Chapter Seventeen
Jill
Iflew business class to Costa Rica with a strange, hollow disappointment sitting alongside the relief I expected to feel, because Robert honored the request in my note exactly as I'd asked, no message waiting when I landed, no private jet trailing mine across the hemisphere, nothing at all, and for the first several hours in San José I found myself checking my phone more often than I wanted to admit, unsettled by an absence I had specifically requested, catching myself refreshing my messages at the baggage claim, in the taxi, in the elevator of the small hotel where I spent one night before catching the shuttle west the next morning.
By the second day, the disappointment had resolved into something closer to respect.
He had listened. Not performed listening, the way he might have once agreed to something in a meeting and quietly done what he'd already planned to do anyway, but actually listened, and stayed away, and let the silence between us mean exactly what I'd asked it to mean, a silence that felt, the longer it lasted, less abandonment and more a promise being kept.
I took a shuttle from San José to a small lodge on the Pacific side, jungle pressing close against the road for the last hour of the drive, the canopy so dense in places it blotted out the sky entirely, howler monkeys calling somewhere overhead in a sound so deep and strange it raised the hair on my arms the first time the sound reached me, and I checked into a room with no air conditioning and a ceiling fan and mosquito netting around the bed, a version of comfort entirely different from the boutique hotels of Italy or the careful stillness of the ryokan, and I found I liked it, this rougher, greener version of being far from home, the sound of rain on the tin roof that first night more soothing than any white noise machine I'd ever owned.
The shuttle driver, a talkative man named Rodrigo who'd clearly made this same drive thousands of times, pointed out landmarks the whole way, a waterfall visible briefly through a gap in the trees, a family of coatis crossing the road ahead of us, and somewhere past the halfway point he asked, in the easy way of someone who'd carried plenty of solo female travelers before, whether I was running toward something or away from it.
I told him I honestly wasn't sure anymore, and he laughed, not unkindly, and said that was usually how the good trips started, the ones people still talked about years later.
The lodge itself was small, eight rooms arranged around a central dining pavilion open to the jungle on three sides, and I ate my first dinner there alongside a handful of other guests, a young couple from Toronto on their honeymoon, a retired schoolteacher traveling alone, and a family of four whose children spent the entire meal narrating, in loud and delighted detail, every insect they'd spotted that day.
Nobody asked why I was traveling alone, and when the schoolteacher, a woman named Ruth, mentioned offhand that she'd been divorced eleven years and had never once regretted learning to travel by herself, I felt something in my chest ease slightly, the sense that my situation required an explanation slowly dissolving in the company of people who'd built entirely ordinary lives around exactly the kind of solitude I was still learning to trust.
Ruth caught up with me again after dinner, the two of us drawn to the same spot on the pavilion's edge to watch the last of the light fade over the jungle canopy, and she asked, without much preamble, what had brought me to a lodge on the Pacific coast alone.
I gave her a shortened version, a marriage in question, a trip taken to figure out the answer, and she nodded along without surprise, as though she'd heard some version of this story from a dozen women before me.
"I taught high school for thirty-one years," she said.
"You'd be amazed how much you learn about marriages from sixteen-year-olds.
The ones whose parents were happy carried themselves differently than the ones whose parents weren't, even when nobody in either household ever raised their voice.
Kids know. They always know, even when the adults think they're hiding it well.
" She looked out at the darkening jungle.
"I hope whatever you decide, you decide it because it's true, not because it's convenient.
Convenient answers have a way of costing you more in the end than the honest, difficult ones would have. "
Luis ran the photography excursions out of the lodge, a compact man in his fifties with a wife and three children in the nearby village and a laugh that came easily and often, his English peppered with Spanish phrases he used without noticing, and on my first outing with him he watched me frame and reframe a shot of a toucan for close to four minutes before he finally spoke, standing patiently a few feet behind me with his arms crossed.
"You are trying to make it perfect," he said, not unkindly. "The bird does not care about your composition. Take the picture that is actually happening, not the one you are waiting for."
I took the picture. It wasn't perfect, the bird half turned away, the light harsher than I would have chosen, the branch cutting awkwardly across the lower third of the frame, and something about its imperfection made it more alive than anything I had shot in Rome or Florence, both cities where I had unconsciously kept trying to prove I still knew how to make something look impressive.
On our second outing, wading through a shallow stream at dawn to photograph the mist rising off the water, I lost my footing on a mossy stone and went down hard, camera splashing into six inches of water before I could catch myself, and I sat there for a stunned moment, soaked to the waist, certain the camera was ruined, my whole chest tightening with a panic that had nothing to do with the equipment and everything to do with how thoroughly I'd embarrassed myself in front of a man I'd known for three days.
Luis waded over, unhurried, and helped me up, checking the camera with practiced hands before pronouncing it, miraculously, fine, just wet on the outside. "This is good," he said, grinning, water still dripping from my hair.
"Good? I just fell in a river."
"Exactly," he said. "Now you stop being so careful. Careful people take boring pictures. Wet, embarrassed people take honest ones."
He was right, infuriatingly. The photographs I took for the rest of that morning, hair still damp, shoes squelching with every step, were looser and better than anything I'd shot since arriving, a heron caught mid-strike against the water, sunlight fracturing through the canopy in a way I hadn't planned for and couldn't have planned for, simply present enough to catch it when it happened.
On our third outing, Luis took me further into the forest than we'd gone before, to a clearing where he said a family of howler monkeys usually gathered in the late morning, and we waited nearly two hours, mostly in silence, before they finally appeared, moving through the canopy overhead with a confidence that made the whole forest feel briefly like it belonged to them rather than to any of the humans standing beneath it.
I photographed until my arms ached from holding the camera raised, and Luis, watching me work, said only, "Now you understand.
Not everything good comes quickly. Some of it makes you wait first, so you learn to actually want it. "
I hiked with a small group through the rainforest on my fourth day, sweat-soaked and mosquito-bitten and happier than I could remember being in years, stopping at a waterfall where two of the younger hikers stripped down to swim beneath the falling water while the rest of us cheered them on from the rocks, and that afternoon I let Luis talk me into a surf lesson I had no business attempting at thirty-eight with no prior experience, paddling out on a board too large for me while he shouted instructions from the shallows.
The hike itself had its own small humbling moment before we ever reached the waterfall, a stretch of trail steep enough that I'd stopped twice to catch my breath while a couple in their sixties strolled past me without apparent effort, chatting easily about their grandchildren.
The husband, noticing my red face, slowed just long enough to offer a piece of advice.
"Stop measuring yourself against the trail," he said, not unkindly.
"The trail's not going anywhere. It'll still be here in ten minutes when you catch up.
" I laughed, embarrassed, and took his advice literally, slowing my pace until my breathing evened out, and I reached the waterfall only slightly behind the rest of the group, sweaty and proud of myself in a way that had nothing to do with speed.
I fell off the board more times than I could count, swallowing saltwater, laughing so hard at my own failure that I had to stop paddling and simply float for a moment, catching my breath, the sun warm on my face and the water buoying me up in a way that felt, absurdly, like being held.
On my eleventh or twelfth attempt, I finally caught a small wave, wobbling upright for three, maybe four seconds before I toppled sideways into the whitewash, and I came up laughing, saltwater streaming off my face, and Luis was already paddling over, whooping, hand extended to pull me up.
A woman from the group photographed me mid-fall, board flipping, my arms thrown wide in the split second before I hit the water, hair fanned out around my head like something out of a painting, and she sent it to me that evening, and I looked at it for a long time before I posted it, on impulse, to an account I hadn't used in years, a small act of visibility I hadn't allowed myself since long before I married Robert.
I looked at that photograph and saw a woman I recognized from a long time ago, someone who had once believed her life could be built around curiosity rather than management, and I understood, lying under the mosquito netting that night listening to the jungle settle into its nocturnal rhythms, insects and frogs and something larger moving through the underbrush beyond my window, that whatever happened next with Robert, I was not going to let myself disappear back into the life I'd left behind without a fight.