“Sneakers, sneakers. Come on. It’s gonna be a day of walking.”
Moans and groans from the boys. Andy is wearing those horrible Adidas slippers he hasn’t taken off since October.
And another complaint, even more irritating, from behind. “Do we have to walk?” Jim gazes in disgust upon his wife. He’d picked Tammy a couple of decades ago from a pool of similar girls, all with the same tweezed eyebrows and light personalities. His buddies had snapped up the others. This was comforting. He felt secure in investing in a bestselling variety of female products. The years had gone by, smoothly, excruciatingly, and at some point, he looked up, and there she was, his wife. They’d booked this cruise because that’s what you do when you’ve made it to the six-figures, and everywhere Jim goes on this goddamn boat, he sees them, the forty-year-old women with thick arms and spotty skin, stuffed into one-piece bathing suits from the clearance rack. And now, the similarities have made Tammy cheap and repulsive.
Jim thinks of a million things to say and then pictures the aftermath. “Let’s get going.”
An hour later than Jim had wanted, they did, venturing out into narrow, blue-carpeted hallways, past the two-level pool deck and the casino. “It’ll be good to leave,” he says of the boat they are paying two thousand dollars a day to stay on. The crew smiles and waves in their cheesy sailor uniforms as the white-sneakered crowd oozes from the bloated hull, down the gangplank, into the city.
“Did you know that America owns this place?” Tammy tells the boys.
“I thought they spoke Spanish.”
They decide to walk along the city wall, a dusty brown zigzag over the cobalt ocean. To their right is the old town, but “I can’t do cobblestones in these shoes,” says Tammy, who has, in her wisdom, decided to wear strappy heels. Andy doesn’t look up from his phone. Will drags his feet, eyes dull. Ships don’t agree with him, and he’s spent the voyage lying in their cabin and eating saltines. Jim believes the suffering will build character, but not fast enough.
The path curves uphill, and they huff and puff past a line of palm trees. Tammy asks Jim, “doesn’t it remind him of Orlando?” They have nothing else to compare it to.
They reach the vast lawn and watch the kites circling overhead. The fortress smears before them long and low, exactly as pictured on the cruise’s brochure. A still out-of-breath Tammy: “Do we want to, like, buy tickets for this?”
As always, about everything, the boys don’t care.
Tammy shrugs. “We could just look at it from the outside.”
Jim summons all of his masculine authority. El Morro is the most famous thing on this island; it’s on every postcard; everyone who goes to Puerto Rico goes to El Morro, and they would seem like absolute idiots if they did not; it’s a fortress, and it’s huge, and it’s an experience, and they cannot just look at it from the—
They go inside. In the stone courtyard, Jim makes a point of reading the placards. Tammy looks over his shoulder and murmurs dates. “1521, wow. 1625, interesting. Completed in…1790. Wow.” They duck politely into the exhibition rooms, squinting at models and nodding at the paragraphs on military history. “My dad would love this place,” says Tammy. Jim doubts it; Tammy’s dad is a fundamentally incurious person.
There are stairs to the top level. Family selfies against the blue, and then with the pastel stripes of the buildings below. Andy is sweating, and won’t shut up about it. All around, other groups make the same procession between placards and photo spots. The same poses, quibbling about lighting and angles. Tammy looks through her camera roll, deleting the ones that show her double chin, and Jim despairs at the state of modern life. Could he be the only one immune to the seduction of the screens, the only one capable of living in the moment?
A flash of green along the slope of the fortress wall. He’s eye-to-eye with an iguana. And he can’t look away, his breath tender in his mouth, as its gullet pulses with meaning. He tries to memorise it, the ridges like blades of grass along its spine, skin the exact texture of the stone beneath. The great lizard blinks once. And then, with a flick of its tail, it starts crawling away. Jim waits until the last possible second before nudging Will. “Iguana.”
“Where?” Jim watches his son spin in every direction.
“Oh, bad luck. You just missed it.
The heat is unbearable. They skip the other floors, ambling towards the exit. What to do next? The boys are hungry, and Tammy wants to sit inside for a while. Andy’s palate extends only so far as chicken tenders, so they want to go somewhere easy, somewhere they speak English.
Half a block into town, Jim finds a hole-in-the-wall place with a TripAdvisor sticker. The waiter seats them by the bar, and Tammy eyes the display of rum bottles with a schoolgirl’s thrill. “I’m going to get a pina colada.”
“Tammy, it’s barely past noon!”
“Oh, come on, we’re in Puerto Rico! I have to have a pina colada in Puerto Rico.”
Meanwhile, Andy can’t find nachos on the menu. Don’t they eat those here? The waiter explains that they only serve the local cuisine, but they do have fries. So they order fries. And then the drinks arrive. Tammy gets a brain freeze on her first sip. Jim stares at her as she gasps theatrically, waving her straw in the air and spraying drops of rum across the table, and the words float languidly into his mind like the bubbles in Will’s Coke. I want a divorce.
“Babe, have some.” Tammy is shoving the straw in Jim’s direction. She’s chewed the top portion practically flat, and he’s expected to just put his lips on her jagged tooth marks.
The words are butting against his mouth now, and he’s afraid that if he opens it, they’ll tumble out. He sips. “It’s a slushie.”
She leans forward, conspiratorial. “But with alcohol. Isn’t it great?”
Andy and Will devour their fries, making their parents aware between mouthfuls that it’s not as good as McDonald’s. Tammy is on another one of her fad diets, and can only drink her calories, or so she reminds them as she orders a second pina colada.
Jim has gamely chosen something with stewed meat and plantanos. “You should all try this,” he says, an expansive gesture of his fork. “They put these spices in it. Very interesting taste.”
“I just want a cheeseburger,” Andy moans.
“Maybe they’d make it for you without the spice,” Tammy suggests, but they can barely understand her around the furious sucking of the straw. Jim hates how she slouches, shoulders sloped like the body of a cello. And the boys, they’re little versions of her, hands all the way down by their ankles. He hates them. No, that can’t be true. He feels a lump in his throat, like headphone cords, anger and revulsion tangled with the starch of the plantains, and he can barely swallow.
Will mumbles, pastier than ever, “Why don’t they have AC here?”
“Hey, hey, server!” Tammy is actually snapping her fingers. Jim makes a grab for her hand. “What? They do that outside America. It’s not rude here.”
“This is America,” he hisses.
“I just want him to turn the heat down.” She lifts an arm to reveal a dark oval on her blouse. “Look at this. Seriously. Don’t you think that’s unacceptable?”
He stares at her, along with half the restaurant. How has it come to this? It was never supposed to be like this. He is forty-five years old, and the only time he’s left the country was going to Mexico with his buddies in college. He’s never gone skiing, hasn’t been to a concert in nearly a decade, and his last three vacations were to theme parks. And here he is in a tropical paradise with the wife he chose and the kids he wanted, and it’s like dancing with a stranger in a club and then when the lights come on, her face is all twisted, a fairytale gone wrong, and you were with that, and chose that, and god, he needs to run. This isn’t him. It never was. He feels awake, alive, head ringing, pulse matching the beat of the salsa music cascading over them from the restaurant speakers.
“Where are you going?” Tammy had been in the middle of a long-winded story about a spring break trip to Miami. She could never handle her alcohol.
“I want a divorce,” Jim mouths. It would be so easy to let the sound through.
“What?”
“I need some air.” And he ducks out the back exit.
He’s in a courtyard, droopy palms and bistro lights. Through the open French doors of the bar across, he hears gentle chatter in English and Spanish, and the sound of a piano drifts in from somewhere, pinging off the cobblestones. The sun is kind, the breeze a breath before a kiss.
To his right, a woman smokes a cigarette. He has to look twice to really appreciate it, the way she leans against the wall as if posed, limbs just so, hand in her dark hair. She acknowledges him with a tiny smile, and he walks up to her, shedding reality with every step.
“Buenas tardes,” she says. Her lashes skim her cheekbones just like the hem of her dress against her thighs. “You want a smoke?”
He hasn’t smoked since college. He takes one. “I’m Jim.”
“Hi Jim.” She smiles again, but doesn’t introduce herself. “Are you visiting, Jim?”
“Yeah. It’s—it’s beautiful.” Jim hasn’t spoken to a new person in what feels like years, and he feels drunk with how big the world is, and how full of humans, full of women with big black eyes and skin that glows in the afternoon light.
“Have you seen much of it yet?”
“Not yet,” he admits. “You from around here?”
“Kind of.” She has a bit of an accent, syllables rough with salt and lime. “I grew up here, and then I left. Then I came back.”
He holds in the smoke for a moment, lets it scrape his lungs clean, and then exhales long and slow. “Why did you leave?”
“I thought I had to.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“It’s my home.” As simple as that. Jim can’t remember being that sure of something in his life.
“I could imagine that. Staying here. The beaches, and the, well, there’s so much culture.” His voice rumbles with the effort of swallowing a cough. He’d never coughed when he’d smoked back in the day. Will she judge him for that? He can’t read her face. With Tammy, it’s so easy, because, frankly, there’s not much there. Her mind has the depth of a lazy river, just a loop going round and round. “So what should I do while I’m here?”
“Well, how much time do you have?”
Jim thinks about that, about time. It’s that classic joke, the midlife crisis, and it’s never been funny to him. Because how do you know when the “mid” is? Just a couple of months ago, his buddy from work had an open heart surgery. And it was touch-and-go for a while, and he’d come home every night with a storm cloud over his head, like in a cartoon. Tammy knew something was wrong, but he didn’t want to tell her about it because he didn’t want to hear her voice talk about it, feel the brute force of her clumsy sympathy. Touch-and-go. What a phrase, death as something tangible, within arm’s reach. And right there, in the sun, Jim feels it settle, suffocating, over him, that he could go back to Ohio, and stay there forever, and that he could die there. And nobody would ever know that he deserved better. “I want to have time here. I mean, maybe I’ll stay.”
Nobody except an iguana, and the woman before him, both of whom have an ancient truth in their eyes. Himself, as he really is. “I want to have time here. I mean, maybe I’ll stay.”
She scans him, up and down. “Don’t you have a life to go back to?”
“It doesn’t feel like it.”
“Okay.” She stubs out her cigarette against the wall. “Let me think. There’s a lot on this island. If you like nature, we have a rainforest. You could drive around, if you’re not much of a hiker.”
“No, hiking is…” He could get into it. “I love nature.”
“And of course there’s the beach. Lots for tourists to do.”
It’s going wrong. The way she says “tourists,” the word sloping down into dismissal. He has to fix this, to show her that he’s not— “Well, I want to know the Puerto Rico that the locals know.” Should he have said it the Latin way? P-wer-tho. If only he could roll his R’s. “What do you do around here?” Maybe you could show me around, he doesn’t add. But it’s there, if she wants to hear it. He used to be good at this, at taking a half-step forward at exactly the right time.
“What do I do?” A complicated arch of the eyebrows. “I go to work. Eat food. Sleep. Same as you.” And then she grins, but it’s over his shoulder again. “Ey, Pedrito!”
Behind, their waiter leans out of the restaurant, and this time, Jim takes note of the man, his symmetry, white teeth and trim figure. And the teeth are on display as he looks at the woman. “Ana! Estas despierta a esta hora?”
Ana laughs from deep in her, raw and free. “Callete!” They continue in rapid Spanish, zipping back and forth over Jim’s head. He’s large, and in the way, and simultaneously a child again, standing at his parents’ hip while they communicate in a frequency he cannot register. Ana and the waiter, lively and sparking with an energy they did not waste on him. And it’s…rude, is what it is, to make him feel like this. They should speak English while he’s there.
Then, there are whispers from the dark of the restaurant, and the waiter turns in, listening, nodding hard. Jim looks at Ana to say, “where were we?” but she’s looking at the waiter, and the waiter is looking at Jim. “Mister. Your family is searching for you.”
Jim swallows.
“They want to go back to the boat.”
From the announcements onboard the cruise ship, Jim recognises the word bote in Ana’s muttered question to the waiter. Something like “He’s a boat person.”
“They-they know I’m back here,” he stammers. “It’s fine. I can stay—“
But she’s there, at the waiter’s elbow, an iceberg looming. Tammy. “Jim. We need to go.”
It’s really Ana and the waiter he cannot deal with, two floodlights pinning him from either side. A sick dizziness comes over him, and he feels ripped from himself, perceiving his body through an alien gaze. A middle-aged white man, a boat person. Cargo shorts, white socks pulled all the way up. Face puffy and wet with sweat, T-shirt stretched taut over the belly he’s been in denial of; had he really allowed it to get so bad? A fat gringo, and his ugly wife.
“Something’s wrong with Will. He threw up, and I think he has a fever—“
“It’s a heat stroke,” the waiter cuts in. “We see it all the time in tourists.”
“Has your son been drinking water?” Ana asks.
“I gave him some.” Tammy is nearing hysterics; he can tell by the shallow inhalations, the rigid shoulders. He has to go to her, to help. Perhaps, says his mind unhelpfully, you are a pathetic failure. “All he’s drunk today is soda.” At that, she bursts into tears.
“I’ll call an Uber.” His tongue is fat too, like the rest of him. He turns to Ana. “Do they, do they have Uber here?”
“We do, but there’s no need. My uncle has a car.” Ana types on her phone, and then she speaks low into it. The kindness of the natives.
Jim has managed to move towards Tammy. He touches her elbow
“Why do you smell like cigarettes?”
He drops it, still blazing, on the ground. Ana puts it out with her foot. And Jim lets himself be led in, to Will’s side as he hunches over a trash can with thin liquid dribbling from his mouth, and the concerned hostess wants to call an ambulance, but Tammy insists on the cruise ship medics only, with their medicine from the mainland. Tammy rubs Will’s back, holding a glass of water close to his face, the waiter with another glass ready, and Jim and Andy hover nearby, useless and empty-handed. “He will be fine,” says Ana. They all watch Will retreat into his mother’s arms. A car pulls up out front.
Tammy and the boys pile into the backseat. Jim notices an Uber decal in the windshield and takes comfort in the familiar logo, the modern nonchalance of getting in a stranger’s car.
Ana catches him at the passenger door. “Hope you and your family have a safe voyage home.” He bristles at the rebuke. Hasn’t he been through enough?
They drive into the narrow, bumpy streets, passing gift shops, fruit stalls, balconies draped with plants and laundry.
Tammy tells Will not to worry, not to feel bad. They’ve barely dipped their toes into the Caribbean, with three islands still left on the itinerary. Islands that have better beaches, and snorkelling, and zipline excursions they can book through the cruise. What more is there really to do here? They saw the fort, and Tammy had her pina colada. And Andy would rather eat dinner on the boat’s semi-formal top-deck restaurant, where he can order the same smash burger and shoestring fries as he has every night.
They hit traffic, and Jim watches through the window as a group of men unloads a truck full of plantains, a white-aproned chef supervising with crossed arms.
“What were you talking about with that woman?”
Jim twists in his seat and regards her, the oh so simple suspicion on her face. “I just asked her for travel tips. If we ever come again.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t know. There’s hiking. Stuff like that.”
Tammy wrinkles her nose. “Would it really be worth coming all the way back here? The heat killed it for me. But I guess that’s the tropics.”
The afternoon sun is harsh on the harbour. The blue of the ocean. The white of the ship. His eyes can’t process both at once.
The car stops at the gangway. “Ok,” says the driver. The boys tumble out the door, Tammy grabbing for Will in renewed motherly zeal.
And Jim, most belatedly, addresses the driver. “Uh, thanks. I mean, gracias.”
“No problem.”
Tammy is shoving Will at the cruise representative, who beckons for a wheelchair. It’s all a little excessive, and Jim suspects his wife enjoys the excitement of it. He can already picture the ensuing FaceTime calls to her parents, sunstroke in San Juan, peril in paradise. “What’s your name by the way?” he asks the driver.
“Luis,” he says.
Jim pats his shorts pockets, feeling for his wallet. “Look, we really appreciate it. What do you say, twenty dollars?”
“You don’t have to pay me, sir. I hope your son feels better.” Luis speaks in broken English, and Jim is a little proud of himself for getting the gist.
“It’s a beautiful island,” he says magnanimously, as he slides his legs out of the car.
Luis nods. “Thank you, sir.”
The door closes. Luis watches as the man joins his family, and down every side street, more are returning, floppy hats and burnt shoulders, scurrying like ants towards the boat that’s bigger than a city block. It will leave tonight, and tomorrow morning, another will come.
