Float Plan(53)

“I agree, which is why I packed the tent.”

“You think of everything.”

He catches me around the waist with one hand and reels me in. “Care to guess what I’m thinking now?”

“That you need a shower?”

One hand against my neck, his thumb on my cheek, he kisses me softly. Then deeply. I run my palms up the back of his T-shirt and we kiss there in the kitchen until we’re breathless.

“A cold shower,” he says. “Most definitely cold.”

While Keane is showering, I wash out the liner for his prosthesis. I’ve never done it before, but I’ve watched enough to know how to do it. His everyday prosthesis stands beside the bathtub, so I leave a clean liner and a sock draped over the socket and sit down on the closed toilet seat lid. “Is this whole thing as scary for you as it is for me?”

“Us, you mean?” he says from behind the floral curtain.

“Yeah.”

“Not even a bit.”

“I guess, after Ben, I’m afraid of having the rug pulled out from under me again.”

“Which makes absolute sense,” Keane says. “Ben was suffering from something over which he had little control, but I’ve been to that same dark place and I made a different choice. That doesn’t mean I don’t have bleak days when I hate myself and everyone else. But if I can promise you nothing else, it’s that I intend to leave this world old, stooped, and with white hairs sticking out of my ears. And if having that image pressed into your brain hasn’t given you second thoughts, well … I’m yours for as long as you want me.”

For so long I thought that falling for someone else would mean I didn’t love Ben enough. That what we had wasn’t real. I haven’t stopped loving him. I just don’t want to regret letting Keane Sullivan go. “You might be stuck with me awhile.”

“I never saw myself having this conversation in a bathroom on Montserrat.” The water cuts off and his face appears around the edge of the shower curtain. “But the longer I’m stuck with you, the better.”



* * *



Within walking distance, we find a small food hut beside the road, where we sit on plastic chairs and eat roti stuffed with potatoes and gravy that we wash down with cold Carib beer. We play a game guessing the color of the next car to come down the road, then slowly walk back to Desmond’s house, waving whenever the locals greet us.

Desmond is home when we arrive. A moment later Sharon comes into the house, her arms laden with grocery bags. She is a tall woman with natural curls who thanks me when I take a few of the bags. Miles, maybe in kindergarten, is missing a front tooth.

“Miles.” Desmond squats down beside his son. “This is my friend Keane Sullivan.”

The little boy’s eyes go wide. “Sullivan like me?”

“Yes.”

“I can spell Sullivan,” Miles announces. He calls out the letters in the correct order, raising a finger with each one until he’s holding up eight. “Eight letters.”

“That’s very good,” Keane says. “I only just learned how to spell Sullivan properly.”

Miles cracks up laughing. “Maybe I’m smarter than you.”

“I reckon so.”

“Keane,” Sharon says, hugging him with one arm and kissing his cheek. “It’s about time you showed up. We’ve missed you.”

“Likewise,” he says. “Sharon, this is Anna Beck, my plus-one.”

“He lies,” I say, following her to the kitchen. “He’s my plus-one.”

As I place the groceries onto the kitchen counter facing the living room, Miles broaches the subject of Keane’s leg, his little voice almost a whisper when he asks, “Are you like Iron Man?”

“A bit,” Keane says. “Only the one leg, though.”

“Cool.”

Satisfied that his father’s friend is superhero adjacent, Miles runs outside to play. Desmond and Keane step out to the side porch with bottles of Guinness—“the proper beverage for liming”—while I help Sharon unpack.

“How long have you been together?” she asks.

“We’ve been sailing together for a little more than a month,” I say. “But we’ve been together for about … sixteen hours.”

Sharon laughs. “That’s very specific.”

“It took some time for us—for me, actually—to figure things out.”

“He’s a good man.” She takes a couple more bottles of Guinness from the refrigerator, opens them, and hands one to me. “Let’s go outside. We’ve got people coming over after the festival, so we’ll worry about the food later.”

The four of us sit on chairs overlooking Margarita Bay while Miles turns somersaults in the grass and plays with Queenie. Desmond tells me how, seven years ago, he met a drunken Keane urinating along the side of the road. “I was going to arrest him, but when he said his name was Sullivan, I brought him home and sobered him up.”

“What he’s not telling you,” Keane says, “is that after he got me sober, he took me out for goat stew and Guinness, and we got drunk all over again.”

Sharon tells me she’s a stylist in a hair salon in the neighboring village of St. John’s, and when she asks me what I do for a living, I don’t mention the pirate bar. I share our plan to start a nonprofit organization. I feel embarrassed by how privileged it is to want to raise money for a high-tech sailboat when Montserrat has been rebuilding for more than two decades, but her smile is generous. “That would be good for him. He needs a purpose.”