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I RODE THE ELEVATOR back up to my room, locked the door, and took my fourth or fifth shower of the day (I’d lost track). Emma’s big race was Saturday morning. I wasn’t actually planning to attend in person. If I wanted to catch Emma and her crew before they left, I’d have to be down at the water before dawn. The dark beach would be packed with team supporters and tourists, and, of course, plenty of little kids careening through the crowd. There would be a live Jawaiian band, or a noisy DJ setup. After their registration and last-minute checks, the paddlers would pile into their various canoes and stroke out to sea. Emma’s canoe and dozens of others like it would disappear over the horizon before the sun was even up.
The women’s crews would leave the bay, paddle the tough eighteen miles down the coast, and disembark. The women would get out and the men’s teams would climb into the same canoes and paddle back up the coast, where they would arrive at the starting point many grueling hours later. A spectator on the beach wouldn’t see anything after the canoes sped off. I’d be staring out at the empty blue water.
Emma had told me all of this on the drive over. She had assured me that my presence was not required at the start of the race, so long as I was available to help celebrate afterward. So it was well past sunrise when the hotel phone jangled me out of a deep sleep. I picked up the receiver and for a few moments, I heard big bore motorcycle engines rumbling in the background.
Then Davison's voice came over the line. Not exactly the wake-up call I would have chosen.
“Eh, Aunty. Dad wants to know if you wanna have breakfast with us.”
"Oh, that's very nice of him to ask. May I speak to your father?"
"He's driving."
"What? It's only...” I squinted at the digital clock on the side table. “Ten-thirty in the morning. Where are you?"
"We're coming back to the hotel. We went fishing already."
"Breakfast with both of you sounds lovely,” I said, “but I'm not quite awake yet.”
The part about not being awake was true.
"Come on Aunty, we can get any kine breakfast. What you like grind?”
I heard Donnie in the background: “Speak English!”
I didn’t care whether Davison was using Standard English or Pidgin. He could have spoken Sanskrit for all I cared. I was not going to endure another meal with him.
“I don't want you to have to wait for me. You two go ahead. Tell your dad thanks anyway."
I eventually woke up for good, got dressed, and went out to wander up and down the main beachfront road. I poked around the shops, but I didn’t buy anything. Crystal jewelry and floaty batik dresses weren’t really my style, and I didn’t need any bargain souvenir t-shirts. When I had exhausted the local shopping possibilities, I parked myself in an outdoor seat at a coffee shop. Every so often a pack of motorcycles would roar by, drowning out the already-noisy traffic.
Equipped with a tall café Americano, a view of the ocean, and a little table all to myself, I passed the time typing online faculty reviews into my phone. The one I left for Pat referred to an inside joke that would seem impossibly tasteless if I tried to explain it. My reference to Emma’s Dalmatian-puppy lab coat, on the other hand, was written for a general audience. I left an absurdly fawning review for myself, and another one right after it complaining about my heavy workload and unrealistically high expectations. All of these evaluations were accompanied by the highest possible numeric scores.
The Student Retention Office uses only the numeric ratings, not the qualitative reviews. So when Pat gives me a straight five out of five rating, and writes “Professor Barda sleeps in a coffin and awakens at blackest night to gorge on the blood of innocents,” that still works in my favor.
As the sun sank to the point where it was aiming right at my eyes, Emma called. I stood and started collecting my things as I spoke to her. She refused to tell me how her crew had done in the race, insisting I come to her room to get the news in person. I assumed it must be good; she sounded excited. It only took me a few minutes to hurry back to the hotel and find her room on the second floor.
Emma was over by the window, busy on her computer. I almost tripped over her husband Yoshi, who was parked right in the middle of the floor at the foot of the bed, eyes fixed on his own laptop screen. The bedspread was piled on the floor around him and draped over his shoulders. He was eating spicy tortilla chips out of the bag, dipping each one into an open jar of mayonnaise.
“Hey, Yoshi,” I greeted him, “did you paddle too?”
He slowly placed his hands over his headphones and pushed them back to expose his ears. I noticed his eyes were red. I repeated the question.
“Oh, hey Molly. No, not today. I just hung out here. I’m doing the double-hull race tomorrow, though.”
“Oh, great!” I enthused, as if I knew what a double-hull race was. Yoshi plugged himself back in and resumed watching the brightly-colored cartoon ponies frolicking on his laptop screen. I watched him wipe his mayonnaise-slick fingers on the bedspread.
“Hey, Molly!” Emma called.
“Hey! How’d you do?” I stepped over Yoshi and his bedspread fortress and plumped down into the big hotel easy chair behind Emma.
“We came in eighteenth in our age group,” she said.
“So do you get a prize?” I asked. “A tiara? A golden paddle?”
“We got t-shirts. We hadda buy ‘em, though.”
“So coming in eighteenth is good?”
“Well, it’s not as good as coming in first,” she admitted. “But it’s an eighteen-mile race, so we decided eighteenth is good luck. It was awesome, Molly!”
“Great. I’m glad you had a fun time.”
“I think even you would have liked it.”
“Seriously?”
I imagined the combined effects of eighteen miles of repetitive motion, saltwater-drenched swim shorts, and the canoe’s hard, impossibly narrow seat. I could almost feel the blisters.
“Right at the start,” Emma said, “we saw two sea turtles swimming underneath us. And about halfway down there were dolphins, right alongside us and jumping out of the water. They were so close to us, like they—oh right, I forgot. You don’t like dolphins.”
“I used to like them just fine, until Betty Jackson filled me in on their, you know, behavior.”
“Yeah, I know. Frat boys of the sea. Anyway, we did pretty good considering we went iron.”
“What does that mean, you went iron?”
“Oh! Sorry, Molly, I thought everyone knew what it means.”
“I don’t know what it means.”
“So in a long race like this, a lot of the crews have an escort boat, yeah? There are nine people on the crew, but only six at a time. You switch out, and everyone gets a chance to rest in the escort boat for twenty minutes out of every hour. But going iron means you only get six in your crew and everyone paddles the whole time.”
“Emma, are you telling me you could have had three more paddlers in the race?”