Do Not Become Alarmed(2)

“I’m hungry,” Penny said. “This is taking too long.”

Liv smoothed Penny’s chestnut hair. Her child of appetite and opinion.

“I shouldn’t be thinking about Titanic, right?” Raymond said, clicking the buckle over his chest.

“Yes, you should,” Nora told him. “Think about how not to die if we sink.”

Benjamin said, “You know the orange life jackets and the lights are just for finding bodies.”

“I think that’s on airplanes,” Liv said.

“It’s unlikely that we’ll sink,” Marcus said.

“I know, babe,” Nora told her son. “We’re joking.”

The emergency signal sounded, and Marcus clapped his hands over his ears, digging his fingers into his curls.

“Sorry!” Nora said, pressing her hands over his. “It’ll be over soon.” Seven short blasts of the horn and one long one. Then they were released.

Liv checked the glucose monitor on Sebastian’s waistband. “Let’s go to the buffet.”

“It’s open?” Nora asked.

“It’s always open, I think.”

“I’ll go unpack,” Benjamin said, which meant he wanted a nap. Raymond wanted to check out the gym. The men carried everyone’s life jackets away.

On the walk to the buffet, Nora linked her arm through Liv’s and put her head on her shoulder, making Liv feel excessively tall. “I love you,” Nora said. “This was a genius idea.”

The children took trays and each got exactly what they wanted: Chinese noodles for Penny, chicken fingers for Sebastian, nori rolls for Marcus, taquitos for June. Watching them eat, Liv felt her mind relax, easing its calculation. Feeding children, even when you had all available resources, took so much planning and forethought. The low-grade anxiety about the next meal started when you were cleaning up the last. But for two weeks there would never be any question about what was for dinner, or lunch, or snack. That roving hunter-gatherer part of her brain, which sucked a lot of power and made the other lights dim—she could just turn it off.

The trip had been Liv’s idea. Nora’s mother died of pancreatic cancer in early summer: swift and painful. After the death, Nora had been flattened by waves of sadness, sobbing jags where she couldn’t breathe or speak. Her mother had been problematic, borderline, sometimes absent. When they were eight, she’d sent Nora to live with Liv’s family, because her new husband didn’t want children around. The cousins had shared a bedroom for two years, until the new marriage failed and the prodigal mother came back. Nora had always been wry about her mother’s flakiness, and trenchant about motherhood in general. No one had predicted that the loss would hit her so hard.

Nora had called Liv in October in despair about Christmas plans. She didn’t want to go to Philadelphia to stay with Raymond’s parents when she felt like such a mess. She didn’t want to be with Liv’s parents, the adoptive family of her abandoned childhood. And she didn’t want to be home in LA, where the clear blue skies and the empty freeways would make her feel even more isolated and exposed. She wanted to be with family but not with family. She wanted to have Christmas but not have it feel like Christmas.

Liv was pragmatic, a problem-solver. She got it from her mother, a flinty Colorado litigator. She believed in finding a third way, when the options seemed intolerable, and she believed in throwing money at problems, when it was possible. She found a two-week cruise down the coast of Mexico and Central America, poking into the Panama Canal long enough to watch the locks work—bait for her engineer husband—and then heading north to LA again. It would be just the two families, Liv and Nora and their husbands and kids. They wouldn’t have to fly, they could board in San Pedro. Raymond was between movies, and Liv’s office was deserted over Christmas. Benjamin could make his own schedule as long as he kept pace on his projects. They could all take Nora away.

“You always said cruises were tacky,” Benjamin said when Liv suggested it.

“They are,” she said.

“And an environmental nightmare.”

“That’s why it’s such a good idea,” she said. “My parents won’t want to go because of fossil fuels and norovirus. Your parents want to go to Cuba. So no hurt feelings. It will be just us, and it will be different. It’s just what Nora wants.”

“And the fossil fuels?”

She felt a little shudder of guilt. “The ship is going anyway?”

Benjamin said yes, and Liv called Nora, who started to cry again, and then they went online to look at cabins.

The kids would have each other to play with, their second cousins. When Nora had been crying on Liv’s couch over the summer, she was also worrying about Marcus. At five he’d known every country and every capital in the world. (Penny, at the same age, had known Colorado, Disneyland, and Santa Monica, where her modern dance class was.) Certain things, like the emergency horn, were intolerable to Marcus, but he didn’t meet all the parameters for a diagnosis. Nora had been looking for a school that would understand her son’s strengths and his difficulties. Raymond wanted one where there might be other black kids. Liv had talked them into trying Penny and Sebastian’s school. It was small, progressive, and at least working on diversity. Their late application was accepted, and Marcus seemed happy there. His teacher created a special geography project for him, and let him read what he wanted.