Monteverde Cloud Forest, the Amazon River, the fjords, the glaciers, the mountain ranges, the deserts, the lakes, all of the oceans.
That must have been so cool, people say when Ayers describes her upbringing. You’re so lucky.
We all want what we can’t have. Ayers wanted a house. She wanted a subscription to Seventeen magazine that would arrive reliably on the first of the month. She wanted parents like Coach and Tami Taylor. She wanted siblings.
Every week or two someone aboard Treasure Island asks Ayers, “What do your parents think about you living on a tropical island?”
The true answer: They think it’s boring. “Oh,” she responds. “They’re proud of me.”
Ayers’s parents have money now—inherited from Ayers’s paternal grandmother—and so their travel has become far more comfortable. They stayed at the Shangri-La in Paris, which must have been interesting. Phil and Sunny still travel with large backpacks instead of proper luggage. Sunny wears pants and dresses made from khaki cotton; both of Ayers’s parents wear Birkenstocks. While in Paris, they had dinner at La Tour d’Argent—because, as Sunny said, it was a classic Parisian experience they’d yet to have in their half a dozen visits to the city. Had Sunny worn her Birkenstocks to La Tour d’Argent? Ayers was afraid to ask.
The last time Ayers spoke to her parents, they were in Morocco, staying with friends they’d met in Ibiza in the 1980s, before Ayers was born; these friends now own a home on the coast in Essaouira. All of Phil and Sunny’s close friends are people they met on one adventure or another—hiking around the crater of Mount Batur in Bali or shopping for an authentic Panama hat in Montecristi, Ecuador. That conversation with her parents was on the morning of Rosie’s funeral, and a lot has happened since then. It feels like nearly everything important in Ayers’s life has happened since then.
A Facebook post from yesterday puts Phil and Sunny at Fairmont the Norfolk in Nairobi. A scroll back through their pictures shows they’ve been on safari in the Maasai Mara.
Bah! Ayers thinks. They never took her on safari! They always said it was too expensive. There are the requisite pictures of giraffes, zebras, lions, elephants. And some of a hot-air balloon ride they took at sunrise. Cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, baboons, hippos. A Maasai warrior posing with Phil and Sunny in their Birkenstocks.
Ayers sighs. Her parents are in Africa. They couldn’t be any farther away. Still, she tries their cell phone. What’s the time difference? She doesn’t care. She calls.
Her mother answers on the first ring. “Freddy!” Sunny says. “Your timing is perfect! The front desk just sent us a bottle of champagne. They think we’re travel bloggers.” She laughs. “I may have misled them a bit—”
Suddenly, Ayers’s father is on the phone. “She misled them a lot,” he says. “Though it works. We’ve gotten free stuff every place we’ve checked in since your mother started referring to her ‘blog.’”
“Great,” Ayers says weakly. Her parents are in high spirits; they’re about to open a bottle of champagne at a five-star hotel after having been on safari. In other circumstances, Ayers might have made a sarcastic comment about the “good old days” when they drank river water that they’d purified with iodine tablets and stayed at a hotel in Borneo where the sheets were crawling with tiny golden ants.
“We’ve been expecting your call for over a week.” Her mother again. In the background, Ayers hears the cork pop—the mere sound makes her stomach lurch—and the Tubes singing “Talk to Ya Later,” Phil and Sunny’s favorite song, straight out of the early eighties. Ayers’s eyes water. Despite the fact that she can’t remember the last time she saw her parents, Ayers knows them well. They’re her family.
But why were they expecting her call? She never calls them; it’s always the other way around. “You have?”
“There’s something you want to tell us, isn’t there, Freddy?” It’s her father again. Freddy is their nickname for Ayers; it’s short for “Ready, Freddy,” which was apparently what Ayers said nonstop when she was little.
“I do…” Ayers says.
“You’re engaged!” Her mother blurts it out; the champagne must have gone to her head already. “Mick sent us a Facebook message asking for our blessing.”
“He did?” Ayers says. She’s taken aback by this news. Mick has met Phil and Sunny three times—the two times they swung through St. John to visit and then at Ayers’s cousin’s destination wedding in San Juan. Phil and Sunny like Mick. Phil and Mick are