A month had passed and I was still waiting to teeter on that tipping point where I would break over into some sort of recovery. The joke was on me. I’d never be anything near normal again.
I was exhausted. Finally the practical matters were all dealt with. My mother was safely cremated, her uncomplicated and scant affairs in order. I had thought I could go on living. So it was I was trying to live my normal life back in The Springs, back to my call center job, back to my much older boyfriend and his weird family. After weeks of dragging myself back and forth from the mountains to settle things, to talk to the district attorney’s investigators, and sometime in there to Salt Lake to the funeral, I wanted to just stay home for a while.
Except home was a loose construct too. I was moving from one house to another, having just put the last load from the old house into the truck bound for the new house when the police came to tell me that my mother was dead. I really wasn’t home anywhere. I had a place I hadn’t even slept in for a full week at that point.
I had lost an indeterminate amount of weight. Some women will dramatically refuse to eat when upset. I was far beyond upset and anyway it wasn’t a refusal. Most days I was just too tired or too preoccupied to eat. My clothes no longer fit me, but then neither did the city, my house, my job, my friends, my mate. The life I had tailored now hung on me, draped and half off.
Since the tipping point didn’t seem evident, I was now waiting for a breaking point. Trying a bid to act normal, allowed myself to be dragged along to dinner. I sat there sipping Ouzo, wondering what would happen if the basement skylight fell in on us. Nathan sat next to me. Between my intrusive skylight thoughts, I studied him. He too had the same tired posture, sunk into the pillows of the lavish Moroccan dining room. I could tell he was waiting on something to change.
Gwen came and poured tea. Porcelain white and redheaded, she didn’t remotely pass for Moroccan even in her elaborate pajamas and slippers, with exotic makeup, pouring tea into glasses stacked on her ankles and knees. But the whole meal was such an amalgam of Moroccan and Mediterranean that the authenticity of anything was hardly a concern.
Drinking from the goblet of Chimay, Nathan stared passed Gwen’s exotic tea pouring spectacle. The light spilling through the skylight had become a focused shaft highlighting the long golden waves of his hair and beard, his eyes reflecting amber. Everyone talked around us, sensing that we had both checked out of the situation altogether after the salad course and belly dancing. Looking over at me for a long moment, he shook his head and I shrugged. That was the most we had communicated all evening, maybe ever.
I had noticed it first. In his rough cream colored, home spun shirt, hair down, he did, for all of the world look like the traditional anglicized christ we had all grown up staring at. Nathan, like the rest of us was unreligious and unchurched. All of us were raised Christian to some rather informal degree and all of us were either agnostic, secular humanist, or atheist, perhaps some imposs`ible combination of all three. Nathan neither liked undue attention or mainstream christianity. I knew it would irritate him if anyone said it.
And for the moment, he did look very beautiful in his sun soaked contemplations and I just wanted to enjoy that for the time I had it. But it didn’t last long. The tea pouring over and the baklava served, attention turned back to one another.
I was surprised when Nicole blurted out “You look like Jesus Christ!” He withered and I thought that was the end of it, but Nicole cackled a laugh and got everyone else to take up the joke. Maybe I thought one of the guys would start it, but not his own girlfriend. “Hey Jesus!” Jay mocked. “Maybe you could turn this water into wine?” I elbowed my boyfriend for that, the closest I had gotten to him all evening then I moved back into my corner closer to Nathan. His brother, asked if he was going to start a cult in the desert. Jeff warned him not to get crucified. Things were raucous and entirely out of hand.
Nathan held the goblet and looking around the tables in our corner suddenly calm. He looked at everyone but me. He took a swallow of beer and said “You know, you are all terrible people. I see that now.” He was completely sincere.
There was silence. I wondered if the entire group had ever been called out like that for the mean spirited bullshit excused as jokes. For a moment I thought the evening was over, but there was a collective laugh and everyone started talking amongst themselves. I slid over closer to him. He noticed, but didn’t turn his head. People still didn’t know what to say to me. That much I was used to. So I spoke. “I thought you looked beautiful” I said in perfect honesty.
Finally he looked at me. “You’re not one of them. You should just get out.”
“Look at Jesus and Mary Magdalene, over there” Chris joked. Nathan had it, I guess.
Standing, he tossed a few bills down for his share of the elaborate meal and walked out. He glanced back at me for a moment before he left the dining room. Nicole did not follow.
I didn’t get out, but neither did he. Still wearing my ill fitting life, I went on, wondering what the breaking point was, waiting for it. Nothing was like it was before, no matter how much I tried to resume normal life. Ungrounded, I just went through the motions everyday. I never really knew if I ate or slept or accomplished anything.
Jay disappeared one night. I wouldn’t have answered the phone, except it was something to do. His boss asked me if he was okay. I told her as far as I knew, but asked if he wasn’t at work. She told me no. I said I’d tell him to call if he came home. Then Gwen called, I guess thinking I might be more forthcoming to her. But really I had no idea. I called Nathan and Joshua, Jeff, his aunts, anyone I could think of. I drove around town for a while, but no one had seen him and I couldn’t find him. I went home and called the jails and hospitals. I called up to friends in the mountains, but no one had seen him there. So I went to bed. Sometime in the night he returned.
His breathing woke me. Breaths came too rapidly, so rapidly I instinctively took his pulse. It was bounding. Though I wanted an explanation, I knew it wasn’t the time. The sheets were soaked with sweat even though he was chilled and gray. “Open your mouth” I demanded, not knowing why. I saw the blisters. “We should take you to the ER” I said. But he refused. He was a small man, but he could still outmuscle me. And couldn’t drag him to the car.
Angry as I had ever been in my life, seeing clearly through all of the denials and lies, I wanted to walk out. I wanted to pack my clothes and just walk away. But I didn’t. Instead I got up and mixed some salt water and sent him to rinse his mouth. While he was gone, I changed the sweat soaked sheets and pillows. Putting him back in bed, I decided confrontation would kill him. Instead of an IV, I spoon fed him gatorade, soothed and stroked him, hoping he didn’t die.
Finally his heart rate went down. Fitfully, I slept, his wrist held in my hand, waking every so often listening and taking his pulse. By morning, he was sleeping, vitals normal.
“Where was he?” Nathan asked me a few days later. I shrugged and got a pitying look.
I wasn’t in denial any longer at that point, but what could I do? Barely mentally stable at that time, I couldn’t usually decide what to have for breakfast, much less where to go next, how to reinvent myself. Instead I made him saline solutions for the blisters in his mouth and buying special mouth washes, monitoring the healing.
“You’re so good to me” Jay said with tears in his eyes.
I refrained, but only barely, from screaming.
If I was so good, why was he off freebasing coke? Why was my mother dead under strange as hell circumstances? Why was I stuck holding a $10,000 bill from the funeral home, my family not offering to help with so much as a couple hundred dollars?Why was my life just a convoluted mess I saw no way out of? I said nothing and went to take a bath.
Nathan got arrested. The call came early in the morning from the El Paso county jail. I sent Jay down to bail him out. It was a DUI, but he got belligerent and that made the charges worse. I went and picked up his truck from impound, putting the fee on a credit card. I was just about under water at that point, so I decided another few hundred dollars wasn’t really going to matter and I’d help Nathan out.
He came to get the truck from me late in the day. Jay was at work as far as we could tell.
“Why?” I asked as I handed him the keys. “Nicole” he said. I sat down on the porch steps. Nathan collapsed next to me. “You know Jay’s friend Chris?” He asked me even though he knew I did.
“What does he have to do with anything that has happened?”
“Nicole was sleeping with him.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.” I meant it.
“It had been going on for a while. Jay knew.”
I groaned at this and put my face into my hands.
“Why are you still here?” He almost demanded.
“Broke, inertia, confusion, depression. Take your pick, any of the four, or all of the above.”
“We have to get away from these people” he said quietly.
Next, Joshua went to jail. Jay and I drove to Woodland Park to see Olivia and the baby. Sitting in the cheap one bedroom house, I surveyed the scene. Dishes stacked in the sink, laundry on the couch and in the bedroom there was clearly a struggle, though most of it came when they arrested a nearly naked Joshua. Olivia said little, pacing while an unaffected Sage played with plastic horses in the front of the TV. “What happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. I woke up and asked what he was doing when I felt wet and then he tried to choke me.”
“Did he say anything?” I asked.
“Not a thing.”
“Did you have a fight before you went to bed, anything?” Not that it would have excused him, but at least there might have been some motivation.
“No, everything was fine.”
By the state of things, I doubted that everything was fine. Jay had been restlessly fussing about the house, doing dishes and throwing away trash, clearly distressed by the smell of urine curing in the bedroom. I wondered if I should offer to strip the bed since I knew Jay was far too squeamish to do it. But Nathan walked in dropped heavily on the couch next to me. Joshua followed him in and sat in an old wingback chair. Everyone except Nathan turned their eyes on him.
“Daddy!” Sage said and climbed up in his lap. Near catatonic, he held her without looking at her. Nathan looked at me, his big amber eyes pleading for something, but I couldn’t figure out what. Answers? Sympathy? Understanding? So I said “Are you okay?”
Wearily he nodded and looked around the room. Getting up I walked around the back of the couch, glaring at Joshua the whole time. I went to the bedroom and stripped the bed. I found some lysol and towels and sprayed down the damp spot on the mattress and blotted it before putting the sheets in the washing machine. When I returned to the couch, I glared at him a little longer then sat down next to Nathan.
Nathan said he would stay few days to make sure Joshua did nothing else to Olivia or possibly Sage. I suggested hospitalizing him, but Nathan said he had a court ordered appointment with a psychologist in a few days. “Has he ever been like this before I asked?”
“No, he’s always been moody, but never violent.”
I said goodbye and we drove home.
The charges were dropped. Joshua snapped out of whatever state he had been in and we thought maybe he was okay, but I never trusted the idea.
Olivia must not have trusted the idea either and left. Joshua and Nathan moved into the house across the alley from us. I was sitting on the back porch steps, French braiding Nathan’s hair. We’d probably crossed a line with him sitting all but in my lap and me playing with his luxurious hair. But the lines for everyone else were blurry at best. I took too long just running it through my fingers and he didn’t mind or stop me. I sprayed a hank of thick strawberry blond hair with water before dividing it to braid. We hadn’t talked at all after he asked me. He asked if I could French braid, and I could and I agreed to.I sat in silence plaiting his hair elaborately as the fall evening chilled.
“It should have been you” he said out of nowhere.
“What should have been me?”
“The one who left. Olivia didn’t deserve what Joshua did, but she’s not smart or even sane. And yet here you sit.”
“Have you ever cut your hair?” I asked since I had no explanation and probably no excuse.
“Not since I was a kid.”
“Sampson” I said.
“What?”
“Remember when everyone was making fun of you for looking like Jesus?”
“Yeah” he said. “I’m still mad, especially with how everyone has been since. Calling you Mary Magdalene was pretty rich, since we all know who the whore in the room was now.”
“Maybe you’re Sampson.”
Nathan tipped his head back and looked up at me. “I like that better” he said.
“They both came to tragic ends though.”
“Don’t we all?”
“I braided it pretty tight. It should stay in well for a few days, maybe a week with your hair texture.” I changed the subject again, but he didn’t call me on my evasions.
He laid his head against my thigh and we sat quietly until it was too cold to be outside anymore.
Walking across the alley, he went home and I took my combs and spray bottles inside.
Christmas came. Everyone was unsure how I would react, it was that first Christmas after a death that everyone feared. Mostly I was numb and ambivalent to all of it. It wasn’t that I ignored it, I just wasn’t part of it. And that was fine with everyone a long as I wasn’t disruptive or demanding. Jay and I had been together for years by then, but Christmas had never been particularly good or important. My mom and brother joined us for her last Christmas. She was happy with how it all turned out and laughed that we somehow had all gotten lamps for one another. Maybe it wasn’t funny. Maybe we all should have seen the light, had she, she would have still been alive and had I, I’d be anywhere else.
Christmas Eve it was me and Jay with Gwen, Nathan and Joshua. Nicole was banished, Chris didn’t want to confront Nathan, even if he had been invited. Jeff just railed against the consumerism and commercialism of the holiday when asked. Gwen left and Joshua was flipping through dusty vinyl in the hall closet with Jay.
I sat alone in the kitchen eating herring with onions and apples and rye bread, thinking about the year prior.
Nathan also chafed at the christian holiday hijacked to sell gifts. He’d never bought anyone a gift as an adult to date, not even Nicole while things seemed good. But now he set a wrapped box I beside my plate and sat down. The paper was blue with silvery snow flakes.
I looked up from the napkin I had folded and refolded into about 50 random origami sculptures.
“You like birds, right?”
I nodded.
“I don’t really know you all that well” he admitted. “Which sucks, but I always remembered you like birds. I know that much.”
I had never told him that, specifically. That detail had only been gleaned by observation, an observation which everyone else except my mother missed. “Don’t argue with her about birds or flowers, she knows them better than anyone” she’d warn people.
I wondered how many times he saw me watching birds, what he saw in that. It was eerily perceptive.
“Open it” he said, a soft smile betraying his cautious solemnity.
The box was heavy for its size. I undid layers of bubble wrap and found a glass bird. It had a deep purple eyes and beak, the glass was marbled yellow and white, giving a convincing impression of feathers. Face pointing heavenward, it looked as if wings would suddenly emerge from the sleek body. Any second, that bird was going to take flight off of the heavy bubble glass egg it was perched upon.
“I saw it and I though of you. I had to buy it.”
Stroking the delicate head of the bird, I didn’t know what to say.
“I wish we could fly away. You know?” He said.
“Why don’t we?” I asked suddenly.
Looking at my little sunlight colored bird getting ready to fly, it all came down on me at once. My mother was dead, my brother all but disowned me since. I got left holding all of the bills from her death. Jay was a wanton drug addict who barely hid it any longer. I realized he didn’t attend the funeral with me. And when I caught the train to Utah it was Nathan who had put me on the train and picked me up. Jay didn’t love me, but he was content with the way things were somehow.
And poor betrayed Nathan. Joshua was a monster that Nathan was now charged with keeping tame. Nicole had also broken him somehow. He’d never been the same since he caught her and got arrested for the DUI.
I wasn’t one of them. I wouldn’t have said I was better necessarily, but it took a lot of self compromise to stay in that situation. And for what? Nathan, though he was literally blood kin to all of it, wasn’t one of them either. Suddenly I couldn’t understand what either of us was doing. As much as either of us were ignored and passively excluded, it would have been so easy to just walk out the door and drive off. Maybe days would pass before anyone realized either of us was gone, more days before they realized it was a coordinated escape.
“Nathan?”
“What?”
“We should just…” but I trailed off.
“Isane, just what?” He asked.
Drive away now, and just figure it all out as we go, was what I wanted to say.
But I was two glasses of wine deep and I was a cheap, cheap drunk. Nathan was probably no less drunk.
“It’s nothing.”
He got up and kissed me on top of the head. “Tell Joshua I went home.” Pausing at the back door he said. “It isn’t nothing. You aren’t nothing.”
Just after the New Year, I got fired from my job. This I met with relief. I had hated that job. They were surprised when they told me.
“Thanks. That’s just one less decision I have to make” I said. No one knew what to make of it. I cleaned out my desk, surprised by the upset of my co-workers.
“They should have been more understanding, it hasn’t been six months” one coworker wailed as I handed out my supplies and various mementos and nicknacks to the people I thought would like or need them. My file box packed with personal belongings, the hugging became disruptive to call flow and supervisors chased everyone back to work. I walked out, happier than I had been in weeks.
Jay was staring at me when I woke up the next morning, but I said nothing. With all of his drug use and dealing, his erratic work attendance, his near total absence from our relationship, I felt no need to explain, much less apologize. Getting up I started to get dressed, ready to start on something, anything else. I was a credential to Jay. I barely drank, I didn’t smoke. I kept the yard and house pretty. My friends were all similarly benign. We all had regular jobs with corporations, forty hours a week of business casual. I seemed like a good girl, mostly, so no one really believed any drug activity ran through our lives. Just the same, our phones were bugged, but I ignored my suspicions for a long time. Old wiring in old houses caused interference. At least that was what I told myself.
But I had cracked the facade by getting fired. Things had intensified in ways I didn’t know and my sudden loss of my job was going to raise new suspicions. The human shield was flawed.
“I have been nothing but angry with you since the day we met” he said out of nowhere as I pulled on my jeans.
“Excuse me?” I said in disbelief. “You are angry? At me?”
“You have been the biggest pain in the ass and I have nothing but resent for you.”
That I didn’t defend myself was surprising. In fact, I felt very little. At some point it’s over. For me it had been over for a long time, I just hadn’t acted on it. Now he had acted on it. And I was done. But I came around the foot of the bed and backed him into the corner, though I didn’t raise my voice.
“You’re angry at the person who kept you out of jail, kept you alive when you overdosed and wouldn’t go to the hospital. You’re angry because unknown to me I was used to mule your drugs around the state, possibly the entire west. You didn’t disclose how deep into this I was and I didn’t know until very recently. You’re angry because you turned me into a prop for how many years? And now I am no good for that. You’re angry? Well, don’t worry, you don’t have to be angry any more.”
With that I started packing.
My last atttenpt was five interwoven braids and Nathan looked like a viking as he moved toward the open door.
“You really want to fly away?” I asked when he came to the door. Jeff stood up mouth agape, half strung guitar dangling. Joshua paused in lighting his bong. Leaving the door wide open in the January cold, he turned and walked away. Unsure if it was a rejection, shock, disbelief or something else entirely, I stood on the threshold in my parka and Uggs, his housemates staring at me, realizing what was happening. The basic white bitch they comfortably loathed was no longer basic. The breaking point had arrived. I heard the furnace click on and felt the warm air rush past me out the door, dank and skunky. Coming back in his coat, backpack slung over his shoulder, he handed Joshua a check for the following month’s rent. Saying nothing else, he walked past me in the snow, cramming his bag into the Samurai. I slammed the door and turned to follow him.
We were broke. But there was never going to be a time where the factors lined up to make leaving easy for either of us. With out a plan or much conversation, we took turns driving to the Oregon border and over the Blue Mountains. We drove right to the end of the continent. The Pacific greeted us, gray and brooding. Sitting on the beach we watched the cold water rage, sand pelting us.
“Now what?” I asked.
“I guess anything we want. What do we have to lose?”
“I think we already lost it.”
“I guess that’s liberation” he sighed heavily.
Nathan found a job on a fishing boat. I dropped him off at Brookings Harbor. Then I drove back north. I took a job with a hospice organization in Astoria, an entire state away from where I left Nathan.
My apartment overlooked an industrial area, but I could see the mouth of the Columbia. No one from Colorado spoke to me again after we took flight, so I never bothered to change my cell phone number. For a year, I lived in peace, making the dying comfortable in their homes. For me it was a sort of closure. My mom died suddenly and I never got the time to say goodbye. Walking softly through quiet houses, speaking in hushed tones while I eased the agony and indignity of certain death was comforting.
One morning the phone rang in the predawn hours, I answered it without looking, thinking I was being summoned to someone’s bedside. But I was not.
“Where is he?” A voice demanded.
“Where is who?” I asked sleepily. I glanced at the phone and realized it was a 719 area code calling. Jeanie, Jay’s aunt, I realized. I doubted it was Nathan they were looking for.
“Jay. We can’t find him. He abandoned the house the neighbors called about squatters.”
“He’s not with me. I’m not even in the state.”
She pressed the issue, butI restated that I had no idea. I left him standing in the house he had since abandoned and hadn’t seen or heard from him since.
She calmed down and asked after Nathan. I told her I put him on a crab boat and that was the last I knew. She didn’t much care what my fate was.
I said I wished I could help, but I had long ago relieved myself of the problem that was Jay and she hung up.
A week later she called me back. “We found him. But it’s not good news. He was in crack house. Jay’s in the hospital and he’ll eventually be okay. Once he’s well, he’s off to rehab. He went too far this time.” I thanked her for telling me, not leaving me to wonder. “It’s only fair. I suppose you suffered plenty with all of it. I understand why you left now.” That little acknowledgment was powerful.
The yellow bird sat sparkling in the window, purple beak pointing over the Columbia and toward the sea. A sunbeam broke the fog and passed through it, sending rainbows across the floor. Pulling on my coat, I went to walk the docks.
Seeing a boat docking, I stopped to watch it. It was a trawler, sitting low in the water, overburdened with it’s catch. The bar pilot was chugging away after another boat to help across the confluence.
“Hey lady? You want some dungies?” Someone called up from the boat as they picked through a plastic basket on the deck. “Sure” I called back, not one to ever turn down a free crab dinner, especially if the water was cold and the shells full.
“Hang on, I’ll send some one up with a couple.”
Even unbraided and windblown, I knew that hair, waist long and barely tamed into a ponytail. When he got up onto the dock he started to hand over the crabs and froze. “Your hair is a mess” I said and he laughed hugging me. “Isane! What are the odds?” He asked.
“It’s only a few hundred miles of coast. Pretty good odds actually.”
“Of all the ports in all of Oregon, I had to sail into yours!” He joked and handed me the bag of scrabbling crabs.
“You like fishing?” I asked.
“Yeah, I love the sea.”
“I bet you wish you’d set sail a long time ago?”
“I don’t think so” he said quietly. “We’re in port a few days. Could you fix this tangled mess for me, for old times sake?”
It was the one bright spot in those rough months, probably the only thing I would say I enjoyed and would revisit. It was a tangible connection in a disconnected time.
He walked around the apartment, admiring the view, even of the industrial section, then he saw the yellow bird. “You kept it. All this time you kept it” he whispered stroking its delicate head.
“Of course. It’s the most thoughtful gift I have ever gotten.”
“You’d like the birds” he said. “They follow the boats, they’ll take chum right out of your hand. The cormorants are my favorite. Probably the friendliest.”
The weather changed and winds lashed the port town. Rain beat the windows and waves rushed up the river. Nathan sat on the floor, his hair damp from the shower. I divided it into sections as I detangled it. We usually hadn’t talked while I braided and that continued to the present. I worked out my approach silently, it came back easily, seeming as if his hair remembered too. Twelve braids woven from his scalp came together at the base of his neck and made one long, thick cable down his back. I broke the silence. “I bet that will last you a couple of weeks. I’m surprised it wasn’t all dreaded up.”
“I brush it, but that only does so much. Which is how you wound up doing my hair back then.”
Then he laughed. “We could make room for you. You could keep all of the long hairs civilized. There are a surprising number of us viking wannabes.”
Now I laughed. “I get sea sick, but what a job! Sea going hair braider.”
“How is Joshua?” I asked.
“Prison” he said.
At first I thought he was joking, but I looked at his face. “Olivia did come back.This time he hurt her bad. She lived. He got 15 years, he’ll be out in 5 they told me. Excuse me for not celebrating. That was something to come back to. I threw my cell phone in the ocean and never got another one. You would think growing up with someone, you’d know them. But I didn’t. You ever hear anything form Colorado?”
“Jay is in the hospital. Jeanie called to ask if I knew where he was, but of course I had no idea. Anyway she called me today and let me know they found him in a crack house, he was in bad shape. Overdose? She didn’t say. But he’ll live and they’re forcing him into rehab.”
“I didn’t even know Colorado Springs had such things, even with everything we got dragged into, Leave it to Jay to find one.”
“I changed my number. I need to be reachable for work, but throwing the phone into the ocean is the best idea I have heard in a long time.”
He nodded and poured another glass of wine.
“Do you ever regret leaving like you did?” I asked.
“No. I wish I would have done it sooner, but…” he paused.
“But what?” I asked.
“I couldn’t leave you.”
“Why not? I was just your cousin’s girlfriend, we didn’t even talk for most of the time we knew each other.”
“Yes, but I had my reasons for that.”
“Really?”
“I never figured you’d stay. And when you stayed for years, I couldn’t.”
“Couldn’t what?”
“Be anywhere near you.”
“Why not?”
“I just liked you way too much” he confessed.
At first I was surprised. I figured I was way too uptight, structured and conventional for him. I liked Nathan, but I had figured for a long time he disliked me. But knowing the opposite was true, almost from the outset things started to make sense, details I had missed stood out.
But I snorted. “I’m surprised we’re even friends, that we got to this place. I am the antithesis of you in every way.”
“And that was the attraction. Those free spirit hippie girls like Nicole are so maddening. No accountability at all. They just smoke and snort the money. They don’t pay the bills if you give them the money. For all of the acceptance and non-judgment they espouse, they aren’t even nice. They might love you, but they love everyone else too. I mean, she couldn’t commit to a hair color, what made me think she could commit to me? You know?”
“She was pretty exotic.”
“Not really, not when you have known and dated dozen who are just like her or worse. You were the exotic one, and underrated at that. Do you have any idea how foreign and attractive a woman who has some integrity, reliability, and loyalty is? And the other thing was, you weren’t trying at being attractive, you just were. It wasn’t some performance, being beautiful. And yeah, okay, so you weren’t the life of the party, but there was something to be said for that too. I mean, you think. You were the only person that saw how they all were. I saw you the first time sitting by yourself and you were just watching and judging. So I sat down and followed your eyes and I saw it finally. It was all just stupid. We were all so fake, but we thought we were so cool and counter culture. But we only did it to be contrary you know? It was no rebellion, just inciting. But at the time, that wasn’t what I wanted to learn. Especially not from you.”
“What changed?”
“I couldn’t stop thinking about how empty it was. Just smoking weed and working shit jobs because they didn’t drug test, being with girls like Nicole, because they had low standards, but then they acted accordingly. You were reading a book one day. It was about snakes. I looked at the back. It was just straight reality when I read the back. You were the only one thinking. And you were the only one being real at all.”
“I never knew any of this.”
“It’s probably too late, telling you now.”
“Is it?”
“I think so” he sighed. “God, you have to be brave enough to just speak the truth when it strikes you or pay the price.”
Something changed in his mood. Instead of looking at his watch and the door, as if he was waiting for me to throw him out, he relaxed. I had to work the next several days, but I told him to just stay until he had to go back to sea. The storms continued and the sailing was delayed. I came home after a long night keeping vigil on a dying patient. In the early hours I went through the routine of washing and covering the body, letting the family say final goodbyes before calling the funeral home. Then I went home. Nathan woke up and blinked at me from the couch. On seeing my face he got up and put his arms around me. “I don’t know how you do half the things you do, but that job…”
“Some one has to do it and I’d want someone to do it for me.”
We slept sitting, heads resting against one another for a long time.
The storm blew out and the boats could sail again. But Nathan was still there when I came home. “You missed your boat” I said.
“Crab is over, they were just going home anyway.”
“What about you?”
“I’m trying to decide if I was too late” he confessed.
“For the boat, yes. But otherwise I think you showed up on time.”
“Then I’m home for now” he said kissing me.
Nathan spent the spring and summer in Astoria. When I wasn’t working we clammed and kayaked. Some days we sat in the shadow of hull of the Perter Iredale wreck until the tide forced us back to the dunes. He looked at the rusting iron, the monument to the occupational hazards of being asea. “It’ll get me” he said, picking at the flaking shipwreck.
“What will?” I asked.
“The sea. Cocaine got Jay. Violence got Joshua. Depression got Jeff. Lust got Nicole and Chris. The ocean is my vice and it will get me. Only there is no rehab or repentance from the sea.”
“Don’t say that Nathan” I begged.
“The odds aren’t even in my favor.”
I closed my eyes so I wouldn’t cry.
Nathan roamed up and down the west coast from Mexico to Alaska fishing. I stayed in Astoria, quitting hospice. I worked for a boat yard, just bringing order to all the chaos of supplies and paperwork, sometimes scraping hulls or holding things for mechanics. I had helped enough goodbyes, I felt some closure and peace about my mom. I got a letter, however it found it’s way to me that the cause of death was a gunshot wound, but the manner was undetermined and no further investigative action would take place. I tore the letter up and let it fall Ito the river.
Nathan came and went. He’d stay for weeks or months, most recently he stayed for almost a year. It wasn’t that he was unaccountable, he just wanted to be at sea and I could respect that. I would get the salt out of his hair and braid it when he came back, as content with him there as I was with him gone. None of my friends could understand how he could just come and go and I was okay with it, but I didn’t feel the need to explain.
If he went out to sea it was rare I heard from him, but calls occasionally came when they went ashore. “I should be home in a few weeks. The catch is dwindling and we chased the big schools as far north as we can. I love you.”
The sea didn’t get him, a mountain did. To me, after what we went through in Colorado, it was a cruel twist of fate. A few days after that call, he decided he was done for the season and he was going to head home. I never expected to be informed of his travel plans. Usually he just caught rides on boats until he got to Astoria or close, calling me to come fetch him in Tillamook or Westport if that was all the closer he got. But this time some sense of urgency took over and he caught a little plane bound for Astoria from Seattle.
Sitting in the kitchen, I watched the yellow bird casting it’s rainbows around the room during a break in the clouds. The knock at the door was unfamiliar and harsh. Still in my Carhartts and Xtra-Tuffs from the boat yard, I answered the door.
“Isane? Isane Karsten? The officer asked me.
“Yes” I answered.
“Do you know a Nathaniel Moore?”He asked.
When I said I did, he asked if they could come in. I let them.
“What is your relationship to him?”
Yes, what was it? I had to put that we loved each other enough to live our own lives into some succinct explanation, but I realized that our relationship could only make sense to us.
“I’m his girlfriend” I explained simply.
Good enough for the police especially since I knew why they were there. That was the code word they were looking for.
“Mr. Moore was on a charter plane out of Seattle two days ago. The plane lost contact somewhere around Mt. Rainier. They found it crashed this morning. I’m sorry to inform you that there were no survivors. Your address was in his wallet, the only contact we could find. Is there any other next of kin?”
I gave them his mother’s name and I knew she lived in Rifle Colorado, but that was all. I told them about Joshua most likely being in prison. Making some notes, they once again said they were sorry. Out of custom they asked me if I was okay, but I was sure they had made these calls enough to know I really wasn’t. But they couldn’t help me anyway, so I said I was and they left.
I went back to work the next morning and said nothing, but it made the news. And people knew enough, figuring it out. So I left work, and took my kayak out on the river. Far from the ocean, a seal bobbed in front of me curiously. Sometimes they swam all of the way to Portland. I paddled after him until near dark, then drifted dangerously back to the put in as the night closed in over me.
After that, no one said another word. It was easy in a way. I just convinced myself he was on a prolonged fishing trip. And perhaps he was. We never agreed on what the afterlife consisted of. Maybe his eternal reward was to be at sea forever. And that illusion worked for many weeks. It persisted until I came home to my landlord handing me an envelope from a funeral home in Colorado.
I opened it, wondering what it was. Anything material he owned besides his clothes resided with me, and it wasn’t much. A few books, some pictures of us, his kayak. That was all. I was surprised there was anything left to send. When I never saw the officers again, no coroner called me, I figured they found someone to take care of his remains and I was content to live with my own illusion.
Opening the envelope I found a small box and an letter.
“Dear Ms. Isane Karsten” it started.
“When going through Mr. Nathaniel Moore’s personal effects from the plane, his family found the ring and letter. They have decided that you should have them as I they were clearly meant for you. Also his brother had asked me to send you one of his his braids as he said that you braided his hair and it was your work. He said Mr. Moore cherished your braiding work and thought it would be a fitting memento. Unfortunately, given the nature of his death, it was in pretty rough shape. I have done my best to prepare and preserve it as an appropriate memento for you. I hope it brings you some comfort. I am very sorry for your loss. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to call.
Sincerely,
Eric Nelson, Funeral Director.
I opened the small box. The braid was there, a couple of feet long. During the summer I had worked to make braids that would stay and not come out for weeks. My last attempt at it apparently worked well staying in for months. I recognized my own work and it had held up very well considering. The ring was a simple band, but it was engraved with fish, chinook salmon to be exact.
“Dearest Isane,
I don’t know why I am writing this as I will see you in a few days time and I can tell you myself.
But I can’t sleep and I thought I should make it a matter of record.
I’m done fishing. More and more I miss you when I leave port and the aching never stopes until I’m back with you. I’m coming home for good and we’ll see what sort of life we can have together. All of these years I took to the ocean, looking for something, but it was always you I was looking for. I want to marry you Isane, I want to be yours. For as long as you will have me, wherever you are my home port.
Love Forever,
Nathan”
The illusion that kept me going was shattered. Not only was he never coming back, I was robbed a second time when I learned why he had chosen to fly back. I wished I had been overlooked in the funeral arrangements. But I had worked in death long enough to know that nothing is ever overlooked.
They knew me well enough to not invite me to the funeral, had they not known what this would do to me?
In the morning, the blow hadn’t softened, but it had diffused a little. I stared at the silver ring, every single salmon was a little different than the next, hand engraved and very well done. Idly I picked up the box from the funeral home and something rattled. I looked I the bottom and there was another band that had caught on the flap of the box. The funeral director missed an “s” on the word ring. I took it out. It was the mate of the salmon band, though sized for a man, sea birds, cormorants flying, like the salmon, each one was different fro the others. Each of us could carry part of the other. I was birds, he was fish. It made perfect sense. I set them on the sill next to the yellow bird.
The seal was was still in the river. I was sure it was the same seal as he seemed to recognize me and immediately swam over to me then started leading the way up the channel. He wanted a raced and I paddled up the river after him as fast as I could against the relentless current. Finally he decided enough was enough, that I was too worthy an opponent, so he displayed his acrobatic skill for a while, me just paddling enough to keep from floating down stream. Again, too close to dark, I said good bye to the seal and paddled back to the put in.
All of the grieving world covets a cardinal sighting. The red birds are messengers from heaven, a sign your loved one is okay. Oregon is not cardinal country. None of it. Nathan was not coming to me as a gaudy red bird even if cardinals were a possibility. I found the gravel bar and beached, stiffly uncoiling from my boat. Picking up my paddle, I looked up. In the dim light I saw it. Sitting on the hood of the dull oxidized teal Samurai was little yellow bird. When he saw me he cocked his little head each direction. Little birds were hard to watch, jumpy and flighty in their actions. But this one just looked at me in the dusk. “Nathan?” I whispered. The bird trilled at this. “It is you” I said softly.
The bird continued to look at me, asking, waiting. For a moment longer I looked at him. The seal barked from the river. “That’s your friend isn’t it? You sent him?” I asked and he fluffed his feathers. Suddenly he flew and l almost panicked, not wanting the interaction to end, but he landed on my shoulder, feathered head touching my cheek. “Do you ever just want to fly away?” I asked softly.
“I guess you have that option now.”
Still he sat, I could feel his eyelid blinking agains my skin.
“Nathan, you can go. You can fly wherever you want, I’ll be okay.”
At first he hesitated, then flew off in the last of the light.
The birds came with the fishermen from all over the world. That February I walked down to the docks. Astoria is more of a crossing than a fishing port, but occasionally fishing boats land and off load fish to a small processor. Some of the fisherman knew me, or knew of me. We’d go get a drink and they’ll tell me stories about him I never knew.
Or sometimes their boats came to the yard for repairs and they’d linger at the office.
Every meeting came with a yellow bird. Glass, ceramic, shell, plastic, felt, rubber, wood, even ivory. At first it was only fisherman who knew Nathan, but soon it was strangers too.
I finally asked one boat owner, the first to bring me a bird, how that ever got started. “Word gets around. Nate said something about how he should find you a yellow bird at every harbor. I guess he decided that wasn’t good enough, he quit to go home to you. But I saw that little wooden bird on top of a computer in the harbor office the day I found out he died. I explained and asked if I could buy it. But they just gave it to me. Then it kind of took off from there. It was all we could do for him or you. We just find him everywhere and bring him home to you in the last possible way.”
I went out to the clam beds that night going the long way in the dusk, through dunes. After I got the news he died, I never went out there. The ongoing joke was that most women got restaurants and roses, I got razor clams. His retort was that razor clams were more rare and expensive than any rose. But the truth was, I was, I would have rather gone clamming. Every couple has their thing and chasing clams was ours.
The weather was unusually calm as I made my way out to the mud flats.
Sometimes storms would force flocks of birds to take shelter on the dunes. Mass migrations of birds to land was a sure sign of foul weather. I dropped between the last two large dunes before the clam beds, and saw them. A thousand little birds hopping about in the dune grass with no storms predicted. Taking one more step made them all take flight. In the last rays of the sunset, they turned and every one of them, out of the dune shadows, was yellow. The boat captain said they saw him everywhere as a yellow bird and now he was here too.
As in life, he came and went. Some years so many yellow birds would fly in for the spring and summer, it became an attraction for ornithologists and tourists alike. Other years you only saw them sporadically. It was local lore. The fisherman had died in a plane crash coming home to propose, and then the birds showed up to console her. More widely it was blamed on climate change and weather patterns. Most Astorians preferred their version of things, knowing the timeline and not believing much in the unromantic inconclusiveness of scientific speculation.
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