More Than This

by Stephanie Taylor

  His words are like a starter pistol firing into the air, and just like that, Holly’s off to the races. The tears spill over and she pulls her hands from his, picking the napkin up from her lap and holding it over her face as if this will somehow hide her outburst of emotion.

  “I’m sorry,” she says from behind her napkin. “It’s been a long time since I was away from the island for this long.” Holly tries a casual laugh, but it comes out like a hiccup. “Maybe I’m just homesick. And I left some things on the burner when I went on vacation, so I’m feeling a little stressed.”

  “Don’t be stressed,” River says reassuringly. “Bonnie can handle anything in your absence. She’s a totally capable woman.” The waitress returns with a pot of coffee and a concerned look on her face. “Thank you,” River says to her, smiling to let her know that everything is under control.

  “I’ve just never been out of touch this long, and I’m worried that something might happen—”

  “What could possibly go wrong?” River’s voice hitches up and a hint of annoyance is evident. “It’s not hurricane season, you don’t have any major weddings or group visits planned, right?”

  Holly shakes her head and dabs at her right eye with the napkin.

  “When you get back you’ll dive in headfirst and get back to real life. I promise it’ll all be waiting for you the minute you set foot on Christmas Key.”

  Holly takes a deep breath and sits up straighter, giving her head a toss like she’s putting it all out of her mind. “You’re right,” she says agreeably. “I know you’re right.”

  River takes her hands again from across the table and gives them a squeeze. From the relieved look on his face, Holly can tell that he thinks he’s dodged a bullet. Her guilt at lying to him by omitting the truth about her stolen computer time fades a bit when she realizes just how stubborn he’s going to be about the whole staying-out-of-contact business.

  They finish their breakfast amidst Holly’s dissipating sniffles, and after they pay the bill and step outside, River points at the tall A’dam Lookout building again. “So?” he asks hopefully. “What do you think?”

  Holly sucks on her teeth. “Well,” she says, looking at the sky deck and the big red swing. “I think we should probably at least go up there and check it out.” She’s working hard to recover her footing after the unexpected emotional outburst at breakfast.

  River reaches out and takes her hand in his with an amused grin. “That was a resounding ‘yes’ if ever I heard one. Let’s go.”

  The swing is terrifying. The fact that it arcs out over the edge of an incredibly tall building as its riders take in the view of the city below is enough to make Holly feel like she’s having an out-of-body experience. This is the kind of thing she’d never say yes to on her own, and the weightlessness she feels as she flies over a city that looks like Lego buildings below her is surreal.

  Her legs are rubber for most of the afternoon as they walk from the Anne Frank house to the Van Gogh museum, and people on bikes blow past them noiselessly, startling her each time they get too close. River plays tour guide, his elation at having gone on the swing filling him with a jovial excitement that Holly almost shares. Almost, but not quite.

  After a long day of sightseeing, they end up back at their houseboat around seven, and Holly sends River to the store for tampons and cookies. (Her tears at breakfast should have been her first indication that tampons and cookies would be necessary that day.) The minute he’s out of sight, she slips out the side door of the tiny rental, the ground swaying slightly beneath her as the houseboat rocks with the movement of the tiny river they’re situated on.

  The owners of the rental also own a larger houseboat on the same property, and Holly covers the twenty feet between the two homes in seconds, rapping on the door of the main house with urgency.

  A blonde woman about fifteen or twenty years older than Holly opens it. “Hello,” she says with a smile. She’s holding a lit cigarette in one hand, wearing jeans and a white shirt that buttons up the front. “How is your stay so far?”

  Holly shifts her weight, trying to be patient. “Really good. The house is so cute.”

  “Not too small?” The woman’s words are slow, her English lightly accented. She brings the cigarette to her lips, narrowing one eye as she takes a pull and then blows the smoke to the side. “Some people are frightened away by trying to live in a tiny house, but it really has everything you need.”

  “It does,” Holly agrees. “Except one thing.”

  “Oh?” Her eyebrows lift elegantly and she runs her free hand over her smooth bun.

  “Internet. I need to check my email.”

  “But the Wifi password—”

  “Won’t help me,” Holly finishes for her. “See, the problem is, we got mugged in London, and I lost my cell phone.”

  “Oh, no!” The woman leans out to tap her ashes into the gravel next to the front door. “That’s terrible.”

  “It was. And the worst part is that River—my boyfriend,” Holly hooks her thumb in the direction of the rental house as if he’s in there, “he wants to pretend like we have no way to check in at home for the whole three weeks of this trip, but I can’t do that.”

  “He doesn’t want to check in at all?”

  “No! He’s got this weird, romantic idea about saying yes to everything except to me,” Holly goes on, growing slightly hysterical as she explains. “And he went to the store just now and I really need to check my email and let everyone know I’m alive.” Weirdly, the tears Holly felt earlier at breakfast are threatening to return, but this time they feel more like desperation than defeat.

  The woman tries to hush Holly, but it sounds more like “Tch, tch, tch.” She looks both ways up and down the sidewalk in front of her property, then reaches out and grabs Holly by the forearm, holding her cigarette in the other hand. “Come in. Hurry, please.” She closes the door behind Holly and leads her through a mostly white house that looks like it was decorated entirely from Ikea catalogs and by watching reruns of mod shows from the 1960s. A thick, white fur rug covers the space in front of a low sectional couch, and a huge pendant lamp dangles from a delicately arched silver stand, its base improbably holding the whole thing upright.

  “The computer is here,” the woman says. “And I am Eva.”

  “Holly,” Holly says, extending a hand in a belated introduction. “Thank you for this. I really appreciate it.”

  Eva points at a spot on the couch and lifts the lid on the laptop. “It’s all yours,” she says, clicking on a tab and closing what she’s been looking at.

  “Thank you so much,” Holly says. She sinks into the couch and starts tapping her log in information into the computer. She feels like the hero in an action movie with only seconds left to defuse a bomb as she fights against the clock to get the information from her email account before River gets back from the store.

  Eva wanders over to the open kitchen area and stubs her cigarette out in a blue cut-glass ashtray, her eyes focused on the water just beyond the windows. “Men are funny creatures, aren’t they?” she wonders. Her back is to Holly as she watches a bird swoop and dive into the water. “My husband once bought me a cat when I’d already told him that I didn’t want animals in our house.”

  “Really?” Holly asks politely, her eyes on the computer screen.

  “Yes. He thought I was missing something by not having a pet, but I swore to him I wasn’t missing anything at all.”

  “They don’t believe us, do they?” Holly asks distractedly, scanning her inbox for the most important looking messages. It’s Friday evening, which means it’s lunchtime on Christmas Key. Her last email from Bonnie is two days old, and all she talks about is Coco wanting to help out in the B&B office. Not that Coco meddling in B&B business isn’t bad enough, but at least she hasn’t opened an email to find an S.O.S. from Bonnie or a message informing her that Christmas Key has already been bought and paid for by some outside entity.

  �
��It’s not that they don’t believe us,” Eva goes on, oblivious to Holly’s eyes rapidly scanning the computer screen. “It’s that they don’t believe we already know what we want.”

  Holly finishes reading Bonnie’s email about Coco rearranging her desk and demanding that she call an impromptu village council meeting. It makes her blood boil to imagine her mother moving her belongings around and answering the office phone, but the real panic sets in when she imagines Coco hearing that Holly is out of reach and hasn’t been heard from.

  “But maybe your man isn’t trying to control you by forcing you to say yes to everything,” Eva allows, tearing her eyes from the window so she can find her pack of cigarettes in the fading light. She switches on a lamp on the kitchen counter. “Maybe he really just wants you to see that the world gets, you know…” Eva waves her hand around like she’s searching for words, a new, unlit cigarette already between her fingers, “...bigger. It grows when you say yes to things you otherwise would have said no to.”

  Holly pauses, considering this. “You’re right,” she says. “I have definitely said yes to things on this trip that I would have normally said no to.”

  “And have you learned anything? Does the world seem bigger?”

  “It seems...scarier,” Holly says. “It makes me want to go home right now and not leave my little island ever again.”

  “That’s honest.” There is admiration in Eva’s voice. “But when you go home to this little island, do you think you’ll do anything differently?”

  Holly thinks for a second before she answers. “You know, I do.” It shocks her to admit it to a woman who is, essentially, a complete stranger, but Holly knows it’s true. “There are some things I could say yes to in my normal life that I would have just been stubborn about before.” She nods, thinking of her life on Christmas Key and her plans for the island.

  “Then that’s something, isn’t it?” Eva flicks her lighter and holds the flame to the end of her cigarette.

  “I guess it is.” Holly watches as Eva turns back to the window, then she opens up a blank email and addresses it to Bonnie.

  Bon—I’m so sorry I haven’t emailed yet! You won’t believe everything that’s happened, but I’m without a phone for the rest of the trip. I’ll check email when I can, but I’m not sure when I’ll have access to a computer again. I hope you’re keeping Coco in line, and I want to hear everything I’m missing—EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I’ll talk to you soon! xoxoxoxo Holly

  Holly logs out of her email and gently shuts the lid to the laptop. “Thank you. I really needed this,” Holly says to Eva. She means the use of the computer, but somehow she also means the female companionship and the supportive ear. Eva smiles knowingly.

  “You’re welcome. Enjoy the rest of your trip, huh? You’re only young once, and there’s something to be said about enjoying Europe—and life—without being tied to a cell phone.”

  Holly follows her through the open living space, pausing on the doorstep as Eva holds it open. The lights are still off in their tiny boathouse next door, so she knows River isn’t back yet.

  “Hey,” Holly says, looking at Eva curiously. “Whatever happened to that cat?”

  A smile spreads across Eva’s face, and a map of fine lines creases around her kind eyes. “Our neighbors were moving to Norway,” she says, pointing her cigarette at the tall row house across the street. “Their little girl always loved my cat, so I asked her parents if they could take him.”

  “Did your husband ever know?”

  Eva looks heavenward with her eyes as she tips her head to one side, considering. “No, I don’t think so. I told him the cat ran away. It made sense, because his name was Avontuur.”

  Holly frowns, her next question written all over her face.

  “It means adventure,” Eva says, winking at Holly before she shuts the door.

  18

  The wait is endless. No one sleeps after Cap’s boat roars off into the open water with Ray, Millie, and Fiona on board, Ray’s lifeless body lying prone on the bottom of the boat as Fiona tends to him.

  Bonnie and a handful of the other women gather in the B&B’s kitchen as they do during every emergency. They’d used it as their home base during the tropical storm that had hit the summer before. It’d been the place to gather when an unfortunate accident had led to Jake and Bridget’s miscarriage, and everyone had cooked and waited during the touch-and-go time when Mori Guy, one of Vance and Calista’s six-year-old twin sons, had fallen into the pool at night and nearly drowned. So now, again, they wait—they cook, and they wait.

  “My rosary hasn’t gotten this much work in years,” Maria Agnelli says, one hand wrapped in the white beads as proof. “This is the same one I used during the war,” she says softly, looking at the beads. “And when my kids were sick, and when Alfie was dying…”

  “We’re all praying for Ray,” Gwen says, leaving her identical sisters at the counter where the three of them are chopping vegetables for a salad. She walks over to Mrs. Agnelli and puts her arms around the shorter woman. “This is just unthinkable,” Gwen whispers, holding her elderly friend in an embrace. “And poor Millie.”

  Bonnie says nothing as she watches the scene around her, but purses her lips and stirs the batter in her mixing bowl with fervor. She’s making drop biscuits to go with everything else that’s cooking: roasted chicken, sweet potato wedges, and the triplets’ salad, but she’s not talking much.

  Her late husband had died of a heart attack. A completely sudden, out of left field, who’d-a-thunk-it, kind of heart attack. They’d been having a wonderful afternoon the day it happened, shopping for dinner makings after their oldest son’s baseball game when Ed had fallen to his knees in Aisle Seven at the Publix while “How Deep Is Your Love” by The Bee Gees played over the speakers in the store. He’d been gone by the time the medics arrived.

  And he’d looked almost exactly the way Ray had looked that afternoon.

  “Bonnie, how long till the biscuits go in?” Heddie Lang-Mueller leans across the steel counter of the B&B’s kitchen. “I’ve got the buffet table set up, and Cap is moving tables and chairs so that we can all sit and eat together.”

  Bonnie reels herself in, the memory of the Gibb brothers’ smooth voices, and the cold, shiny linoleum floor beneath her bare knees fading away as she comes back to the reality of the B&B kitchen.

  “They’re going in right now. Give me ten minutes, and you’ll have hot biscuits.” Bonnie smiles at Heddie and blinks a few times, pushing the tears away that spring to her eyes every time she remembers her beloved Ed spread out on the ground next to the shelves of Cheerios and Frosted Flakes.

  Heddie reaches out and wraps her long fingers around Bonnie’s soft hand. “Everything is going to be okay,” she says softly. “Even if it’s not okay, we still have each other.” She’s mistaken Bonnie’s teary eyes for concern about Ray. Bonnie is worried about Ray—and Millie—of course, but her salty tears as she preps cheesy biscuits for the oven are for Ed.

  She keeps her memories and her worries to herself and smiles at Heddie again. “I know, Heddie. We’ll get through this, no matter what happens.”

  The door to the kitchen swings open as Coco rushes in. “I called the hospital in Key West, and they won’t tell me anything,” she announces, stopping short of a foot stomp that would announce to everyone just how unused to being denied she is.

  “Patience, young lady.” Maria Agnelli is stern and disapproving. She shoots Coco a look that’s full of venom. “We’ll know more when it’s time for us to know more.” She totters over to the doorway and hands Coco a cup full of silverware. “Now go and put this on the buffet table so we can eat something before midnight.”

  Like an obedient (if slightly offended) teenager, Coco turns heel and walks back through the swinging door.

  “I swear…” Bonnie shakes her head but doesn’t finish her thought. She doesn’t need to; everyone in the room is thinking the same thing. They need Holly back, and they need
Ray to be all right. They need Coco to disappear, and to take her half-cocked ideas about a casino and an island full of service workers living in clapboard apartment buildings with her.

  People start to filter out to the dining room with stacks of plates in hand, hot dishes held on trays, and pitchers of water and iced tea. Bonnie waits in the kitchen for the biscuits to rise and turn golden brown. When she’s finally alone, she allows herself a few, private tears. Some for Ed, some for Ray, and some for the fact that she’s scared of what’s going to happen if Coco gets her way.

  It’s late when Bonnie gets home, but she checks her email before turning in, like she does every night, hoping for a message from Holly. And like magic, this time she’s got one.

  “Hallelujah!” she shouts in the living room of the empty house. Without kicking off her shoes, Bonnie sits on the couch with her laptop and opens the message.

  Bon—I’m so sorry I haven’t emailed yet! You won’t believe everything that’s happened, but I’m without a phone for the rest of the trip. I’ll check email when I can, but I’m not sure when I’ll have access to a computer again. I hope you’re keeping Coco in line, and I want to hear everything I’m missing—EVERY. SINGLE. THING. I’ll talk to you soon! xoxoxoxo Holly

  A wave of happy-sad emotion floods Bonnie’s tired body. She’s happy that Holly still sounds like Holly—somehow far away and unreachable, but still Holly—but sad that she’s going to have to tell her about Coco’s casino plan and Ray’s heart attack. A phone call would be a better way to break some of this news, but for some inexplicable reason, Holly’s got no phone on this trip. So Bonnie puts her fingers to the keyboard and lets the words tumble around in her mind as she starts to type.

  Hi, sugar! I miss you so much—she writes, then pauses. She looks around her living room at the throw pillows and at the photographs on her wall that her son took and then blew up and framed for her. The lamp is on in the corner of the room, glowing warm and yellow against the dark night beyond her windows. Bonnie sets the computer on her coffee table and stands up to close the curtains and turn on the porch light.