Frank’s island tour—offered free to hotel guests—is described by the Paradise Inn’s brochure as a brief excursion into the island’s myths, mysteries, and mermaids, its selkies and sirens. What the brochure fails to mention is that most of the tour is aimed at selling extra-cost amenities. Frank has today’s group look at the hotel’s spa, the sea-themed restaurant, the saltwater pool, and some pinkish seashells with purported medicinal properties. Only after that does he finally gather the handful of patrons inside a thatched pavilion on the beach. This group stands in pairs, their blinking the sole movement in their flushed faces.
Frank clears his throat and says that long before the hospitality industry became king here, this small island housed an order of Franciscan monks. (The members of the group—mostly honeymooners—look slightly guilty at the news.) During World War II, the monastery was converted into a small naval base. Frank paints touching portraits of soldiers under big church bells, gripping guns. The bells now are lost. So are the soldiers, so are the monks. But to up his tour’s lyricism, Frank talks mostly about the bells. The story goes that the monastery bells were dismantled and thrown into the sea by a formerly devout soldier, turned deaf by the booms of bomb explosions and turned atheist by the bomb explosions themselves.
“The bells were never heard again,” Frank tells today’s group, “until one day a woman at the hotel, unhappy on her honeymoon, tried to drown herself in the ocean. Coincidentally, just as she’d tucked herself into a soft bed of seaweed, she heard a church bell ringing. She opened her eyes and thought she saw a cathedral rising up from the ocean floor. It was a sign, she thought. She came up for air. She swam to shore. She went back to her hotel room. Yes, she lived. Nevertheless, legend has it…”
Frank takes a deep breath. The crowd stares at him. Then Frank offers up his best puckish grin. “Legend has it she still wound up getting a divorce.”
The couples always titter at this, give each other knowing glances. Only today when Frank says the line about divorce, a woman gives him a knowing glance. Frank, fifty years old, wears shirts with prints of silver swordfish on them, or sometimes rainbow trout. This woman, who appears to be in her twenties, wears a tight-fitting bright blue shirt and white shorts. She looks exactly like his ex-wife looked twenty years ago.
The divorce was her fault. She cheated. He pushed her once, with both his hands, but she was the one who cheated. Frank has packed all his memories of her away in what he likes to think of as the cerebral cellar of his brain. He imagines those memories decomposing down to their more basic bits, fusing to other forms: fairy tales, myths, legends, the stuff of tacky tours, the stuff that makes his living, the stuff that allows him to live.
“Well,” he says, after several moments of looking at the woman in the blue shirt. “Well, yes, I guess we’re going to conclude now.”
He thanks the group, then leads them back to the lobby, where he reminds them their hotel contains five different restaurants specializing in different cuisines: French, Vegetarian, Asian Fusion, Sustainable Seafood, and Mexican. The guests disperse.
But the woman who gave him a look, the woman who looks like his wife, she lingers for a moment. Of course, she is not his wife. His wife is now his former wife, lives in Seattle, is in her forties. This woman is Something Else. And now the Something Else waves to Frank, before walking into an elevator.
Frank sweats.
Frank honeymooned at this hotel, on this island, too. They were on the third floor with a partial ocean view, their room covered in pictures of mermaids with Miss America smiles. “So tacky,” his wife had said, but she had said so while grinning, while removing her bright blue shirt.
For a while, after the divorce, Frank worked as a guide in all sorts of different museums and cities. Then he came back to this island. He likes his arrangement with the hotel and he likes the ahistorical attitude of the hotel’s visitors. They’re fine with ignoring troubling cultural pasts, because their honeymoons are designed around ignoring their own pasts, infidelities, prenuptial doubts. When he led tours at a natural history museum, there was someone always trying to out-PC someone else, or asking Frank where the museum had retrieved those skulls, what native tribe they slaughtered with guns to swipe up and preserve those arrowheads. Now, working for the hotel, all he has to do is try to sell seashells and tell stories. No one cares if they’re true or not. The group always seems relieved just to be there. His tours offer a break from the physically and emotionally exhaustive work of honeymooning.
Although Frank stays at a discounted rate in a small room on the first floor of the hotel, he doesn’t interact much with the guests. He doesn’t interact much with the hotel staff, either. Most of the staff, the ones not from the island, are teenagers and early-twentysomethings. They have come to intern here, which means fold towels, wash tables, work in one of the five restaurants. They receive nothing for their time but room and board. For a while they’re all smiles about it. The way they see it, they’re on a free vacation in paradise. Eventually they realize they’re being exploited and they leave. They typically don’t last more than a couple of weeks.
Sometimes, at night, Frank goes to the hotel bar and watches people there. The bartenders serve cocktails that glow a radioactive pink or a radioactive orange, lighting up women’s faces. Tonight the woman in the blue shirt just so happens to be sitting at the bar, alone. It’s the kind of coincidence that seems like a set-up. Still, Frank slides into the seat next to her. She looks up and smiles.
She says, “I really like your shirt, just so much. What kind of fish are those?”
“Swordfish.”
“Oh. Obviously. They do look just like swords.” She laughs. The laugh is familiar, high-pitched, unhesitating. A memory, a fragment of forgotten sound, floats out from Frank’s cerebral cellar.
“Listen,” the woman says, when the little show of a laugh is over. She is leaning forward, her hair spooling on the bar’s counter. “I guess you noticed I was staring at you before, during the tour. It’s because there’s something you should know.”
“Yeah?”
“She was me.”
“Who was you?” She is still wearing that blue shirt.
“I was that woman? The one who tried to drown herself and heard the bells.”
“Hah. No,” he says. “It’s just a legend.”
“Hah. No,” she says. “It was me in the story.”
“Okay,” says Frank. “Totally.”
“Really. I came back to see if I’d hear them again. I promise you.”
She might be crazy. Of course, he’s the one who thinks she looks just like his former wife from twenty years back. So maybe he is crazy. Maybe he’s talking to one of his own stories.
“Let’s go for a swim,” the woman says. “I’ll guide you to where the bells are.”
“I made them up.” Frank tries a flirtatious grin on, feels a little like his face is being sawed in half. “The monastery part is true, but the bell part I made up. They don’t exist.”
“They do, too,” she says. “Let’s meet in one hour. On the beach.”
“How could you even hear a bell sound underwater?”
“Above land, we hear through air conduction. Under the sea, bone conduction.” The woman smiles warmly at him. “People can hear sounds under the sea that they can’t hear on land. Sounds at higher frequencies. Isn’t that something?” The way she delivers the information, in a smooth, yet friendly sort of voice, she sounds like a host on NPR or something. Not like anyone Frank really knows, but like someone he might half listen to on a long drive, just to distract himself from the slow passing of the seconds.
Then she gets up and is gone. Frank buys a beer and starts to think. He wants to think about the woman, but he ends up thinking about his former wife and his former wife’s laugh. What kind of medium conducted the sound of her laugh back into his head just now? Not air, not bone. Can sound be conducted purely by memory?
The time he pushed her: He had been angry. He had pushed hard. This was even before she had cheated. Twice he had pushed her, actually. True? A certain wobbly expression on her face each time. The light in her eyes seemed off-balanced, diffracted, like sun filtering through beveled glass. Her skin rainbow-flushed.
One hour. The woman had not been smiling when she said that.
If the woman is a hallucination, she’s a punctual one: She’s already there when Frank arrives at the beach. He wears nautical blue swimming trunks. She wears a sleek black Speedo, a one-piece, all business, her hair pulled back in a ponytail now. There are other couples on the beach but they’re very much occupied with one another. The woman waves to him as he comes nearer. Her toenails are painted gold. The ocean is black. The water will be colder than he likes.
“Why don’t we sit on the beach for a while first?” Frank asks. “Talk a little?”
“This isn’t about talking. It’s about listening. I’m guiding you, Frank.”
She starts to turn away. He reaches for her arm, but she flinches and snakes her body from him like he’s hit her. Now the woman is running to the water.
“Come on,” she calls to Frank. She dives down, so he takes a deep breath and dives down, too. He doesn’t hear bells. Instead, in the underwater darkness, he remembers the look on the woman’s face when he grabbed for her arm. He remembers pushing his wife. The small sound she made afterward, steady and quiet and nothing like bells. He goes up again to the surface for air.
He sees some of the interns, down on the beach.
Treading water, the woman forgotten, he watches the interns.
They’re supposed to be working, but instead they’re lying in the sand, teenagers trying to tan under the cinereal light of the moon. They let loose peals of laughter, even though their bodies have to be heavy with ache from dishwashing, waiting tables, mopping. Pieces of their conversation drift his way. They’re talking about opening their own hotel, all of the interns together, right here, right on this spot, free from that bastard of a manager they’re working under. They say they will be business partners. By that, they mean they will be friends forever.
But in two weeks, Frank predicts, they will be gone from this place, the whole experience a story they will tell to the new people they meet, the new friends forever that they see on new islands, in new internships.
Where is the woman? Instead of looking for her, he looks some more at the interns, the beautiful young kids glowing with lunar tans. Maybe he will leave with them, even though he seems too old to change. He will go to a new and unhaunted island. The ocean’s full of islands.
Someone is grabbing his legs, trying to pull him down under the surface. Probably the woman, joking around. If he ducks his head under the waves, he will hear her highest-frequency laugh, the sound conducted through his bones, and he will know her, what she is exactly, what story to tell to get her to let him go.
Lee Conell’s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Guernica, Glimmer Train, Crazyhorse, The Masters Review, Five Chapters, and elsewhere. She is a recent graduate of Vanderbilt University’s Creative Writing MFA program, where she was the 2014-2015 fiction fellow and won the Guy Goffe Means Prize for Fiction. She currently lives in Nashville and works as a writer mentor for Southern Word and as a creative writing instructor for K-12 students and others in the Nashville community.