The row out was different from the row in — quieter, in the way things were quiet after something real happened, thespecific quality of a silence that had been earned. The water outside the arch was the impossible blue again, afternoon on everything. The shadow of him was still below the surface. I watched it and didn't look away and he saw me watching and didn't pull it back.
We tied up at the dock and I stood and he was right there, one hand on the boat, looking up at me.
I looked at the cove.
I pressed two fingers to the ink still visible on the inside of my wrist. They were dark blue, soft at the edges, already beginning the slow fade, and I held them there.
Okay,I thought.So that happened.That was a thing that had happened and it was going to keep being a thing, and I had four more days on this island and I was not going to spend a single minute of them pretending I was a person who could walk away from this.
I was not walking away from this.
I was staying right here.
Maro
Marisol was on the terrace when I came in from the water.
I had not known she was there. I had caught the morning swell as usual and when I paddled in and stood with the board under my arm and looked up, she was sitting with her coffee and her feet tucked under her and she was watching me with the particular quality of attention she gave to things she had decided were interesting.
I had been in these waters long enough to recognize inevitability when I saw it.
She raised her cup. Not a wave exactly. Just an acknowledgment.I see you. I've been watching.I carried the board up the sand and she tracked the whole walk and when I reached the foot of the steps she said: "Teach me to do that."
"No," I said.
She looked at me over the rim of her cup. Unhurried. Patient in the specific way of someone who was not actually prepared to take no for an answer but saw no reason to say so yet. Themorning light was full on her — her dark hair already losing its argument with the humidity, her green cover slipped off one shoulder, the ink marks from the cave still faintly visible on the inside of her wrist.
"I have four days left," she said. "You have a board. This is a simple resource allocation problem."
I looked at her. She looked back. The morning was very bright and she was sitting in it like she belonged there, like the black sand and the cliff and the particular quality of this cove had arranged themselves with her in mind, and I said fine, which I had probably been going to say since she asked.
I did not have a smaller board, which became relevant immediately. My board was nine feet of longboard built for unhurried surfing in water I had known since before it existed. It was not a beginner's board. It required lying flat and paddling out through Caribbean chop that had no interest in being accommodating.
I explained this.
She looked at the board. unphased. She said: "okay," and picked up one end.
We carried it to the water together, close the way carrying something long requires you to be close, her arm warm alongside mine.
"I want you to know," she said, "that I have never surfed before. I also have a complicated relationship with balance."
"You walk without falling down most of the time."
"Mostof the time," she agreed. "That's really the crucial qualifier there."
She was grinning — the sideways one, the one that arrived before she meant it to — and something in my chest did the compression thing it had been doing with increasing frequency since the ferry, and I looked at the water.
"The board does the balance work," I said. "Your job is to not fight it."
"Not fighting things," she said. "I can work with that."
She fell off before she cleared the break. The board slid out, her arms made a brief and dignified attempt at physics, and she went in clean. She came up with salt water streaming down her face and her hair entirely across her eyes, found the board, and got back on.
She fell a second time, slightly differently, and came up already repositioning her hands.
I paddled beside her and said nothing. The falling was the teaching. The getting back on was the point. She got back on the same way she had gotten on the wrong ferry and carried her bag into Casa Oscura and touched a tentacle in the dark without flinching — with complete matter-of-fact intention, like the only question was what came next.
On the third attempt she cleared the break.
