The house was quiet when I woke up the next morning. Gracie lay fast asleep still in Katie's bed, her face soft and peaceful in slumber. As far as I could remember, Katie hadn't come in during the night and I still had no idea what the fight at the party was all about.
Out in the hall, John and Mike's door was locked and I guessed they were still sleeping. The living room couch had pillows and sheets still on it, perhaps where Connie had crashed for the night. I knocked lightly on Marley's door and cracked it open. He was awake, on his phone and smiled when I lay beside him. His crumpled sheets were cool with the morning air blowing in through the open balcony. We didn't talk. We didn't need to. But just lay listening to the sounds of the sea and the birds in the trees. His phone rang suddenly, a call from a guy he had met while taking an early summer course at his future university. I gave him some privacy. I walked back to Mike and John's room. I slowly cracked the white shutter door to find only John asleep, propped up against the back board of the bed, a book resting on his chest and his glasses on his face.
He looked innocent and vulnerable and I thought how there was something sweet about a person giving into exhaustion right then and there, in the middle of whatever it was they were doing. An unintentional, natural reaction to life. Our guard down, the unconscious face revealing all the emotions the conscious one didn't in an act of betrayal by our most human side.
The room was strewn with clothes and sheets and sand at the foot of the bed. A messy room. With things left scattered all around. And though I was a person inclined to neatness, there was something natural and comforting about the scene. It showed a place where someone had very much been. It told a story of what the person had been doing. It showed a placed lived in, still filled with the warmth and smell of that person. It made neatness feel dull and boring and lifeless in comparison.
Light was shining in through the windows and shutters on the other side of the room with the vivid green palms just outside the window providing adequate shade. Books patiently waited on the side tables to be read later that night.
As if he felt me watching him, John opened his eyes slowly.
"Hey there old man," I greeted him.
For a moment he looked disoriented and confused, as if he forgot where he was. I walked over to him, feeling the urge to comfort him.
He smiled, placing his book on the bedside table and moving his legs over the side of the bed so he was sitting looking up at me as he held my waist. "Old man?" he asked, looking confused but amused. "Aren't I only a few years older than you?" he teased.
I smiled and pointed to his face. "The glasses," I clarified.
"Oh," he said, taking them off quickly, embarrassed as if he had forgotten they were there.
"No, I like them," I said, stopping him. "But come to think about it, you were lying down like an old man. Don't you ever notice how old people always sit up perfectly in their little spot on the bed? Kids and teenagers literally just lounge anywhere, flop down any way. A leg here, a leg there, only half their body on, an arm hanging off, propped up by one elbow, on their stomach, their head at the bottom, their feet on their pillow, sideways." He chuckled.
"Alright. Well come and show me how to lie like a teenager," he said jokingly seductive.
And then he suddenly pulled me down on the bed with him.
I struggled and laughed, tangled in his embrace.
"I have to warn you though. I'm not so still when I sleep. I'm all over the place," he said.
"Oh no. Well I'm sorry to tell you but I'm not so sure this will work out."
"Of course it will! I'll take up all of the space in the bed that you won't. Compromise baby!"
I rolled my eyes. "In your dreams dear."
"I came looking for you earlier, but you were still asleep."
"Where's Mike?" I asked, glancing at the empty bed beside the window.
"Him and Connie took off early this morning to go fishing with Martin and Nelson...Katie?"
I shrugged. "Haven't seen her, but she messaged me late last night and early this morning to let me know she was okay."
We must have fallen asleep not long after that, because when I woke up, we were tangled together, just as we had been lying before. He hadn't moved a muscle. We were perfectly content as we were, no sounds but the soft wind in the trees outside and sacred silence.
I had dreamed that I was in a bus driving down a hill. The bus shook and my body jumped limply up and down. I lay my head against the rickety window and through closed eyes could see and feel on my face flashes of sunlight squirting through the high mountain side above us. I felt again like a child. Movement, even the slight pounding of my head against the glass, putting me into a lull. My body was exhausted from the weekend in which I played freely with other children in the cool and with an energy working its way up the frays of the rag of wildness. A family in the garden, a ball being kicked, a mother checking plants, watering the gardens and moss covered brick steps; eating ice cold fruit to keep cool; sun shining, breeze blowing, grass green. It was both relaxing, relieving and frightening. Had I lost my future and willingly retreated? For a moment, I opened my eyes to see a shaded, mystic canopied scene, a grand mountain view, missing concrete barriers, the rusting bodies of old cars hitched up parked in corners, goats and people along the way next to small brightly coloured concrete huts and women and children in Sunday church clothes walking down the hill to church. I closed them again. With my hair strewn about me, my clothes rumpled and uncoordinated, the smell of a dog still about my hands, nature's natural dirt under my nails and traces of others still on my body, I traveled back peacefully. Like driving home, down a hill with the windows down at twilight. It felt as if I didn't know where I was going, and so I relinquished control to the driver and allowed my sleeping soul to be carried back to my life.
Back in the waking moment, the sun was now high in the sky, glowing proudly, peaking in the early afternoon. A lawn mower sounded outside, a car honked in the far background and my body filled with the warm atmosphere, perfectly temperate, cool enough to only rely on the little breeze blowing in.
The day had relaxed beautifully in time for the bonfire that Mike's family was setting up on the beach. The sky above was a soft shade of blue with streaks of pink. The sun would soon retire, sending the last of its warmth and light in a soft orange glow. A bitter sweetness would cling to its departure.
On the deck outside, Katie had finally revealed herself, tanning her bronzed skin by the pool and flipping through a magazine, an aloof presence with dark shades over her eyes and her mouth a hard set line.
Later on in the evening, activity picked up between the two houses as kids played in the sand and the adults set up the barbecue, chairs and tables around a small bonfire and carried food down from the big house. My first time seeing Mike and Connie for the day was behind a tree whose view was sheltered from the bonfire, buying a spliff from a rasta guy.
"Respect," the guy said and continued walking on.
Marley, John and I stood with them talking as they passed it back and forth.
"Michael!" It was Mike's mother yelling for him from up the beach, her tone more an indication of her anger than the fact that she used his full name, which she always did.
"Fuck," Mike said, quickly passing off the joint and blowing the last of the smoke out as he sprinted out from behind the tree and up to the bonfire. He was fuming when he came back down.
"She mad about the weed?" Connie asked him.
"No," he all but growled. "She told me to stop encouraging people like that ras up this side of the beach. As if it's not a fucking public beach anyway," he said, running his hand aggressively through his hair.
"She not exactly wrong you know Mikey," Connie said calmly. "Not too long ago we heard a story about some people getting held at gunpoint and robbed at their beach house in the middle of the day." I thought of the irony of being robbed on vacation, the illusion of paradise stolen right out from under you and replaced with a bitter reality.
"Yes but Jesus, that guy wasn't going to do anything."
"No but I guess it can be hard to know who to trust. Sad but true."
Mike, unconvinced, saying it was better to take the risk and do the right thing, fumed for a while, but soon regained his usual spirit. The tension between him and Katie even seemed to thaw enough for them to talk, while we all sat by the fire and ate, though we never got the story of what had happened the night before.
Walking on the beach with Marley I saw John playing with his brothers and caught myself smiling without even knowing it. I snuck up on him from behind and sprang onto his back, laughing at his startled jump. Realizing it was me he laughed and pulled me around to his front. I wrapped my arms and legs around him and kissed him passionately.
"I like the enthusiasm," he said as I climbed down and he softly kissed my neck, sending shivers through my body.
In the early hours of the night, the adults packed up and headed out for the city again, the long weekend having come to an end. The only people remaining in the big house would be Mike's brother Paul and his group of friends.
We decided to drive up to a spot said to have the best view of the full moon on a clear night like this. The official history was that the property had last belonged to an English writer no less, his home having seen the likes of queens and film stars passing through. Before him, to an English pirate, who used it as a lookout.
The house still held the writer's possessions, now decades old, almost exactly as he had left them, and inscribed on its side, a pretty piece of a final poem:
When I have fears, as Keats had fears,
Of the moment I'll cease to be,
I console myself with vanished years,
Remembered laughter, remembered tears,
And the peace of the changing sea.
And out on the vast lawn overlooking rises of land and the Caribbean Sea, sat a statue of him looking out at the view as he had in life, not too far away from his final resting place.
Up there, the moon was perfectly round and massive, a glowing sun in the night sky. The breeze was cooler than usual for the island and the coconut trees were silhouettes blowing lightly in the orb's glow. It had emerged like a god upon the hills. A perfect circle in the sky cut out. A hole to the heavens. Lighting the clouds of curtains and the sky, its stage. It was mesmerizing. Tree branches spotted it in my line of vision. But no matter. It would rise above them.
Still, I couldn't help but wonder what else the earth had buried here with no permanent fixture to mark its place in history. What pieces of that eternal puzzle of time had been lost to the ages? Had been erased or rewritten or left out of the story web of life? What other personal histories there were that had been overlooked? How many personal stories had not been heard? How much didn't we know? How much couldn't we know? How much could we find out? What were we missing? What didn't I know? What hadn't I learnt? What could I simply not know?
It made me uncomfortable, not being able to know everything; not being able to somehow have all knowledge within my possession. Things in the past that I simply couldn't know of, or that had been lost; things in the future that I couldn't possibly know yet; all the stories I couldn't hear and tell but that needed to be told. It was a powerful thing, being a storyteller; a great responsibility one might say. And yet how did we encapsulate it all? Was selective remembrance an inevitability?
I somehow felt frustrated, overwhelmed and still fascinated all at the same time because we may not have had knowledge of everything, but we had knowledge that so much more knowledge existed, and somehow feeling as if it was all existing all at once. The past the present and the present the future and somehow everything one and infinite. Order and chaos. Time and space. And all of us just incomplete things walking around, searching for that whole.
As we sat out on the dew-covered lawn looking up at the moon, the smell of jasmine and mint just beyond, behind us, the bushes were lit like a fairy garden as fireflies illuminated the night.