I started the next day on my balcony.
Many cruise veterans consider a balcony a luxury they’ll forego. They like to sit out in the public areas, moving around the ship depending on if they want sun or shade, less breeze or more.
I love the balcony. Of course, for the privacy. And for the ability to hear the ocean whenever you feel like opening the door — if you’ve bothered to close it at all.
But the biggest factor is that the opaque privacy screens on either side allow you to frame your experience as you choose. Sit one way you look back to where you’ve been. Switch seats and you’re looking forward to where you’re heading.
Look one direction and watch the gathering clouds we were sailing toward, as I had faced when I first came out here to eat my room-service breakfast. Or move to look in the other direction and see only a cloudless, blue-skied horizon, as I did now.
So what if I was looking behind me. It was a much prettier view.
The islands were days out of sight. But that horizon behind us was bright and open and … familiar. Especially compared to the uncertain clouds ahead that could be masking anything.
You’re right. I’m wimping out about looking forward to where I’m heading.
In my life and in the next half hour.
I understood the life stuff. Big changes, major course correction, uncertainty, and all that.
The next half hour was that I’d promised myself I’d take a brisk walk around the jog track for at least a mile.
Yet the buffet beckoned, much more alluring than the walk. Yes, I’d decided I could ease up on my weight restrictions as part of my disguise once I stopped being the author of Abandon All … or was I shedding the disguise of the past fifteen years?
Either way, I didn’t want to do it all during this cruise. And all with sugar. To be blunt, the buffet bulge threatened my wardrobe.
Did I crave sweets because of my disrupted life?
Or because of displaced tension from the Marry-go-Rounders, whom I seemed destined to spend a lot of time with on this cruise. It happened that way on cruises sometimes. You saw a few people over and over, while never running into others, only to discover six months later you were on the same ship at the same time.
Yes, and there was also Petronella.
I told myself she was only trying to show her gratitude. My mother’s voice in my head reminded me to be kind.
Aunt Kit’s said a few different things. I always had loved that woman.
Even when she sat me down in her office in the brownstone and kicked me out of the nest.
She’d had good reasons.
“The trouble is we’ve become an industry. Not a cottage industry, more like a villa industry, supporting a network of people who have a vested interest in doing the same thing over and over. Agent, assistant, publicist, editor, publisher—”
“Me.”
She patted my arm. “Not you. You want to move on. You just don’t know it yet. And you’ve more than earned your keep.”
Wanted to move on? Not so sure. Recognized the wisdom. Yes.
My time as hot young writer had passed its expiration date some time ago. That is, it passed for the author of Abandon All. Not me, Sheila.
Yeah, this got complicated sometimes.
I left the balcony and prepared for my day among the people.
Then — boom — I remembered the song played by the guitarist and violinist that I hadn’t been able to identify. The earworm had a name.
Hey, that had to be an omen, right? It would be a good day.
* * * *
The first person I saw — almost as soon as I opened my cabin door — was the violinist from the musical duo.
I almost didn’t recognize her.
She moved slowly along the corridor. I drew back into my doorway to let her pass, thinking she was a passenger I didn’t recognize.
Taking her for a passenger was justified, because crew members found in the hallway outside the passenger cabins wore stewards’ uniforms. She wore jeans and a t-shirt.
Just before she would have passed, her identity clicked in my head and I turned and spoke without checking in with the higher functioning levels of my brain.
“That song,” I blurted at her, letting my cabin door close behind me.
She jolted, eyes rounding.
“The song you and your — the guitar player played during the last set. It’s an Irish song called The Fields of Athenry.”
The lyrics came rushing in along with the title. The story of a young, him in prison about to be shipped to Botany Bay for stealing corn to keep his children alive and her preparing to see her love leave forever.
Now that I’d blurted out the earworm identity, I had room to notice that, in addition to rounding, her eyes were producing tears. She was crying. And trying hard not to.
“I don’t know.”
“It goes kind of like this.” Yes, I tried to hum. Or whatever it’s called when you da-da-dum an approximation of a tune. In my case a distant approximation. Lamely, I ended with, “It’s very pretty.”
“I don’t know.”
She had a heavy enough accent — my Eastern European guess strengthened — that I wondered if that’s all she could say or if the phrase conveyed her incomprehension of my English.
“Are you okay?” I figured that had a better chance of being understood by any non-English speaker, as long as they’d seen an American movie or two.
She dipped her head, bringing a tissue clasped in her left hand to her eyes. The crying made noise now.
“What’s wrong?”
“Must go. Must not be here.” So she spoke some English. “Must go.”
“Can I help?”
She shook her head sharply, which might have loosened some internal lock, because she ran down the hallway, putting her right arm out to balance against the wall now and then, while her left hand clutched the tissue.
She paused once, halfway to the door to the Atrium area, looking toward a door on the same side of the corridor as my cabin, then hurrying on even faster.
When she pushed open the door at the end, I headed the opposite direction for my virtuous walk.