Chapter 5 — Kept Dry24
@solena.rising
“Someone asked me tonight what I’m still afraid of, and loves, I had to sit with it.
Here’s where I landed. Boundaries are just fears wearing coats.
We stitch them, we button them up to the chin, we call them healthy.
Tonight I’m taking some coats off. I’ll tell you what I find underneath. Sleep soft.”
We did not talk about the pavilion.
We had lunch instead, at separate ends of the same conversation, and then my mother went off to be filmed receiving a seaweed wrap, and I went to handle the one piece of business I had on this island, which was confirming the way off of it.
I had a wedding to shoot the Saturday after we landed.
Ugly work, but booked work, and booked work needs a man to show up.
I found Coral in the welcome hall, arranging flowers that already looked arranged.
“Pleasant tides, Squid.”
“Sean. Hi. Quick thing. The ferry back, a week from Tuesday. I just want to confirm we’re on it. I’ve got a job the Saturday after.”
“A job.” She said it gently, the way you’d repeat a word a child had mispronounced. “You’re planning your leaving. It’s day two.”
“I plan ahead. It’s a flaw. The ferry, though.”
“The ferry comes on Tuesdays.”
That was technically information. “And the passports. How does that work when we go? Do we just swing by, or?”
“Oh, don’t worry.” She said it the way you’d say a baby was napping. “They’re resting in the salt room, nice and safe.”
“Sure. Could I actually look at mine at some point? The wedding venue wants ID scans for the vendor list. It’s a whole thing.”
“Why would it need looking at?” Her head tilted, sympathetic, immovable. “It’s resting, Squid.”
She squeezed my arm and went back to the flowers, and I stood there for a second with nowhere to put any of it.
I walked it off. Hotels hold passports. Resorts have safes. The wedding was eleven days out, and I was being gently managed by a twenty-five-year-old with a braid, and I told myself those two facts lived in different drawers.
The room had been done while we were out.
Not cleaned. Done. The bed sat remade with its corners knife-sharp, the spare blanket folded at the foot, and my pillow, the one that had spent the night on the floor with me, was back up at the headboard like it had never defected.
The floor where I had slept did not exist. There was no evidence that a second person had ever slept anywhere in that room, which, officially, no one had.
“Someone was in here,” I said.
“Housekeeping, Sean. It’s a resort.”
“They didn’t make the bed. They corrected the record.”
“They fluffed a pillow.” But she was looking at the floor where the nest wasn’t, and she didn’t say anything else for a while.
Dinner was at the long tables above the water, lamb and charred lemons and bread that came apart in warm ropes, and I performed the meal like a professional.
I passed dishes. I laughed at the right windows.
I did not mention the pavilion, with a thoroughness that must have looked, from the outside, like devotion.
The weathered man from the cook-fire sat across from us beside a tiny talkative woman with rings on every finger, and he spent the whole meal turned toward her like she was the only broadcast on the island.
She talked. He listened, and refilled her glass before she asked, and I caught myself watching the two of them the way you watch something you can’t name yet.
There was a seafoam card propped by the bread basket. Tomorrow afternoon. The Tide Sitting. New pairs warmly expected.
“Oh, your first Sitting,” said the older woman from last night, misting up on cue, pressing her husband’s knuckles to the table. “You’ll remember it the rest of your lives.”
No part of that sentence helped.
Then Coral passed behind our chairs with a hand for each of our shoulders and leaned down between us, warm and unhurried and far too close.
“I hope the bed suits you two,” she said. “We take pride in our comfort.”
She was gone before either of us could arrange a face.
So that was the floor, burned. We held the conference in our room at ten, in the low gold of the salt lamps, in whispers, like the flowers might be listening.
“We have to share the bed tonight,” my mother said, arms folded, looking at the bed and not at me. “They noticed, Sean. Coral wouldn’t have brought it up otherwise. If they’re paying attention to our bed, then the bed has to look right.”
“The bed has to look right,” I said.
“It’s a big bed. We’re adults. Don’t make it strange.”
“I’m not making it strange. I’m establishing a framework.”
“Oh my God.”
“I sleep on top of the duvet. You sleep under it. That’s two sovereign nations.” I laid the spare pillows down the middle of the bed, end to end, a clean firm border. “And this is the wall.”
She watched me build it with her arms crossed and an expression I declined to examine. “I used to bathe you,” she said. “You had a little rubber octopus.”
“Things have developed.”
“Clearly,” she said, and got under the duvet, and was asleep in four minutes. The sleep of the love-bombed. I lay on top of the covers in the dark on my third of the bed, straight as a tool in a box, and listened to her breathe.
The air conditioning had opinions. It came down off the wall in one relentless silver sheet, and the duvet I had renounced lay there beside me, warm, occupied, diplomatic.
I held the line for an hour. I would like that noted, one full hour, jaw going, arms crossed like a man lying in state.
Then I climbed under. For warmth. The record will show it was for warmth, and the record will also show that the wall still stood, and that I kept to my own cold scrap of fitted sheet like a gentleman.
I woke at some black hour of the morning wrapped around my mother.
We had met in the middle. That was the worst of the available facts, that the wall hadn’t been breached so much as abandoned by both governments, pillows shoved somewhere south, and there was no version of the map where only one of us had traveled.
She was tucked back into me, full length, her spine against my chest, my arm run under hers and folded across her, her hair in my mouth.
She was warm the way the duvet had only been advertising.
And I was hard against her. There was no unfactualizing it this time.
It was pressed against the curve of her ass through two thin layers of cotton, fact upon fact, and she shifted in her sleep, the smallest settling-back, and every nerve I owned stood up and applauded, and I lay there in the dark with my heart going like a caught thief.
Separating from her was the hardest thing I had done on that island, and I understood even while I was doing it that the difficulty was the problem.
It should have been easy. It should have been a recoil.
Instead it was a slow argument I kept losing in increments, because she was warm and she fit and some traitor sector of me had been waiting for exactly this since the pavilion, maybe longer, and pulling away from her felt like peeling tape off my own skin.
Thrilling is the wrong word. Unnerving is the wrong word.
Wrong is the right word, and it didn’t help.
I went by degrees. The arm. The hips, in one long burglar’s retreat.
The hair, surrendered out of my mouth. I fed the pillow into the gap, and she gathered it in and sighed into it, content, and I stood in the dark above the bed with my pulse everywhere it shouldn’t be, and then I went out for air.
The grounds at three in the morning were beautiful the way everything here was beautiful, relentlessly, like it was being paid by the hour.
I took the path down to the bath house and ran cold water and held my face in it for a while.
The walk back was all moonlight and tamarisk and the small civilized lights along the path stones, and I was almost back to our building when I saw her.
Coral was standing on the path.
Not walking. Standing. Off-white, pressed, braid done, composed, at three in the morning, on a path between buildings, facing me like she’d been issued the spot.
“Is everything alright, Squid?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
“Mm.” She smiled with great kindness. “The second night is restless. The tide settles it.”
“Right. Well.”
“Sleep soft, Squid.”
I went up the stairs. At the door I looked back. She was still on the path, exactly where I’d left her, hands folded, facing nowhere in particular, and the moonlight approved of her completely.
The word had been assembling itself all day without my permission. Out on that path, it finished.
My mother surfaced when I sat down on the edge of the bed. “Did you fall in,” she murmured.
“Wake up. I need to say a thing.”
Something in my voice did it. She came up onto one elbow, hair down, eyes half open, the duvet pooling at her waist, and I kept my eyes on the headboard and said it in a whisper, because whispering was all this place had left us.
“This is a cult.”
“Oh, Sean.”
“They have our passports and I’m not allowed to look at mine.
Somebody came into this room and noted exactly where everybody slept, and by dinner Coral was dropping hints about how she hoped the bed suited us.
That’s not housekeeping, that’s surveillance with a duster.
Forty people answer a video in one voice, the same words, you didn’t know those words and you were mouthing along anyway.
And Coral is standing out there on the path right now, three in the morning, dressed, pressed, like the night shift of something. ”
“She works here.”
“Nobody works at three a.m. in ironed linen, Mom.”
“It’s a retreat.” Her whisper came back harder. “Retreats are intense. Intensity is the product. You think this is the first place that’s taken my passport? Resorts do it in half of Asia.”
“And the room?”
“Turndown service.”
“And the chanting?”
“It’s a wellness community, Sean, they have a thing they say. Catholics have a thing they say. You don’t call your grandmother a cultist.”
“My grandmother never locked my documents in a salt room.”
“Keep your voice down.” Hers had gone to a hiss, and we were both up on our elbows now, three inches of dark between us, whisper-fighting like a married couple in a hotel, which was the joke neither of us made.
“Do you know what this is for me? They picked twelve creators. Out of everyone, off the whole entire internet, they picked me. This is the biggest thing that has ever happened to my career. Possibly to me. And you want me to torch it because a girl with a braid asked if you were alright too nicely.”
“At three in the morning.”
“She was probably doing rounds.”
“Rounds,” I said. “Of what?”
She didn’t have an answer for that one, and I watched her decide not to need one. She lay back down and pulled the duvet up over her shoulder, a border of her own, and spoke at the ceiling.
“It’s eleven more days. It’s free, it’s beautiful, the food is unbelievable, and my numbers have never been better. Go to sleep, Sean.”
I lay down on my ten percent of the bed. Neither of us rebuilt the wall, which meant something, or didn’t, and the word I’d finally said sat in the dark on the pillow between us and breathed.
We slept in the same bed, on opposite sides of it.