Via Dolorosa(2)

The shrimp boats scaling the coastline were ambushed by the torrential rains on the first day of the storm, and there proved some difficulty in turning them around and steering them back toward port. The man, Nick D’Nofrio, could see the vessels through the large, glass patio doors of the hotel room. He could see the great shrimp nets, pulled back and fastened against the bodies of the boats, coming undone and whipping loosely in the strong wind. He could see the braided, sea-slick lines, and he could hear, even from where he stood behind the glass and so far away, their rough engines breaking through the current over the rush of the storm. There were three boats, and they were having a difficult time maneuvering back up the coast in the storm. The tide was creeping up the beach and the waves were enormous and foamy and white, and the boats, in turning around, would burst through the foam and leap into the air and crash back down into the ocean. Nick could see all this through the glass patio doors. Outside, the rain accosted the doors and the wall of windows, shades drawn, and the harsh wind stripped the headstock of the great palms in the courtyard. The pools had been closed down, and they were empty and lonely in the courtyard. What patio chairs that had not been collected lay strewn and forgotten about the pool area, many on their sides like fallen soldiers. From the windows, Nick could see the beach, too, out beyond the courtyard, and it did not look like the beach either he or the girl had become familiar with. It looked cold, dark, and foreboding, the sand packed hard and solid from the rain, its color dark and bone-like. It looked smooth, too, and like glass.

There was a large brass clasp bolting shut the patio doors. Now, Nick undid the latch and pushed the doors open. He cracked them only two inches, but the wind was strong and he could feel its strength against the doors, could feel it trying to take them from him. The wind was cold, too, and it rushed into the room through the opening. The sheer white curtains billowed out and a few leaves of hotel stationary, each page emblazoned at its bottom with the hotel’s crest, rustled on the desk across the room. Shivering, he looked out at the rain and saw it coming down, punctuating the surfaces of the three fountains in the courtyard below, as well as the surfaces of the swimming pools, hard and unforgiving and like something nearly alive.

Holding onto the door handle with one hand, he managed to produce a lighter and a half-empty pack of generic cigarettes from his breast pocket. He pushed the cigarette between his lips and, with his right hand, fumbled with the lighter. The flint kicked up only blue sparks. He couldn’t light it and, after a few moments, grew agitated and stuffed the lighter back into the breast pocket of his shirt. The cold made his hand hurt, rendering it temporarily useless.

They ate dinner in the small hotel restaurant that first night of the storm. Neither of them had an appetite. The girl drank plenty of wine and looked forlornly at her salad throughout the meal. She was dressed plainly in a printed dress with thin shoulder straps, which exposed her small, round shoulders, the freckled skin a faint pinkish color from the summer sun. Her dark hair was cropped short and leveled just to the line of her jaw, pulled back behind her ears at either side of her round, smooth, white face. The waiter, who was a young boy with dark skin and a black, neatly kept ponytail tucked discreetly into the collar of his starched and pressed uniform, undoubtedly sensed the couple’s unease. The young waiter had been very friendly to them the first few days of their stay, but he did not say much this first night of the storm.

He could sense the change, Nick knew.

The waiter took their orders and brought their drinks with an air of anxious discomfort. Nick watched him closely, watched him to see if he kept quiet because of the unease. Or perhaps, Nick thought, the young waiter was like an old farm dog whose demeanor was influenced by something in the storm. Yet Nick didn’t think it had anything to do with the storm.

“I don’t like being quiet with you,” Emma said at one point during dinner.

“Sometimes it’s necessary,” Nick told her.

“Is it necessary now?”

“I think that maybe it is.”

“I want to say something to you,” she said. “I feel like there is so much to say and that I should say it to you, Nicky, but I don’t know what to say.”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“Nick…”

“Just eat.”

“But I need to talk to you. We need to talk.”

“Don’t.”

“I just feel—”

“Don’t,” he said again. “Not now.”

“Can we please talk?”

“I think it’s necessary to be quiet now,” Nick said.

She left before the check came on that first night of the storm. Nick paid the bill with a credit card after ordering a final cup of hot coffee from the dark-skinned young waiter. He sat, sipping the coffee, which he took black without cream or sugar, and remained seated at the small, circular table against the bar, looking out past the sheet of windows along the wall and at the darkness of the night and the intensity of the rain. He thought, This rain should be just as strong by the end of summer. I feel that by the end of summer, this place will need much rain to wash everything away. He thought about this and did not know what it meant…yet he was familiar with truth, and knew he could not lie to himself, and knew that when he understood most things, he usually understood the truth in them first before he understood anything else about them. And he did not know if such a talent was a good talent.