Maika
“No way,” I reply.
“Sure. And I’m the Queen of England in a floral robe,” she retorts, raising an eyebrow with that mischievousness that neither the years nor her falls have managed to erase.
I give a half-smile and set the note on the nightstand, pretending I’m fine.
My grandmother’s room at the nursing home smells of lavender cologne, moisturizer, fresh-cut flowers, and that unmistakable blend of clean sheets and afternoon sun that you only breathe in places where someone cares for you with true affection.
It’s not a perfect place. But this room has always felt like home. Maybe because she’s in it.
“Come on, I’m going to comb your hair,” my grandmother says, patting the arm of the chair. “Your hair looks like you’ve been wrestling with a pillow.”
“The pillow has always been so unkind to me,” I reply.
It’s wonderful that my grandmother still spoils me like that. True love. I turn my head and sigh.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she murmurs.
“What?”
“As if I’m going to shatter into a thousand pieces at any moment. I just took a little stumble. You’ll see, I’ll be just fine in no time,” she replies casually.
“Grandma…”
I sit on the bed across from her and take her hands.
They’re warm, full of little blue veins and stories no book could ever tell.
Hands that braided my hair perfectly when I was a little girl, that made unforgettable snacks, that signed complicated papers so I could study, work, and fly far away.
Hands that let go of everything to hold me tight.
“Thank you,” I whisper, and my voice breaks before I can continue.
Catalina frowns gently.
“Why, my girl?”
She closes her mouth, but squeezes my fingers tightly, encouraging me in silence.
“For being my mother, my refuge, and my whole world,” I continue, my eyes brimming with tears.
“For working until your back ached every day. For pretending you weren’t tired when I needed you to take me to school.
For selling your best earrings to pay for that language course for me.
Yes, I know,” I add as I see her eyes widen in surprise. “I found out years ago.”
“They were hideous,” she tries to justify herself.
“They were beautiful,” I insist.
“They made my ears look big.”
A tearful laugh escapes me.
“But even so, you did it, and I never felt like a burden to you. Because you taught me that you can have strength without losing your tenderness. And you raised me with so much love that, even though the world often seemed cruel to me, I always knew there was a place where someone was waiting for me with open arms.”
My grandmother blinks several times, moved.
“Don’t make me cry, or my face will end up looking like a raisin.”
“Well, go ahead and cry. I’ve been crying for days and I still look gorgeous,” I joke.
“You’ve always been such a drama queen.”
“And you’ve always been so stubborn.”
“You inherited that, too.”
We laugh through our tears. I rest my forehead on her hands and close my eyes for a moment, breathing in her familiar scent.
“I was so afraid of letting you down,” I confess.
“That time, when I started on the cruise ship… when that thing with Helen happened… I didn’t stand up for myself like I should have because I thought that if they opened a disciplinary case against me or fired me from the company, I wouldn’t be able to pay for this.
I wouldn’t be able to take care of you the way you deserve. And I hated myself for it.”
She strokes my head gently, with that infinite tenderness that has always saved me.
“My girl, you were young and you carried the whole world in a suitcase that was far too small.”
“That doesn’t justify hurting her,” I reply.
“No. But it explains why you also hurt yourself.”
I close my eyes tightly.
“It was she who paid for the first treatment through the shipping company’s private insurance.”
“I know.”
I jerk my head up.
“What do you mean, you already know?”
My grandmother smiles innocently.
“We old ladies know these things, Maika. The director of the nursing home told me. And she also told me you didn’t take it very well.”
“Because she did it behind my back, and decided for me. It made me feel… small. It wasn’t just about the money,” I explain, after getting up and going to the window to look outside.
“It was my dignity. My decision. My life. Helen can’t just barge in there as if I were one of her emergency protocols on the ship. ”
“Maybe she did it because she loves you, don’t you think?”
The phrase strikes me like a bolt of lightning. The nursing home’s garden is quiet: two residents are sunbathing with their eyes closed, a nurse is patiently pushing a wheelchair, and a gray cat is lying down as if it were the true owner of the place.
I stand still. The room seems to change suddenly, even though everything remains the same: the scent of lavender, the light streaming through the window, my grandmother in her armchair.
But something inside me clicks into place.
Helen didn’t want to humiliate me. She just wanted to save me, to protect my grandmother because she knows she’s my whole world.
“Oh, God,” I murmur. “What an idiot I’ve been!”
I throw myself at my grandmother and give her a loud kiss on the cheek.
“You should go get her,” she whispers in my ear as I kneel beside her armchair and burrow into her arms like I did when I was little. “And don’t come back without making it very clear to her how much you love her.”
I hug her tighter, feeling her warmth.
“I love you.”
“And I love you, my sunshine.”
· · ·
The day the crew reboards at the port of Ibiza, naturally, turns into chaos for me.
Not literally, though almost. We have to be on board at two o’clock sharp, and it seems that—once again—I’ve miscalculated the time terribly.
The taxi I’d ordered decides not to show up.
The second one gets stuck in a traffic jam of epic proportions, and to top it all off, a wheel on my giant suitcase—where I’m carrying half my wardrobe for the cruise’s themed nights—breaks right in the middle of the sidewalk, and I end up dragging it along as if I were carrying a corpse inside.
“Come on, please, step on it—the ship’s going to leave without me!” I yell at the driver, who isn’t to blame for any of this.
“Miss, there’s a traffic jam because of the tour buses,” he replies with the patience of a saint.
“Well, do something!” I exclaim, almost pulling my hair out.
The man looks at me in the rearview mirror as if he’s just confirmed that I’m completely crazy.
He’s right.
When I finally arrive at the port terminal, the Marine IV is gleaming in the Balearic sun with its white decks, about to swallow my future if I don’t get a move on. There are exactly seven minutes left before they close the crew access. I pay the taxi driver in a hurry, grab my stuff, and dash out.
I run through the passenger terminal as if all my past mistakes were chasing me—and there are many of them, and they’re in excellent physical shape.
My hair is a bird’s nest from the rush and the harbor wind, and my T-shirt is stuck to my back.
“Move out of the way, please!” I shout, dodging a couple of retired Germans in hats.
Great. I’m late, out of breath, and in love, and to top it all off, making a scene.
Maika Aranda in all her glory.
A security guard at the terminal looks at me in alarm as I head down the gangway.
“Miss, passengers enter through Deck 5…”
“I’m the entertainment coordinator! Unfortunately for the ship’s security!”
I practically crawl up the gangway. My lopsided suitcase gets caught on the safety rails of the ramp.
I curse it with a couple of words that would make a dockworker blush.
I manage to yank it free and burst onto the deck, into the technical access area, like a hurricane with my lip gloss completely melted.
And, of course, I crash into someone with the force of an ocean liner.
“Ouch!”
The suitcases fall with a horrible crash to the floor. My bag spills out, and I look up, my lungs burning, ready to apologize.
Helen is standing right next to the security scanner, impeccable in her uniform, the gold stripes gleaming, the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt and a control tablet in her hand where she logs the crew’s ID cards.
Her stern, iron-willed expression is a sight to behold; she tries not to lose her composure in the face of the chaotic scene I’ve created.
For an endless second, we say nothing. The beep of the card machine seems to be the only sound on board.
The crew around us freezes. Gonzalo is at the crew counter a few meters away; Nico and Lara, from my entertainment team, peek their heads around the main aisle.
And Lara opens her mouth as if she were witnessing the best musical theater premiere—and for free, no less.
“Maika,” says Helen. “Can you tell me what…?”
“Yeah, I’m a mess,” I confirm.
Her eyes scan my messy hair, the dark circles under my eyes, the suitcases scattered on the floor, and my wrinkled T-shirt. Then she glances at her wristwatch with professional severity.
“You’re three minutes late for the cutoff. I was about to file the report,” she says, with incredible seriousness.
Although, a second later, she smiles at me from ear to ear.
“I hadn’t realized I was running so close to the deadline,” I reply with my usual sarcasm, trying to catch my breath.
Gonzalo, from behind the counter, lets out a whistle.
“Clear your throats, gentlemen, this is going to be good,” whispers Nico.
I have no time for them, nor for the shipping company’s regulations, nor for my damn pride, nor for speeches rehearsed in front of the mirror. I drop my bag, take a step forward, and grab Helen right by the lapels of her uniform.
Her eyes widen, and for a second she loses all composure.
“Maika, what are you doing? We’re in the service area; the captain might…”
“Shut up,” I snap at her, staring intently. Then I think better of it and correct myself: “Shut up, please. I have to say this before I lose what little courage I have left after running the 100-meter dash with suitcases.”
Helen stands still, stiff, but without moving away, so close, and so beautiful with that scent of the sea and expensive perfume, so much a part of me, even though I still doubt whether I deserve her.
“I was an idiot,” I confess. “A proud, stubborn idiot—a combination that’s highly dangerous to anyone’s mental health. I got mad at you because I wanted you to tell me.”
Gonzalo mutters from the back something that sounds like “a point for the cheerleader.”
“But I’ve realized something important,” I continue, feeling my eyes well up with tears.
“You did it because you love me. Because you saw my fear, my panic at not being able to handle it, and your rigid mind couldn’t just sit still.
Because even though you’re a controlling officer, you also have a heart so damn big that it doesn’t know how to ask permission before saving the people it cares about. ”
Helen’s eyes shine brightly in the sun on the access deck.
“Thank you for helping my grandmother,” I whisper, gripping her lapels tighter. “Thank you for loving me so badly and so well at the same time. Thank you for not telling me to go to hell, even though I’m chaos personified.”
Nico whispers from his hiding spot:
“I’d give that speech a nine.”
“A ten,” Gonzalo corrects him. “There are tears, and the ship is about to cast off. This is cinema.”
“I love you, Helen,” I say, no longer caring about anything or anyone.
“I love you when you’re unbearable, when you make absurd lists to be a little more human, when you try to control everything because you’re terrified that life will leave you behind.
I love you on the promenade deck, in the crew quarters, in the ports, in your officer’s uniform and with that ‘I’m going to file a report on you’ look that, inexplicably, I find the most attractive thing on the planet. ”
Someone claps in the background. I don’t care who it is.
“And yes, I want to work with you. In the office or wherever they send us. But not running away, not sacrificing myself, not letting you decide for me or me for you. I want to fight by your side. I want us to be a mess, but the kind that wins battles and survives any storm together. A perfect mess.”
Helen lets out a laugh, purely emotional, and drops the control tablet onto the security counter.
“I love you too, Maika,” she says with that resounding clarity that reaches deep into my bones. “I love you so much that I was terrified of losing you, and that’s why I didn’t know how to do it right.”
“Well, we’re going to have to practice a lot,” I say, smiling through my tears.
“A lot.”
“A whole lot.”
“Maika.”
“Yes?”
Helen grabs me by the waist with a firmness that takes my breath away.
“Just kiss me already and shut up.”
And I obey, boy do I obey. I kiss her in front of everyone: in front of Gonzalo, who starts clapping as if we’d won the World Cup; in front of Nico, who shouts something about stars and planetary alignments; in front of Lara, who wipes a tear from her eye with her thumb, pretending she’s got something in her eye.
I kiss her with all my pent-up desire, with gratitude, with forgiveness, and with the whole future ahead of us.
When we pull back a little, she rests her forehead against mine.
“You’re late, coordinator,” she whispers with a crooked smile, returning to her professional tone. “And this is going to have consequences.”
I smile against her lips, giving her one last playful kiss.
“Well, I’ll be ready for them.”
As the crew continues cheering in the background and the captain’s announcement blares over the Marine IV’s speakers that we’re starting engines to set sail, I understand with crystal clarity that dry land isn’t always in a port.
Sometimes it has warm hands, shared fears, absurd lists, and an officer’s cap lying on the floor.
Sometimes it’s named Helen. And this time, I’m absolutely certain I plan to stay on board forever.
As long as it’s with her.