I want them to stay there, repressed down deep.
I don’t want to deal with them.
I don’t want to think about them.
I don’t want to let them out.
But yet, here I am, in my quarters, sitting cross-legged on my hard little cot, a blanket around my shoulders and another across my lap, with my notebook on my thigh and a thermos of green tea nearby.
Fuck.
Fine.
Here it goes.
I’m going to write down five letters, which I have not written nor thought nor spoken—through constant and intentional avoidance—for many, many months.
H E N R Y.
Fuck. Fuck.
I’m fighting sobs as I sit here, staring at those letters, struggling to see the page through tears.
I haven’t allowed myself to think about him almost at all in the nineteen months and thirteen days that have passed since his death.
Weird—I didn’t have to stop and think, stop and count, I just knew, instinctively, exactly how many months and days it has been since Henry died. He was admitted to the pediatric oncology ward on Valentine’s Day, twenty-one months ago.
We buried him nineteen months and eleven days ago.
I couldn’t think about him.
I still can’t.
Just writing those five letters of his name has taken everything I have. My pen is shaking in my hand. My lips are pressed tightly together. I’m breathing hard—my lungs refuse to inflate all the way. My eyes burn. Sting. They’re hot. The page is blurry.
I haven’t allowed myself to really cry in…God, I don’t know how long. I cried—I sobbed, shattered, utterly broken—the day he died. A few tears trickled down my cheeks now and then, in the days that followed—slow, dripping, single tears. Like a leaky faucet—DRIP…DRIP…DRIP. I couldn’t cry, though. Not really. After that initial shattering, I couldn’t really cry anymore.
Why?
I’m not sure. I haven’t cried since then.
Wait—no. That’s not true: I cried when I discovered Christian had left.
Have I coped? Have I grieved? Have I mourned?
I don’t know.
I saw a therapist—I saw two, actually. The first was Craig, who ended up referring me to a female therapist who actually was able to get me to open up a little, in a way Craig never could. Because with Craig, I only saw him as a man, a MALE, rather than someone to whom I could trust my innermost turmoil. I told him I needed a different counselor, and he referred me to a colleague. I liked her immediately upon our first appointment, and she really did help me to come to terms with the tragic loss of Henry, to some degree at least.
Craig called me a few weeks later to ask me to go out on a date with him.
And then there was a second date, and a third, and a fourth. On the fourth date, something happened: he kissed me…and I liked it. A lot. I was so needy, so vulnerable, and so lonely. So angry, so consumed by—I don’t even know what. A million burning emotions, and when Craig kissed me, they all exploded, the sweet relief of physical touch—something I craved, something I needed—something that was consuming me. I never even stopped to think. I just—I ACTED. I let myself have it. Christian had abandoned me, and I was alone and needed comfort. So I took it.
Craig got me naked, and I got him naked, and we were kissing and he was touching me, and I was touching him. It felt GOOD. I liked it. But it wasn’t…it just wasn’t RIGHT. He wasn’t Christian. He didn’t feel right, didn’t sound right. Didn’t touch me the right way. There was nothing wrong with the way Craig kissed or touched me or sounded or felt, it was just…WRONG. I don’t know how else to put it.
So I stopped it.
I cried when he left.
And I think that was the last time I truly cried.
Why am I thinking about this, using journal space on it? Maybe because that moment with Craig showed me that I NEEDED Christian. That even when I try to move on, I can’t.
When was the last time I thought about Henry? I don’t even know. Part of me feels horrible about that…like I’ve betrayed him, as if by refusing to even think his name, or call his sweet little face into my mind’s eye, that I’ve forgotten him—
As if I COULD forget him.
I just…I think I instinctively knew that if I let myself think about him, I’d start crying and I’d never stop. There’d be no end to the sorrow that would emerge from me. It would just…devour me. Consume me. Drown me.
Even now, I’m afraid of that.
I’m afraid of thinking about Henry too much, because I’m afraid I’ll start crying and never stop.
My hand is cramping, I’m exhausted, and the storm is finally starting to die out a little. Which means, maybe, I’ll be able to sleep.
It’s worth a shot.
* * *
I don’t know how long I slept. I haven’t even really gotten up yet, haven’t checked my phone, haven’t looked outside, haven’t even left my bed, yet. It feels like I slept a long time, though. I’ve got that groggy, disoriented, sluggish feeling you get after sleeping for something like eighteen or twenty hours, you know?
I woke up sobbing again.
I dreamed of Henry again.
I saw him. I felt him. I smelled him. He’d be a little over three by now, but in the dream he was alive, and he’d never died, and he was just as I want to remember him, as he was before he started showing signs of being sick—a sweet, happy, warm, joyful little bundle of perfection. Those blue eyes, so bright. His little hands, chubby and reaching for everything, grabbing onto everything. His cheeks and chin, so much like Christian’s. His hair, dark like mine.
He was real. He was alive, in my arms, and it was pure joy, for those few moments.
And that’s when I woke up—with the realization that it was just a dream crashing through me, the knowledge that Henry was gone.
How long did I sob, before I got it under control? I don’t know. Too long, and not long enough. I had to force myself to stop. Had to growl at myself to be quiet, had to clamp my teeth down on the sobs, had to wipe the tears away and sniff the snot away and blink and breathe until I could pretend like I’m in control.
But I’m not in control.
At all.
I think it’s a good thing this is a dry boat—meaning there’s no alcohol on board. Not a drop. Dominic says it ensures the crew is always in control and sober and ready for anything, and it makes putting into port and getting free time all the better for everyone. If there were alcohol on this boat, I’d be drinking it right now. I’d probably be drinking it all the time. Every moment.
Which…is a problem.
There’s a period of time I genuinely just don’t remember—the weeks after I finally forced myself to start eating again, forced myself to leave the bed. Which I think I only did because I realized I couldn’t will myself to just die.
That’s what I wanted, I think: to die.
To just…stop being alive, so I could be with Henry, and so I could escape the pain.
When I finally realized I wasn’t going to die, I started eating…and started drinking.
Christian and I both hit the bottle pretty hard, during that period.
It was the only thing that could numb the pain.
I still worry I’ll use that coping mechanism even still. But, I haven’t allowed myself to drink, not since the hurricane.
Up until then I’d been drinking myself to sleep every single night. Was it low-key alcoholism, maybe? I don’t know. Self-medication, certainly.
Where am I going with all this?
I don’t know. Nowhere. I don’t have a point. I don’t have anything specific I’m trying to say, this time.
It’s all a mess inside my head. Even with all I’ve written so far, it’s just the tiniest little scratch on the surface.
It’s like being a diver free-swimming with fins and a tank and a wet suit, swimming down and down to the limits of human endurance, which is the nothing at all, not in comparison to
the true depths of the ocean.
That’s me.
That’s what’s within me.
What I’ve dredged up so far is just a tiny sliver, and lurking beneath it all is a Marianas Trench of heartache and sorrow and anger and guilt.
It’s easier to pretend it’s not there, to just go through the motions of being alive. On board this boat, it’s far too easy. But I can’t do that.
I just cannot allow myself to do that any longer.
Because really, that’s what I’ve been doing so far, isn’t it? Hiding? Running? Pretending?
How much longer can I do it? It’s festering inside me. Rotting. Fermenting.
I can’t go through the motions anymore.
I can’t keep burying and repressing and hiding and running and bottling.
I am in flux—in life, and as a person:
Who was I? Who am I now? Who will I be? Who do I WANT to be?
I hear Dominic outside my cabin. He’s knocking, telling me the storm has passed and they need me to put together more food—the stew and the soup and the cookies are all gone.
I’m needed.
There’s that, at least.
7
[Conakry, Guinea, Africa; date unknown]
All of my writing, so far, has been about me, or Ava, or Henry. About us, about my life—events, memories, and images; vignettes of my life, remembered without context. Today, however, I feel like I need…a break. A brief respite from constantly thinking about myself and Ava and everything.
And so, I’m going to write something different. What it means, I don’t know. What relevance it has, I don’t know. I just know that there’s significance to what pours out of me, this time. I feel it inside me, this story. Words. Ideas, images, themes. Not directly about me, but still about me in some indirect way.
I don’t know.
So I let it out. Let it emerge.
Sitting in my usual place on the veranda, in my chair, notebook balanced on my knees, I write:
[From a handwritten notebook; date unknown]
THE LIGHTHOUSE AT THE END OF THE WORLD
* * *
It is a barren, windswept island. A few scrub pines grow on it here and there, some tall, sharp-bladed grass. The entirety of the island is hilly, rising and falling, curving around and carving in, full of divots and caves and hidden folds in the granite. It looks and feels like what it is—an outcropping of rock protruding from the angry, wine-dark sea.
It is a place of importance to sailors; it marks a channel, alerting ships to the presence of nearby rocks. There is a lighthouse upon it. A residence. A barn. An acre or so of grass fenced in for a cow and her calf and a few goats. Some chickens cluck in scattered clumps around the house, and a path of uneven stone flags mark the way from the residence to the lighthouse. A small fenced-off garden grows behind the house with vegetables growing in neat rows.
The sky above is almost always clear blue, except when storms blow in, and when those storms come, they rage with all the fury of the gods.
Connor Yates is the lighthouse keeper. He is a sullen, terse, unhappy man. Prone to bouts of heavy drinking—there was a war, and the memories of it haunt him, driving him to drink in an attempt to drown them out. It doesn’t work, and he will give up the bottle for a time, only to go right back to it when the nightmares and waking moments of memory become too strong.
He has been alone on the island, tending the lighthouse, for too long—years. So long he has forgotten how to speak, he sometimes thinks. The shipping company which owns the lighthouse sends a ship twice a year, laden with supplies—haunches of dried beef, sacks of potatoes, canned fruits and vegetables, bags of corn and flour and sugar, pouches of smoking tobacco, cases of whiskey, months’ and months’ worth of newspapers bundled together in heavy squares and tied with twine, books, casks of ale, sides of mutton, tins of coffee and tea, bales of hay, barrels of oats and grain and seed for the animals, bullets for his rifle and pistol which he only uses for target practice as a means of passing the long boring hours, a myriad of other sundries necessary to support a man alone on an island in the middle of the ocean.
Connor is lonely, but mostly content in his solitude.
The solitude is the only balm he has found for the ragged wounds to his soul; he came away from the war unwounded in body, and this too is a source of unending guilt for him. He likes the isolation—when he wakes screaming from a nightmare, there is no one he will awaken or frighten, no one to ask him what’s wrong, no one to try and wake him and perhaps be accidentally wounded, for he can become quite violent when roused from a nightmare. Which, long ago, is something Connor discovered the unhappy way, and is the reason for his self-imposed exile to this distant, desolate place: he doesn’t trust himself around other people.
For all of its desolation, for all that it is far, far from anything like humanity, it is a beautiful place, wild and brutally lovely. Connor can see hundreds of miles in every direction from the tiny rim of a balcony encircling the glass of the lighthouse, which is a hundred feet tall and built upon the very highest promontory of rock on the island, another two hundred feet above sea level.
Connor finds the greatest peace—the only peace—standing on that narrow, ledge gripping the brass railing and staring out at the rippling marble field of the sea, veined with streaks of silver and jade and azure, twinkling with diamond glints on sunny days and hard and leaden on gray, stormy days. He stands facing east to watch the dawn, and returns at sundown to face west, watching the sun drown itself beneath the horizon. He is capable of standing there, forearms on the brass tube of the railing with the wind in his beard, for hours on end. The wind is always blowing, up there, hard enough to howl past his ears, hard enough to sometimes require him to grip the railing to keep from being blown off balance.
Sometimes, he thinks he could bound up onto the railing, crouch there a moment, then spread his arms like wings, leap into the sky and catch the wind and be carried away. Sometimes, he has gone so far as to grip the railing and tense his legs and prepare to leap, but then he remembers the ships, and that without him, the light would go out and the ships would crash, and more lives would be laid at his feet. More blood would coat his hands. And he then forces his hands to unclench and forces himself to relax against the rail and watch the sun, to close his eyes and feel the wind in his hair.
Time is a fickle mistress. The days and weeks and months pass unevenly. Sometimes an entire month will pass and he’ll only realize it with a start, and wonder where the time went, and then he will think surely half a year has passed already, and he’ll consult the calendar affixed to the wall in the kitchen, and realize only a week has passed. Time plays the same game on him with hours and minutes. Units of time are interchangeable, to Connor, in some ways.
The only way he has of marking the passage of time at all, really, is the arrival of the ship with his supplies in spring and fall, reminding him of the existence of the world beyond his little island.
The ship, in the years Connor has lived on the island tending the lighthouse, has always been captained by the same man—Elijah McKenna, a hard, swarthy man with a black beard long since gone mostly silver, skin like old leather, eyes like chips of granite, a man almost as tersely uncommunicative as Connor himself. Elijah pilots the lighter from the ship to the tiny dock himself, and helps Connor unload the supplies and then helps him haul them up to the residence. Once the work is done, the men will tamp their pipes and tipple some whiskey and sit and smoke on the porch of the residence, and Connor might remark on recent storms, and Elijah might remark on events from wider world, but on the whole, both men are content to sit and smoke and drink. They may play cards, or they may pass back and forth the pages of the most recent newspaper—many weeks and months old by this time, usually. Elijah is the only person Connor has had any contact with at all in at least three years; if there is anyone in the whole world whom Connor might call a friend, it would be Elijah.
Then, one spring, the ship arrive
s, and the lighter scuds up against the dock. Connor is there to accept the line and tie it off; he does so slowly, his movements listless and fumbling. His attention is not on the rope, nor the pylon to which he is tying it, but on the lighter. Instead of Elijah—stout and leathery and solid and silent, clad as always in faded dungarees and a thick wool sweater and heavy boots and an old slouch cap—there are two people; neither of them is Elijah.
One is a man on the older side of middle age, but trim and tough looking, with broad shoulders and fierce eyes, smartly dressed in a suit, with an unmistakable air of a man used to command. The other is a woman. Young. Soft. Hesitant of movement as she climbs out of the lighter onto the dock, but with confidence in her gaze, which lands on Connor and remains there, unwavering, openly curious; she is more than just pretty, or lovely; she is, truly, the most beautiful woman Connor has ever seen, and he knew many women before the war, when he was an eager young man in a sharp uniform, when the world held only possibility. She is fair of skin—her skin looks to him like cream just before it is poured into a mug of coffee. Her hair is dark, twisted into an effortlessly elegant knot behind her head. Her dress is pale green, accentuating her creamy skin and dark hair. It is not the gown of a high-born lady, but a sturdy, sensible thing, allowing her easy movement. But yet, for all that, she carries herself with an air of elegance and sophistication, which makes Connor feel uneasy and dirty and hesitant.
Once both the man and the woman—obviously his daughter, for they have the same eyes and a similar cast of feature and similar bearing—have climbed from ship’s boat to the dock, Connor only stands there, staring, silent.
“Well?” the man says, his tone hard and impatient. “Best get the supplies unloaded. I’m Captain Robert Kinross, and this is my daughter, Tess. You are Connor Yates?”
Connor only grunts an affirmative, at first, then remembers his manners in the presence of a lady. “I mean, yeah. Yes. I’m Connor.” He reaches down into the lighter and hauls out a bag of potatoes, one in each hand. “Where’s Elijah?”
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