Fox in Paradise

I found her hat first—cream linen with a silk ribbon, caught in the bougainvillea behind the bungalows. No one wears hats like that to Panama unless they're hiding something or running away.

Sarah had been missing three days when her husband hired me. He said she'd always wanted to see the papaya farms, said she needed to get away from the Michigan winter. But I'd seen the photos in their room—her laughing in that hat, cutting into fruit with a satisfaction that made something twist in my chest. My own hollow spaces had been refusing children for five years.

Tom and I stood on his screened porch last night, drinking rum while he talked about Sarah's obsession with becoming a mother. "She said the papaya farms were magic," he said, voice cracking. "She read somewhere if you eat enough, you'll conceive." I didn't tell him papayas were just fruit. Some beliefs are kinder than the truth.

We ended up in his pool at midnight, water swallowing our words, his hands finding the spaces in me that had gone dormant. I hadn't meant for it to happen, but grief is its own country, and we were both citizens without passports.

This morning, I walked the edge of the property and saw it—a fox, red as a fresh wound, watching me from between the papaya trees. Foxes don't belong in the tropics. But then, neither did we.

It dipped its head once, like it knew something I didn't, then slipped away toward the water. I found three perfect papayas on my porch when I returned, arranged like an offering.

Tom drove me to the ferry. I wore Sarah's hat. He didn't ask me to take it off.

"What happens now?" he asked.

I watched the water lap against the pilings. "You keep looking. I keep working."

"And last night?"

"We both needed to feel something besides this."

He kissed me then, desperate and sad, and I thought about how some connections are just papaya sweet and quick to rot. The ferry horn sounded. I boarded without looking back, but I kept the hat.