The Color of Heaven - 09 - The Color of Time (15 page)

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.”

Chris took in a deep breath and let it out, shakily. “When it’s your kid, you
really
need to believe that somebody’s going to watch out for them if they get taken away from you.”

“
I know
.” Our eyes locked and held tightly, and our deep, emotional understanding of each other in that moment was as real and obvious to me as the boat keeping us afloat, or the gigantic moon in the sky.

“This might sound crazy,” I said, “but when I talked to Ethan in the dream the other night, I feel like he could have been calling me from heaven, just to check in and offer up some advice. He seemed happy. Really content. I can only aspire to feel that way someday.”

“Me, too.” Chris’s eyes lifted and he pointed out the Big Dipper and the Milky Way.