Stay with Me: A Novel

By Sandra Rodriguez Barron

“Stay With Me accomplishes all we might ask of a novel….It reminds readers what great pleasures and surprises are to be found inside such rare, fine, and atmospheric novels when we’re lucky enough to find them.”
—Laura Kasischke, author of In a Perfect World

Stay With Me by Sandra Rodriguez Barron is a gripping and deftly written novel about the meaning of family and the bonds that create one’s history. Provocative and character-rich, Stay With Me grippingly explores the mystery behind the pasts of five toddlers who were stranded on a boat and left drifting in the ocean, and the aftermath, many years later. Literary giant Isabel Allende has raved about this author’s work, saying, “Rodriguez Barron’s exuberant prose yields an immensely entertaining reading experience.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 30, 2010
• ISBN: 9780062030580

Sandra Rodriguez Barron

Sandra Rodriguez Barron is the author of The Heiress of Water, winner of the International Latino Book Award for debut fiction. The recipient of a Bread Loaf Fellowship and a National Association of Latino Arts and Culture Grant, she was born in Puerto Rico, lived in the Dominican Republic and El Salvador, and now lives with her family in Connecticut.

Book preview

Prologue

1979

Nine days after the hurricane, a boat departed from the southern shore of the Dominican Republic, in the early morning hours of September 8. As its twin diesel engines muscled over treacherous, shark-infested waters, the path was illuminated by a resplendent full moon. By the time the For Tuna reached the halfway mark of its journey, the sky had become as blue as the American’s eyes, which were fixed, under the shade of a captain’s visor, toward U.S. territory.

The boat approached the uninhabited island of Mona, where three-foot iguanas, with their sagging jowls and horned snouts, sauntered out from the caves to sun themselves upon the rocks. A graveyard of crudely made wooden rowboats lay mangled and strewn about on an empty beach, evidence of previous failed attempts of boatpeople to traverse the Mona Passage and make it to Puerto Rico’s western shore. The American slowed down and eyed the wrecked boats. She circled Mona Island, searching the beaches, the mouths of the high cliff caves, and the site of the abandoned guano mine. She eyed the rusted, decommissioned lighthouse on the north side and passed around a pair of binoculars. The men surveyed the wild, desolate island from the surrounding waters. Finding no sign of life at all, save a few wild goats roaming a plain, they departed. The For Tuna bucked its way across the choppy surface waters of an abyss that drops down to the deepest point in the Atlantic Ocean. The American’s eyes stung from the salt in the spray that whipped at her face. It was a violent, gut-twisting ride, and when the men grew seasick and began to vomit, her self-doubt threatened to swell into a full panic attack. But she clung to the wheel and reminded herself over and over that land was just fifty miles away. She was deeply comforted by the sound of children’s voices drifting up from inside the cabin, singing Spanish lullabies.

Three hours later, a beautiful sight: Puerto Rico’s western shore appeared as a long strip of green along the horizon. Twenty minutes later, the For Tuna’s hull cut through a floating carpet of seaweed and hurricane trash—palm fronds, dead fish, empty soda cans, and plastic junk. The American pulled into a docking area a mile south of the city of Mayagüez. She tied the For Tuna up to a pier and secured a yellow balloon to the rail of the boat before she left. No one saw her as she hurried down the dock, arms folded over her chest, pressing a tissue to her eyes, sobbing. And no one saw the two dark-skinned men who followed her either. They stepped out of the boat with their heads low, their eyes concealed beneath the brims of their straw hats. One of them wore a black suit; the other was more plainly dressed. The American looked back at the boat several times before she traversed the length of the pier. The men didn’t look back at all. Twenty-seven minutes later, two Mayagüez police officers arrived at the site of a waterfront condominium and yacht club complex that was still under construction. It had been abandoned for months, after the developer went bankrupt. An anonymous call had tipped off the police to the docking of a suspicious-looking vessel. The identifying balloon was hardly necessary—the For Tuna was the only boat in sight. The officers boarded it with weapons drawn. They found the hatch closed, but not locked. Officer Flores pulled it back and peered into the boat’s cabin. Without saying a word, he stepped aside, shook his head and let his partner get a look at what was below.

Officer Castillo peered into the dim interior. Curiously, he smelled something that made him think of his infant twins: milky vomit, talcum powder, and soiled diapers. Inside were four toddlers lying across the boat’s cushioned surfaces, with their eyes closed. They were dressed in outfits befitting a family who could own such a handsome boat—two of the little boys had button-down shirts and dark dress pants, while another was dressed in a princely sailor suit. The girl was wearing a fancy pink, puffy flowered dress.

Where the hell are the parents? Flores said, and the two men scanned the cabin from above. The little boy in the sailor suit lifted his head to look at them. He put his hands over the chests of the two children lying next to him. His eyes lingered on each officer’s face. Then he lifted one hand and tried to snap his fingers, or perhaps pinch something, but he didn’t say anything. His eyes rolled up to one side. He waited. He did it again. They looked at them expectantly, as if he had asked them a direct question and was waiting for a response. Officer Flores looked at his partner. Is that sign language?

Officer Castillo shrugged. He went below, into the spacious cabin and searched the whole boat. He found a fifth child, a little girl hiding under the overhang of an open storage compartment, this one in a white-and-yellow dress. There were no adults anywhere in the vicinity. There weren’t even any witnesses to question. Officer Flores shouted into his radio, "We need medical personnel! I have a boatful of unaccompanied minors! Yes, minors! Children! Nenes!" After the ambulance left with the children, the Coast Guard cutter Borinquen arrived, and the officials all wrote up their reports, taking photographs and securing the vessel. Everyone was expecting the parents to appear at any minute, shouting and looking relieved and explaining the details of some mishap that had separated them from their children. But none appeared, so they followed protocol and prepared for an investigation that they doubted they or anyone else would have time to pursue anytime soon. The items that made it into the evidence file that day were two empty plastic gallon-sized bottles of water, three plastic baby bottles, cloth diapers, some folded children’s play clothes, and a small blanket. One of the little girls clutched an unfinished rag doll without any stitching on the face, which the officers wanted to put in the file, but the little girl threw such a tantrum that they let her keep it. Officer Flores also added that all five of the children had a faded starfish drawn on the tops of their left hands. The drawings, he noted, were sketched with the competence of an adult hand, with a fine-tipped green marker.

There was one item aboard the boat that didn’t make it into the evidence file or the notes. Officer Castillo found a can of a Dominican brand of powdered milk on the floor of the boat, stuck behind a cushion. He popped open the lid, and saw that it was still half-full and had a measuring cup inserted into the yellowish-white powder. He sniffed it, took a pinch and rubbed it between his fingers, squinting as he scrutinized the texture of the powder. He turned the can around and around for a moment. Recalling the dark olive skin of at least two of the children, Officer Castillo, whose mother was Dominican born, waited until his partner was not looking, then went up on deck and tossed the can overboard, where it landed among all the other hurricane trash floating around the boat. In the meantime, the American watched him from the roof deck of the defunct condominium building next to the dock, through binoculars.

The discovery of five unaccompanied minors aboard a boat didn’t make the news in Puerto Rico that night or in the week that followed. The media coverage was still focused on the death toll and homelessness in the Dominican Republic, and on the virtual obliteration of the Windward Island of Dominica. During the last two days of August, Hurricane David had reached category five strength, with winds that rose to a nightmarish one hundred and seventy-five miles per hour. On August 30, Puerto Rico was spared a direct hit, but it suffered massive property damage and had more than a dozen casualties. President Carter declared it a disaster zone. The next day, David collided with the Dominican Republic’s capital city, where it took approximately two thousand lives, both on impact and in the subsequent floods. But it grew weak as it crawled across the high mountain range of Hispaniola’s interior, so neighboring Haiti had no deaths and very little property damage. On September 4, the Washington Post quoted the Dominican Civil Defense Director as saying, The situation is catastrophic. Hunger is starting to be felt by thousands of country people isolated by blocked roads. While Dominicans got to work digging out mud-caked cadavers, word spread that yet another storm, Frederic, was thundering its way over from Africa. But mercifully, Frederic didn’t live up to its potential—at least not in the Caribbean. Frederic staked out its own territory in Alabama and Mississippi, where it took five lives and went on to become the costliest hurricane in U.S. history up until that date.

After Frederic passed, news media began a slow and gradual softening of its post-hurricane fixation. A week after the children were found on the boat, a hospital spokesperson informed a junior reporter from the San Juan daily newspaper that the children found in Mayagüez were doing well but were still under observation. The next day, Puerto Ricans heard about the incident for the first time, in a small article in the San Juan Star, on page twenty-two of section C.

The children of the For Tuna were estimated to range from two to four years old, and had limited vocabulary. One of them communicated his needs through some kind of sign language, but one little girl managed to clearly identify herself as Rosita. They didn’t know what country, city, or town they were from. Not a single one could name a parent. None of the children resembled each other enough to support the presumption of a genetic relationship, and the forensic methods available at the time were useless in settling the question of family relations between the children. One of the children appeared to have some African ancestry, another had white skin and gray-blue eyes, while yet another had a slightly reddish tint more typical of the Caribbean indigenous people. The other two were dark-eyed and dark-haired but ethnically nondescript. It was clear that Spanish was their primary language and it was noted that they had distinctive Dominican accents, discernible even in the pronunciation of their monosyllabic baby talk. In a televised interview, a hospital spokesperson told a reporter that the children look Puerto Rican, but sound Dominican. It was this careless, off-the cuff remark that finally ignited an interest from the public, not for the children’s welfare—at least, not initially—but rather, because it reopened old wounds on the subject of immigration and race. They are members of our Caribbean community, wrote a graduate student at the University at Ponce in a letter to the editor. Why would anyone bother to wonder if they’re ‘legal’ or ‘illegal,’ from this island nation or that? They’re in Puerto Rico now and it is our duty to protect them.

A week later, U.S. federal authorities had upgraded the case to urgent and assigned personnel with experience in solving crimes involving missing children. Authorities on every Caribbean island were in collaboration with the FBI in a campaign to find anyone who might be able to identify the children and locate their families. It was determined that the anonymous female caller who had alerted the local police probably had something to do with the children’s abandonment. The police were still actively searching for her. The call had come through the non-emergency line, so it hadn’t been recorded. The dispatcher who took the call said that the woman had spoken in Spanish, but with a heavy gringa accent.

The For Tuna (named simply after its owner’s fish of choice), had been lost sometime during Hurricane David. It belonged to retired Army officer Stuart Norwin, who normally kept it at a marina in San Juan. When Norwin heard news of the impending hurricane, he had been fishing off the northwest coast of Puerto Rico. He was forced to tie up in Aguadilla, a city eighteen miles north of Mayagüez. The storm had passed just one hundred miles to the south of Puerto Rico, and the For Tuna had been swept away. Norwin was in the process of filing an insurance claim when the police contacted him. He told them that he had never seen the children before and had no idea how they ended up in his boat. Officer Castillo asked him to take meticulous inventory of his boat and its equipment. Norwin concluded that the only items missing were a set of binoculars and his captain’s hat. But a month later, he made another discovery. He called Officer Castillo to tell him that he kept a book of nautical maps aboard his boat, and that when he had opened the book he saw that one of the charts had been marked up with a green marker. It charted a short course, beginning on the eastern shore of the Dominican Republic and ended at Mayagüez. Norwin was sure that neither he nor his wife had marked up the map. An area called the Hourglass Shoals was circled, and a little exclamation point was drawn next to the circle. Whoever marked up the map knew what they were doing, Norwin concluded, tapping at the exclamation point. That’s the danger zone, where the shoals clash with the currents barreling over from the Puerto Rico Trench. Officer Castillo thanked him and took the map into evidence. The Feds would take it from there, officer Castillo told him. But Norwin never heard anything more in regard to the maps.

The airwaves crackled with speculation: had a group of Dominicans found the deep sea fishing vessel and used it to get into Puerto Rico illegally? But how to explain the children’s elegant clothes? The girls, it was noted, were accessorized with headbands and rubber bloomers that matched the pattern on their dresses. What kind of illegal immigrants arrived in one hundred percent cotton linen? It made more sense that they were well-to-do Puerto Rican children, transferred to the For Tuna from a boat that had been taking part in some kind of a celebration. But where were the missing parents? And who was the mysterious gringa?

If they were elegantly dressed, then they are probably of Cuban origin, offered the President of the Cuban–Puerto Rican Society in a televised interview. He was astounded when his comment elicited hostility from the local community. The arrogance! shot back the Director of the Dominican Social Club, as he scooped up his baby and held her up for the TV cameras. To imply that their fine clothes could only make them Cuban! His small daughter was presented in clouds of pink crinolines, with a matching headband and a huge silk daisy pasted to her bald head. In the meantime, the police decided to release news of the starfish drawings on the kids’ hands. This strange detail whipped imaginations into a frenzy. With the world still reeling from the murders and mass suicides in Guyana the year before, everyone wondered: could the children be Jonestown escapees, finally coming out of hiding? Could the starfish drawings indicate membership in a newly formed cult? But the absence of adults didn’t make sense in any scenario. As each day passed, the realm of possibilities expanded in the community’s imagination. An AM radio talk show suggested a double suicide at sea by the children’s parents. Soon, armchair detectives throughout the Caribbean were debating their theories on the marine radio waves and over rumrunners at dockside bars. Mothers gathered outside of schools to debate the circumstances under which they could imagine their own kids ending up on a boat, alone. There were theories involving aliens and phantom cruise ships, the lost city of Atlantis, the Bermuda Triangle, modern-day pirates, drug smugglers, and child traffickers. An international controversy was already brewing in regard to the U.S. Navy test bombings off the coast of the Puerto Rican island-municipality of Vieques. In May of that year, twenty-one activists were arrested for civil disobedience in a restricted bombing area. The Viequenses’ theory was that the five children belonged to a group of separatists from the big island who had been secretly murdered by the U.S. Navy. This theory was extremely popular and incendiary, despite the fact that no one was missing. In the end, every theory was easily dismissed. There were no weapons on board. No blood, no signs of a struggle, no note, no clues. And six months later, still no answers.

A black market adoption agency and several known pedophiles plotted to gain custody of the children. Within the year, two people went to jail for their scheming. When the San Juan newspaper tried to run a five-year update, the children’s records were closed. All five had been adopted and were living in Arizona, New York, Connecticut, and Florida. One remained in Puerto Rico.

The only peek the public got into the children’s new lives was due to a slip on the part of a Child Services spokesperson. She had told a Newsweek reporter (a Californian who bore a striking resemblance to Robert Redford), over rum cocktails and lunch, that two of the children had been given names that made reference to their strange story. One little boy had been named David, after the hurricane. The adoptive mother had said that the name paid homage to his astounding resilience, for he had once been either traumatized or speech-delayed but was now talking up a storm. The New York intellectuals who adopted the precocious Rosita—the tipsy woman confessed—had renamed the girl Taina, after the indigenous people of the Greater Antilles. The bit about their names made it into an article. Her speculations did not: "They were poor kids. In Spanish we say jíbaros, or campesinos—hillbillies. Anyway, they were clearly staged to look like affluent children, she said. You know how I know? She reached for the reporter’s stack of photos and newspaper clippings and rotated one of the photographs so that he was looking at it straight on. Look at the kids’ outfits. What’s missing?"

The reporter stared hard into the photo but shook his head.

Look at their feet.

They’re barefoot, the reporter said. So what?

The woman squinted. Why would anyone put such a gorgeous outfit on a child and then have them run around barefoot?

No shoes were found in the boat?

The woman shook her head. Isn’t that strange? Where are the shoes? And look again, she said, pointing to the photo. The soles of that boy’s feet are dirty. Wouldn’t you give your kid a bath before putting him in a sailor suit?

Hmm, the reporter said, squinting. "After the party, the kids were running around in the grass, where their feet got dirty. They got carried into the boat. Dirty feet hardly make them campesinos."

The woman couldn’t resist the temptation to impress the handsome reporter with her inside knowledge, so she spilled what she knew: Okay then, here are three more clues, she said, as she leaned forward. She pulled down one finger. The girls’ ears aren’t pierced. She used her other hand to give one of her large gold hoop earrings a hard tug. In Latin America, no self-respecting mother is going to let people mistake her girl for a boy. Newborns have their ears pierced before they ever leave the hospital. It’s practically the law. She arched an eyebrow and tapped at the table with her long red nails.

The reporter frowned. Maybe the parents were just smart; kids can choke on jewelry. Or maybe the parents aren’t Latino. I remember my sister wasn’t allowed to get her ears pierced until she was twelve . . . You said there are two more reasons?

The woman leaned in a little more, looked left and right, and whispered, "How about the fact that the boys aren’t circumcised? Around here, only kids born at home are uncircumcised. That proves that they’re . . . you know . . . jíbaros."

The reporter had leaned back in his chair, laced his fingers behind his head, smiled sideways, and said, "I’m not circumcised. Do I look like a jíbaro to you?"

The woman choked a little on her cocktail. When she finally stopped coughing, and her eyes stopped watering, she cleared her throat and smiled. But she found it difficult to make eye contact with the reporter, so she held a finger up and ordered another rum cocktail. "Make it añejo this time, she told the waiter. For the next ten minutes, she mostly addressed the small potted ficus tree to the left of the reporter’s shoulder. Maybe the children’s parents are hippies, she said with a nervous laugh. The reporter, who retained a smirk for the rest of the interview, prompted her for the third clue. At last the woman’s capacity for indiscretion dried up. She waved one hand around, shook her head, and said, I’m drunk. I can’t remember. But there’s more."

With limited information, a short deadline, and a lengthy word requirement, the reporter was forced to do a little speculating himself. He predicted, in that final update, that if the world was to learn anything new about the children and their background, it would have to be under certain conditions. First, that the children reach legal age in order to speak for themselves—their adoptive parents would understandably try to shield them from the public eye. And second, that they become curious or motivated enough to seriously investigate the question on their own.

Soon after, the reporter was assigned to interview a major-league baseball player who had initiated a reunion with his Puerto Rican birth mother in the months after a near-fatal car accident. He asked the ballplayer to comment about the mystery of the children from Mayagüez. The young man speculated that, since there were five of them, sooner or later, one of them would be compelled to search for their biological families. I was afraid to know, the athlete confessed from his wheelchair. And then one day I woke up in a hospital bed, bandaged from head to toe, and decided that I just couldn’t leave this world until I knew how I got here in the first place.

As the years passed, the Newsweek reporter thought of the five children now and then, but more so when he had children of his own. He thought of them when his wife dressed their daughter in puffy pink dresses for Easter, and when their four-year-old son wore a sailor suit to a wedding. He discovered that the spokeswoman had been absolutely right about the context of the missing shoes. People didn’t let toddlers run around barefoot on formal occasions; it probably was a significant clue. And if their story had generated so much print yet still failed to produce answers, how could the question possibly fail to stir the children’s own imaginations some day? As a parent, he hoped that their motivator would be simply curiosity, rather than, as the ballplayer had suggested, some soul-shaking misfortune.

Part I

Chapter 1

August 2007

David

I’m standing on the porch of a Victorian nested high atop a windswept island of pink granite. Griswold Island is the first in an archipelago of three hundred and sixty-five islands known as the Thimble Islands, off the coast of Connecticut. Out on Long Island Sound, colorful sailboats glide across the expanse of water that sparkles in the afternoon sunshine. The air is thick with the fragrances of summer—charcoal and suntan lotion and that fishy smell that never lets you forget you are by the sea. I’m highly entertained by the drama playing out before me. Two seagulls, fierce as gladiators, are battling over a two-pound quahog. The rocks below are a dumping ground for the birds’ trash, and they’re littered with broken oyster, clam, and mussel shells. I should be helping out inside, but I have to stay and see which bird wins the trophy clam. If Julia’s brothers and uncles were here right now, we’d be making bets.

I’ve been coming here for the last six summers with my girlfriend, Julia Griswold, who is a descendant of the man who built the house in 1886. I intend to marry her. My grandmother’s diamond engagement ring is in the right front pocket of my khakis, and I pinch the unbendable platinum between my fingers now and then. I know that the odds are slim that Julia will say yes at this point, but that’s another story. I brought the ring with me, just in case, because I can’t image a more romantic place than this.

Julia (who refers to herself these days as my friend) is somewhere inside the house, preparing for the arrival of our guests. The breeze sweeping though the back windows of the house carries the aroma of berries and brown sugar baking in the old stove, along with the clatter of cabinet doors and drawers being opened and shut. I know Julia well enough to know exactly what she is looking for—sterling silver iced tea spoons. Julia knows perfectly well that my brothers and sisters will push away the tea and demand to know where we keep the beer, but she’s fussing anyway. Not because of me or because of the rarity of this occasion. No, she’s doing it because the ritual of welcoming guests in this meticulous manner has been a family tradition for one hundred and twenty-one years.

There are ten branches of Griswolds who all share the cost and upkeep of this home equally, and since the summer season is so short, the family uses a strict time-share system. Amazingly, each of the ten branches of the Griswold family have cut back their allotment by one day, so that I may host the first-ever reunion of my siblings, which, needless to say, means the world to me. As far as clans go, we are polar opposites. Whereas the five of us are adoptees, the Griswolds have a family history that goes back to the Stone Age. Curiously, they’re fascinated by my lack of origins, tantalized by the very idea of not knowing anything. Around here, I’m the slightly freakish stray everyone loves. I’m a fixture at the poker games and I’ve partaken of Scotch withheld from sons. I regularly sneak in nudies for the old guys and beer for their grandsons. The aunts are fond of me too. I’m privy to secrets kept from daughters and I’m the only non–family member to have a house key.

In the butler’s pantry, Julia’s on her knees, pulling out yellowed boxes of stemware. I reach around her and pull out a tray full of tarnished silver things. There they are! She smiles and taps herself on the forehead. I take a handful of spoons, along with a bottle of silver polish and a flannel rag, and I wash the spoons in the long enamel farm sink in the kitchen and lay them out on a checkered kitchen cloth, while she gets to work on the bouquet of flowers from the garden. I squeeze polishing cream onto the chamois and rub up and down until the metal is warm to the touch. I lay them across the counter and they gleam, shiny and fierce as a set of surgeon’s tools. When she spots them, her eyes light up. She kisses me on the cheek and gathers them up in the cloth. She heads out to the porch, muttering something about how her great-great-grandmother would be proud of the table setting. Besides the spoons, her dead relatives’ contribution to the welcoming ceremony include a hodgepodge of pitchers, glasses, linens, and dessert plates. My favorite is a ceramic sugar bowl and creamer set in the shape of a pair of bikinied lady frogs with huge, drooping boobs. It’s a cautionary tale—they belonged to an aunt who left the fold and went to Vegas, and in the end, they’re all she had left. But her contribution to the table setting is held in equal esteem as that of the ancestors who passed on the fancy crystal, china, and silver. In this house it’s the essence of the family as a whole that counts, and the more kooky or off-beat their personalities, the more vividly they are remembered. The Griswolds are anchored by the meticulous indulgence in each other’s idiosyncrasies, tastes, and habits. After a while, you half expect these people to pop up at any time; and this is what is motivating Julia to work so hard in the kitchen, obeying relatives she’s never even met. I imagine my aunts with their hands on their hips, barking out orders, she once told me. So I do what they say.

Ever since I got sick, I’ve developed a deep respect for the spirit behind this crazy tradition. It occurred to me one day that people in this family don’t really die. Griswolds just sort of become invisible. Their funerals are a blast. There’s champagne popping, laughter, dancing. Liquor. Lots of liquor. In fact, I had more fun at Julia’s dad’s funeral than at either of my sisters’ weddings. And yet, seven months ago, I was dismissive of what I thought were silly, wasteful, and time-consuming rituals. In fact, the first time I came, six years ago, I thought the ceremony was for me; I presumed that Julia was showing off her future-wife potential. Wanting to dash once and for all any illusions of marriage, I said, If you’re trying to impress me with your domestic skills, don’t bother. Back then I sported a goatee, which I tugged as I said with a shrug, I’ve got to warn you that I’m not the marrying type.

Her response had been one of visible relief. That’s totally fine. You’re not my type anyway, she said. As it turns out, we were both wrong. I intend to right that wrong.

My siblings should be pulling into the small village of Stony Creek by now. I fetch old Uncle Oz’s spyglass from a ledge between the eaves of the lower roofline. Oz, who left this world the same year as Woodrow Wilson, kept his instrument on the ledge where he could access it in emergencies (defined as the chance to ogle girls in swimsuits). I shut one eye and peer through the tube. It works, but the view is cloudy and there’s a crack in the lens. It kind of antiques the world. It’s like I’m in one of those films from the roaring twenties. I swear I can almost hear the big band music every time I use it. Through the spyglass, I see that my sibs are boarding the water taxi that will bring them across the mere two hundred yards of water that separate us. Even though we have a motorboat, Julia arranged for this initial taxi pickup because it can handle more cargo and luggage than our small boat can, and this way we can get everyone’s belongings over in one trip. I’ve been Griswold house-trained, so I diligently replace Uncle Oz’s spyglass on the ledge (if you forgot, he’d reputedly smack you silly with a fly-swatter). I look around for something a bit more contemporary, and find a pair of marine binoculars on a coffee table. I raise them to my face. I adjust the focus wheel and the image comes in clear, sharp, and steady. I yell through the screen door to let Julia know that they’re getting close.

There is a scale measure to the far left corner of the objective lens of the binoculars. I know I shouldn’t do this, but it has become a compulsion to constantly test my brain. I