The Layover Cure

The gate agent said the word "cancelled" twice before I actually heard it. I was standing in the tiny terminal on Terceira Island, in the Azores, holding a boarding pass for a connecting flight that was no longer going to exist, and the agent was already moving on to the next person in line.

"Excuse me," I said, stepping sideways instead of forward. "What are my options here?"

She looked up at me with the tired patience of someone who had said this to forty people already. "The next flight out is tomorrow evening at six. The airline will put you up overnight. There is a shuttle to the SkyWater Resort. Hot springs. Very nice."

I am Justine Sylvester, fifty-four years old, thirty years an insurance adjuster, and I stood there doing the math. Two days of my vacation burned on a volcanic rock in the middle of the Atlantic. My husband would say I should look at it as a gift. My husband had been dead for four years, though, so mostly I just said rude things to myself in the privacy of my own skull and got in line for the shuttle voucher.

The terminal was small enough that I noticed the other stranded people by process of elimination. A family of five with matching yellow backpacks. A businessman on the phone, saying "no, Thursday, Thursday" over and over. And a tall man about my age sitting sideways in a plastic chair, long legs stuck out into the aisle, reading a battered paperback with a cracked spine.

Something about the way he sat nagged at me. I am not a person who notices strangers. I notice filing deadlines and water damage on ceilings. But the sitting, the legs, the book held low like he was hiding it from a teacher, it all clicked somewhere in the back of my head.

They put me and the yellow backpack family and the businessman and the tall man on the same shuttle van, because of course they did. The drive out to the resort took twenty minutes along a road that clung to the ridge, all fog and black rock and steaming cracks in the ground where the volcano couldn't be bothered to stay fully asleep. The family talked loudly. The businessman talked on the phone. The tall man and I did not talk, but I caught him glancing at me twice in the rearview mirror, and I caught myself glancing back.

The SkyWater was nearly empty. Off-season, the desk clerk told us, in the tone of someone apologizing in advance. She checked us in one at a time, sliding key cards across a counter made of some kind of polished black stone. The businessman went first. Then the family, in a loud and complicated negotiation about room configurations. Then I stepped up, and the tall man drifted over and stood beside me, close enough that I could smell coffee on his jacket.

"Sorry," he said, "but I have to ask. Do I know you? You keep looking at me like you're trying to place me, and honestly I've been doing the same thing since the gate."

I turned and looked at him properly for the first time. Gray in the brown hair, lines around the eyes, a build that said he'd been broad once and still lifted enough to prove it. And then it landed. Not a soft landing, either. It hit me square in the chest.

"Atlanta," I said. "The claims adjusters' conference. The Marriott, the one with the atrium. You weren't an adjuster. You were..." I snapped my fingers, a habit I hate in myself. "You worked the ramp. Baggage. You gave a talk about ground crew safety that nobody went to except me, because I got lost."

Joel Brownlow laughed. Actually laughed, head back, and the desk clerk looked over at us with mild alarm.

"Justine," he said. "Justine Sylvester. Sylvester like the cat." He stuck out his hand and I shook it, which felt absurd after thirty years. "I can't believe you remember the safety talk. That talk was terrible. I gave that talk because my supervisor made me."

"It wasn't terrible. I learned that you should never stand behind an active engine. Life-changing information."

"It was a bad talk in a bad ballroom," he said, "and you were the only person there, and I bought you a beer at the hotel bar afterward and you left halfway through it."

Ouch. He said it pleasantly, but it still landed. "I did," I admitted. "I had a conference call scheduled. A hurricane claim in the Panhandle. I remember thinking, this man is interesting and I am leaving to talk about roof tarps."

"Well," he said, and shrugged, and the shrug carried thirty years in it.

The desk clerk pushed two key cards across the stone. "Rooms two-oh-six and two-oh-eight," she said. "Adjoining. The dinner seating is at eight. The pools close at eleven."

The yellow backpack family applauded their own room number, somehow. I picked up my card and Joel picked up his, and we stood there a moment like two people at a class reunion who don't know which conversation to escape into.

"Dinner at eight?" he asked. "I mean, unless you have a conference call."

"Roof tarps can wait," I said.

* * *

I changed into the one decent sweater I had packed, put on earrings for the first time in months, and gave myself a long look in the bathroom mirror. Fifty-four. Gray coming in at the temples because I had stopped fighting it during the pandemic and never restarted the war. Fine lines, a decent jawline, the same stubborn chin. I looked as though I had buried a husband and raised a daughter and processed about eleven thousand claims. I decided that was good enough and went down to the restaurant.

The restaurant was one room, twelve tables, and empty except for us. A view of the steaming pools through floor-to-ceiling windows, fog rolling past like the whole island was breathing. Joel was already at a corner table with a beer, and he stood up when he saw me, which nobody had done in a while.

"They have fish or fish," he said, sitting back down. "Also a soup that might be fish."

"I'm from the Gulf Coast. Fish is my whole personality."

"Right, Mobile. You said that in Atlanta. Something about your father shrimping."

"My father did not shrimp. My father sold insurance to people who shrimped. But close enough, people mix it up."

Dinner took nearly two hours, because neither of us is in a hurry anymore and because we had thirty years to get through. He had gone from the ramp into air traffic control, twenty-two years now, working a regional facility outside Memphis. Divorced at forty, one grown son in Denver he saw twice a year. I did the same math out loud: married at twenty-eight, widowed at fifty, one grown daughter in Chicago who called on Sundays and worried about me living alone in a way I found both sweet and insulting.

"Air traffic control," I said, when the second beer arrived. "You went from throwing bags to telling pilots where to go."

"Somebody has to. It's mostly boredom and occasional terror. You'd like it, actually. It's all assessing risk quickly and then going home and not talking about it. Isn't that what you do?"

"That is exactly what I do." I laughed into my glass. "Except my version has more paperwork and fewer lives at stake, usually."

"You look good, Justine," he said, plain as that, no angle on it. "You looked good at twenty-four. I remember thinking, this woman is the only person in that whole conference who listens to people."

"I remember thinking, this ramp agent is too tall for me to look at comfortably and I should probably leave." I took a breath, because it seemed like the moment for honesty, or at least for a version of it. "I thought about that beer a lot longer than I admitted to. I left because I got scared, Joel. I was married to my job and I didn't know how to sit at a bar with a stranger and just talk. So I invented a phone call."

"There wasn't a phone call?"

"There was a phone call. There was also a bathroom mirror where I rehearsed the phone call for ten minutes first."

He turned his beer glass in a slow circle on the tablecloth. "I wondered for years what would've happened," he said. "Not obsessively. Just, you know. Every conference, every airport bar. One beer with a woman who remembers a bad safety talk."

The waiter came by and asked about dessert, and we both said no at the same time, and then there was a pause that had a different temperature than the other pauses.

"The thermal pools are open until eleven," Joel said. "I'm going to go sit in one and feel foolish about my life choices. You're welcome to join me or you're welcome to invent a phone call. Both are historic options at this point."

I looked at him over the candle. The fog rolled past the window behind his head.

"Give me twenty minutes," I said. "I left my swimsuit on the bed."

"I'll be in the pool by the window," he said. "The one that's steaming."

"They're all steaming, Joel."

"Then I'll be in all of them."

* * *

I changed into the swimsuit, which had been packed for a vacation that got cancelled three years ago, and it still fit the way a swimsuit fits when you are fifty-four and honest with yourself. Functional. Then I pulled a towel off the rack, wrapped it around me like a robe, and went down through the quiet hallway in my flip-flops.

The pools were outside, down a short path of flat volcanic stone. Steam came off the water in slow curls, and the fog beyond the low wall was doing its own thing. Off-season meant nobody else was around. I could hear water moving somewhere below the ridge, and the little path lights made orange dots in the mist.

Joel was in the pool by the window, like he said. He had gray swim trunks and wet hair pushed back, and he was leaning against the stone edge with his arms spread along it.

"Look who didn't invent a phone call," he said.

"Give me time."

He pointed at the steps. "Water's about a hundred. Takes a minute to get used to."

I went down the steps slowly, holding my towel, and set it on a dry spot on the stones. The water