“Who said that?”
“Some famous philosopher, I think. Anyway, you might as well just get on with it, because we all know that’s what you’re going to do.”
“But I’m scared,” I would say. “He broke my heart, Mom.”
“What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” she’d announce. Always with the quotes, that one. “Besides, if it all turns to shit, it’ll give us a reason to have a drink about it later.”
At that, I would have laughed. And true to her word, she would have stocked the fridge with a four-pack of vodka seltzers so that we could unwind about it properly after the deed was done.
God, I miss her.
I put the clothes away in my dresser and, without anything else to use as a procrastination tactic, I grab the book off my nightstand.
The way I see it, if I’m even entertaining the idea of talking to Beckett Nash, I should at least know what he wrote.
“Have dinner with me?” I asked.
“Really?” Harmony looked up at me as if the suggestion was preposterous somehow.
“Yes, really. You need to eat, right?”
“What about my mom?”
“Bring her.”
“On a date? With you?” She wrinkled her nose. Perhaps she intended it to look like an expression of disgust, but it struck me as adorable.
“Ah,” I said, smiling. “Who ever said it was a date?” This made her blush. “I’m teasing. But your mom is the reason you’re here, right? So, I don’t want to stand in the way of your time together.”
“She likes to have dinner early,” she explained. “She’s usually in bed by eight.”
“An early bird,” I pondered. “Well then, we’ll grab ourselves an early bird special. There are lots of restaurants in the square we can choose from. What does she like? They’ve got Italian, Dutch, Cuban. Pick your poison.”
Harmony smirked, but pursing her lips did nothing to dissuade me. If anything, it made me notice how pink and full they were. “Why are you doing this?” she asked quietly.
“Asking you to dinner? It’s selfish, really. I like you, and I don’t like eating alone.” It was bold, but I couldn’t waste theopportunity to look into those eyes under a lavender-streaked sky with a Caribbean-inspired band playing mariachi music in what was quickly becoming the most romantic, hope-filled place on earth.
“I’ll have to ask her,” Harmony mused.
“As you should. I’ll be out on the jetty over there,” I said, pointing to a wall of rocks jutting out into the calm, turquoise water. I held up my notebook. “I have plenty of writing to keep me company for now.”
“What if you’re not there? Where should I find you?”
“I’m staying in room 212. You can call my room from the house phone.” I didn’t want to mention that I chose not to get an international calling plan for my cell phone for the duration of the trip. It was too much money, and my mom knew what hotel I was staying at if she needed to reach me. Plus, Iwantedto be off the grid. I craved it—no distractions of everyday life to get in the way of my creative process.
“Okay. I shouldn’t be too long. She’s just over at the pool. Give me a few minutes.” Harmony smiled, and fireworks exploded inside my chest.
I returned the smile. As she spun around, the wind caught her hair and made it float momentarily. Awash in the glow of the afternoon, she was a firefly, lazily making figure eights in the late-day breeze. A few strides away from me, she turned back and waved.
I walked out on the rocks, taking care to step on dry spots so as not to slip. The sun hugged me with its warm rays as I perched myself on the end of the jetty facing the vast sea. Sitting cross-legged, I opened the notebook in my lap and unclipped the pen from its home within the wire spiral, slidingit out and clicking the top. I turned to a blank page. The paper was as endless and empty as the water before me. I breathed in its possibilities.
Instead of returning to my work in progress, I began to free write. I sometimes did this as a warm-up, just to get myself in the right mindset for writing. Only, in this moment, I was making a list, which was unusual. Bullet points instead of complete sentences.
It was a list of things I knew about her.Harmony, it was titled.
Studying her name written out by my hand, I felt something awaken inside me. The shape of those letters set in that exact order made me feel alive.Beautiful, I wrote, but that word seemed insufficient to describe her sparkle.Incandescent, I tried, which was better.Kindhearted. This much was certainly true. The way she spoke about her mother was all the evidence I needed.
As I looked out into the blue horizon, I considered all the things I had yet to learn about her. My pulse was alive in a way that I hadn’t felt before, maybe ever.
