“Don’t try changing the subject. Who is he?” Vi still grasped my wrist.
“Oh, Vi,” I said over a sigh. “He’s someone who … It’s hard to explain. But he’s … I can’t handle anything else at the moment and, to be honest, he’s wonderful but also not someone who …” I didn’t really know how to end that sentence. I just knew that, despite everything that Oliver and I had in the past, he now had a Berlin wall that kept me and everything else locked out.
“I know exactly the type,” Vi whispered. “The type that would reach into your chest, caress your heart like no one ever had, and then, without even intending, rip it out and take it with him. And you’d beg for him to do it again. Been there, done that, have the tee-shirt.”
My laughter called out the attention of everyone in the common room—residents, staff, two visitors, and my manager. They all looked at me. I was probably the color of my scrubs. Vi’s description was so close to the truth that laughter was my only recourse.
“Go on with your business. Nothing to see here,” Vi reprimanded everyone. “Ever heard of LOL?” She highlighted each letter. “Laughing out loud? This is it.”
Amarilys and Cherri, who were on shift with me, smiled at Vi. The residents knew her enough to do as she bid and mind their own business.
Sue got up and approached us. “I want what she had,” she said to Vi, gesturing with her head toward me.
“Trust me; you don’t,” Vi replied while I continued to fail at subduing my laughter.
My manager smiled at me. She was probably relieved to see that I was okay, despite having to live with “my sister.”
It was a sunny morning, and when we sat in the garden, I thought of Vi’s words. They weren’t funny really, but many times in my life, I laughed instead of cried. June found it irritating. It was a coping mechanism I couldn’t even control. I laughed when I dealt with annoying or ruthless landlords, bank managers, my ex, my kids’ teachers.
Thinking of my kids, I thought about my conversation with Oliver last night and how we had both alluded to that night at the Ocean Breeze Motel when I had first told him about them.
Back then, I had been raising twin toddlers, living in a murky cloud of perpetual exhaustion, trying to make ends meet. Jamie had gotten himself fired from the custodian job I had arranged for him at the local school. So, when Oliver had showed up, my temptation wasn’t just physical. He had offered me the type of emotional connection I didn’t have with anyone, certainly not with the man I was living with. He had offered me an out, a new life. I couldn’t take any of it, though everything in me wanted to.
My body had ached for him, my heart had, too. I didn’t even know if it was his pain or mine that I had been feeling. If he had grabbed me and kissed me that night, I couldn’t guarantee that I would have stopped him.
A few days after that night, when I’d arrived for my shift at the motel, the girl at the front desk had handed me a package. “Why are you mailing things here?” she had asked.
I hadn’t. But the package with a New York postmark had my name on it and the motel’s address. I had taken it with me in the housekeeping cart and opened it in the same room Oliver had stayed in. He had left the next morning, I had been told, and the room had been used by two other people since. I had sat on the bed and stared at the package in my lap after opening it, tears blurring my sight.
No card. None had been needed.
Two twin sets of Lego Duplo were under the wrapping paper. Lego Duplo ducks on wheels.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Parking Pretty, that Oliver had fixed for me, I slipped quietly into the cabana. The light on the balcony on the second floor and that of the living room told me that Oliver was home.
After taking a shower and changing into a pair of jeans and a zip-up hoodie, I headed toward the beach. I needed to get away from the house, and there was nothing like the ocean to put things back in proportion. Its vastness, endlessness, and timelessness versus my own little existence lent me some perspective.
The last person I expected to see standing close to the water edge, not too far from the house, was Oliver. He still looked like an ad to a yacht club with a light gray Henley and dark cargo shorts, the moon tattoo on his right calf contrasting with his golden honey skin.
Given my weakness for him, I shouldn’t have, but I approached him. He noticed me only when I stopped next to him.
“Hey.” This time, it was me who startled him.
“January,” he admitted my presence then immediately darted his gaze back to the view.
The sun was setting, and we stood there, watching the orange ocean, as if we were shoulder to shoulder protesters against the dawning darkness.
“Gorgeous,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Sunsets remind me that everything has an end, even shitty days. You get a new chance at sunrise the next day. Don’t you miss it when you’re … or maybe you have—” I had no idea where he was usually staying, probably split between continents like he had been before.
“Sunsets happen every day everywhere.” He side-eyed me with a faint smile, then added in reply to my question, “I love the ocean view, but to be honest, I don’t care if it’s the Pacific, Atlantic, Mediterranean, or Baltic.”
From anyone else, this could have sounded like bragging in being a man of the world, but I knew better. I knew Oliver better. Oliver had houses, but not a home. I never owned a house, but I always had a home. Except now.
