Chapter 2
Maro
Ifelt the ferry before I heard it.
Pressure, first. The displacement, the signature of weight moving through water.
I had known this ferry's engine for eleven years, since before Marcelin replaced the original motor with something louder and less efficient, which I had advised against at the community meeting and was overruled.
This was, among the many things humans regularly got wrong, a small one.
I had learned to make peace with small ones.
Three passengers. Two of them I knew. The third was not known to me.
I surfaced in the channel to look, which was different from being interested. I was curious the way I was curious about most things the humans did. I had observed humans for longer than most human civilizations had existed. I was not, at this point, easily surprised by them.
She was at the stern.
A woman. Curvy, warm brown skin catching the last of the afternoon light in a way that made the word warm insufficient as a description.
Dark hair losing a spectacular fight with the humidity.
The particular softness of a body built for comfort rather than sharp edges, the kind of softness that the late light found and held.
She stood with her weight slightly back, like someone who had learned to hold their ground without announcing it.
She had a piece of paper in her hand. She put it away and looked at the island — and it was her soft, worried expression that caught me.
My tentacles had drifted out while I was watching — two of them, curling in the current, which happened when I was not paying attention to not letting it happen. I pulled them back. Mostly.
Tina met the ferry because Tina met every ferry, which was a commitment I respected and had long since stopped trying to explain to myself.
She had also, for forty years, been the primary source of situations I had not agreed to be in.
It had started when she was seven years old and convinced me through sheer stubbornness to retrieve a fishing net from the reef.
I retrieved the net. This set a precedent that I had not managed to reverse since meeting her fifty three years ago.
Casa Oscura had been quiet this season. I knew this in the way I knew everything that happened on this side of the island — because the water knew, because the mood of the village carried in the current.
In March when Tina said the words occupancy rate in that flat careful tone she did not usually use, I realized what a problem it was for her.
Three rooms in April. Two in May. The resort on the other side kept what little tourism reached the island and kept it efficiently.
I watched from the cove while the wrong-ferry woman had her short conversation with Tina. I was watching the cove. She happened to be in it.
Then Tina picked up her bag. And the woman looked at the dock, looked at the locals collecting parcels, and looked at the options available to her.
This was not what tourists normally did. Tourists argued. Tourists found their phones and looked for a signal and attempted to explain their itineraries to Tina as though she had influence over ferry schedules.
The woman, Marisol, followed Tina.
***
I came around the headland at dusk, and she was on the terrace with Tina's pink drink in one hand.
She was warm and still and looking at the water the way the water.
I moved closer.
She saw me. I knew she could see me from the terrace; I was not concealed, I was not attempting concealment. The locals knew. The resort tourists assumed it was a costume or a performance piece and moved on. I had long since stopped managing what the tourists did with the information.
I took the wave.
It was a good wave — I knew every wave in this cove, had known them since before this island existed, and I let this one carry me in a way I did not usually bother with for an empty beach. My tentacles trailed out in the foam, luminous briefly in the last of the light. I did not pull them in.
I knew she was watching. I dove and waited for her to leave for the night.
The dock was warm under my hands when I pulled myself up. Late. The terrace was empty. The corner room was lit softly behind its shutters.
Two of my tentacles rested on the dock planks.
Tina came out with coffee. I had not once in forty years managed to sit on this dock without her appearing within ten minutes.
The coffee was too sweet. It was always too sweet, but I drank it.
We sat without talking. This was one of Tina's finest qualities, the willingness to simply be present without filling the space with sound. She had many fine qualities. This was the one I relied on most.
"One guest," I said, eventually.
"A good guest," Tina said, which meant something different, and she said it with the tone of someone filing a piece of information she expected to refer back to. She looked out at the water. Then she said, with a wink: "She’ll be here for a week. Corner room."
I looked at the lit window.
Eventually the light went out.
Humans came to this island and they left. This had been true since humans started coming, which was not very long at all by my measure. They came on the ferry and they left on the ferry and the water forgot them.
I sat with my tentacles trailing in the dark water until the tide turned. It took longer than it should have and when it went it went in inches, pulling back across the black sand with a patience even I could recognize.
One week, I thought. Not very long, by any measure I had.
I was becoming uncertain what I was measuring by.