CHAPTER 9

.9.

I left the wet wool swimsuit in a heap on the bathroom floor. It smelled like a drowned dog and weighed almost as much. After a quick toweling and a pair of dry canvas trousers, I felt human again, but my skin was still tight from the salt.

I stepped back into the main room to find Jimmy standing on the lanai, framed by the screen door like a ghost in a bathrobe. Only it wasn't a bathrobe; it was a three-hundred-dollar silk suit he’d left crumpled on the sand, now stiff with salt and sagging in all the wrong places. He’d gone into the water in his briefs, but he’d come out looking like a man who’d lost everything but his pulse.

“I’m sorry, Ray,” he whispered. He looked down at the ruined silk, then back at me again. “I... I think I killed the suit.”

A part of me wanted to tell him to take his ruined suit and his wrecked nerves back to the Royal Hawaiian and leave me to my blank page. I wasn't his nursemaid, and I certainly wasn't his Kahu. But then I looked at his eyes. He wasn't just shivering from the night air; he was drowning in a different kind of water – the kind that doesn't have a shoreline.

“Forget the suit,” I said, grabbing a dry cotton shirt from the chair and tossing it to him. “Come on. You need something in you that isn't brine.”

I led him three blocks back from the beach, away from the tiki torches and the jazz bands, to a small wood-frame shack tucked under a banyan tree. This was Ah-Fong’s cousin’s place. There was no name on the door, just the scent of shrimp dashi and charcoal.

The Mamasan behind the counter was a woman who didn't believe in wasted words. She saw me almost every night at ten, and she’d seen me in every state of repair. She looked at Jimmy – the fair-haired haole in the wrecked silk and my oversized shirt – then back at me. She didn't ask if he was a millionaire or a madman. She just gave me a small, knowing nod, as if to say I was bringing home another stray and that was all right.

“Two bowls,” I said. “And don't hold back on the green onions.”

We sat on backless stools that had been smoothed by a generation of working-class patrons. Jimmy watched the Mamasan work with an expression I couldn't quite pin down. It wasn't the "slumming it" look I expected from a guy with his pedigree. It was a mix of wonder and a strange, quiet appreciation – the look of a man seeing something small and real for the first time after a lifetime of living on a wealthy movie set.

The bowls arrived, steaming and fragrant. Beside them, she placed two tapered bamboo sticks. Jimmy stared at them like they were a pair of complex surgical instruments he wasn't qualified to handle.

He tried to mimic my grip, but his fingers – honed for holding polo mallets and silver cocktail shakers – couldn't find the leverage. One stick went east, the other west. He looked at the noodles, then at me, the frustration flickering in his eyes.

“Use the spoon, Jimmy,” I said, sliding the ceramic ladle toward him. “Nobody here is giving out prizes for technique.”

He didn't touch the spoon. He set his jaw – the same stubborn line I’d seen when he was failing at surfing – and tried again. He fumbled until he managed to pinch a single noodle, lifting it with the intense concentration a man usually reserves for defusing a bomb. It was a clumsy, slow job, but he didn't quit.

“It takes time, Jimmy,” I said, blowing on my own broth. “You don't just shake off the dark water like a dog after a bath. Your body remembers the air leaving even if your head wants to forget it.”

He managed to get a mouthful of the noodles, the heat finally bringing a flicker of color back to his cheeks. He looked around the shack – at the bare bulb, the stained wood, the simple ceramic bowls.

“How much time?” he asked. He wasn't looking at me; he was looking at the sticks in his hand. “A month? Two? A year?”

I didn't have an answer. I was a history major, not a doctor of the soul. “I don't know. Everyone’s got their own clock. Some people find their nerve in weeks; some never touch the surf again.”

Jimmy looked up then, and the shivering had stopped. There was a sudden, sharp clarity in his blue eyes that made me think of a reef shark – still, but dangerous. “I’m staying,” he said.

I paused with a noodle halfway to my mouth. “Staying? The paper says you’re on the next boat.”

“The paper is wrong,” Jimmy said, and he clamped the chopsticks together with a white-knuckled grip. “I’m staying until I can swim again. Until I can go back out there and not feel like the Pacific is trying to take back what you gave me.”

I wanted to laugh. I wanted to tell him that a "Danish Pastry Prince" wouldn't last a week in a beach shack once the novelty wore off. I wanted to say he’d be back in Hollywood the moment the first invitation to a wild party arrived.

But I didn't say anything. I just finished my noodles and watched him struggle with those bamboo sticks as if his life depended on mastering them. I didn't believe him for a second.

I was wrong, of course. Jimmy wasn't just staying. He was moving into the story, and he was taking me with him.

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