by J T Kalnay
Joe did not bargain for this. He did not agree to watch another loved one waste away and die. I know he did not agree to that and I will not renegotiate now. I will not renegotiate even though I know he would honor this new deal. He would come here to be with me. Would leave his home, would leave the island, or would stay with me if I choose to spend my last days here with him. I know that he would honor a deal he had not made.
Because I know he loves me. Loves me in a way that only we understand, and maybe not even us. He loves me in the way that only a man who is willing to let you be truly alone can love you. Loves me on my terms, on the days I choose to visit, on the trips I choose to take, on the Atlantic sunrises and Lake Erie sunsets that I choose to share.
I know he loves me like maybe no man has ever loved another woman. So completely and yet so completely without ties, without bounds, without any claims. He has never asked for more than I was willing to give and he seems to know where that boundary is without me ever having to say.
It has been an unfair bargain for him. I was cruel to let him accept it all those years ago. I have been unkind as only a woman who knows she is so loved can be. I did not wield the love like a weapon, I did not brandish it like a sword. But I did use its power. A power I know I can use this one last time if I want to. A power that would crush him. But even my cruelty has a limit. I will not do this to him.
I watch the leading edge of the storm as it finally crosses the sound and touches the island. I feel the power of the wind as it buffets up against my cottage. I know the beach house will be trembling as its top floors catch the full fury of the wind. I imagine the gun metal gray of the ocean overlaid with the foam of the breaking white caps. I think how I want my ashes to be cast into those waves, to be carried by wind and waves and tide back and forth to wash over all the island and travel to everywhere the Atlantic goes but to be just off the shore where I can see the beach and the ocean and the pier and my homes. Cara was right, eventually the answer just came to me. I want to be here forever. Near this beach, near Joe, near us and what we have had here.
I have been specific in my will. Specific about the date I want my ashes spread, and the exact GPS locations out on the ocean. I have researched the tides and currents and forecasts and am leaving nothing to chance. I do not want to be buried alongside my father in our private Ohio cemetery. I do not want to be buried at all.
I want to run on the beach and swim in the waves and glide along above the rolling breakers with the processions of pelicans. I want to be free, and to be near Joe. Forever. I want to watch over him as he jogs the beach five times a week with a stride that gets slower and slower and becomes more of a shuffle every year, even with the new knees and new hips. I want to be there in the waves when he paddles out to surf on the best of the low tides, when the waves will break from the south to the north and he can ride and ride in the warm Topsail waters.
I want all of this, for myself, and for Joe. I know, as he does not, how my passing may be the end of feeling for him. How over ten years for two months and two trips a year he was alive and in love and someone that he wasn’t during all those other hours and weeks we spent apart. And I know that he will never seek to replace me. That those two months and two trips per year will simply end. I know that his rituals will continue unabated, will become ever more obsessive and ever more compulsive but will not have our days and months together to balance him. I can see this as if it has already happened. His jogging days, his trash days, his surfing days. He will go on, and the island will go on, and I desperately want to be a part of both.
In my last will and testament I have also made one final request. A request for Joe. I have asked him to do the same. To have his ashes spread in the same spot after he passes away. So that we can both be a part of the island forever. So that they we can be together forever, in all the ways that we loved the most, in the ocean, on the beach, and on the sunrises that are our perfection.
Lightning splits the sky and thunder rocks my cottage. The storm is directly overhead.
I send an email to my sister, asking her to come and get me. I am too weak to drive home alone. I give her the address. It is the first time she will have been in my house. I ask her not to mention it to Joe.
Joe
I re-read the letter again, for perhaps the tenth or twentieth time. She is not coming to the lighthouse. She says that she will make up for it by staying for all of January and for two weeks in February. She says that she will stay for three weeks in Costa Rica.
I have no choice.
I accept the unilaterally renegotiated terms.
Even though I suspect they are not worth the paper on which they are written. She is done with me. For some reason she is done with me. Probably because I questioned her about the ‘fever’. Maybe because she is sick with her mysterious fever and does not want me to know.
No. I will not do this. I will not wonder why she is done with me. I will simply accept it as the inevitable conclusion of our contract. The terms were always clear. Either of us could end it simply by not showing up. She has ended it for her own reasons and has not asked to renegotiate. Though I would in a moment. I would come to her and sit with her through whatever illness or problem she has. But she has not asked and I will not impose.
I put pen to paper and write ‘I accept’ on her letter and mail it back like that. Just like that. Nothing else. No questions, no pleas, no additional information. I spill a drop of coffee on the return envelope and draw a stick figure cartoon of a man pouring coffee to make the spill mark.
She has proposed that in lieu of having our lighthouse weekend we will have two extra weeks in February and two extra weeks in Costa Rica. If it is real, it is a good deal for me.
If it’s real, which I know it isn’t.
Shannon
It felt like fall this morning in Ohio with November-like waves crashing over the break wall in the crystal clear air that had been scoured clean by the cold air from Canada. But this evening it is late August again. Warm but not hot. Short sleeves during the early evening and then a sweatshirt at night.
The sun is still an hour above the water, still yellow and gold with a brilliant streak painting the nearly calm waters of Lake Erie all the way from the horizon to my Coast Guard station home. The granite table on my lakeside balcony is slowly giving back the warmth it collected during the day so I am warm enough here above the harbor.
The five or six maples at my Coast Guard station are still full and heavy with all of their summer leaves. Only a few of the green ash in the park have dropped their leaves. As has become a happening over the summer, hundreds, perhaps five hundred people are sitting on the hummocks and hills in Caitlin’s Cove. They are waiting for the sunset. These Clevelanders know there are only a few of these precious golden days left before the ice and clouds and dark join forces in another interminable winter.
The sun drops a perceptible amount and my balcony is half a degree cooler. There is no humidity, no condensation on my glass of iced merlot. There is no lover waiting for me, but there is this sunset.
The regular fishermen are starting to pack their things on the end of my jetty. I have had no problems with them respecting the “closed at dusk, open at dawn” policy. They have accepted the gift I have given them, the gift of the freedom of my jetty. I think the platoon of private security my sister has not so secretly installed in my park and near my home has helped with that routine.
Contrails above have dispersed into feathery wisps that curve gently in the light blue sky.
The sun has moved closer yet to the horizon. It is accelerating.
The golden stripe on the water is more narrow and now has its first tinge of orange and red and green. The air cools another degree and I look for my sweater, even in August.
Now I feel the lake giving back some of its warmth from the day. In the park I see mothers pulling sweatshirts onto children, and see lovers nestle closer together.
And now the sun has touched the horiz
on. Deep purples spread across the horizon where the inland sea meets sky. Nearly black reds blend up through the lighter reds and oranges to the salmon dusted clouds. Tendrils of flame shoot skyward and paint the underside of the clouds.
The sun is quickly halfway below the horizon. There are only two or three minutes left. Someone once explained this acceleration to me, but no explanation can describe this phenomenon that I am participating in on my porch above my water encircled home.
A hush falls over the hundreds in the park. I stand, trying to save one more second of this miracle of August on Lake Erie. A thousand or maybe ten thousand sea gulls cross in front of the A.Y. Jackson Red Maple colored sun and when they are past there is just a sliver left.
I watch and while I hold my breath it is gone and night has arrived here at my Lake Erie home. Two jet skiers race toward this sunset as I take one more sip of my nightly merlot. The sun is gone. The few clouds are stained with ever changing ochers and tints and oil colors. Is this who I am? Am I a Lake Erie sunset viewed alone with my second glass of wine? Observed from my renovated home that sits a hundred yards down a narrow causeway that separates me from the acres of parkland that in turn separate me from the city?
In the last of the glow I see the difference between the water outside the break wall and the harbor inside. See the serenity inside, and the tiny chop that can blow up into towering, hurtling masses in an hour. But tonight it is calm, and I am at peace.
Is Joe?
Is my ex?
Can they see this the way I do? Could they see it with me? Or would they need to see me as well? They would say that I am more beautiful even than what they had just witnessed. But they would be wrong. Especially now as the cancer spreads and weakens me as it feasts on my insides. The cancer noticed me, and it is as insatiable as my lover.
The sun will set in these riots and orgies of color and calm long after I am gone. After I am gone. A day that will arrive soon. A day that will arrive suddenly as my light accelerates towards my horizon. But there will be no onlookers, no-one to wonder at the kaleidoscope that appears and then disappears without ever letting it be held or grasped or understood.
I have chosen to die here in my harbor home, alone. I will not subject anyone to these last months or hours. They will be mine.
Joe doesn’t have to know.
My ex doesn’t have to know.
My sister knows, but she will leave me be. She kindly deposited me here after retrieving me from my cottage. She actually waited in the car outside my cottage, she did not come in. My sister gets me.
I know, and the last of the faint reds and salmons that just now have winked out somehow have told me that they too know and that they will put on these shows for me as long as they can.
The light winks on in the lighthouse and it is night.
Joe
It is 8 a.m. on January 4 and I am on her back steps and she is not here.
She has been here every year for the past nine years but she is not here.
Unlike October she has not written to say she is not coming.
I am worried. There are a thousand reasons why she might not be here, most of them simple reasons like running out of gas or getting a flat tire. My most recent Google search revealed nothing dire.
I call her, but there is no answer.
I call her sister.
“Shannon is late,” I say.
“What do you mean?” Cara says.
“I mean it’s 8 a.m. on January 4 and I am on the back steps of her house on Topsail and she’s not here like she has been every other January 4 for the past ten years.”
“Joe you’d better come quickly,” Cara says. “Maybe you can help me find her.”
“Find her?”
“It’s near the end. And she said she wanted to be alone for the end.”
“The end?” Joe asks.
“She didn’t tell you?” Cara asks.
“Tell me what?” Joe asks.
“You’d better get here as fast as you can. I mean today. Rent a plane, do whatever you have to. Just get here.”
I am in Cleveland, at her house, but she is not here. This house is entirely Shannon. It is distant from any neighbor and perched over the frozen harbor. Her things and her essence are everywhere. I climb the spiral wrought iron staircase to what must be her reading room. There is a letter.
I read it. It is a good-bye letter to me. She must have written it here.
But where could she be?
The beacon from the lighthouse sweeps her home and I know that’s where she is. She is in the lighthouse. She intends to die in the lighthouse. Where a winter storm is sending frozen spray higher and higher against the lighthouse and the keeper’s house.
I race down the stairs and out to her dock. The harbor is frozen but there is open water near the lighthouse. There has to be a way.
I race through her garage and into her boathouse. There is a zodiac and a jet ski and a kayak and one empty slip. The wind is howling from the north and even in the harbor there are five foot waves. Outside the break wall Lake Erie is throwing gigantic twenty foot swells against anything that dares to stand in its way.
I go back in the house and tear all the blankets and the comforter off her bed. I stuff them in a garbage bag, and then stuff all that into another. It will have to do.
I fire up the zodiac and brace myself for a cold I cannot even imagine. It is only four hundred yards across the harbor. The first hundred by the boat house are frozen. I push the zodiac ahead of me even as frozen spray finds every square inch of exposed skin. As I approach the edge of the ice, near the first of the open water, the boat suddenly breaks through the ice and I am barely able to scramble aboard after sinking to my waist.
There is no way to describe this cold.
The engine fires and I fight the waves and arrive in the lee of the lighthouse. There is a protected spot near the steps and I am able to latch onto the chains that reach down from the frozen steps. I ascend the steps using the chains and spare only one glance back at the zodiac that has been swept back across the harbor to the ice.
Out here the wind is hurricane force and filled with ice and freezing spray. The lighthouse seems to be tilting as the ice builds up unevenly.
I am inside and have closed the door behind me. The lighthouse is dark and cold and smells of decades of decay.
I call out her name but there is no reply.
Stairs lead up and I follow them towards the meager light that filters down from above.
She is here. I know she is here. She could not possibly be anywhere else.
I pull the blankets and comforter with me though my legs are so cold I can barely climb.
I see her.
She is here.
Seated with her back to her home, facing out towards the storm.
I fall on the floor behind her and kiss her.
My lips nearly freeze to her forehead. There is no fever in this frozen lighthouse.
“You came,” she whispers.
“Yes,” I answer. She is cold but dry. She must have come out before the storm. There is no telling how long she has been here. I remove my wet clothes and wrap us in the blankets and the comforters and pull her close.
“I love you Joe,” she says. “I’ve always loved you. Even when I didn’t know what love was. I’m so sorry I never told you.”
“You told me every day,” I say.
Shannon
They say it is a miracle.
That the hypothermia cured me.
That the three days and three nights that Joe and I spent frozen in the lighthouse at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River somehow saved me. There is no explanation. Tens of millions of people have watched the YouTube of the frozen lighthouse, but only Joe and I and a few brave men in the Coast Guard know that Joe and I were trapped inside.
My sister the brilliant cancer researcher has no explanation. Every time she runs her wand up or down my body that intense look of concentration on her face dissolv
es and turns to the purest sisterly joy and love that ever was.
She cannot explain it, but she can accept it.
I have been cured by being frozen in the lighthouse for three days. Three days without food or water or heat. Three days when Joe never left my side. When he held me to warm me. When he somehow managed to arrange a rescue. Three days when he told me he loved me at least a million and five times.
How many miracles can one woman endure? The miracle of the natural gas and oil, the miracle of Joe, and now the miracle of a hypothermic cure.
I think that a dozen doctors, or maybe a hundred dozen, have taken blood and tissue and swabs and have performed tests and have poked, prodded, and imaged every cell in my body. I have had enough.
It is time to retire from being a miracle and to relax.
Joe and I will travel from my Coast Guard station home to my home in Costa Rica. He will be surprised to learn that I have a home in Costa Rica. He will like biking back and forth from Hermosa to Jaco on the mountain bike path that now connects the two towns. The path that was built by a legion of men with machetes and rakes and shovels and no heavy equipment. Men with wheelbarrows and burros who spent five years of constant labor to make the trail. The trail cost me nearly five million dollars and employed every worker who wanted a job in Hermosa or Jaco. Salvaro put one of his cousins in charge and the construction went smoothly. Even now, every day a hundred men walk the trail with machetes and baskets and rakes to keep it clear. The jungle never rests.
So we are going to Costa Rica so that I can be warm and so that we can surf and so that we can be a woman and a man and not a miracle and her savior.
