The Vacationers

“Well,” Jim said, standing up straight again. He looked toward Fra

Lawrence, Charles, and Fra

“I’m really sorry,” Lawrence said. “I don’t know what happened,” meaning both that he didn’t know what had gone down at the magazine and that he didn’t know what had occurred in the three previous minutes. Neither Fra

Sylvia woke up with a dry, open mouth. She’d had four glasses of wine at di

The photos were taken at a party, one of the first “last parties” of the year. There was the last party at the park the cops never checked, there was the last party at someone’s free house, then the last party at someone else’s free house. The party in question had taken place at an apartment on the sixth floor of the Apthorp, a giant building on 79th Street, only five blocks from the Post family manse. Sylvia hadn’t wanted to go, but she had, because she did like some of the people she was graduating with, if not very many of them. When the photos surfaced on Facebook the next day, her skin slick with sweat, her eyes blurry from too many plastic cups full of cheap beer, her tongue in one boy’s mouth and then another and another, boys she didn’t even remember speaking to, she vowed to herself that she would never go to a party ever again. Or on the Internet. Moving to Spain was sounding better and better.

“Shit!” she said, looking at the time. She had three minutes to get dressed and downstairs before Joan would arrive. Sylvia pulled on her jeans and a black T-shirt from the pile on the floor. She leaned against the mirror and looked at her pores. There were girls at school who spent hours in the ladies’ room putting on makeup expertly, as though they were each teaching their own YouTube tutorial, but Sylvia didn’t know how, nor did she want to learn. It was almost impossible to change anything about yourself at a school you’d been attending since you were five—with every tiny step away from your former shell, someone was bound to say, “Hey! That’s not you! You’re faking!” Sylvia lived in fear of such fakery. Going to college was going to be amazing for many reasons, the first of which being the simple fact that Sylvia pla

Lawrence pulled Charles into their bedroom as quickly as he could.

“What are you doing, my strange little munchkin?” Charles was amused, despite having just left Fra

In lieu of an answer, Lawrence opened his laptop and spun it in Charles’s direction.

“Give me the phone,” Charles said. “What time is it in New York?”

It was just before five p.m. in New York, and they managed to catch the social worker before she was out the door. Deborah read them the details off a form: the baby weighed five pounds, ten ounces and was seventeen inches long, born to a twenty-year-old African-American mother. The father was Puerto Rican, but he was out of the picture. The birth mother had chosen their letter out of the book at the agency. The baby’s name, which they would of course be welcome to change, was Alphonse.

“Are you interested in proceeding?” Deborah waited.

Charles and Lawrence held the phone between their faces, both leaning forward, so that together their bodies formed a steeple. They looked at each other, eyes wide. Lawrence spoke first.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, we are.”

Deborah explained what would happen next—they’d heard it before, but like everything important, the minute that it became a reality, they’d forgotten all the details. The birth mother could choose any number of families, and the agency would approach them all on her behalf. Once those families had said yes, the agency would go back to her with the list. The birth mother would then pick the wi

“We’re in Spain,” Lawrence said. “Should we come home? Should we come home right now?” He glanced around their bedroom, calculating how long it would take them to pack and drive to the airport.

“Stay on vacation,” Deborah said. “Even if the birth mother does choose you, we’re looking at a couple of weeks before you’d be able to bring Alphonse home. If you can stay, stay. I’ll be in touch whenever I hear something, probably next week.” She hung up the phone, leaving Charles and Lawrence standing there, the precious object now silent between them.