I made my way up to the highest deck and moved to the front of the boat. I liked to have a view as we sailed to the bigger island, St. Martin, where I would catch my flight back to New York. Others had the same idea, and soon, the top deck was full of people with binoculars and cameras. They all crowded the railings to capture pictures. Some took selfies while others asked strangers to take their photos for them.
I soaked in the view through my eyes instead of a camera lens.
When the ferry left, the horn blew loudly enough to startle some of the passengers. Amused, I smiled down at the water. The sun beat down on my shoulders and back, and before long, I was sticky with sweat and saltwater.
At St. Martin, I caught another car. This one took me to the airport. It was a small building located right smack on one of the public beaches on the island. No word of a lie. There were signs planted in the sand warning people that the plane jets could blast them clean off their feet if they were in their path. The planes came in freakishly low, sailing right over the heads of beachgoers going about their afternoon in the sun to land on the tarmac roughly five hundred feet from the shoreline.
The first time I’d seen it, I couldn’t make sense of it.
Who chose such a bizarre place to build an airport? Why not go a little farther inland?
I supposed it made landing easy, but still, people were stupid by default. If their eyes were glued to their phones, they hardly noticed a damn thing happening around them. I should know. As a writer, I spent a good bulk of my time people-watching. I watched for behaviors and mannerisms, things I could mimic in characters in my books to create genuine, three-dimensional people within my work. In all my years watching strangers, that is something I’d concluded—when looking at their phones, people were as clueless and occupied as a dog watching its master holding a piece of cheese.
The airport wasn’t all that busy this morning. Mondays weren’t a big day for arrivals or departures apparently. I checked in and went through security in less than twenty-five minutes before I settled down on a leather chair in the only cafe in the airport. I sipped a decaf Americano because the last thing I wanted was to feel jittery on my flight, and I pulled out my notebook. I rested it on the armrest and wrote a few pages while I drank my coffee and waited for my boarding time.
An hour and fifteen minutes later, I was in my front-row first-class seat on the plane. I still had my notebook out, not because I wanted to write right then but because I wanted to look busy and focused so that whoever sat beside me didn’t try to strike up a conversation. The last thing I wanted on a flight was an obligatory conversation with a stranger.
Sure, I could use it as material for a book, but sometimes, a guy just wanted to fly in peace. My game plan, should things go how I wanted, was to recline my seat, close my eyes, and sleep for most of the flight. Maybe I’d have lunch when the meal cart went around. Maybe I’d continue to sleep.
Time would tell.
As the rest of the plane filled up, I found myself crossing my fingers that nobody sat beside me. Those were the best kind of flights.
My hopes were dashed when a seventy-five-year-old man in a tropical-printed shirt sat down beside me. He had a backpack with him, and stitched onto the front was a large Canadian flag. His wife, or the woman I assumed was his wife, had the aisle seat on the other side. She too had a Canadian flag on her bag.
I twisted to my notebook, held the pen over the page, and willed him not to speak to me.
“Morning, lad,” the Canadian man said. “Always a shame to leave such a beautiful place behind, isn’t it?”
I grimaced internally but smiled at him. “Definitely. First time?”
He shook his head. “Genie and I come every year on our anniversary. But every year, it gets harder and harder to leave. She says it’s because we’re old and frail and don’t like heading back to British Columbia in the rainy fall season.”
“I hear it’s cold there this time of year.”
“It’s not nearly as bad as the other coast,” he said. “Our winters are fairly mild compared to the rest of the country. Where you from, lad?”
“New York.”
“Ah, then you have far colder weather than us.”
“I like the cold.”
“I don’t mind it either. It’s just the rain I don’t like. Seeps into your bones. Can’t warm up. But that’s not what makes it hard to leave a place like this.”
“What is then?”
The man gave me a knowing smile and tipped his head to his wife. “When you’re old like us, you don’t know how long time is going to favor you. One of these trips will inevitably be our last one together. When you start to close in on the end of the line, every minute and every day counts. So leaving the beaches and the memories we have here behind gets a little harder each year.”
I stared at him.
He chuckled and put his seatbelt on. “Look at me, going all soft on a stranger. I can see you have work to do there. Carry on. I’ll mind my own business and harass my missus instead.”
As soon as he turned around, I flipped to the back of my notebook and scribbled down what he’d just said to me. It seemed like the perfect piece of wisdom for a book.
And for me.
The air had a cold snap to it when I pushed out the doors at JFK airport and stepped out onto the busy sidewalk where travelers were flagging down taxi cabs and Uber drivers. I carried on down the sidewalk to the pickup location, where I spied what I was looking for, a glossy black Bugatti Chiron. The car headlights flashed and I grinned as I dragged my bag down the curb.
My friend, Walker, extracted himself from the car. He was a tall man and nearly every vehicle was too small for him except for big trucks. He wore a black winter overcoat and a burgundy scarf. Walker had always had a flair for fashion. It was the artist in him. He grinned like the devil as he met me in front of his car, clapped my shoulder, and pulled me into his side.
“How did the tropics treat you?” he asked, thumping me in the chest with his other hand balled in a fist.
“Fairly well,” I said as he took my bag off my hands and popped the hood of the Chiron. A small compartment sat under the hood where the engine of most cars were. This car’s engine was in the back. My suitcase fit neatly in the little pocket and Walker closed the hood. I moved around to the passenger side and we both slid into the car. It smelled like leather and money. “I didn’t get as much writing done as I’d have liked but it was productive nonetheless.”
“Is Harriet going to blow her lid when she hears your word count?”
I shrugged. “She can if she wants to. I can’t help if things are moving slowly right now.”
Walker checked his mirror before pulling out into traffic. The car hummed and my ass started to get warm. I realized he had his heated seats turned on.
“I hear you, man,” Walker said. “Deadlines are a bitch. I feel that way and all I do is slap paint on a canvas. You’re writing entire books. I can’t fathom that.”
“And I can’t fathom how you paint so well for an asshat.”
Walker laughed and rested his wrist on the top of his steering wheel as traffic came to a gridlock stop leaving the airport. He’d always been easy to make laugh. I liked that about my friend. “I can’t fathom it, either. But the models keep me in line when I’m working.”