by Julie Paul
The night before they leave, Claudia cannot sleep. Or if she does, it is only to dream out her anxiety, mainly about being all alone and lost in a foreign country. She tries to focus on what has happened between her and Rodger, which doesn’t take long: that zap of a first kiss at the library, a kiss in the car when he dropped her off one night. A hug that felt like a whole season had come and gone when he finally let her go. Still, it is enough to keep her awake, worried that she is in over her head. She’s a librarian. She’s used to loving books, not people! She looks around and loves them all, just waiting on their shelves to be chosen.
And what do you wish for them, Claudia? To be touched, taken home, opened.
Three hours until morning, until the airport shuttle honks its arrival to take her away.
Only one room booked.
On the airplane they watch their own movies and Claudia falls asleep against Rodger’s shoulder, behaviour that has her blinking with embarrassment when she sees drool on his shirt. He doesn’t seem to mind. They land in Cuba and both of them are sweating even before they leave the plane, which makes her feel better about Rodger than she did before, if that is possible. He sweats in heat, too. He’s real!
Voilà! No, Aquí! Here it is. Cuba.
Sweat rolls off their faces as they roll their suitcases away from the carousel and out into the wham of fragrant warmth.
Rodger takes her slippery hand in his slippery hand and they stare out the taxi windows. What she sees as they cruise the streets of Havana on their way to the hotel is nothing like what she’s imagined, even though her guidebooks have plenty of photos.
A child carrying a baby pig. Men wearing straw hats, playing stand-up bass and drums. Women and girls who move their hips in ways she’s never seen, just walking down the street. Old people in doorways, watching old cars pass. Women with gigantic cigars in their mouths, looking like they’re enjoying themselves immensely.
Rodger points. “Interested in one of those?”
Claudia doesn’t need to think about it. “Yes,” she says.
Oh, God, yes.
Tropical Dreams
Everyone told us the chances of seeing a crocodile were minimal. They’re nocturnal. Shy. Not waiting to pose for us. And yet there we were, at the garbage dump on the small island of Caye Caulker, diseases swirling in the filth beneath our flip-flops, because a croc was supposed to be in residence there.
This was Day One of our tropical vacation in Belize. Yay, us.
Allan led the hunt in the searing afternoon heat. Our winter-weary skin was fresh meat for the equatorial sun; we’d arrived that morning via water taxi after flying into Belize City. We looked like beige Barbie dolls. We were going to fry, and I was okay with that.
On a small hill he spotted the woman who lived on-site, we’d been told, tidying up the junk around the junk that was her world. “We hear there’s a croc or two here,” Allan called.
She shook her head above a spine with a serious curve and told us not to bother. “All de kids scare ’em away,” she told us. “With rocks.” She sounded upset.
Smart kids. Then I looked at my husband, Fraser, and Allan, his friend from university, the thrill of the hunt in their eyes—they looked like little kids.
The woman closed the door of her plywood shack.
“Well, that blows,” Allan said, hands on hips.
“Total letdown,” Fraser said. I heard the irony in his voice, but I’m not sure Allan did.
Then we heard a shriek. Allan’s girlfriend, Billy, younger than the rest of us by at least ten years, had her hands over her mouth—a mistake, putting your fingers anywhere near your mouth in a garbage dump—and was pointing to a puddle.
Allan rushed over. “You see one?”
“Oh, my God, it’s terrible,” she said.
She’d found a drowned kitten.
“Ah, shit,” Allan said. “I thought we’d hit the jackpot.”
Fraser and I were fading at home in Vancouver, the way goldfish lose their colour when they’re in a dark room. Neither of us had taken a southern vacation before: Fraser was miserly, and I was too afraid of disease, after seeing awful things in my training as a care aid—and then at work, at the group home—that might have been prevented by basic hygiene. But we needed vitamin D, badly, and to breathe in air that wasn’t half-water.
According to the websites, Belize was cheap, had decent snorkelling, and lacked Starbucks. Fraser invited Allan and Billy. The four of us spent fall and winter in our respective cities, plotting flights and vaccinations and assortments of snacks and small pharmaceuticals, texting each other often. Fraser was a substitute teacher, French immersion, at a different school almost every day. Allan was some kind of faux-finisher, making murals of rustic scenes for the urbanites of Calgary. Billy was a nursing student, her training almost complete. We all wanted out of our cages; we all wanted some R & R.
After the garbage dump excursion, Billy and I rinsed our legs in the turquoise ocean and coated them in hand sanitizer as an extra protection from parasites. Then, we walked to the other end of the village, to take a dip in the local swimming hole, the Hurricane Iris–ruined pier, because the guide book I’d brought said the swimming was better.
The water was too warm, like swimming in someone’s mouth. And yet it felt so good to be nearly naked, up to our necks in water and with a sky that wouldn’t pour sheets of cold, grey rain down on us. Fraser found a lid from a plastic ice cream tub on the beach and tossed it like a Frisbee. I caught it and sent it flying back.
Billy cried, “Oh, I’m terrible at this,” when it was her turn to throw. The lid landed about two feet in front of her.
Fraser, the hero, swam over, rescued the lid, and aimed it at me. “It just takes practice.”
“Oh, you’re so good,” Billy called. “Allan, did you see that?”
Allan was not into the game. He was lying on the cement pier, a meaty forearm strapped over his eyes.
I threw the lid to Billy. “Sue, you too!” She giggled. “A poet and I don’t know it.” When she tossed the lid, her perfect little boobies bounced like tiny porpoises. I noticed Fraser trying not to look. Her belly ring caught the light when she jumped above the surface. Ahhh. There was sunlight! There was hope!
Over dinner at a beachside restaurant, Fraser and Allan looked like tired surfers. Billy’s blond cap of hair was sticking up stylishly from the salt water, while my bottle-black mane hung thick with sand and knots. Hot wind blew off the water. Billy had put her peach T-shirt back on over her swimsuit, but I could hear her nipples saying, Hey, old lady, you think your husband can keep away for long? I don’t remember what we ate—the food in Belize was categorically unmemorable. I just remember Billy’s little voice, her ginger-ale giggle, my husband’s responding laughter, and Allan’s one-word grunts. I remember that peach T-shirt.
Fraser and I had been married for three years. We liked being married. We liked the strange thrill it gave us to say “husband and wife” because in certain circles it felt like we’d done something wrong. We both were products of broken marriages, and to come out the other side and still go willingly into the gold band and double-named cheques said something about us, we thought. Our parents’ infidelities and neuroses wouldn’t enter the utopia of our marriage.
Our marriage: utopian? Fraser was looking at those Billy boobs. Of course he was.
That night, the sky proved me wrong. The rain that fell was overachiever rain. A torrential, outlandish amount of rain. We had to run from the restaurant to our hotel, and when we arrived, the staff was playing cards by candlelight in the lobby. We darted around buckets and towels on the tile stairs and made it to our room, where water was leaking in from under the balcony door.
We staunched the flow with every towel in the room. Fraser wanted to sit on our balcony’s plastic chairs and watch the rain.
“You’re serious? We came all this way to get out of the rain and you want to watch it here?”
“Nothing like this h
appens at home. No rain with this kind of drama.”
True. No power except the weather. Being without electricity wasn’t so bad—we were on holiday, out of the dismal winter, ready to relax. And yet, I wasn’t relaxed.
“I wonder if Allan’s room is flooding, too.” Fraser scratched a bite on his ankle. Billy and Allan had left the restaurant before us so she could medicate a migraine brought on from the change in barometric pressure. They’d fought over the number of drinks Allan was consuming, too. She’d actually put her hand over his wineglass when the waiter tried to fill it.
“What’s wrong?” Fraser asked me. “You’ve been quiet all night.”
“I’m fine. Just thinking.” What was I thinking? About Fraser’s eyes on Billy’s body. Not about Fraser’s eyes.
“We’re on vacation. You’re not supposed to think.”
“It’s finally cooler,” I said. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to think.”
Five minutes later we heard Billy and Allan, fighting. Then, a minute later, a switch to moaning. The fight as foreplay.
“I thought she had a migraine.”
He shrugged.
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “It sounds like they’re on the flipping balcony.”
Fraser laughed. “That’s just like Allan. Never one to hide his feelings.”
“I’m going in.” My shorts were wet and tight around my ass. I lifted out of the low chair with a sexy squelch.
Fraser grabbed my arm as I stood up. “Can I come?”
“I thought you wanted to listen . . . to the storm.”
“I’ve heard enough.”
It got us both going, hearing them. He initiated the kisses, and I didn’t stop him. As Fraser roamed my body, I told myself that beauty was beauty; it didn’t need to be categorized further. My thoughts were my own territory. I could do anything in my tropical dreams.
The next day we took a snorkelling trip to the coral reef that runs the length of the whole country. Fraser and Allan were delighted to touch nurse sharks and manta rays. The two men were in their glory, sunburned faces popping up every few minutes to exclaim how totally amazing it all was. The sharks only suck on your skin, the tour guide assured us as he threw cat food into the water. No worries. Gentle animals. No crocs out here. The fish were spectacular—neon and bright and flashing between us through the coral brains and branches that hadn’t been destroyed by hurricanes.
The tour concluded with a one-hour stop on Ambergris Caye, the bigger island to the north. The guide found a lunch place on the beach, and after some mediocre fish burgers and really loud reggae, the four of us sought some shade to wait for the boat to leave. We were jet-lagged and sun-weary by then, and the only shade was from the shadows of the bright buildings or beneath gigantic coconut palms. I’d read the guidebook: not a wise place to sit. Still, Allan insisted.
“What are the chances? The odds are pretty slim.”
The rest of us floated in the water. I was nearly asleep when Allan shouted, interrupting our reverie. “What the fuck? Billy, come help me!”
He was sitting up, rubbing his shoulder, glaring at us as we waded back to shore through the tepid waves, fast as we could.
“There’s the coco loco,” Billy said when we reached Allan. She pointed at the green coconut the size of a Nerf football. “Or should I say ‘smart coconut’? It must’ve heard you.”
Allan held one palm over the hurt shoulder. “You think it’s funny, a broken bone?” He wasn’t smiling.
“Oh, Allan,” Billy said. “You’re all right.”
“This is my painting arm,” he said. “If I don’t paint, you suffer.”
Billy looked as though she’d been slapped in the face. We knew he’d been paying her way through university, paying for everything so she didn’t need to work while studying. They’d met when she was sixteen, fresh out of a bad boyfriend scenario, and he’d footed the bill from then on. He’d virtually raised her.
Fraser looked around. “There’s our guide, heading back to the boat. Maybe he’s got some ice in the drinks cooler for your arm.”
“I’m all right,” Allan said, on his back again on his towel. “Billy, go buy me a beer for the pain.”
She rose and started toward the restaurant. She turned and gave me a helpless look. I caught up with her. “Can I borrow a few bucks? It’s better if I don’t ask Mr. Happy for cash right now.”
I handed her an American twenty. “Get one for each of us.”
The next afternoon, we took the water taxi back to Belize City to catch a bus going south. We were on our way to Placencia, a small town on the southern coast, a place, according to the book, with the best beaches in Belize and the best gelato in the world.
The water taxi station was a bus station, too. While we waited for our bus, a man wove in and out of the crowd, saying, “Tsewi!” He carried a box full of bottles. Billy bought one—a seaweed drink that came in reused water bottles—and then, I couldn’t believe it, she drank it.
“Not bad,” she said. “Sue, give it a try.”
“No way. I only have so much Imodium with me.”
Billy made Allan take her picture with a local girl in tiny braids, snot running into her smile. The girl’s mother, dancing around to call attention to herself and disappearing for long minutes at a time, was possibly a prostitute. Then, although touching a strange animal was so careless, especially for a nursing student, Billy cuddled with a coati. The owner of this weird raccoon/anteater mash-up claimed he was a vet and that he could ship one to her for only fifty dollars. She wanted to take one right there and then. She was so naive, I envied her; I’d never been that kind of innocent.
We made it onto our bus without any tropical animals, and despite the heat and the Bob Marley blasting, Allan fell asleep. I was halfway through a novel, Fraser put earphones in and played a video game on his phone, Billy, in the seat in front of me, opened her textbook and flipped through the pages.
“Do you miss work yet?” She’d turned around and rested her baby-fresh chin on the back of her seat, like a puppy would. The Belizeans around us stared at her.
Which part might I miss? The holding of the piss bottle or the sponge bathing? The washing of other peoples’ dishes or the meticulous records I had to keep to ensure the group home was funded for another year? “Not yet,” I told her. “You miss school?”
“God, no,” she said. “We’re doing practical work now.” She kneeled to face me fully. “You know, bodies are pretty gross, Sue.”
I snorted. “Really.”
Her lips puckered. “I’m not sure if I can go through with it.”
“With what?”
“This program. All those sick people, looking at me, needing me.” She glanced at Allan, snoring beside her. “Allan thinks I should become a flight attendant.”
God. From one blond caregiving stereotype to another. “That’s a bit extreme,” I said.
She shook her head. “I’m considering it. I’ve had a lot of waitressing experience, and I’m a good flyer—”
“But what do you want?”
She took a huge breath and let out an enormous sigh. “I want to stay here and forget about everything!”
Allan raised his groggy head. “Keep it down, will you?”
Bob Marley’s song “Sun Is Shining” came on then. Billy turned around to face the front of the bus again and sang along. I watched her browned shoulders dance. Fraser pulled his headphones out. “What’d I miss?”
After hours of school bus–style travel along marginal roads through small villages and groves of dusty orange trees, after switching buses in Belmopan and again in Dangriga, after too much reggae and too many granola bars, we made it to Placencia. We checked into our shared cottage on the beach, then dropped everything to take a swim. The orange starfish looked like cartoons, fat beauties that didn’t resist us picking them up like the ones back home. The beach was coarse sand—not the typical perfect sand as I’d imagined, but the water was clear and
clean and warm and calm. We all washed the bus trip away in the briny blue.
Billy swam away from the rest of us. After a minute I checked on her. She was floating on her back, no bathing suit top in sight.
Fraser and Allan were already on the beach. I removed my top and wrapped it around my wrist. Booby sway, water tongues, I took a deep breath and floated face down. It felt free and right for about five seconds, until I had a thought. Nipples might look like bait to a passing fish. I turned over onto my back. Billy might’ve looked over; I don’t know.
When we emerged, tops back on, the guys were talking about sports. Sports! Fraser never watched sports, as far as I knew, and yet he was full-on into having opinions about teams and players, arguing about who’d win the Stanley Cup. Billy and I lay down and absorbed some rays until a young girl came over and offered us a handbill for a Happy Hour, two for one at the nearest bar-restaurant.
We raced back to the cottage, dried off, and changed quickly so we’d get a table. Over a dinner of chicken fingers and fries, I watched the three of them proceed to get plastered. I was on the wagon because I couldn’t stand the taste of dark rum. We were in Rumville, and rum was all they served.
Billy leaned over and told me she thought I was exotic-looking. “You and Fraser make a beautiful couple.”
Sweet little slosh-face. “Thanks.”
After dinner, Fraser and Allan looked through the guidebook for things to do in the area. They listed choices aloud: whale shark tours, game fish expeditions, lagoon kayaking.
“All I really want to do is lie down and bake,” I said.
Billy agreed with me. The sun was making her hair turn white, like Swedish kids’ hair. She was becoming younger before my eyes. Just a girl with excellent boobies. Right then, they were trying their best to remain inside a green halter dress, without much luck.
The guys protested our laziness but agreed to give us the night to make a decision. “We can’t just lie around like bums.”
