The Last Resort

by Marissa Stapley

  “In this room, I want you to feel empowered to be who you are, to say the things you want to say. I want you to feel seen again, Shell. I want you to feel like the woman you are. Because I know how you feel. I truly do. We’ve all felt this way at some point in our lives. Invisible, inadequate, filled with needs and desires we just can’t express. Because we’re too afraid.”

  He was leaning toward her and looking directly into her eyes and it was too much, like a spotlight swinging its beam across her body, invasive and overbright. It was what she had wanted, to be seen, but now she felt exposed, and not the right parts of her. She had seen Colin’s intake forms, and he had written almost nothing on them. Hers were the same. Bare bones, a basic sketch of a marriage on the rocks. Arguments? Check. Lack of Intimacy? Check. Resentment? Check. But there was so much more.

  Miles reached for her hand. “You don’t have to talk. You don’t have to say another word. Just look at me. Look into my eyes and stay here with me.”

  She looked into his eyes and felt a sickness spread through her, a sort of panic. He wasn’t going to ask her anything, about Zoey, about her life, about any of the past that was burning a hole inside her. She took a deep, struggling breath. “Miles—”

  “Relax,” he said. “Breathe calmly in and out. Feel every single breath. Make it purposeful. Feel the leather against your legs, hear the ocean in your ears.”

  Shell did as he said because she didn’t know what else to do. She forced herself to slow her breathing, to be conscious about it.

  “Repeat after me,” he said after a few minutes, during which she noted his breaths had come to match her own, that their chests began to rise in mesmerizing unison. “I am broken.”

  “I am broken.”

  “I have failed and I have faltered, but those days are behind me.”

  “I have failed, I have faltered...” She echoed his words, closing her eyes. Were they praying? She couldn’t be sure. When was the last time?

  “I am going to allow myself to heal,” he intoned. “I am going to allow myself to be healed. I am going to stop thinking about alcohol. I am going to forget about the sin of those bottles. I am going to turn away from the weak and sinful side of myself.”

  Her mouth went dry, but she repeated what he said. “And I am going to step forward into my new beautiful life. I will not be alone when I do.” The sound of the waves and the sound of his voice were a comfort in the dark. “Open your eyes,” he said. “Look at me.” She did, and nothing happened. He stared into her eyes and she stared back, trying not to feel alarmed.

  It felt like too much time passed. But eventually, she started to feel relaxed because there was nothing else to feel. Eventually, the ebb and flow of her emotions slowed, then stopped altogether. She was used to this, this sitting and staring. She had spent entire days this way. At least today she wasn’t alone. There was that. At least she had eyes to stare into.

  “Your soul is as deep as an ocean,” Miles said. “Let me in. Let me in.” Shell found herself pulled out of the sense of relaxation by the intensity in his voice. She fought to come back to the surface, to push away the soporific sensations of sitting, staring. She had things she wanted, needed to say.

  “Miles, there’s something that—”

  “Stop. You are always fighting, pushing, struggling in your life. I am asking you to sit and be still. I am saying you will heal. Let me in.”

  There was something in his words that scared her. But maybe she was the scary one. He was the expert.

  She sat as still as possible, she made sure their breathing matched, and she kept her eyes locked with his. And she must have let him in, she must have done it, because later, when a timer sounded behind her, he smiled broadly and he said, “Wonderful, wonderful, excellent work, I’m honored to be your therapist. See you same time tomorrow.”

  “But what am I—what am I supposed to do? I mean, you haven’t even asked me anything about—”

  “Keep doing what you’ve been doing. Relax. You’re a beautiful woman, Shell. I saw your great, intoxicating beauty, and I felt honored. Thank you for showing yourself to me.” He pressed his hands together and nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. You are perfect.”

  She felt strange and numb. Colin felt further away than ever. And she felt as though she had just betrayed her husband.

  * * *

  Inside her bungalow again, Shell walked to the terrace doors and opened them, stood and looked out at the same waves she had seen when she was in Miles’s office, the same stretch of beach. She walked back inside. Through everything she did, she tried not to think about how much and how desperately she wished she still had the vodka. A sin, Miles had called it, and it was, wasn’t it? For her, it always had been—and she had never talked about it to anyone.

  She closed the curtains in the bedroom and undressed, then walked into the bathroom. She stood in front of the mirror. She was too thin, yes, but her stomach still had a slight roundness she had not been able to flatten after having Zoey, even with Pilates and yoga and random planks that would make Zoey laugh. There were stretch marks, too, low on her abdomen. These had lightened when she’d rubbed expensive creams and oils on them, but never disappeared completely. Wiggly silver bands, like handwriting. You are a beautiful woman, Miles had said to her. But these marks told another story altogether, one of a woman with a career who had realized, at almost forty, that she wanted a child. They had tried everything and she had told herself that no matter what, she had no regrets. And then, Zoey, a gift, a relief. Because there had been regret, even if she had denied it. Zoey had saved Shell from that—for a while. Now all she had was regret. She didn’t care that she was considered beautiful. It was this other story she badly wanted to tell: how empty she was. How mired in what could have been. And yet Miles Markell, one of the best therapists in the world, didn’t seem to be interested.

  No. No. You must be missing the point. He doesn’t need to be told what you’re feeling. He just knows. She just wasn’t focusing on the right thing. Maybe this path he wanted her on was the way to go. Maybe going over her trauma again and again in her own mind was the problem. Was that it? She was just supposed to turn it all off to get better?

  What choice did she have? She’d tried everything else. She had to trust him.

  She walked naked over to the sliding doors that led to the pool. She slid in. Her body felt weightless in the salt water. Her hair floated out around her shoulders. She stretched her arms above her head. Her nipples rose above the water for a few seconds and she felt them harden in the sea breeze. She closed her eyes and she saw Miles’s face. She opened them again, because his face was not the one she wanted to see. She was lonely. That was all. She wasn’t used to allowing someone to get too close. It had been a year—386 days, to be more precise—of keeping herself locked away. She was frustrated, she had expected release, and it felt instead as if everything was being forced deeper and deeper inside. But she just had to do what Miles said and the agony would stop.

  She closed her eyes and ducked her head under the water. In the total, womb-like silence, she felt a strange form of peace. But it didn’t last. Under the water, her body trembled. She breached the surface and gasped for air.

  “Are you ready?” Miles said into his microphone, his voice an exuberant shout.

  “He’s enjoying this a little too much, don’t you think?” Johanna said under her breath.

  Servers were moving among the tables with rolling carts. They were placing a box on each table with a board game inside. Johanna pulled the box toward her side of the table and read the top. “‘The Marriage Retreat Game.’ That’s an original title.” She shot a wry look in Ben’s direction. “Can you read the rules? I don’t have my glasses.”

  Ben shook his head and smiled. “When do you ever have your glasses? Did you even bring them?”

  She smiled, too, she made herself do it
and the smile reached her heart and warmed it somewhat. Wasn’t it true that you could grow to love someone? It just took time. She didn’t need a counselor to teach her that. When she was alone with Grace she felt the opposite. Out here, she saw what could be possible. The life she was supposed to lead. “Of course not. You know me so well. I don’t even know where my glasses are.”

  Grace had arrived. She was standing beside her husband in a long dress, burgundy with smoky gray flowers. Her hair was piled and pinned atop her head. Miles took her arm and said something and Grace smiled, and it felt familiar to Johanna, a smile that moved over her face slowly.

  She turned away from Grace and focused on the task at hand. The game. Her marriage. It was going to be easy. It had to be easy. All you had to do was close off your true self, hide it in a box somewhere inside. The simplest thing. She’d been doing it for years.

  Ben opened the box and lifted out the game board and instructions. “‘Increase your communication and deepen your intimacy with a roll of the dice,’” he read, then looked up at her. “Okay, I can admit, this is a little cheesy.”

  Johanna picked up the dice and shook them in her hand. Ben looked nice tonight, she told herself, with his hair tousled and still damp-looking, his shirt buttoned down. She thought about how it should make her feel, to see him sitting across the table from her—and then she did feel it, she was sure of it. I adore him. She had said that earlier today. She could make it true. And every day, she would get more strategies to take home and use to make her life easier than it had ever been.

  “Love you,” she said, reaching across the table to squeeze his hand.

  “Love you back. Okay, so I think we roll the dice and answer questions. And whoever gets to the end first...” He read the rest of the instructions and laughed. “I don’t actually know. There is no winner or loser. Apparently this game is ‘all about the journey.’”

  “Who gets to go first?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Any other rules I should know about?”

  “Nope.”

  “So, basically, this game is entirely pointless.”

  “We’re supposed to learn things about each other.”

  “We know everything about each other.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “Okay, let’s see. You go.”

  He rolled the dice, moved his marker—he had chosen blue—six spaces and lifted a card from the top of the deck. “Funny, I don’t actually know the answer to this question,” he said. “So maybe we don’t know everything.”

  “What is it?”

  “Who was your first love?”

  The smile disappeared from her face. She pasted it back on. “I know your answer,” she said. “Denise Morris, in third grade.”

  “Wow, you have a great memory. But I wouldn’t exactly call her a first love. I was eight.”

  “Okay, well, who then?”

  He thought for a moment. “My girlfriend in college, Maya—but truly, Jo, it was nothing compared to the way I feel for you. Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be answering this question?”

  “You,” she said. “You were my first love. My only love.”

  “Come on. There were guys before me.”

  “Yes, but none I loved the way I love you. Truly, you are the first guy I’ve ever loved.”

  “First boyfriend, then. First guy you...” He raised an eyebrow, and she remembered how he used to like it, when she would tell him sexy stories. Back when they used to have sex.

  “His name was Matt,” she said. “It happened at a high school party, in someone’s parents’ bed.”

  He leaned forward. “I bet you were so hot in high school.”

  “I bet you were, too,” she whispered. She took her foot out of her sandal and ran it up his leg. Then she leaned toward him and whispered, “Let’s ditch this pointless game and go back to our room.”

  “We can’t just keep taking off on these things—”

  “We can do what we want. We’re not children.” She moved her foot higher. She was a star pupil.

  “We certainly aren’t,” he said.

  “So...?”

  “I’d be a fool to say no to you.” He stood. “Let’s make our escape.”

  She saw Miles Markell watching them and frowning as they joined hands and walked quickly away. She didn’t see Grace anywhere, and wondered if she was watching, too. Johanna tilted her head and kissed her husband as they walked. A few couples were whispering, eyebrows raised. The fire that had been smoldering ignited in the base of her pelvis, she wanted this now, now that it wasn’t just the two of them, now that there was room for fantasy—and the idea that maybe later, people might be fantasizing about them.

  “I want you inside me now,” she purred into his ear, then tried to think of something else. “I want your cock. You should lift my skirt, bend me over and fuck me, now, up against that tree.” Her mouth was on his earlobe.

  He groaned and said, “Come on, let’s go to the villa,” and they started to walk even faster.

  He fumbled for his key, opened the door, pressed her against the wall with his hands and his mouth and kicked the door shut behind him. She closed her eyes, closed them tight, ran her hands down his back, then stopped and said, “Blindfold me, tie me up.”

  “I don’t think I have anything to tie you up with,” Ben was saying into her mouth, as she felt the fire inside her dimming slightly.

  “Nothing?”

  He had his hands on the waistband of her skirt. He pulled it down, then her panties. “No,” he said, “and I don’t think I can wait.”

  “Against the wall,” Johanna said, but he was lifting her onto the bed and then he was on top of her. She closed her eyes.

  “You feel so good,” he said, but she heard him as though he were miles away. She was thinking about something else, someone else, somewhere else.

  “I want you. I always have.” It wasn’t him, but she tried to make it so. The body she was imagining was much softer. “Please...” She squeezed herself around him and felt the waves coming. She made the appropriate sounds and compliments, all directed at him, but she could already feel the hollow regret, swimming its way toward her. She shut her eyes tighter.

  “Jo,” he said. “Oh, yes, Jo.”

  “That was amazing,” he said afterward, breathless, climbing off her, and she wondered how it was possible to be inside someone’s body and not realize they were gone.

  “Ruth, could you please clean up that table?” Miles snapped, even though it didn’t matter, even though the staff would do it. Ruth did what he asked, her mouth a slash of hot-pink unhappiness. Eventually, Grace watched her walk off alone into the night.

  “Ready?” Miles said, beside her now. She followed. The night air was calm, warm on her skin. Above, stars spilled out across the sky, lawless and yet mapped out and analyzed for a millennia, even more rigorously than people had ever been—even more than the people Grace treated week after week, year after year. Grace had often wondered what would happen should a star fall out of Orion’s belt, should one of the Seven Sisters plunge into nothingness. Some nights, she stayed outside and looked at the stars and indulged in thoughts like this. Tonight especially, she needed time alone, to think. It had been easier to do that, she realized, to take time for herself back when Miles and Ruth would spend their evenings together. She had sanctioned an extramarital relationship, yes—but she had had her reasons. It was out of her mouth before she could really think about it: “What’s happened between the two of you? You and Ruth?”

  He didn’t answer her. They left the poolside lounge behind; it was empty of couples now. Grace could see a few of them, walking along the beach, talking. The game didn’t seem like much, but it generally didn’t cause any conflict, and often did do what the box said: foster a sense of intimacy. She had walked past Johanna and Ben’s ta
ble a few times, had tried to get a look at Johanna’s ankle and that familiar-looking rash—but there had been no way, and then they had left. “The game certainly seemed to work with the Reid couple,” Miles said, as if reading her thoughts. “A little too much. Shameful behavior.”

  Just then, a loud voice erupted from the bar area, one of the husbands, a large man from North Carolina, shouting “Jesus, I could really use a scotch right now!” to raucous laughter.

  She winced and didn’t look at Miles.

  He stopped walking and turned to her, his face a bitter mask. “Really, Grace?” His voice was a low growl. “How long has she been out of my bed and you’re just noticing and asking now?” He began to walk again.

  She caught up. “I noticed, but I thought you were just giving her time, after what happened with the—”

  “NO.” This time, his voice was a roar. They were far enough away that the guests wouldn’t hear, and if they did they’d think it was the ocean, or maybe an animal in a jungle that they somehow believed still existed here, that they didn’t understand had been bulldozed to make way for resorts like this. Paradise, Miles called it, but it wasn’t—it only had been, once, and well before their time.

  She let him walk away. She waited until she heard the front door of their villa slam far ahead of her before she began to walk again. She stood outside their home and looked up at the stars but found no comfort or distraction from her thoughts, which strained against their tethers in so many directions. Ruth. Miles. Johanna. Her own fears, her own past, like a creature in the walls of a house, ignored but unmistakably there. Finally, she went inside. Silence. She was afraid. She took the stairs as quickly and quietly as she could, entered her office and closed the door. It had no lock. She wished for one but it was no use: he had broken two already.