Float Plan

by Trish Doller

  “That was…” I trail off, unable to find the right word amid the thoughts piling up in my brain. I kissed Ben so many times, but kissing Keane is somehow … better. I don’t know how to process that.

  “Better than calling Jackson Kemp an arse?”

  I laugh, grateful for the way Keane always seems to know how to defuse the emotional bombs in my head. “Almost.”

  “So, you know, I wasn’t plotting it,” he says. “But the opportunity arose, and you didn’t seem to mind, so I—”

  “Stop talking.”

  This time I kiss him, giving in to the pleasure of sinking my fingers into the softness of his hair. Paying attention to the sounds that teach me what he likes. I am not ready for more than this—not yet—but this is good. It is enough.

  today is a doorway (25)

  I wake when the sun comes through the open hatch in the V-berth and I hear the soft slap of water against a hull that isn’t sailing. Through the companionway I see Keane on deck, making up lines. Wherever we were going in the night, we’ve arrived. I climb out of bed and slip into the bathroom to brush my teeth because kissing him has become a distinct possibility and I don’t want morning breath. When I finish, he’s in the cabin, about to start brewing a pot of coffee.

  “Good morning,” he says.

  “Hi.” My cheeks are warm. I feel shy and I wonder if I’m the only one who can feel the undercurrent of bashfulness. “Did you sail all night?”

  The cabin feels smaller than ever as I move toward him, not knowing how this works. Are we more than friends today? Or was last night a New Year’s Eve one-off?

  “I did,” Keane says. “I had enough energy last night to power a city.”

  “Thanks for letting me sleep.”

  He reaches out, hands gentle on my hips as he pulls me in. My arms fit up around his neck and when our lips come together, there’s a hint of toothpaste in his mouth too. The first kiss is tentative and soft. In the space before the next kiss—no more than a heartbeat—need crashes over me like a wave. My hips roll against him and his hands move lower, pressing me closer until it’s hard to tell where I end and he begins. Unlike last night, today is a doorway. We just have to step through.

  “Is this going to ruin us?” I’m breathless as I ask.

  “No.” He kisses my neck, sending a rash of shivers down my back. I shudder and his laugh is wicked and delicious.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I have been a sure thing since Bimini, Anna.” He touches his forehead to mine. “When you looked at me and said ‘I’ve changed my mind about those eggs,’ your face was frightened and fierce, and right then I knew I’d follow you to the ends of the earth if you’d let me.”

  “I don’t think I really had a lightning bolt moment,” I say. Keane stepped into my world a stranger and quietly became someone so necessary that I don’t want to be without him.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he says. “We’ve arrived at the same place.”

  “Where exactly are we?”

  He laughs. “Go on. Have a look.”

  I climb out on deck to find us anchored in a small bay on a volcanic island where thick clouds are gathered at the top of the tallest hill. “Is this … Montserrat?”

  “It is.”

  When Ben and I planned our trip, guidebooks made little mention of the island, aside from the Soufrière Hills volcano eruption in 1995 that buried most of the island under lava and ash. Even cruisers on internet sailing forums recommended the island only as an overnight anchorage while en route to more southerly destinations. Ben wanted to see this island more than any other, but I keep that to myself. If this is Keane’s favorite place, I want to see it through his eyes.

  * * *

  “Montserrat reminds me most of home,” he says as we run the dinghy to the town dock at Little Bay, although town is a generous word for a handful of buildings. “The cliffs and green hills are very much like Ireland, and a good many of the people, regardless of skin color, are of Irish descent.”

  “It’s prettier than I expected.”

  “Not an uncommon reaction,” he says. “People expect to see only devastation, but there’s so much beauty here. Just wait.”

  The lady at the customs office checks our clearance papers from Jost Van Dyke—we pretend like St. Barths never happened—and we pay the necessary port fees. In the same building is immigration, where our passports are stamped, and we have officially arrived on Montserrat. We come out from the warehouse and a police car pulls up alongside the building. A brown-skinned officer wearing a crisp white uniform shirt steps out of the car and says to Keane, “Top of the morning.”

  “May the road rise up to meet you,” Keane replies, his accent exaggerated. The corner of his mouth twitches as if he wants to laugh, but I have no idea what’s happening.

  “And may you arrive in heaven before the devil knows you’re dead,” the officer says, his attempt at an Irish accent mangled by his Montserratian tongue, and the two break into laughter, pulling each other in for a hug.

  “Anna.” Keane slips an arm around my waist. “This is my great friend and quite possibly sixth cousin once removed on my father’s side, Desmond Sullivan. Desmond, this is Anna Beck, my partner in crime.”

  Keane skillfully sidesteps giving our relationship a definition, a relief because it feels too new for that. I shake hands with Desmond, and he leads us over to his patrol car.

  “My shift won’t be ending until midafternoon,” he says. “But I can drive you up to my house until I’m finished.”

  “There’s a small matter of a dog,” Keane says. “A pot hound we adopted in the Turks and Caicos. She’s got all her inoculations and proper papers, but I understand there’s a necessary permit?”

  “Bring her ashore,” Desmond says with a wink. “If anyone asks, she’s mine.”

  “You sneaky bastard.”

  Desmond laughs. “Runs in the family.”

  Keane and I go out to the sailboat for Queenie and our bags, and return to Little Bay Beach, where we drag the dinghy above the tide line and tie it to a tree. Queenie does fishtail slides in the black sand, happy for freedom after so many hours on the boat. When she’s finally settled, panting and smiling, we clip her to the leash and head up to the road, where Desmond is waiting.

  “The Montserrat Festival comes to a close today,” he says, driving us along narrow hilly roads lined with trees and ferns. Everything is so green. “Sharon and Miles will be at the parade, but when we are all home, we’ll have a proper lime, yeah?”

  “That would be grand,” Keane says, and explains to me that “having a lime” means hanging out with friends, eating, drinking, talking, listening to music. “In Ireland we call it craic”—he pronounces it like crack—“but the concept is the same.”

  Desmond lives in a village called Lookout. His little mango-yellow house sits on a hill overlooking a bay where the water is the same shade as the blue shutters framing the windows.

  “Lookout,” he says, letting us in through the red front door, “was built after the volcano destroyed the lower part of the island and many people relocated here. It doesn’t have a rich history yet, so it’s still discovering its flavor.”

  He leaves us with an invitation to make ourselves at home, but there are only two bedrooms.

  “We can’t kick Miles out of his room,” I say. “Even if Desmond insists.”

  “I agree, which is why I packed the tent.”

  “You think of everything.”

  He catches me around the waist with one hand and reels me in. “Care to guess what I’m thinking now?”

  “That you need a shower?”

  One hand against my neck, his thumb on my cheek, he kisses me softly. Then deeply. I run my palms up the back of his T-shirt and we kiss there in the kitchen until we’re breathless.

  “A cold shower,” he says. “Most definitely cold.”

  While Keane is showering, I wash out the liner for his prosthesis. I’ve never done it before,
but I’ve watched enough to know how to do it. His everyday prosthesis stands beside the bathtub, so I leave a clean liner and a sock draped over the socket and sit down on the closed toilet seat lid. “Is this whole thing as scary for you as it is for me?”

  “Us, you mean?” he says from behind the floral curtain.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not even a bit.”

  “I guess, after Ben, I’m afraid of having the rug pulled out from under me again.”

  “Which makes absolute sense,” Keane says. “Ben was suffering from something over which he had little control, but I’ve been to that same dark place and I made a different choice. That doesn’t mean I don’t have bleak days when I hate myself and everyone else. But if I can promise you nothing else, it’s that I intend to leave this world old, stooped, and with white hairs sticking out of my ears. And if having that image pressed into your brain hasn’t given you second thoughts, well … I’m yours for as long as you want me.”

  For so long I thought that falling for someone else would mean I didn’t love Ben enough. That what we had wasn’t real. I haven’t stopped loving him. I just don’t want to regret letting Keane Sullivan go. “You might be stuck with me awhile.”

  “I never saw myself having this conversation in a bathroom on Montserrat.” The water cuts off and his face appears around the edge of the shower curtain. “But the longer I’m stuck with you, the better.”

  * * *

  Within walking distance, we find a small food hut beside the road, where we sit on plastic chairs and eat roti stuffed with potatoes and gravy that we wash down with cold Carib beer. We play a game guessing the color of the next car to come down the road, then slowly walk back to Desmond’s house, waving whenever the locals greet us.

  Desmond is home when we arrive. A moment later Sharon comes into the house, her arms laden with grocery bags. She is a tall woman with natural curls who thanks me when I take a few of the bags. Miles, maybe in kindergarten, is missing a front tooth.

  “Miles.” Desmond squats down beside his son. “This is my friend Keane Sullivan.”

  The little boy’s eyes go wide. “Sullivan like me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can spell Sullivan,” Miles announces. He calls out the letters in the correct order, raising a finger with each one until he’s holding up eight. “Eight letters.”

  “That’s very good,” Keane says. “I only just learned how to spell Sullivan properly.”

  Miles cracks up laughing. “Maybe I’m smarter than you.”

  “I reckon so.”

  “Keane,” Sharon says, hugging him with one arm and kissing his cheek. “It’s about time you showed up. We’ve missed you.”

  “Likewise,” he says. “Sharon, this is Anna Beck, my plus-one.”

  “He lies,” I say, following her to the kitchen. “He’s my plus-one.”

  As I place the groceries onto the kitchen counter facing the living room, Miles broaches the subject of Keane’s leg, his little voice almost a whisper when he asks, “Are you like Iron Man?”

  “A bit,” Keane says. “Only the one leg, though.”

  “Cool.”

  Satisfied that his father’s friend is superhero adjacent, Miles runs outside to play. Desmond and Keane step out to the side porch with bottles of Guinness—“the proper beverage for liming”—while I help Sharon unpack.

  “How long have you been together?” she asks.

  “We’ve been sailing together for a little more than a month,” I say. “But we’ve been together for about … sixteen hours.”

  Sharon laughs. “That’s very specific.”

  “It took some time for us—for me, actually—to figure things out.”

  “He’s a good man.” She takes a couple more bottles of Guinness from the refrigerator, opens them, and hands one to me. “Let’s go outside. We’ve got people coming over after the festival, so we’ll worry about the food later.”

  The four of us sit on chairs overlooking Margarita Bay while Miles turns somersaults in the grass and plays with Queenie. Desmond tells me how, seven years ago, he met a drunken Keane urinating along the side of the road. “I was going to arrest him, but when he said his name was Sullivan, I brought him home and sobered him up.”

  “What he’s not telling you,” Keane says, “is that after he got me sober, he took me out for goat stew and Guinness, and we got drunk all over again.”

  Sharon tells me she’s a stylist in a hair salon in the neighboring village of St. John’s, and when she asks me what I do for a living, I don’t mention the pirate bar. I share our plan to start a nonprofit organization. I feel embarrassed by how privileged it is to want to raise money for a high-tech sailboat when Montserrat has been rebuilding for more than two decades, but her smile is generous. “That would be good for him. He needs a purpose.”

  As afternoon turns into evening, friends and family trickle in, including a girl dressed in a hot-pink gown with a sparkling tiara on her head and a Miss Montserrat sash draped over her shoulder. She is Sharon’s sister, Tanice, straight from the festival.

  “You needn’t have brought out the royalty on our account,” Keane says. “We’re regular folk.”

  Sharon straightens her shoulders and gives a small head toss. “But I am no regular folk, Mr. Sullivan. I am sister to the queen.”

  Tanice rolls her eyes and goes for Desmond’s CD collection to put on music, removing her tiara and kicking off her high heels. A group of men start barbecuing chicken on the grill, and some of the women come inside to unwrap their potluck side dishes. I wander between the two groups, Guinness in hand, listening to them lament about how long it’s taken to turn Little Bay into a proper town and catching snippets of gossip about people I don’t know.

  I walk around to the west side of the house to watch the sun go down. Keane comes up behind me, slips his arms around my shoulders, and rests his chin on top of my head. “If you keep your eyes just above the sun as it slips below the horizon, you may see the green flash.”

  We watch together and I try not to blink, but as the sun sinks, I see nothing but sky. “I missed it.”

  “Next time, then,” Keane says, kissing my cheek. “We’ve got many sunsets to come.”

  the real world (26)

  Sharon drops us off in the village of St. Peter’s the next morning at the Fogarty Hill end of the Oriole Walkway, a trail that runs through the island’s center hills to Lawyers Mountain. Queenie stays behind to play with Miles, while Keane and I go hiking in a dense forest of trees, roped with vines bearing leaves as big as our heads, and ferns growing thick along the trail. Keane points out a large iguana crawling through the branches of a tree and we hear—but don’t see—the croak of mountain chickens, a once abundant frog, endangered since the eruptions.

  The climb is steeper than we anticipated and when we reach the summit, our shirts are damp with sweat. But at an elevation of more than 1,200 feet, we can see in every direction. To the north, my boat is a blue dot in Little Bay. Beyond it are the Silver Hills, remnants of a dead volcano. In the south, clouds of steam and gas hover above the dome of the quiet Soufrière Hills volcano and the pyroclastic flow cuts across the green island like an angry gray scar. Nevis and Antigua are rocky blue shadows on the horizon.

  “After listening to the talk last night about unfinished construction and unfulfilled campaign promises, I don’t know how the island sustains itself,” I say. “But up here, I understand why people wouldn’t want to leave. I understand why you love it.”

  “So many people are attracted to the wreckage,” Keane says. “But the people are the reason I come back.”

  On our way down the mountainside, we fill our pockets with lemons and guavas from trees along the trail. When we reach the end, Sharon and Miles are waiting. Queenie watches us approach from the open back window of the little SUV, her tail a furious blur.

  “If it wouldn’t be a bother, would you mind dropping us at Little Bay so we can check on the boat?” Keane sa
ys. “We’ll call a taxi to bring us to Lookout, so you won’t have to come fetch us.”

  Sharon leaves us at Little Bay and Queenie jumps into the dinghy before we’ve pushed it off the beach. On the boat, we check the bilge, make sure the engine starts, and then collapse in the shade of the cockpit tent. Keane removes his prosthesis, sock, and liner, and rubs the back of his residual limb. He didn’t complain of pain during the hike, but he looks uncomfortable.

  “Can I do that for you?”

  “What? Rub my leg?”

  “It always feels better when someone else does it.”

  “It does.” His eyes meet mine and hold there. “But you don’t have to do it.”

  “I want to.”

  I lean forward and take the lower part of his right leg in my hands. His limb is a topographical map, raised ridges of scars and soft valleys of normal skin, and touching him this way feels almost too intimate. But when I work my fingertips gently against the muscles along the back of his leg, he closes his eyes and sighs. I knead my thumbs along the back of his knee and his groan is pure pleasure. “Jesus, that feels good.”

  It doesn’t take long for my fingers to feel comfortable with the scar patterns on his skin, for it to stop feeling foreign and start feeling like Keane. His eyes are still closed when I notice a rise in the front of his shorts.

  His eyes fly open.

  “Fuck. Anna, I’m sorry, I—” He scrubs a hand over his face while he covers the front of his shorts with the other. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s—That’s not true. I want you so badly right now, I can barely stand it.”