Chapter 11
Eleven
Victor
I lead a forty-five minute yoga session, shower, eat breakfast, and chat with my daughter, her fiancée, and their friends, all while trying my damndest not to think about Jason’s last words to me last night.
Because if I think about what he said—that he didn’t regret what we did; that he couldn’t promise God he wouldn’t do it again if he had the chance—I will be unable to stop myself from begging him to take another chance with me.
But it’s not like I hadn’t told him he could have another chance with me. And still he didn’t take it.
I take a moment in the men’s room near the restaurant to wash my hands and splash some water on my face. By the time I reach the van that will take us on our expeditions today, everyone’s already loaded and ready. There’s one seat left in the first passenger row.
Next to Jason.
“Morning,” he says gruffly.
“Good morning,” I reply. I’m not exactly sure what to say to him.
We’re in a van full of people, our daughter among them, and this is really not an environment conducive to a heart-to-heart conversation about anything—what he said last night, what we did fifteen years ago, what I've been imagining since last night.
“Did you get any breakfast?” is what I settle on.
He nods. “I grabbed a quick bite while you were in the shower. Figured I’d give you the room and take my shower while you ate.
” He shifts away as I dig around the bench seat for the buckle to fasten my seatbelt but my hand still brushes the outside of his hip.
I glance at him in hopes of catching some sort of reaction, but he’s facing front, his eyes trained on the windshield.
“Jason,” I start, but Kelsey throws her arms around Jason’s shoulders from the seat behind him.
“Anyone know any good road trip songs?”
Silas does, as it turns out. He leads us in singing a mix of classic rounds and folk songs I dimly remember from my Boy Scout camping days to popular songs from the seventies and eighties that definitely came out before he was born.
He’s got a good voice, a pleasing tenor that blends beautifully with Jason’s warm baritone.
Eventually, the rest of us stop singing along so we can listen to them harmonize the rest of the way to our destination.
I, for one, am so spellbound that I don’t even notice the ominous clouds rolling over the sky until we arrive at the Arenal Volcano National Park parking lot.
“Oh, shit,” Kelsey’s maid of honor, Greta, comments when we’ve all exited the van. Fat raindrops are plonking on the hood of the van and the sky looks like it’s seconds away from opening up and dumping on us. Everyone scrambles to pull on rain jackets.
We line up to pay the park admission fees and then our tour guide, Fabio, herds us to the big map of the park on the wall near the ticket booth.
There are two main hiking trails, a two kilometer trail that leads over a decades-old lava flow to a lookout point and a three kilometer trail that branches off the main trail and loops around through the rainforest until it picks up the main trail again.
Silas points to a black line on the map that heads straight up the slope. “Camino vehicular,” he says. “That means vehicle road, yeah? Couldn’t we just drive up?”
“We drive up to sendero Las Coladas,” Fabio says. “In this moment, it is raining, but here in Costa Rica, en otro momento, the rain may stop, si?”
There’s another tour group dressed in ponchos, rain hats, and rubber boots that are noisily preparing to head off for their hike. Silas heaves a theatrical sigh, but pulls the hood of his rain jacket up and cinches it tight around his face.
“We’re going to get wet at the hot springs anyway,” Kelsey points out.
“Yeah, in a bathing suit,” Silas grumbles, but it’s good-natured and we all pile back in the van for the short ride up to the trailhead parking lot.
The rain holds off until we’re about half a kilometer along the trail, at which point, it’s an absolute deluge. I’m wearing a rain jacket, but water manages to find its way inside my jacket anyway.
Jason’s damp hair curls at the nape of his neck, the way it did when he dropped his head on my chest for about thirty seconds after he came on me that night.
I didn’t get a chance to run my fingers through his hair then and I can’t do it now, either, and part of me aches so sharp, I have to bite my tongue almost hard enough to bleed.
Instead of turning back, our group soldiers on through the wall of rain.
My hiking boots make squelching sounds and Jason’s wearing a pair of Keen sandals that are shortly spattered in mud.
Silas and Logan are just ahead of us and I catch a glimpse of Silas’s blond hair plastered to his face when he turns his head to say something in response to whatever Logan murmured to him.
Despite his grumbling at the entrance, he smiles at Logan and doesn’t seem too annoyed by hiking in the rain.
Fabio tries to keep up the pretense of giving us information about the geography and flora of Arenal, but none of us can focus for longer than ten seconds at a stretch, not with the rain pounding on our shoulders and wet hair sluicing rivulets down our faces.
Jason is the only one who looks unbothered, which I know to be a lie, but he’s always been the sort of person who’d rather die than admit he’s uncomfortable.
The rain lets up just as we reach a set of stairs that lead to an old lava bed.
Fabio tells us that Arenal Volcano erupted in 1968 and destroyed three small villages nearby.
We pick our way over lava rocks to a viewpoint.
The dark rocks are sharp and jagged but surprisingly not slippery.
Logan holds a hand out a few times to help Silas navigate without twisting his ankle.
It makes me want to do the same for Jason, even though he’s perfectly capable of managing on his own.
We have to wait a bit for the line of folks hiking above us to snap their photos and take in the view, but eventually, we all make it to the top and gather for a group photo with the volcano in the background.
It’s not a great photo, as the volcano’s summit is pretty much covered by clouds, but there’s a line of people waiting for us to move along, so we don’t linger too long.
The trail down crosses a bridge to another viewpoint.
Fabio points in the direction of more clouds and tells us Lake Arenal is Costa Rica’s largest lake.
Not that we can see where the clouds end and the lake begins, so we just take his word for it.
By the time we make it down the trail, the clouds have cleared up some and we get a good view of a smaller lake below us with a thick coating of green algae. There’s a large bird strutting along a half-submerged branch and Jason takes his binoculars out to get a better look.
“What bird is that?” Logan asks.
“I don’t know,” Jason responds, still gazing through his binoculars.
“I’m not familiar with it. It has pink legs, a long yellowish bill, and a gray head and neck.
” He speaks like he’s committing these details to memory.
“Orange breast, short black tail.” That must be what he’s doing, to look the bird up later in one of his field guides.
“Can I see?” Silas asks.
Jason hands the binoculars over and we all take a turn looking through them at the bird. It sticks around for a while, oblivious to us looking down at it, and struts back and forth along the branch, occasionally dipping its beak in the water.
“It looks like a chicken,” Silas observes. “The great Costa Rican algae chicken. Pretty sure that’s its scientific name.”
“Sounds about right,” Jason says with a lift at the corner of his mouth.
And it’s that little half-smile that kills me. I’m so far gone for this man.