During an Arizona Trip, Synchronicity Strikes a Reader by the Pool

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I was trying to plan the first real vacation my son Dante and I would take with just the two of us, and I only knew we couldn't go back to Guánica.

Before my husband Vincent died, the three of us would spend most winter breaks at a no-frills resort in the sleepier, southwestern part of Puerto Rico, a place rife with mangroves. This vacation happened for a couple of weeks in February or March—when you couldn’t feel your face in New York—almost every year until Dante graduated from middle school. We would gleefully squint away the sun, burn our thighs kayaking, and search in quicksand-like muck for my missing flip-flop. Most memorably, ever since Dante was old enough to pull his mini penguin suitcase behind him, we would plow through our stack of books on the beach as a family, lying on a curtained bed while the waves rolled in and out. I would reread my old copy of Jesus’ Son while toddler Dante paged through Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! In the late afternoons, when the daylight would start to slink behind the clouds, Dante and Vincent would often wander down the dock. Dante would come back, his long, brown hair lightened by the sun, saying “Daddy has a present for you!” before dropping a bag of plantain chips in my lap.

I couldn’t go back there.

The last few years had been brutal. A year after Vincent's death in 2020, my then 15-year-old son suffered cardiac arrest. It happened in the middle of his school musical, as he stood in the wings. They announced a medical emergency, stopped the show, and asked if I was in the audience. I hurried backstage as two people were performing CPR on him. I was in utter denial about why he was unconscious on the floor and kept talking to him as if I could wake him up. EMTs flooded in, cut his shirt open, and yelled instructions as they shocked him. I stood on the stage and watched in horror.

Time slowed and I began to see the clear fork in the road of my life. I fought down my panic and over the coming days he overcame each hurdle: the night in the ventilator, the days in a coma, the mornings of short-term memory loss, his surgery to install a defibrillator, and the frustrating diagnosis that there was nothing wrong with him physically and nothing in his system to explain his incident.

Miraculously, he came home a week later, on my 44th birthday. I was relieved but stunned that we had gone from being in a hospital surrounded by help to just me and him in our apartment, doctors visits and tests ahead of us. I spent that summer with him on family leave in a rented house in upstate New York but I was too frazzled to relax, forever wary of the ticking time bomb that was his beating heart.

***

Vincent followed literary news and kept a revolving roster of new releases on the bedside table, but he was also an English teacher who liked to pontificate on older classics. He raved about Carson McCullers to me, particularly The Heart is A Lonely Hunter: the story centers on a deaf-mute man named John Singer in 1930s Georgia, and the fates of four townspeople who interact with him. Vincent said she was a genius, and that the novel was underrated, among the best he'd ever read. He wanted me to read it so we could discuss. I never got around to it.

When we got back from upstate, I tried to start the novel several times and failed. I certainly couldn't pick it up during our frantic weekend trips to visit colleges, where I acutely felt Vincent's absence as I navigated New England freeways in rented SUVs with complicated keys and fussed with my name-tag while we toured another cramped dorm with no air-conditioning. The book became just another reminder that Vincent was missing what he'd been looking forward to as both a father, and as someone who guided high school seniors for a living.

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In 2023, Dante was preparing to go off to college across the country. It was pretty much the last time he and I were going to travel together before his new life as a young adult began, so this was an important trip. He had grown up sunkissed, going to the beach every day as a child in eastern Long Island. There was a wildlife rescue center near our house where Dante and I would have Saturday breakfast on one of the picnic tables before visiting with the rehabilitating owls and eagles, recuperating in their respective cages. We often hiked in the nearby woods, checking still waters for tadpoles. So I decided to indulge him and let him decide where we would go. I told him we could go anywhere on the continent.

He wasn’t a city kid, and he’d only been out west as a toddler. He wanted to experience the unique beauty of the American desert—Arizona was the first place that came to mind.

Packing for Phoenix, I stashed easy tropical-print wrap dresses and long-unworn bikinis into my suitcase. I love the sun and missed feeling it on my bare back. I was excited to see something new with my son. I was determined to gorge myself at the restaurant and recline in comfort near a water station. In the middle of all this, I scanned the living room bookshelf and surprised myself by tossing the The Heart is A Lonely Hunter in my bag.

The trip was perfect for Dante, who had eschewed college in the city for the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, and longed to drive across various American states to poke at conifers and eyeball the wildlife. He’d taken a high-school birding class and was excited to see what the southwestern skies had to offer. He loves that birds are everywhere, he says, no matter where you go. He likes the idea that you don’t have to explain what a bird is to anybody, that they’re a commonality that all humans have encountered.

One day, our resort brought in an expert from the local rescue Liberty Wildlife, who wandered the grounds with a falcon one day and a kestrel during the next. This immediately took Dante back to our weekend mornings at the wildlife center, and to those kid-related events around our town when volunteers would bring around tiny owl ambassadors who couldn’t be released back into the wild. We noticed movement in the skies as they turned dark blue and were informed that the birds were nighthawks, which delighted us to no end.

While Dante spent the latter part of the trip hiking in the dry Arizona heat, photographing quail and roadrunners on Camelback Mountain, I stretched out on a lounge chair by the quiet spa pool and picked up The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. I could see immediately why Vincent loved the novel: it elegantly expressed myriad forms of human heartache through the goings-on in a small Southern town. Everyone was connected by their loneliness. The characters meet with bleak fates: one gives up her dreams, one lives out his life far from home, another commits suicide. I related heavily to their darkness, but it also made me realize that I was no longer in that place. I’d spent the last few years in a state of loss and worry, waking up in tears, afraid of what might come. But now, I was grateful. The story doesn’t end when the book does (maybe those characters found peace) and nor does mine: My husband died, but my son survived. Dante was here with me, in a beautiful place, and his story was just starting.

I read the book for the rest of the trip, always by the pool and before bed, the heat from my suntan cooled by the sage-scented bed sheets. We were in the middle of the desert, far from Guánica and the Caribbean Sea, where another family was probably lying on the beach bed. But I felt like Vincent was on the trip with us, like I might turn a corner and he’d be there waiting to go on our post-dinner walk.

On the final day, after rounds of yoga at dusk and a sound bath that we had to ourselves, I handed Dante the book and told him I’d like to talk when he was done reading it, too. In turn, he dropped a bag of plantain chips in my lap.

“Present for you,” he said. “I can't believe they have these here.”

Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler