiled at John and said, “Cow milk here, sir.”

  “I know, but do you also have any goat milk? Or do you know where I can get some?” A beam of sun cast prisms on the glass pitchers between them.

  “We don’t have goat milk, sir.” In that bright surreal moment, two goats walked by just behind the breakfast pavilion and brayed.

  “You’ve got to. I mean, look!” John laughed, pointing, but the server remained impassive. Clara was batting at the light, trying to lean over and out of her father’s arms to touch it or some other evanescent but fascinating thing.

  “I understand your request, sir, but we don’t have goat milk.”

  “Someone has to have it, somewhere. It’s for the baby.” Clara lunged almost out of his arms, and he let her grab a piece of butter in golden fail, stacked in a bowl of ice.

  “Let me get the manager for you, sir. Maybe she can be of assistance.” The server walked off very slowly, leaving the cow milk sweating in an iced pitcher, where a fly darted around the rim. Clara’s fever seemed to be lifting, and she kicked her legs with delight when John pointed at the goats. She squeezed the pat of butter and it began to melt in her fist.

  “Dadoodoo dadooo daddooo da!” she said.

  John was thrilled. She didn’t know what she was saying, but one day—and they were getting nearer to it—she would call him Daddy. “Did you say Daddy?”

  “Dadooooooo!” she said, while a long string of spit stretched from her chin.

  He took her back to their table, and they spoke and smiled at each other.

  “Dadooo,” she said.

  “Daddy.”

  “Dadooo.”

  “Say Daddy.”

  “Dadoooooooo.”

  “Close enough.”

  The drug had worked. Within twenty minutes she’d recovered. Her babbling restored his confidence. When the manager finally arrived, it felt like an interruption. She stood before him, very erect, with a regal forehead and a scent of talcum powder.

  “Hello, Mr. Reed?” she said.

  “Dadoo,” he finished saying to Clara, and then addressed the manager. “Oh, hello.”

  “How may I help you today?”

  “I was looking for goat milk for my daughter. That’s what she drinks.”

  “I’m sorry we don’t provide that, Mr. Reed, but we do provide cow milk. May I go get some for you, put it in her bottle?” She reached for the bottle with elegant brown fingers.

  “I think cow milk makes her sick. But there are goats—I mean, if you could tell me how to get to the town, to a store, a grocery store.”

  She looked amused and folded her arms over her chest as if that were an impossible proposition. “That is a very uncommon request. We strive to give you all you need here at the hotel, all the best foods that we have flown in.”

  It was absurd to fly food in to a place where you could grow anything. “Okay, but if I needed to get some—”

  “We don’t get everything here in our stores. We import. I will get the concierge for you, sir. Maybe he can help you with your shopping.”

  “I don’t want to shop,” he said to Clara once the manager left. She looked at him with total understanding and cooed. He watched as the manager stopped at the cereal bar. She poured some milk into a small glass and sniffed it.

  Clara seemed to have completely recovered. Maybe it wasn’t the milk. Maybe it was something in that okra stew. He did not want Ines and Veronica to be right, and because Clara needed a bottle—she was grabbing the empty thing and tilting it to her lips—he went to the cereal bar and poured cow milk in her bottle. She dove at it and consumed it all quickly. He didn’t want to believe it was not simple. The baby is hungry; you feed her.

  John was trying to justify what he’d just done when the concierge appeared. He was wearing the same mint-green slacks, and his skin was very dark. “I see she satisfied now?”

  “Yes, she’s all right,” he said, slightly embarrassed. “Thank you.” None of this, he told himself, was rocket science.

  On the way back to their room, he stopped in the lobby to visit the business center. He immediately found several e-mails from Caroline, the administrator at Miller Equities. Miller Equities, he mouthed to himself. I’m a grown-up. I work at a company. It seemed funnier to him than anything he could imagine. He had been a boy, chasing a squirrel over the fall leaves until it ran into a muffler. How did he get here? He’d look at the work emails later: He’d been out only one day. He scanned the list for a message from Arthur Greene, but there was none. After a dull ping, Art’s message appeared on top. There was no subject heading.

  John opened it to find a single word: WHAT?

  He hovered there, his fingers poised over the keys. He despised Art’s use of all caps. It felt like an indictment. But how could he reply? He was so far away. Through the window he saw the ocean glinting in the already high sun. They had to go swimming, once, at least. Then they’d leave.

  In the room, he packed up their few belongings and busied himself for the beach, which he’d been dreaming about since they boarded the plane at Kennedy. He slathered some lotion he found in a basket in the bathroom on his pale chest and nose and all over Clara. He wanted his father to know that he’d protected her. This was something he did: conjured his dead dad at certain moments to show him his competence.

  Evan Reed, good liberal and good father, was watching, not scrutinizing, as Veronica had once characterized it. His father had been a mid-level executive in medical publishing. It was “lucrative,” Evan used to say, “but not obscene.” No, his parents felt that obscenity was John’s realm. It was laughable; aside from the support staff he was probably the least well-paid person at Miller E
quities. That said, he made almost six times what he’d earned at the Journal. He was the quiet one in the firm, gathering information behind the scenes; he effected change but never made a decision. “I’m so not a big shot,” he’d told them. “Great if I were, but I’m not by any stretch!” Evan had obstinately misunderstood this as false modesty, and Muriel liked her son better as a writer.

  John recalled the awkward announcement that he and Veronica had made as they sat around a scarred thirty-year-old picnic table in Irvington. “The Wall Street Journal is nothing to sneeze at,” Evan had said. “You’re a writer, not a money guy.” Muriel gazed down at a dish of stuffed grape leaves and covered her mouth with both hands.

  “What, Mom? Just say what you want, okay?”

  “Nothing, honey.” Muriel’s voice shook a little, as it always did, as it moved syllable by syllable with cautious intention. “It’s just that your father and I think that, well, in terms of contributing—”

  “I’m writing about big pharm!”

  His parents exchanged a private look, after which Muriel was encouraged. They had the kind of marriage that people admired, that in its exclusivity made their kids almost envious. John and his sister, Sasha, felt they could never live up to it. Even in the glowy time between Veronica and John, his parents regarded them with patronizing distraction. It was as if he and Veronica were acting at being in love, were trying it on. Muriel and Evan were so sincere, so very authentic, that everything around them was diminished.

  “We just think you write so well,” Muriel said, “and you could write about other things too, you know.”

  Their approval had escaped him. Maybe Evan could finally appreciate John now that he’d become a father, now that he was doing something, fathering, that was irrefutably good.

  But Evan had never known John as a father. He died of a heart attack when Veronica was pregnant. He’d had no prior history of heart trouble, and most of what he published was about coronary disease; John and Muriel had once confessed their shared magical belief that this particular area of Evan’s knowledge should have made a heart attack impossible.

  John adjusted Clara so her nose wasn’t smashed against the cloth of the BabyBjörn. There was always the fear of suffocation. Maybe Evan died because John decided to make money instead of write about it (or at least that was the way that Evan phrased it, and he wasn’t entirely wrong). There was an unspoken conceit; John knew from observing Veronica’s father that the rich thought they’d become rich because they were smarter, when actually they were rich because they’d aimed for money all along. They weren’t more gifted; it was what they chose.

  At thirty-one John chose, feeling both his father’s antipathy and Veronica’s father’s approbation. Soon Veronica would become pregnant. She worked for a nonprofit, and John was writing. His prestigious bylines buoyed him for a few days but never seemed to cause a strike at Pfizer or stir any publisher’s interest in a book deal. And life was expensive. Veronica wouldn’t admit it, but she was accustomed to luxury—a certain type of Italian sheet that was very soft but ripped easily, fresh flowers when she felt like them, all her food from locally sourced organic farms, and cabs—and he didn’t want to be beholden to her father, asking for loans he could never repay. John had to review all this regularly in his mind, to legitimize it, as he did now, even while on vacation.

  Vacation? Evan would say. John shrugged in defiance. And why not? He’d been on a treadmill since Clara was born; he was running to finish his work, to get home, to have a few minutes with the baby before she slept, to elicit some spark from his stony wife, to breathe. And then he did it all over again, day after day. He’d sorely needed a vacation.

  On the jagged rock steps that cleaved to the side of a cliff, holding Clara tight to his chest with one hand as the other grasped on to the prickly rope banister, he was almost content. Evan, like Joss Saperstein’s girlfriend, Adele, would wonder, Where’s Veronica? A simple enough question. John looked toward the hotel, where she would be getting dressed. John would remind Evan about sunscreen and that funny mole on her chest. Evan would nod, because he knew the literature on melanoma.

  There had been little time to grieve Evan; there had been only the future. Even on the day of the funeral, John had buried his face in Veronica’s shoulder and embraced a body that seemed to be leavening like warm bread. She’d pulled his hand to her belly to feel a kick that was forceful, adamant.

  Reaching the beach, he saw men setting up royal-blue umbrellas in the sand. It wasn’t the nicest hotel in the world, but it was trying, and its guests who wore heels on the beach and ordered Chablis were trying too.

  He was thirsty and flagged down a waiter—waiters on the beach! They’d never condone such decadence in Irvington. A waiter stood before him, perspiring in his uniform. “I’ll have a … uh … a piña colada. How’s that?”

  “That’s fine, sir.”

  John had considered saying the word virgin—it was barely ten A.M. and he hadn’t slept much in the past day or longer—but he needed his mind to stop. Plus, he’d missed Friday’s morning meeting with the principals at Miller Equities. Yes, he’d emailed his report on Lancelot Drugs, but it was too sketchy, almost threadbare, and Lloyd Miller, who was very old school, was most likely pissed at having to make do without hard copies. Miller was the same age as John but, because he was John’s boss, because he always appeared in a suit with an ironed handkerchief, he seemed older. John spread a towel on the sand, then released Clara from the Björn, placing her in the shade of a large palm. Veronica would approve.

  “Here’s your drink, sir,” the waiter said, setting it down on a tray next to a plate stacked with Pringles. For a moment John’s panic ceased.

  He looked out at the ocean. The waves curled in large turquoise tunnels, and a few, far out, were dotted with surfers. Nearby, two pale hotel guests lay on their towels like beached seals, and behind him, under the tree, a man with dreadlocks was hacking open a coconut with a pocketknife. John felt lucky again, elated to be among such beauty and warmth. Call Muriel, call Veronica, he told himself. Veronica wouldn’t want to go to Irvington—she found his well-meaning mother annoying. By mentioning Irvington in his phone message, he had bought a little more time.

  Behind him he could hear the effort of the man opening the coconut. Clara slept soundly. She looked peaceful. He rested for a moment, watching her.

  The man with the coconut walked past, offering a large chunk of the white meat to a woman in massive sunglasses. The woman shook her head and adjusted her chair so her back was to him. When the man turned around, John caught his eye. He squatted down before John with the dripping husk. “Do you want to taste this for three Beewee?” he asked.

  “I can give you a dollar. I haven’t had time to change currency.”

  “Sorry to bother you while you relax. This is a very good coconut, though. You should try it.”

  John took a piece and bit into it. It crunched and filled his mouth with unexpectedly sweet water. It was unbelievably good.

  “Would you like some more, like to buy the rest?”

  “Sure,” John said, feeling magnanimous and handing him five dollars.

  The man pocketed it slowly, trying not to appear needy. “I used to sell my pottery on the beach, but the hotel cracked down and doesn’t allow it anymore. People get offended,” he said, looking toward the woman who had turned her back to him.

  “American women get easily offended,” John said.

  The man laughed. “I’m Derek,” he said, and shook John’s hand. “You married to one, her mother?” he asked, gesturing toward the baby.

  “I am, and she hates buying things on the beach, I can assure you.”

  Derek laughed. They talked for a while. He’d gone to university in the States for a year and claimed to know all about American women. He came back to the island when his mother was dying. “Then I fell in love, got stuck here,” he said, blushing. “In a few months we’re moving to London.”

  �
��People always want to leave home—even places like this. This beautiful. I mean, you get to live here.”

  “But there’s no work here, except in tourism. I can’t—the uniforms…” He trailed off. “New York would be exceptionally cool!”

  “You’d think,” John said, remembering the constriction that would grip his throat as he stood in line at Duane Reade buying diapers, or as he made his way through packs of tourists snapping photos with their cellphones on Houston Street. The total lack of imagination in their repetitive evenings at the same places. Isabella’s for dinner again. What was so great about that?

  Clara woke up with a few little grunts and a huge stretch. John scooped her up and then noticed the odor of her diaper. Derek smiled at the baby and offered her a finger to squeeze.

  “Thank you, this is good,” John said, gesturing with the coconut.

  Derek waved goodbye with a long brown hand. “Take care, New Yorker,” he said.

  John looked up at the steep, vine-covered steps that led back to the hotel and decided to change Clara here at the beach.

  “Hey, wait,” John called out suddenly to Derek.

  Derek returned and crouched down to face him. His body emitted the strong odor of sex. “You want something else? You smoke?” Derek asked.

  “No. I do have a question, though. Do you know where the nearest grocery store is?”

  “It’s not exactly a grocery store. Not a supermarket but a small store,” he said. He wore a close-fitting green T-shirt and tight black trunks. Juice from the coconut dripped from his fingers. “I’ll show you,” he said, “if you have time.”