40. Janet
JANET
It’s taken a year for me to learn that the sharp squeaks in the palms are parakeets, the low broken roar in the hills comes from howler monkeys, and the dry clicks near the porch light are the gecko hunting moths off the wall.
The rooster outside my window is arguing with itself.
I scramble two eggs in the cottage’s tiny kitchen and eat them standing at the counter, looking out at the palm leaves scraping the window screen.
I’m on the porch before the heat comes up. The blue mug with the chip in the rim.
The walk into town while the road is still damp, and the air smells like coffee, dust, and leaves.
At the market, a man reaches for the same mango I do.
His hand stops before it touches mine.
“Perdón,” he says, smiling.
He’s tall, tan, probably late thirties, linen shirt open at the throat, expensive watch, the kind of man who knows exactly how good he looks buying fruit before noon.
I take the mango. “Está bien.”
“You’re American,” he says in English.
“Sometimes.”
He laughs.
“I’m having lunch at the place by the water,” he says. “You should let me buy you something better than mangoes.”
For a second, I almost enjoy the simplicity of it.
A handsome man. A sunny morning.
“Thank you,” I say. “But no.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t meet men in markets. It’s a thing.”
He smiles “Too bad.”
Marisol is already setting out mangoes when I reach her stand.
“Buenos días, Janet,” she says. “Hoy están dulces.”
“Entonces deme cuatro,” I say.
Marisol starts choosing them from the crate.
“How’s your mother’s hip?”
“Better,” she says. “She’s walking to church again, but she still complains about the steps.”
“Tell her to rest before the rain starts.”
Marisol laughs, weighs the mangoes, and slips an extra one into the bag.
On the way back, the dog with one white ear follows me to the gate and waits for the piece of chicken I pretend I’m not saving for him.
Inside, I pass the mirror by the bedroom door and stop.
The sun has changed me. My shoulders are brown, my arms darker, the bridge of my nose freckled from a year of the walk into town.
Salt and heat have pulled the ends of my hair lighter.
The woman in the glass isn't the one who stood in a courtroom and said the People are ready. I've stopped looking for her.
I spend my days in sundresses and sandals.
I leave my phone. I take my book down to the beach after breakfast, find the same stretch of sand I always find, and let the day do whatever it wants with me.
By early afternoon I'm at the open-air bar, my toes in cool sand under the table, a rum drink sweating a ring onto the wood. I've read the same paragraph three times. I don't mind. That's what these afternoons are for.
Someone slides onto the stool at the end of the bar.
I don't look up right away. I do, because something about the shape of him catches at the corner of my eye before my brain finishes catching up.
He's shirtless, board shorts low on his hips, skin gone gold from the sun in a way New York never gave him. There's a scar cutting across his abdomen, pale and raised, the kind that makes strangers glance twice.
He catches me looking. Doesn't look away first.
"Hi," he says. "I'm Mike."
I close my book slowly on my finger to hold my place.
"Hi," I say. "I'm Janet."
He picks up his beer and moves down two stools. Like he's asking permission by how far he sits.
"That's a nasty scar," I say, nodding at his stomach.
"Oh yeah, it was bad. I almost died."
"Sounds terrible."
"A beautiful woman saved me." He takes a pull of his beer.
"Aren't you lucky?" I say.
"Oh yeah, and then she disappeared."
"You know what that say, if it’s meant to be…”
"They do say that,” he sips his beer.
"How long have you been here?"
"Four days." He turns the bottle in a slow circle on the bar top. "You?"
"Almost a year," I let it sit. "Staying long?"
"No idea," he says. "I wake up and let the day take me wherever it takes me. Today it took me here."
We stay at the bar until the light turns orange on the water and the ice melts in our glasses.
He asks about Montezuma, and I tell him about the waterfalls, the rope swing, the road that turns to mud after rain. He says he saw signs for Cabo Blanco on the way in. I tell him I finally took the surf lesson Marisol had been nagging me about for months, stood up once, and haven't been back.
The bartender starts stacking chairs on top of tables. He says something to me in Spanish about closing up and I answer without thinking, and Mike watches me do it like it's the first thing tonight that's surprised him.
“Well, I’m heading to a place up the road,” I say. “Tiny place. Best fish I’ve ever had.”
“You’re going to think I planned this,” he says, “but I’m headed there too.”
“What are the odds?”
“Can I join you?”
I look down the road, then back at him.
“It would be silly for us to take two tables.”
He smiles a little.
We walk down the road together, our shoulders almost touch, the dust soft under our feet and the ocean moving somewhere beyond the trees.
We eat rice and beans and a whole fried fish with our fingers, and he laughs at something I say. The couple at the next table glances over. I'd forgotten what that sounded like. His genuine laugh, not the one he used to perform for a room.
Walking back, the road is dark except for porch lights and the moon coming up over the water. He doesn't reach for my hand. He walks close; our arms brush every few steps. I could close the gap if I wanted.
At my cottage door, he stops.
"This is me," I say.
"This is you."
I push the door open and step back into the dark.
He follows me in. The door closes soft behind him, and for a second neither of us moves.
We look at each other.
He steps toward me, and I don’t move.
His hand comes up to my jaw, slow, like he's asking a question with his fingers instead of his mouth. I answer him by closing the last of the distance myself.
The kiss starts carefully and doesn't stay that way.
My hands find the scar on his stomach, trace it in the dark, and he goes still under my palm like he's letting me touch the worst of it on purpose.
I press my mouth there next, right over the raised line of it, and he makes a sound low in his throat that undoes something I've been holding together for a year.
Discovering each other all over again.
He walks me back toward the bed without breaking the kiss, unhurried, like we have every night left in the world to get this right. My shirt comes off first, his shorts follow, and the moonlight through the shutters cuts him into strips of light and shadow that I chase with my hands.
He takes his time with me, every inch deliberate, like he's relearning something he was afraid he'd lost the right to know. When he finally moves inside me, my hand finds the scar. I bite down on his shoulder to keep quiet, and he catches my jaw in his hand and makes me look at him instead.
I do. All the way through it, I do. My hand stays where it is, over the raised line of skin, until neither of us can hold still any longer.
After, we lie in sweat, tangled in the sheets with the ceiling fan turning slowly overhead.
My fingers find the scar again without me deciding to, tracing the length of it in the dark.
He watches my face while I do it, like he'd let me touch that scar every night for the rest of his life if it meant I stayed close enough to reach it.
Outside, the ocean keeps making the same sound it's made every night for a year, patient, endless.
"Does it hurt?" I ask.
"Sometimes."
I turn my head against the pillow to look at him. In the dark, I can make out the shape of his mouth, the start of a smile.
He pulls me closer, and I let him. We lay there in each other's arms and sleep.
I wake to sun cutting through the shutters in thin gold lines across the bed. Mike is already up, standing at the little kitchen counter in yesterday's shorts, two mugs in front of him and the coffee pot hissing through its last cycle.
"I made coffee." He pours two cups and hands me one.
We carry the mugs out to the small porch and sit on the top step, shoulders touching, the ocean laid out flat and silver in front of us. A fishing boat cuts a slow line across the horizon. Neither of us talks for a minute. I don't feel the need to fill it.
He looks at me, and something in his face loosens, like he's been braced for a different answer.
The boat disappears past the point. The coffee goes cold in our cups, and neither of us moves to make more.
For the first time since Joe, since the video, since a bathroom floor stained with someone else's blood, I'm not waiting for the other thing to happen. There is no other thing. There's this. Salt air, his arm around me, the sound of water doing what water does.
I could get used to mornings like this.
I think I already have.
"I’m glad I found you," he says.
"It’s good to be found.”
We walk to the ocean and stand where the water reaches for our feet, then pulls away again, the waves coming in and going out like the world breathing around us.
The End
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One day I’m a struggling actress in LA, finally accepting that my dream is over.
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Sneak Peek:
Read Chapter 1: Anna
"I am enough," I remind myself as I enter the room.
The casting director is still looking at his phone.
I stand at the tape mark on the floor, script memorized, breath controlled, waiting. His assistant gives me an apologetic smile that means we're running behind, or he does this to everyone, or don't take it personally.
"Anna Simmons." He finally reads my name off the top sheet like he's reading a grocery list. "For the role of Diane. Supporting. You have the sides?"
"It's Simons. Anna Simons."
"Any questions?"
"No."
"Okay." He sets the phone down. Looks at me for the first time. "Whenever you're ready."
I close my eyes for half a second.
Then I stop being Anna Simons. I become Diane.