Page 67 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

He almost missed the turn off the deserted road that led past crumbling, old houses and wide, empty fields, turning quickly and skidding into the parking lot. The whole island seemed like a beautiful ruin, wild hydrangeas growing over tumbling roadside walls, huge, estate-sized homes abandoned and falling to piles, barely populated towns. Angeline loved it. But something about it scared him, even before creepy Petra and her goons. His neck and the back of his head still ached. He’d twisted his arm in the fall. He felt a wash of the same impotent rage he’d felt when they’d pinned him to the ground.

Maverick slowed the vehicle, tires crunching on the gravel. The radio didn’t pick up any stations, only static. The silence was oppressive. He realized he was gripping the wheel so hard that his hands ached.

The hotel came into view as he drove farther into the lot, a low white building. Above, the clouds had cleared. It looked like one of those VR experiences where everything was just shy of being real, elevated, colors filtered and popping, the movement of leaves and clouds just a little too perfect. What did they call it?Uncanny valley.When something was close but not quite close enough to the truth as to become almost frightening, just shy of being human or natural as to become unhuman, unnatural.

He stepped out of the car, the air heavy with the smell of salt and rain. He walked around to the back and popped the hatch and put his eyes on the bags he’d taken from the tent and stashed there. Seeing those bags, knowing what they contained, gave him comfort.

He shut the hatch, the sound echoing.

Then he walked over to the other Range Rover, put a hand on the still-warm hood, glanced at the PopMap. He saw Angeline’s Tinkerbell avatar hovering near Alex’s and Tavo’s.

His throat was dry.

There.

A slender, dark form over by the stone wall that edged a cliff, a vertiginous drop into the rocky, churning sea below. Angeline said that someone had died by suicide from that ridge—a princess, was it? Some kind of island royalty, forced into an arranged marriage. He’d barely been listening but remembered thinking the name sounded like a flower. Jacintha. Angeline loved all that stuff: history, legends, ghost stories. There was a book about the doomed princess in the lobby. She’d been a poet, apparently. The book and all her poems were in Portuguese, but that didn’t stop Angeline from poring over the pictures.

“Why kill yourself, though? Just put up with the guy. How bad could it be?” he’d offered when she told him the story.

That look. “Spoken like someone who has never been forced to do anything he doesn’t want to do. That’s what it is to be a white, affluent male in this world.”

As usual, he felt like he’d fallen short of the mark Angeline used to judge everyone, everything.

“I’m just saying.”

The form over by the wall stood stock-still, looking out at the surf or back in his direction, he couldn’t tell. He waved an arm, but the figure was unmoving. Angeline. It had to be. That Tinkerbell shape, those narrow but erect shoulders. A dancer’s bearing. A queen.

Twice in the last year he’d sensed that she wanted to leave him. After his last rejected proposal, he’d pressed her when the camera was off.

“Why won’t you marry me?”

She’d hemmed and hawed, finally answering.

“You’re not ready for marriage, Mav. It’s not just a ring and a piece of paper. Not something you do for show. It’s a union. It means that we put each other before everything else. In the little things, the day-to-day, and the big things. That takes a certain kind of…maturity.”

“I’m mature,” he’d whined.

But the next day, he and Tavo flew to a friend’s new restaurant in Rio, and some jet-tracker asshole posted about it on Twitter.While people all over the world starve, and climate change is an emergency for humanity, influencer Maverick Dillan takes his private jet to Rio for a single steak dinner.There was an image of him stuffing his face, looking bloated and high. To make matters worse, he’d missed an important meeting with a sponsor, and Ange had had to cover for him.

She was mad. Madder than she’d ever been at him.

But then he tore his rotator cuff during a bad snowboarding fall the next week, and he was laid up in major pain. She softened then, like she always did when he was broken. She stayed. He’d made promises he intended to keep. It was time to slow down. After this challenge he’d make some wrong things right.

He walked toward the hotel, the form still unmoving. Maybe it wasn’t a person at all. His phone pinged, and he looked down to see a text from Hector.

The generator just crapped out.

He didn’t answer it; the generator was the least of his fucking problems right now.Handle it, Hector. For fuck’s sake, it’s your only job.

He let himself into the dim lobby, moved soundlessly through the elegant lounge with its low couches and tables, sprawling bar, fireplace with embers still glowing. The back wall was comprised entirely of glass doors that opened onto the stone patio, revealing the spectacular view.

The place felt deserted; they’d had it mostly to themselves like a staffed Airbnb. Behind Angeline’s back, he’d asked Hector not to check them out. Keep the rooms. The plan at the time, before everything started to go FUBAR, had been to sneak back here to sleep. He had too many injuries to sleep in a tent like he used to.

He stepped outside, and the ocean was a roar. The form he’d been chasing was gone. Nothing, no one there. But there had been. He was sure of it.

The wind whipped at his hair and his clothes as he tried Angeline again. He felt small, inconsequential against the endless sky and the wild surf below. As a kid, he remembered loving that feeling. Now it scared him. In the real world, he was nothing.

No answer. But this time, faintly, he heard Angeline’s ringtone from off in the distance, that riot of chimes she favored that sounded like manic fairy bells. He followed the sound, hung up, and dialed again, the sound of the chimes getting louder as he approached the stone passageway that led to the guest rooms. On the air, he heard the high-pitched calling of a bird.

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