CHOICE

     She woke up after only a few hours, feeling refreshed and peaceful for the first moments before she remembered…and that put the ache back in her chest. Wanting to comfort herself, she lay back and smoothed her hair over the pillow, then held a mirror over her head—which pulled the skin taut around her cheeks, accentuating her cheekbones—and dabbed her mouth with pale pink lipstick, her lashes with mascara.

     Sometime later she thought she heard a knock. At the window she saw Terry below, holding a pot. It couldn’t have been more than 8:00 a.m. “Wait!” she called, and, still in her silky white nightgown, she ran down the steps. He knocked a second time.

     “I just wanted to return this…and the money I owe you,” he said. “I’ve written a note.”

     She took the pot in one hand and glanced at the scrap of paper, scanning the words out loud. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” it said, “but it would have ended the same, anyway—with me leaving on a jet this morning.”

     “I have to go,” he stammered. “I have someone waiting to take me to the airport.” He was embarrassed by her reading the note in front of him, she realized.

     “I’m sorry too.” She reached out and touched his shirt, staring at his button for a long moment—wondering what more she should say—before looking into his eyes. He stammered another apology and gave her a fumbled kiss on the cheek. “I have to go,” he repeated. “Maybe you want to give me your address…”

     The following morning she washed her sheets and hung them out on the balcony to dry, swept and tidied her room. She chatted with John Michel briefly, and before she left for the post office, she found a note on the stairs. It said, “I think you go—a kiss, Jean Michel.”

     She went to the post office to find out what time the bus for Figueras left, then carried her suitcase out to the road and waited with the other passengers. That night on a train to Madrid she stood in the crammed, cramped corridor; all the other loiterers were men. She opened the window and leaned out, the wind whipping her hair across her eyes and open mouth, and she felt free, freer than she had in a very long time—because she’d finally made her choice. She was going home to California, where she would make her life.