I sat in the good chair on the terrace because I was not in a state to trust a hammock and I let myself stop being the person who managed things. The sun was going low over the jungle. The black sand was holding the day's heat, glowing warm and dark. Somewhere inside, Tina's radio played something slowand guitar-heavy that drifted out through the kitchen window and dissolved into the salt air.
A week, I thought. Less like a prison sentence. More like a door someone had left open.
I was working on my second sip when something moved in the cove.
It surfaced slowly, thirty feet out — dark against the dark water, and large in a way that recalibrated the scale of the cove around it, large in the way that made me aware of how big the water actually was. Not a fish. Not a boat. It stayed up just long enough to register — long enough for me to see the shape of it. Then it slipped back under and the cove closed over it like a door.
A pelican landed on the dock post and looked at me. It did not seem concerned.
Okay, I thought. Okay so there was something in the water. Islands had things in the water. I had been awake for twenty-two hours and the drink was excellent. Maybe I was just seeing things.
I stayed on the terrace for a long time anyway. Watching the cove. It didn't surface again — just sat there, dark and still and vaguely aware of me, or that was how it felt, which was probably the rum talking.
Tina called me in for dinner at seven. Rice and fish and something with plantains that I ate two helpings of. We didn't talk much. She was the kind of person who didn't require conversation to make you feel welcome, which was the rarest and most valuable kind of person.
I fell asleep to the sound of the water.
It should have felt wrong, being here. After all, I was on the wrong island, in the wrong bed and starting week that had gone sideways from the first moment. Through the window,something large moved slowly in the dark water below, and I watched it for one long moment before I closed my eyes.
It didn't feel wrong.
That was the strangest part.
Maro
Ifelt the ferry before I heard it.
Pressure, first. The displacement, the signature of weight moving through water. I had known this ferry's engine for eleven years, since before Marcelin replaced the original motor with something louder and less efficient, which I had advised against at the community meeting and was overruled. This was, among the many things humans regularly got wrong, a small one. I had learned to make peace with small ones.
Three passengers. Two of them I knew. The third was not known to me.
I surfaced in the channel to look, which was different from being interested. I was curious the way I was curious about most things the humans did. I had observed humans for longer than most human civilizations had existed. I was not, at this point, easily surprised by them.
She was at the stern.
A woman. Curvy, warm brown skin catching the last of the afternoon light in a way that made the wordwarminsufficient as a description. Dark hair losing a spectacular fight with the humidity. The particular softness of a body built for comfort rather than sharp edges, the kind of softness that the late light found and held. She stood with her weight slightly back, like someone who had learned to hold their ground without announcing it.
She had a piece of paper in her hand. She put it away and looked at the island — and it was her soft, worried expression that caught me.
My tentacles had drifted out while I was watching — two of them, curling in the current, which happened when I was not paying attention to not letting it happen. I pulled them back. Mostly.
Tina met the ferry because Tina met every ferry, which was a commitment I respected and had long since stopped trying to explain to myself. She had also, for forty years, been the primary source of situations I had not agreed to be in. It had started when she was seven years old and convinced me through sheer stubbornness to retrieve a fishing net from the reef. I retrieved the net. This set a precedent that I had not managed to reverse since meeting her fifty three years ago.
Casa Oscura had been quiet this season. I knew this in the way I knew everything that happened on this side of the island — because the water knew, because the mood of the village carried in the current. In March when Tina said the wordsoccupancy ratein that flat careful tone she did not usually use, I realized what a problem it was for her. Three rooms in April. Two in May. The resort on the other side kept what little tourism reached the island and kept it efficiently.
I watched from the cove while the wrong-ferry woman had her short conversation with Tina. I was watching the cove. She happened to be in it.
Then Tina picked up her bag. And the woman looked at the dock, looked at the locals collecting parcels, and looked at the options available to her.
This was not what tourists normally did. Tourists argued. Tourists found their phones and looked for a signal and attempted to explain their itineraries to Tina as though she had influence over ferry schedules.
The woman, Marisol, followed Tina.
***
I came around the headland at dusk, and she was on the terrace with Tina's pink drink in one hand.
She was warm and still and looking at the water the way the water.
