I put on my snorkel gear and walked backward into the sea until I was about chest-deep. The water was warm and perfectly clear. I could see scores of colorful fish. I dove and paddled out to sea.
After that, I lost all track of time. It was as if I were swimming in the aquarium in the waiting room of my daughter’s dentist’s office. I half expected to go around the next rock and see the enormous face of some kid with braces staring at me, his nose pressed against the glass.
All I had to do was throw out a few kernels of food, and out of nowhere I was swarmed by fish tickling my skin and poking against my mask.
I thought about nothing, my mind a complete blank as I floated along, dispensing food, admiring one brightly colored fish after another.
In some ways, it was like being in a sensory-deprivation tank. It was just me and the fish and the gentle current. I was in a deeply relaxing snorkel trance that wasn’t broken until I tossed out some food and an eel shot out of the rocks and into my face like a jack-in-the-box.
I screamed and jerked upright, scrambling for footing, sucking in water, and scraping my left leg across the razor-sharp surface of a lava rock.
It was only as I stood there, coughing and bleeding, my mask askew, that I realized I was in only about three feet of water.
Still coughing, I staggered back toward the beach, sat down in the surf, and pulled off my flippers. As the water lapped against the two-inch-long cut below my knee, I experienced for the first time what it really means to have salt rubbed in a wound. It was like being scrubbed with a loofah made of glass shards.
While I was drying myself off, careful not to get blood on the towel, I noticed how tight and itchy my back was. I couldn’t see it, but I knew I had a nasty sunburn. How many hours had I been out there, floating facedown, my back cooking in the sun? I wouldn’t be wearing my bikini top again that trip. It was going to be T-shirts for me for the rest of the week.
But despite my discomfort, I couldn’t remember the last time I felt better or more truly well rested. I gathered up my things and trudged back to the resort.
Monk was leading a trio of maids out the front door when I came in through the back patio.
“See you tomorrow. If you have any questions before then, don’t hesitate to call,” Monk said, waving at them as they left with their carts, vacuums, buckets, and mops. “Aloha.”
When he turned around, I expected him to avert his gaze away from my shocking nakedness. But instead he hurried over to me, looking at my left leg.
“What happened to you?”
“I was snorkeling and scratched my leg on a rock. It’s no biggie.”
“Not if you enjoy infection, gangrene, and amputation.”
“It’s not that bad, Mr. Monk.”
“I want you to sit down and put your leg up on a chair.”
He took me by the arm and led me to the kitchen table. As I was sitting down, he noticed my back. He gasped. Based on his reaction, you’d think the flesh had been stripped away and he was looking at my exposed spine.
“I got a little sunburned,” I said. “It happens to everybody here.”
“Why didn’t you just douse yourself with gasoline and light a match?” He pulled out a chair and I lifted my injured leg up onto it. “Don’t move.”
Monk hurried to his room and came back a moment later with a small gym bag, which he set on the tabletop. He dragged a chair beside me, took a pair of rubber surgical gloves from the bag, and put them on.
“What’s in the bag?” I asked.
“Haven’t you ever seen a shaving kit before?”
He pulled out iodine, antiseptic cream, cotton swabs, gauze bandages, tweezers, scissors, tape, and enough medical supplies to stock a small hospital.
“You brought all that just for shaving?”
“I might nick myself,” Monk said.
“Or get shot in the chest and have to remove the bullet yourself.”
He soaked a swab with iodine, picked it up with the tweezers, and then gently dabbed my wound. The iodine stung again, but not as bad as the salt water.
“I’m sorry,” Monk said, glancing up at me. “But it has to be done.”
“It’s okay.”
Monk held my leg with one hand and tended to my cut with the other. While he dressed the wound, I watched him. I was deeply moved by this simple gesture, by his tenderness. Gone was any awkwardness he felt about my nakedness. His concern for me trumped his own anxieties. Well, most of them anyway. He still wouldn’t touch me without gloves.
“What have you been up to while I was snorkeling?” I asked him.
“Showing the maids how to vacuum, mop, and dust,” Monk said. “We had a lot of fun.”
“You’ve been doing that since I left?”
“I’m on vacation, so I’m cutting loose, being a little wild.”
He finished bandaging my cut and, using the tweezers, put all the used swabs into a Ziploc bag, which he sealed and put into another bag.
“Turn around,” he said.
“Why?”
“So I can put some cream on your back,” Monk said.
“You’d do that?”
He went to the kitchen, got some paper towels, and wound them around his gloved right hand until it looked like he was wearing an oven mitt. “If my hair were on fire, would you put out the flames? Would you throw me a life preserver if I were drowning?”
“Of course.”
“It’s the same thing.” Monk came back, squeezed some lotion out of a tube onto my shoulders, and started to rub it in with the paper towel.
It felt as if he were using a blowtorch. I yelped in pain and jerked away from him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“You might as well be using
