Searching
Pete Able
The hotel room was empty, but that was no big surprise. Eliza and I had had a fight. I remembered that much from the night before.
In the past seven years of marriage I’d mostly learned not to pick fights, but sometimes alcohol made me forget. We’d played that stupid drinking game with some of the locals and I, all of a sudden, decided my Spanish was better than hers—it wasn’t. Of course, it wasn’t. I might know a word or two but, in reality, it wasn’t even close. But it didn’t matter. The fight wasn’t really about whose Spanish was better.
All that was left of Eliza now was a magenta colored bikini bottom, that she must have overlooked, hanging up in the bathroom. She probably packed hastily before I woke. I tried to picture it. Either she had been crying or she was in a rage, violently throwing clothes into her open suitcase. I would have preferred to believe it was the former, but the latter seemed more likely. Lucky for her I always slept like a log.
I got a muffin and some black coffee from the main lobby and wondered how many hotels there were on the island. I wondered how I would explain to a cabbie that I wanted him to taxi me around while I questioned each front desk personage in order to see if they had had a tall blond American woman check in recently. She couldn’t lug her giant suitcase all over the place, right? I realized I’d have to find a cabbie that spoke English because I was sure I couldn’t explain it in Spanish. Eliza probably could have, but I couldn’t, I thought with chagrin.
Though I doubted I’d learn much, I questioned the short, smartly dressed man at the front desk while turning in my key and checking out of the hotel. The man’s thin mustache twitched with a crooked smile as I said good morning. He had an air of mischief about him, as if the situation were some kind of joke.
“Good morning, sir,” he replied with a thick, but confident, accent.
“Did you happen to see my wife leave this morning?”
“Yes, sir. She left very early.”
“Did you happen to note the time?” I asked.
“Perhaps 5:30, sir. The sun had barely risen.” He smiled.
“Did she leave a message for me?”
“No, sir.”
“And did she mention where she was going by any chance?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.” He smiled again.
No real help there, but I hadn’t expected much.
I thanked the man and gave him a very small tip. Probably an insult, really, but he was enjoying my situation way too much.
On my way out onto the already sunbaked street I checked my watch. Eliza had a three-hour head start. Essentially it was hopeless. I knew how much Eliza could accomplish in three hours. If she set her mind to do something, she could be very efficient. She could be in another country or even on another planet by now, I thought. She could have gone south to Nicaragua, west to El Salvador or Guatemala, or straight up to Mars. In my mind there were no limitations on what she could accomplish. Especially if she had her anger with me to fuel her. From experience I knew she could take that and run a marathon with it. For all I know, I thought hopelessly, she could be on a boat to Cuba just to spite me.
Out on the dusty orange street with my suitcase and my pack I suddenly felt lost on my own. At least with Eliza when we were lost, we’d be together so that it always felt a bit like home. I’d hold held her hand and I was confident, her will in conjunction with mine buoyed me up. But now that was gone. It occurred to me I had never traveled much on my own. Surely I had never been out of the States without her for a travel partner before. They say traveling alone is how you truly find yourself. I wondered if that were true. If so maybe it was good that Eliza and I would have this time apart, I thought. Maybe there would be some kind of growth. It seemed to me there hadn’t been any growth for a long time. And it seemed we could use some. That all sounded swell in my head, but I still wanted to find her as soon as possible. She could take care of herself, I knew, but I didn’t think I could enjoy myself without her. I wouldn’t be able to relax. I was a bundle of nerves already, and I felt like I could easily land myself in some kind of hot water.
It was a real stroke of luck that I found Marco. Actually, it might be more accurate to say Marco found me. After I had been aimlessly wandering the streets awhile he almost ran me down in his old, rusty white car. He rolled through an intersection without slowing down, skidded to a halt, and I, too shocked to react, remember looking down to see his front tire about an inch from my flipflopped foot. He only stared at me with a wide smile, looking like an unlit Jack-o-Lantern with a couple teeth missing.
“Hello, hello. Hey, big time. Hey, high roller. You big time high roller, huh? You need a ride? I’m best taxi on dee island. I’m Marco. I drive best! C’mon, let’s go for a ride. I’ll take you all around. I’ll take you all over. We go all around town, hey c’mon.”
Though he had nearly run over my foot, and seemed potentially hazardous in almost every way, I had to admit his English seemed pretty good. Or at least, he seemed to have a bigger vocabulary than all the other cabbies that I had spoken with up to that point. And when I explained my situation to him, Marco seemed to understand immediately and enthusiastically agreed to help.
“We find her, man. We find her no problem. Your old lady. Yeah, man. We get dat bitch!”
I didn’t condone Marco’s language but chalked it up to cultural misunderstanding and let it slide. And aside from that his enthusiasm was positive and infectious. I quickly became confident, and excited, to find my old lady—the old ball and chain, I added as a joke silently to myself. As soon as I pulled the car door shut, Marco sped off down the dirt road, honking his horn at a cluster of brown chickens that were blocking the way. Marco’s quick adjustments on the steering wheel almost made it feel like we were in a go-kart instead of a real car.
Marco chauffeured me around the island at an incredible speed. My life flashed before my eyes a couple of times, but miraculously we didn’t crash, and, maybe even more miraculously, I managed to keep my breakfast down. The first four hotels we checked were a bust. Each time I showed the people at the front desk a picture of Eliza on my phone, and asked ‘Is this woman staying here?’ and ‘Have you seen this woman?’ in the Spanish phrases Marco taught me, but they all shook their heads. After the last I began to lose hope.
“Well, Marco,” I said, feeling almost like he was a pal of mine by now, “maybe it’s for the best. Eliza and I could use some time to cool off. She must have gotten a ferry off the island. She’s probably headed home. Back to the States. It’s likely she’s already at the airport by now.”
“No, no, no,” said Marco, shaking his head. “No ferry today. I know place. One more place. Quiet place. Place at tip of the island. Secret place. We check there. No worry. C’mon, let’s go. Trust Marco.”
I said, sure why not, I’d trust Marco. What did I have to lose? For a moment I hardly cared. I was so tired of being jostled around in the car in the Caribbean summer heat that Marco could have robbed me blind and left me naked on the side of the road and it would have hardly changed my mood or personal outlook. I felt so hot and discouraged that I’d adopted an attitude of near acceptance of just about everything. It seemed neither nothing very good, nor very bad, could possibly happen. Not, at least, until either I found Eliza, or until the temperature cooled off considerably.
For the time being, I put my seatbelt back on and reached up for the handle above the window, my hand’s permanent position while Marco was driving. I was grateful for the luxury of an “oh-shit” handle in an old car on a small island in Central America. Come to think of it, I should’ve counted myself lucky there was even a seatbelt. Even if it was just a lap belt, without the accompanying shoulder strap that saved so many lives.
Marco continued to keep my guts in a knot with the way he covered the poorly maintained dirt roads, weaving around the deep potholes and the odd pieces of metal, stone and livestock. After twenty minutes or so the island narrowed and the sea was visible on either side of the road, sapphire blue, smooth and calm. The road began climbing and the palms grew shorter and developed collars of yellow spikes around their trunks, which to me resembled enlarged versions of necklaces that girls might wear to punk rock shows. I had a feeling we were going farther off the grid than I ever had before. Was there anything more unpredictable than the third world? I wondered. Was there a fourth-world where I could get into even more trouble? Finally, as we neared the end of the road, a small shack came into view.
“Here, here,” said Marco. “Dis dee place. Cheap room for rent. Great paradise view.”
The shack was simply a corrugated steel roof set on four walls of concrete blocks. In the front yard, if you could call the patch of yellow gravel a yard, there was a hammock set between two palm trees and a donkey tied to a stake. If it weren’t for the otherwise beautiful, tropical surroundings and total lack of neighbors, the place would have looked like it belonged in a New Mexico trailer park.
“This is a hotel?” I asked skeptically after Marco brought the car to a stop.
“Yes, yes, hotel,” insisted Marco. “Secret paradise hideaway.”
Marco pronounced this last word carefully, as if it were important, or as if he had only just learned it. Either way it made me consider the word briefly. Was this where people came to hide? Maybe people came here seeking solitude, escape. That may be what Eliza was seeking, but the place was too basic and simple for her. No air conditioning. No room service. It was exactly the type of place Eliza would normally hate. But in order to get away from me, I decided, she would probably suck up her distaste and rough it for awhile. It occurred to me then that the fight might be more serious than I initially thought.
I gave Marco some money and asked him to wait while I went to question the proprietor of the shack, if there was one. As I approached I half expected to find nothing but dead animal carcasses with flies buzzing. The smell of the donkey gave me the feeling I was entering a small zoo. I stepped into the open doorway cautiously and found a darkly-tanned, potbellied man sitting in a recliner on an ochre colored oval rug. He was drinking a can of beer and watching a soccer match on an old, cracked TV set hanging on the wall. A small green lizard scurried down from the wooden door frame just before I knocked.
“Pardon me,” I said. “Sorry to bother you. Do you speak English?”
The man lazily turned his head and met my gaze with glazed over, yellow eyes.
“No, I don’t speak any English,” he said effortlessly, with what seemed like a Texas drawl.
Shocked to find a man speaking fluent English on this remote corner of the island, I fumbled for what to say next.
“I—I’m looking for my wife,” I said. “She’s my height, with short blond hair, thin, attractive. Have you seen her?”
The man took a long drink from his beer. In no hurry at all to answer me, he wiped his mouth and thick, black mustache with his wrist and the back of his hand in one, slow, lackadaisical motion.
“She staying here,” said the man, casually. “She pay for dinner tonight, one night in hammock, and breakfast tomorrow.”
I was slightly flummoxed as I found what the man said hard to believe. Spending the night in a hammock wasn’t at all like Eliza. She hadn’t even wanted to come to the island at all for lack of a proper resort.
“Is there mosquito netting for the hammock?” I asked.
“No need,” said the man. “The sea breeze take care of the mosquito.”
I felt certain the man knew correct grammar and that he was simply too lazy to use it. Perhaps it was the heat, I thought. I imagined prolonged exposure to this type of heat could drive people to act in all sorts of strange ways. Maybe it’s what made Marco drive crazy, and maybe it even contributed to making Eliza leave. Anyway, I doubted what the man had said about the mosquitoes, but was in no mood to argue. That wasn’t the reason I was there.
“Where is my wife now?”
The man belched, turned his attention back to the soccer match, and said, “She went down to the beach.”
Out front the donkey hee-hawed as I walked past and made me jump. Marco pointed and laughed. I gave Marco more money, took his cell number down and sent him on his way. I watched his car go bouncing down the road, kicking up dust as he sped away. I was almost sorry to say goodbye so soon. In hindsight I was glad Marco hadn’t robbed me and left me stranded. It was much easier this way, and it saved a lot of time. But for some reason the thought of Marco robbing me made me smile.
I spoke to the man in the shack again and, for a nominal fee, arranged to leave my suitcase there along with my wife’s. He probably charged me the same, if not more, than he had charged my wife for the night, but I didn’t care to squabble. Maybe it was a bad American attitude, but I hoped I could buy friends in the hard-scrabble places of the world.
Behind the shack there was a narrow trail through the jungle that zigzagged back and forth down a steep slope to the sea. The jungle was dense and humid and I immediately began sweating profusely. The sweat dripped down into my eyes, off the tip of my nose, from my armpits down my flanks, the crack of my ass, you name it! I’d been in steam rooms that were cooler! But just as I was about to lose it the trees and underbrush opened up to a narrow beach, fifty yards long, with a nice, cooling sea breeze.
It was a beautiful, picturesque beach, but Eliza was nowhere to be seen. I looked up the beach, I looked down the beach, I looked in the water—there wasn’t a soul in sight. If I’d been looking for a private island paradise, it would have been an ideal location, but I wasn’t. If Eliza had been standing by my side, I’d have been perfectly content, but she wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do next. I felt keenly just how far away from home I was. Anything familiar, anything recognizable, was a thousand miles off in the distance. Realizing this gave me a sinking feeling in my chest.
I made my way to the water to cool off and think. On the walk over the fine, shifting sand I looked out into the sea. A few hundred yards off the beach there was a tiny island, a large rock really, with a clump of small trees, protruding up out of the now aqua blue water. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but then, down by the water’s edge, I spotted Eliza’s purse, sandals, sunglasses and towel.
At first I puzzled over Eliza’s things. Separated from her body the objects looked like clues to a mystery I couldn’t hope to solve. The longer I looked the more surreal the situation appeared. But when I finally shook my brain into focus, I was able to put two and two together. With nothing else to go on, I concluded that Eliza must have swum there, to the tiny island, leaving her things behind, intentionally or unintentionally, like breadcrumbs for me to find. It was the only logical explanation. More and more the actions of my wife of seven years were surprising me. More and more they were giving me goosebumps.
After giving it some thought, I saw no other option but to follow Eliza out to the island. But before doing so, I had to swallow no small amount of anxiety. I was no great adventurer. The unknown held no allure for me. I preferred a concrete, visible take on the world where reason and convenience reigned. This was something my wife and I had in common, or so I’d always thought. Now I was beginning to question Eliza’s motives for every little action. It seemed she was going against all her normal sensibilities. And that’s what was worrying me most. Was she changing and leaving me behind? If so what did that mean for me? I wondered. The future at this moment seemed as uncertain as the temperamental Caribbean weather. I felt totally underprepared for what might lay ahead.
I left my pack, shirt, flipflops, and sunglasses together with Eliza’s things and waded into the warm water. I walked slowly at first. Schools of small yellow and blue fish darted away from the two poles of my legs. The depth remained shallow and I was able to walk a long way. When it finally did become deeper there was reef that hurt my feet, so I floated on my back and gently propelled myself along with my arms, gazing up at the sky, which was clear and blue and seemed as thin as a simple watercolor painting.
Swimming this lazy backstroke made the journey take a long time, but I was eventually clamoring up the rocks of the tiny island. The first thing I noticed was how green everything was. The island hadn’t seemed so alive from the distance, but now I realized everything everywhere around me was lush, like some kind of botanical garden. Mangroves grew up from in between the black rocks and, higher up, several different types of small trees and shrubs grew. Everywhere I looked was green, green, green with life.
As I started out, the branches of the mangroves made good handholds for when navigating the trickier parts of the terrain, or when jumping from rock to rock. In a short period of time, though making my way relatively slowly, as I was barefoot, I had skirted the entire island. The first time around I had stayed by the water’s edge and saw no signs of Eliza. I’d called out her name two dozen times or so, always without answer. In fact, there had only been an eerie silence since I had pulled myself out of the water and up onto the black rocks. An eerie, unbroken silence that creeped me out somewhat.
For some reason I’d had some hesitance about climbing deeper into the center of the island, but now I saw there was no avoiding it. I had to be thorough in my search for Eliza, otherwise there was no point in having gone looking in the first place. Searching for your wife in the third-world wasn’t something you half-assed, I decided. Besides, I reasoned that surely there could be no danger lurking on such a small island. I imagined any threat would have to be miniature, as the island itself was. Or at least, that was my hope.
I used the branch of a mangrove tree and some type of purple vine to shimmy up a rockface onto higher ground, and after that the climbing was all very easy. The black, damp earth was soft on my feet and the incline leveled out after awhile, which made for an almost, pleasant hike. Again I felt that, had Eliza been by my side, I would’ve had nothing at all to complain about. The small green island would have been a perfectly acceptable vacation destination. Great for a short hike and a picnic.
Though it was a clear day the sun’s rays couldn’t cut through the canopy of lush green trees overhead, so it was like walking underneath a dark storm cloud. I continued to call out Eliza’s name but my voice grew lower and softer as I lost confidence. I began to worry that something terrible had happened to Eliza, or even worse, something bad was happening that she herself was a party to. I don’t know what made me think that, but I had a bad feeling. I thought again of the idea of a fourth world, and was uneasy, the sinking feeling in my chest returning in waves.
The closer to the center of the island I got, the denser the undergrowth became. Before long I had to kick and tear my way through the plants to continue on my way. It was a terrible struggle and I more than once thought of giving up, swimming back to the big island, having a drink in the hammock in front of the potbellied man’s shack, sleeping there even, with or without mosquito netting, but the thought of Eliza in trouble kept me going. Seven years of marriage isn’t something you just throw away because it gets difficult. You have to make up after stupid fights. You have to push through the jungle, so to speak. Kicking and tearing. Whatever it takes. To coin a phrase, I hadn’t come this far to only come this far.
Just as I was about to drop down and rest, or go to sleep, or pass out, I came to a clearing. It was a large, circular clearing that was too perfectly round not to have been manmade. Around the circumference there were lamps on tall iron lampposts lighting the space. I looked to the center of the circle and there, sitting in a pool of clear, steaming water, looking perfectly contented, was Eliza. I was stunned. I think my jaw actually dropped. There was my wife, her short blonde hair wet and matted down over her ears, sitting calmly, all alone, in some sort of hot spring, on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and she, thinking herself unseen, was smiling. Smiling, it seemed, only to herself. It was perfectly strange. I couldn’t account for it. But I didn’t care. I was just happy I’d found her.
I approached the steaming pool slowly, trying to get a sense if my wife was still mad. As soon as I came into her line of view and she laid her eyes on me I could see all had been forgiven. With graceful fingers she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“You found me,” she said, the same surreal smile on her lips.
“It would seem so,” I said.
“Took you long enough.”
Just then a lone bird cried out from the canopy above. And, as Eliza’s smile caused one to spread across my face too, its melancholic song echoed through the jungle.
Looking back on it now, we refer to it as our “hide-and-seek vacation.” Now we even try to recreate it by staging fake fights and going our separate ways in strange places. We take turns searching for each other. On occasion we’ve stayed apart for days at a time… Once in Eastern Europe and then once more in South America. It’s always such a relief when we finally find each other. It’s a feeling that’s worth trying to recapture. It does something for our marriage that seems to be working. We both get to travel alone some, and then, at the end, we get to find what we’re looking for. What more could you want out of a vacation?
Pete Able
The hotel room was empty, but that was no big surprise. Eliza and I had had a fight. I remembered that much from the night before.
In the past seven years of marriage I’d mostly learned not to pick fights, but sometimes alcohol made me forget. We’d played that stupid drinking game with some of the locals and I, all of a sudden, decided my Spanish was better than hers—it wasn’t. Of course, it wasn’t. I might know a word or two but, in reality, it wasn’t even close. But it didn’t matter. The fight wasn’t really about whose Spanish was better.
All that was left of Eliza now was a magenta colored bikini bottom, that she must have overlooked, hanging up in the bathroom. She probably packed hastily before I woke. I tried to picture it. Either she had been crying or she was in a rage, violently throwing clothes into her open suitcase. I would have preferred to believe it was the former, but the latter seemed more likely. Lucky for her I always slept like a log.
I got a muffin and some black coffee from the main lobby and wondered how many hotels there were on the island. I wondered how I would explain to a cabbie that I wanted him to taxi me around while I questioned each front desk personage in order to see if they had had a tall blond American woman check in recently. She couldn’t lug her giant suitcase all over the place, right? I realized I’d have to find a cabbie that spoke English because I was sure I couldn’t explain it in Spanish. Eliza probably could have, but I couldn’t, I thought with chagrin.
Though I doubted I’d learn much, I questioned the short, smartly dressed man at the front desk while turning in my key and checking out of the hotel. The man’s thin mustache twitched with a crooked smile as I said good morning. He had an air of mischief about him, as if the situation were some kind of joke.
“Good morning, sir,” he replied with a thick, but confident, accent.
“Did you happen to see my wife leave this morning?”
“Yes, sir. She left very early.”
“Did you happen to note the time?” I asked.
“Perhaps 5:30, sir. The sun had barely risen.” He smiled.
“Did she leave a message for me?”
“No, sir.”
“And did she mention where she was going by any chance?”
“I’m afraid not, sir.” He smiled again.
No real help there, but I hadn’t expected much.
I thanked the man and gave him a very small tip. Probably an insult, really, but he was enjoying my situation way too much.
On my way out onto the already sunbaked street I checked my watch. Eliza had a three-hour head start. Essentially it was hopeless. I knew how much Eliza could accomplish in three hours. If she set her mind to do something, she could be very efficient. She could be in another country or even on another planet by now, I thought. She could have gone south to Nicaragua, west to El Salvador or Guatemala, or straight up to Mars. In my mind there were no limitations on what she could accomplish. Especially if she had her anger with me to fuel her. From experience I knew she could take that and run a marathon with it. For all I know, I thought hopelessly, she could be on a boat to Cuba just to spite me.
Out on the dusty orange street with my suitcase and my pack I suddenly felt lost on my own. At least with Eliza when we were lost, we’d be together so that it always felt a bit like home. I’d hold held her hand and I was confident, her will in conjunction with mine buoyed me up. But now that was gone. It occurred to me I had never traveled much on my own. Surely I had never been out of the States without her for a travel partner before. They say traveling alone is how you truly find yourself. I wondered if that were true. If so maybe it was good that Eliza and I would have this time apart, I thought. Maybe there would be some kind of growth. It seemed to me there hadn’t been any growth for a long time. And it seemed we could use some. That all sounded swell in my head, but I still wanted to find her as soon as possible. She could take care of herself, I knew, but I didn’t think I could enjoy myself without her. I wouldn’t be able to relax. I was a bundle of nerves already, and I felt like I could easily land myself in some kind of hot water.
It was a real stroke of luck that I found Marco. Actually, it might be more accurate to say Marco found me. After I had been aimlessly wandering the streets awhile he almost ran me down in his old, rusty white car. He rolled through an intersection without slowing down, skidded to a halt, and I, too shocked to react, remember looking down to see his front tire about an inch from my flipflopped foot. He only stared at me with a wide smile, looking like an unlit Jack-o-Lantern with a couple teeth missing.
“Hello, hello. Hey, big time. Hey, high roller. You big time high roller, huh? You need a ride? I’m best taxi on dee island. I’m Marco. I drive best! C’mon, let’s go for a ride. I’ll take you all around. I’ll take you all over. We go all around town, hey c’mon.”
Though he had nearly run over my foot, and seemed potentially hazardous in almost every way, I had to admit his English seemed pretty good. Or at least, he seemed to have a bigger vocabulary than all the other cabbies that I had spoken with up to that point. And when I explained my situation to him, Marco seemed to understand immediately and enthusiastically agreed to help.
“We find her, man. We find her no problem. Your old lady. Yeah, man. We get dat bitch!”
I didn’t condone Marco’s language but chalked it up to cultural misunderstanding and let it slide. And aside from that his enthusiasm was positive and infectious. I quickly became confident, and excited, to find my old lady—the old ball and chain, I added as a joke silently to myself. As soon as I pulled the car door shut, Marco sped off down the dirt road, honking his horn at a cluster of brown chickens that were blocking the way. Marco’s quick adjustments on the steering wheel almost made it feel like we were in a go-kart instead of a real car.
Marco chauffeured me around the island at an incredible speed. My life flashed before my eyes a couple of times, but miraculously we didn’t crash, and, maybe even more miraculously, I managed to keep my breakfast down. The first four hotels we checked were a bust. Each time I showed the people at the front desk a picture of Eliza on my phone, and asked ‘Is this woman staying here?’ and ‘Have you seen this woman?’ in the Spanish phrases Marco taught me, but they all shook their heads. After the last I began to lose hope.
“Well, Marco,” I said, feeling almost like he was a pal of mine by now, “maybe it’s for the best. Eliza and I could use some time to cool off. She must have gotten a ferry off the island. She’s probably headed home. Back to the States. It’s likely she’s already at the airport by now.”
“No, no, no,” said Marco, shaking his head. “No ferry today. I know place. One more place. Quiet place. Place at tip of the island. Secret place. We check there. No worry. C’mon, let’s go. Trust Marco.”
I said, sure why not, I’d trust Marco. What did I have to lose? For a moment I hardly cared. I was so tired of being jostled around in the car in the Caribbean summer heat that Marco could have robbed me blind and left me naked on the side of the road and it would have hardly changed my mood or personal outlook. I felt so hot and discouraged that I’d adopted an attitude of near acceptance of just about everything. It seemed neither nothing very good, nor very bad, could possibly happen. Not, at least, until either I found Eliza, or until the temperature cooled off considerably.
For the time being, I put my seatbelt back on and reached up for the handle above the window, my hand’s permanent position while Marco was driving. I was grateful for the luxury of an “oh-shit” handle in an old car on a small island in Central America. Come to think of it, I should’ve counted myself lucky there was even a seatbelt. Even if it was just a lap belt, without the accompanying shoulder strap that saved so many lives.
Marco continued to keep my guts in a knot with the way he covered the poorly maintained dirt roads, weaving around the deep potholes and the odd pieces of metal, stone and livestock. After twenty minutes or so the island narrowed and the sea was visible on either side of the road, sapphire blue, smooth and calm. The road began climbing and the palms grew shorter and developed collars of yellow spikes around their trunks, which to me resembled enlarged versions of necklaces that girls might wear to punk rock shows. I had a feeling we were going farther off the grid than I ever had before. Was there anything more unpredictable than the third world? I wondered. Was there a fourth-world where I could get into even more trouble? Finally, as we neared the end of the road, a small shack came into view.
“Here, here,” said Marco. “Dis dee place. Cheap room for rent. Great paradise view.”
The shack was simply a corrugated steel roof set on four walls of concrete blocks. In the front yard, if you could call the patch of yellow gravel a yard, there was a hammock set between two palm trees and a donkey tied to a stake. If it weren’t for the otherwise beautiful, tropical surroundings and total lack of neighbors, the place would have looked like it belonged in a New Mexico trailer park.
“This is a hotel?” I asked skeptically after Marco brought the car to a stop.
“Yes, yes, hotel,” insisted Marco. “Secret paradise hideaway.”
Marco pronounced this last word carefully, as if it were important, or as if he had only just learned it. Either way it made me consider the word briefly. Was this where people came to hide? Maybe people came here seeking solitude, escape. That may be what Eliza was seeking, but the place was too basic and simple for her. No air conditioning. No room service. It was exactly the type of place Eliza would normally hate. But in order to get away from me, I decided, she would probably suck up her distaste and rough it for awhile. It occurred to me then that the fight might be more serious than I initially thought.
I gave Marco some money and asked him to wait while I went to question the proprietor of the shack, if there was one. As I approached I half expected to find nothing but dead animal carcasses with flies buzzing. The smell of the donkey gave me the feeling I was entering a small zoo. I stepped into the open doorway cautiously and found a darkly-tanned, potbellied man sitting in a recliner on an ochre colored oval rug. He was drinking a can of beer and watching a soccer match on an old, cracked TV set hanging on the wall. A small green lizard scurried down from the wooden door frame just before I knocked.
“Pardon me,” I said. “Sorry to bother you. Do you speak English?”
The man lazily turned his head and met my gaze with glazed over, yellow eyes.
“No, I don’t speak any English,” he said effortlessly, with what seemed like a Texas drawl.
Shocked to find a man speaking fluent English on this remote corner of the island, I fumbled for what to say next.
“I—I’m looking for my wife,” I said. “She’s my height, with short blond hair, thin, attractive. Have you seen her?”
The man took a long drink from his beer. In no hurry at all to answer me, he wiped his mouth and thick, black mustache with his wrist and the back of his hand in one, slow, lackadaisical motion.
“She staying here,” said the man, casually. “She pay for dinner tonight, one night in hammock, and breakfast tomorrow.”
I was slightly flummoxed as I found what the man said hard to believe. Spending the night in a hammock wasn’t at all like Eliza. She hadn’t even wanted to come to the island at all for lack of a proper resort.
“Is there mosquito netting for the hammock?” I asked.
“No need,” said the man. “The sea breeze take care of the mosquito.”
I felt certain the man knew correct grammar and that he was simply too lazy to use it. Perhaps it was the heat, I thought. I imagined prolonged exposure to this type of heat could drive people to act in all sorts of strange ways. Maybe it’s what made Marco drive crazy, and maybe it even contributed to making Eliza leave. Anyway, I doubted what the man had said about the mosquitoes, but was in no mood to argue. That wasn’t the reason I was there.
“Where is my wife now?”
The man belched, turned his attention back to the soccer match, and said, “She went down to the beach.”
Out front the donkey hee-hawed as I walked past and made me jump. Marco pointed and laughed. I gave Marco more money, took his cell number down and sent him on his way. I watched his car go bouncing down the road, kicking up dust as he sped away. I was almost sorry to say goodbye so soon. In hindsight I was glad Marco hadn’t robbed me and left me stranded. It was much easier this way, and it saved a lot of time. But for some reason the thought of Marco robbing me made me smile.
I spoke to the man in the shack again and, for a nominal fee, arranged to leave my suitcase there along with my wife’s. He probably charged me the same, if not more, than he had charged my wife for the night, but I didn’t care to squabble. Maybe it was a bad American attitude, but I hoped I could buy friends in the hard-scrabble places of the world.
Behind the shack there was a narrow trail through the jungle that zigzagged back and forth down a steep slope to the sea. The jungle was dense and humid and I immediately began sweating profusely. The sweat dripped down into my eyes, off the tip of my nose, from my armpits down my flanks, the crack of my ass, you name it! I’d been in steam rooms that were cooler! But just as I was about to lose it the trees and underbrush opened up to a narrow beach, fifty yards long, with a nice, cooling sea breeze.
It was a beautiful, picturesque beach, but Eliza was nowhere to be seen. I looked up the beach, I looked down the beach, I looked in the water—there wasn’t a soul in sight. If I’d been looking for a private island paradise, it would have been an ideal location, but I wasn’t. If Eliza had been standing by my side, I’d have been perfectly content, but she wasn’t. I didn’t know what to do next. I felt keenly just how far away from home I was. Anything familiar, anything recognizable, was a thousand miles off in the distance. Realizing this gave me a sinking feeling in my chest.
I made my way to the water to cool off and think. On the walk over the fine, shifting sand I looked out into the sea. A few hundred yards off the beach there was a tiny island, a large rock really, with a clump of small trees, protruding up out of the now aqua blue water. I wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but then, down by the water’s edge, I spotted Eliza’s purse, sandals, sunglasses and towel.
At first I puzzled over Eliza’s things. Separated from her body the objects looked like clues to a mystery I couldn’t hope to solve. The longer I looked the more surreal the situation appeared. But when I finally shook my brain into focus, I was able to put two and two together. With nothing else to go on, I concluded that Eliza must have swum there, to the tiny island, leaving her things behind, intentionally or unintentionally, like breadcrumbs for me to find. It was the only logical explanation. More and more the actions of my wife of seven years were surprising me. More and more they were giving me goosebumps.
After giving it some thought, I saw no other option but to follow Eliza out to the island. But before doing so, I had to swallow no small amount of anxiety. I was no great adventurer. The unknown held no allure for me. I preferred a concrete, visible take on the world where reason and convenience reigned. This was something my wife and I had in common, or so I’d always thought. Now I was beginning to question Eliza’s motives for every little action. It seemed she was going against all her normal sensibilities. And that’s what was worrying me most. Was she changing and leaving me behind? If so what did that mean for me? I wondered. The future at this moment seemed as uncertain as the temperamental Caribbean weather. I felt totally underprepared for what might lay ahead.
I left my pack, shirt, flipflops, and sunglasses together with Eliza’s things and waded into the warm water. I walked slowly at first. Schools of small yellow and blue fish darted away from the two poles of my legs. The depth remained shallow and I was able to walk a long way. When it finally did become deeper there was reef that hurt my feet, so I floated on my back and gently propelled myself along with my arms, gazing up at the sky, which was clear and blue and seemed as thin as a simple watercolor painting.
Swimming this lazy backstroke made the journey take a long time, but I was eventually clamoring up the rocks of the tiny island. The first thing I noticed was how green everything was. The island hadn’t seemed so alive from the distance, but now I realized everything everywhere around me was lush, like some kind of botanical garden. Mangroves grew up from in between the black rocks and, higher up, several different types of small trees and shrubs grew. Everywhere I looked was green, green, green with life.
As I started out, the branches of the mangroves made good handholds for when navigating the trickier parts of the terrain, or when jumping from rock to rock. In a short period of time, though making my way relatively slowly, as I was barefoot, I had skirted the entire island. The first time around I had stayed by the water’s edge and saw no signs of Eliza. I’d called out her name two dozen times or so, always without answer. In fact, there had only been an eerie silence since I had pulled myself out of the water and up onto the black rocks. An eerie, unbroken silence that creeped me out somewhat.
For some reason I’d had some hesitance about climbing deeper into the center of the island, but now I saw there was no avoiding it. I had to be thorough in my search for Eliza, otherwise there was no point in having gone looking in the first place. Searching for your wife in the third-world wasn’t something you half-assed, I decided. Besides, I reasoned that surely there could be no danger lurking on such a small island. I imagined any threat would have to be miniature, as the island itself was. Or at least, that was my hope.
I used the branch of a mangrove tree and some type of purple vine to shimmy up a rockface onto higher ground, and after that the climbing was all very easy. The black, damp earth was soft on my feet and the incline leveled out after awhile, which made for an almost, pleasant hike. Again I felt that, had Eliza been by my side, I would’ve had nothing at all to complain about. The small green island would have been a perfectly acceptable vacation destination. Great for a short hike and a picnic.
Though it was a clear day the sun’s rays couldn’t cut through the canopy of lush green trees overhead, so it was like walking underneath a dark storm cloud. I continued to call out Eliza’s name but my voice grew lower and softer as I lost confidence. I began to worry that something terrible had happened to Eliza, or even worse, something bad was happening that she herself was a party to. I don’t know what made me think that, but I had a bad feeling. I thought again of the idea of a fourth world, and was uneasy, the sinking feeling in my chest returning in waves.
The closer to the center of the island I got, the denser the undergrowth became. Before long I had to kick and tear my way through the plants to continue on my way. It was a terrible struggle and I more than once thought of giving up, swimming back to the big island, having a drink in the hammock in front of the potbellied man’s shack, sleeping there even, with or without mosquito netting, but the thought of Eliza in trouble kept me going. Seven years of marriage isn’t something you just throw away because it gets difficult. You have to make up after stupid fights. You have to push through the jungle, so to speak. Kicking and tearing. Whatever it takes. To coin a phrase, I hadn’t come this far to only come this far.
Just as I was about to drop down and rest, or go to sleep, or pass out, I came to a clearing. It was a large, circular clearing that was too perfectly round not to have been manmade. Around the circumference there were lamps on tall iron lampposts lighting the space. I looked to the center of the circle and there, sitting in a pool of clear, steaming water, looking perfectly contented, was Eliza. I was stunned. I think my jaw actually dropped. There was my wife, her short blonde hair wet and matted down over her ears, sitting calmly, all alone, in some sort of hot spring, on a tiny island in the middle of nowhere, and she, thinking herself unseen, was smiling. Smiling, it seemed, only to herself. It was perfectly strange. I couldn’t account for it. But I didn’t care. I was just happy I’d found her.
I approached the steaming pool slowly, trying to get a sense if my wife was still mad. As soon as I came into her line of view and she laid her eyes on me I could see all had been forgiven. With graceful fingers she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
“You found me,” she said, the same surreal smile on her lips.
“It would seem so,” I said.
“Took you long enough.”
Just then a lone bird cried out from the canopy above. And, as Eliza’s smile caused one to spread across my face too, its melancholic song echoed through the jungle.
Looking back on it now, we refer to it as our “hide-and-seek vacation.” Now we even try to recreate it by staging fake fights and going our separate ways in strange places. We take turns searching for each other. On occasion we’ve stayed apart for days at a time… Once in Eastern Europe and then once more in South America. It’s always such a relief when we finally find each other. It’s a feeling that’s worth trying to recapture. It does something for our marriage that seems to be working. We both get to travel alone some, and then, at the end, we get to find what we’re looking for. What more could you want out of a vacation?
