Placencia



  Placencia

  A Short Story

  C.A. Clemmings

  Copyright © 2013 by C.A. Clemmings

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  To Thomas, with love

  Table of Contents

  Placencia

  Acknowledgement

  About The Author

  Placencia

  She could charter a small airplane and arrive in Roatán before dark. Outside the airport the wind began to swirl. Taxis lined up against the curb offered trips to airfields in Belmopan and Big Creek. Further down, shuttle buses were headed to various tourist destinations across the country.

  Their vacation in Honduras had been planned months in advance. Andrea was there to oversee a photo shoot, and afterwards they would spend several days together soaking up the splendor of Roatán. Elodie had always avoided the tropics, and places that called to mind heat and hammocks, and an unwavering ease of life and responsibility. Now she felt the torturous pull of the heat upon her face. The air was open and somber, like unlived memories. She turned and made her way to the shuttle terminal and boarded a bus.

  The young woman sitting next to her wore a polished shell necklace with a dark stone pendant that settled on the rise of her breasts. Her long silky neck held Elodie’s attention, until she saw the woman blush and turn away from her towards the window. The woman’s features were ideal for a character she had been sketching in her mind. But the story was still incomplete, just fragments of description and scenarios she had collected over time.

  The bus stopped and Elodie awoke, startled she had fallen asleep midway through the journey. The woman had already slid by her, and the rest of the passengers were gone. She saw sand, and the smell of the ocean came to her in salty whiffs. “Are we there?” she said to no one in particular. A man approached as she disembarked. He was wearing shorts and flip-flops, his shirt unbuttoned and loose over a tank top with red, green, and gold stripes. His face was shiny and ripe from life under the sun, and he held up a few brochures of sites and attractions, displayed like an unfolding fan.

  “Welcome to Placencia,” he said, his smile radiating through his eyes. “We have many attractions. Eleven miles of beauty with clear blue water and the reef and the rainforest.”

  “Where am I?”

  “Placencia. Belize. You have a hotel?”

  A wave of dread spread across Elodie’s belly. “I need to get back on the shuttle.” She turned around and the bus was gone.

  “There’ll be another one soon.”

  This calmed her. She would be later than she had calculated, but at least there was a way out. She just had to wait. She tried to re-trace her journey. Her flight had left New York at around eight that morning. After the layover in San Salvador, her mind had become muddled. She’d had to switch planes because of a mechanical issue, after which she continued on to Honduras, her destination. By four o’ clock that evening she was shocked to discover she had arrived at the airport in Belize City. From there she had jumped on the first shuttle that came along.

  She had to find a way to Honduras. Andrea was precise, with firm control over her business affairs and personal life. She was a successful model manager who worked with scores of girls. When Elodie called her, she sounded aggravated and impatient.

  “How could you do this to me?”

  “They put us on the wrong flight,” Elodie said.

  “To…Pacencia? Or whatever the hell it is?”

  “No, the shuttle brought me here.”

  “I suppose the shuttle is running a kidnapping service.”

  “Andrea, I’m sorry.”

  “Did you take anything?”

  Elodie had taken a pill to settle herself before the flight in New York. She might have taken another one or two in San Salvador.

  “No,” she said. “I’ll be there before you know it.”

  Andrea was calmer now. “One of the girls needs me…Elodie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make sure you get here.”

  The hours on the bus had been wasted. Elodie hung up the phone and looked around. It was late, but everything was still visible as if illuminated by a soft gray light. She was on a dirt road lined with short tropical houses painted pink and yellow and blue. Telephone and electrical wires hung low from wooden posts, and fruit trees swayed in the soft breeze. A few people went in and out of shops or sat outside on stools sipping cold beers. A boy rode past on a rusty bicycle, his shirt flapping in the wind. To her left only a few yards away were the white sand and the Caribbean Sea.

  The man in flip-flops watched her, and after her eyes had soaked up enough of the sea he stepped forward. “I can take you to a little hotel,” he said. “I also have a boat to go snorkeling or diving. You like to fish?”

  Elodie had not thought of those things. She wondered now if she had even remembered to pack a bathing suit or a camera. She had her overnight bag and her purse. She wore a white linen dress that flared at the knees, and her wavy hair danced around her face in the last shadows of evening.

  “Take me to the hotel,” she said.

  The hotel was a low blue house with a richly manicured lawn, and hibiscus and flamingo flowers in the front garden. It belonged to her self-appointed guide, Morgan, and his wife Nakia, who was plump and warm. Nakia smiled and showed Elodie to a room with a floral bedspread and white chiffon curtains billowing at the open window. Purple and white bougainvillea lined a pathway outside the window, and through the petals she caught a glimpse of the turquoise sea as it began to seep up the color of night. A mahogany dresser in one corner of the room was chipped all along the base by the floor, and Elodie could feel the springs in the soft bed where she sat.

  Under her own bed in New York was the locked wooden box with copies of her novel manuscript that she told Andrea she had been sending out to agents. In her purse beside her on the floor was the flash drive she’d brought with her containing the manuscript file. She had planned to work on it in Honduras, but now she realized she had not brought her laptop. She had been writing and re-writing her novel for years, but still she wondered if it was really any good.

  She lay awake in the small room in Placencia. As exhausted as she was, sleep would not come. A framed picture of a young woman hung on the wall across from the bed. It was tinged with yellow and the passage of time. Beneath the picture a handwritten caption read, In Memory of Mariana Robal. A Beloved Woman.

  Was she in a dead woman’s room?

  Elodie was restless throughout the night, half-asleep on the sunken bed. Whenever she drifted off, she dreamt of the sea outside with its placid dark shade, its softly rippling water. She was in the sea. Or was she the sea? The sea was a woman who had lived for a hundred years, too frail to lift her head, too frail to open her mouth. It was a woman who had not lived at all and who hungered to see another shore. At times it lashed out like a beast prodded by whips of wind, splashing forward and back, engulfing even itself. It swirled around Elodie’s waist and pulled her in, pulled her out, pulled her down into its unquenchable depth where she saw Mariana Robal’s face in its framed picture.

  The next day she tried to come to terms with where she was. She was struck by the heat that poured through the open window. It was already almost noon. The fan, which she had neglected to turn on, stood in the corner of the room like an imperious sentinel. She showered and ate fried dumplings and salt fish that Nakia prepared. Nakia told her the woman in the picture
was Morgan’s dead sister. Elodie did not ask how she died. Instead she went out before Morgan could accost her and take her on a tour of the mangroves.

  The sun scorched the top of her head and the back of her neck as she walked. She stopped at a bar with a thatched roof that extended over tables on the sand. An Englishwoman was telling a story about a manatee she had caught sight of in the mangroves. Others at the bar were content with the warm breeze and steel pan music floating around them as they had their drinks and fried fish, the storyteller’s voice a minor nuisance.

  Elodie ordered a Belikin and took languid sips in the quiet corner where she sat. For the past month she had not felt like herself. She had been following Andrea across New York City every weekend, and she could not sleep. She thought she and Andrea would have more time together once she had completed her manuscript, but Andrea and her business partner had just launched a new venture, a hot spot girl bar in the West Village. Andrea was there most Saturday nights to charm her clientele and keep them coming back. For much of their four-year relationship Elodie stayed home to write, but now that she was unoccupied she could feel Andrea slipping away.

  Women loved Andrea. She was like a creature of the night with her dark hair and eyes the color of the sea, wrapped in leather and a welcoming smile. Andrea had become more successful over the years. She lived in a world of numbers and parties and clients and bookings. She negotiated contracts and received commissions. She paid all the bills in their apartment in the city. Elodie was approaching thirty-two. She had published one short story in a quarterly magazine several years ago.

  Her cell phone rang as she was on her third beer.

  “I called you last night,” Andrea said. “I’ve been calling you all morning.”

  She sounded as close to frantic as she could ever be.

  “The signal is bad in certain spots,” Elodie said.

  “Elodie, what is this about?”

  “Nothing. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  Andrea paused. “Is this about your father?”

  “No.” Elodie’s father had died a month ago. Word had traveled to her mother, who conveyed the news to Elodie, but she had not gone to the funeral.

  “Are you breaking up with me?” Andrea asked.

  Elodie got up and teetered over to stand under the shade of a coconut tree. She could feel sweat dripping down her stomach.

  “Please don’t get like this,” Elodie said.

  “You went to Belize on purpose.”

  The woman from the shuttle appeared at the bar.

  “…and you know I hate to be alone,” Andrea was saying.

  “You have photographers and a slew of magazine people,” Elodie said. “And girls.”

  “I don’t like to sleep alone.”

  “I doubt you would ever have to.”

  “Don’t be silly. Come to Honduras.”

  “Come to Belize.”

  “Stop being difficult.” It sounded like Andrea was crying. The effect of the sun and beer made Elodie’s stomach churn.

  “I didn’t even bring my bathing suit,” Elodie said. Last week before Andrea left, they had planned out their vacation outfits together. Andrea had picked up a white bathing suit from the pile on the bed. Part of the midsection was cut out to accentuate the hips and bosom.

  “You will look fantastic in this,” Andrea had said. It was true. Elodie still had her figure and her beauty, but Andrea was around models and gorgeous women all the time.

  “So it will be a week,” Elodie said.

  “Six days of work and then you join me. You could come now, but we won’t get to see each other much until after the shoot.”

  “I’ll fly in when you’re done,” Elodie said. Andrea had pulled her up from the bed where she sat. She undid the clip that held Elodie’s long curls and kissed her.

  “Then Roatán will be truly worth the trip,” she’d said.

  When Andrea finally hung up, Elodie walked down Placencia’s long, slender sidewalk. She didn’t want to think about Andrea crying in Roatán.

  Placencia was a small fishing village, once populated by pirates, now occupied by their descendants. Further north were the luxury hotels and private beaches. This was the heart of the village. A tropical haven in the center of the world. She passed beachside restaurants and cafes and fishermen out with their freshly caught jack fish and snapper. If she lived here she could buy a fish every day and steam it for dinner. She could sit on the veranda with a cold beer and let the sea breeze lap at her skirt tail. She could walk barefoot in the white sand and write under the shade of a coconut tree. She could have affairs with tourists from cold places, coming to Placencia for warmth and adventure.

  When she was younger it was mostly just her and her mother, Julia. Year after year they vacationed in the cold. Elodie had spent her school holidays at ski resorts in Colorado and Vermont. Sometimes they went abroad with Julia’s colleagues from the university in New York where she taught. Julia always packed and prepared meticulously. Every detail on their itinerary was organized by her, and she was always driven towards the stark wet snow and blustery places, away from the mere suggestion of heat and the tropics.

  Though sheltered from any knowledge of her father, Elodie began to form a picture of her parents’ relationship as she got older. She learned through whisperings from her mother’s friends over time. Julia had taught mathematics in the Caribbean for about a decade. There she’d fallen in love with a married farmer from the islands and had a secret child. The relationship curdled–he had fathered other children outside of his marriage–and Julia was devastated. Those were the crucial points of their story, which Elodie had gathered.

  The winter Elodie turned sixteen, she and her mother were in Switzerland. Julia was dating an oil man from Russia who owned the ski resort where they were vacationing. Julia was out on the slopes. She was happy. Elodie had begun to develop burgeoning feelings toward women, and she felt a profound isolation from her mother and the life carved out before them. She left the slopes, where she had only wandered across a short hill, and came back to their chalet. She dumped her gear on the wood stone bench in front of the house and sat waiting. Further from the house, families and couples mulled around–some chatting and securing their gear, some getting ready to board the lifts and head to the hills. The bright snow and shapes and colors numbed her. She picked up a handful of snow and crunched it between her fingers. A chunk of her life was missing. A chunk that seemed as impalpable as the wet snow melting from her hand.

  Julia came back and waved. She only waved at Elodie like that when she was in love. She sat and began to unfasten her skis.

  “Why are you sitting here?” she asked, but she sounded distracted. “Hmm?”

  “You never talk about my father,” Elodie said, though she had meant to say something else. Something flippant or clever.

  Julia’s face swelled. “What?” She said it quietly, as if daring Elodie to repeat the words. She was not a woman many people crossed.

  “I…want to talk about him.” Elodie decided to stand her ground.

  “How can we talk about what doesn’t exist for us?”

  “He’s alive. He exists.”

  “Maybe we do not exist for him. Consider that. Anything I’ve done, I do for your protection.” Julia removed her gloves and folded her hands in her lap.

  “You can’t protect me from knowing my own father.”

  “Aren’t you happy? I thought you were happy,” Julia said. Her eyes turned soft and watery, and suddenly Elodie was sorry.

  “I’m happy,” Elodie said, and maybe it was the truth. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “I’m miserable.”

  Julia sighed. “The last time I saw your father I told him to come with me to the States,” she said. “To run away from that life–poverty, problems–for it was an anomaly for me to be in that position. My standards…well, we were already entangled and I wanted to make the best of it. You were just
a baby. I said the three of us could start over. I said, ‘If you don’t come with us you will never see Elodie again.’ And he told me, ‘Take the child and go.’”

  Now Elodie headed toward the Placencia dock in the heat, beyond the cabanas and guesthouses and men in hats with fishing rods. A fisherman came by with a bucket on his head. He had an aura that made him seem out of place, even with his common attire.

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  He looked like a picture Elodie had seen of her father once, with his drawn figure and the strain of labor on his face. “Good afternoon,” Elodie said. “Where does this road lead?”

  “What?” The fisherman stopped and turned around, balancing the bucket with effortless skill. The bunched-up cloth between his head and the bucket was soaked, and water streamed down his forehead, falling in long drops from his chin.

  “Where does it end if I keep going?”

  “End of the peninsula,” he said.

  The woman from the shuttle with the polished shell necklace was lounging on the beach, on one of the blue and white chairs a few rows down from Elodie. She was alone, with earphones in and a book on her lap which she glanced at from time to time. Elodie had her notebook, and she jotted down a few observations as the afternoon wore on. A man on a towel rubbed suntan lotion onto his shoulders, round and round again until Elodie could no longer see the freckles on his skin. She watched shadows cast by the coconut trees above sway and grasp like dark hands across the sand. At the edge of the water children played, splashing each other and running along the shore. They were only a few feet away, but they were like a mirage, the image of them coming to Elodie as sets of teeth and laughter.

  There was the fisherman again, this time without his bucket, making aimless trips up and down the beach. His sullen temperament was at odds with the yellow Hawaiian shirt he wore. He stopped and motioned at the kids playing with their kites, then stood quietly with his back to the water, looking back toward the bar, perhaps looking back at all of Placencia.