The voice in my earbuds asks me to find a place where I feel safe.
I shut my eyes. Behind my lids, the blue of the water comes first.
The app asks what I can smell. Damp rock and brine come first, then butter sizzling somewhere nearby and a sharp trace of lemon. I can hear my friends laughing above the water and the tide drawing back over the stones. Sun warms my bare shoulders; the deeper comfort comes from having the right people beside me.
The plane lurches sideways. I grab the armrests and swallow a noise that would wake the man snoring next to me. Flying doesn't normally trouble me. This last little aircraft always does: every seam and rivet seems visible from my seat, and the wind moves it around as though it weighs nothing.
My meditation app chooses this moment to go quiet. I try to supply its next instruction myself. Find your happy place, Mara.
I lift the window shade. The sky outside is wide and bright enough to interrupt my panic without any help from an app. I have other memories I use when I need steadying, but the coast comes most readily. If I concentrate, I can summon the gulls, the wind moving through my hair, a mouthful of cold beer and the taste of blueberries. None of it is in this cabin. My body doesn't seem to care.
After the year I've had, seeing my friends again is only minutes away. So is the place where we always meet.
The wheels hit the runway. A few people clap from the back; I pull out my earbuds and finally let go of the seat. My neighbor opens his eyes, having slept through every jolt I noticed. He is older, with shaggy white brows and a voice rough from waking.
"Crab Week?" he asks.
"Every year with my best friends," I tell him. He nods, which is more encouragement than I need. I add that I haven't seen them since last summer. He makes a sound without looking at me. We met in college, I explain, but now we live far apart and matching everyone's time off is a feat. His expression suggests he had asked for one word, not our history.
Ordinarily, I'm a model seatmate. I'd sooner risk a bladder infection than ask someone to let me into the aisle, and I've stayed still beneath a stranger asleep on my shoulder until I woke with drool on my shirt. I've held other people's babies and badly timed therapy dogs, listened to middle-aged men tell me their life stories after I took out my earbuds, and flagged down a flight attendant when a spring-break teenager started turning green.
This man does not want another detail about my vacation. I know it, and yet as we wait to get off the plane I have to hold my lips together to keep from launching into a celebratory song in his direction.
At the little baggage carousel I claim my suitcase, then walk through the doors into daylight. I feel absurdly ready for any activity a holiday commercial might suggest: a game of bowling, perhaps, or letting a conveniently handsome stranger give me a piggyback ride. In my head, I'm game for all of it. What matters is that I'm happy.
The prospect of this week got me through long, thankless shifts at the veterinary hospital and the hours afterward when I was too tired to sleep. I imagine chilled white wine, crab rolls and laughing with my friends until all of us need tissues. A horn sounds from the lot. I'm smiling before I find the car.
"Mara! My missing person!" Livia calls through its open door.
Her father's old red sports car is parked in the sun. She stands beside it in neat cropped trousers, bare arms, a silk scarf holding back her fair hair. Everything about her looks considered until she begins bouncing on her toes and waving a piece of poster board. Her terrible handwriting announces THE AUDIENCE IS REQUESTED TO APPLAUD. It has the air of a grand theatrical welcome, wildly excessive for one woman coming off a regional flight.
I run toward her. She tosses the sign toward an open car window, misses, and has to let it fall so she can run too. Our embrace is clumsy; her shoulder presses against my throat, as it always does. She rocks us from foot to foot.
"You made it," she says into my hair.
"I did." I tighten my arms around her.
She steps back and inspects my face. "Wait. What's changed?"
"I replaced it," I say. "Whole new face."
"I knew it." She puts an arm around me and leads me toward the car. Her familiar perfume trails behind us; beside her careful scent I remember the sugary body spray I used in our first year together. "Whoever did the work was ambitious. You look several decades younger. Possibly not born yet."
"It wasn't a surgeon. I bought an enchantment from someone online."
"Good value, then." She squeezes my shoulder. "You look wonderful."
I tell her she does too, and she says she can hardly believe we're in the same place again. I feel the same. For a moment we don't speak. We spent nearly five years living alongside each other, and the ease with which we share silence hasn't gone away.
At the car she says she's glad I managed to get away from work. The hospital keeps rotating me through different services, doesn't it? More than one hospital, I remind her. It would have taken more than a shift schedule to keep me from coming.
"You left someone in charge of the operating table, I hope?"
"Nobody was left alone in the operating room," I say. "I only borrowed a scalpel for the trip."
Livia's laugh bursts out of her, much bigger than anyone expects from her polished appearance. The first week we roomed together it startled me every time. Now I would know it across a crowded room.
She flings open the rear door and puts my suitcase inside, then retrieves the sign from the ground and tucks it alongside. "How were the flights?"
"Mack flew the last leg again. The one who keeps his sunglasses on the back of his head."
"I've never seen his head without them."
"He must use them to watch what's happening behind the plane."
"After he stopped drinking, I thought he'd become a smoother pilot," she says. "Apparently not."
"Was he better at flying before?"
"No. Exactly the same. He was much better at telling jokes over the speaker."
She settles behind the wheel; I get in beside her. From the console she finds an extra scarf and offers it to me. The gesture is lovely, though no scarf can rescue the curls that survived three flights and a dash across both Chicago O'Hare and Seattle–Tacoma.
"Today he didn't make a single decent pun," I say.
"Then it was a wasted flight."
She starts the car with a growl of the engine. We leave the lot with the windows open and the light on our arms. We're still about an hour from the coast. Even this far inland, stacks of Dungeness crab pots stand in yards and beside sheds.
Over the wind Livia calls, "HOW ARE YOU?"
For a second the pleasure of sitting beside her gives way to the thought of what I need to say before this trip is over. I want a little more of the pleasure first.
"GOOD!"
"AND THE RESIDENCY?"
"GOOD!"
She gives me a look. "WE HAVEN'T PROPERLY TALKED IN WEEKS. THAT'S YOUR ENTIRE REPORT?"
"BLOODY," I offer.
There are other answers I keep to myself. The work is exhausting and frightening; its exhilaration can turn unpleasant, leave me nauseated, even devastated. Two years into my veterinary surgical residency, I still spend little time in the operating room. The minutes beside an attending surgeon and an animal patient stay with me for hours afterward. Routine duties pass more quickly. Other residents dread them, but I don't. Even as a child, I found peace and a measure of control in cleaning, organizing and checking chores off lists I'd made myself.
An animal is ready to go home; I complete the discharge. A blood sample is needed; I collect it. A record has to be entered; I enter it. Each job has a definite beginning and end. On difficult days, being able to see that one small thing is done helps.
"AND RHYS?" Livia calls.
My stomach turns again. Gray eyes come to mind, then the memory of pine and clove. Not this minute, I tell myself.
"WHAT?" I shout, though I heard her.
Eventually I will have to talk about him. I'd rather not do it while we're driving fast in an old, open-windowed car. More than that, I'd like Bianca, Dane and Jules there. Saying it once is hard enough. I've waited until now; a few more minutes seem possible.
Livia tries again, louder. "HOW'S RHYS?"
The answers I withheld about work return in question form. Unsettling exhilaration? Nausea? The occasional sense of being devastated?
"GOOD, I THINK." The last two words keep it from feeling entirely false. He may well be good. When I saw him last, he seemed happier than he had in months. I cannot speak for him now.
Livia nods and turns up the radio.
Her father's rule is that anyone using the family place must put the radio back on his stations before leaving. She shares the lodge and its cars with some twenty-five cousins and siblings, so there is always someone to remind. An old jazz singer greets us as the road climbs through pines toward the water. The music is as familiar as the turn in the drive.
From here the view opens suddenly: a glittering strip of sea, rock cliffs, and the lodge rising above them. It still catches me off guard. The original house is old, though I couldn't say exactly how old; later additions extend behind it and to either side, their cedar siding made to look as though it has always belonged. A four-car garage stands apart. Beyond a creek, a guesthouse sits among ferns, moss and trees shaped by the sea wind. Livia passes the garage and stops at the front entrance. The sight of it makes me warm with recognition.
"Remember the first time you brought Bianca and me?" I ask as we climb out. "I was upset because Brandon stopped calling. You made that slide show of everything wrong with him."
"Brandon? You mean Brendan?"
"That was his name?"
"You were going to marry him," she says. "According to you."
"Your presentation was persuasive." I reach into the back for my suitcase.
"Or perhaps it was Bianca talking to us all week. She did a better job than either of us with my dad's third engagement."
"That wife had all the dogs, right?"
"The second wife. Not all at once, either. She'd bring home expensive puppies, then send the grown dogs back to the shelter."
I shudder. Livia says she won the cousins' betting pool on when that marriage would end. The prize was the lodge for Cape Lark Crab Week. That's how she secured our week there; cousin Dean's losing ticket turned into everyone else's good fortune.
"Then Cousin Dean deserves our thanks," I say, lifting my hands briefly toward the sky.
"He'll survive. I think he lives aboard a catamaran somewhere in the Mediterranean these days." She takes the suitcase from my arm and catches my hand with her free one. "Come on. Everybody's waiting."
"Am I the last?"
"Dane and I arrived last night. Bianca and Jules came this morning. We've been sitting on our hands, practically vibrating while we wait."
"An unexpectedly intimate group activity," I say. "Already?"
She laughs. "Our own hands. Under our own bodies. Nobody else involved."
"A clarification worth making. For a moment I thought our reunion had taken a turn."
At the door she pauses with a grin she seems unwilling to explain.
"Why do you look as though you know something?" I ask.
"I don't."
"Is that how they teach lawyers to lie?"
"I object to the premise."
"Then why aren't we going in?"
She opens the door farther and motions me ahead of her. The foyer is cool. Old shelves smell faintly of dust, and beneath the sunblock and summer herbs there is the salt damp that lives in a house near the sea. I breathe it in before following the sound of voices toward the back. Bianca is speaking somewhere beyond the hall; Dane answers with a low laugh.
Livia takes off her shoes, leaves her keys on the console and calls to them that we're here. Jules comes down the hallway first, her red-gold hair pulled up, tattooed hands already reaching for my face. She kisses both my cheeks and holds me by the shoulders.
"Mara! Is it really you? Let me check."
"She bought a new face from an online spell-seller," Livia tells her.
"Ah. I was wondering why the welcoming committee had admitted a complete stranger."
"Or it could be the edibles," I say.
Jules laughs with her whole body, each burst of joy seeming to catch her by surprise. She joined our group long after college, yet it takes an effort to remember when Bianca's girlfriend wasn't one of us. I hold her wrists and tell her how much I've missed her. She insists she's missed me more.
Then she stops laughing. "Do you know?"
"Know what?"
She looks past me to Livia. "She doesn't know?"
"No," Livia says.
"What don't I know?"
"There's a surprise," Livia says, taking one of my arms. Jules loops hers through my other, and the two of them walk me down the hall. I try to ask what they're doing.
At the entrance to the kitchen I stop so suddenly that my elbow catches Jules in the ribs. She makes a noise, but most of my attention has gone to the man rising from a stool at the breakfast bar.
His hair is dark blond, his shoulders broad. The firm lines of his face make his mouth seem softer. From here his eyes look gray; up close, I know, green rings their irises. I know because I've lain tangled with him beneath a blush-pink sheet, the bedside lamp turning his skin gold while his whisper seemed to brush against me.
His shoulders are loose, his face composed, as if being in the same room as me is nothing unusual. I can't draw a full breath; panic tightens through me, with nowhere to go. The app's instruction comes back: find your happy place. I'm standing in it, and he's here. Of everyone at the end of this hall, he's the last person I expected—and the last I want to see.
Rhys Callahan. My fiancé.