Page 12 of My Dead Wife's Ex Will Do
I tuck the cushion under me and tentatively cross my legs in front. The ache in my ankles and hips subsides and my spine lengthens. Victor pats my shoulder in approval and returns to the front of the room.
“Inhale,” he says, resuming his seat on his folded legs. “And exhale.”
It’s easier to concentrate on breathing now that I’m more comfortable. I feel the gentle breeze on my skin, the day’s heat sliding away. We breathe in unison a few more times and then Victor says, “Now open your eyes if they’ve been closed and let’s move to our hands and knees.”
He takes us through a series of what he calls cat and cow stretches, then we all stand. “Let’s flow,” he says with a wide smile. Fuck if I know what that means, but everyone else seems to.
He gives step-by-step instructions, though, thankfully. I mix up stepping back with the wrong foot occasionally, but it’s actually easier to follow than I thought it would be. After a couple rounds of reaching up, folding forward, and stepping back, we end up in a pose Victor calls Downward-Facing Dog—I’m not even going to try remembering what he said the Sanskrit word for it is—which he tells us to hold for five breaths.
It’s much harder than it looks when Victor does it. My arms start shaking after breath number two and I grip the mat, my knuckles whitening. Victor’s been walking around in between demonstrations and he comes up alongside my mat. “Can I touch you to help adjust your pose?”
“Ungh,” I grunt, which I mean as consent and luckily he takes as such. I don’t know how much longer I can stay like this. He steps behind me, braces his bare feet on the outer edges of mine, and hooks his fingers in the creases at my hips. Then he pulls my hips sort of up and back at the same time and damn if that doesn’t shift more of my weight onto my legs instead of my arms.
“Huh,” I say, still sort of muffled because I’m still freaking upside down.
“Better?”
“Yeah,” I manage. He pulls my hips up and back a little more, then smoothes his hands along my sides. “Knit your ribs together.” I have no idea how the hell to do that but somehow, something shifts under his hands. “Now turn your upper arms out and your forearms in.” Another instruction that makes no damn sense, but in trying to follow it, the strain in my shoulders eases and I feel more stable.
“There you go, that’s much better.”
He lets go of me and steps back. I immediately lose all the adjustments he made and my weight shifts back onto my arms and wrists. When Victor tells us to bend our knees and rest our seat on the soles of our feet, I tell myself that I’m just glad to be out of that dog pose and not that I miss the warmth of his hands on my body.
Seven
Victor
I finish leading my daughter, her fiancée, their friend, and Jason—whatever the hell he is to me—through a flow sequence, then round out our practice with some forward bends, a couple rounds of bridge pose, and some gentle twists. In this first session, I’m trying to get a sense of everyone’s familiarity with yoga and physical ability to get into the poses. Kelsey and Silas have the magical flexibility of youth and Adrienne seems to know her way around the mat. Jason, on the other hand…
Poor dude. He’s so clearly out of his element here. Stiff and self-conscious, even though absolutely no one is judging him. When he stretches out on his back for shavasana, I can see his eyes twitching and rolling beneath his closed lids.
I walk softly to Jason’s head, crouch down and place my thumbs in between his brows, then press all ten fingers firmly into the pressure points on his skull. Jason sighs and his eyes stop twitching. I drag my thumbs from his eyebrows to his hairline, then across the width of his forehead.
I repeat this massage twice more, then rub his temples and release him. His lips twitch into a small smile and his hands relax a bit more at his sides.
I do the same massage on Adrienne, Kelsey, and Silas, then return to the front of the room, settle cross-legged on my mat, and gently call the group out of shavasana. Jason blinks blearily at me when he sits up. His eyes are soft in a way I don't know what to do with.
Kelsey chatters quietly with Silas as they roll their mats up and put their props away. Jason looks away, stands and rolls his mat up too, replacing it in the cubbyhole next to where Adrienne placed hers. The girls and Silas head off to their rooms to change for dinner and I catch up with Jason after making sure the pavilion is restored to the condition it was in when we arrived.
The setting sun turns the rainforest canopy copper as we walk along the torch-lit path that winds between lush foliage. I can see a slight stiffness in Jason’s gait that tells me he pushed himself in the vinyasa flow I led.
“Your alignment improved with some adjustment,” I remark. “You’re not as bad at yoga as you think.”
Jason shrugs, looking uncomfortable with the compliment. “I’ve watched the occasional YouTube video.”
I wonder if they're my videos. The thought sends an unexpected thrill through me, the idea of Jason watching me, following my cues in the privacy of his home. I push the thought away.
Jason stops walking, grabs my arm, and forces me to a halt. “Holy shit,” he whispers. ”Look.”
He points ahead of us, off the path, into the trees. It takes me a few seconds, but then I see it. On a low branch of a gnarled tree perches a large bird with its back to us and its head in profile.
“Bright blue crown, black eye mask,” Jason murmurs more to himself than to me. The bird’s body color shades from greenish around its shoulder to turquoise near its rump and its long tail feathers end with bright blue spade-shaped tips.
“What is it?” I ask.
“A Lesson’s Motmot,” he says. “I was hoping to see one, but I didn’t think I’d get to so soon.”
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
