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Jack Abbot is sitting on the bench of a sandy beach. Waves crash and wash away the beginning of sand castles and initials hastily inscribed onto the shore. A beautiful woman stands at the lip of the last wave, toeing at the muddy beach floor as it instantly dries up. The woman turns and gives him a wave, and a thumbs up, and her name is Samira Mohan and she hasn’t complained about the sun (or the moments he falls oddly silent as they traipse through the city he is uncharacteristically familiar with) even once.
What washes over next is not saltwater on the shore, but a grief that his therapist says is its own sort of beauty even though it twists his stomach and intestines and heart into a puzzle he can’t solve. The last four days since their plane touched down on vacation, he’s realizing it isn’t meant to be solved; he realized for the thousandth time in life that, much like Samira, or the people he’d loved before her, he isn’t capable of understanding the puzzle, much less solving it. It was never about solving. He didn’t want to be capable of figuring her, or the before-woman, or Robby, or his sister or niece or mentor, out. He much preferred sitting by and marveling at those he loved. That was love. It had been love all along.
The beautiful now-woman ventures further into the water. He likes this beach; likes this neighborhood. If you stand in one spot in this neighborhood and just spin around you can see the sea, and the mountains, and the city, and strife, and strength, and beauty. The before-woman’s name, Marisol, meant “the sea and the sun”. Decades prior, the first time the before-woman brought a much less grey-haired Jack to this exact Miraflores beach, he watched her sprint into the water without a care for her husband. She didn’t fuss about getting her curls wet or the sand between her toes or the shell she definitely stepped on; she just popped back up and yelled out to him, “This beach was the first time I touched the sea!”
Jack wishes more than ever that Samira knew the before-woman. They’d met in passing, she’d seen Marisol, but he wishes they could speak. Wishes they could have broken bread and laughed at each other and at him and agreed how irritating it is to live with him. He wishes Marisol were here, knows that she’d point Samira out and comment on how beautiful she is, and he knows she’d be thrilled when he told her she’s a quintillion times smarter than she is beautiful. He has a knack for women like that, unfortunately for them.
Samira likes Lima, Peru. She says the city feels alive. There’s dancing and music and the drivers are terrifying. The before-woman is dead, but these things don’t change. In fact, the before woman is more alive than ever as he shows Samira around her country: she tells him as much, on the balcony of their hotel the first night there.
“Is it weird that I feel like I know her? Like she’s here.”
“She is,” Jack replied softly, looking past the city fog and tracing where the tippy-tops of the mountains give way to Lima’s gray sky. He doesn’t know if it’s selfish, but he thinks he loves Samira more when she’s willing to say things about his wife, like complimenting her choices on their kitchen renovation or how well she trained Jack or the cologne she convinced him to wear 10 years ago or here, in her home country.
He lifts a hand after a few seconds, the hand that isn’t holding a mug of coffee, and points towards the mountains they’ll die to journey into the following week.
“She’s there,” He corrected.
It’s his first time here since his wife became the before-woman, before he went through the worst time in his life to get to his new best. Mari always said she’d come here when she died, at least for the summer. He sees the women dressed like Mari’s mom and grandma, dancing and twirling in beautiful skirts at a traditional dance exhibition Samira actually found and asked to attend; it’s the only time all night that Samira takes no photos or videos. He doesn’t tell her it’s Mari’s traditional costume, that it’s what her family often wore: instead, he eyes her transfixed expression. It’s as though some part of Samira knows, like Mari is calling out to her, or him. After the show, she says it’s her favorite of the night, even over the other dances with the scissors and fancy masks and the romantic duets.
Jack likes how blunt Samira is. It’s a trait he’s always admired- Mari had been quilted from a similar cloth, though she had been more playful than Samira. He liked that Samira didn’t need him, and that Samira liked having a set amount of alone time every day or week. He liked everything that made Samira real, liked that she got kind of mean when she was tired and that she was an incredibly kind person, but had little patience outside of work hours. He liked how independent she was. Samira didn’t need him, and it made him love her more than he ever knew was possible.
He thinks he loves Samira more than Marisol. It sounds evil at first, and it sounds too sappy for him to admit out loud but he thinks it might be because Marisol is inside of Jack and every particle, ounce, cell of Jack, loves Samira. Jack thought he lost half of himself when she died; thought he could never get it back, but now knows it was her gift to him because now he can love Samira as if he is two.
Samira doesn’t make a fuss about the guinea pig being served to the tourists one table over at dinner that first night. When he insists they try a pisco sour, she even tries to pretend it’s anything other than God awful (it was) and that she actually liked it (she didn’t).
It takes the better part of a week to finally trek up to the remote portion of the altiplano that Marisol always called home, even when she’d spent more time away from it than in it, and right up to the day she died. They stay with a second cousin whose daughter moved to the coast and left her room open, and Jack does his best to translate even though he can only comprehend Aymara and Spanish and sometimes, his ear is so untrained he can’t tell when they switch from one to the other. Samira actually pitches in for some of the Spanish portions of their conversations, the result of two dedicated months on a language app.
Jack knows he loves Samira Mohan more than anything or anyone in the world, but he did not know he could love her more.
She talks about the museums they visited, about what Mari’s family witnessed; the bombings, the assassinations, the piles of bodies that turned up overnight, every night, for two decades. She doesn’t always like talking before bed but tonight, every night, she asks and asks and asks. Did Jack like Lima the first time he visited? What was her reaction when they could finally afford to visit for the first time since she emigrated? Did he ever hear the story of her journey to the city as a teenager? Did he ever consider the volunteer programs to provide medicine to the rural populations, full of little girls and boys who looked and laughed and cried and sang like his wife once had?
Jack stays quiet after some of her questions. It’s tradition- Mari did the same thing the first time (or the thousandth) he asked the very same questions. There were days she was willing to tell a stranger how she walked and hitchhiked out to Lima as a young girl, and then there were days she couldn’t even speak. He wasn’t sure if it was because she missed it, and hated herself for leaving or having to leave or feeling like she had to, or if it was because her mind forgot she was a 40 year old woman in Pittsburgh and instead, upon waking, instilled in her the same memories, smells, and sounds of being a 5 year old hiding from the senderistas or soldiers, or the days of dodging them at university.
“Sometimes Mari wouldn’t speak to me all day. She even had to call out of work once or twice. Didn’t always cry, either. Just said she missed being a kid.”
“Seriously?” Samira asked, the images of the many, many massacres flashing before her eyes. “Even after all that?”
“Especially after all that,” Jack said, then fell silent.
Jack didn’t think his first time back to Peru after losing her would be so touristy; then, how could he ever have expected Samira? For a long time- sometimes, still- he didn’t even want to live. He didn’t want to make it to the next day and his best friend had to do his grocery shopping because, for months, he had refused. What time was there to consider, much less plan, a visit to Peru that involved tourist activities he’d checked off his bucket list decades prior? It was all worth it, though, to see Samira overlooking Machu Picchu (with a sweaty sheen to slivers of exposed skin that he really, really did not mind ogling while she snapped her photos) and marvelling at wild camelids.
He wants to puke when he realizes he was once Samira, and Marisol was once Jack, falling in love impossibly more with someone as they fell in love with the land Marisol came from.
Samira’s talking about their next visit before they’ve even made it back to Lima. She’s a particular woman with particular routines and comforts, and as such, was something of a homebody. Was being a key word because now not only is she talking about the next time in Peru, but about visiting her relatives in India, or finally seeing the Christmas markets in Europe. Jack will go, of course, because Jack will always go where Samira is involved. He’ll pay for the nicest seats and her favorite hotel and will pack all their bags and carry her purse on every hike.
Jack loves everything about Samira, but he especially loves her brain. She doesn’t just love him; she’s learned him. When he gazes out at the Miraflores coastline, it’s Samira who watches from the balcony door and suggests he go on a walk without her. He wants to, but he won’t say he wants to, and insists she come with him. She refuses, just as stubborn as he is, though it comes from a place of particular kindness tonight, just like everything Samira Mohan does. He promises he’ll be quick, that he’s only doing it because they both need alone time in that exact moment in order to decompress, and she’s nice enough to pretend that he’s right and usher him out the door with a kiss on the lips.
There’s an old nickname for Lima. The locals call her Lima la Gris, or Lima the Gray, because she likes to cover the sun for several months. Many times, he and his wife sat on the same beach, on the same bench, with the same sand sticking to their toes, as she complained about there being no sunset.
The weather is warm. The breeze is light, carrying with it the sounds of families and lovers and guitars and water. The ocean is a beautiful blue, littered with surfers and babies being dipped into it. The city is alive. The sky is copper and gold and red and lilac and the clouds look like cotton candy and the water shimmers orange as if it’s on fire and the birds are little black dots against it and Jack knows all the way down to his bones that there has never been a sunset as beautiful in this country or the world. The world is ablaze for Samira Mohan.
His phone chirps. He opens a text and sees a photo of the sky, taken from the hotel balcony. Are you seeing the sunset, Samira asks, then sends another photo. It’s beautiful, she says. Thank you for bringing me, she adds. I love you, she says.
Jack sets his phone on his lap and looks out at the sunset. It’s growing blue now as the sun sinks fully beyond the horizon. This time tomorrow they’ll be over halfway to Pittsburgh, where his ring has sat for two weeks on his bathroom counter.
My time with you was so short, he thinks, looking at the spot the sun had been. Come back. Let me tell you how much I loved you. Maybe I can take another photo or video and then you never really have to disappear forever. Let me keep you in this world with me. Let me have you. I will do it right this time. I will find a way to make you be here with me.
The sun disappears under the sea. Let me go home, it says as the last blues fizzle out; let me be. I am happy here. I am always here, and I am in Pittsburgh, and I’ll be in London if you go to London and Sydney if you go to Sydney and the grocery store if you go to the grocery store, because I am always here.
“Go home,” the night sky says. He looks down the coast and spots his hotel room in the distance. The light is on. “Go be.”