“
Fine,” she says. “I’ll go surfing with you in April, you arrange it, send me a letter with the details. If I change my mind and I’m not there you’ll just have to accept that. But I will commit to considering it. And I’ll make plans for a lighthouse tour. I will write you and tell you when and where. With the same condition. That I might not show. In fact I might even tell you in April that it isn’t working and that I won’t see you at any lighthouse and that I don’t even want you to see me in July or in October or in January. Are you willing to accept those terms? To risk July and January on April? That you might end up somewhere without me? Or that somewhere else might end us? That you might end up at a lighthouse without me? That you might never see me again? Because I don’t know that I can change that much. I truly don’t know. I have done some things that are unfair to you. But you say that it’s your decision. So here’s some more things. I will commit to trying, but with the understanding that I might not show. Is that a deal?” she says.
“
Deal,” he answers.
“
Deal,” she repeats.
They shake hands.
She walks over the room service cart, pours coffee into two cups, hands him one, then pours hers out on the carpet. He pours his into the growing stain.
Shannon and Joe
Her car is running. The weak winter sun has melted the dusting of snow and the ice has turned to cold isolated puddles. The exhaust from her car is leaving a low-hanging fog in the parking lot. He has loaded her small bag in her trunk and is standing by her door. She has the window down to say good-bye.
“
I liked your letters. So please only write me letters,” she says.
Joe is unsure how to answer.
“
No texts, or emails, or calls. I don’t want that,” she says.
Joe still doesn’t know how to answer.
“
It would be too immediate, too much in the now. Having chosen to live the way we are going to, having made our arrangement, our bargain, our deal, any email would be an instantaneous demand to write you back in that instant without thinking. Your letters are tangible, but they’re not demanding. They do not call for an instant reply,” she says. “They are something I can tolerate, something I can accept, something that fits into my world.”
Joe begins to understand. Once again it is about demands, and freedom from demands.
“
I can think about what I want to say, or not say, and how I want to say it, or not say it. I can pick it up and put it down, know that it will be there the next day and that my pen can add words to my letter in my time, at my pace, as the thoughts appear and as I find the words to express them,” she says.
Joe could see Shannon sitting with pen in hand, thinking on her words. He could not see her in front of a computer responding to some spur of the moment inane email.
She continues. “I know you are there, and I’m here. It’s the deal we’ve made. Letters keep you here, emails and calls and texts make you too much where I am. A
letter leaves you in your place and me in mine with a distinct boundary between our places.
Skype is the worst idea ever. I don’t want that little of you, those horrible teases. I only want you when I can have you, and even then only some of the time. So the letters are the right thing. And our visits, and our trips of course. That’s who we are,” she finishes.
Joe takes her hand in his. Raises it to his lips, kisses it gently.
“
It’s who we’ve chosen to be,” he says.
Shannon
“
You agreed to what?” Cara asks Shannon.
“
I think you heard me,” Shannon says.
“
Julys and Januarys on Topsail? Then a surf week in April and a lighthouse week in October?”
“
That’s right.”
“
He’s not going to be coming to the house and seeing the kids and everybody during July is he?”
“
No. It’ll be like this July. Run or walk on the beach in the morning. Then meet him at his shop for coffee.”
“
Coffee?”
“
It’s a public place,” Shannon says.
“
So you’re telling me that you’re going to be able to see him every day in July and not have sex with him? After what you just told me you did all January?”
“
I didn’t say that.”
“
But you just said it’s a public place.”
“
I think we’ll figure it out...”
Joe
“
You did what?” Joe’s sister asks.
“
We made a deal,” Joe says.
“
A deal I’m sure I’ll never understand. Won’t that deal insure that you’ll never find anyone else?”
“
I have found someone else. I found Shannon.”
“
You know what I mean,” his sister says.
“
You’ve been my sister for a long time. You knew me with Danny and you knew me with Colleen. How would you compare me now to me with either of them.”
His sister looks him up and down. Drinks from her coffee. Then looks out the window and seems to focus on a place a long way away. She takes another drink from her coffee.
“
Cat got your tongue?” Joe asks.
“
You’re right. And I can’t figure it out. But then I never could figure you out,” she says.
“
Join the club,” Joe says.
Shannon
Dear Joe,
If I had any doubt in my mind about visiting a sunny and warm location, this winter in Cleveland has removed that doubt. This has been a viciously cold winter, with day after day when the sun refused to shine.
So, I am definitely coming to Costa Rica, for warm temperatures, warm water, sunlight, surfing, and of course to see you. I have no pre-conceived notions about what we will be like in Costa Rica. We might not work there like we didn’t work in Wilmington. It might not be like our January on Topsail. I just want you to be prepared for that to be the case.
I have done some reading about surfing in Costa Rica and apparently you have chosen very wisely. The instructor and his camp have been very well reviewed by a large cross section of visitors, from absolute newbies to experienced surfers.
I am a little concerned about some of the descriptions of Costa Rica (e.g., increasing drug use, not-illegal prostitution, unfinished projects) but am encouraged by the consistently warm water temperatures and the amount of sunlight.
Life in my Coast Guard station is so very interesting. First there were the storms of November, and then the cold of December when the inner harbor started to freeze. Lake Erie was completely frozen over when I got back from our January in Topsail but then during a big wind storm the ice broke up and now there are patches of open water. The ice chunks (floes?) made an extremely loud noise as they crashed and ground against the break wall and against the base of my house. I guess I know why they built twelve feet of concrete at the base of my little tower.
So I’ll see you in Costa Rica.
Shannon
p.s., who is going to be in charge of coffee???
Joe
Dear Shannon,
Thank you for your letter.
That is excellent news that you will be coming to Costa Rica.
Yes I understand that we might not work there, but I also understand that we might work there. In fact, given that it will be sunny and warm and that we will be surfing and that there will be all types of new experiences around I am confident that we will work there. The place will be different from everywhere else we have been together but we will still be us. There will be surfing and sun and sand and beaches to walk on.
The Atlantic has had an odd March, with the Gulf Stream running in closer than normal. This has led to some unique experiences this spring. There have been dense fogs and there have been spring thunder storms. And there has been excellent fishing. You remember Mike? We’ve gone out sport fishing on his boat a couple times and caught some tuna, some Mahi Mahi, and even a Wahoo, and we were only about two miles out. Usually you have to go out about twenty miles to catch anything here. I don’t usually like to go fishing on the ocean because it takes two hours to ride out to the Gulf Stream and then you get sea sick fishing out there and then it takes two hours to get back and you usually never catch anything. But this March has been truly unique.
Of course this unique March is going to be followed by a truly unique April in Costa Rica.
I’ve been running.
I park where I normally park and run where I normally run and the memory of us together is still here on the beach, here on Topsail, just like you wanted it to be. We’re here together every day, and it’s so good. I see what you mean about keeping things good where they are good. We are good here, even in March.
I hope we will be good in Costa Rica in April, but if we aren’t we aren’t and I’m not going to try to force something that isn’t there. Our January together here on the beach is still so now and vivid for me that it can be enough if Costa Rica doesn’t work out. Joe.
Costa Rica
I have arrived a day before she is scheduled to arrive. In her last letter she wrote that she was still coming. I will ride with the surf camp van to pick her up at the airport, even though she will be tired and will be adjusting to the heat and the humidity. I thought about letting her arrive here on her own terms. I thought about giving her the evening and night to acclimate and then seeing her in the morning. But then I thought she might wonder why I wasn’t there to meet her.
So I have decided to meet her with the van. Which gives me the rest of the day to get the lay of the land.
Already I can tell that this place is unplugged. There is no phone or television in my room. There is a small AM radio that I have not yet turned on. This place is really unplugged. It revolves around the tide, which makes sense because I am at a surf camp. A surf camp with a large main building at the bottom of a steep hill and with a series of bungalows dotting the hillside from bottom to top.
The main house has a deep porch on the three sides that will face the tropical sun. The doors and windows are open, and there are no screens. Which surprised me because I assumed there would be biblical amounts of mosquitoes. But so far I have seen none.
There are three or four small, lean dogs that alternate between lazing in the shade and patrolling the grounds that have recently been tropical rain forest and that could return to rain forest at any moment. I get the feeling that if I closed my eyes or simply didn’t pay attention for a while that the rain forest, which is a polite word for jungle, will quickly reclaim these grounds. But what appears to be perpetual landscaping and perpetual house cleaning is keeping the jungle at bay. Men with machetes and mowers move relentlessly along the grounds.
The main house has a twenty foot high peaked ceiling, with a small legion of geckos clinging to the undersides of the high ceiling. Perhaps this explains the absence of mosquitoes, but I am so new to the tropics that I am unsure. Actually this is not the tropics, this is the equatorial region. But I can’t stop thinking ‘tropical paradise’.
I am sitting at a table, which I have learned is a ‘
may-sa
’ and am sitting in a chair, which I have learned is a ‘
see-ya
’. I have learned this from a slender young boy who I thought was seven but who turns out to be twelve. It seems that the Costa Ricans are shorter and leaner than we gringos. I am a fit gringo, which makes me stand out in two ways. I am thinner and more lean than the other gringo guests, but thicker, less lean, and taller than the Costa Ricans.
The
may-sa
and
see-ya
are both made from the same piece of native wood that must have been hewn from an enormous tree. Although the people and dogs are smaller, it appears that everything else is bigger in Costa Rica. Trees reach hundreds of feet into the low hanging clouds. Hundred foot long vines hang down from the towering trees. Twenty foot crocodiles hold their station in the current in a Mississippi River sized torrent hundreds of feet below a mile long suspension bridge. Steep mountains and steeper gorges abound.
I am not in North Carolina any longer. On the drive from the airport I noticed that every house had bars on the doors and windows, even though my research showed that Costa Rica has one of the lowest crime rates in the world. As we approached the coast, I saw dozens of half-finished or nearly finished hotels and condo complexes. When the American economy recessed, gringo investment in Costa Rica dried up and these bastions of American vacationers stand as testaments to unfulfilled greed.