Then I hear a door creak open, and to my left a guy in a chef coat and checkered pants appears. He moves a nearby rock over to keep the door open. His arms are tattooed to the wrist, and he’s pulling a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He doesn’t notice me right away while he lights his smoke and checks his phone. It almost feels like an apparition, like he walked off the set of a cooking show.
I cough, and then the cook looks up. He’s got bags under his eyes, a couple days’ worth of scruff. Surprisingly young, maybe a year or two older than me, if that. Americans always look older to me, so it’s hard to tell. “Not open,” he says, cigarette in his mouth.
“No, I know.”
The cook eyes me, the suitcase at my side. “Then what the hell do you want from me, dude?” He takes a long drag, and when I don’t say anything he looks back down at his phone, exhaling a puff of smoke that dissipates quickly in the breeze coming in from the water. From the cracked door, I can hear the vague clattering of people moving about the kitchen. I want the smell of Chef Elise’s food to waft out, but all I get is the cigarette.
“Sorry,” I say, feeling like at least one of us is an asshole. I turn around, go back to the front entrance, where I see a girl slip a key into the door and push it open. She’s wearing earphones, a baggy brown sweater, a bag slung over her shoulder. I know this is stupid and weird, but I don’t have anywhere to go and can’t stand the thought of wandering around the island with no place to go and no one to talk to, so I roll my suitcase over to the door. I knock on the glass.
A few seconds later the door swings open. The girl standing in front of me is pretty—late teens, dark hair, large sixties-style glasses—and for a moment I forget what the hell I’m doing here. Then, over her shoulder, I see the restaurant, exactly like it was shot in the TV show. Thirty tables, a mirror along one of the side walls to make the space feel bigger, a bar adjacent to the hostess stand for people waiting. The back wall is floor-to-ceiling windows looking out at the patio and the ensuing view.
“Sorry,” I say, realizing how long it’s been without me saying a word. “I wasn’t staring at you. I know it probably looked like that. I was just...” I point over her shoulder, stammer, feel my mouth start to go dry. “I want to make a reservation?”
The girl chuckles. “You might officially be the earliest person to ever show up for a reservation.” She holds the door open to let me in and then heads to her hostess stand. “What’s with the suitcase?”
“Um. I just got here,” I say.
“That’s cool. From where?” She opens up a large leather-bound agenda and runs her finger down that page.
“Mexico City.”
She looks up at me over the rims of her glasses, takes me in for a moment. “You came straight from Mexico City to this restaurant before dropping off your bags?”
I fiddle with my luggage tag. “When you put it that way it sounds kind of insane.”
She laughs, eyebrows raised. “No, not insane. Just eager.”
I wonder how I could possibly explain my arrival without sounding nuts. Revealing a single detail could unravel my whole story, and my whole story begins and ends with Felix bleeding onto the sidewalk. “I guess I couldn’t wait.”
She looks back down at the scheduler, biting her bottom lip as she flips a few pages back and forth. We fall into silence, and I look around as if it might all disappear at any moment. I can hear faint music coming from the kitchen. It’s hard to believe that I’m standing in a place Felix never got to.
“Looks like you’re going to have to wait,” she says. “Earliest I have is Tuesday.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, summer’s busy for us. All these tourists.”
A wave of disappointment washes over me, made worse by the fact that I recognize it as disappointment. This is nothing. Any sane person wouldn’t bat an eye at this. So why do I feel like my whole journey has been thwarted, like I have to find a bed immediately and disappear beneath its covers?
“I mean, you could always come back and check for cancellations?” the girl says. “Those happen sometimes.”
It takes me way too long to say, “Oh, okay. Sure.” She takes my name for the Tuesday reservation and then I stand there for a while, not wanting to go back outside but realizing there’s nothing left for us to say to each other. “Bye,” I say. The girl holds a hand up as she puts her earphones back in.
“Nice meeting you!” she calls out when I’m halfway out the door.
Outside, the world looks empty again. The sun’s bright and hot, and everything looks white, drained of color. I’m on an island with no place to stay, no one to go to if I need something. It sounds comically childish, but I want to call my mom. I told her I’d be gone a week; it hasn’t even been twelve hours, but I don’t know what else to do.
“Si sabes,” a voice says.
“No, I don’t,” I say out loud, though I have to remember that just because I’m here on my own doesn’t mean I can start talking to myself. I grab my phone and hold it to my ear.
“You know that Winston Churchill quote, right?”
“Felix, you know damn well I don’t.”
“‘If you’re going through hell, keep going,’” he says through my phone. “Not that I think you’re going through hell. Far from it. This place is nice.”
Yeah, okay, I think. Still kind of having a conversation with my dead brother via a cell phone that doesn’t actually work. “What do I do until Tuesday?”
“Keep going,” he says. “Find a place to stay. Wait for a cancellation. Explore.”
It seems like a typical Felix oversimplification, but at least it’s an idea. A set of instructions to follow. So that’s what I do. I wander the streets until I find myself on a stretch of hotels and motels set up along the beachfront boardwalk.
I check the first few hotels (big-name chains, families of four wading in the pool, lit with joy) but there’s no vacancy. Eventually, I find a room on the far end of the boardwalk, at a motel that definitely wouldn’t meet my parents’ approval. I unpack my suitcase, take a quick shower, emerge into this strange and sad little motel room.
What the hell am I doing here?
In the months since the Night of the Perfect Taco, solitary rooms have been the hardest to inhabit. I find myself sitting down, standing up, opening the cupboards, feeling the strangeness of having a body. I’m moments away from that now, or from seeing Felix, or burying myself under the covers for the rest of the day.