I picked it up again, and then I stood there with it in my hand and I had a very thorough internal conversation with myself, which went something like this:okay so on one side of this you have a return flight at six tomorrow morning, and a lease through March, and a job you are good at, and a best friend who is going to lose her entire mind in a way that will require a minimum two-hour phone call, and a mother who will have fourteen questions and then a follow-up question she thought of in the parking lot, and furniture you chose, and a coffee maker, and a gym membership you don't use but you pay for every month which is fine, lots of people do that, the point is you have a life in Austin, Texas, and it is a real life, and the ferry goes to the airport.
And on the other side:a black sand beach, and warm bread every morning, and a cottage with a new hammock on the terrace at the end of a path by the dock, and eight days of sleeping the kind of sleep where you wake up and the birds are real and something in you has unclenched that you didn't know was clenched, and a man at the end of the dock who put up a hammock last week and is currently looking at the water and not asking you anything at all.
The sensible thing was to get on the ferry.
And here was the problem. I didn’t want to go back to my old life. I wanted to stay here with the sun, and the sand, and the drinks, and most of all…Maro.
The ferry docked and loaded three passengers from La Boca, two boxes of supplies, a bicycle that required an extended negotiation with the gangplank. Then it left, and I was still standing on the dock, and the ferry got smaller and smaller until it was just a white shape and then nothing.
The entire time, Maro stood beside me without saying a word.
"You missed the ferry," he said.
"I did," I said. "There is another one next week."
Maro looked at me.
“I’m not getting on it,” I said. The waves crashing over the dock filled the silence. “Tina told me there’s a free cottage.”
He was looking at the water. “So…” He took a deep breath, as if he was worried about what to say next. “You’ll stay?”
“Yes.”
He looked at me and smiled. "The cottage needs airing out," he said. “But I think it’s perfect for you.”
I took out my phone, opened my email, typedRemote work. Let's talk Mondayto my boss and hit send before I could have any thoughts about it, which was honestly the only way to do anything that actually mattered.
Marisol
The fish fry had been going for two hours and I was on the wall outside the rum bar with my margarita. It’s Tina's recipe, my adjustments, her ongoing editorial opinions, a negotiation that would apparently never resolve.
I was watching Maro stand at the edge of it all the way he always did.
Theo was on his back. Bastien was hanging off his left arm with the full-body commitment of a child who had decided this was load-bearing and was not going to be argued out of it. Petra was beside him giving what appeared to be a detailed report on something she'd found in the tide pools, and he was listening to her the way he listened to everything — completely, without reservation, with the specific patience of something that has all the time that has ever existed and has decided this particular moment is worth it.
Old Gustave was arguing with him about the current off the south point. Maro was correct. Gustave knew Maro was correct.The argument was going to continue for another decade at minimum and they both found this entirely satisfactory.
I sat with my drink and I watched all of it happening around me.
Here's what I understood, sitting on that wall: I hadn't chosen a sexy man on a beach.
I'd chosenintosomething. The fish market man who'd handed me a paper bag for the road before I knew I wasn't taking it. Tina, setting out two cups of coffee on the dock for forty years without being asked. The kids on the reef who'd been swimming out to find him since before their parents were born. The old men who argued with him about currents they'd been arguing about for decades. All of it had been here long before me, this centuries-deep thing, and at some point in the last month the island had apparently made a decision about me.
I found I agreed with it.
Tina sat down next to me on the wall. She had the look she got when she'd made a decision and the decision involved saying something to me whether I was ready or not.
"He hung that hammock the day after you arrived," she said.
"I know."
"He has never done anything like that. Not once, in forty years."
I looked at my drink. "I know."
She was quiet for a moment. Then: "He didn't know if you'd stay. He hung it anyway."
I thought about that. The empty hook. The hammock sitting in the storage shed. Him going to get it and hanging it and walking back to the water without saying anything to anyone — just leaving it there where I could find it or not find it, as I chose. The hope made physical and then set down without a word.
