“I feel like I have no sense of time anymore, not since Jeremiah was lost.”
She sat in her favorite chair in her scrupulously clean apartment. The chair faced the big front window. The sill was sparely decorated with a few items that would catch the sunlight. An old, deep blue bottle. A stone that sparkled with embedded fragments of mica, or quartz, or both. A small plant, the kind that did not flower. At least he had never seen it flower. Everything was carefully dusted, even the stone.
“Let’s go out. We could drive to the river, or even to the seashore. It will be fun.”
“Won’t that take too long? Don’t you have to be getting back?”
“No, not today; I don’t have to be anywhere. Come on, let’s go.”
He stood and reached for his hat, hoping it would prompt her. It worked, she rose and started up the stairs.
“I’ll just be a minute. The seashore would be nice if you’re sure you can.”
She was ready shortly, wearing a light jacket and carrying her sun hat. It was a large floppy straw hat with a white sash to tie under her chin. He remembered it well, from countless spring and summer days. Not autumn though; she had a different hat for autumn. It appeared right on time every year, in mid September. The weather didn’t matter; it could be a warm, summery September and there would be the autumn hat. He realized he didn’t know where she kept it. She had a winter hat as well, but he couldn’t remember quite when that one made its entrance. Probably around Christmas.
The day was bright enough for sunglasses. It was comfortably warm, but not hot. They were well into summer now, and all the summer shops and stands and flowers and vehicles and fashions surrounded them as they drove. Many of the shops they passed prompted memories for him, and he pointed out this one or that as they appeared. Never too personally. Never “Look, that’s where we had those great hamburgers.” Instead he would say “Look, they repainted their sign,” or “They hang more and more lobster floats; they’re going to run out of wall space.” She would do the same, although not quite so much. He usually couldn’t tell where she was looking.
It took an hour’s drive to near the seashore, and once in the area they stopped for lunch at an open-air seafood restaurant. It was a familiar place with a familiar view of a harbor opening out to wider water. She sat at a picnic table while he stood in line and fetched their food. He hadn’t asked what she wanted, nor had she said. It was understood; she would only have spoken about a change in what she wanted, and today there was no change. He also ordered the same thing. It seemed to him the prices had gone up, but perhaps it was just his worries about money, always lurking in the back of his mind, poking and prodding at his thoughts and perceptions. Forgetting had never come easily to him.
As they ate, watching the waves and the gulls, noticing some of the families at nearby tables, he understood the visit and the lunch was just a tool. The pots and pans in the restaurant kitchen were the same as they had been on each of their many summer afternoon visits — even as some were replaced and new, they were the same. They produced the sounds he had heard before, distantly, from outside at the tables. The aromas were the same, even as the summer breezes were new breezes, drifting far across the lands and waters by the time of his next visit. The food was the same, the same tastes, the same textures. All of these things were tools; the kin of hammers and saws and drills and screwdrivers, and used just as constantly and carefully in a construction.
There were boats on the water; mostly pleasure craft, mostly white. He thought she liked watching the boats, although it wasn’t something they discussed. For a long time he had cultivated the idea that he did not particularly like boats, and he generally passed up opportunities to be on or near boats. He repeated, both out loud and to himself, that his interests did not include boats, nor ships. He was careful not to repeat this too often; just occasionally. When he encountered boats he looked past them, as they were things that did not draw his eye. He did not know if she believed him. His life was not what he had thought it would be. He sometimes shook his head at how wrongheaded his expectations had always been. Even when Jeremiah’s loss had not changed that.
He cleaned up the paper containers and plastic utensils from lunch. It was a pleasant time; they were comfortable and agreed, without saying so, that it had been a good and useful lunch, and the construction continued. She glanced at her watch; perhaps by now it should be called maintenance, not construction any longer.
“Let’s visit the lighthouse; it’s such a nice day.”
At the lighthouse they strolled on the easy path well back from the top of the cliff. He picked up a white pebble and tossed it into the surf below, but neither of them watched it as far down as the breakers. His eyes were on the white sails farther offshore. He had no experience of sailboats; only small motorboats long ago. She was watching the gulls, or the lighthouse itself. They sat on a bench beside the path, the one positioned so you could see the waves as well as the lighthouse. It was an old lighthouse, and he wondered aloud how the huge stones in its walls had been cut and assembled so long ago. What had the tools been. She did not reply, but pointed out a newer, smaller metal structure bolted to some rocks some distance offshore.
“That’s what they really use now. There’s a radio in it so it doesn’t have to be so high up. But I hope they keep this one anyway, even if they don’t need it.”
He looked from one construction to the other. The two things shared a function, but had no real connection.
“How long do you think they’ll keep it open?”
“Oh I don’t know. I don’t have any sense of time any more. But let’s go; maybe we can catch the ferry and go home that other way. Maybe that’s the route Jeremiah would take.”
