I saw the daubing brushstrokes of the sun on the ocean—except that it was no longer an ocean. The water was running too swiftly, and I could see the bottom. It was a brook, a creek, and the stones of the bed shone beneath it. They were iridescent, glittering through water that ran clear in the middle but muddy in the eddies. A clump of dirt broke off from the side of the stream, and the water clouded, but several of the shining pebbles glinted through the mud and debris.
A child ran pell-mell toward the water, chased by his mother. The sound jolted me, and I realized I had drifted into reverie.
Sometime later I looked out at the water and thought of Lucian walking along the beach by the light of the moon. As I considered the water, the bright blue of the ocean, a cloud passed before the sun, dimming it. I could not see from beneath my umbrella that it was a thunderhead.
THAT EVENING, RAIN PELTED the balcony of room 408. A rare storm, they called it. So unusual this time of year, the hotel workers said. But nothing seemed usual or unusual to me anymore, the words having become meaningless to me.
I was, however, troubled by Lucian’s near silence. I expected him to show up by the minute—every day, tonight even—to ramble at length into my internal tape recorder. I expected, alone at night, to purge myself of every word here, at this desk, before weaving them into the fabric of my manuscript like a bright thread. But despite his constant assertions that our time was short—was growing shorter, even—he never showed.
During the daylight, with burgers by the pool and smooth bodies lounging on chairs to distract me with thoughts comfortingly base, I could manage not to think about it too much. But by my fourth day I saw through the beautiful drinks on poolside trays to the cheap, plastic glasses and recognized the second-rate nature of the evening entertainment on the stage beside the outdoor bar as I ate my dinner from a scratched Fiestaware plate. I became aware of the fraying hems of the flamenco dancers’ costumes, the gauche makeup of the girls. And I began to notice the plaster peeling from the edge of the stage itself, the painted gold scrollwork chipped where careless workers had run into it, the cracking Mexican tile beneath the staircases.
I could not help but think of the home in Belmont, once so grand, reduced to a pile of rubble.
One night as I ate my dinner outside, I observed a man and a woman sitting at a table off to the side of the stage. They appeared neither raucously drunk nor so old that they applauded the dancers in the way that grandparents did at dance recitals.
In fact, there were no drinks on the table in front of them at all. And though the man—I judged him to be in his thirties—looked perfectly at ease in his Billabong T-shirt and cargo shorts, and the woman was elegant in her beaded halter, they reminded me of the men at the mall, of the two women at the bar in the Four Seasons Hotel, so that I finished my dinner in a rush, wondering if I only imagined the weight of their gazes upon my back as I strode across the pool area toward my room.
The next night my room seemed too dark, the light of the lamps insufficient and sallow against the moonless night, the black of the ocean seeming to encroach upon the beach. I was edgy, irritated, checking the clock, the calendar on my laptop.
The wind shifted, and water pelted the casing of the sliding glass door. I got up to close it, and as I did, the phone rang. The sound, so electric, so mechanical against the backdrop of rain, of the waves I was able to hear from my bed at night, startled me. I had not heard the ringing of a phone in four days.
I frowned. The tour desk had tried relentlessly to sell me any number of day excursions, all of which I had declined—could they have taken to phoning my room? But it was well past ten o’clock, the time when most hotel guests were out dancing, drinking, or in town at the Cabo Wabo Cantina hoping for an appearance by Sammy Hagar.
When I answered, the voice on the other end of the phone was thick and so emotive that I barely made out the sound of my own name.
“Hello?”
“Clay? How did you do it?”
“Sheila?” I said, confused. I had left the number of my resort with her in case anything came up at work—or if the committee felt compelled to rush me any good news that couldn’t wait until I returned. In fact, Sheila was the only one with my hotel number, as Mrs. Russo had not yet returned from Haverhill.
I thought again of Lucian’s warning to keep away from Mrs. Russo.
“How—how did you do it? How do you get by?” Her voice caught repeatedly as she spoke, making her sound like a child that had cried too hard to talk except in hiccupping gulps.
“Sheila, what’s going on?” My alarm mingled with impatience. I was in Cabo. I had come here from the opposite coast on two long flights in a carefully researched package deal to get away from the office, from my single life in Boston, and from the winter.
I had come here to write.
“How did you do it?” she choked between staggering breaths.
“Do what, Sheila?”
“Get by. After Aubrey left.” The last word was a sob.
“What do you mean, how did I do it? Sheila, what’s going on?”
“I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t know how to do it.”
My impatience sparked annoyance. The last thing I felt like dealing with was Sheila’s self-inflicted turmoil. “I just did, Sheila.”
“He just doesn’t know. He just doesn’t know.” Her voice squeaked up an octave.
I’d never heard Sheila like this before—Sheila with her empathetic ear, who had never demanded much, if anything, of Dan, who turned the warm light of her love so readily on her family and children and friends.
“He doesn’t know what? What’s happened?”
“He’s left. He left.”
