Switched (3 page)

I Googled it, and a whole slew of gorgeous pictures popped up. Crystal clear turquoise water. Rocky coves. Castles. It was an island off the coast of Spain and from the looks of it, complete paradise.

I clicked on the photos of the house. It was located in a medieval village near castle walls. One picture of a quaint bedroom, another of a small bathroom. A nice oven. Amazing views.

I clicked reply on my email.

Dear Mallorca,

Yes! Let’s do it.

“This is great, Debra. Just great.”

I pressed my cell phone against my ear so that I could hear Stacy over the noise in the airport as I ran for my gate.

“Are you sure? Are you sure?” I asked her. “I’m not crazy?”

“No! This is perfect. You need an adventure.”

It had been a quick forty-eight hours. The Mallorca people were a lovely Swedish couple. They were urgently looking for a home exchange in Chicago because they planned on doing business here for a month. They loved my condo. It was perfect timing, they wrote to me. Kismet.

I liked the sound of kismet. There was a sad lack of kismet in my life, unless catastrophe could be described as kismet. Kismet would probably turn my life around. I never imagined it could be brought to my doorstep by a middle-aged Swedish couple who owned a house on a Spanish island, but I was willing to take the leap and accept my kismet from whatever source.

Getting a ticket to Mallorca at the last minute wasn’t easy. I would have to change flights in Reykjavik and Hamburg, and I was stuck in a middle seat for all three flights. During the first leg of the trip, I was more or less comfortable between an Icelandic stockbroker and a fifteen-year-old kid who was being sent to his father per their custody agreement.

With a renewed sense of purpose and hope, my anxiety left me somewhere over Newfoundland, and I fell fast asleep. I woke only when we began our initial descent into Reykjavik, slumped over the kid, when he started to touch my breast in an inappropriate manner.

I snapped back into my seat, mopping some drool off my chin with the back of my hand. “Did you just cop a feel?” I demanded.

He shrugged. “I’m just a kid.”

“Did you see that?” I asked the stockbroker, but he shrugged, too, and threw me a disapproving look as if I was a depraved cougar who preyed on defenseless boys during transatlantic flights.

“I was sleeping,” I explained to him. “He took advantage of me.”

The stockbroker said something in what I gathered was Icelandic, which made the boy and the man across the aisle chuckle. I stood up and wagged my finger at them.

It turned out that air marshals frown on aggressive behavior—even if it’s completely justified—by passengers during descent. As far as Icelandair was concerned a woman standing up, wagging her finger at a boy and a stockbroker, was aggressive as hell and required zip-tie handcuffs.

That’s how I landed in Iceland: as a terrorist suspect, hog-tied and carried by two Nordic air marshals while I screamed about Commies and my rights as an American citizen. I might have also sung “America the Beautiful,” but my memory is a little foggy.

Foreshadowing is a marvelous thing, and if only I had recognized that traumatic experience as foreshadowing or a warning that maybe this home exchange vacation idea wasn’t all that wise, I would have saved myself a lot of suffering. After all, running away from your problems doesn’t work. They’re tethered to you. You’re running, and the problems are right there, keeping up with you as you huff and puff and make sweat stains in your clothes that will never come out.

So, being trussed like a Christmas goose and treated like I deserved a killer drone with my name on it should have given me an inkling that a month on a beautiful island might not be all that it was cracked up to be.

But I didn’t see the situation for what it was.

In my newfound optimism, bathed in the afterglow of a Kate Winslet romantic comedy, I saw my incarceration as a temporary hiccup in a life-changing adventure. A mistake, if you will, in an otherwise mistake-less experience.

“I want all of your badge numbers!” I hollered.

Stripped of my purse and carry-ons, I was put in a tidy little room with a wood table and four metal chairs. The walls were covered with posters from the Icelandic Tourist Board. Iceland looked nice. Clean with beautiful nature.

Not Mallorca, but still.

The door opened and in walked a gorgeous Icelandic man. Blond just like everyone in the posters. He was tall, stood ramrod straight, and didn’t have an ounce of fat anywhere on him. He was a muscles only kind of guy.

I looked at his muscles, tracing them with my eye down his shoulders to his torso and his thighs, which pressed through his black slacks. I caught myself biting my fingernail and stopped. He smiled at me like he was a kindergarten teacher and it was my first day at school. Eye contact.

I felt something comforting and warm wash over me. Forgotten was the fact that I had been jilted at the altar. Forgotten was the fact that I had been arrested as a terrorist suspect and would probably wind up in Alcatraz or Devil’s Island or wherever Iceland sent its worst criminals.

I was surprised that I could feel such an attraction, considering I had just had my heart broken by the love of my life, but as in all good things that come to us, I didn’t question it.

I put my hand out to shake his, but before he could put his hand in mine he stumbled to the side, presumably pushed by the man behind him. That man took a giant step forward and got in my face like a frothing pit bull.

He was just as tall as the gorgeous Icelandic man but with more muscles. He didn’t exactly slouch, but his posture was more than relaxed, all the while giving off an air of aggression. Pit bull was a good nickname for him. He looked like once he took a bite, he didn’t let go.

“You’re wearing Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt,” I noted. His left eyebrow shot up in surprise. What can I tell you? It was odd clothing for an interrogator. “Your clothes,” I said, tugging at my own blouse to illustrate.

He nodded. “Yeah, I understood what you said. I was just wondering why you said it.” He took a seat across from me and nodded to the blond to sit next to him.

“Oh, you speak English,” I said, relieved.

“I’m English, you see. So I speak English.” He removed a sandwich from his pocket and took a bite. He was clean-shaven, and so was his head. He had striking blue eyes, big, round, and sparkling. He was very—how can I describe him?—manly. He was also rude, eating in front of me,  I had only had a bag of pretzels and three Bloody Marys in the last twenty-four-hours.

My stomach growled in protest. He took another bite of his sandwich.

“You don’t sound English,” I said. “Nothing like Gerard Butler or Sean Connery.”

“That’s because they’re Scottish.”

“You don’t sound like the Queen, either.” He had a thick, guttural accent with a gravelly voice that was hard to understand. He raised his eyebrow again and took another bite of his sandwich.

“My Icelandic colleagues thought I could be of some help because of the whole Anglo thing. I’m just passing through,” he explained.

“I thought I was passing through, too,” I pointed out.

He took another bite of his sandwich. “Chief Inspector Doyle Wellington,” he said by way of introduction. “I’m actually on my way to a holiday.”

The blond Icelander piped in. “Chief Inspector Wellington has terrorism experience.” He smiled at me, and my heart did a little leap. I smiled back.

Wellington cleared his throat.  I blinked and turned my attention back toward him.

“I
don’t
have terrorism experience,” I insisted.

The Chief Inspector stood. “Let her go. She can still make her next flight.”

Mr. Hunky Iceland Man had other ideas. His smile vanished, and he looked noticeably less attractive. “But we’ve only begun the interrogation,” he protested.

“Let her go,” Doyle Wellington repeated with the last bite of sandwich in his mouth. He opened the door and went out without looking back, leaving me with the Icelander, who seemed disappointed by the turn of events. I saw a flash of waterboarding and electric shock in his eyes, and I shivered. He definitely wasn’t as good-looking as I first thought.

***

Wellington was right. I made my flight to Hamburg with minutes to spare. I was starving by the time we landed, but the airport was jam-packed with families anxious to get their vacations started.  I squeezed my way through fifty German dads in shorts in order to get to the express line at McDonald’s, but after an hour waiting for my turn to order a Big Mac and fries, my credit card was declined, and I realized I didn’t have any euros.

I had forty American bucks in my wallet and no time to find a place to change money. They announced the boarding for the last leg of my journey, and I hightailed it to my gate. It was a short hop to Mallorca, but I was wedged between two oversized people in undersized seats and with absolutely no legroom.

I counted down the minutes until we landed, sitting with my knees up around my ears.
It’s not the journey; It’s the destination,
I repeated in my head. I tried to think optimistically. In a matter of minutes, I would be in a beautiful home on a beautiful island, sipping tropical drinks with easy access to a gorgeous beach. What’s a little discomfort—and arrest for suspected terrorism—leading up to paradise?

Paradise with a side of healing. A month of pampering away from everything would be perfect no matter how hungry I was, I reminded myself. My stomach growled. Forty-five minutes until we landed. To pass the time, I thought of Spanish food—paella, tapas, and Spanish rice.

***

After landing, it took another forty-five minutes to deplane as the hordes of tourists pushed in front of me, determined to beat everyone else off the plane. Was I the only Zen tourist in Mallorca? For that matter, was I the only American? And was I the only single person?

I walked through a sea of German families toward the passport checkpoint and stood in a line of one under a big sign marking the place for entry of non-European Union residents. I was congratulating myself on not having to wait in the other mile-long line when the officer studying my passport raised an eyebrow.

“Would you please follow me?” he asked me in a thick Spanish accent.

“Why?” I asked, which I guess was the wrong thing to say, and in a matter of minutes a female customs official was telling me to strip down in a small room. “I’m not a terrorist,” I told her as she felt up my boobs for bombs and contraband.

The police in Iceland must have put some warning on my passport, and now I was being molested by a tiny Spanish woman with a thick mustache. I had been traveling for hours. I was starving and filthy. I was being treated as a criminal for the second time in one day. Suddenly, being jilted by the man of my dreams and being fifty thousand dollars in debt didn’t seem so bad.

“I don’t think you’ll find anything
there
,” I said as she patted down my crotch.

I was told to get dressed, and my luggage was brought in. The two customs officials searched every nook and cranny. I’m the world’s worst packer. I had brought three suitcases and two carry-ons. I had brought clothes for every kind of weather and social event.

“I probably didn’t need sweaters,” I said as they continued to ransack my belongings.

It was hotter than hell in the airport. No air-conditioning. No windows. I was in a small closed room, and I was sweating buckets.
It’s not the journey; it’s the destination
, I reminded myself, and even though I was in Mallorca, the airport was not my destination.

They finished with my belongings, closed up my suitcases, and instructed me to place them on a large cart. I followed them out to the passport checkpoint line, which was now empty except for the three of us. The man stamped my passport and gave me a huge smile.

“¡Bienvenido a Mallorca!” he announced happily.

“Gracias,” I replied in one of the five Spanish words I knew.

I wheeled my luggage out to the main part of the airport. Kiosks and restaurants were closing up for the night. It was almost midnight, and the airport was very quiet. I realized with a good dose of panic that the places to change money were closed, and I had only forty American dollars with me. I also remembered that my credit card had been declined in Germany.

Here’s the thing about traveling: There are travelers who go on cruises or to all-inclusive resorts, who bathe in the lap of luxury while being coddled by attentive staff. Then there are the backpacking adventurer travelers who go bungee jumping in Ecuador and eat fried grasshoppers in Beijing.

Because the only traveling I had ever done was my eighth grade trip to Washington D.C., Disney World in Orlando, and my senior trip to the Bahamas, I wasn’t really any kind of a traveler. But standing there in a mostly-closed airport late at night on an island I had never visited in a country I’d never been to where I didn’t speak the language and without a working credit card and no local currency, I longed for the Carnival Cruise Line. Longed for it like a retired lady in Boca, armed with a fifty-percent-off senior discount.

“Buffets,” I mumbled, standing outside in the taxi line. I was the only one there and with no taxi to be found. “They have midnight buffets on the Carnival Cruise Line,” I said to myself.

A perfect tear rolled down my face. I thought of Bora Bora and the luxury bungalow on the water that Jackson had reserved for our honeymoon.

“If I were on my honeymoon, I would have a man, and he would carry the luggage and worry about the money, and nobody would call me a terrorist and feel up my boobs if I didn’t want them to.”  My voice wobbled into the silence of the taxi area.

Then a miracle happened.

A man in a tiny van drove up and yelled something in Spanish at me through his open windows.

“I don’t speak Spanish!” I yelled back, as if his ability to speak another language made him hard of hearing.