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CHAPTER ONE
Amber Mazzara stroked the skinny back of her retching son.
“Get it up,” she said soothingly. “Just get it all up.”
He heaved. Amber kept her gaze on the terra-cotta tiles beneath her boots and tried not to think about how many minutes behind schedule for the airport this episode was going to put them.
If we miss our flight, we’re fucked.
That’s what her husband, Tony, had said under his breath right before she escorted Jacob to this attractive raised bed beyond the overhanging roof of the open-air lobby to empty the contents of his stomach.
Crude, but correct. Jacob’s older brothers, Anthony and Clark, had been at each other’s throats all morning, externalizing their eight- and ten-year-old angst about the fact that their vacation was nearly over in a constant stream of taunts, arguments, and posturing. She’d separated them and exiled them to benches on opposite ends of the lobby, but they were still pulling faces at each other and generally being a pain in the butt. Everyone was dressed for the airplane, not the Jamaican climate, which meant they were all hot, itchy, and overtired.
And because they’d bought the cheapest possible tickets, they had three plane rides to endure. If they were lucky, they’d arrive in Columbus around ten and be home to Camelot by midnight.
If they missed their flight out of Montego Bay and had to travel standby, they were indeed fucked.
Jacob heaved. The cotton of his blue T-shirt rose beneath her palm, soft and hot, clammy with his little-boy perspiration. She followed the pronounced bumps of his spine with one fingertip, willing him a peace she couldn’t feel.
He whimpered. “Sorry, Mom. Clark made me do it. He said—”
“Shh. It’s all right.”
His brothers had taunted him into eating half a chocolate bar. Jacob was milk intolerant; whenever he ate dairy, it came right back up.
She loved her boys, but sometimes they were rotten people.
Jacob spat onto the shiny leaf of a dark green plant with yellow and pink spots. A croton, she thought it was called. They had one at home, but it was only about twelve inches tall. Here in Jamaica, they were everywhere, and they were enormous. This plant was a good four feet in both height and diameter, its spots vibrant beneath the gleaming slide of her youngest son’s saliva.
It was the heat, she supposed. The island environment gave this plant what it needed to grow and thrive.
When she got home to Ohio, she would throw the other one away. It would be kinder than keeping it alive on top of the buffet in the formal dining room, stunted and starving, attracting dust.
Her house seemed to manufacture dust. She dreamed sometimes of moving back into the tiny one-story cottage that Tony had owned when she met him, where they’d lived until after Anthony was born and Tony became fixated on the idea of building something bigger.
That old house was too small for them now—the boys would have to crowd into one bedroom, lined up head-to-toe-to-head-again like sardines—but the daydream captivated her anyway, because when she’d lived in that house with Tony, she’d known who she was. She’d felt centered in herself, grounded by her love for her husband and the daily reality of babies and diapers, sticky fingers and Cheerios and bath time.
Overwhelmed, sure. Exhausted a lot of the time. But full of so much love and pride, she’d thought sometimes she might burst with it.
Jacob heaved and spat again.
“Gross,” Anthony said. Amber looked up. Her middle son had drifted over from the bench where she’d put him. Because what was cooler to an eight-year-old than watching his little brother puke? Nothing.
“Back on the bench.”
He’d been the instigator all morning, bickering with Clark, probably masterminding the plan to get Jacob to eat the chocolate. Whining, tormenting Clark, getting up in Amber’s face with that aggressive energy young boys had in abundance—that stiff-armed, rictus-faced Hey, look-at-me look-at-me look-at-me thing they did that pushed her buttons, hard.
“But I wanted to see if—”
“Get your butt over there right now or there will be consequences.”
“That’s so unfair,” he whined. “I was going to tell Jake I’m sorry.”
“Back. Right now.”
