Eli worked through a rain-drenched Saturday. He let the story absorb him until, before he realized the connection, he’d written an entire scene with wind-driven rain splatting against the windows where the protagonist found the key, metaphorically and literally, to his dilemma while wandering his dead brother’s empty house.
Pleased with his progress, he ordered himself away from the keyboard and into his grandmother’s gym. He thought of the hours spent in his Boston fitness center, with its sleek machines, all those hard bodies, the pumping music.
Those days were done, he reminded himself.
It didn’t have to mean he was.
Maybe the jelly bean colors of his grandmother’s free weights struck him as mildly embarrassing. But ten pounds remained ten pounds. He was tired of feeling weak and thin and soft, tired of allowing himself to coast, or worse, just tread water.
If he could write—and he was proving that every day—he could pump and sweat and find the man he used to be. Maybe better, he mused as he picked up a set of purple dumbbells, he’d find the man he was meant to be.
He wasn’t ready to face the mirror, so he started his first set of biceps curls standing at the window, studying the storm-churned waves battering the shore. Watched water spume up against the rocks below the circling light of the white tower. Wondered what direction his hero might take now that he’d turned an important corner. Then wondered if he’d written his hero around that corner because he felt he’d turned, or at least approached a turn of his own.
Christ, he hoped so.
He switched from weights to cardio, managed twenty minutes before his lungs burned and his legs trembled. He stretched, guzzled water, then went back to another round of weights before he flopped, panting, onto the floor.
Better, he told himself. Maybe he hadn’t made it a full hour and felt as if he’d just completed a triathlon, but he’d done better this time.
And this time he made it to the shower without limping.
Very much.
He congratulated himself again on the way downstairs on a hunt for food. He actually wanted food. In fact, he was damn near starving, and that had to be a good sign.
Maybe he should start writing these small progressions down. Like daily invocations.
And that struck him as even more embarrassing than lifting purple weights.
When he stepped into the kitchen, the smell hit him seconds before he spotted the plate of cookies on the island. Any idea of slapping together a sandwich went out the rain-washed window.
He lifted the ubiquitous sticky note on the film of plastic wrap, read as he pulled the wrap up and snagged the first cookie.
Rainy day baking. I heard your keyboard clacking, so didn’t want to interrupt. Enjoy. See you tomorrow about five.
Abra
Should he reciprocate for all this food she kept making? Buy her flowers or something? One bite told him flowers wouldn’t make the grade. He grabbed another cookie, hit the coffeemaker. He decided he’d build a fire, pick a book at random out of the library and indulge himself.
He built the fire to roaring. Something about the light, the snap, the heat meshed perfectly with the rain-whipped Saturday. In the library with its coffered ceiling and dark chocolate leather couch, he scanned the shelves.
Novels, biographies, how-to’s, poetry, books on gardening, animal husbandry, yoga—apparently Gran really got into the practice—an old book on etiquette, and a section of books centered on Whiskey Beach. A couple of novels, he noted, which might be interesting, histories, lore, a scattering of those written about the Landons. And several referencing pirates and legends.
On impulse he drew out a slim leather-bound volume titled Calypso: Doomed Treasures.
Considering the trench in the basement, it seemed apt enough.
Stretched out on the couch, fire blazing, Eli munched on cookies and read. The old book, published at the turn of the twentieth century, included illustrations, maps, biographical snippets of whomever the author deemed a major player. Enjoying himself, Eli delved into the fateful last voyage of the Calypso, captained by the not-very-infamous pirate and smuggler Nathanial Broome.
The book carved him as handsome, dashing, full of derring-do, which was probably a crock for any who didn’t subscribe to the Errol Flynn or Johnny Depp school of pirates.
He read of the battle at sea between the Calypso and the Santa Caterina described in an adventurous, bloodless style that made him suspect, perhaps unfairly, the author had been a woman writing under the masculine nom de plume Charles