Chapter 9
Marisol
Ihad packed the night before, because I was a person who packed the night before — a person who had her boarding pass loaded on her phone and her Monday meetings rescheduled and her out-of-office set to expire tomorrow morning, a person who did the things that needed doing when something was going to happen, and this was going to happen, so I had done the things.
The bag was by the door. The ferry was at noon. I handled it.
I sat on the terrace with my coffee and looked at the cove, which was doing the full thing — the morning light on the black sand, all that blue-green water going approximately fourteen different colors at once, the cliff with its jungle situation, the reef out there doing nothing wrong — and I thought: this is fine, I am fine, I have made a decision and I am a person who follows through on decisions, and also the cove is extremely beautiful but that is not relevant information right now.
Maro was out past the reef, just the shape of him moving slow in the water, doing his morning patrol of the beach. I watched him for a moment and then had to look away. Looking at the cove was making this decision even more complicated.
I walked to La Boca at ten, because I wanted to say goodbye to the village.
The fish market was mostly packed up. A few of the guys sorting through the last of the morning catch with the easy rhythm of people who had been doing the same thing since before they could remember and found it entirely sufficient.
The older one, the one who had never once introduced himself but had been nodding at me every morning like we had a longstanding agreement about something, held out a paper bag without looking up from what he was doing.
"What is it?" I said.
He shrugged. "For the road."
I took it and carried it up the hill to Casa Oscura, where I found Tina on the terrace sitting with her coffee in the chair she appeared to have been sitting in since the beginning of recorded time, and I sat down in the other one.
"My ferry's at noon."
Tina looked at me with the expression she had when she had already assembled a complete opinion on the situation. “Hmm, I know.” She paused to take a sip of coffee."The cottage has been empty for eleven years."
I looked at her questioningly.
"The east one, down the path from the dock." She looked at her coffee cup, not at me. "The hammock on the terrace is new, though."
When she went back inside, I opened the paper bag and found salt fish, wrapped in brown paper, still warm. Delicious.
***
The ferry was on the horizon when I came down, white against the blue, maybe forty minutes out and moving steady and completely, undeniably real.
Maro was at the end of the dock.
He was standing with his hands at his sides and his tentacles resting loose at his lower back and his dark eyes on the water.
My heart twisted as I put my bags on the dock.
He didn't ask. He wasn't going to ask — I understood this about him the same way I understood the wave patterns and the coffee and the ten-minute walk, just a thing I knew now, the shape of how he was: he would stand there until noon and watch me get on the ferry if I got on it and he would not say a word and he would not put the weight of what he wanted onto a decision that had to be mine, because that was who he was, because after two hundred years of watching people leave he had apparently decided that the only thing worse than watching someone leave was making them feel guilty about it.
This was genuinely unfair and I was going to need a minute.
I picked up my bag.
I put it down.
I picked it up again, and then I stood there with it in my hand and I had a very thorough internal conversation with myself, which went something like this: okay so on one side of this you have a return flight at six tomorrow morning, and a lease through March, and a job you are good at, and a best friend who is going to lose her entire mind in a way that will require a minimum two-hour phone call, and a mother who will have fourteen questions and then a follow-up question she thought of in the parking lot, and furniture you chose, and a coffee maker, and a gym membership you don't use but you pay for every month which is fine, lots of people do that, the point is you have a life in Austin, Texas, and it is a real life, and the ferry goes to the airport.
And on the other side: a black sand beach, and warm bread every morning, and a cottage with a new hammock on the terrace at the end of a path by the dock, and eight days of sleeping the kind of sleep where you wake up and the birds are real and something in you has unclenched that you didn't know was clenched, and a man at the end of the dock who put up a hammock last week and is currently looking at the water and not asking you anything at all.
The sensible thing was to get on the ferry.
And here was the problem. I didn’t want to go back to my old life. I wanted to stay here with the sun, and the sand, and the drinks, and most of all… Maro.
The ferry docked and loaded three passengers from La Boca, two boxes of supplies, a bicycle that required an extended negotiation with the gangplank. Then it left, and I was still standing on the dock, and the ferry got smaller and smaller until it was just a white shape and then nothing.
The entire time, Maro stood beside me without saying a word.
"You missed the ferry," he said.
"I did," I said. "There is another one next week."
Maro looked at me.
“I’m not getting on it,” I said. The waves crashing over the dock filled the silence. “Tina told me there’s a free cottage.”
He was looking at the water. “So…” He took a deep breath, as if he was worried about what to say next. “You’ll stay?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me and smiled. "The cottage needs airing out," he said. “But I think it’s perfect for you.”
I took out my phone, opened my email, typed Remote work. Let's talk Monday to my boss and hit send before I could have any thoughts about it, which was honestly the only way to do anything that actually mattered.