“Good, because now they’ll actually find food for us,” muttered Isa. “If I’m hungry, it doesn’t matter. If you’re hungry, stop everything! You might die!”
“Isa, for the love of all that’s good and holy, please knock it off,” I pleaded. “Can we be nice to each other tonight? We’re on vacation.”
“Are we, though?” said Charlotte, rolling her eyes, and Isa laughed.
“I’m glad you’re at least agreeing on something. Why don’t I call the hotel concierge to get a suggestion?” I said. “I bet a good meal will have us all feeling better.”
After a few minutes on the phone, we ended up back in Condado at a restaurant that served traditional Puerto Rican food. Shiloh immediately decided on mofongo, a dish made of mashed, well-seasoned plantains topped with meat or seafood, while I settled on the ropa vieja with a side of red rice and beans. But Isa had abandoned her menu in favor of her novel without choosing a meal, and Charlotte was scowling off into the distance.
“What is it, Char?” I asked.
“I don’t like anything they have,” she said, still looking at the wall. “Can’t you just ask them to make chicken fingers?”
“No,” said Shiloh. “You can find something on the menu to eat, or you can go hungry.”
I glanced at him, wondering if he was hangry; he didn’t usually snap like that. “Actually . . . ,” I began. Actually, she couldn’t skip meals without risking a serious dip in her blood sugar—which he knew. “What about the grilled chicken with rice and beans?” I suggested.
“Whatever,” she muttered.
“Is this about the beach earlier?” I asked.
“No.”
“It’s about you being spoiled, Charlotte,” Isa said, not glancing up from her novel.
I could feel something stirring in me. It wasn’t strong enough to qualify as anger, but it wasn’t mild enough to be mere irritation. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I would have diagnosed myself with a raging case of disappointment. Was I the only person on this vacation who remembered how fortunate we were to be able to hop on a plane to spend a week on not one but two tropical islands?
I opened my mouth, then clamped it shut just as fast, because I’d just remembered that my own mother had never broken up my arguments with Paul by telling us which one of us was in the wrong. She’d figured out early on that it was far more effective to play head cheerleader than referee.
“Isa, chicken with rice and beans work for you, too?” I said pleasantly.
“Fine,” she said from the other side of her book.
“Great!” I said, waving our server over. He took our order and asked if we wanted anything to drink. I glanced at Shiloh, who hadn’t seemed relaxed since . . . well, since the jellyfish incident, come to think of it. In fact, unless my eyes were playing tricks on me, he looked just as tense as he had in New York. I needed to turn this ship around, and fast.
“A piña colada for both of us,” I told the server.
Shiloh arched his eyebrows.
“The ibuprofen’s not cutting it,” I explained, “and hey, we’re in Puerto Rico.”
“Thank you . . . I think.”
“You’re welcome, I think. Hey, remember when you took me out for piña coladas when we went to San Juan together?” I said, hoping the reminder of those heady days would make him smile.
He broke into a grin. “You didn’t believe me, but they really were the best, weren’t they?”
“They were,” I agreed, grinning back at him.
“I heard from my buddy that the place is actually still there,” he said. “I wish our trip was a little longer.” We were spending five nights in Vieques, then another night in San Juan before flying home.
“Maybe we can come back with just the two of us,” I said, eyeing the girls. From the way they were slouched down in their chairs, you’d think we were making them sit through a trigonometry lesson. I had to remind myself that I’d planned a family vacation on purpose; they needed this as much as the rest of us did.
“What are you both looking forward to?” I asked them after the waiter delivered our piña coladas. It was a question my father used to ask Paul and me at dinner; he’d believed that even if we were just having microwaved lasagna, meals were for interacting with each other.
“Going home,” said Charlotte.
“What she said,” said Isa.
“That’s enough,” said Shiloh. His voice was low, but all business. “We’re on vacation and we are going to have a good time.”
“Aye, aye,” said Isa as Charlotte pretended to salute him.
For a second, I was on Team Twin. Forced fun—sign me up!
Then I remembered that this whole thing had been my idea.
“Let’s change the subject,” I said before taking another sip of my drink. “You still think we’ll have time to see your dad on the way back from Vieques?” I asked Shiloh, who was staring at the television over the bar. A soccer match was on, and although he was a fan, I suspected Isa and Charlotte’s behavior was the real reason his eyes were trailing a bunch of soccer players on teams he didn’t follow.
“It’ll be tight, but we’ll manage,” he said, glancing at me quickly before looking back at the screen.
“Maybe we can look for souvenirs for your friends after we get settled at Milagros’,” I said to the girls, but now they were watching the game, too. I sighed; what was wrong with good old-fashioned conversation?
A whole lot, based on the little my family said to each other after our meals arrived. Maybe that’s why, when our server appeared to see how our food was, I ordered a second drink, which I drank with gusto as everyone else continued to vegetate.
“You’re in rare form,” whispered Shiloh as we made our way back to the hotel.
“Are you suggesting I can’t walk in a straight line?” I joked, leaning against his arm. In truth, I didn’t actually like feeling tipsy, but it was easier to harness my inner Pollyanna when the world around me was all soft and fuzzy. “Anyway, I need to let my hair down at some point, right?” I said, looking over my shoulder to make sure the girls were still straggling behind.
“I guess so. I know things have been pretty intense for you lately.”
I frowned. “For all of us.”
“But your brother and Charlie’s divorce, and your dad . . .”
Boy, he really knew how to accentuate the positive. “My dad’s been dead for six months now,” I said, watching a lizard dart along the side of a wrought-iron fence.
“Do you want to talk about picking a date for the burial? We never did that before we left, you know.”
“While we’re on vacation?” I said, looking at him quizzically. “Not really.”
“Fair enough,” he said quickly before turning back to the girls. “You two coming?”
Isa nodded. But Charlotte, who was a few steps behind her, said nothing, and there was nothing behind her glassy eyes.
I was stone-cold sober and at her side faster than you can say helicopter parent. “Char, what is it?” I asked.
But I already knew that it was exactly what I’d been most afraid of since the moment she’d received her diagnosis. Her blood sugar had plummeted and was continuing to drop. Her face was pale, and she was shivering as I put an arm around her and guided her into the hotel. “How much insulin did you take?” I asked.
“The usual,” she mumbled. “I think . . . I didn’t eat enough.”
My heart was galloping in my chest. “But your plate was almost empty.”
“She put it in her napkin,” said Isa.
“Oh Charlotte,” I said. “You can’t do that.”
She started to say something but gave up before the first word came out.
“It’s okay,” I told her as we got on the elevator. “We’re here now. It’s going to be fine.”
In fact, I didn’t know she’d be fine any more than I knew how to stop elephant poaching and cure cancer. This had happened to Charlotte once before, after a socc
er game. She hadn’t eaten as much as she should’ve beforehand, and she’d been running so hard that her blood sugar had dipped perilously low before she even realized it was happening. It was quite possibly the most terrifying thing I had ever lived through.
And now it was happening again.
The elevator opened and let us onto our floor. I motioned for Shiloh to unlock the door to our room.
“Isa, glucose gel—it’s in my purse. Now,” I barked, making a mental note to apologize to her later. “Shiloh, please get some orange juice from the vending machine, then get the test strips. Go!” Charlotte was like a rag doll as I guided her to the bed. “Stay here, love,” I said, willing myself not to cry. “This is just going to take a minute, and you’re going to feel better.”
Isa, God bless her, was back in a flash with the tube of gel. I pulled the lid off with my teeth and told Charlotte to open her mouth. Please be okay, please be okay, I prayed, watching her glassy eyes as I squirted it onto her tongue. She claimed to hate the way it tasted, but now she didn’t protest at all. In fact, she didn’t really do anything.
“Sweetheart,” I said, trying to keep the panic out of my voice, “I know you feel terrible, but please try to swallow.” Her eyes had just closed but her throat had moved, so I told her to open her mouth again, and I emptied the tube.
“How is she?” said Shiloh, who was at my side, holding a bottle of juice out to us.
“Definitely hypoglycemic,” I said.
“Crap,” he said, frantically trying to unscrew the top of the juice bottle. “Try this.”
“Just a little,” I said. “The gel should be kicking in soon, and we should test her sugar before we go too far.” I tried to hoist Charlotte up. “Some juice, Char. Open up for me.”
Shiloh held the juice to her mouth. She startled slightly, but then sat up and took the container from him and took a sip on her own.
“There we go,” I said as the light began to return to her eyes. I smiled, even though I wanted to sob, because I needed her to see that she was going to be okay.
“You scared us, sweetheart,” said Shiloh quietly, putting his arm around her. To an outsider, he would have looked oddly calm, but I recognized this as his version of coming down from fight-or-flight mode. “Thank goodness we caught that in time.”
I knew what he was thinking but hadn’t said—because I was thinking it, too. Even a few minutes longer and she could have slipped into a coma.
“You okay?” asked Isa, her hand on Charlotte’s arm.
Charlotte nodded weakly. “I’m sorry,” she mumbled. “I didn’t mean to do that.”
“I know you didn’t.” I was so overcome with relief that it took me a minute to be able to speak again. “We’re all learning here. Let’s check your blood sugar and get a little more food in you, and then what do you say we hit the hay for the night?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m really tired.”
Dear dog almighty, I was, too. So tired that when Shiloh and I crawled into one of the room’s two double beds an hour later, I didn’t even wonder when he’d finally make love to me, or think about my daughter’s latest brush with death, or wish that my vacation had not gotten off to such a disastrous start. Instead, Vieques, in all its verdant, tropical glory, appeared like a mirage behind my closed eyelids, and before I knew it, I had fallen into a deep, dream-filled sleep.
ELEVEN
“That was way too close.” Shiloh and I were side by side in front of the sinks in the hotel bathroom while the girls changed into their bathing suits. He met my eyes in the mirror. “I know we didn’t have a chance to talk about Charlotte last night, but we need to. I don’t want that to happen again.”
“I know. We should talk about a new plan when we get home. Maybe even get Dr. Ornstein involved,” I said, referring to her endocrinologist.
“Sure, but what about the rest of the vacation?” he asked, frowning as he reached for a towel to dry his face.
“I think we got all of our bad luck out of the way for this trip,” I said, adjusting the straps of my sundress.
“Hmm,” he said, sounding unconvinced. “I hate to say it, but maybe this is how she learns. Maybe this scared her into never pulling that again. I know it’s not great to have to eat your food whether you feel like it or not, but if she doesn’t . . .”
Was he kidding right now? If she didn’t, she could slip into a coma and die. “That cannot possibly be an option,” I said firmly.
“I know that it feels better to think that way, but we need to make sure Charlotte understands the risks,” said Shiloh, still watching me in the mirror. “If last night is any indication, she isn’t taking this seriously.”
“So, we take it seriously for her. I want her to have a childhood. I don’t want her to spend every waking moment worrying about her blood sugar.”
“She has a childhood,” he said, frowning. “A really good one. Kids deal with hard things all the time, and you know what? They grow up to be adults who are good at dealing with hard things. Look at you and Paul.”
He was trying to be kind, but he couldn’t have picked a worse example if he’d tried. If I thought about it—and I mostly tried not to—there was a reason Paul and I had turned out the way we had. Yes, I was a natural-born optimist, while Paul had emerged from the womb expecting the sky to fall. But over time I’d come to understand that our personalities had probably been dialed up a dozen notches in direct response to our mother dying. I didn’t want that for Charlotte.
“You guys almost done in there?” yelled Isa. “We’re ready to go to the beach.”
“Let’s finish talking about this later, okay?” said Shiloh, and I nodded.
“We’re done, but you’re absolutely eating breakfast before you go anywhere near the water,” I announced as I emerged from the bathroom.
“Thanks a lot, Charlotte,” muttered Isa.
“What did I do?” she growled back.
“You need to eat so your blood sugar’s okay before we can go have fun,” Isa said, rolling her eyes.
“Isabel Milagros, I hear one more comment like that from you and you’ve lost your phone until October,” snapped Shiloh.
Neither of us raised our voices at the girls very often, but honestly? Isa had deserved it.
“You think Charlotte chose to get diabetes?” I said to her. “Or that this is fun for her or any of us?”
“Thanks for reminding me that I ruin everything, Mom,” said Charlotte before opening the glass double doors and walking out onto the patio.
I felt like someone had just tied a cement block around my waist and tossed me overboard. My mother would never have phrased it like that—and come to think of it, my father wouldn’t have, either. So if my daughters were fed up with me, I couldn’t blame them.
I was, too.
After a terse breakfast we headed to the beach. Even at nine in the morning it was already blazing hot, but the sun was hidden by a cluster of ominous-looking clouds, with more rolling in by the minute. “Think that’ll pass by the time we’re on the ferry?” I asked Shiloh.
He grimaced. “I’m guessing now’s not the best time to tell you there’s a tropical storm watch in effect.”
“Since when?” I said with alarm. As a pilot, he had access to weather data that put the app on my phone to shame, so I barely bothered checking it myself.
“This morning, apparently—last night they were just predicting showers.”
“But a watch isn’t the same as a warning, right?” After the argument I’d had with the girls that morning, I really—really—needed to get to Vieques so we could hit reset on this vacation. “Do you think we should be worried?”
He shrugged. “Watch, warning: none of it is great. I mean, there were half a dozen storm warnings every hurricane season when I was growing up, but I can only think of a single one that ever actually materialized into something truly dangerous. Since Hurricane Maria, though, I worry more than I used to. The weather patterns are more severe
than they’ve ever been, and it’s only getting worse. You saw the shoreline.” He gestured to our right, where an entire stretch of beach we’d loved had disappeared into the ocean.
“I hate to even suggest it, but do you think we should stay in San Juan instead of going to Vieques?” I asked, crossing my fingers that he wouldn’t say yes.
“I’m not sure,” he said, his eyes following Isa and Charlotte. “I think we check the weather again before we head to Fajardo and make the best decision we can at that point.”
The horizon was a deep gray. I had a sinking feeling in my gut, but I reminded myself that the same feeling had told me my cancer was back. Maybe I was wrong about this, too. “I bet it’ll pass,” I said.
And to my surprise, it did. Within the next hour the sky had cleared and the storm seemed to be petering out, so we decided to proceed as planned.
I’d vetoed flying; after our near crash on our first trip to Vieques, the ferry seemed like a far safer option. Except maybe it wasn’t, because as our boat began to cruise away from the marina in Fajardo, the waves grew higher and higher. One after another, the waves slapped against our ferry, which was bouncing with such vigor that I was certain we were catching air. Normally, I wasn’t afraid of the water. But right before I’d gotten up that morning I’d had a dream about Charlotte. She’d been drifting away from me on a life raft, and I’d stood on the shore, paralyzed and unable to swim to her. I’d awoken coated in sweat, my heart pulsing with panic.
“You okay?” Shiloh whispered beside me.
“Yes,” I quickly replied, pushing away the image of my daughter desperately waving for me even as she went farther out to sea. But it was probably just leftover anxiety from her hypoglycemic incident playing tricks on my mind. “I didn’t sleep great,” I added. “It’s making this feel worse than it is.”
“Worse?” said Isa, who’d been listening to our conversation. She clung to the arms of her seat as we hit another wave. “Not possible. This is the worst.”
“It’s okay,” Shiloh assured her. “They wouldn’t take us out if it wasn’t safe.”
“Really? Because if we don’t die first I’m going to hurl, and I’ll probably choke on my vomit and die anyway,” said Isa. “Tell me how that’s safe.”
Don’t Make Me Turn This Life Around Page 7