Only now it is all a bit spoiled, isn’t it? This same disappointment every year; childish, he concedes, but there it is: he still hasn’t found paradise, not quite. Because, like everywhere else, when you get down to it, it is all just bodies and their manifold wastes and where to put it all, it is all just disorder two days from taking over. The week before he flew down here, a blizzard had prevented trash pickup in Manhattan for a few days. On his walk from Grand Central to the office, the sidewalks were piled five feet high with black trash bags. At street corners, the garbage pails were overflowing, the pavement around them littered with chicken bones, half-eaten hot dogs, diapers, frozen rivers of old coffee. He saw a little terrier in a red sweater urinate at the base of a pile of trash bags; he saw a thick beige puddle beside another pile, and stared at it curiously for a moment before the smell hit him and he realized it was vomit. As he walked past all of this he had fixed an image of a tropical beach in his mind and thought, Thank god I’m getting out of here. But now that he is out, now that he is here, he cannot help but wonder whether the only damned difference is the bougainvillea, whether this place is nothing but the same old ugliness, spackled with an unconvincing veneer of beauty.

A YELLOW rubber ball rises high in the air. A dozen children dash across the sand to catch it. It is ten in the morning, the start of the resort’s daily hour of children’s games and relays. While the children play, their parents use the free time. At the moment the yellow ball reaches its apex, a mother shudders with the force of her first orgasm in a month. Another mother is getting close and hoping ferociously that her husband lasts. A husband and wife who fully intended on sex snore in bed. Couples drink tequila sunrises in the hot tub, read on the beach, pound away side by side on treadmills in the fitness center. A wife poses for her husband in front of the ocean, trying her best to hide her soft thighs. For a moment their children slip from view. Briefly, they seem not to exist at all.

CLAIRE IS no good at games. She falls during the crab walk. “Come onnn,” her partner urges during the three-legged race. Two strides into the egg-and-spoon relay the egg rolls off her spoon and cracks on her foot. But most of all she is no good at the mysterious process by which children sift out into pairs and clusters, securing their buddies for the week. Even Axel from Belgium, who doesn’t speak English, slips right in with another rowdy boy. They kindle friendship so quickly it leaves her dizzy, as if she’s been spinning; when she stops, the world tilts back into place and the business of making friends is done, settled, without her.

THE FAT one brings the family’s lunch. They watch him come up the beach, the heavy tray balanced on his shoulder. He stumbles. French fries rain onto the sand.

“I apologize,” he says when he reaches them. “I’ll bring you more chips.”

“Oh, don’t bother. There’s still plenty,” the mother says encouragingly. “Clairey, sweetheart, no writing.”

The little girl freezes, caught with her index finger in midair. The word she had been writing was chips. She was up to p. She shoves her hand down at her side. She can feel her finger itching with the half-finished p and the s. She will have to finish later.

“Leave her alone,” Alison snaps at her mother. She takes Claire’s hand, raises it to her lips, and gives it a peck.

The mother sighs. This habit of her younger daughter’s emerged a few months ago, her index finger wiggling and looping through the air. “I’m writing,” Claire had mumbled when the mother asked what was going on. They’d met with the school psychologist, a mistake—after that Claire got furtive about it, sneaky, only doing it when she thought no one was paying attention. It is a constant struggle for the mothers: How do you know what is merely odd and what is worrisome? How much damage can you inflict upon your child if you treat something like it is one when it is really the other?

After Clive sets out their food on the low tables between their chairs, he takes a small towel from his pocket and wipes the sweat from his brow.

“Must be hot out here in long pants,” the father says.

Alison shoots him a disapproving look, which he ignores. If fathers only said things their teenage daughters approved of, they would never speak at all. The mother and father exchange glances. A change has come over their daughter. Lately, her teenage moodiness carries a whiff of moral judgment. Newer still is this sighing dismissiveness, as if they are hardly even worth the effort of her judgment. Make no mistake, she’s a college girl now.

“It’s not so bad,” the fat one mumbles. “Are you having a cold winter at home?”

“Brutal,” the father says. “It’s been snowing nonstop. I envy you, waking up to this every day.”

“We do have our hurricanes,” the fat one says.

“You had a bad one a few years ago, right? Something with a C.”

“Klaus.”

The father claps his hands together. “Klaus! That’s the one.”

“We had six hundred homes and many of our schools destroyed.”

“How awful,” the mother says.

The father cannot comprehend how people can be willing to live in a place where something like this can happen. He decides that a sense of the perpetual potential for destruction, for incurring a total loss, must be baked into people’s temperaments here from birth, so that living like this is easier for them than it would be for him. Which is not a deficit in his character, for presumably if he had been born here he, too, would be such a person, able to bear unpredictability with stoic equanimity. He pauses to imagine himself as such a person—a pleasurable leaving-behind of himself as he enters a self more connected to and at peace with the planetary vicissitudes.

“Tell me something,” the father says. “Where do you recommend for some local food? You know, something authentic.”

The fat one gives him the name of a restaurant in town. His friend works there; his friend gives tours of the island and the cays, too, “At a good price.” The mother and father smile and thank him, but something silent is exchanged between them: they enjoy receiving local knowledge, but they are also on guard for local slipperiness.

Up and down the beach, fathers sign bills for lunches and drinks. They try not to think about the numbers. Five bucks for their kid’s Orangina, eighteen for their wife’s goat cheese salad. They do not want to linger on the ways they are being nickel-and-dimed in paradise. Besides, what price can one put on such moments? Here is the sea, the blue water and the milky froth. Here is the soft, sun-warmed sand. The grains of sand on earth, a father read somewhere, are fewer than the stars in the universe. How unlikely, then, what an unbelievable stroke of luck, his family on this beach.

SOME TIME later, the skinny one comes to clear the family’s plates.

“What are the sisters planning the rest of the day?” he asks.

“We’re going to build a castle, right, Clairey?” Alison says.

“Did you know I was this year’s Carnival Sand Castle Competition champion?”

“Is that so?” Alison sweeps her hair off her neck and gathers it into a ponytail.

“For true. Well, honorable mention.” He grins. “If you girls need any consultion on your design, just let me know.”

“We like to build our sandcastles solo, thank you very much,” Alison says with a fetching smirk.

Edwin squats in front of Claire. “And you, little miss? Do you, too, prefer to build your sandcastle solo?” He smiles at her.

Claire nods rigidly.

He laughs. “Okay, little miss.” He tousles her hair. “See you later, sisters.”

As he heads off down the beach, the mother notices that her daughter has her eyes on him, watching him go.

THE SKINNY one is the prince of the sand. The social hierarchy of the guests flows through him. Those he anoints with his gregarious approval seem to possess an invisible status. It is true he takes a lot of breaks and his tendency to stop and chat slows down service on the beach, but this is forgiven, even embraced. What’s the rush? They’re on island time. He is adored, too, by the young children, who follow him around like a fan club.

Then there is the fat one, Gogo, clumsy in the sand, clumsy with a tray of cocktails on his shoulder, clumsy adjusting the umbrellas to keep up with the movement of the sun, his voice rarely rising above a mumble. But he is Edwin’s friend. The closeness between the skinny one and the fat one is clear. When they pass each other on the sand they exchange high fives and chummy insults. Often, Edwin returns from his break with a grease-spotted paper bag in hand—lunch for Gogo.

When a guest asks Clive about their friendship, he says simply, “We’re best mates.”

“Me and the Goges?” Edwin says, asked the same question. “We come up together from small. Me and he go back to primary. Who you think it was named he Gogo? I’d tell you why but he’d kill me.”

One sundown, the man with the dolphin swim trunks is jogging down the beach when he sees Edwin struggling to drag a stack of chairs across the sand. Clive hurries over and, without a word, lifts the load from him. The man feels something crack in him. He loves his wife, don’t get him wrong, but somehow he had forgotten until this moment—maybe he has forced himself to forget—the sweetness of friendship.

THE SISTERS do many things together. They collect seashells. They trade underwater messages in the pool: “Mayonnaise is gross.” “Fluffernutter is the world’s best dog.” In the ocean, Alison scoops Claire into her arms and Claire wraps her arms around her sister’s neck.

“Our ship sank and Mom and Dad and everybody else is dead,” Claire says. “We’re in the middle of the ocean.”

“See that island out there?” Alison says, pointing to Faraway Cay. “We’re going to have to swim for it. It’s our only chance. Can you make it?”

Claire nods, sober and brave.