Thirteen. Seventy-two. Forty-nine. The voice of the girl on the radio aged, deepened, but her articulation—even through a roar of static—was as careful as ever. Maybe it was Naaliyah, leaning into a microphone half a world away. I am in Irkutsk, now, crossing into Siberia. I am in Lima; I am in Toronto. Tell everyone I love them.
There were rumors, of course: Naaliyah had fled with a French charter captain and was somewhere in the Arctic Ocean; Naaliyah had a string of boyfriends all the way to Cuba; Naaliyah was living in Barbados, working as a waitress. He imagined her in Chile, in Puerto Montt, wrapped in a dark coat, crossing some weathered square and staring up at the stark spires of a church.
The seasons traded places. Guests glided in on rented catamarans and ate at the restaurant and raved about the stars or the soup or the clarity of the sea. Felix went from table to table with his hands clasped behind his back and explained the night’s menu and Nanton stood behind the front desk turning pages of his newspaper and Winkler went from lantern to lantern at the end of the night extinguishing little flames.
Once a week a cruise ship steamed past, maybe a mile out, stuffed to the portholes with creamy light, and in the lulls between waves Winkler could hear music drift across the lagoon. The entire island was changing. Vacation houses sprouted on hillsides; local boys deemed themselves sailfish hunters and swaggered along the quays hawking charters. The cane mill closed; forests were cleared to make room for a copra plantation, an airstrip, even a golf course. Bed-and-breakfast bungalows popped up, boasting wicker chairs and elaborate latticework and complimentary American newspapers.
The inn itself began to slump, as though it had simmered too long in a covered pot. Sea stars climbed walls and crept into gaps in the mortar like disembodied hands trying to undo the place. Toilet flappers failed; showerheads rusted; potato bugs built empires of tunnels beneath the linoleum. The Plexiglas flooring had buckled slightly, so that the armchairs did not sit flush anymore and tipped from side to side whenever a guest sat.
Worse, Nanton’s little rectangle of reef was dying. Shaded from sunlight, pressured by discharge, the coral slowly died, elkhorns collapsing into rubble, and algae moved in, coating the abandoned fingers and struts with a waving black fuzz. Fish still roved beneath the lobby but they were mostly chubs now, greedy, trained to wait below the railing for the shadows of crumb-dispersing tourists
In storms cocktail glasses fell from lobby tables; kitchen pots swung and clanked. Occasionally a groundswell rose high enough to slip beneath the porch doors and push a sheet of water through. Nanton would scream and curse and climb on his stool clutching his guest book, and Winkler would slide the armchairs aside and push the water back with a rubber squeegee.
Some days, pulling on his rubber boots and wading into the lagoon, prying anemones or urchins off the glass bottom with a paint scraper, he felt like a damkeeper, attempting to keep an overwhelming quantity of water at bay, managing a truce that was doomed to eventually fail.
Mice chewed tunnels through the thinning thatch of the inn’s roof and seedlings sprouted in the eaves and the tide swirled against the lucent floor of the lobby and the world—somewhere, out there—fought its wars and constructed its cease-fires while Winkler managed what remained of his life as microscopically as possible, head down, unwilling—or afraid, perhaps—to look up. The same Spanish girl read her same numbers into her same microphone, and an antenna somewhere flung them into the ionosphere in huge electromagnetic waves, across the ocean, through the walls of the shed, penetrating his shirt and skin and bones and cells and nuclei and smaller still—radio signals in his dreams, in his soul.
He endured Nanton’s indignities: wearing the same flower-print shirt every day, renting teeth-ravaged snorkels and leaky masks to guests, pushing the perpetually full bin of dirty towels from beach to laundry, and pushing the clean towels back again. Perhaps, he’d think, staring at the sky above his shed—a brightening green bowl of light—this is a dream. Any moment I’ll wake and be thirty-three years old, in Ohio, in bed, in the middle of the night. The warm shape of Sandy will breathe beside me; I’ll hear Grace mumbling in the nursery. I’ll pull back the blanket; I’ll go to her.
Or he could wake in his childhood bed inside the coat closet and smell the ghosts of all the animals who gave up their coats there, the foxes and minks and caribou; he’d pull open the door and hear trains shunting through the snowy rail yard, his mother stepping through the apartment, pouring a glass of water, chewing a piece of toast at the window before work.
There was that chance. But each time he woke, there was the dusty, cramped interior of the shed. The springs of his cot creaked beneath him; a pain throbbed two-thirds of the way up his spine. A smell like rust, like failure; the cool emptiness of his bed; the sound of the sea sighing into the reef and a fly writhing in a corner-spun web: he was forty-eight, he was fifty; he was alone.
Once—1993, or ’94—he was walking the road to the pier, north of the inn, when he stopped outside Felix and Soma’s house. It was a Tuesday, and Soma was on St. Vincent, working at the post office, and Felix, Winkler knew, was at the inn, working through lunch orders.
The gate was closed with its loop of wire, and before he could think too much about what he was doing, he unfastened it and entered the yard. The hens came running, heads bobbing, scratching up dust with their dinosaur legs. He waded through them to the screen door.
“Hello?” he called. But no one was home. He knew no one was home. He ran his hand over the crack in the wall, its edges a rawer white against the blue paint.
Inside it was dark and cool. Most things were as he remembered them, as they had seemingly always been: the ungainly boats sitting on everything, painted in their Popsicle colors; Soma’s books in the corners; the light blue picnic table with its laminate hanging from the underside in long, deciduous strips. On the counter sat a flat of two dozen eggs waiting to be wiped clean.
But there were changes, too, or maybe it was being in the house like this, uninvited, the kitchen devoid of noise and activity. It felt emptier, less hopeful. Not so much haunted as abandoned, as if even its ghosts were away, at work on more pressing concerns.
Felix had since installed a sink and several chipped plates sat in the bottom, one with a mostly eaten tortilla on it, a soggy quarter-moon. Outside, in one of the neighboring yards, a dog began to bark.
The stove smelled like caramelized onions. The charcoal box was tidy and full. In the corner room that had been the boys’ and then Naaliyah’s still hung the poster of Chile’s Torres del Paine, faded so the sky had gone white and all the granite pink. A menagerie of stuffed cartoon rabbits sat mute on the shelf; a fistful of dried herbs stuck out of a pebble-filled wine bottle. On the underside of the top bunk the constellations of glow-in-the-dark stars still clung, pale and stiff, the adhesive failing.
Once, he remembered, for a whole summer, Naaliyah had wanted to learn to walk on her hands. She wore a purple one-piece bathing suit every day, frayed at the straps and hems, and she’d bend and spring onto her hands and ask Winkler to hold her calves in his fists and she’d walk on her palms through the sand, her suit slipping off her buttocks, legs straight. They’d shuffle a few dozen yards until her arms gave out. “How many did I make that time?” she’d ask, breathless, shaking out her arms.
“Fifteen, I think.”
“Fifteen,” she’d say, savoring it. “Okay. Let’s try for twenty.”
Outside someone passed along the path carrying a radio and Winkler froze beneath the archway of the bedroom. Soma’s clothesline creaked in the breeze. The music was a long time in fading.
They still slept behind a curtain. Their bed was unmade, its sheet kicked to the foot. A row of dresses hung from a dowel in the closet; rumpled cook’s tunics were piled in one corner. And a little TV, with a complicated aerial rigged on cop, and a battery-powered clock radio, and a glass of stale-looking water, bubbles arrayed along the bottom.
He lifted one of Soma’s blouses from the floor to his nose and inhaled and held it there for a minute or so. Then he set it down carefully and retreated, walking quickly, past the picnic table and the wary eyes of the laminated Virgin, easing the screen door shut behind him so it would not clap, and hurried out through the yard.