Vacation with the Kraken Surfer (Monsters and Margaritas #8)

Chapter 1

Marisol

Okay so here's the thing about me: I was on my phone.

I know. I know. I was the person who ran onboarding sessions called Present & Engaged: Why Your Phone Can Wait and I got on the wrong ferry because I was texting my mother back about whether I had remembered sunscreen, which, yes, Mom, I had remembered sunscreen.

I was going to a beach, I was not an idiot, I was just, as it turned out, an idiot.

The sign at the back of the boat said La Boca — Playa Oscura. My boarding pass said Las Palmas Resort & Marina. I had read both documents three times in the hope that one of them would have the decency to change. They were united in their refusal.

Current status: twenty minutes out to sea, wrong direction, operating on airport rum and the specific dead calm of a person who had passed through every stage of panic and come out the other side into something that looked a lot like acceptance if you squinted.

I had been awake for twenty-two hours. My checked bag was in Miami.

I had a flight home in eight days and a resort booking I was apparently not going to use and a list of everything that had gone wrong that currently stood at eight items and was going to stand at eight items because I was not adding anything else to that list, I was done, the list was closed, the list was a crime scene and I was leaving it for the investigators.

Eight items:

The 6 AM flight delayed four hours because of a bird strike, which, fine, birds exist, I cannot be angry at birds

The layover in Atlanta during which I ate a nine-dollar granola bar and sat next to a man who wanted to talk about his divorce for forty-five minutes

The checked bag which contained literally all of my real clothes and also my good shampoo somehow making it to Miami without me

The airport in San Juan that was, for reasons I did not have the energy to examine, playing Christmas music in July

The connecting flight in which I had a middle seat between two men who had each individually decided they were entitled to the armrests and were conducting a silent war over them that I was physically caught in the middle of

The taxi driver who took me to the wrong ferry terminal

Getting on the wrong ferry

Still being on it

The island was coming into view now and I looked at it because there was nothing else to do and … okay. Okay.

That was a cliff.

A dark volcanic rock going straight up out of the water, draped in jungle so dense and green it was almost aggressive about it, the kind of green that didn't exist in Austin and was making a point about that.

Below the cliff was a beach. Black sand.

Not dark, not grey — black, like someone had poured ink on it and then the afternoon light had gotten involved and turned it warm and amber and honestly kind of gorgeous.

The water in the cove was the exact color of sea glass held up to the sun.

This was extremely rude given the circumstances.

I wanted a beach vacation the way you wanted a concept.

The idea of a beach vacation — the drinks, the float, the particular spiritual experience of having nowhere to be.

I burned in forty minutes flat and I had complicated feelings about sand as a texture and I had booked Las Palmas because it was the most aggressively relaxing option available, the kind of resort that handed you a towel when you arrived and pointed you toward a pool with a swim-up bar and left you alone.

I had rescheduled this trip four times. Since January. I was going to do it if it killed me.

It was killing me a little, actually.

The ferry docked against a small wooden pier made of three planks and a rusted cleat, the kind of dock that had been built by someone who was pretty sure it would hold.

I picked up my carry-on and walked down the gangplank into heat that was soft and thick and smelled like salt and flowers.

There was one woman waiting at the dock.

She was in her sixties, wearing a loose linen dress the color of the sea in shallow water.

Arms folded with the particular ease of someone who had stopped being surprised by anything approximately thirty years ago and had made a full peace with this.

She looked at me with warm dark eyes and the beginning of a smile, and I thought: she already knows how this conversation goes.

"Hi," I said. "I think I got on the wrong ferry."

"Yes," she said.

"I’m Marisol. I'm supposed to be at Las Palmas. Is there a—"

"Same ferry comes back Tuesday," she said. Patient. Kind. Utterly unmoved.

I did the math. Tuesday. I counted on my fingers like a person who had temporarily forgotten how calendars worked.

Seven days. Seven days on the wrong side of an island that didn't have a swim-up bar, with the clothes in my carry-on, which were three days' worth of clothes because my real clothes were in Miami.

"I have a room," the woman said. "Good view. Dinner at seven. Come."

She picked up my bag and started walking, up a path that curved away from the dock into the trees.

I looked at the dock. I looked at the path.

I thought about the logistics of asking someone for a taxi and then the logistics of finding a road and then the logistics of arriving somewhere unfamiliar and having to explain myself again.

I had no choice but to followed her.

Sometimes the obstacle was not the practical one.

***

Her name was Tina, and the place was called Casa Oscura, and I understood immediately why it wasn't on any app I had ever used.

There was no slick website. There was no booking widget.

There was a hand-painted wooden sign at the path that said Casa Oscura — 6 habitaciones in faded blue letters, and the word bienvenidos underneath in smaller script, and the feeling of a place that knew exactly what it was and had no interest in explaining itself to people who wouldn't understand anyway.

My room had wooden shutters that latched with a hook. A ceiling fan with a pull chain. A rag rug on the tile floor in colors that should have clashed but didn't. And a window aimed directly at the cove.

I stood at the window and looked at the water and thought: okay.

Okay. This was not what I had planned. But the view was doing something to the part of me that had been clenched for two years, and the air smelled like nothing I had a name for.

Tina was already banging around in a kitchen somewhere producing smells that made my airport granola bar feel like a distant bad dream.

***

The drink was pink and cold and it tasted like passionfruit and rum and something underneath that I couldn't name — smoky and sweet at once, landing in my chest like a warm hand pressing on something that had been tight for a long time without my noticing.

"What is it called?" I asked, when Tina brought it out to the terrace.

"No te preocupes," she said — don't worry about it — and went back inside.

Fair enough.

I sat in the good chair on the terrace because I was not in a state to trust a hammock and I let myself stop being the person who managed things.

The sun was going low over the jungle. The black sand was holding the day's heat, glowing warm and dark.

Somewhere inside, Tina's radio played something slow and guitar-heavy that drifted out through the kitchen window and dissolved into the salt air.

A week, I thought. Less like a prison sentence. More like a door someone had left open.

I was working on my second sip when something moved in the cove.

It surfaced slowly, thirty feet out — dark against the dark water, and large in a way that recalibrated the scale of the cove around it, large in the way that made me aware of how big the water actually was.

Not a fish. Not a boat. It stayed up just long enough to register — long enough for me to see the shape of it.

Then it slipped back under and the cove closed over it like a door.

A pelican landed on the dock post and looked at me. It did not seem concerned.

Okay, I thought. Okay so there was something in the water. Islands had things in the water. I had been awake for twenty-two hours and the drink was excellent. Maybe I was just seeing things.

I stayed on the terrace for a long time anyway. Watching the cove. It didn't surface again — just sat there, dark and still and vaguely aware of me, or that was how it felt, which was probably the rum talking.

Tina called me in for dinner at seven. Rice and fish and something with plantains that I ate two helpings of. We didn't talk much. She was the kind of person who didn't require conversation to make you feel welcome, which was the rarest and most valuable kind of person.

I fell asleep to the sound of the water.

It should have felt wrong, being here. After all, I was on the wrong island, in the wrong bed and starting week that had gone sideways from the first moment. Through the window, something large moved slowly in the dark water below, and I watched it for one long moment before I closed my eyes.

It didn't feel wrong.

That was the strangest part.