Waves

Waves is a Jamaican resort where the Barber family seeks a temporary escape from the strain of Jacob’s case. Its glossy promise of a life without thought or trouble briefly becomes real for them: they feel lighter as they book the trip and travel from Boston to Montego Bay, and Jacob finds a new girlfriend. But the resort’s apparent refuge is unsettled when Hope disappears and her mother calls the family’s room asking whether she is with him.

A Paradise Designed for Escape

The family chooses Waves on the night Laurie says she wants to be somewhere else. None of them has heard of the resort or been to Jamaica; their decision rests entirely on Waves’s own website, whose images are so extravagantly Photoshopped that their obvious falseness becomes part of the appeal. The site sells transformation as much as travel: vacationers appear remade into glamorous versions of themselves, while the resort is staged as a fantasy Caribbean village of brightly painted buildings, shutters, and verandas.

The resort’s pools intensify the artificial dream. Cerulean water, fountains, swim-up bars, and a logo shining on each pool floor form a chain that spills toward a low cliff; an elevator descends from there to a horseshoe-shaped beach and a small cay. Beyond it, sea and sky merge into a horizonless blue. The image promises a world apart, not a visit to a place that might prompt reflection. The family is not looking for a “real” destination such as Paris or Rome; they want a setting where, as the narrator puts it, thought cannot survive for long and nothing is allowed to spoil the fun.

Arrival and Resort Rituals

The website’s emotional staging works. The family feels some of the burden lift when it books a two-week stay, more when the plane leaves Boston, and more again after landing in Montego Bay, where warm air and glare greet them on the tarmac. Jacob grins at the airport, and Laurie holds the narrator’s hand and calls the place paradise. The happiness feels surprising precisely because their underlying troubles have not changed; the trip offers relief, not resolution.

A shuttle driver meets them with a clipboard bearing the Waves logo and performs a cheerful resort welcome, repeatedly saying “Ya, man!” The family joins in, aware that the routine is practiced for vacationers. At the resort gate, manicured flowerbeds lead to a portico where bellmen unload their bags. Their uniforms combine pith helmets and red-striped black trousers with bright floral shirts, a deliberately incongruous costume that makes the staff seem like an army enlisted in the resort’s good-time fantasy.

Inside, the Barbers exchange their money for Waves’s small silver “sand dollars” and receive rum punch. The narrator tips a staff member without knowing the unclear exchange rate, then recalls little of the first day and even less of the second. That haziness belongs to the resort’s promise of suspension: daily life recedes into pools, meals, drinks, and scheduled entertainment. The family spends mornings at the beach and afternoons at pools; evenings bring shows, karaoke, or guest talent contests, with staff urging everyone to join in. Laurie and the narrator drink beer and piña coladas, the meals are abundant buffets, and Jacob tries beer for the first time, though he does not finish it.

Jacob and Hope

At Waves, Jacob spends much of his time with Hope, a new girlfriend. The two increasingly leave the family to be alone; even when they meet the Barbers at a pool, they sit at a distance, and the narrator once sees them holding hands furtively on neighboring chaises. Jacob seems happy with her, and the family welcomes that happiness as a rare good thing in his life.

The Barbers do not know at first that Jacob has given Hope a false surname, calling himself Jacob Gold, using Laurie’s maiden name. The change keeps her from discovering the case through a search for Jacob Barber. His parents believe she knows nothing about the case and avoid asking her directly, afraid that doing so might ruin the first bright experience Jacob has had in a long while. They wonder whether she is unaware of his notoriety or knows about it and is drawn to the danger, but neither possibility is confirmed in their account.

The narrator remembers Hope warmly: she is courteous and polite, with blond hair and a soft Virginia accent that sounds appealing to the Bostonians. Her ease in her own body, including wearing bikinis without the self-consciousness the narrator associates with many teenagers, also endears her to them. Her name gives the brief romance an almost fairy-tale symmetry, and the narrator tells Laurie that at last they have hope. That word’s emotional charge comes from the family’s precarious circumstances as much as from the girl herself.

Hope’s Disappearance and the Limits of Refuge

The resort’s insulated happiness is interrupted when Hope’s mother calls the Barbers’ room around dinnertime. She asks whether Hope is with Jacob because the family has not heard from her all afternoon. The narrator says they have not seen her. Asked later when the family learned that Hope had vanished, the witness cannot recall the exact timing, but remembers the call and its question clearly.

The episode changes the meaning of Waves as a refuge. The family has chosen a place built to make trouble seem distant, and for a few days the resort’s rituals, scenery, and new romance have helped Jacob and his parents inhabit that illusion. Yet the call brings the outside world into their room, and the question about Jacob links the holiday’s fragile happiness to the case and to a new uncertainty. Waves can provide distance and temporary lightness; it cannot guarantee that danger or consequence has been left behind.