Chapter 6
Maro
Marisol was on the terrace when I came in from the water.
I had not known she was there. I had caught the morning swell as usual and when I paddled in and stood with the board under my arm and looked up, she was sitting with her coffee and her feet tucked under her and she was watching me with the particular quality of attention she gave to things she had decided were interesting.
I had been in these waters long enough to recognize inevitability when I saw it.
She raised her cup. Not a wave exactly. Just an acknowledgment. I see you. I've been watching. I carried the board up the sand and she tracked the whole walk and when I reached the foot of the steps she said: "Teach me to do that."
"No," I said.
She looked at me over the rim of her cup.
Unhurried. Patient in the specific way of someone who was not actually prepared to take no for an answer but saw no reason to say so yet.
The morning light was full on her — her dark hair already losing its argument with the humidity, her green cover slipped off one shoulder, the ink marks from the cave still faintly visible on the inside of her wrist.
"I have four days left," she said. "You have a board. This is a simple resource allocation problem."
I looked at her. She looked back. The morning was very bright and she was sitting in it like she belonged there, like the black sand and the cliff and the particular quality of this cove had arranged themselves with her in mind, and I said fine, which I had probably been going to say since she asked.
I did not have a smaller board, which became relevant immediately.
My board was nine feet of longboard built for unhurried surfing in water I had known since before it existed.
It was not a beginner's board. It required lying flat and paddling out through Caribbean chop that had no interest in being accommodating.
I explained this.
She looked at the board. unphased. She said: "okay," and picked up one end.
We carried it to the water together, close the way carrying something long requires you to be close, her arm warm alongside mine.
"I want you to know," she said, "that I have never surfed before. I also have a complicated relationship with balance."
"You walk without falling down most of the time."
"Most of the time," she agreed. "That's really the crucial qualifier there."
She was grinning — the sideways one, the one that arrived before she meant it to — and something in my chest did the compression thing it had been doing with increasing frequency since the ferry, and I looked at the water.
"The board does the balance work," I said. "Your job is to not fight it."
"Not fighting things," she said. "I can work with that."
She fell off before she cleared the break. The board slid out, her arms made a brief and dignified attempt at physics, and she went in clean. She came up with salt water streaming down her face and her hair entirely across her eyes, found the board, and got back on.
She fell a second time, slightly differently, and came up already repositioning her hands.
I paddled beside her and said nothing. The falling was the teaching.
The getting back on was the point. She got back on the same way she had gotten on the wrong ferry and carried her bag into Casa Oscura and touched a tentacle in the dark without flinching — with complete matter-of-fact intention, like the only question was what came next.
On the third attempt she cleared the break.
She sat up and looked at the horizon, and I watched the tension leave her shoulders as she understood she had made it, that the break was behind her, that she was out here in the open water with the cove spread out behind her and the Caribbean going green and then deeper in the morning light, and she looked at it the way she looked at everything: like it was worth looking at.
I pulled up beside her. "Your feet are wrong."
"Tell me."
I told her. She adjusted. Not quite right.
I reached over and put my hand on her ankle, moving it to the correct position, and she went still the way she went still when I touched her — that quality of complete attention, everything in her orienting toward the point of contact — and I was aware of the warmth of her ankle and aware that I was aware of it and removed my hand.
"Better."
"What about the rest of me?"
"Weight too far back. Shift forward when you stand."
She looked at the board and then at me. "Can you get behind me? On the board?"
I understood that I should say no. The board would hold us but it would hold us closely, and she was warm and I was already thinking about the warmth of her ankle, and this was not a situation I should be deepening.
"The board is designed for one person," I said.
"A very large person," she said. "There's room."
I looked at the horizon.
I got on the board behind her.
The board held us. That was the extent to which I had been correct.
Everything else — the closeness, her back against my chest, the backs of her thighs warm against mine, the soft and generous weight of her pressed against me, real and warm and present in a way I had no prepared response for — none of this I had accounted for, and I had been in these waters for centuries and I had always accounted for everything.
I put my hands on her hips to stabilize us.
She was warm through the thin fabric of her swimsuit, soft under my hands, and I was aware of all of it with a completeness that had nothing dispassionate in it.
I had been aware of her body since the cave — the weight of her, the warmth of her skin, the way she felt held — and having her here against me now with my hands at her hips was not resolving any of that.
"Okay," she said. Her voice was slightly different than usual. "So. Feet."
"Shoulder-width. You push up and your weight comes forward as you stand. You are trying to get over your feet, not behind them."
"Got it." A pause in which I could feel her breathing. "You can put your hands back."
I put my hands back. I felt her exhale.
A wave was building — I felt it before she did, the weight and speed of it, the particular shape of this one. "This one," I said, and she paddled, and the wave took us, and she pushed up.
She stood.
Badly, briefly, with her arms out, weight slightly wrong and her face did something I had not predicted and could not look away from: surprise and delight arriving at the same moment, the expression of someone who had done something impossible and was not yet sure they were allowed to keep it.
Four seconds. Then the wave finished and she sat back down abruptly and I caught her, arm around her waist, her hand finding my forearm and gripping it, her side warm against my chest.
"Yes!" she breathed, entirely delighted. "I stood up."
"You stood up," I said.
She turned to look at me over her shoulder and we were very close, salt water on her face, eyes bright, that expression still on her and the mate pull was not a tightening anymore.
It was a fact. The same order of fact as the depth of the channel or the pull of the tide: immovable, beyond argument, simply true.
"Again," she said.
We went again. And again. The fourth attempt ended with her falling sideways and I was beside her when she surfaced, hand at her waist, which had become a habit without my instruction.
She came up laughing. When I held her while she was laughing and my internal voice went entirely quiet in a way it had not been quiet in a very long time.
She filled my hands. When she pressed against my arm there was warmth and softness and substance to it, a realness, and I found I had no remaining capacity for the dispassion I had been attempting.
She was warm and round and laughing and I was holding her in the water and there was nowhere else I wanted to be.
I did not immediately let go.
She noticed — the laughing softened into something warm and aware, and she looked at me with the water still on her face and said nothing. Gently, she kissed me. I tasted the salt on her lips.
I let go. "Again," I said.
The fifth wave was the one. She paddled, pushed up, stood — properly this time, weight forward, feet right, chin up — and rode it all the way in. When it ended she stepped off instead of falling, which I had not taught her, which she had simply decided to do.
She turned to look at me from the shallows.
The sun was full on her, her swimsuit wet, the black sand warm around her feet, and she was grinning — wide and entirely for herself, the pure private joy of someone who had done the thing — and I looked at her and thought: warm current finding unexpected channels.
Soft the way the ocean is before a swell.
I have watched thousands of humans and not one of them has looked like this to me.
"Most beginners do not get a wave."
"Is that a compliment?"
"It is a fact."
She smiled and waded back toward me through the shallows, unhurried and entirely at home in her own body, and I watched her and forgot for a moment what I had been trying to be careful about.
We were walking back up the beach when the tour boat appeared, coming around the headland too fast and too close. I sucked in a breath, connecting to the water. The water around the boat changed and the boat turned back without its captain appearing to understand why.
"Was that you?" she said.
"Yes."
"Can you do that whenever you want?"
"More or less."
She nodded, unbothered. "Good. I'm glad someone's paying attention." Like it was obvious. Like of course it should be this way. She kept walking and her arm was warm against mine on the path and neither of us moved away from it.
"You are the first person in a long time I have wanted to come back to the water for."
She slowed, her eyes meeting mine as I spoke.
"I swim the channel every morning. I have done this since before the channel had its current shape." I kept my eyes on the path. "I went past the reef this morning and turned back. This is not something I have done before. I want you to know that."
She hummed to herself. "I'm glad the ferry went to the wrong dock," she said.
"Go in," I said. "You'll burn."
"I've been out here all morning and I haven't burned once." She went up the steps and at the top she turned. "Tomorrow. Same time?"
I looked at her. She looked back — salt water drying in her hair, ink still faintly on her wrist, the expression that meant she had already decided and was simply waiting for me to catch up.
"Fine," I said.
The slow smile arrived, the one that took its time, and she went inside.
I went to the dock and sat and looked at the water and thought about her on the wave and the warmth of her hips under my hands and the weight of her against my arm in the shallows and the way she had said I'm glad like she meant it all the way through.
The water was very calm. Quieter than it had been in a long time. I wondered what would happen when she left.