“I do not understand the Internet,” Charles said. “It’s a giant void.”

Jim agreed. “A limitless void. Hey, Syl,” he said. “How’s it going over there?”

Sylvia looked up. She had the crazed expression of a child who’d stared directly into the sun, blinking and temporarily blind. “What are you guys talking about?”

“Nothing, dear,” Jim said, laughing. Sylvia went back to the computer screen and started typing quickly.

Charles shrugged. “At least she could always get a job as a typist.”

“I don’t think those exist anymore. Administrative assistants, maybe, but not typists.”

“Franny seems okay.” They made eye contact for a moment while Jim handed off a dripping plate.

“Does she?” Jim wiped the back of his wet hand across his forehead. “I really can’t tell anymore. You’d know better than I.”

Charles clutched the plate in both hands, turning it over and over until it was dry. “I think she does. That bump isn’t pretty, but it’ll heal.”

“Do we need to sue that tennis player, whatshisface? I never liked him. That awful ponytail, now this.” Another lawsuit would balance out his own, force them to band together. Jim imagined himself and Franny striding into a Mallorcan courtroom, the bump on Franny’s head now the size of a tennis ball, hard proof of Antoni’s negligence.

“And how are you?” Charles asked. He purposefully looked toward the dishes, now dry and ready to be put away, and toward his wet hands, which he toweled off.

Sylvia had started playing a video, the sound of which blasted out of her tinny computer speakers. She was off in teenager land, content and miserable in equal measure, oblivious to the trials of any human heart that wasn’t her own. Jim turned the sink back on, though there were no more dishes to wash.

“I have no idea,” he said.

Charles placed his hand on Jim’s shoulder and gave it a squeeze. He wanted to tell Jim that everything would be fine, and that his marriage was as solid as it had ever been, but lying seemed worse than offering a small show of sympathy.

Day Eight

THE PREVIOUS EVENING’S THREATENING WIND HAD blossomed into full-on rain. Gemma hadn’t warned them about the possibility of inclement weather, and Franny was furious. She hobbled from the bed to the window and watched skinny raindrops ping against the taut surface of the swimming pool. It was Saturday, one of their few weekend days in Mallorca, not that there was much of a delineation between the week and the weekend. Still, Franny felt cheated, and planned to go downstairs and complain. First, she hobbled back around the bed the long way and into the bathroom, where she was so shocked by her own reflection that she actually yelped. After waiting a moment to make sure that no one was coming to her rescue—another thing to complain about—Franny moved closer to the mirror.

She had somehow managed to hit herself with her racquet, that much Franny understood, hard enough to knock herself to the ground. The bump rose out of her center part, a lone volcanic mountain in an otherwise peaceful valley. “Ugh,” Franny said. She tied her black robe more tightly around her waist, as if that would distract anyone, and swanned her way down the stairs as slowly as Norma Desmond, wishing for the very first time that she’d thought to pack a turban.

The chest in the living room had been well stocked with board games: Monopoly and Risk, Snakes and Ladders. Charles had made a brief but impassioned speech in favor of a game of charades but was quickly shot down. They decided on Scrabble, and Lawrence was winning, being the best at math, which everyone knew was all it took to truly succeed. He knew all the two-letter words, the QI and the ZA, and played them without apology, even when it made the board so dense that it was difficult for anyone else to take a turn. Bobby, Sylvia, and Charles all stared hard at their letters, as if simple attention alone would improve their odds.

“I’m pretty sure you’re cheating,” Bobby said. “I wish we had a Scrabble dictionary. Sylvia, go look one up on your computer.”

“Screw you. You’re just mad you’re losing,” she said, rearranging the tiles on her rack. She had two O’s. Moo. Boo. Loo. Fool. Pool. Polio. Sylvia always played the first word she saw, and didn’t care if she set up the next player for a double word score. She laid down MOO. “Give me seven points, please.”

Lawrence rubbed his hands quickly over his face, up and down. “Sylvia, sweetheart, you’re driving me crazy. You can do better than that, I know you can.”

“Let her play how she wants to play, Lawr,” Charles said, swatting him affectionately on the wrist. “Now, let’s see . . .” He played BROMIDE, crisscrossing Sylvia’s MOO, a bingo. Charles and Sylvia both cheered.

“You so don’t get it,” Bobby said.

Carmen was not a fan of word games, or of board games at all, and she’d been sitting in the chair on the other side of the room, flipping through Sylvia’s airplane magazines. She’d read them already, and knew the pictures by heart—this television star was looking skinny, this one was looking fat, and they were wearing the same bikini! Every few minutes she would get up and slowly walk behind Bobby to look at his letters, and the board, and then circle back to her chair like a discontented house cat. The last time they’d gone on vacation, two winters previous, Bobby and Carmen had gone to an all-inclusive resort called Xanadu. The resort was on a Caribbean island, and because all the food and alcohol had already been paid for, they felt like high-rolling celebrities, exactly as the resort’s brochure had said they would. They had six margaritas at once at one of the swim-up bars, and when Bobby later threw up all over their hotel room, they didn’t particularly mind, because it had all been free, and they weren’t responsible for cleaning it up. They rented Jet Skis and went parasailing. They had sex in a cabana at the far end of the beach—twice in one day. The other people at Xanadu had been great—all other couples like them, ready to dance until dawn and maybe slip a tongue down someone else’s throat when their girlfriend or boyfriend went to the bathroom. It was just fun. Nothing serious, nothing boring. Even though mostly they’d just sat around on the beach, it still felt like doing something. They were tanning, they were drinking, they were dancing. That was a real vacation. Being locked up in this house on Mallorca felt like the day in the fourth grade when Carmen’s mother had forgotten to pick her up at the library after school.

“Bobby, can I talk to you for a minute?” she said, standing up again and letting the magazine flutter from her hand to the floor.

Bobby looked at the board, and at Lawrence, and at his sister. “Play slowly,” he said, and followed Carmen out of the room and into the kitchen.

“Did you talk to your parents yet?” she asked, once they were out of earshot.

“What?” Bobby looked over her shoulder, making sure no one else was close enough to eavesdrop. It had always been one of his sister’s talents.

“About the money. It’s really not that much. And if you could just pay it all off now, the interest . . .” Bobby stopped Carmen by clamping his palm over her mouth. “Hey,” she said, and peeled it off.

“Listen, they’re my parents, okay? I know how to talk to them.” Bobby crossed his arms over his chest and blew an errant curl off his forehead.

“Okay, if you say so,” she said. “It’s just that we’ve already been here awhile and you’re sort of running out of time. And why didn’t you tell me about your father’s job? I didn’t realize he was really leaving the magazine, like, for good.”