The earth was full of stones but she liked prying them out of the ground. Emily’s gardening knife scraped their edges. Some stones were flat and could be added to the rock wall bordering the property; others had set their long, sharp teeth deep into the dirt. She wiggled rocks out of place but stopped when she heard the distant splash of the children.
Their voices were happy. She didn’t want to overreact. Jack said she always overreacted. She stifled the instinct to go around the house to the backyard and scold the children for swimming without an adult present. She didn’t want to be an oppressive mother. They were good swimmers. If they needed her, she was close by. It’s crazy, Jack often said, the way parents constantly monitor their kids. It wasn’t like this a generation ago. Let them play.
They had tolerated the traffic on the drive upstate, had tolerated Jack waking them early on a Saturday. He had carried them down the staircase of their Upper East Side town house, one sleepy child in each arm. Stella’s dreaming mouth was open as she rested her strawberry-blond head on Jack’s shoulder. Connor was too big, really, to be carried, his long, thin legs knocking loosely against Jack’s strong ones as the trio descended the stairs. Jack’s smile was contented and proud, as though this moment with his children in his arms was a long hike with a vista at its end. “You can eat breakfast in the car,” he had told them, “and jump right into the pool when we get there. This might be the last warm day of fall, so let’s enjoy it.” Connor and Stella had flung themselves from the car, slammed through the pool gate, and jumped off the diving board. Emily’s dive was a clean slice. Jack chose not to swim. He went into the guesthouse, crowbar in hand.
That was hours ago. Emily set a daffodil bulb into the pocket left in the ground by a rock, pushed dirt into the cavity, and straightened. The splashing on the far side of the main house grew louder. Earlier, Connor and Stella had gone inside, teeth chattering, to change into last year’s Halloween costumes: a pirate for Connor and a pink cat for Stella. Now, though, they called to each other over the slap and scatter of water.
Unable to ignore her unease, Emily set down the gardening knife and stepped out from under the maple. She walked toward the backyard. A bird sang. Her pace quickened.
No one had wanted to go upstate except for Jack. He had work to do, he said. There was a leak in the roof of the guesthouse: a yellow stain on the ceiling. Last weekend Jack had broken into the drywall to find dead chipmunks that had eaten through the fluffy pink insulation and clawed the studs. He removed their carcasses from the holes he had made and took photos of their brown husks, their big teeth. He made the children come look and placed a skeleton into Connor’s open hand. “See what they did to our house?”
“Not our house,” Connor said. “The guesthouse.”
“I’m going to get them,” Jack said. “Every last one.”
“Bad guests!” said Stella.
“Exactly.” Jack boosted Stella so that she could peer into the ceiling’s hole, insulation pulled from its gut like intestine. “Bad guests!”
“We could hire someone,” Emily said, not hopeful. When Jack began a project he finished it.
“Why, when I can do it myself? Or do you think I can’t?”
He worked on the guesthouse while the others swam, until the children grew bored and hungry and left the pool to eat hot dogs in front of the TV in their costumes. She had thought that was where they were, watching cartoons while she gardened. She had thought that she’d locked the pool gate, but she must not have. Connor and Stella shouted, then only Stella, whose shout became a word that changed Emily’s worry into fear: “Mommy! Mommy!”
Emily ran across the grass.
The children barreled into her before she turned the corner of the house. She clutched them.
Stella’s cat suit was dry, but Connor was soaked, his brown pirate’s jacket now black and heavy with water.
“Are you okay?” she said. “What’s wrong? Connor, why did you swim in your costume?”
“He didn’t!” Stella said.
“Daddy threw me into the pool,” Connor said.
“What?”
Connor’s wet eyelashes were black and spiky. His spindly body, tall for ten years old—he was in the ninety-seventh percentile for height, tall like his father—was shaking. He coughed, then couldn’t stop coughing, even when Emily rubbed his wet back. Finally, voice thin, Connor repeated, “He threw me into the pool.”
The air was quiet. Emily noticed, as she should have noticed before, that no thumping or clattering came from the guesthouse. “He was playing with you?”
“No,” Connor said.
“No,” Stella said, more firmly.
It had happened like this: from the playroom, the children had seen Jack dive into the pool. As he did laps, they snuck into the pool area, past the open gate. “To surprise him,” Stella said, taking over the story when Connor stopped. Stella was much shorter than her older brother, eyes a muddy green, and angry—at Emily.
Her daughter’s silent accusation struck home: Emily couldn’t protect anyone, not them and not herself. She hadn’t been there when it had counted. She wanted to explain her exhaustion, how every moment counted in the company of Jack because each one was a crisis or the incubation of crisis—or things seemed fine, and Jack was happy, even joyous, yet she had learned not to be fooled, so the crisis coursed inside her: electric, perpetual. Yes, she had been planting flowers. Neglectful, selfish. As if anyone cared what grew in the spring. But she couldn’t always be on alert. She wanted to describe the fatigue, the defeat, how it wasn’t possible always to know where to be and when, what to do, how to do it, how to prevent or soothe or deflect her husband’s moods, when to heed her anxiety, when to suppress it. She didn’t know exactly what had happened at the pool but knew enough. Connor was crying but she almost couldn’t tell because he was soaked. Water ran from his hair down his forehead. He wouldn’t look at her. Stella looked nowhere but at her. When had Stella first looked at her like this, as though Emily weren’t her mother but a cardboard imposter, a rip-off?
Stella told the story of what had happened at the pool. Connor had asked Jack a question and was ignored. He asked again, was ignored again. He began splashing Jack, who lunged from the pool, grabbed Connor’s arm, and yanked him underwater.
“Is that it?” Emily said.
Connor was silent.
“Yes,” said Stella.
Connor said, “When I was underwater, I didn’t know if I would come up.”
“But you did? Right away?”
“Yes,” Stella said. “Daddy let him come up right away.” Stella was no longer angry, but chastened, worried that her anger would be to blame for what might come next. “It’s okay.”
“Is that true?” Emily asked Connor.
“Almost right away,” he whispered.
“Stay here,” Emily told them.
She went to the backyard, where Jack stood at the pool’s edge, toweling off, his red hair like a lit match. He saw her expression and rolled his eyes, letting his gaze slide deliberately over the heated saltwater pool with its deep bottom and sides the smooth gray of a dolphin; the cherry trees that, a few months earlier, had blown pink confetti over the velvet lawn. His gaze invited her to behold the acres that they owned, the woods where the children liked to gather wild blueberries from an overgrown island in the pond. Sometimes they startled a fawn waiting in the marshy bushes for its mother and sent it splashing into the water, startling frogs in turn. Jack looked at the eighteenth-century colonial farmhouse with fireplaces large enough to roast a pig; wide-board oak floors scarred beautifully by time; Dutch doors; the porte cochere with its fluted columns, built to shelter a horse-drawn carriage from weather. Come winter, this scene would be crystalline, trees bare and frosted, snow scalloped into drifts like thoughts that start small and then amount to something. Jack would turn on the radiant heat beneath the kitchen floor’s blue-and-white Portuguese tiles. Her slippered feet would warm. She would relax until Jack looked at her, exactly as he looked at her now, expression fascinated, betrayed, alive with an unbelieving disappointment that said,
Here we go again and
Nothing will be good enough for you.
Jack said, “It was a game.”
“It wasn’t.”
“Connor needs to learn how to behave. What do you want, for him to grow up with no respect? You didn’t even ask what happened. I’m not the problem here, Em. You act like I’m a monster for playing with my kid.”
“You can never do that again.”
He whipped the towel from his hair. The sun was bright in his hair, bright in her eyes. “Who are you,” he said, voice low, streaked with menace and hurt, “to put me on trial?”
* * *
They had been dating for five months when he leaned over the boat to dip one half of a cut tomato into the Mediterranean, lifted it, dripping, and squeezed lemon over it. He had used a serrated knife; the tomato’s edge was ragged. The deck tipped gently beneath her as she accepted the tomato, its red bowl overfull, reddened seawater running down her arm. Beyond him lay Li Galli: three islets, the largest one knuckled like a finger whose gesture was hidden below the water. “Look at you,” he said. “How did I get so lucky?”
Emily’s white bikini accented her flat, tanned belly. Her blond, wet rope of hair stuck to her breast. She had the sense that her beauty was a story told about her and she wasn’t its author. She didn’t know how to make her beauty mean other than what people decided that it meant, yet its value was obvious: a currency she possessed even though she was poor.
The soles of her feet burned against the deck. Hours earlier, they had been cool on the terra-cotta tiles of the villa that Jack had rented in Positano. One wall in the bedroom was formed by the side of the bare cliff, rugged and chill to the touch. On the terrace that morning, a housemaid swept bougainvillea petals into a vivid pink pile. The brush of the broom echoed the waves against the rocks below.
At first, Emily had felt uncomfortable with how much Jack spent on her. Lavish gifts. This vacation. But he urged her to let him. He wanted her to see how much he loved her, which made the luxury he offered hard to resist. And why resist it? She felt elevated, relieved of care. Dazzled. Her beauty allowed her to enter a more valuable kind of beauty—this boat on the sea, that villa on the cliff, the ease of a life maintained by others. The bliss of never having to worry about how to pay. Emily wasn’t merely an example of beauty, or its witness; she now lived inside it. She belonged, and it belonged to her.
Earlier that week, they had taken the ferry to Capri and swum in grottos whose spectral light painted their bodies blue, then went to Pompeii because she had studied Classics and wrote her senior thesis on Etruscan mirrors. The plaster casts of the volcano’s victims didn’t haunt her. The frescoes in the brothel held her attention but she forgot them later. What stayed with her, out of all the relics of Pompeii’s long dead, were the empty fountains in homes for the wealthy. She imagined the fountains as they once were: the chandelier of water, the calm before catastrophe.
The volcano killed the rich, too. This was a lesson from the past. Emily shouldn’t let herself be carried away by how nice Jack made life by having money and loving her. Nothing lasted forever. No one was immune from tragedy. Pliny the Younger had written about the indiscriminate disaster of the volcanic eruption, seen from across the Bay of Naples, its cloud like an umbrella pine. The air after Vesuvius’s eruption had been so hot that it could turn brains into glass. She should remember that. Wealth’s protection was not perfect.
But it felt perfect. After the excursion to Pompeii, Jack opened a bottle of Barolo on their terrace and told her that it was a superior vintage. It was delicious. The sea below was silver. He ran a large hand over the Oscar de la Renta dress he had given her. It was hard not to get carried away, because he wanted her to get carried away. It made him happy, and his happiness—like his wealth, his love—felt good. “I can’t imagine my life without you,” he said. She blushed with delight.
One night, Jack sailed their boat to Praiano, a village tucked into a cove, where they dined in sight of the black sea and begging cats. Clamshells littered Jack’s plate. Emily had thought that maybe it would happen then, but it didn’t. It didn’t happen when they sailed back to the house, even though the Milky Way floated above them like a vast bolt of metallic fabric. The time was right, but it didn’t happen then either.
Jack pointed toward Li Galli. “That’s where the sirens sang to Odysseus,” he said, which she knew. She was touched by his effort to please her. Jack was a romantic. She had been reading
The Odyssey when they first met. “Go on,” he said. “Eat.”
She bit into the tomato. It was salty from the sea and tangy from the lemon. Its taste unleashed a memory. It tasted like her first kiss, at seventeen, almost four years before she met Jack but it was as if she had been an entirely different person then. On a hot day, she and her friend Gen had gotten lemonade and sat on the back of Gen’s pickup truck, watching a storm blow in. Gen’s hair had been wild in the wind. Gen shoved her hair out of her face. Emily leaned to kiss her, and they stopped being friends.
In the gently rocking boat, Jack went down on one knee, a smile on his handsome face, the diamond beaming from its box. She couldn’t breathe or move: one hand clutched the gunwale,
the other held the tomato so lightly that it might fall. She was crying even before he asked her to marry him.
Copyright © 2025 by Marie Rutkoski. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
