That night Ben came home before the bars closed. Although Gertie was in bed with a pillow over her head, she could hear the key in the lock. The creak of the hinges. The rush of the cats to greet him. The crinkle of his leathers as he lowered himself to their height. His raspy whisper: “Good morning, pickle.” And: “Hello, banana toes.” She could picture his smile, the gap between his front teeth, the way he was now, in this very moment, leaning forward to rub his nose against theirs, remarkably holding his balance despite how drunk she knew he must be.

A few stumbles and his silver coat was shucked, his boots unzipped. Would he use the bathroom or come straight to bed? Gertie’s heart pounded. How she wanted to leap up and shout and point. But they had a therapist now, Joan, and Gertie had learned to breathe into her reactions to see if they changed.

Ben opted for the bathroom. She could hear his piss hit the toilet water; could imagine its tart, ripe smell. He didn’t always flush, not wanting to wake her, which was a kind enough gesture, and yet this bothered her. She had commonsense rules that helped her keep life manageable. But when Ben had told Joan about how he’d folded their bath towels and put them away only to have Gertie refold them, Joan had turned to Gertie and suggested that perhaps her way of folding towels wasn't the only way, and Ben had nodded. This had given Gertie pause. It was clear to her that if Ben could quell his adolescent urge to stay out late drinking (and who knows what else) then he wouldn’t have to leave his Jack-Daniels piss in the toilet until morning. But she was nevertheless doing her best to see the marriage from his perspective, a sometimes enlightening and sometimes infuriating experiment. Gertie inhaled deeply, the way Joan had shown them, and exhaled as if blowing out candles.

Then he was in the room with her, reeking of smoke and booze and his own salty odor. Gertie loved his smell. Not the smell of the bar; his smell. Much of her anger melted away. He tiptoed to his side of the bed, the cats flanking him; back went the sheets and up the cats jumped, purring like overheated radiators. “Shh,” he whispered, gently, of course. And then there he was beside her, his warmth sheathing her before they were even touching.

“You awake?” he slurred, his long blond hair falling over her shoulder.

He knew she was. When he was out late she was incapable of sleep, as if by staying awake she might have some control over when he came home and in what state.

“Gert?” He encircled her from behind. Gertie would have been glad to have sex, but not like this. Not with him drunk—okay, maybe he was only tipsy—and her frustrated. Yes, he had come home early, or earlier than he used to (he too was working on his behavior), but—she glanced at the clock—it was still 1:30 and he’d sworn up and down that he’d be home by midnight. The same thing had happened last week and a few weeks ago as well. Broken promises might as well be lies, and Gertie didn’t like being lied to.

“A little awake,” she said.

“A little awake,” he repeated, snuggling his mouth into her neck.

How familiar he was, this husband of hers. Nine years he had been by her side. She loved this man. The way he made her huevos rancheros on Sunday mornings, the apartment awash in early light, Bach ascending in the background, while she and the cats lingered in bed. His tenderness for people who had made unfortunate life decisions even if Gertie would have judged them far more harshly. That laugh! Like squabbling geese. How he would take her hand when they were walking down the street as if they were still in high school. And now here they were: in their white iron bed, beneath the skylight, negotiating the rhythm of sex as they tried to save their marriage.

When they’d met in the early eighties, both nineteen, Gertie had been able to keep up with Ben swig for swig, line for line, pill for pill. She loved the clubs, the hard drive of the music, the rank smell of the banquette chairs and heavy velvet curtains (god knows what these looked like in daylight), the soggy tang of sandwiches shared in the early hours in the dimly lit back room. The deliverance of it. The glorious vitality of her legs as she stomped across the dance floor. The vibration in her bones.

Back then, Ben ran the video room at a Detroit club and sold Placidyls and Dilaudids he kept tucked in an Army-surplus ammunition belt. Spiky black hair, gobs of eyeliner, clever, funny, with girls trailing him like baby ducks, he was the darling of the club scene. And he wanted her. He asked Gertie out nearly every time she turned up at the club, which was often; he bought her drinks, introduced her to his friends—the Detroit elite, let her know how beautiful she was, what a slamming body she had. And her mind! She was attending the University of Michigan. He was impressed by that. Gertie soaked up the warmth of the unexpected spotlight. Soon, they were rarely apart.

Three years later, after she’d graduated with a BFA in photography, they moved to New York and found a tiny studio in the Village, the traffic so loud and packed so tight they sometimes sat on the fire escape and threw eggs at the honking cars. But what did they care: off they went into that bright Manhattan night—velvet ropes lifting, secret vials appearing, once more the vibrations, the laughter, the sheer luxurious madness of that time.

Ben was playing bass in a fledgling hard rock band and Gertie was shlepping lights around for a series of mildly famous fashion photographers. Together they hustled their way through unimportant jobs, unreliable people, unremarkable apartments until, at last, Ben’s band landed a record deal and Gertie placed her first headshot of an up-and-coming actress in one of the glossy magazines and their lives felt the way she thought they should. So much so they’d married, a small affair at City Hall. Gertie had been so moved by her love for Ben, she’d barely been able to get out her vows through the tears. It was late November of 1989; the Berlin Wall had just come down and earlier that year the Dalai Lama had won the Nobel Peace Prize. Gertie felt these were auspicious events that would bode well for their union.

And for nearly a year, they did. Then one night at Limelight, she did so much coke that it came back down her nose. Vito, a meaty, perspiring forty-something dressed in far too little clothing, leaned forward and used his thick cold tongue to lick it from her upper lip. She felt her stomach twist.

After that, a grayness fell over Gertie’s world. What were they all doing, she wondered. Grown people getting home at five or six in the morning, disoriented and often cranky, trying their best to block out half of what they’d been up to—it was all so depressing. Or maybe she was depressed. She took up with the burgeoning raw foods movement. Joined the gym. Went to bed around midnight. Woke up at nine. Quit the clubs.

But Ben didn’t.

“Come on, baby,” Ben would say. “Come out with me.”

“Let’s stay home tonight,” Gertie would counter, offering him a sip of her smoothie. Her skin was brighter these days, her eyes whiter, her moods more consistent.

“I can’t.” He’d extend his arms to the side to show how much he had to carry now that he was in a signed band. “It’s my job.” And, of course, this was true. Even when he wasn’t gigging, he was now required to hang out at clubs and become a presence—a darling—just the way he had been in Detroit. Who was she to interfere with that?

So off he went, solo.

At first a part of her pined for these old habits; how alone she was in their apartment. But in what felt like very little time she realized she could organize her proof sheets, sketch ideas for the next day’s shooting. Soon she was booking more jobs, making more money, and her life revolved around the sun rather than the moon. She wanted Ben to be a part of this.

But Ben was content with his life as it was.

“You’re the one who changed,” he’d shout, when they fought at three or four in the morning—on the fire escape, in the living room, once even on the street neighbors yelling out the window to shut the fuck up like in the movies. “You used to be fun.”

Sometimes the fights were mild, sometimes they’d escalate into something quite astonishing, though never violent, not physically. After the first one, Ben snuck out while Gertie was asleep and brought her flowers from the deli: dyed-blue carnations. She twined their stems and hung them from one of the exposed pipes that lined the wall in the kitchen. One fight was so bad, Gertie woke to a blanket of bouquets.

“Did you buy out the deli?” Gertie asked, giddily—though deep inside she could feel the steady throb of distress. Ben grinned.

Slowly, the wall filled with flowers in varying states of decay. Visitors found them enchanting. “I want somebody to love me like this,” her friend Maggie pined. But for Gertie the browning, brittle petals were reminders of fragile love could be.

She admonished him when he sauntered home with the dawn, ignored him, cried, lashed out. Once she even packed up the cats and went to the Washington Square Hotel for the night; she wanted him to feel what it was like to be without her. But he didn’t get home until eight in the morning and by that time she was already back, scrambling eggs.

And so it went, these past three years. She was living in one version of their marriage, he in another, until they began to slowly, accidentally, miserably wear each other out.

In January, when their old friend Evan invited them to Costa Rica for a week, Gertie knew it was what they needed. They would stay on an isolated beach, a tropical paradise away from the lures of Manhattan. Evan and his wife, Poppy, had moved there four years ago. Evan had slowed down around the same time Gertie had and Ben trusted him. She hoped he’d be a good influence.

Evan and Poppy met them at the airport in their open Jeep. It was hot, in the mid-nineties, and Gertie stripped off layers of clothing as she squeezed into the back seat beside Poppy and the bags of food. Evan drove erratically, cutting off cars and running what few traffic lights were to be found, but Gertie was too done in by the beauty of the flowers and low mountains to care. Modest highways quickly whittled down into paved streets, then to a dirt road with high banks. Soon they were deep in the jungle. Gertie reached forward and placed her hand on Ben’s shoulder. He laid his hand over hers.

“Fucking spectacular. Right, baby?”

Gertie couldn’t speak.

The trees were monumental, their trunks the size of three maples back home, their canopies so tightly knitted together the sky was barely visible. The air was fragrant and the only sounds were the wind through the leaves, the peculiar calls of unknown creatures, and their tires on the rocks and fallen branches. They didn’t belong here. She could feel it. She wondered if the others could feel it, too.

“Poppy and I haven’t been this far in before,” Evan said.

“And your friends are just letting us use their place while they’re gone?” Ben said.

“That’s what it’s like here,” Poppy said. “What belongs to one person, belongs to everyone.”

She was wearing a floppy hat, halter top, and cutoffs and looked much younger than twenty-eight, though she was the same age as the rest of them. Gertie and Ben hadn’t met her before; they knew Evan from when he’d lived across the hall from them on the street with the cars that honked all night. He’d met and married Poppy, an aspiring clothing stylist and the daughter of a socialite, in Los Angeles and then they’d moved here to start a tamarind exporting business.

“I’m not sure I’d like that,” Gertie said, twisting her wedding band.

“You get used to it,” Poppy said, smiling. “You’ll see.”

Deeper and deeper Evan took them into the jungle, the road so raw in places that it wasn’t clear the Jeep could go on. Finally they turned right and drove up a steep hill to the palapa—a round, open-walled, thatched-roof hut— surrounded by mango, pineapple, and banana trees that would be their home for the next week.

All four tumbled out of the Jeep and gaped at the astounding view of the ridiculously blue ocean.

“This is fucking insane,” Ben said, laughing. He pulled Gertie close and kissed her on the mouth. He hadn’t had a drink on the way down and he tasted clean. “I fucking love this place,” he said, “and I fucking love you!”

Gertie turned and studied the palapa. “There are no walls.”

Poppy laughed; It sounded like tiny glasses being clinked together. “You don’t need them here.”

“Don’t worry, babe, I’ll protect you.” Ben was wearing a Panama hat he’d picked up at the small airport when they’d landed. She thought it was a good look for him; it brought out his cheekbones and, with his thick hair pulled back in a ponytail, gave him an air of light-hearted elegance. He kissed her again then grabbed their gear and practically skipped up to the palapa. Poppy followed behind with a duffel bag over each shoulder. Gertie and Evan reached for the bags of food in the back seat at the same time, both stopping short.

“Good to see you,” Evan said, his voice low and steady. He was always the ground to Ben’s flight.

Gertie smiled, cautiously. “It’s nice to see you, too.”

“I got it,” Evan said, gathering the brightly woven totes into his hands. “You grab the beer.” He nodded toward a case of Imperial next to a bottle of whiskey. The irony of her being the one to carry this up the hill wasn’t lost on Gertie, but it was a modest amount for the four of them and she was grateful for this.

Inside, four faded canvas hammocks hung like cocoons from the tall rafters and four high-backed wooden chairs, each carved with a different medieval-looking symbol, surrounded a heavy table. It smelled of overripe bananas and hot earth.

“Hammocks?” Ben thumped a cigarette out of a pack. “Where’re we supposed to fuck?”

Gertie cringed yet internally echoed his sentiments. This trip was meant to be restorative: where were they supposed to fuck?

Poppy hugged Evan around the waist. “Not to worry, man,” Evan said. “My friend told me there’s a small cabin out back that can be used as needed.” He winked at Ben. Rather than relief, Gertie experienced a strange revulsion as if her pussy were on display—and being bartered for. She glanced at Poppy to see if she had a similar response, but she was grinning, her hand tucked inside Evan’s floral shirt. When had Evan started wearing florals?

That settled, Ben stretched his arms, first one then the other, over his head, then he and Evan fell easily into the chairs. Poppy and Gertie turned their attention toward the kitchen: a narrow stone countertop with a two-burner stove. The two of them strategically fitted the supplies into the limited space.

“I hope we have enough food,” Poppy said, plonking a bag of black beans on the counter.

“If not, we can just pop by the corner bodega,” Gertie said, hoping to sound playful. Then into the silence added: “It was kind of you and Evan to do all the shopping. We owe you money.”

“Don’t even think about it.” Poppy placed a hand on Gertie’s shoulder. “You’re our guests.”

Her skin was hot and Gertie released herself by grabbing a beer. It was warm, of course, but the fifth of whiskey contained twenty-five shots, with a third of a shot leftover. Twenty-five and a third shots was enough to get Ben wasted, even if the others joined in, and left plenty of time to ferret out another bottle of something in some jungle town they didn’t yet know about. Strategically, beer was the safer route.

“Want one?”

Poppy nodded.

Gertie made it a practice to not drink around Ben; doing so, she felt, made it easier for him to do so. And she did not want to make drinking easy for her husband. But now that she and Poppy were both swilling beer she felt she had no choice but to include him.

“Want one, baby?” She held up a bottle. He nodded. And Evan as well.

“Let’s take them to the beach,” Poppy said, but the men were content in their chairs so Poppy and Gertie set off by themselves down the steep path to the shore.

On a narrow strip of sand stretching between the glassy waves and the tall, fat trees, Poppy slipped off her flip-flops and placed them on a fallen branch, the size of an oak tree trunk back home. She motioned to Gertie to do the same; Gertie stepped out of her clogs and placed them on the log, closer to the ocean. The sand was hot and she jumped in place a few times. Then Poppy took her hand and led her down the beach.

They’d barely taken two steps when they were overcome by the most astonishing sound, something prehistoric, yet also portentous like Tibetan Buddhist chanting monks. Chills shot up Gertie’s spine. Poppy pointed to the trees. Through the lush canopy scurried chestnut-brown monkeys, masses of them, their tails lofted, their mouths open in cartoonish pink circles. If they weren’t so high above them, they would have been terrifying.

“Howler monkeys,” Poppy said, dropping Gertie’s hand to point. “It’s how they protect their boundaries.”

The creatures swung from limb to limb, dangled from their tails, huddled in mobs, and studied Gertie with the same curiosity with which she studied them.

They continued strolling along the edge of the water, the beach extending miles in both directions.

“Evan speaks so highly of you,” Poppy said. “And Ben too, of course. But more you, if I’m truthful.”

“We were all three close for a while,” Gertie said, deflecting the accusation inherent in Poppy’s words.

Poppy laughed. “I guess that came out strangely. Like I’m jealous or something. I’m not. Evan and I are happy.” Her perky confidence irked Gertie. Flashes came to her of late-night drinks with Evan at the Great Jones Cafe (“Cheers, big ears,” he’d proclaim clinking her glass with each round) while Ben was out doing whatever Ben did when he wasn’t with her; their legs touching beneath tables, their eyes careful with one another, the effortless conversation about anything, everything! She’d imagined from time to time, how different her life could have been.

“He worries about you, though,” Poppy said.

“Worries?”

“Yes. You know. He worries that Ben doesn’t always treat you the way he should.”

“Well then it’s a good thing Evan didn’t marry Ben,” Gertie said, keeping her voice as calm as she could. She took another slug of her beer. It was nearing five in the afternoon and the tide was coming in.

“Oh, I’ve said it badly. I only meant to let you know that we get it.” Poppy took Gertie’s hand again and squeezed it.

Gertie’s first impulse was to knock Poppy on the head with her beer bottle—this sort of imagined knee-jerk defense was often her response to kindness. But then she found herself moved by this unexpected empathy from a near stranger and fought the urge to cry. She mustered a clipped “Thank you.”

They walked in silence, sweat building between their interwoven fingers. Gertie longed to pull away, but would she seem unkind? Uncool? Uptight? Like a wife who refolded towels? At last they turned, and the reorienting allowed her to slip free. When they reached the log, the tide had swept Gertie’s clogs out to sea.

“That’s a good sign,” Poppy said, brightly. “When the ocean takes, it gives back something even better.”

“It’s just that those were a gift. Ben picked them up in Amsterdam when the band played there.”

“It’s going well? His music?”

Gertie shrugged. “They’re going on tour with Metallica.”

“Fantastic!” Poppy said. And, yes, it was fantastic. This tour could be just the thing to nudge the band from critics’ darlings into a household name. And yet the thought of Ben out on the road with a band notorious for their hard living frightened Gertie. There had to be a way for Ben to achieve his dreams that didn’t involve dangling his weaknesses before him.

Once again, she felt the urge to weep. Maybe it would do her good. Maybe she would tell Poppy everything. But it sounded so silly when she recounted it to herself: So what if Ben liked to stay out late? So what if he came home drunk? Or possibly still did drugs? So what if every once in a blue moon he disappeared for a day or two? Did it really matter if she sometimes had to lie to people she liked, her parents, co-workers, in-laws, friends—to herself? Did it matter if beneath it all there was a murmur of exhaustion? He was going to be a star. Plus, he didn’t drink during the day. There was never alcohol in the apartment. In fact, he could easily bypass drinking for days or weeks. She wasn’t sure if he was technically an alcoholic. She’d thought about leaving Ben more than once, but she loved him, she knew that much was true. And he loved her. Plus, now there was Joan. Joan would help them. This trip would help them. She just had to be patient.

“Hurry up,” Poppy said. It had started to rain and Poppy was already many strides ahead of her.

By the time they reached the palapa the rain was coming down hard. Ben and Evan were seated at the table, deep in conversation, a handful of empty beer bottles between them. Five, Gertie counted; Ben was just cracking open another. How many did that make for Ben, Gertie wondered, slipping into the seat beside Evan. All these years later he still smelled of Old Spice.

“What are you boys up to?” she said with a whiff of sass; the beer had loosened her up a bit.

“Ben’s just filling me in on the upcoming tour. Not bad, not bad.”

Gertie reached across the table and touched Ben’s hand. He winked at her. His eyes were Husky-blue, his lashes deep-blonde and long.

The rains came down harder and a blue-headed parrot flew in and nestled on one of the rafters.

“How extraordinary,” Gertie said. And with its bright green wings and red beak it certainly was.

“That’s just the first of many,” Evan said. “Soon the place’ll be thick with them.”

“It’s true,” Poppy said. “Even in the city they try to get in during storms.”

“And toads,” Evan said. Sure enough, when Gertie looked down toads were already hopping in. She lifted her sandy feet and quietly crossed her legs on the chair.

The wind blew the rain sideways and Evan began lowering the slatted walls like blinds around them. Soon they were in semi-darkness.

“But what you need to watch out for are the scorpions,” Evan said. “Check your shoes before putting them on. And the fer-de-lance. Those suckers will kill you in a bite.”

“What’s a ferderfuck?” Ben asked, lighting a cigarette.

“Poisonous snake,” Evan said. “They’re legendary here. Its name means ‘iron of the lance.’”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” Ben said. He reached for another beer but caught Gertie watching him, smiled, and returned it to the table unopened. Relief washed through her. Everything would be okay. On the dancefloor, in bed, possibly even in a hammock, their bodies always found their way back to one another; they knew how to heal.

“Don’t worry,” Poppy said, lighting a lantern. “They don’t always kill you, sometimes you just go blind. Or get hit up with a bit of organ necrosis.”

Ben laughed one of his hearty laughs—the kind that sounded like squabbling geese. “Anything else we should know about?”

“Ants,” Evan said. “Spiders the size of your fist. Vampire bats.”

“Why’d you bring me to this death trap, baby?” Ben said to Gertie.

She felt suddenly shy, everyone’s attention on her.

“Because I wanted you to die,” she said. They all laughed.

The first night, everyone had been so exhausted and yet also so glad to be reunited they’d talked until the wee hours of the morning then passed out in the hammocks. But Ben and Gertie ended up in the cabin the second night.

“Flip you for it,” Ben had said to Evan, his arm snugged around Gertie’s shoulder.

“Nah,” Evan said. “You two flew all the way here. It’s yours.”

It had been an easy day in the sense that Ben not only hadn’t had anything to drink, he hadn’t seemed to want anything. When Poppy and Evan cracked open a few beers stretched out on a blanket on the beach, Ben declined.

“Keeping it clean,” he’d said, waving his hand at the bottle Evan extended to him.

“All right, man,” Evan said, nodding, his bottom lip thrust slightly forward. “All to the good.”

“Gotta keep the wife happy.” Ben pulled her onto his lap.

That was the part that hadn’t been easy. That way he nimbly pushed his drinking onto her as if her efforts to control it were the issue, not the drinking itself. Embarrassment tightened her jaw as she dodged Evan’s gaze; she didn’t want his pity. But in all likelihood, Ben was refraining from drinking in order to keep her happy. And wasn’t this what she wanted?

Now, in the tiny, wooden cabin, all of that felt long ago, both their bodies still hot with the sun, and Ben’s hair damp with the sea.

Ben backed Gertie toward the bed, his fingers teasingly against her side, her breath heavy. The only light, the moon seeping through the cracks in the wood. When they reached the wooden platform, Gertie paused.

“Poppy said to check for scorpions.”

“Fuck scorpions,” Ben whispered into her ear, as if these were words of seduction. And they kind of were. His voice was clear, his breath alive with papaya and freshly-squeezed orange juice. The two of them suddenly felt so young to her, so pure. Yet she was also aware of all they’d traversed, all they’d lost of themselves and each other.

Together they fell onto the futon. Ben’s lips were chapped from the salt water, and she could feel tiny flakes of skin in her mouth. A merging. Ben wriggled out of his swim trunks, and she saw his cock in that muted light. She wrapped her legs around him and drew him onto her. They reached for the zipper on Gertie’s sundress in the same moment, but it was stuck. They squirmed through the useless joint effort of freeing it and Gertie squealed when Ben, at last, ripped the dress from her body. It was a clean rip, something she could easily repair later, but she didn’t think about this at the time. Instead she thought how wondrous it was to have her husband inside her, sober.

Afterwards, with her head on his chest, Ben started laughing. “Holy fuck,” he said. “Like literally, holy, holy fuck.”

After that the days moved slowly. Breakfasts were fruit plucked from the surrounding trees, a handful of nuts. Nestled two to a hammock, they ate gazing at the bright pink jungle geraniums and sturdy torch gingers and complex bromeliads and myriad other flowers that encircled them. Gertie yawned more than she used to, finger combed her hair. She felt a restlessness, a sweet vibration awakening her legs. Afternoons passed lazily on the beach reading, talking, swimming, telling silly jokes. Evan had learned how to surf and wasted more than a few hours attempting to teach her. How good it felt to be in his company again. How easy. The two of them in the shallows as he demonstrated how to paddle or carefully held the board as she tried to stand.

And yet, Gertie kept waiting for all of it to fall apart.

Ben had certainly gone days before without a drink; he’d gone weeks, even months; she couldn’t yet trust that this stretch of sobriety was anything other than a time-out, a rejuvenation of sorts, the way a plant returns to its dormant state during the winter, so that he could resume the drinking with greater verve.

“Does it help not to trust him?” Poppy asked, when Gertie finally confided in her on one of the beach strolls.

“A little, yes.”

“Denying yourself present-time joy in case there isn’t any joy in the future?”

“That way it won’t hurt so much when it’s gone.”

Poppy draped an arm around Gertie, her wrist shimmery with the jasmine oil she made herself. Gertie’s skin was now a golden brown, her shoulders and nose a pale-petal pink. The heavy ocean air had brought her skin to life—plumped it back up after all those years of hard city air, and her hair was shiny and full.

“So you’ll badger him into submission?”

Gertie conjured a badger’s sweet, stripy face and ferocious teeth. Was this really her?

“Sounds exhausting,” Poppy pressed on.

What it was, this waiting to see if Ben would get fucked up and wreck things, was stressful; stressful letting him know, subtly, or maybe not so subtly, that he was being watched; stressful sending out signals of future disappointment, future hurt, future turbulence and woe if he did slip up. And none of it made a difference, it was all a useless exercise in pseudo-control. Some of Ben’s worst drinking nights had been with her watching.

“It can be,” Gertie said, suddenly not really trusting Poppy either.

“Maybe you’re wanting trust to be something it’s not.”

On the day before they left, they drove to a small cafe in the nearest village, where they ate homemade mango ice cream from hot-pink ceramic bowls. Ben hit it off with the owner, a drummer in a local band, who showed Ben his kit in the backroom while Gertie picked out books at the free exchange for the flight home. He vibed like the sort who liked to party and Gertie braced herself for the moment Ben would reappear fucked up, already the sting of tears in her eyes.

Yet when he reappeared, he was straight. The four of them roamed the dusty streets of what passed for a shopping area: a tiny grocery store inside someone’s home, a barber shop, a pharmacy the size of their kitchen in New York. Two bars. A man dressed in a straw hat and tight-fitting vest stood in the doorway of one smoking a cigar and waving them in. Ben strode toward him. Poppy gave her a sympathetic glance, lips puckered forward, eyebrows raised. Imagining an invisible rope tied around Ben’s waist, Gertie gave it an angry yank. It worked! All Ben had wanted was a light for his cigarette.

Ben drove the Jeep on the way back. It started raining again and in no time the road began to flood.

“Go faster, man,” said Evan. “We don’t want to stall out here.”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Ben said.

“We do not want to stall out here, man,” Evan repeated. “This is the middle of fucking nowhere.”

Everyone was soaked to the bone as the Jeep had no roof, but the rain felt good to Gertie. The danger felt good as well. What would happen if they stalled out in the middle of fucking nowhere? She had the sensation of being enveloped by the trees and the curious noises and all the poisonous insects and it felt like a relief. Stall, a voice in her head whispered, stall.

Early that evening, after the rains had stopped, Gertie joined Ben on the beach searching for shells. In the trees the howler monkeys raged and sang.

“As if this isn’t the middle of fucking nowhere,” Ben said, his laugh more a cackle. He skimmed one of the shells he’d collected across the water, a skill Gertie had no idea he possessed. Their lives in Manhattan revealed only the parts of themselves that were needed for survival there.

“True,” Gertie said. “But at least here we have the hope of his friends coming back and finding our dead bodies.”

Ben skimmed another shell. “I like it here,” he said. “I like being here with you.” Ah, the brightness of his eyes, even now as the day was fading. “It’s like none of the rest of it exists.”

She wondered if by “it” he meant the bars and clubs and parties, the slowly receding early-morning fights, but didn’t want to ruin the moment by asking.

Ben gave her an odd kiss: part gentle, part furious. Then he began spinning in circles; arms out to the side he twirled round and round and round. The sun lowered and the sky went purple. Darkness came on quickly here. The monkeys howled louder in the changing light and Ben spun. Gertie longed to join him. What freedom! What abandon!

Finally, he stopped and leaned over hands on knees, panting. It was so dark she could barely see him, just hear him breathing.

“Gertie?”

“I’m here.”

After a late dinner Poppy and Gertie stayed at the palapa reading in hammocks, while the men hotfooted it down to the ocean, their flashlights carving a trail. The walls were up, and there was a breeze. Soon enough she heard Poppy’s light snores, and their insouciant drone soothed her. In some baseline way this whole trip had soothed her. The air, the trees, the water, the birds. And Ben not even wanting to go to the bar. She rolled on her side only to discover Evan standing beside one of the supports watching her.

“Shit,” she said, jolting up. “You scared me.”

“Sorry.” He was clad in nothing but low-slung bathing trunks. “Just came up to grab some whiskey.”

Gertie was disappointed, but she remembered Joan’s encouragement to find their marriage’s balance: Ben had been so measured on the trip, perhaps it was her turn to join him. She hopped out of the hammock and strode toward the kitchen.

“I’ll take it to him.”

“I don’t think that’s the best idea,” came Poppy’s muffled voice, her mouth half in the pillow. She didn’t complete the thought but the intent was clear: your husband is an alcoholic.

The blue flare of the lantern momentarily dimmed. Gertie felt equal measure gutted and surprisingly prepared to deny the veracity of Poppy’s implication. She pushed forward. Evan met her at the counter. As they both reached for the bottle, their arms and hipbones touched. His skin radiated warmth and a sprinkling of sand ran up his arm and across his chest. Gertie felt herself flush. She pulled her hand back and turned slightly away.

“Want a shot?” Evan asked.

Gertie shook her head. “I was just going to take it down to the beach.”

But Evan had already filled two glasses. He moved in close. She could smell their history. They’d once known everything about each other. She didn’t want the alcohol, but she wanted what it meant in that moment and this both delighted and frightened her. Gertie accepted the glass.

“Cheers, big ears,” Evan said, clinking his glass against hers. They swallowed in unison.

As Evan refilled the glasses Gertie found herself staring at his stomach muscles. His skin was golden, his chest hairless, his nipples small and dark. She was once more acutely aware of a life that could have been hers. Flustered, she placed the drink on the counter. “No more for me.”

“Come on,” Evan said. “You’re on vacation.”

Then Ben burst into the room, winded.

“That fucking hill,” he said, throwing his chest forward to inhale, dramatically; he dropped his flashlight which illuminated him like footlights. “They shoulda built this fucking thing in a more convenient location.” He grinned. “Doncha think?”

His s’s and t’s were thick and truncated and he moved his jaw back and forth the way he did when he was very fucked up. The familiar tightness in her shoulders and neck shot back.

“I think it’s fantastic just where it is,” Poppy said, sitting up in the hammock.

“Holding out on me,” Ben said. He snatched the whiskey bottle, took a swig. and wiped his mouth with his hand. He smiled at Gertie. Her stomach gripped. His darting eyes. The fast breathing. The way he chewed his lip, the bottom one that Gertie could see now was already raw.

“Where’d you get it?” she said.

“Get what?”

“Whatever it is you’re on?”

For a moment, Ben’s face softened, his shoulders drooped, and it looked as if he was about to confess everything, even ask for forgiveness, but instead, with unfamiliar malice, he said, “Oh, won’t you have stories for Joan.” Then he burst out laughing. “Oh, Joan, we went to Costa Rica and played house with this surfer pussy and his fantastic puppet wife for a week and then Ben got his hands on some pure Central American coke and went out of his motherfucking mind.” Ben’s gestures were wild, choppy, exaggerated. His body jerked around the room. She’d never seen him in such a state. “Oh, poor, suffering Gertrude, here have a tissue and we’ll talk about what an asshole your husband is while he sits there on the couch pretending that he gives a fuck.”

“Ben, man,” Evan said, holding a hand to Ben’s chest.

“Oh, you,” Ben said, the disgust palpable. “You tamarind-selling douchebag, still trying to fuck my wife, I see.”

“It was the guy at the café, right?” Gertie knew this detail didn’t matter—and yet she had to gain control over something.

“Out of my ass,” Ben shouted. “I got it out of my beautiful, golden ass.”

And in a flash he was gone.

Relief flooded through Gertie the way it does when a screaming child finally quiets. Go, she found herself thinking. She imagined him running back down the hill, past the fallen branch, into the water; the ocean sweeping him away, the way it had her shoes.

“Shit! He’s running into the jungle,” Poppy said, pointing out into the darkness.

Gertie jammed on Poppy’s spare flip-flops and whisked up Ben’s flashlight while the other two grabbed one of the lanterns. Soon they were tromping through the thick underbrush. They called and called Ben’s name; the monkeys howled in response. They’d been out ten or fifteen minutes when Gertie realized she’d no idea of how to get home again, but they would deal with that later. Right now, her mind raced with images of Ben bitten by a scorpion or one of those deadly snakes, or swarmed by the howlers (did monkeys swarm?). Or perhaps outlaws lived in the jungle, dangerous people, murderers. Ben, higher than high, might stumble across them, and they would be forced to kill him. And yet it made no sense to think they’d attended all those therapy sessions and worked so hard to be attentive to each other’s needs, let alone that he’d barely touched a drop of alcohol in their seven days here only to have him get fucked up on coke and die.

On they trudged, zigzagging back and forth, their lights unified into one path. The air was heavy with jungle mulch. Branches and leaves and something else (bugs?) crackled beneath their feet; vines shot across her body. She could only see patches of the trees that the light briefly illuminated, but she could feel their presence as strongly if they were breathing on her. Here was her danger. Here she was, at last, in the thick of it. And yet the jungle seemed fond of her: A handful of mosquitoes bit her arms and shoulders, but most flew clear; something large-ish and hard-shelled shot up her leg, but she brushed it away easily enough; the earth vibrated up through her feet the way the dance floor had in her youth. (Was this even possible? Perhaps she was becoming hysterical?)

An hour passed in this manner, two hours, three hours. They were walking in circles, Gertie was certain she recognized trees, rocks, sloths. Morning loomed. Ben is dead, she thought. My husband is no more. She thought she might be sick, but then, once again, a gentle peace eased through her, a peace she was afraid to articulate for how awful it would sound. Instead she said, “Let’s go back.”

They found their way with relative ease: in part, the vibrations guided her; also, in the rush they’d left a few lanterns burning creating a distant glow. They silently climbed into their hammocks. For a moment Gertie lay there, staring off at the sky. So many stars. You never saw stars in Manhattan, she thought. A deep unbidden breath filled her. Then she closed her eyes and slept.

Gertie jolted awake. Her muscles ached, her left calf was throbbing, and her mouth was sticky and dry. The night flooded back to her; she felt sick with shame: how could she possibly have slept when Ben was missing? Get up, she admonished herself. Get into the jungle. Find your husband. But her limbs felt woven into the hammock. Beside her Poppy made stirring sounds, and Evan rolled toward her, his arm falling loosely over the edge of his hammock. Ben’s was empty. She was used to this, Gertie reminded herself, remembering how many mornings in New York she had awoken after a fight to find Ben gone. He always returned. The dead flowers along the wall in their kitchen were a testament to this. Maybe he was collecting flowers this very moment, digging a bromeliad right out of the earth. This was ludicrous, of course, but not impossible. She missed the kitties and wondered how she would get back to them. Jeep rides, planes, taxis all felt far away.

The sun beat down on her shoulders, already so warm though it was early, and Gertie turned her face toward the light.

Then she saw him. His hair loose and wild. Bare chested and barefoot. He looked like Jesus slowly mounting the hill.

She remained still. Felt the way each step closer impacted her body. Even at a distance she could see the ruby scratches on his arms and chest.

“He’s back,” Evan said, wrangling himself from his hammock and into a t-shirt he pulled off the floor. He moved toward Ben the way a father might toward a son he was welcoming home from prison; Poppy followed. Gertie watched this feeling…nothing—a numb wad of blankness where her emotions should be. She forced her legs to move and joined her friends. Together, they encircled Ben like her imagined swarm of howlers, and he fell into her arms.

“Where’s your shirt?” she asked. “Your shoes?”

Such practical questions, so silly.

“I don’t know, baby.” She could feel he wanted to cry. How frail he seemed in this moment, how alone. He clung to her hand as she led him, step by step, up the hill. Poppy and Evan gathered fruit for breakfast while Gertie guided Ben into the cabin and silently bathed his wounds with a washcloth moistened in a bowl.

An image of herself as a teenager came to mind. Clad in her favorite strappy, white nightie with the small red and yellow polka dots, sheets askew, earphones snug to her head. Music was how she’d survived those years. Up late, probably two or three in the morning, she should have been asleep ages ago. But her heart was bright and open; her future—her beautiful future—unfurled before her and that was exhilarating.

After Ben’s body was clean, the water in the bowl crimson with his blood, they walked to the beach, just the two of them.

“I’m scared,” Ben said. There was a lush plummy bruise along his left cheekbone; his swollen lower lip flared like a stubborn child’s; his body reeked of jungle mulch, of decay. “I think I need help.”

How she had waited for these words.

“What happened out there?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember anything.”

“Nothing?”

He shuddered. “Nothing.”

Now he wept, perched on the very log that had sacrificed her clogs. Was it Ben that the ocean had given her in exchange for them? Gertie sat beside him and he lowered his head onto her lap. The sun was high and hot and they were both sweating. Above them pranced the monkeys.

“I’m here,” she said, tracing a deep scratch along his back. “I’ll help you.”

He curled into her. “You know how to take care of me, Baby,” he said, his breath hot against her belly. She could feel his heart slowing, his muscles unwinding; he was calming down. “What would happen to me without you?”

Gertie imagined picking him up from a twelve-step meeting in the basement of the church on Norfolk, fingers intertwined as they walked to a drink-free dinner and then intertwined again as they strolled home to make love, good love—the sort they’d been making in the cabin. She saw them smiling, laughing, thriving. At last, there was order; at last, all of her patience was paying off. She pictured them shaking hands with Joan, thanking her for her help, but they were okay now, on their own.

“I think there’s a meeting on Monday nights,” Gertie said, careful not to label it, but he knew what she meant.

“We booked studio time for the week we’re back, Baby.” The tears over, his voice now pre-jungle Ben. “The managers want new demos to give to Lars. You know I can’t do anything else when we’re recording; it takes over fucking everything.”

Ben rolled onto his side and sighed. A sigh so childlike, his life so easily fixed, it made her stomach lurch. He could only sigh like that because of her. The weight of his head in her lap began to feel cumbersome. He was cutting off the blood flow in her thighs.

“Baby,” he said, looking up at her, lips curved into the slightest smile; he was going to say something loving, something tenderly mischievous. Something that would make everything okay. She could feel the words already. He slipped his fingers between hers, squeezed them. How familiar they felt, how warm, the tips rough from his bass strings. And yet she felt her heartbeat thump in her ears, behind her eyes. Her throat tightened and she needed a drink of water, but they’d come to the beach empty-handed.

“Baby,” he said again, when she didn’t respond.

They’d been through this before: His soft, sweet regret, her forgiveness. This was their biggest performance to date, but there was nothing unique about it.

“I’m tired,” she said. To Ben? To the log? The ocean?

She thought of the dance floor all those years ago, when their dreams and their life force had been equal.

“Refolding a towel isn’t the same as getting fucked up on coke and disappearing into the jungle.” She was pleased with how even her voice sounded, every bit as back-to-business as his. Then she thought, Fuck Joan. And this thought delighted her.

Ben sat up.

Free of his weight at last, Gertie jumped up, took a step toward the water, and then another. She stretched her arms as wide and firm as a bird’s wings, tilted back her head, another brilliant blue sky. Gertie found herself spinning. Around and around she went, her feet dislodging the sand, replacing the smooth ancient order of grains with a glorious mess. How heavenly this felt. How right. Why had she waited so long?

Jane Ratcliffe’s work has appeared in The Sun Magazine, The New England Review, The Michigan Quarterly, The Chicago Quarterly, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Longreads amongst others. She holds an MFA from Columbia and lives in Ypsilanti MI with a delightfully mischievous kitty and dog.