Page 77 of Alonzo

It’s only then that I notice he’s frowning. And I only notice because he smiles when I call him hot. But then he looks past me and juts his chin forward. “Here we are.”

I hadn’t even noticed that the channel had opened up to reveal a small island.

“Welcome to my secret, Tara Tanner.”

I glance at him, grinning, my troubled past neatly packed away like it should be. “What are we doing?” His lopsided smile and prolonged silence make me cock my head. “What are you up to?”

“I just want to show you something kinda cool. It’s… maybe a little…” He sighs. “You’ll see.”

“Oooo. Now I’m kinda nervous. Should I be nervous?”

He steps out of the raft, drags it up the beach a little, then offers me his hand. I take it and then he swoops me up in his arms and swings me around. So suddenly and so fast, I barely have time to laugh before I am set back on my feet.

He kneels down, his fingers sliding down my calf until he’s holding my shoe. “Put your hand on my shoulder, Tare. I’m gonna take off your shoes.” He’s looking up at me when he says this, the moon lighting up one side of his face, but leaving the other side obscured by dark shadows.

When I touch his shoulder, I swear I feel him shudder. He slips my sneaker off one foot, then the other. And then he rolls up my pant legs until they’re cuffed just below my knees.

Then he takes his shoes off and does the same for his pants and stands up, once again taking my hand.

We walk across the beach like that. And for a moment I wonder what we’d look like to a voyeuristic stranger. A couple in a new relationship? Or a couple in a committed one?

I opt for the second. Because he doesn’t feel new. We don’t feel new. Even though we literally just met for the first time this morning, our love feels old.

Old like starlight that crosses galaxies.

Inevitable like the straight line it travels on.

He leads me to a path. A soft, worn path that is half smooth dirt and half blown sand. We come to a ridge, climb it—Alonzo first so he can help me—and then we’re on some kind of plateau. Not high in elevation, but higher than the shoreline. So that the tops of the small trees we just came through surround us on all four sides.

I get caught up in the view for a moment. The carpet of moonlight sparkling across the sea. Other parts of the Keys off in the distance. A few boats and the lights of houses and businesses lining the edges of everything.

“Where are we?”

“My mother’s family owned this little island for centuries. It was donated to the park system many decades ago and it’s now technically a part of the naval base. But we have something here the government is not allowed to touch. Something we still own.” I’m staring up at him, still trying to puzzle those words out, when he points to the middle of the flat ground we’re standing on. “That is where my great-great-great-grandfather is buried.”

There is a dark rectangle in the middle. Maybe twenty feet on the longest side and six on the short one. A rock, I realize. A large, flat rock, and near the top, in a long rectangle, is a plaque with an inscription.

“Come here. I want to read it to you.”

I let him lead me into the center of the cleaning and we stand over it, just looking down. It’s unreadable in this light, but I don’t need much light to see that the words aren’t written in English. “What’s that language? Not Spanish.”

“No. Portuguese. My mother comes from a long line of Portuguese sailors. They would be called explorers if this were four hundred years ago, but most of the exploration business died a while back in this part of the world. So they fished, and crabbed, and dived, and did other things.”

“What’s this say? The story of his travels?”

“No. It’s a story called Vasco and the Siren.” He looks down at me and smiles. “It’s a story about a man—my great-great-great grandfather, Vasco—and the woman who ruined his life.”

The guffaw comes out unexpectedly, too loud and too harsh. “Wait. He’s bitching about a woman on his gravestone?”

“Not just any woman. The siren, Adrienne.” He says it with an accent. Ad-ree-en-ee. “She was my great-great-great grandmother. Their relationship was… well, when a sailor marries a siren things get interesting.”

“Apparently.” I laugh. “He wrote on his grave.”

“Wanna hear it?”

“For sure.”

“We have to lie down on top of the grave. Because it’s part of the story.”