The Mothers A Novel - By Jennifer Gilmore Page 0,13
toward me with two glasses of wine, and how I had a vision of him holding a child’s thumbs and guiding that child across the room to me.
I’m not inclined to such fancy, but it was how I knew that I would choose Ramon. Since then I’d been looking so hard to catch sight of that child’s face.
“Thanks for being glad.” I sounded more sarcastic than I’d intended.
We were silent for a bit. I remembered us before any of this, on Capri, a last-minute trip we took to escape Ramon’s mother for a few days. Our hotel had been carved into a cliff overlooking the sea, the famed Blue Grotto far below. Paradise, really, though our room—the only remaining one available—looked out onto the street; the sea and sky and cliffs were cropped out.
Before dinner we had walked down to the Grotto. It was twilight, when all the glass-bottom two-person boats were on their way out of the caves. Tourists (Tourists! I thought; I had with me an Italian!) made their way, beaming, shakily, out of the boats and onto the stone shore. We stood and watched, and then Ramon spoke to a few people in Italian, inquiring as to where was nice to eat, I think, and soon enough someone was taking us out onto their boat.
Come, Ramon had said, gesturing for me to step in. We ducked low in the boat and rode toward this tiny white light, the spectacular entrance to one of the sea caves, and the echo of the fishermen speaking to one another. Inside, Ramon gently pushed me to stand, and when I met his hand with resistance, he threw off his shirt and jumped in. He glowed—this is the thing about the Grotto: as dark as it is inside, it shoots what it holds in its waters through with silvery light. I watched Ramon, nacreous in the water. He looked luminous and also fearless. I was still scared of any of the ways my body could fail and shame me, and yet I jumped in after him, the fisherman clapping slowly behind us, and I felt the heavy water, watched my hands, as I lifted them, carry light.
When we went back to the room to change before dinner—
a place the fisherman had recommended, not fancy, but authentic—we turned to each other in the dark of the room. The sun had gone down, and now the night sky appeared, illuminated with stars, like fish in the sea, I knew, even if I could not view it. I imagined Ramon, as I would often picture him now, indomitable in the water.
We stripped off our wet clothes and our bodies were clammy as we met each other.
“I have an idea,” Ramon said.
We were standing. All of him was touching all of me.
“What.” I placed my face at his neck. “Tell me.” I looked up at him.
“Let’s try to make a baby,” he said.
What I remember most was giggling as he pulled me onto the bed.
_______
“Oh my God!” On the highway, Ramon stopped short. We had come upon a row of five or six cars, the sun glaring off their shining hoods, a deflection of flaxen light. It took me a moment to see the true distraction, a bus that was turned slightly on its side, on the shoulder of the road. There was something painted on the surface of the bus that I couldn’t make out, and several of the dark windows were smashed in; the remaining ones had white, spiderweb-like lines bursting across the glass. The front wheels still spun in the air, dismal pinwheels.
“Oh my God,” I said again, covering my face with my hands.
Several people had gotten out of their cars and were on their phones, clearly calling for help.
“Jesus,” Ramon said, driving along the opposite shoulder. I could feel our tires slowly turning beneath us, the sound of stray stones impressed in the tough, grooved rubber, and then the shift from the scrape of smooth, new asphalt to the soft rugged earth.
We saw someone inside the bus, propped sideways. Spread palms pushed against the glass of the doors, and then the hands, as if the fingers remembered the laws of reversals, began pulling at the door. And then this person, off-kilter, as if the world had turned upside down, stepped jerkily out of the bus. The shoulder-length hair, teased high, and the long legs, wrapped in tight denim, the high, slender hips, belonged to a man.