“I haven’t told anyone,” Ayers said. “Not even my parents.”
“That explains your leave of absence.”
“Just for a couple weeks,” Ayers said. “Until I get a better grip on things.”
“I’m sure it seems scary,” Cash said. “But I’ll help. We’ll all help. Baker has his flaws, but he’s an excellent father.”
Ayers wasn’t ready to hear this; she wasn’t even sure she was going to go through with it. “Don’t tell a soul,” she said. “Not Tilda, not your mom, not Baker.”
“Are you kidding?” Cash said. He bent down to rub Winnie’s head. “I’m giving you my best friend. The last thing I’m going to do is cross you.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m here,” Cash said. “And you know what? I’m psyched.”
To track down her mother and father, Ayers clicks on the Wandering Wilsons Facebook page. Her parents share a cell phone and they call her when they’re in a place with reliable service, which isn’t often. Ayers’s parents—Phil Wilson and Sunny Ray—have never married, though they’ve been together for thirty-five years. Each refers to the other as “my partner,” and they call each other “my love.” Their relationship is nontraditional—and enviable. They have a shared vision of seeing the world on its own terms, abiding by the old adage “Take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints.” Phil and Sunny met during a semester abroad in the Canary Islands in 1984; Phil was at Berkeley, Sunny at the University of Wisconsin. After that semester, they both dropped out and hopped on a freighter headed for Portugal, starting a life of wanderlust that has continued to this very day. Ayers’s earliest memories are of walking between her parents down the dusty streets of one foreign country or another, the smell of diesel fuel, the sound of unfamiliar languages. Phil was the navigator; he had the map. Sunny was the ambassador; she did the talking, learning the words for Hello and Thank you in the language of every place they visited. They stayed in hostels or cheap hotels, Ayers and her parents sometimes all sharing a bed. They cooked in communal kitchens, showered in communal bathrooms. They slept on trains. They hiked and camped, snorkeled, tubed, zip-lined, canoed, rafted, spelunked. They shopped at local markets, napped in botanical gardens, hopped on and off the goat-and-chicken bus, lit candles in churches, swam with dolphins and whale sharks, ate from street carts, bathed in hot springs, climbed to the scenic lookout at the crack of dawn, rode the elephant or donkey or camel, awoke to the call of the muezzin from the local mosque, swapped paperbacks, hand-washed their laundry and hung it to dry stiff as cardboard in the baking sun. As soon as they stayed somewhere long enough to feel comfortable, they packed up and moved on. Ayers had seen it all: the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, Torres del Paine, the Galápagos, the northern lights, the Monteverde Cloud Forest, the Amazon River, the fjords, the glaciers, the mountain ranges, the deserts, the lakes, all of the oceans.
That must have been so cool, people say when Ayers describes her upbringing. You’re so lucky.
We all want what we can’t have. Ayers wanted a house. She wanted a subscription to Seventeen magazine that would arrive reliably on the first of the month. She wanted parents like Coach and Tami Taylor. She wanted siblings.
Every week or two someone aboard Treasure Island asks Ayers, “What do your parents think about you living on a tropical island?”
The true answer: They think it’s boring. “Oh,” she responds. “They’re proud of me.”
Ayers’s parents have money now—inherited from Ayers’s paternal grandmother—and so their travel has become far more comfortable. They stayed at the Shangri-La in Paris, which must have been interesting. Phil and Sunny still travel with large backpacks instead of proper luggage. Sunny wears pants and dresses made from khaki cotton; both of Ayers’s parents wear Birkenstocks. While in Paris, they had dinner at La Tour d’Argent—because, as Sunny said, it was a classic Parisian experience they’d yet to have in their half a dozen visits to the city. Had Sunny worn her Birkenstocks to La Tour d’Argent? Ayers was afraid to ask.
The last time Ayers spoke to her parents, they were in Morocco, staying with friends they’d met in Ibiza in the 1980s, before Ayers was born; these friends now own a home on the coast in Essaouira. All of Phil and Sunny’s close friends are people they met on one adventure or another—hiking around the crater of Mount Batur in Bali or shopping for an authentic Panama hat in Montecristi, Ecuador. That conversation with her parents was on the morning of Rosie’s funeral, and a lot has happened since then. It feels like nearly everything important in Ayers’s life has happened since then.
A Facebook post from yesterday puts Phil and Sunny at Fairmont the Norfolk in Nairobi. A scroll back through their pictures shows they’ve been on safari in the Maasai Mara.
Bah! Ayers thinks. They never took her on safari! They always said it was too expensive. There are the requisite pictures of giraffes, zebras, lions, elephants. And some of a hot-air balloon ride they took at sunrise. Cheetahs, leopards, rhinos, baboons, hippos. A Maasai warrior posing with Phil and Sunny in their Birkenstocks.
Ayers sighs. Her parents are in Africa. They couldn’t be any farther away. Still, she tries their cell phone. What’s the time difference? She doesn’t care. She calls.
Her mother answers on the first ring. “Freddy!” Sunny says. “Your timing is perfect! The front desk just sent us a bottle of champagne. They think we’re travel bloggers.” She laughs. “I may have misled them a bit—”
Suddenly, Ayers’s father is on the phone. “She misled them a lot,” he says. “Though it works. We’ve gotten free stuff every place we’ve checked in
