This Is How It Always Is(90)
“What about Penn?”
Ah. There was the rub. “He’ll be fine without me.”
“But will you without him, dear?”
A perfectly reasonable question. “He’s just … he’s writing a story instead of living our life.”
“Maybe he’s doing both.”
“He can’t do both, Mom. Both isn’t an option. They’re irreconcilable. Our kid is an actual person and therefore can’t be a character in a story. Penn thinks everything that’s wrong is just prelude to the magic, and one day soon, we’ll all get to forget what’s past and live happily ever after.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Fantasies always do.”
“Penn’s never been a realist, sweetie.”
“Not being a realist doesn’t make reality go away,” Rosie shrilled. “The transformation on offer here isn’t magic. It isn’t instantaneous, and it isn’t painless. It’s years and years of frog kissing. It’s frog kissing for the rest of your life. It’s frog kissing with nasty side effects and unpredictable outcomes you can’t undo if you change your mind that results maybe in your being more princess and less scullery maid than before, but not quite in your being all princess and no scullery maid.”
“What does Poppy say?”
“Nothing.” The name was growing strange again to Rosie’s ears already. “Poppy’s gone, Mom. He wants to be Claude again.”
“Wants to be?” Carmelo asked.
“Wants to be. Has to be. Thinks he is. Thinks he should. Thinks he must. I don’t know.”
“Have you asked her?”
“Him,” Rosie corrected.
“Have you asked?”
“I’ve tried, Mom. He can’t tell me. Maybe he doesn’t know. He’s very sad.”
“Isn’t that your answer then?” Carmelo wondered.
“I don’t know either,” Rosie said, and then, softly, because she was trying to be an adult and not cry on the phone to her mother in the airport, “I’m very sad too.”
Carmelo said nothing for a moment. Then she said, “What about elephant attacks?”
“Elephant attacks?”
“They have elephants in Thailand, dear, and they’re not repelled by DEET.”
It seemed telling to Rosie that getting trampled by a five-ton animal came last on her mother’s list of concerns.
But if she shared (some of) Carmelo’s worries, she was still finally going to Thailand, fulfilling a promise she’d made to her sister most of a lifetime ago. If she was unhappy about how she’d left things with Penn, about wanting, for the first time since they’d met, to be apart from him, she was still flying to far-off Asia with her youngest child. If she was worried about leaving the boys in their own precarious state, about choosing Claude over them again, about abandoning them to negotiate their daily lives without her for a little while, she was still road tripping with her baby. And if it wasn’t a road trip so much as transnavigated international journeying via hope, imagination, panic, and plane, that was also good, and she had learned over the years to take what she could get. She’d been dreaming of the trips she’d take with her daughter since her sister died, and if it wasn’t quite Poppy anymore and she came home with Claude instead, a prodigal son, well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
Away
The plane was cramped, freezing, and boring, the flight longer than long division, and nearly the moment he landed in Bangkok, Claude longed to be back aboard like the time he (well, Poppy) had fallen out of a whale-watching kayak into Puget Sound. On the plane he had personal space, cold soda of which his mother was apparently allowing him an unlimited amount, and a bathroom with toilet paper. And though the plane bathroom smelled like a bathroom, the rest of the plane did not smell like a bathroom. All of Bangkok smelled like a bathroom, none of it had toilet paper, and the temperature had been nice for about sixty seconds while the icicles from the airplane thawed off, and then he became as hot as he had ever been in his life, not hot like when he visited Carmy in Phoenix, hot like wet, like in a bathtub, like one minute he was dry and the next he had sweat shooting out of him in all directions like a spastic sprinkler.
Claude was not remotely ready to rejoin the real world, but fortunately, Bangkok bore little resemblance to it. He tried to keep not caring about anything, but it was hard. The sidewalks were invisible, so full of people he could only guess there were sidewalks underneath them. The cars were all hot pink and gloss turquoise and neon green. The buses were multistory, like squat apartment buildings on wheels. Squadrons of scooters weaved in and out and between and around everyone like a plague of insects. The scooters had whole families piled on board, the dad wearing a helmet, the mom and the kids and the babies bareheaded and sandwiched in and looking unfazed by the heat or the smell or the fact that their dad didn’t care about their heads as much as his. When Claude stared at these sweaty families as they squeezed by his air-conditioned van, the kids would wave and smile at him, the moms and dads too. In fact, it seemed like everyone in Thailand wanted to look right into his eyes and smile at him. They wanted to ask if he was okay and if he was happy and if he needed anything. Yes, he needed extra strength air-conditioning, toilet paper, and some personal space. And helmets maybe for the little kids on the scooters.