Jamaica

Jamaica becomes both a real destination and an imagined refuge for the Barber family: a place they choose precisely because it seems to promise escape from the murder case, from home, and even from thought. Their two-week stay at Waves brings an unfamiliar, fragile happiness, and gives Jacob a chance to meet Hope. But the resort’s manufactured paradise cannot erase the family’s troubles; Hope’s disappearance soon brings those troubles back to their door.

Choosing an invented paradise

After Laurie said she hated the house, the town, and the trapped feeling of her days, the family decided that same night to leave. They chose Waves, a resort in Jamaica they had never heard of, in a country none of them had visited. Their decision rested on the resort’s website: Photoshopped beaches, aquamarine pools, fountains, swim-up bars, and a hotel dressed up as a brightly painted Caribbean village. The pools appeared to tumble toward a low cliff, where an elevator descended to a horseshoe-shaped beach and a little cay. In the images, sea and sky ran together without a visible horizon, as if Waves belonged to a world apart.

The family recognized the images as obviously fraudulent and found that artificiality irresistible. They did not want a “real” destination that might prompt reflection; they wanted somewhere in which, as they imagined it, thought could not survive for long and nothing would spoil the fun. The resort’s fantasy was not a mistaken impression they simply failed to detect: its obvious falseness was part of its appeal. They were buying not only a vacation but a temporary suspension of the life they could not stop living at home.

The journey and its contrasts

The relief began before the family arrived. Booking a long stay made them feel lighter; the plane’s departure from Boston lifted the weight further, and stepping onto the tarmac in Montego Bay, into glare and warm tropical air, seemed to complete the transformation. Jacob grinned, Laurie held Andrew’s hand, and the three of them allowed themselves to feel happy, even while understanding that the troubles they had left behind remained real. The vacation did not solve those troubles; for a while, it gave the family permission not to carry them at full weight.

A resort shuttle, marked with the Waves logo, carried the arriving guests along the island’s north coast for nearly two hours. The road was crumbling, with lush mountains on one side and the sea on the other. The view also included scrap-wood and corrugated-tin shanties, ragged women, and scrawny children walking beside the road. The vacationers fell subdued: they wanted to acknowledge the poverty without letting it become their responsibility or ruin the holiday they had paid for. The ride thus put the resort’s polished promise beside the conditions beyond its enclosure. Jamaica was not only the picturesque backdrop on the website; the journey exposed the distance between the image sold to visitors and the lives visible along the road.

Jacob meets Hope

On the shuttle, Jacob sat on a wide bench at the back beside a girl about his age. Their conversation was cautious, and Jacob kept his answers short, but to his parents the encounter looked wonderfully ordinary: the girl did not know about the murder case and seemed unaware of Jacob’s awkwardness. Andrew and Laurie deliberately avoided staring, afraid that their attention might spoil the moment. In the resort’s suspended world, Jacob was briefly not a notorious defendant but a teenager talking to a girl who had no reason to regard him through that story.

Jacob and the girl, Hope, soon spent much of their time together. The family saw them separate themselves from the adults at the pool and once glimpsed them holding hands discreetly on neighboring chaise lounges. Only later did Andrew and Laurie learn that Jacob had given Hope a false surname, calling himself Jacob Gold after Laurie’s maiden name. That small deception explains why she had not learned about the case through an ordinary search, and why her interest could feel unshadowed by the accusation. At the time, the parents did not know the explanation. They wondered whether Hope had simply never searched for Jacob online, or whether she knew the story and was drawn to the danger associated with him; Jacob said she knew nothing, and they did not dare question her and risk disrupting the first good thing that had happened to him in a long while.

Andrew and Laurie liked Hope partly because Jacob brightened when she was nearby. They remembered her as warm, courteous, and polite, with blond hair and a soft Virginia accent that sounded lovely to them as Bostonians. She seemed comfortable in her body and wore bikinis without the self-consciousness they associated with teenage insecurity. Her name, arriving with the relationship itself, gave the family an almost fairy-tale sense that hope had finally appeared in their lives. That feeling was real to them, but it depended on a brief and partial acquaintance: the couple preferred to be alone, and the Barbers saw little of Hope during the few days they knew her.

The resort routine and the interruption

At Waves, the days settled into a vacation rhythm: mornings at the beach, afternoons at one of the pools, and nightly entertainment that might be a musical show, karaoke, or a guest talent contest. Staff members urged the crowd to perform exuberant enjoyment, and the guests answered with clapping, cheering, dancing, and resort punch. The family ate heavily at all-you-can-eat buffets after months of eating too little; Andrew and Laurie spent their sand dollars on beer and piña coladas, while Jacob tried his first beer, called it good, and left it unfinished. These details make the escape bodily as well as psychological: the family could eat, drink, swim, and participate in rituals whose purpose was simply to keep the holiday moving.

The refuge was interrupted when Hope’s mother called the family’s room around dinnertime. She asked whether Hope was with Jacob because the family had not heard from her all afternoon. Asked later what they had told her, Andrew said they had not seen Hope. The call changes the meaning of the resort’s temporary calm: the new relationship that had seemed to offer Jacob ordinary happiness now becomes bound to an unexplained absence. Jamaica remains associated with escape, but it is also where the family’s brief knowledge of Hope meets the uncertainty of her disappearance.