Life and Other Near-Death Experiences

by Camille Pagán

  He grinned. “See, and I would have put you at twenty-two.”

  “Guilty as charged.” I was tempted to ask him how old he was—my current guess placed him well into his forties—but even though he knew my terrible truth and had been permitted to touch me, I wasn’t going to get too cozy.

  A government truck pulled up at about the same time a Coast Guard cruiser began to circle the shore. A police officer got out of the truck and approached us. “You’re the pilot?” he asked Shiloh, who nodded. The officer pulled out a pad and started asking questions while I zoned out. Paul and Tom had both called me back, and I hadn’t picked up because I wasn’t sure how to respond to either of them. Paul was probably freaking out, but he would freak out even more once he found out that I was in Puerto Rico and hadn’t told him about it. As for Tom—well, I didn’t even want to go there.

  “Miss? Where are you heading?” the officer asked me.

  I could barely remember my middle name, let alone recall my itinerary. I grabbed my phone and opened my e-mail. “Island Motors,” I told him, once I’d located my reservation confirmation. “I’m supposed to pick up a rental car.”

  “I’ll give you a ride if you like,” he said.

  I looked at Shiloh. “Go ahead,” he told me. “I still have to deal with dispatch and the Coast Guard.”

  My eyebrows shot up. “Given that your current means of transportation is your two legs, and I would prefer to never get into a moving vehicle with you ever again, I wasn’t asking you for a ride. But I smell like dirty socks, and I was hoping I could get my luggage.”

  He glanced back at the plane, which no longer appeared to be smoldering. “Let me check.” He jogged back to the shore, where a couple of Coast Guarders were milling around. He returned a few minutes later with a sheepish expression. “They’ve got a bunch of clearance stuff they need to do. So probably not until this evening. But I’ll tell you what. You tell me where you’re staying, and I’ll make sure our company gets it delivered to you.”

  I peered down at my filthy T-shirt and frowned. “Is that my only option?”

  “Afraid so.”

  “Okay.” I was reaching for my phone to find the address to the beach house when it began to ring. Blech. “Cripes, Tom,” I muttered.

  “Tom’s your boyfriend?” Shiloh asked.

  I flushed, embarrassed that I’d been overheard. “Um, no. He’s not.” I caught his eye, but this time, I looked away quickly. Because this guy—the one who almost just killed me? He was very attractive—if you liked the sinewy, weathered type. And the expression on my face just informed him that I did.

  It was a good thing I’d never see him again.

  THIRTEEN

  “This your first time in Vieques?” the police officer asked.

  “How can you tell?” I shouted, my head half out the window, like a dog coming home after a week at the kennel. Vieques was verdant, beautiful, and largely untouched by humans. There were cinderblock houses scattered among the rolling hills and dotting the roads, and we passed the occasional grocer and restaurant. On the whole, though, it was miles of solitude hedged by sea. Heaven.

  “Good luck,” the officer said when he dropped me off at the car rental place.

  “Gracias!” I responded.

  I rented a Jeep because I’d read that a vehicle with four-wheel drive and the ability to withstand a pothole or thirty was the only way to get around here. I almost never drove; Tom liked to, so I let him and took public transportation or a cab when I was on my own. Now I realized I’d done myself a terrible disservice. As I puttered along, the other drivers whizzed by at what seemed to be eighty miles an hour. Nerves got the better of me, and my hands began to shake again. With no navigator and only a paper map for reference, I made one wrong turn after another. I was about to drive myself into a ditch and call it a day when I spotted the street sign.

  It was hand-painted on a panel of wood, sort of like the type people like to post in front of their vacation homes—Retirement Road; Had Her Way. This sign read Calle Rosa. It was a long dirt path canopied by trees and vines. Half a mile down, I located the driveway and turned in. Then I saw it in the distance: the stretch of beach I’d been waiting for.

  I parked the Jeep at the foot of the driveway and climbed out, not bothering to grab my bags. My feet crunched on the gravel as I strode toward the pale pink stucco house where I’d be staying.

  “Took you long enough.”

  I jumped as an older woman emerged from behind one of the large fronded palms in front of the house.

  Her laugh was broken glass on concrete. “I’m kee-ding! You’re Libby, no?”

  “Yes,” I said, extending my hand. “You’re Milagros?”

  Her skin was soft and crepey beneath my fingers. “Ay, gringa,” she trilled. “Mee-lah-grohs.”

  “Milagros,” I corrected myself, trying not to frown at the woman who would be my landlady for the next month.

  She gave me a toothy smile. “Muy bien! You’ll be just fine, mija. Come on,” she said, waving for me to follow her farther down the drive.

  “So that’s not where I’m staying?” I said, pointing at the house.

  “No. That’s mi casa.” She led me to the back of her house and down a winding path, until we hit a similar but markedly smaller pink house (which, judging from the crumbling stucco and the wavy metal roof, could more accurately be described as a fancy shack). “This,” she said, unlocking the wrought iron door, “is yours.” She handed the key to me and motioned for me to step in.

  There was a small living room, a tiny bedroom, and an eat-in kitchen. But off the back of the kitchen, a large glass-walled porch opened directly onto the beach. It was the entire reason I’d chosen this property, and unlike the rest of the house, it looked exactly as the online photos depicted it.

  Milagros crossed her arms and regarded me. “You don’t like it?”

  “It’s perfect.”

  She beamed. “Good. Because you already paid for it, and I don’t do refunds.”

  I inquired about the bathroom, which I hadn’t seen yet, and she directed me to a small door next to the bedroom. I looked in and tried not to gasp. It was a glorified broom closet with a sink and a toilet better suited for a preschool.

  “Um . . .”

  “No bath,” Milagros said.

  I sighed, catching an unfortunate whiff of eau de B.O. on the inhale. I could always bathe in the sea.

  Milagros hooted. “You are too easy, Libby!” she said, slapping her thigh. “The shower’s the best part. Follow me.”

  She unlocked a door off the end of the kitchen, which led to a garden surrounded by a stucco wall as high as the house itself. Though tiny, the garden was filled with birds of paradise, orchids, and dozens of other tropical plants I’d never seen before. At the end nearest to the beach, there was a cement stall. I stepped inside to find an expansive outdoor shower lined with vivid blue tiles and—just in case I needed to be reminded that I was newly single—two enormous shower heads.

  “Is it safe?” I asked Milagros.

  She pursed her lips. “Nothing in this world is safe, mija. But it would take a lot of effort for someone to get over the wall and into this garden. I’ve lived alone for forty-one years now. When you’re a single woman, you’ve got to use your head. Hell,” she said with that jangled laugh of hers, “when you’re any kind of woman, you’ve got to use your head. Don’t leave your purse on the back of your chair, don’t wear your jewelry to the beach, and don’t flash your money around.” She examined me. “You okay?”

  Come to think of it, I wasn’t feeling so hot. “I just need to sit down,” I told her. On top of my most recent brush with death, I hadn’t had a proper meal since . . . yesterday? I couldn’t actually remember the last time I ate, which may have been the first time in thirty-four years that I was able to make that claim.

 
; “Here,” Milagros said, guiding me to the sofa on the back porch. “Sit. I’ll be right back.”

  I sank into the sofa and surveyed my surroundings. The place was sheer Caribbean kitsch: old wicker furniture topped with weathered floral cushions, candy-colored walls decorated with cheesy prints of seashells and boats and sunsets. Tom would have an aneurysm if he had to sleep here for a single night. I loved it.

  Milagros returned with a frosty glass, which she pressed into my hand and instructed me to drink. Coconut water! Was anything ever so delicious?

  “Now eat these,” she said when I finished, handing me a plate full of crackers spread with a thin reddish-orange paste.

  “Is this guava?” I said, my mouth jammed full of food.

  She nodded. “I put fresh fruit and milk in the fridge, and coffee and granola in the cupboard. When you need groceries, there’s a place about a mile from here, but there’s a better one closer to Esperanza. I can tell you about any restaurant on the island, too, so if you’re not sure, just ask me. You feeling better, mija?”

  “Much better,” I assured her. “Thank you. Now, I hate to ask, but do you have a T-shirt I can borrow?”

  I got in the shower as soon as Milagros left. Although the water made my incision sting and my lone toiletry was the bar of soap I snatched from the bathroom sink, I soaked myself until the shaft of sunlight shining through the roofless shower had almost disappeared. What a day. What a week. While I was profoundly grateful to still be alive, I didn’t know what to make of contradicting emotions racing through me. I was proud of myself for getting out of Chicago and excited at the prospect of my month in paradise, even if I had barely made it there.

  But the more I thought about it, the more Maxine’s comment—I always wondered about Tom—gutted me. She may as well have said, “Stupid Libby, I’ve known he was gay since high school! How could you not?” It was a valid question. I’d slept next to the man almost every night for the past decade and had called him my own for nearly twice as long. I truly believed he loved me in every way that a husband should love his wife.

  And I had been wrong.

  No amount of improved communication or couples’ counseling was going to fix us. Tom and I were over. Absolutely, irrevocably done. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that what I’d said to Jeanette in the coffee shop was true. Tom wasn’t dead, but this felt an awful lot like death.

  I got out of the shower, wrapped myself in one of the stiff towels I’d found in the closet, and walked back into the house. I was halfway across the kitchen when something skittered across the far edge of my peripheral vision.

  On instinct, I ducked behind the cupboard island that divided the kitchen from the small dining space.

  “You can get up,” a wary voice called. “It’s just me.”

  Me? This suggested I knew my attacker. Which, if memory served, was statistically most often the case.

  “Shiloh,” he said.

  I groaned.

  “Yeah, I sense that you’re happy to see me,” he said. “The good news is, I have your suitcase. So you can put some clothes on.”

  I stood up slowly, intending to peek over the edge of the counter to see if I could run to the bedroom without being seen—then shrieked when I realized Shiloh had walked over and was peering down at me. “Whatcha doin’?” he asked.

  I pulled my towel tighter around my chest. “First you try to crash our plane, now you’re trying to give me a coronary. You just let yourself in? What if I was naked?” I said indignantly, even as I mentally chided myself for failing to lock the screen porch just minutes after Milagros told me to be careful.

  “I’m confused,” he said, grinning. “Is that supposed to sound like an adverse outcome?”

  “Creep,” I retorted, although I wasn’t really feeling threatened by him. (Paul would say this was on account of my faulty people reader. “You’d find something to like about Charles Manson,” he groused after I mentioned I didn’t think his ex-boyfriend—who, admittedly, exhibited bunny-boiling tendencies—was as awful as Paul made him out to be.)

  “Guilty as charged,” Shiloh said, borrowing the phrase I’d used on him earlier that day. “But I happen to be the creep who brought you your stuff. Otherwise you’d be sitting in your own stink for another forty-eight hours. No one else was available to bring your bag by.”

  “As you so rudely discovered, I’ve showered, and now I smell perfectly fine, thank you very much.” I eyed him suspiciously. “I hope you’re not doing this because you feel sorry for me. Because you know about . . . well, you know.”

  He leaned in to sniff me—the nerve of this guy! “You do smell better, and no, I didn’t bring your luggage just because of the ‘you know.’ I happen to be a fairly decent person.” He glanced around. “So what are your plans for your time on the island? Are you meeting people here? Is this Tom character making an appearance in the near future?”

  I stuck my chin out. I may have even pouted. “He most certainly is not.”

  “Good, because you didn’t sound too excited about him calling you. What are you doing for dinner tonight?”

  “Finding something in the fridge,” I said. “Given that I survived a near-death experience today, I’m not really up for exploring.”

  He gave me a half smile. “Life is a near-death experience. But suit yourself,” he added lightly, as though I’d just rejected the offer he didn’t actually make. “Your suitcase is on the porch. See you around, Libby.”

  I opened my mouth, but he was gone before I could get the words out.

  FOURTEEN

  It wasn’t enough that he almost scared the pants off me twice in one day. No, Shiloh had to go and inform me that nearly crashing into the Caribbean—to say nothing of the cluster muck of cells sapping away my life force—was no different from the unpleasantness of everyday existence.

  Well, that pithy pilot was lucky I hadn’t assaulted him, I thought to myself the following morning. Which was progress on my part, I reasoned as I pulled off the T-shirt I’d slept in and stood before the bedroom mirror. It was a cheap full-length, and the wavy glass narrowed my waist while lengthening my incision, making it look even worse than it already did. I’d removed the bandage a few days before, thinking that some air would do the wound good, but the two-inch gash remained red and angry.

  Stepping into my bathing suit, I commanded myself to stop thinking about Shiloh and cancer and anything that remotely rankled. I was going to the beach, and darn it, I was going to enjoy it.

  This time I heeded Milagros’s warning and left everything of importance in the house, triple-checking the door to make sure it was locked. It was still early, and aside from an absurdly fit woman jogging barefoot down the shore, I was alone. I laid my towel out on the sand and headed for the water. The waves were cool as they rushed against my legs, then warm as they retreated back into the sea, so I waded in deeper. My incision stung, but I dove into the surf, determined to make friends with pain—or at the very least, to learn how to ignore it. Sure enough, the discomfort let up, so I went back under, holding my breath while the sea enveloped me, filling my head with its blunted gurgling sounds. Saltwater seeped into my mouth as I surfaced. I felt invigorated and alive, or whatever it is to be aware of your body as it is pacified by a fresh burst of oxygen and momentarily oblivious to the disease eating away at it. For the next few weeks, at least, I was going to be fine.

  Except it didn’t appear that way, because Milagros, clad in a short orange housedress, came running down the beach hollering my name.

  Reluctantly, I trudged back to the beach. “What is it, Milagros?” I asked as she approached the water’s edge.

  “Ay, Libby, I thought you were drowning! Por favor, be careful. The tide is very strong right now. You see those waves?” she said, pointing into the distance.

  “Those are, like, a mile out.”

 
“They’ll suck you right under,” she insisted. “Don’t go in past your belly unless you’re at a roped-off beach.”

  “Okay,” I said, trying not to sigh and failing miserably. Luisa instructed me to give myself away like the sea, but come to find out, I was only able to do that in designated swimming areas.

  “Bien. Oh, and, mija? I take drinks on my back porch every day at six. Join me if you can.”

  Take drinks. This woman was too much. “Okay, Milagros,” I agreed. “See you then.”

  While Paul inherited our mother’s sharp cheekbones, dark hair, and warm complexion, my resemblance to her was evident only in my medical files. As such, even with SPF four hundred slathered on, my pale skin was no match for Vieques’s proximity to the equator; after an hour on the beach, I was forced to head back to the house. I changed into a sundress and attempted to make myself presentable, then drove to Esperanza. Though it was not yet noon, the tiny town was bustling: families roamed about, smiling and squabbling in equal measure; bronzed surfer types in bodysuits toted boogie boards and kiteboarding equipment toward the water; and couples held cameras at arm’s length to snap nauseatingly gleeful selfies.

  With no small effort, I parked the Jeep on the side of the road. Then I secured my wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses and set off on foot. As far as I could tell, most of the town proper was situated along a strip on the island’s southern coast. As I walked from one end of the strip to the other, I passed dive shops and trinket stands, white-tablecloth restaurants, and food trucks parked along the grassy stretch dividing the road from the beach. After weighing my options, I stopped at a restaurant with generic fare and private dining verandas overlooking the water.

  “Just you?” asked the hostess.

  “Just me,” I said. You would think I’d know how to dine alone, but you would be wrong. Although I’d devoured many a sandwich on a park bench during lunch, I’d never intentionally sat down at a real restaurant and eaten by myself. Given that I was traveling solo for an entire month, it seemed a good time to learn.