Emeline Can't Escape an Invasion of Love
The Beryl Stairs ©ped
3b
Cabo Morado, Nicoya, Costa Rica
The middle afternoon wind grew with the climbing sun, and the dark chop of the ever-pressing, scrambling ocean turned from murky indigo to teal coffee as mossy tubes of briny glass peeled over the marzipan sand, foaming, crackling, and relenting under the porous curtain of crushed shells. A cargo ship, bound for stops in Tambor and Puntarenas, hovered on the horizon like an iron birdhouse, still against all casual glances.
____Emeline sat atop a bluff of rock, cross-legged, facing the scouring salt air in ritual resignation, continuing with her breathing exercises. Blissful, bittersweet tedium filled her purpose; she was at the endless precipice—the one that drew her outward with its unreachable edge. Living at the junction of the three spheres (Litho, Hydro, Atmo) and breathing in deliberate, meditative beats, had become her only behavior; any other endeavor was subject to judgment and misery. At times, when she finished her evening food and lit her lamp, she would dribble recriminations and fantasies across a pad of paper and wonder expectantly at the words, waiting for the dose of prose, waiting for the phrase that would challenge her existence and compel her to interact—once again—with the known world. To date, and to her relief, nothing she produced had swayed her from the cape, but—instead—had only reinforced her banishment to a degree of understanding that she was there and nowhere else because all bodies arrived from their pain to rest under a canopy, and hers was founded from legitimate and natural need. The notion that rest became her highest purpose had hardly tinkered at her conscience. When the kingfishers lighted on the jutting north point and the wind merged through the pillars of giant cedar in reassuring rushes, she knew the whole of her being was a complement to the spectacle—she was a vane, a node, a petal.
____From between the cargo ship and the north point, she made out the shape of a figure inside of a sea kayak. The occupant was paddling soundly and purposefully, and heading for her shore. To her south was the nature preserve, and her neighbor to the north, Jarno, her only neighbor, was too frail to be on the water alone. On occasion she’d happen across paddlers and track junkies, all searching for an elusive break upon which to surf, but this figure on the water was unsettling, inasmuch as the being in the buoying bobber had no backpack, and the vessel was of the pleasure cruising variety, allowing for little stowing space.
____The paddler’s form and face emerged and took definition before her gaze; it was a young man, presumably Gringo, and his expression flashed into a chalky pall of wonder at the sight of her figure, now standing, on the horseshoe of sand.
____“Emeline!” he cried. “Is that you?”
____She cringed. Her lower legs flooded with lead and her gut twisted. She knew no one here like this boy.
____“It’s me! It’s Brandon!”
____She stayed on her firmly planted feet, incredulous and doubtful she knew any Brandon until, thinking back to her brother’s retreat, she recalled a boy who hovered about her like a remora fish and sat by her—baited—at the dinner table. A churning clamminess claimed her gut and her salivary glands cramped at the nausea of his lupine beauty; the boy was lean and bent like Quixote, and his blonde bangs rolled from his crown like sheaves of winter wheat. His lineaments were sharp. His nose protruded like a weathervane, his brow eaved over his gray eyes like a shelter, and his lips were flat, chapped, and innocent. Emeline recalled the trouble he once stirred in her. She waited and kept her tongue staid.
____“Are…are there rocks here?” he pleaded. “Is it safe to carry the breakers?”
____Emeline smiled and nodded gently, curling one hand to her. She expunged her hostilities and allowed the course of his arrival. Currents plague us all, she thought.
____Brandon grooved the nose of his kayak into the sand and leapt onto the bank. He bounded for her and offered a sincere embrace. “It’s incredible to see you again, Emm,” he said with the height of singular emotion. “Are you well?”
____Emeline fluttered from his stab at civility and form. The boy appeared to her out of a strobe chamber, changing from babe to man like the myriad film cells in a biography. She nodded and squinted toward a question.
____Brandon stopped her with his stare. For a handful of moments he took the pleasure of her smiling eyes and stored it away like a prize ribbon under glass. Then, in a paroxysm of self-correction, he righted himself. “We’ve been on foot for two days,” he said. “A guy, a nice fellah named Jarno, told us you were around the point. He leant me his grandkid’s canoe to get to you faster.”
____“WE?!” she cried.
____Brandon laughed. “Of course. Your brother…and some friends of ours.” He looked around and strained for a connecting force. “Carey,” he added. “You may remember her. She’s here with her boyfriend.”
____“And these ‘friends’ of yours, they’re following you on foot?”
____“Sure. They should be coming down the pass in a couple of hours.”
____Emeline smiled with the trace of an ancient exhaustion. “And I suppose Rinn just wants to visit and reconnect, no strings, huh?”
____“Well, he wants to kidnap you, but I don’t think his confidence will be enough to pull it off, I mean, that’s up to you, and, well, you’ve never, you don’t…”
____“Exactly,” said Emeline. Brandon’s candor quelled the pain of the ambush long enough for her to arrange for the encroaching showdown and its compulsory preening of old feathers. She patted Brandon on the chest and smiled into him with appreciation. “I want to thank you for the early feed. Rinn usually pounces on things, and you’ve softened his blow.”
____“Don’t worry so much, Emm. We’ll try to keep him on his keel while he’s here.”
____“Would you care for an aperitif while we wait?”
____“A drink, right?”
____Emeline howled in delight. “Follow me,” she beckoned. She led the boy to her lair of mason block and tin and pulled a dusty bottle of port from a case. She pointed him to her broad cedar picnic table and threw him a dry baguette. “Do you have any cigarettes?” she said.
____“No, sorry.”
____The two toasted each other with blue tin mugs and breathed and waited on the intervention. Brandon, while—at first—paralyzed from her method silence and urgent—himself—to steer a conversation to her liking, soon fell under the drumbeat of the flopping waves and assumed his role within the elements. Each time he felt the pauses weighing on him, however, he would part his lips to speak and Emeline would halt him with a raised palm and a sinister grin, her eyes flashing with harbored mischief and pleasure. As the fresco of the cyan afternoon descended into a blood-orange dusk, they halted each other’s impulses with quick and clear glances and easier smiles.
The port bridged any discomfort.
*
The woolen web of awakening from an evening nap—the sky ceding from its rarest hush into the purgative plough of night—had proven burdensome in the past for Emeline; the fog of her unconscious clearing itself in the darkness and the awareness of carrying herself through a state of alertness well into the wee morning would prickle at her as a stark and lonely mission. It was the moment in between, however, the moment when the gloaming kissed her back into being with the scrubbing nudge of a zephyr, that would loan her the most ecstatic sliver of peace and innocence. In this evening’s case, the web had been her hammock, and the plough was dear young Brandon, nuzzled and mingling with consciousness, at her bosom. She felt the shiver of companionship and acceptance bolt through her limbs and settle in her chest for a beat. She smelled the nutty, salt-crusted oil in his hair and felt the last of the missing sun’s heat on his skin. He had immured her in the scents of kelp, sesame, and horsehide, and had overtaken her will to enjoy any other sensory revelation. Only the tease of a nearby campfire and the stirring of voices compelled her away from the trance.
____“I brought smoked salmon, smoked Gouda, and a bushel of raisins,” said Rinn, unpacking before his friends. “What have you got?”
____David, across the circle of fire, pulled a bag from his pack. “We’ve got canned pineapple, bagels, and cream cheese.”
____“Pineapple’s mine,” insisted Carey. “You’ll have to cut me for it.”
____“I have…a bottle of coconut scented sunscreen, and a bag of figs,” confessed Ingrid.
____“Fine.” Rinn stood. “I’ll forage in the shanty for a service set.” He walked gently by his sister in search of plates, knives, and napkins.
____Emeline shot her eyes open and bit back at the goading. “Shanty?!” she said. “This is my home, Rinn.”
____Rinn smiled. “Well, dearest, if I find Chinet inside, then a shanty it remains.”
____“Flatware and CHINA are in my trunk, alas but it’s a service of four, asshole,” said Emeline. “You’ll have to share.”
____Rinn approached his sister and placed his palm on her head. “Lovely to see you again, Sis,” he admitted.
____“To the last, mon frere,” growled Emeline. She looked out to the campfire and made out the face and figure of Carey, but did not recognize the two around her. She nudged awake her playmate and placed a hand over his jaw. “Who’re the two sitting around Carey?” she said.
____Brandon, dashed that the membrane had been broken, but young enough to feel the need to conceal the disappointment, rose from the hammock and pointed into the fire. “David is Carey’s boyfriend,” he said. “They’ve known each other since they were kids.” Brandon pointed at the noble blonde woman. “Ingrid’s a big time poet from Iowa,” Brandon’s voice crackled into a chuckle. “She, well, she went off the rails in Beryl and Rinn’s trying to patch things up with her. Otherwise, she’s a stand-up lady.”
____“Ingrid…”
____“You know her?”
____“Christ, Brandon. I’d like to spend a semester at sea with that woman. She’s intense. Her shit was in my Master’s curriculum, years back. I lectured about her when I was an Adjunct. She’s the god damned standard.”
____“Well, there you go!” encouraged Brandon. “You gotta be glad we came to see you, now, hmm?”
____Emeline cringed at the prospect of the interminable night. She was living in the Cape, neighbors only with a gentle Scandinavian, and inhabiting a well-fought plateau in mind and body. She knew her rhythms were only beginning. Now she faced a gauntlet as absurd and as gilded as any writer would dread—a best-selling novelist and a poet of multiple laurels were gathered around her fire pit, awaiting her defense of process and self. At once, she feared more for the comfort and entertainment of the others; she liked what she remembered of Carey, she enjoyed the woman’s brightness and candor, and she was only beginning to peel the emerging layers of Brandon to her whim.
____Rinn will suffocate me within a circle of compassionate logic, she thought, and if that fails him, he’ll play the pity card. I’m dead to my deepest defenses, her mind chanted to her. I’m charged with my ugliest self. And in front of good people. It was the price for the perfect retreat, she knew, but she couldn’t prevent the howling sensation that this price should not have been claimed so early, and it shouldn’t have been championed by her helpless brother. Of all the people in her life she was claimed to have disappointed, her brother should have capped the back of the line. The difference, and the stem of the resentment between them, arrived from the shared revelation that she was to resume her creativity in this aerated, tropical den, whereas he was plagued with an indefinite and self-proclaimed sabbatical, one which turned him outward to the illusion of need from others. Rinn sees me as he sees himself, she discovered. He wants me back. He wants me to echo his emptiness by way of some perverted pedigree of art and blood.
He will not eclipse me with his unutterable tragedies, Emeline’s mind declared to her. He will not become my master.