The Color of Heaven - 09 - The Color of Time

by Julianne MacLean

  “I’m amazed you can say that,” I said. “I think I’d be pretty steamed if Ethan had left me for another woman. I would have hated her for stealing him away.”

  Suddenly I remembered my dream where Ethan had been married to another woman named Grace. I hadn’t felt any bitterness toward Grace, but perhaps that was because in the dream, I had been the one to end our relationship. Ethan had never cheated on me, so maybe that’s why the jealousy wasn’t there.

  But that was just a dream, I reminded myself. In reality, we had never divorced. Ethan was dead.

  “Are you okay?” Chris asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  I shook my head as if to clear it. “I’m sorry. I was just thinking about how relationships can be so confusing sometimes.”

  “Were you thinking about Ethan?”

  I nodded.

  He studied my face for a moment and I felt exposed. Emotionally naked, as if he could see past the façade of cheerful, polite behavior to the real person I was inside—and see the grief that still lived in my soul. A shadow passed across his features and I knew in that instant that he recognized how adrift I was.

  “But you guys were happy, weren’t you?” he asked. “You never had any problems?”

  I had to think carefully about that, and found myself floating around in a sea of uncertainty. “It’s strange that you ask that question. I don’t know how to answer it, exactly, because I’ve been feeling really muddled lately.”

  Chris leaned forward. “In what way?”

  I was probably insane to bring it up, but I wanted to tell someone. Maybe it was the wine, but I felt unbelievably comfortable with Chris. Though we’d only seen each other once, and in painful circumstances, over the past fifteen years, I felt as if we’d known each other forever.

  I shrugged a shoulder. “You asked about my marriage to Ethan. He’s been gone for eight years now, but I’ve been having some strange dreams lately. In one of them, I dreamed Ethan was still alive, but we were divorced and he was married to someone else. I talked to him on the phone and had a conversation that seemed very real. I also dreamed that he died when we were teenagers and we never had the chance to get married at all.” I took a deep breath. “Now that you’re asking about our marriage, I’m not sure which of those three scenarios to tell you about. They all feel so real to me. It’s like I’ve had three different lives, and they’re all running parallel to each other. Sometimes, lately, I don’t know where I am.”

  Chris inclined his head with a look of concern. “If it helps, I can tell you for sure that I was at his funeral eight years ago, and there really was an accident with a drunk driver, so the phone conversation you had with him had to have been a dream.”

  My face flushed with heat. I waved a hand, suddenly embarrassed. “I know… Of course that’s what happened. Dreams can just feel so vivid sometimes.” I picked up my wine and fought to get a handle on the conversation. “So…to answer your question, Ethan and I had a really good marriage and it was devastating when I lost him. Tyler too.” My voice softened as I looked out at the pink sky over the water. “I thought we’d be together forever.”

  Chris reached for my hand and held it.

  I swallowed over a painful lump in my throat and looked down at his hand upon mine. He had a long, thin scar running from his knuckle to his wrist bone. I traced it with the pad of my thumb.

  “It’s hard when life doesn’t turn out the way you expect it to,” I said. “One minute, you imagine a certain future for yourself, then it’s ripped right out from under you. It’s like getting thrown out of a speeding car on a dark, winding road. Suddenly you’re bruised and disoriented, stuck somewhere all alone with no way to get home, not even knowing which direction to turn. Then you start walking, and you get holes in your shoes and your feet hurt. You’re hobbling and you can’t find your way back. You just become more and more lost.”

  Chris nodded his head and entwined his fingers through mine. “That’s exactly how I’ve been feeling for the past four years, ever since Katelyn threw me out. Then…to find out about Logan being sick… None of it was what I imagined would happen.” His eyes met mine. “Do you think we’ll ever get back into another car and know where we’re going? Do you ever think we’ll be able to jam our foot onto the gas pedal and press down hard?”

  Our fingers caressed and interwove. “I don’t know. After a certain point, there’s just so much baggage to drag. It’s hard not to be overly cautious and want to hit the brakes at every turn, or pull over and come to a full stop. To just stay put.”

  We sat in silence for a long while. Buffy was curled up, asleep next to the barbeque. The wind had died down since we’d started eating, and the water was now as calm as a mirror. In an inverted double world, it reflected the stately clouds overhead and the trees on the point.

  “It’s going to be a gorgeous night,” Chris said. “How spontaneous are you?”

  “Pretty spontaneous. Why?”

  “I’d suggest we take the sailboat out, but there’s no wind. Could I tempt you with a rowboat ride?”

  Smiling brightly, I relished the joy that rose like a bubble inside me. “You most certainly could.”

  Chris gave me a mischievous look and pushed his chair back. “Then let’s get going while there’s still some of that incredible light in the sky.”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  A feeling of peace washed over me as I stood on the dock, watching Chris step into the wooden rowboat. He set the oars down with a gentle clatter, and reached out to me.

  Taking his hand, I stepped in. The boat bobbed and rocked beneath my feet, upset my balance, so I made haste to sit down in the stern while Chris untied us and sat on the center bench, facing me. He rolled up his sleeves, set the oars into the rowlocks, and soon we were cutting through the still water, moving away from the dock and out of the secluded cove.

  The steady, smooth thrusts of his oars against the resistance of the water lulled me into a state of pure tranquility. Neither of us spoke, for we were attentive to the sounds of the natural world—the water dripping from the oars each time Chris raised them up, the seagulls calling out to each other, the perfect calm of the windless evening.

  We both looked up when a flock of ducks flew over us in V formation. They were silhouetted against the twilight sky, quacking noisily. As soon as they were gone and their sounds faded over the treetops on a distant point, our eyes met.

  “It’s beautiful here,” I said.

  “Yes,” Chris agreed. “We’ll go along the shoreline to get away from the neighborhood lights. I know a great spot for stargazing.”

  With the soles of his sneakers planted firmly on the floorboards, he rowed with a physical strength that impressed me. I found myself watching the thick bands of muscles in his forearms flex and relax with each long stroke of the oars. His gripped the handles tightly and my eyes fell again upon the scar I had noticed at the table.

  “Where did you get that scar at your knuckle?” I asked.

  He glanced at it briefly. “That’s from a surgery I had when I was a kid.” He was slightly out of breath as he spoke. “I fell out of a tree and broke my hand. I have another scar on my back from the same fall. I went down through a bunch of branches and got scraped up pretty bad. I can’t complain, though. If I’d landed two feet to the left, I would have been impaled on a wrought iron fence. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  “Wow. That was lucky,” I replied. “I guess it wasn’t your time yet.” I lifted the hem of my skirt to show him my worst scar. “I have a bad scar on my knee from falling outside my school when I was twelve. I never told my mother this part, but I was late and I didn’t go to the intersection to wait for the lights to change. Instead, I ran across a busy street where there were cars coming from both directions, and they were all going really fast. I stumbled, but managed to stay on my feet long enough to get to the other side where I wiped out really hard. Luckily, I didn’t fall in the middle of the street, or I would have
been flattened like a pancake.”

  “I guess it wasn’t your time either,” Chris replied, then glanced over his shoulder to see where we were heading.

  By now, the stars were beginning to appear like little sparkling diamonds in the sky, and the horizon glowed with a pinkish-red hue. Chris lifted the oars out of the water and looked all around.

  “This is the spot.” He pulled the oars in and set them along the port side of the boat, then dropped the anchor line over the side. Relaxing with his elbows on his knees and his hands cupped together, he glanced up. “When Jared and I had sleepovers, his parents used to bring us out here at bedtime. They’d put us in our pajamas and row us around until we fell asleep in the bobbing boat, then they’d row back in and carry us up to bed. To this day, nothing relaxes me like lying back in a boat and looking up at the stars.”

  “You’re not going to fall asleep on me, are you?”

  There was laughter in his brown eyes as they met mine. I was struck by how handsome he was in the gloaming, and how everything about him seemed so achingly familiar. I felt an intense longing within myself—a longing for the past, I suppose. A wish to return to those romantic days of my youth when the world was a joyful place and I had no notion of tragedy or sorrow.

  Suddenly, I felt as if my soul were lifting off the bench and I was able to watch this scene from another more knowledgeable plane where I comprehended and appreciated its significance and beauty. I wanted to commit the moment and the feeling to memory so I would never forget.

  I took in a deep, cleansing breath of the salty sea air to ground myself in this reality. I rubbed the palm of my hand firmly over my thigh to focus on physical sensations.

  “Where is your sister now?” I asked Chris, remembering the few times I had met her that first summer. She had been a year or two older than him.

  “She’s in Arizona,” he replied. “She married a guy she met in college and they have two great kids together. She’s a librarian.”

  Hearing the hollow sound of a buoy bell toll in the distance, we both looked out to sea. A fishing boat with its lights on was motoring along the horizon, heading north.

  Chris turned his attention to the sky again, then stretched his arms over his head and rolled his neck and shoulders. Sliding his lean, muscular body down to the floorboards, he lounged back and rested both his arms along the length of the center bench.

  “That’s better,” he said. “Much easier to look up.”

  Following his lead, I lowered myself to the floor, facing him, and stretched my legs out alongside his. “You’re right. This is better.”

  The boat bobbed gently up and down while we waited for the sky to fade to black. Soon the full moon began its rise.

  “What about your grandparents?” Chris asked. “Do they still live in Portland?”

  “My grandmother does. She’s still in the same house, but my grandfather passed away a number of years ago.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” he replied. “They were nice people. I remember helping your grandfather clean out his garage one day.”

  I wagged a finger. “That’s right. You and Ethan carried an old washing machine out to the curb. My grandmother was so happy to get rid of it. You have no idea.”

  He nodded at the memory. “I’d love to pop by and say hello to her while I’m here.”

  “She’d like that,” I told him, “but she’s in the hospital right now.”

  “Nothing serious, I hope?”

  The boat rubbed and creaked up against the anchor rope, and suddenly I couldn’t remember what Gram had been admitted for. My lips parted as I stared at Chris, searching for the words to answer his question.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You have that look again, like you just saw a ghost.”

  Fear shot into my belly while I fought to get a handle on my bearings. “It’s happening again,” I replied. “That thing where I can’t make sense of what I dreamed and what’s real. I’m certain she had some polyps removed, but I’m also remembering that she fell off a ladder and broke her hip. I remember being at her bedside after the surgery.” Cupping my forehead in my hand, I whispered, “Oh, God…”

  Chris sat forward and reached for my hand. “What is it?”

  “I’m just a bit concerned that what happened to my sister might be happening to me. She was really sick last year.”

  “Do you mean Jenn?” Chris asked. “The one who was hit by the car when you met Ethan?”

  I nodded. “Last year she started having some trouble with memory loss and she became a bit delusional. It turned out that she had a brain tumor. Though she’s doing well now, it was a hard time.”

  Chris sat back in shock. “Is she okay now?”

  “She’s fine, but she had to have major surgery to have the tumor removed. Now I’m worried that I have the same thing, because it can’t be normal to forget why your grandmother is in the hospital, can it?”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  I shook my head. “Not yet, but I have an appointment for tomorrow. I shouldn’t even have mentioned it. It’s probably nothing.”

  I watched an airplane, like a tiny bright shooting star, travel across the sky, and I strained to hear the faint sound of its engine. A moment later, the wake from the fishing boat reached us and our wooden boat rose and fell on the swells.

  “This is heavenly,” I said.

  “I agree.” Chris leaned back against the bench again. “As far as experiences go, it’s pretty hard to top this. Oddly enough, I never do this in Seattle. I don’t know why. There’s water and stars. I don’t live far from a beach. It’s just something I don’t do there. I only do this when I come home.”

  “It’s interesting that you call this home,” I replied, “when you’ve spent the past fifteen years living somewhere else, and that’s where your work is, your house, all your stuff…”

  He lifted his head. “Where do you consider home, Sylvie? You grew up in Montana, but you’re here now.”

  “Oh, this is definitely home to me,” I replied. “I can’t imagine living anywhere else. I love the smell of the sea and the people, all the customers who come into the pub, the friends I have here. And this is where I was married to Ethan and where I had Tyler. There’s just something about this place. Even though I was born in Montana, it feels as if my heart was born here, and this is where it needs to be.”

  I realized suddenly that the homesickness I’d noticed the other day was gone. I felt like I belonged here.

  “I know the feeling,” Chris said. “I sometimes look back on my life and wonder what would have happened if I’d convinced Katelyn to move out here with me as soon as we got married. I could have started a practice in Portland and I’m sure she could have found work. That’s what I wanted, but I just didn’t think it was what she wanted.”

  “Do you think you would still be together if you had moved here?” I asked, regarding him steadily in the moonlight.

  He shrugged. “I don’t know if she would have been happy here, but at least she never would have met Joe. But maybe Joe wasn’t the problem. Maybe we were. Now that we’re apart, I can look back and understand that something was missing. We weren’t really connected, you know? I think she loved me on a superficial basis because she could tick off a bunch of little boxes on her ‘husband material’ list. I just wish I had known then what I know now.” Chris shook his head with regret.

  “If I had a dime for every time I said that…”

  “Tell me about it,” he replied. “But there’s no sense wishing for the past to be different, because it is what it is. We make the best choices we can at any given moment, and then we have to figure out where to go from there, and how. Sometimes it’s easy. Sometimes, not so much.”

  “You must be my alter ego,” I said, “because I’m always looking at my life that way, wishing I had made different choices, imagining what my life would have been like if I had.”

  Chris lifted his head and eyed me intently. “What would you
have done differently?”

  I blinked up at the incredible, star-speckled night sky and relaxed into the movement of the boat. “I wouldn’t have let Ethan and Tyler go out that day.”

  “The day of the accident?”

  “Yes. I can’t help but blame myself, because Ethan had taken Tyler out on a Saturday afternoon so that I could have some quiet time to myself, just to relax and read a book on the veranda. I’ll always feel guilty about that—for taking that time for myself. What I wouldn’t give to have said, ‘No, I want to spend the day with the two of you. Let’s stay home and rake the yard or something.’”

  Chris rested his hand on my knee. “You couldn’t have known what would happen.”

  A bird flew overhead and soared in front of the moon. “I know, but it’s hard not to dream of a happier ending, or to imagine what life would be like today if they were still here.” I gave him a look. “But there I am, doing it again—always dreaming about what could have been.”

  He nodded and tossed an arm under his head to look up at the stars again. “I think we just have to get through the hard stuff and have faith that we’re on a path to the place we’re meant to be. Everything that happens to us moves us one step closer to that place.”

  “I keep trying to tell myself that,” I said, “but how is it right that Tyler and Ethan were meant to end up dead? Tyler was such a sweet, innocent little boy. Why wasn’t he meant to live a full life?”

  Chris continued to stare up at the night sky. “It sounds cliché, but maybe we also have to have faith that he’s in a better place. They both are.”

  “Heaven, you mean.”

  He sat up and draped his arm across his raised knee. “I’ve thought about that a lot over the past couple of years, because of what Logan has been going through. He’s just a kid.”

  I nodded. “And you need to believe that when he goes—when we all go—there will be something more.”