“Quarantined,” he repeats. “In my room.”
“Why? What happened? Are you okay?”
Her dad sighs heavily. “My stomach has been funny, so I called to see if I could get a refund on the cannery tour tomorrow, and apparently the cruise ship people panic when passengers don’t feel well so—”
“The cannery…?”
“In Juneau,” he says impatiently. “We’re supposed to— You know what? Never mind. The point is that I’ve been quarantined.”
The ship rocks steeply from side to side, and Greta squeezes her eyes shut, thinking that she shouldn’t have had so much to drink yesterday.
“You’re sick?” she asks, feeling a little queasy herself.
Conrad lets out a grunt. “I’m fine. You toss your cookies a couple times and they treat you like Patient Zero. Never mind that the goddamn ship is rolling around like we’re in the Bermuda Triangle. I swear I—”
“So you’re not allowed to leave your room?”
“No.”
“For how long?”
“At least another eighteen hours.”
“Jesus.”
“I know.”
They both go quiet for a second, and then Greta forces herself to say, “Do you want me to come over there?”
“Nobody’s allowed in,” he says without bothering to hide his exasperation. “That’s the whole point of a quarantine.”
She tries not to let the relief creep into her voice. “Okay, well, do you need anything?”
“I’ll be fine,” he says. “Can you tell the others I won’t make the tour tomorrow? You can take my place if you want. It’s the cannery and then a ride on the tram.”
“Oh,” Greta says, and her voice goes up an octave, “yeah. Maybe I’ll—”
“You don’t have to,” he says gruffly.
Again there’s a pause. The room is so black it almost feels like she’s floating. She grips the phone harder, remembering how she used to creep out into the backyard after their fights, sitting on the old childhood swing set until it was too dark to see. They fought about everything then: about her grades, about her sneaking out, about the fact that she cared about the guitar more than math or science, more than anything, really.
Even then she missed the days when Conrad used to stand at the entrance of the garage and watch her play, a silhouette against the setting sun. But she was no longer an eight-year-old kid with a too-big guitar, her tongue stuck out in concentration. She was twelve, and then thirteen, and then fourteen, perpetually clad in flannel and scuffed Converses, already chafing against the great injustice of growing up on the outskirts of Columbus, where nothing ever happened. By then, her father had already seen enough to know that he would lose her to music, that she would choose that over everything else, and the great big spotlight of his attention had swiveled to Asher, who was a kicker on the high school football team and tried hard in math, who wore an Ohio University sweatshirt and dreamed of all the same things Conrad had once dreamed of, all the things he’d never had: college, opportunity, getting a leg up in the world.
The summer she turned fifteen, Greta saw an ad for a guitarist in the record store where she hung out after bagging groceries, and when she showed up to audition, everyone else was older, eighteen and nineteen and twenty. They looked at her with condescending smirks until she started to play; then they immediately offered her the spot. Practice started every night at nine, which was her weekday curfew, so she perfected the art of sneaking out and back in again. But sometimes she got caught, and when she did, there was always another fight, one more in a series of many, so many that she grew numb to them, so many it became hard to care what he thought.
By the time she was a junior, her bandmates had all gone off to college, which was fine. They had never really played any gigs, just practiced in a kid named Topher’s basement, and Greta was better than they were anyway. But she kept sneaking out all the same. Kept hiding cigarettes in her bedroom. Kept hitching rides downtown whenever a band she liked was performing at one of the music venues. And so the fights continued. Helen did her best to play referee, to absorb or deflect whatever bitterness flowed between the two of them, but even so Greta would usually find herself in the cool of the backyard afterward, sitting on that swing set, sometimes stewing, sometimes crying, sometimes just giving herself the space to wonder what it would be like to live a different sort of life, in a different sort of place, with a different sort of father.
Every once in a while, he’d come out and join her. He never apologized or explained himself, even though Greta suspected her mom had sent him out there to do just that. He was much too stubborn. And so was she. Instead, he’d just lower himself onto the swing beside her, the beam creaking above them, and for a long time, they would sit there together in the dark, gazing up at the wash of stars.
They’d always been better with silence.
“I feel bad,” Greta says eventually, the phone pressed hard against her ear, “that you’re going to miss Juneau.”
Conrad’s voice, when he answers, is softer. “Me too.”
“I’ll check in on you when I get back.”
“You can’t—”
“Quarantine,” she says. “I know. I meant I’ll call or something.”
“Oh,” he says. “Okay.”
In the deep, deep dark, she finds herself nodding. “Okay.”
And then he hangs up.
She falls asleep again immediately, into the kind of hard, dreamless sleep that usually follows a show. When she wakes, she fumbles around for her phone on the table, and sees that it’s almost nine.
The buffet is on the lido deck, and it’s crowded this morning. A couple of kids run past wearing powdery doughnuts like rings on their fingers, and an attendant pushing an elderly man in a wheelchair tries to fight his way past the line for coffee. The tables are arranged along the perimeter of the ship, pressed up against the windows, and Greta spots Mary and Eleanor sitting at one of them, their heads bent over a phone.
For a second, she pauses, struck by the sight of them together like that, thinking about how her mom should be there too. These women had been as much Helen’s family as Greta and Asher and Conrad, the three of them trading gardening secrets and tips on asking for a raise, organizing meals when one of them was sick, and throwing parties for every occasion. They spent summers in each other’s backyards and winters at each other’s kitchen tables. They were friends—best friends—but they were also family.
And now there are only two of them.
When Greta walks up to the table, Eleanor beams at her. “Mary was showing me some pictures of the proposal,” she says, turning the phone around. Greta doesn’t have time to prepare herself; just like that, she’s looking at a picture of Jason, down on one knee, grinning up at a beautiful Asian woman who looks like she’s straight out of a J.Crew catalog.