Key Largo is the setting of Michael Noonan’s six-week retreat after Jo’s death, a trip that turns from a vacation into a reckoning with grief and the fear of returning to work. Away from Derry, he revisits memories of Jo and the persistent dreams of Sara Laughs, eventually understanding that the block is not the only thing he fears: breaking through it would mean beginning to move forward without her. He leaves Key Largo resolved to return to Sara Laughs, hoping the place can offer shelter and perhaps open a way back to writing.

Choosing the Retreat

After seeing a Humphrey Bogart film poster at The Shade, a revival movie house in Derry, Michael chose Key Largo for the association with the film starring Bogie and Bacall. He initially arranged a three-week stay, then reconsidered: wealthy, on his own, and retired, he saw no reason to limit the trip and extended it to six weeks, asking a travel agent to find him a cottage. The choice was both practical escape and an act of remembrance, since April’s Bogart program honored Jo’s favorite actor.

Michael arrived with furniture to unwrap and the expectation that he would be away from the years he might have to spend in a No Writing Zone. The contrast between that imposed possibility and the open-ended trip gave the retreat its initial shape: he had time, money, and distance, but no clear plan for what would follow.

The Work of Passing Time

Key Largo enchanted Michael for the first month; for the final two weeks, he was bored. He stayed in place because he believed boredom could be useful: someone able to tolerate it could do a great deal of thinking. He ate shrimp, drank margaritas, read twenty-three John D. MacDonald novels by his own count, and walked the same stretch of beach until he knew everyone there by first name. He also continued unpacking furniture, much of which he did not like, although all of it fit the house.

The ordinary routines did not erase Jo. Instead, they left room for memories of their shared life to recur: her pride in cooking for the Noonans, her reactions to his jokes and haircuts, her attempt to learn a banjo breakdown, and her anger at what she called his frustrated-artist complaints. Michael’s recollection of these different moods keeps grief from settling into a single, simplified image of her. The vacation’s stillness gives the memories duration rather than resolution.

Dreams and the Fear of Writing

Michael’s thoughts repeatedly return to his dreams of Sara Laughs, especially the final dream, which remains clearer than his other dreams over the years. He distinguishes its remembered details from what he takes to be mere scene-setting and considers the dream’s larger elements as a pattern. That attention to recurring images makes the dream something he can examine, but not something he can fully explain.

On the night before flying back to Maine, Michael says aloud that he is afraid of writing and afraid even to try. By the end of the vacation he has been drinking on many evenings, and he recognizes that the problem is not simply the existence of writer’s block but the prospect of undoing it. He suspects that moving past the block would also require picking up the strands of his life and going on without Jo. The distinction changes the meaning of his stalled work: the block is bound up with bereavement, and its removal feels like a further separation.

The Decision to Return

Michael comes to understand Sara Laughs as both a place of shelter and a place associated with the beginning of his writing ritual. He connects it to Jo’s attachment to the property and to the ritual’s champagne, final line, and benediction. The return he imagines is therefore not a simple search for inspiration. It means going back to a place deeply connected to Jo while accepting that he must also let go and attempt to rebuild his life.

By the time he packs his vacation gear and flies back to Maine, Michael has decided to spend the months before Harold Oblowski and Debra Weinstock begin pressing him for another novel at Sara Laughs. He expects to reach the lake by the Fourth of July, after tying up matters in Derry and having Bill Dean prepare the house for year-round residence. He does not expect the place to cure him; instead, he allows himself to hope that returning may help, and that he may once again wish on the evening star over the lake.

The decision is not entirely reassuring. Michael recalls that the cut on the back of his hand had appeared in the dreams before it appeared in waking life, a detail he cannot fit into his attempt to interpret them. Key Largo thus ends not with certainty but with a chosen direction: Michael will return to the place he has come to regard as shelter, while acknowledging that the dreams have attached risk to that return.