The Rest of the Tune

At sunrise in Watamu, the Indian Ocean was the color of a peach held up to the light. Nia stood on the pale sand with her sandals in one hand, watching small waves travel through the sheltered shallows. Farther out, a line of breaking water marked the reef. The breeze carried salt and the faint smell of somebody warming a stove behind the beach, while the last shadows beneath the trees remained cool enough to make her wish she had brought another layer. She had come out to clear her head after the wedding. Instead, she heard a tune she had not heard in seventeen years.

It was only five notes, hummed badly enough to be familiar. Eli stood near the beach entrance, looking toward the water as though he had been there for some time. They had recognized each other at the reception the previous evening, across a table crowded with flowers and glasses, and had managed ten minutes together before a cousin pulled him away for photographs. Nia had gone to bed wondering why ten minutes with an old friend had unsettled her more than several entire dates with newer men.

He looked pleased to see her now. The formal jacket was gone, replaced by a blue shirt with a stubborn fold across the sleeve, and his face was easier to read without the music and moving crowd between them. At thirty-nine, he was broader than the young man she remembered, with a little gray at his temples. He still tilted his head when listening. Nia had forgotten that detail until last night; once she saw it again, she could remember looking forward to it.

She asked where he had found the tune. He said it had found him while he was packing for the wedding, on an old recording he had almost deleted. There were several minutes of conversation, a great deal of terrible singing, and then that unfinished phrase. Nia recognized the melody from a trip their university friends had taken together after graduation. Somebody had borrowed a guitar. She could remember the room, the rain outside, even the chipped bowl they had used for keys, but she could not remember why the music stopped in exactly that place.

Eli still had the recording on his phone. He suggested listening to it away from the people watching the sunrise, and they walked toward a quiet stretch of open sand, keeping to the shore. He did not begin playing it immediately. Nia was glad. She wanted to hear what his voice sounded like now, when he was speaking only to her, before a younger version of him complicated things.

They had been close for one summer, then less close across different cities, new jobs, and relationships neither had known how to summarize in an occasional message. There had been no quarrel. Friendship had simply acquired longer intervals until the intervals were all that remained. Nia remembered thinking he might kiss her on the last evening of that trip. She also remembered making some foolish remark that left them both laughing too hard for anything to happen. For years she had treated the moment as a pleasant near miss, belonging to people they no longer were.

As they walked, she began to doubt the neatness of that conclusion. Eli asked about the brother whose wedding they had attended years ago, remembered the town where her parents lived, and listened closely when she explained that she had moved back to Nairobi. He was there too. His relationship had ended the previous year, he told her without turning it into an accusation against anyone; Nia had been single for longer. The facts settled between them with a quiet significance neither tried to disguise.

They paused where a strip of firmer sand held the reflection of the brightening sky. Behind them, a silver-haired man with amber eyes and a cobalt-blue scarf came down the beach path, passing close enough for Nia to notice the little camera in his hand. He continued in the other direction. Eli took out his phone and found the recording, holding it between them at a volume meant for two.

At first there was only rain and an argument about whether somebody had returned the guitar. Then Nia heard her own younger voice singing words she was grateful the wind partly obscured. Eli supplied a chord, someone laughed, and the five notes emerged, hesitant but recognizable. They reached the place where the tune stopped. On the recording, the young Eli asked what happened next, and the young Nia answered with perfect confidence that she would think of something tomorrow.

Then another voice announced that the power had returned, and everybody began shouting about hot showers. The recording ended in the scrape of chairs.

For several seconds neither of them spoke. Nia had expected a forgotten ending, perhaps a song whose title would make everything fall into place. Instead, the tune was unfinished because a roomful of wet travelers had abruptly become more interested in washing their hair. She laughed first, and Eli bent his head, laughing with her. The small mystery dissolved so completely that she could almost feel the old room around them, then let it go.

He told her he had liked that summer. She said she had too, and the simplicity of the exchange left less protection than either of them had probably intended. Nia studied his face. She could see the younger man in it, but what drew her now was the person who had let the silence last, who seemed willing to hear an answer before deciding what the morning meant.

“I used to wonder about us,” she said.

Eli looked down at the phone, turned it off, and put it in his pocket. “I’d rather find out now.”

The warmth that rose in her was sharper than nostalgia. She stepped closer and rested her free hand against his arm. They spoke about something practical, almost shyly: a walk in Nairobi when they were both home, the following Sunday, a time and a meeting place they each knew. Nia liked that he asked when she would be free instead of assuming she would make room. She liked that saying yes made her want to say something less sensible as well.

Eli reached for her hand. She turned toward him fully, the sandals dangling from her other fingers, and told him she wanted him to kiss her. His smile arrived before he moved. He touched her cheek and kissed her softly, and for a moment she was aware of everything at once: the breeze against her neck, the firm sand beneath her feet, the care with which he held her. She drew him closer for a second kiss. This one lingered, and when they parted they remained near enough that speaking would have felt unnecessarily loud.

The sun was higher now, turning the shallows clear and bright. Somewhere behind the trees, the wedding guests would be waking and looking for one another. Nia was not ready to return. She slipped her fingers between Eli’s and suggested that they walk a little farther along the beach before the heat arrived. He hummed the five notes again, smiling when she recognized them, and this time she answered with a small descending phrase of her own.

He repeated it until he had it right. Then they walked on together, trying the two halves of the tune, with Sunday already entered in both their calendars.