my head. I needed to drive, to get my kids, to be myself again.
“Let me get your clothes,” Pamela said, and ran her fingers through my hair.
“Hey,” I said, “I just need one other thing.”
“What’s that, darling?”
I looked directly into her smiling eyes. “Do you have a cigarette for me?” I asked. “I quit years ago, but after this I definitely think I need one.”
SAMANTHA
“NO, THANK YOU,” I said, as Eduardo Marquez offered me a cigarette. “I don’t smoke.” We had just ordered dinner, and I couldn’t figure out if I was on a date here. Or if I wanted to be.
“Will it disturb you if I do?” he asked.
“Not at all,” I said, though it wasn’t really true. I never could stand the smell of smoke, not even from a fireplace. Some people find a roaring fire cozy in the wintertime, not me. I can’t stand the smell of the smoke in my clothes, in my hair. And as for cigarettes or cigars—nothing could be more repulsive. (Robert insisted I take a puff of his victory cigar the night of the election and it almost ruined my evening.) However, there was something debonair in the way Eduardo drew a cigarette from the case in his jacket pocket, and something of a flourish in the way he brandished his lighter. It was a cool lighter, stainless steel or perhaps silver, thick and solid-looking with a Spanish word I didn’t recognize engraved in the handle, perhaps a name. Whose name would he have engraved in his lighter? A wife? A girlfriend? Did he have either of those? Was I on a date?
“It is a habit I solemnly regret,” he said, “but one I will never leave behind.”
“How old were you when you started?”
“Nine years old,” he said, and laughed gently at the look of horror I’m sure was on my face. “Yes, it is horrible. But there wasn’t a boy who didn’t smoke when I was in school.”
“I grew up in Connecticut,” I said. “I remember some kids started smoking when we were about twelve or thirteen. Nine years old, that’s just crazy.”
“I never thought a thing of it until I came to live in the States. Last year I was in Madrid and I lit a cigarette for a pregnant woman in a restaurant. She was quite far along. After living in America for so long, I hesitated to do it.”
“I would hope so.”
“But I thought to myself that if I did not, surely she would find someone else who would. The cigarette was dangling from her lips. It would have been rude of me to pull it out, so I decided to light it for her instead.”
He dragged gently on the cigarette. His fingers were long and slender.
“It seems to me a shame that you have spent four weeks on the island now and seen nothing of it,” he said. “It is admirable to see how dedicated you have been in your training, and I have no doubt this has been fine therapy for the personal difficulties of which you informed me on the day you arrived, but I cannot imagine you don’t have some time to experience the sights and culture of the island.”
“Have I really been here four weeks?” It felt as though I had arrived yesterday, and perhaps dreamt the rest of it.
“As of tomorrow, yes.”
“It has flown by, really flown,” I said. “Our breakfasts have been a lovely part of that.”
Every morning since that first one, without fail, I have begun my day with a swim in the ocean. I am in the water by six o’clock and usually for more than an hour. Then I trudge up the beach and fall into a comfortable chair by the pool, where I inform a waiter (most days the same one with the pleasant smile from my first day) that I am ready for my tea and granola and ask him to please alert Señor Marquez that I am safe. This began my second morning on the property, when Eduardo told me it was strictly prohibited for me to be in the ocean so early, because there was no lifeguard on duty.
“Let me ask you this,” I said to him that day. “If you catch me doing it, what is the punishment?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“I mean, I’m sure I can’t go to jail for swimming alone when no lifeguard is on duty. I couldn’t be arrested or anything. Could I be thrown out of the hotel?”
“That would