I was back to being alone. Back to being caught in my thoughts. Back to everything I had tried to escape from.
Except now that I’d actually willed myself to give it all up, there was something that pushed at my mind.
Someone.
The man who had saved me.
Just where had he come from and where did he go? When I came to on the beach a few minutes later after I had blacked out yet again, he was gone, and I was stuck looking at the faces of the panicked tourists, one who must have called the ambulance for me. The man, with his scars that crisscrossed the side of his face, and his vibrant eyes that hinted at the depths within, had completely disappeared.
The least he could have done was stick around so I could thank him.
But would I have thanked him? Perhaps if I saw the darkness in him, he saw the same darkness in me.
I got off the table and stood on the stiff grass, careful not hurt my ankle. It was especially tender after my board was ripped away from me, but not bad enough to warrant spending the money to get it checked out. I wondered if my board had washed up on the beach somewhere or if it was lost to the waves, then decided to forget about it. I didn’t want to spend an extra minute here, knowing that I’d made a fool of myself by almost dying and all that.
I fished my keys out of my board shorts and headed to the Jeep I’d rented during the last two weeks. I had one week left on it before I was supposed to return to the mainland, back to Doug and the life that was drowning me. I swallowed my bitterness at still having to find a way out of all of this.
On the way back to Kilauea, I drove fast—too fast—nearly smashing into a waiting car as I sped over the one-lane Hanalei bridge, stars in my eyes and the war raging on in my mind. It was a miracle I even pulled into the driveway of my rental house in one piece.
The fact is, I wanted to keep driving. I didn’t want to come back even to here, the place that should have been the escape from my marriage, from my job that didn’t even insure me, and everything. But that was the irony of trying to escape to an island. There was nowhere to go; you just kept going in circles, coming back to where you started.
I went inside to the kitchen and poured myself an extra-large glass of red wine, wishing I hadn’t finished the bottle of Scotch the night before. Leaning against the counter, I stared at the backyard, which disappeared into a thicket of hibiscus and gardenia, the azure sea stretching beyond it. I’d stared at the same scene ever since I arrived, willing myself to paint it. There was a papaya tree in the corner, a small fish pond, a hole in the distressed wood fence where brightly colored feral chickens would come through. This should have been paradise—this should have brought me and my art back to life. But it hadn’t.
My phone buzzed and vibrated on the counter. I didn’t even look at it. I knew I probably had a million missed calls since I headed out surfing, and I knew they were all either from work or from Doug. Work, because I was sure the temp couldn’t handle another day under my boss’s direction, and Doug because he just had to know where I was. Not because he cared—he stopped caring two years after our wedding—but because the fact that I took off to Kauai by myself was the biggest fuck-you to his renegade ego that I could have done.
I wondered what he would have thought if he knew I’d almost drowned without his permission, what he could have said if I’d come home with a death certificate. Would he genuinely be upset, distraught at losing his wife because he loved me oh so much—or would he just write me off to be with Justine?
I gulped back the rest of the wine and thought about what the gravestone of Lani Morrison would say on it. Here lies a wife? Here lies an artist? Here lies one lost woman who never quite found her way?
I hoped it would be blank and that people could draw their own stories about my life. They’d all be better than the truth, that Lani Morrison died at the age of thirty-three, childless by choice, locked in an unhappy seven-year marriage with a man who’d been in love with someone else for most of it. She lost her parents to a car crash when she was seventeen, found mediocre fame in her twenties for her watercolor paintings, then when her muse, her “spirit” for the art, left her, she had to find work as a part-time assistant in an office selling dishwashers.
May she rest in peace.
Fuck peace.
I slammed down the glass and it shattered on the marble countertop, sending shards everywhere. As I looked down at the mess, I felt acutely overwhelmed for a second, before I decided to let it all go. I plucked the bottle of wine off the counter and headed out into the backyard, where I sat down on the back stoop and proceeded to drink until all the cab sav was gone and I was even more numb than before.
Though not numb enough to prevent my thoughts from going back to the mystery man, my savior. What was it about him that kept stealing my attention? Every time I tried
