The Punishment
for Felonies in Belize

His 7 AM flight from Boston had been canceled. More abandoned than canceled, he thought, sprinting at top speed through Miami International Airport. Whenever he eased the tension in his arm, a small suitcase thumped against his hip. He glanced at the long vein running down the center of his upper arm. Bulging and reddened, the bicep strained against the sleeve of his T-shirt. Not bad, he thought. Never too rushed to be vain! He remembered the sick feeling in his stomach when the co-pilot of his doomed flight had made the first announcement. After a half-hour had passed, most of the passengers had deplaned, choosing to wait for further news in the concourse. Fuming, Randall remained in his seat, trying to read the Boston Globe. Some passengers strolled the aisles, while others took down their carry-on luggage and rearranged the contents. Does anyone but me even pretend to notice size restrictions anymore? Randall wondered, noticing suitcases and backpacks the size of steamer trunks.

After a second interval, another airline employee joined the plane’s crew. Heavy but trim, the woman’s blonde hair fell smoothly to the shoulders, curving inward at the bottom toward the neck. A dark suit with a gold pin denoted status higher than that of an ordinary flight attendant. Her function became apparent not long after he realized that she had no hard information to dispense. She chatted with passengers still attached glumly to their assigned seats. She laughed in the galley with the attendants. She kept up morale. A professional soother, Randall thought.

As Randall observed her at work, he thought of Margey. He felt certain that by this time, while he sat miserable and stalled on a tarmac, Margey was safely soaring from Chicago to Miami. Margey thrived on blind luck. Probably her plane from O’Hare had been delayed by mere minutes—just long enough for her to arrive late and hustle aboard. Margey trusted planes and trains to depart behind schedule. Whenever he travelled with her, it seemed as though they were linked together by an electromagnetism of good and bad fortune, he at the negative pole and Margey at the positive. It never occurred to her that she was sucking up an unfair share of the world’s limited supply of good luck.

When the soother reached him, he had his story prepared. His friend would be looking for him, he explained. His flight from Miami was the last one of the day for Belize City. If Margey went from Belize City to the islands without him, he would have no way of knowing where to look for her. The soother listened to his story closely, agreeing that flying to and from Belize was problematical. Randall listened to her bland consolations with genuine interest, thinking of smart, efficient blondes in Hitchcock movies. Tippi Hedren and Eva Marie Saint. If the soother were his travelling companion, she would be an invisible force field repelling bolts of bad luck. When he told her he might be able to catch a flight from Miami to Belize on Take-a-Chance-Airlines, she raised her eyebrows.

“‘Take-a-Chance’—?” Putting one hand to a string of small pearls.

“You know, ‘TACA.’ ‘Take-a-Chance Airlines.’ Flies between Miami and Belize and Guatemala and the Yucatan. It’s the only company other than yours that flies to Belize from the U.S. Someone told me all you insiders call it ‘Take-a-Chance Airlines.’” The final comment was a lie; he had made up the nickname beforehand.

She leaned her head to one side, the hair curve slipping across her shoulder. “No comment!” she laughed musically. “No comment at all!”

I want this woman with me, Randall thought. Margey never appreciates my wit.

Flushed and sweating, his right arm almost numb, he bore down on the TACA boarding gate right at the minute that the plane was scheduled to take off. Sliding to a stop, he thrust the ticket forward, then listened as an agent explained to him that he could not enter because the plane carried only sufficient food for the passengers already aboard. The novelty of this latest impediment did not escape his admiration. Catching his breath, he wiped sweat from his brow, then shook the drops from his fingertips with a neat wrist snap.

“Gentlemen,” he saluted them, “this morning I awoke at 4 AM in Bangor, a city just south of the North Pole. I have sprinted through two airports, this miserable suitcase swinging from the end of my arm like a leaden semaphore card. Regard that bicep, please. My shins feel like cracked cedar shingles. I ate mightily on my flight here, for which I ran through two terminals in Boston. I therefore shall consume nothing on your aircraft. Usher me to your nearest seat.”

The airport in Belize City made him think of bus stations in old movies. The doors to the restrooms were of scarred wood. Benches that belonged in city parks sprawled across the small waiting area. He discovered Margey talking to a travel agent. Dressed in canvas shorts and a black blouse, her hair long and thick, as she always wore it. As he came up beside her, she turned her head, said hello as though he had been there all along, then continued talking with the young man behind the desk. He put one arm around her shoulders and bent his head into her brown hair.

“Good to see you, too, Margey dear,” he said.

On their Tropic Air flight out to San Juan, the largest of the Belizean cayes, he asked her if she had tried, when she arrived in Miami, to find out why he was not there. “I meant to go down to the ticket counter and ask someone about your flight,” she said, “but my mother would have killed me if I left the country again without calling her, and when I was done talking to her it was almost time to board my plane. I figured that whatever had happened to you, I should keep heading for Belize.”

“What if my car had been hit by a big moose in Maine?” he asked. She laughed, but he tried to sound earnest. “I’m serious,” he said. “Those beasts are absolutely suicidal this winter.”

“Oh, come on,” she chided. “I knew it was just a late flight or something. You always show up.”

“But what if I hadn’t made it to Belize today?” he continued. “Would you have still gone to the cayes without me? How would I have found you there? We only just made our hotel reservations now.”

“Oh, we would have hooked up,” she answered. “I don’t think there’s much to the place.” She looked out the window just as the plane dipped sharply. The ruffled sheet of aquamarine sea seemed only inches away. “I don’t really like small planes, you know.” She shifted away from the window a few inches—closer to him, but not so close that their bodies touched. “Not since that nightmare plane ride in Nepal.”

Feeling thwarted, he dropped the subject. “Did you bring any shampoo?” he asked, thinking of essential items in the luggage that he hoped was following him from Boston to Belize.

“No,” she answered. “Actually, I didn’t bring anything I thought I could borrow from you, since I had to drag so much stuff with me for my two weeks in Guatemala after you leave.”

He stretched his legs out into the aisle, laughing. “If that includes money, you better hope my suitcase finds me. Because that’s where all my travelers cheques are.”

Margey proved to be right: there wasn’t much to San Juan. Through the section of the island populated by tourists ran a narrow dirt road, dissolving into jungle at one end. In the other direction lay the island’s expensive hotels, their stucco facades facing the ocean across outdoor restaurants and neat rows of chaise lounges. But Randall and Margey stayed at Ruby’s Ocean Breeze Hotel, a cheap place with no hot water most of the day. They snorkeled near the coral reef, went scuba diving, and Randall took wind-sailing lessons while Margey lay in the sun. In the long afternoons, they would drift back to Ruby’s, buy bottles of Belizean beer at a tiny dirt-floored store, then stroll down the road, drinking. One afternoon Ruby herself, a short, heavy woman, came running toward them. Raised high in both her hands, like a treasure, was Randall’s missing suitcase.

“They just brought it from the airport,” she gasped. “I thought you might need something from it, so I’m bringing it you right now.” She dropped the suitcase in the dirt. Randall and Margey held her up while she caught her breath, all laughing.

One afternoon after a dive, they sat on a palm-thatched patio eating citrus and conch cocktails. Margey talked about her job and Randall reminisced about hiking the Appalachian trail with her a year ago. He avoided referring to two days when he carried Margey’s pack on top of his own because she had sunburned her back. Then Margey described her first date with a man in Chicago.

“What timing,” Randall said. “Did you tell him you were going to Belize with a male friend?”

“Sure,” she answered. “I told him we’ve been friends since grad school. That you’re harmless.” Her last word made him set down his spoon abruptly and look away. The sun was still high in the sky, the vast sea a smooth glass beyond low waves breaking on the sand.

“You make me sound like an old dog, Margey.” He kept his voice low, but his face suddenly was burning in the hard sunlight.

“Oh, come on.” She poked his arm with her fork. “You know what I meant.”

He knew he should change the subject, how she would react if he continued, but he spoke quickly.

“When I found you in the airport on the mainland, you barely noticed I was there. You kept talking with that travel agent for another five minutes before you even looked at me.”

“Oh blast it,” she muttered, looking down at her food. “You always do this at least once. Did you want me to hurl myself into your arms?”

Randall suddenly rose to his feet. For a moment, the flimsy plastic chair stuck to his bare legs, then it fell onto the planks of wood. They both stared down at it until the clattering stopped. When they faced each other again, her expression seemed defiant, impatient for his criticism. “As though that’s the only alternative to taking me for granted,” he whispered, trying to keep his voice calm. He wished he had said nothing, but more words trembled out of his mouth. “What a cheap answer that was, Margey. You always do that.” Then he stalked away, shaking all over. He paused where the patio ended, hoping she might call after him, but he knew she would not. Walking away toward the surf, he stole a look back. She was finishing her cocktail, talking to a waiter as he righted the chair. Randall heard him laugh in response to something Margey said.

That night he avoided her. Before she returned to their room, he showered and left again, eating dinner alone at a restaurant and disco that she had found unappealing. He had two drinks during his meal, then several more when he began talking with a group of commercial travel agents from Nashville. Soon he was dancing with one of the agents, a woman who spoke in a drawl so long that he lost track of her sentences before they ended. The dance floor was open to the night air, but, as the bar filled, the coolness of sea breezes was overpowered by a sweaty smell. Even in a muscle shirt and gym shorts, Randall felt oily, flushed. He drank as he danced, sloshing a gin and tonic on his feet. He tried to tell his partner that he felt out of place in the Caribbean, that he usually avoided expensive playgrounds for white American tourists. But she only smiled back at him, not hearing his words. When a sentimental ballad began to play, she came closer, swaying against him until he put his arms around her. She asked him if he had come to Belize all by himself.

“I’m with Margey, so yeah,” he answered, shouting above the music.

“Who’s Margey?” she asked, sliding one hand up and down his back.

“This platonic friend who thinks I was gelded after she dumped me eleven years ago. Since then, I’ve been getting her ass out of scrapes all over the states and Europe. She’s a disaster-magnet, but she’s a doctor, and she’s traveled more than I have, so she thinks she knows more about the world than I do.”

“And what are you?” Her voice was high and sweet. She slipped one hand through the armhole of his loose shirt and pressed it against his side.

“A doctor.” He laughed in a big spurt, spilling more of his drink. An REM song began blaring through the room and the dance floor suddenly shook with pounding feet. “I’m a real doctor, actually,” he yelled. “A Ph.D. Margey’s an organ technician. She does angioplasty. Would you want a balloon in your aorta? The treatment’s only good for a few years, anyhow, then the balloon people fall over dead like redwoods. I write articles. The titles alone would curl your hair. Don’t ask.”

Her face remained blank through his banter. “What are you doing with this Margey person if she’s so bad?” she finally asked. “I’d say you ought to find someone who appreciates you.”

“You are so right, ma’am,” he answered in a solemn drawl. “Look at that bicep. Enough to make anyone feel safe, right?” He flexed his right arm for her. “You think Margey would ever say it looks nice? Not my Margey. I could paint my face purple and she wouldn’t notice.”

She opened her mouth to answer, but he raised his arm, cuing her to spin. Then he dropped her hand and turned away, still dancing. Suddenly he thought of Margey sleeping alone in their room. Why could he not accept her as she was? Even though she never showed him any appreciation or affection, he knew she honestly tolerated the fussy habits he had developed through years of living alone. His own acceptance of her weaknesses, he admitted, was partly faked. He tried to conceal his frequent annoyance with jokes, had even trained himself to avoid making accidental references to her perpetual disorganization. The previous summer, he had repressed so much discontent that he finished a trip with a case of indigestion that lasted weeks into the fall semester.

They had toured the west coast of Ireland together. On their third day, they left Galway in a rented car, the bicycles they had brought with them from the states strapped to a carrier. A few miles after it was too late to turn back, she found that her change purse was missing. The cash only amounted to a few punts and some change, but the purse contained her keys to a flat in Paris.

“Damn, damn, damn,” she yelled. She was on her knees in the passenger seat of the tiny Uno, tossing around bags in the back seat.

“Please turn around and put your harness back on, Margey,” he said, surveying the road as though it were a minefield. “I haven’t driven on the wrong side of the road in a long time. We can search your bags when we stop.”

“I already lost one set of keys to Danielle’s apartment before I took the ferry here from France,” she told him, turning around and flopping into her seat, throwing back her hair. “It costs a fortune to have keys made in Paris, you know. Danielle may not be there when I get back, in which case I won’t have a place to stay. And if she is there, she’ll think I’m a total scatterbrain.”

He allowed the reverberations of her last word to subside before he spoke again. “As Dan Rather used to say before CBS told him to cut the crap, Margey: ‘Courage.’” She stared through the windscreen, ignoring him. “We know the only two places in Galway where you could have left the purse, right? If we don’t find it when we get back, maybe you can call Danielle and arrange something.”

But she refused to be comforted. “Look at those sheep sleeping right in the road,” he said, nudging her with his elbow. “Those fluorescent stripes make them look like harper seals saved by Greenpeace people. Move, you sheep,” he hollered out the window. “American at the wheel!”

Back in Galway three days later, they drove straight to the shop where they had rented the bicycle carrier. When they failed to find the purse, Margey sighed deeply and walked out the door.

“The purse will be at the airport,” he consoled her. “I saw it in a dream last night, right after I heard the banshee wailing. Courage.”

Margey went off to do some laundry for their long bike trip to Clifden the next day. Left alone, Randall wrestled his bicycle into the car, then drove fifteen miles to the Galway airport. After parking the car and leaving the keys in a drop box, he began searching for the purse. The small terminal was deserted, the counters and stalls all closed and empty. But at a bar in the far corner two older men were drinking beer and smoking pipes. Feeling self-conscious in his tight biking tunic and a blue bandanna, Randall squelched his aversion to asking strangers for directions or help. But when he asked the men about a lost and found, they only turned and stared at him, silent, their faces wrinkled and red like two old fists.

When he finally left the airport an hour later, he discovered that his front tire was flat as paper. He had brought extra tubes and a flexible spare tire to Ireland, but they were packed in the gear already dropped off at their B and B. He pumped up the tire, but the pressure held for less than a kilometer. Dusk gathered and the drizzle grew to a steady rain as he dogged along, stopping every few minutes to inflate the tire again. Once he stopped to get his windbreaker out of his knapsack, but then remembered that Margey was wearing it. Just before full dark, his arms and face scarlet from the cold, he found a bike shop on the outskirts of Galway.

A young mechanic eyed the tire gravely, an unlit cigarette hanging from his lips. “Roikt wit dorns,” he finally announced.

“Exactly,” Randall answered, his mind racing through possible translations. When he finally hit on ‘raked with thorns,’ the flat tire suddenly made perfect sense. “You’re absolutely right,” he told the boy. “We had our bikes on the back of a car, and one night my friend backed the car into a hedge.”

They had been near Sligo, searching for a farmhouse B and B on an unpaved lane. When they agreed they were lost, Margey stopped to turn the car around. As he was urging her to be careful, both rear tires slipped into a gully. After a few tense words, he had gone groping into the black night, stepping blindly into the ditch and landing on his knees in icy water. Working by touch, he braced both his legs against a tree, put his back against the car, and began heaving. Between grunts, he yelled at Margey not to let the car roll backward. He imagined both his legs with compound fractures, hoping she was better at setting splints than making three-point turns. Getting away with tires only roikt wit dorns was probably lucky.

A red-haired teenager with a dry, efficient manner, the mechanic handed Randall an old sweater to wear, then locked up the shop. They worked together on the bike, first hunting up a German-made tube that would fit Randall’s bike, then ripping thorns from the tire with pliers. When Randall finally reached city centre over an hour later, he found a note from Margey tacked on a bulletin board in the launderette. She had gone shopping. The note told him to meet her at a pub down the road. At the bottom of the note, she had added “Bring the garbage bag with the clean clothes under the counter.”

“Bloody hell,” he bellowed, striding up to her table and throwing down the bag. “Unhand that Guinness, wench! I’m soaked, filthy, greasy, tired—”

“Any luck with the change purse?” she asked, sliding her beer across the table toward him.

He began to reach into a pocket for the purse, but the guarded optimism in her face abruptly changed his mind. “Affable chaps at the bar in the airport said ‘no’ when I asked them if they knew of a lost and found—I mean the place for ‘left luggage.’” He finished off her beer. “Get me another!” he barked, banging the glass down. “‘No’ is all they said. Fortunately, a cleaning woman appeared who was more articulate. We looked behind counters, opened cabinets, hustled and bustled and searched the whole damn place. The catatonic men kept staring at me, whispering to each other. The woman and I found no change purse.”

She dropped her head in her hands, shaking her long hair. “Why do I keep losing things?” she moaned.

“A question often asked, Margey, but courage. The only other person I could find was a mechanic working on a helicopter on the landing field. It seemed ridiculous to ask him for help, but I figured I had already lost every ounce of self-respect, so what did I have to lose? I stamped across the tarmac with iron resolve, yelling ‘Hey, you’!” I didn’t want him to ignore me the way the men at the bar had done, you see.”

“And?” She looked up, all of her face but the eyes covered by her hands.

“Your eerie good luck has held true. The purse was in a hangar, for unknown reasons. Keys and even money intact.” He tossed the black bag on the table. Her face lit up as though it were the apple thrown by Discordia before the three vain goddesses. Which one would Margey be, he wondered? Certainly not Aphrodite. And Hera seemed too cold and willful even for Margey. Ah, he thought. Athena. Skillful, unemotional. Wise with a man’s knowledge. Of course.

“Are the keys really there?” she cried, reaching for the purse.

“Of course,” he answered, trying to sound indignant. He was shivering all over with cold and excitement, the sudden pulse of alcohol through his veins. Something about her happiness made him feel weak. “You know I return with my sword or on it.”

In the bathroom, he cleaned up and changed into jeans and a sweater that Margey had washed for him. After more beer and a hot dinner, he asked her the question he thought was too obvious to remain unspoken. “Didn’t you wonder where the hell I was all that time, Margey? When I caught up with you here, you acted as though I were right on time.”

She shrugged, content and slightly drunk, holding the purse. “Figured you stopped to look at something,” she answered. “What did happen, anyway?”

Still thinking of Margey’s befuddled expression the previous summer, he felt himself grabbed by the shoulder, then spinning. With a smile, his dancing partner pulled him around to face her, wrapping her fingers firmly around the muscle he had displayed. She moved closer, making him put his arms around her waist. As he looked into her bright eyes, the music died and the floor stopped shaking. With a slow jolt, the swaying world righted itself into hard angles and smooth planes. He looked at the gin and tonic in his hand, knowing that if he ordered another drink, he would not stop until his words were slurred, until he was melancholy and sullen. He looked at the woman as though she were behind glass, wondering if he could spend the night with her. But what would he say to Margey? He saw himself, fresh from having sex with a stranger, encountering her in the morning. Suddenly, he realized that if he went to this woman’s room, he would betray some quality in his friendship with Margey. He was too drunk to know what this quality might be, but he felt a need to protect it.

He said good-bye to the woman as neatly as possible, trying not to sound abrupt, then left the bar. Wanting to strip the bar’s music and smoke from his skin, he jerked off his shirt, shivering as the night air closed around him like the leaf of a jungle plant curling around an insect. He walked with his face turned up, inhaling the cool rhythm of the ocean breezes. Far above him, palm trees hurled their heads back and forth. The black ocean on his right was watchful, impassive, showered with light from a bone-white moon. When he reached Ruby’s, he fell asleep in a chaise lounge on the beach, the ocean pounding toward him like black stallions in his dreams.

The next morning, he found Margey eating breakfast at the restaurant next to Ruby’s. “Someone looks green under his tan and all those new muscles,” she said. “Too much medicine last night?”

He squeezed her shoulder as he passed behind her chair. “I didn’t really drink that much, but it hit me hard. Must be all the pressure changes from diving so much. Any coffee?” He had showered quickly when he woke up and found their room empty, but he was still unshaved, hands shaky.

“I saw you on the beach when I came over here. Why didn’t you come back to the room?” She watched him drink two full glasses of water. “It’s too cold here at night to sleep on the beach.”

“Hope there’s no exotic amoebae in there,” he said, setting down the water and switching to coffee. “I wasn’t moving too steadily last night, Margey dear, and I didn’t want to wake you up. Seemed like the least I could do after causing an argument and ruining our day.”

“I was awake. And don’t be so quick to apologize, Randall. You had a point.”

“I did?” He looked up from the menu. She was observing him silently, her expression unreadable. He wanted her to say more, perhaps to admit that he had good reasons to feel neglected by her. But a sudden blast from a car horn made them both jump. Out in the street, a flatbed truck was rolling down the road, loaded with children from the island’s elementary school. Sitting on the dusty boards, young girls were dressed in stiff cotton dresses of white and tangerine and blue. Bunny ears cut from construction paper swayed above their heads, a blur of lemon color. The children waved their arms and shouted, blowing on whistles and throwing confetti in the air.

“Easter!” Margey and Randall exclaimed to each other. “Come on,” Margey said, pulling at his arm, “they want to make a parade.”

But Randall hung back, still wanting to talk. Before he ran after her, he watched Margey talking with the children. One of them gave her a pair of ears to wear, while another reached out her arms. Margey plucked her off the truck, swinging her high in the air, both of them laughing. Randall watched Margey’s long, brown arms, her breasts lifted upward, tight against a yellow silk shirt.

After the parade, they returned with the children to their school, where a teacher asked them to talk to her students about life in America. Later, Margey sat on the beach writing postcards while Randall took his final wind-surfing lesson. He tacked back and forth in long graceful sweeps, shifting his weight at just the right moments, keeping his back arched and tense. As his muscles hardened, he felt his lingering hangover break into a crystal lucidity. He felt powerful, attractive. He called out for Margey to watch him when he dipped close to shore, but she never looked up from her work.

When his lesson ended, they went to their room and began packing. “Tell me again why we’re going to Caye Caulker,” Randall said. “Is it because you want to smoke dope with all those Rastafarians?”

“Damn and double damn,” Margey muttered behind him. “I can’t find La Ruta Maya.”

Not again, he thought. He turned to look at her side of the room. Clothing and books were strewn about, as they had been since their first day. “Is this book terribly important?” he asked, knowing that it would be.

“It has a good section on Guatemala,” she answered. “And I wrote something in the margin that I absolutely need, the phone number of some people who might put me up for a few days until I get settled.” Sitting on the floor, she frowned viciously at the piles of debris around her. “I hate losing things!”

Randall sighed and sat down on his bed. He felt well-rehearsed for this moment. “Calm down,” he said. “Let’s try to figure out the last time you saw the book.”

He awoke well before dawn the next morning, a half-moon washing the room with pale, eerie light. Feeling like a spirit, he slipped from between the sheets. He reached under his bed for a sweater and a flashlight, then crossed the room and opened the door noiselessly. In her own bed, Margey was sleeping easily, her breathing deep and even. She always wore a T-shirt and gym shorts to bed when they shared a room, an androgynous uniform identical to his. But the shirt had twisted to expose a narrow strip of her bare stomach above the edge of the bed sheet. He stared at the spot until he saw the rhythm of her breathing, then he looked at her face. She was no longer the young woman he had met in his first class at graduate school, years before she switched to medicine. He saw nothing but smooth, healthy skin on her face, the familiar small mouth with twin shadows at the corners. But the face showed a maturity he had never noticed before. In the crepuscular light, her face seemed like a symbol of the changes they both had lived through since those days. And of the continuity that somehow kept them linked. When she moved slightly, he quickly left the room and shut the door. If she awoke and found him staring at her in the dark, he thought, she would never share a room with him again.

The island’s landing strip was less than a mile away, but as he stumbled along the uneven dirt road, following his flashlight’s narrow beam, the distance seemed endless. Why he was doing this? Margey, after all, had lost the damn book, not he. It was not his fault that the airport, where she might have left the book when they first arrived, would not be open until long after they left the island by boat at 6 AM. But when he thought of her arriving in Antigua all alone, without the contact number, he felt he must help her. She had travelled through much of the world without his protection—something she always reminded him of whenever he hinted that she might need him. But she was with him now, and he owed her the best he could manage, whether she wanted it or not, whether or not she would do the same for him. The forces that had shifted the quirky balance of power and responsibility in their friendship for so long had given him a role to play, a part to finish. Or something like that, he thought. Above him, the moon tinged black clouds with luminescent edges, then sank behind them into darkness. He walked faster.

The terminal building was little more than a shack made from corrugated metal sheets, sitting on the edge of a soccer field. He paused for a moment, listening, then clicked off his flashlight and trotted across the field. Darting glances from left to right, he felt himself assume the skulk of a thief. She made me a criminal, he thought, stifling a laugh. Wonder what they do to you down here for this kind of stunt? Then he began sliding along the building’s back wall, searching for a window. When he found one slightly ajar, he saw himself entering easily and finishing this task without trouble. But the window was high enough so that pulling himself up to the sill while opening the window wider was tricky. Slowly, he hoisted himself off the ground, knocking the window farther open with his head. He dragged his upper body across the sill until he was balanced like a lever on the narrow ledge, his arms groping through a void, his legs waving in the air for balance. As he peered into the dark, the window suddenly fell down on his back. He cursed and twisted to right and left, trying to raise the window high enough to get a hand beneath it. Then he felt something sharp rip through the skin of his right arm. The pain made him panicky. In three quick motions, he squeezed an elbow under the window, pushed up with all his strength, and blindly threw himself forward. Not one of my better ideas, he thought, sprawling headlong onto a row of molded plastic chairs. He lay there motionless, his heart pounding as he waited for the echoes of falling chairs to cease. When the heavy silence returned, he realized that he would never do anything so outlandish in the states. He was no better than a frat boy raising hell in Cancun, trusting to his identity as an American tourist, a white tourist, to protect him from serious trouble.

Only a few hours later, a red sun just lifting above the horizon, he and Margey were cutting through a calm sea in a power launch. They were groggy and hungry, but charged by the pure cool air burning away in streams of mist. “Oh, here,” he shouted at her over the motor’s roar. “Thought you might need this.” He pulled a book out of his knapsack and handed it to her. “Keep it safe, now.”

“La Ruta Maya!” she cried, taking the book from his hands. “How did you find it?” She riffled through the pages as though some of them might be gone.

“When have I failed you, Margey dear?” he asked, leaning back in his seat and propping up one foot on the side of the boat.

“Seriously,” she said, looking up from the book. “Was it at the airport after all? How did you get in when it was closed?” She looked at the bandage on his arm. At the center was a pale red smear. “Does this have something to do with that cut?”

“Look at this bicep,” he said, holding it up for her to see. “Think it will look sexy with a scar?”

She put the book in a canvas bag, then turned away from him to watch the boat’s green-white wake. After a moment, he asked her what was wrong. Didn’t she want to hear the whole story of how he had found the book? But she shook her head, keeping her back to him. Taking her long hair in both hands, she twisted it into a braid and let it fall onto her back.

When he saw her walk through the door, he drew in his breath sharply. She stood in the dimly lit foyer, shaking snow from her hair and brushing it from her coat. People in dark clothes crossed his line of vision as he stared at her. One moment she was talking to the director, who took her coat. The next she was looking in a mirror, blowing her nose with a handkerchief, wiping melted snow from her eyelashes. Then she stood on the threshold to the central room, uncertain, her face in shadow.

“That’s my friend Margey,” he said to his sister. He tried to speak normally, but it was impossible not to drop his voice to hush.

“The woman you went to Ireland with? And Newfoundland and Belize?” Marlene turned around and took a long look. “I thought she’d be very pretty,” she said, nodding. “When did you tell her what happened?”

He shook his head. He had phoned Margey shortly before his brother Frank had fallen ill. A recorded message told him that her number was no longer in use. When he tried to leave his number with her paging service, he learned that her identification code was no longer valid. He slammed the receiver down, remembering two other times in their history when she had moved without telling him. Does she know you can get free postcards from the post office to send to your friends? he wondered. He wrote her a letter that was returned with a yellow sticker on it saying ‘Undeliverable as Addressed.’ Two days later, Frank was taken to the hospital when he fell down at work, both his legs numb as rocks. Through the following weeks, the shifting diagnoses advanced by doctors had absorbed Randall’s life.

“Bring her over here, Randall,” Marlene said, giving him a slight push. “She must feel awkward.”

He began to thread his way through the crowd, people smiling at him as he passed. A firm pressure on his arm, a hand lingering on his shoulder. “Your brother was a wonderful man,” someone said. Randall nodded, but he kept his face blank. When he broke through the fringe and stepped into the empty space separating him from Margey, his heart was beating hard, his hands shaking. He stopped, confused by Margey’s image. In his thoughts, she was always outdoors. Hiking, swimming, bicycling. T-shirts and shorts, jeans and backpacks, tennis racquets, ski equipment, rented cars. He remembered taking her picture one autumn day when they climbed Mount Katahdin. She was wearing canvas shorts and a plaid vest borrowed from him. Her brown hair, always unruly, was pulled back with a bandanna, but a cloudy fringe fell across her forehead. Behind her was a stand of pine trees, their bright green needles piercing dry red leaves blown against them by a howling wind.

In a grey skirt and a navy blue sweater, a delicate silver chain around her neck, she could not be the same person. Her disfamiliarity suddenly made him think of his brother at the other end of the room. Randall turned to look at the coffin on the raised dais. With the blink of a card-player’s trick, Frank had become a stranger. Delusional, he would swoop from chaos onto startling ideas, jabbering until spit flew from his mouth, leaving Randall and Marlene miserable and embarrassed. Pretending patience, Randall would hold Frank’s hands for hours, wishing he could run from the hospital and meet Margey somewhere far away, anywhere. Then Frank fell silent and never spoke again.

Randall took a step toward the coffin, but suddenly Margey was pulling him back. She embraced him quickly. He put his arm around her waist, surprised at how far he had to bend over to bring his face close to hers. “You would have liked Frank,” he said. She held him close. “He was so capable, and strong. I called you, but I couldn’t get through. And I wrote, but then I gave up. Everything happened so fast. His brain turned into boiled cabbage. No one this close to me has ever died before.” He pulled back to look her in the face. “I thought we weren’t friends like this, you know? I told myself you would call the next time you were ready for a trip. We’d be someplace in Scotland or Mexico and I’d get drunk while I told you about Frank.”

She said how sorry she was, then led him through the archway into the foyer. In a small parlor with one lamp burning, she sat down on a sofa, then pulled him down beside her. He sat with his elbows on his knees, holding his head in his hands. Margey put an arm around his shoulders. He felt his back shaking under her touch, but could not stop it. As callers began to leave, the two sat talking. She explained her canceled numbers and address, then let him tell her about the bacterial infection that no drugs could reverse.

“We see it more and more,” she said, holding his hand. “So many common bacteria have developed new resistance to antibiotics.”

He straightened up on the loveseat, rubbing at his eyes with the heels of his hands and looking her in the face. “How did you hear about Frank?” he asked. “How did you find the funeral parlor?”

As she answered his questions, he wiped at his face with a handkerchief, interested in something other than Frank for the first time in days. “All those things you did just to come here?” he asked.

“It wasn’t especially hard, Randall.” Her face was grave. “You’ve been a good friend for a long time. Of course I came to see if I could help.”

He looked down at the floor, away from her. Help, he thought. Nothing can help. But then he remembered thinking, in the worst days of Frank’s dying, how wrong it seemed that Margey had never met his family. He suddenly wanted to introduce her to Marlene and his mother. And even show her Frank before the hours ended. At different times, they had all teased him that Margey did not really exist.

After leaving Caye Caulker, they had traveled across Belize into Guatemala. Under a burning sun, they walked silent and awed through the stark, shadeless ruins of Ti-Kal. They slept that night under mosquito netting in a dank cabin without electricity, rising at dawn to wander through the park again. Monkeys swung through trees as keel-billed toucans cut flying orange streaks through the curls of humid mist. The jungle was green and dark, alive with shrill, exotic cries. They both wished they could stay longer, but the next day Randall would fly back to Maine, Margey to Antigua for two weeks of intensive Spanish instruction. They arrived back in Belize City exhausted from ten hours on an ancient American school bus, but after dinner they rallied their spirits and went to the Radisson Fort George for drinks. A safari-suited doorman, tall and black and glowing with good will, ushered them inside. They sat in a bar elegant with teak-framed mirrors reflecting the green plush of a dozen banquettes. As they drank champagne, Randall remarked that the bar seemed like a place where some smart, pretty actress with a low profile would suddenly walk in. Maybe Gillian Anderson. “It’s cosmopolitan, but off the beaten track,” he said. Margey asked if he wished Gillian Anderson were with him instead of her.

“Anderson or that doorman,” he answered. Then he removed a calculator and a notebook from his pocket, saying it was time to figure out which one of them owed the other money. He already knew that Margey owed him a couple hundred dollars and that he might not receive it for months. He didn’t care.

“Oh, not now,” Margey said, reaching over and closing the notebook. “Figure out the finances in Bangor and write to me. This is our last night together. I don’t even know when I’ll have a friend to talk to again, especially in English.”

All that day, a tropical storm had swept across the Greater Antilles and into Central America’s coastline. The sky above had blackened and sagged in heavy, rounded clouds. Before noon, furious rain pummeled the city’s flimsy wooden buildings. Streets flooded, the harbor closed, and the city’s long open sewer brimmed full and overflowed. Electricity failed in the early evening. The bar was lit only with candles and hurricane lamps. Randall and Margey rose from their seats to stand near the French doors leading to a patio bordering the harbor. Randall suddenly wanted to tell her how much he wished they were not parting, but he held his silence. They stared into the glass, their reflections tinted green by the bar’s low light, clear water sheeting down the glass.

“Thanks for the trip,” she said, her voice just a whisper. “I’ll miss you. Thanks for helping with things.”

For a moment, her profile was sharp in the dark glass, then it was lost in streaming rain. Her expression, when the wavering rain and shadow allowed him to see it, was solemn. Struck by her stillness, he wanted to tell her that he would miss her, too. That she was a friend he loved whatever her terms, despite his discontents. But her few words had said more about her feelings for him than he had ever heard her say before. It seemed right for one trip to end with Margey having shown more emotion more than he.

At Ti-Kal, they had discovered they were victims of complementary phobias. Without fear, Randall charged up and down the treacherous center staircases of the pyramids. But he could stand at the top for only a moment before a strange fear of the vast, empty air surged through him, forcing him to descend. Margey, however, as though taunting his weakness, sat happily beneath the roof comb of Pyramid III, eating bananas and talking in French with another tourist for almost an hour. But she had tortured herself to the summit, clutching at handholds so tightly that she cut her hands. He reminded her of this as they stood by the French doors, told her it was funny the way he would already be charging down a pyramid, fleeing airy gulfs, while she still clawed her way up. She nodded with a slow hint of a smile into the liquid sheen, but she said nothing. They stood close together, his chest grazing her back. Beyond the glass, sleek yachts tossed in the raging sea, their tall white masts slanting against each other like crossed lances.