The confirmation landed in my inbox at 11:42 a.m. Subject line: Upcoming Reservation, Rosewood Half Moon Bay. Your stay begins Saturday.
I closed the laptop, put it in its case, and set it by the door. Then I went back to the kitchen and made a second cup of coffee, which I drank sitting on my couch in the quiet of a Tuesday morning with nothing on my to-do list and no one expecting anything from me.
The couch held me, and the coffee cooled in my hands, and I did not check my email. In a year of Tuesdays, that was the first one that belonged to no one but me.
I called Joy back at noon.
“I booked it,” I said. “Jamaica. The week of the wedding.”
A pause.
“Smart.”
“I don’t feel smart. I feel like I’m waiting for something.”
“You are,” Joy said. “But so is she. She just doesn’t know it yet.”
I let that sit for a moment. Outside my window, the Tampa street was doing its afternoon thing—a delivery truck backing up, two kids on bikes, ordinary life proceeding at its ordinary pace.
“I’ll call you when I land,” I said.
“Call me from the beach,” Joy said.
The Tampa airport smells like sunscreen and fast food in the early morning, which is either deeply American or deeply specific to Florida, and I find it comforting either way. I was at the gate by 7:00 a.m. on Saturday with a carry-on bag and a yellow legal pad I had brought for a client project I had no intention of touching.
The gate area was full of people in vacation clothes, the relaxed, shoulders-down posture of people who have already mentally arrived somewhere else while their bodies wait for the plane. I fit in among them, which was its own kind of relief.
My phone showed seventeen missed calls by the time I boarded. Three from Patrice, two from Stacy, and twelve from a number I did not place, which turned out to be the Bayshore Grand’s events line. I put the phone on airplane mode and watched Tampa disappear through the oval window.
The resort was exactly what the photographs promised, which is not always true of resorts. The light in Jamaica in the early afternoon comes down flat and warm and makes everything look as if it has been polished to a kind of stillness, the way afternoon light works in places that are not trying to be anything other than what they are.
The air smelled of brine and something green and heavy—flowers I could not identify—from the path to the main entrance, and the ocean sound arrived before I could see the water, low and rhythmic against whatever the coastline did in that specific cove.
My room had a balcony that faced the water. There was a small table on it with two chairs, exactly as in the photograph. I set my bag inside and walked straight out to the balcony and sat down in one of the chairs and ordered a rum punch from the app on my phone and looked at the ocean for a long time.
The water was the color that water is in photographs of Jamaica, which sounds like a useless thing to say. But when you arrive somewhere and the thing everyone photographs is actually that blue, there is a moment of mild disorientation, of adjusting your expectations upward.
My phone lit up on the table beside me. Stacy’s name on the screen. I watched it ring to voicemail, then Patrice’s name replaced it, then the Bayshore Grand’s main events line. I silenced all three and went back to the ocean.
By the end of the first day, I had fourteen missed calls, not counting deliberately. The number was just there in the notification bar, a small red badge visible from the corner of my eye every time I picked up the phone to check the time or order something from the room app.
I was reading a book I had downloaded before the flight, a novel set in coastal Maine by an author I had been meaning to read for two years and kept not getting to. I read for two hours in the afternoon light on the balcony with the rum punch half finished beside me, and I finished three chapters before dinner. The prose was good. Someone had thought carefully about the sentences. I appreciated that in a way I might not have a week earlier.
I ate alone at a table by the water. Ordered something with shrimp and lime, the local preparation with a sauce I could not identify and did not try to. I ate every bite and tasted it. I ordered a second glass of wine and finished that too. I sat at that table by the water for forty minutes after the bill came, just listening to the sound the ocean makes against a rocky coastline, which is different from the Gulf sound I grew up with. Sharper and more percussive. A working sound rather than a resting one.
I slept eight hours. I could not tell you the last time I had slept eight consecutive hours.
The next morning, I woke to the sound of the ocean through the balcony door I had left cracked open, a sound so steady and close it took me a moment to place where I was. The ceiling fan was turning slowly above me. The sheets were white and cool and smelled of nothing personal, which was its own comfort—sleeping in a bed that did not know me and had no expectations.
I lay there for several minutes, just breathing and listening to the water.
I ate breakfast at a small table on the restaurant terrace. Eggs and fruit and coffee, a simple arrangement on white plates. The coffee was strong and slightly bitter in a way I liked. Two tables away, a couple in their fifties were reading separate books and occasionally reaching across the table to touch each other’s hands without looking up, a gesture so practiced and unperformative that it was either thirty years of marriage or the best acting I had ever seen.
I ate slowly and did not check my phone.
The novel I had downloaded was about a woman who restores houses on the coast of Maine, tearing out old walls and finding the original structure underneath. And the metaphor was obvious, but I did not mind. The author wrote clean, uncluttered sentences that respected the reader’s ability to draw conclusions without being told what to draw, and I appreciated that.
I read on the balcony with the ocean below me and the sun tracking across the sky, and for three hours nothing in the world required me to respond to it.
The second day, the calls came faster.
By noon, I had twenty-three missed calls. By mid-afternoon, a voicemail from Stacy arrived that I played once, holding the phone slightly away from my ear.
“You need to call me back.”
Her voice had that flat, compressed quality I had not heard since we were teenagers, when she was working toward something she was not getting and the pressure of not getting it made her sound like a wire pulled tight.
“The venue is saying there’s no guarantee on file under a personal account. The photographer’s contract references some corporate arrangement. I don’t understand. Denise is talking about a discount, some prior arrangement, some relationship with your firm. I don’t know what she means. I don’t know what’s happening. You need to call me back. You need to fix this.”
I played it twice to make sure I had heard it correctly.
You need to fix this.
Five words delivered with the absolute certainty of someone who has never been told no by the person she is speaking to, because I have never told her no. Thirty-one years of yes, of accommodation, of filling in the gaps she left behind her the way water fills a hole in sand—silently and completely.
And she stood on the dry ground and never once looked down to see what was holding her up.
Ryan, her fiancé, had called twice too. His voicemails were shorter.
“Hey, Andrea, not sure what’s going on with the vendor stuff. Can you give me a call when you get a chance?”
Polite. Confused. The tone of a man who has been told there is a problem and has been given his fiancée’s version of whose fault it is.
I set the phone down on the balcony table. It was warm from sitting in the sun. The ocean below was very flat in the afternoon. I watched a pelican circle once and drop into the water and come up with something silver in its beak, and the whole transaction took about four seconds and was completely indifferent to everything I was thinking about.
I went inside, changed into my swimsuit, and walked down to the beach, a quarter mile south along the waterline, past the other guests with their drinks and their separate silences, until I found a stretch of sand with nobody on it. I sat down and let the water come up over my feet twice, three times, steady and cool at the edges where the shallow water ran thin.
The sound of it was immediate and close. Each small wave erasing itself against the sand and drawing back.
I sat with that for a while.
