Flashback

THIRTY-ONE

Winter is softer here than the winters I’ve known, almost tropical in its liquidity. Sometimes it rains for days, not a downpour but a gentle, obliging mist that settles in a whispering thrum on the deepwater bays and pebbled inlets of the island. Some mornings, when I can’t sleep, I get in my rental car and drive down to Mukilteo or over to Keystone and watch the early ferries come and go from the docks. There’s a ritual to it that reminds me of the abbey, each crew member in his or her place, each rope secured. The way the chains clang, and the ship groans and creaks against the wooden pylons and rubber bumpers, and the deckhands call out to one another often sounds like a kind of prayer.

On weekends I sometimes stay till midmorning, but on schooldays I leave at seven-thirty and drive toward Greenbank, toward the corner where Madeline and her great-grandmother wait together for the school bus. She’s a serious child. I can tell from the way she holds her lunchbox, from the way she peers impatiently down the road. Sometimes when I go by, the two of them are talking, Madeline looking up at the older woman with a puzzled scowl, her sharp little eyebrows drawn together in an inverted V. She doesn’t seem to miss me, and for this I’m grateful, but I also know this is part of the careful way she carries herself, and that sometimes when she’s looking down that road she’s imagining me coming around the wooded corner to meet her.

It’s only a matter of time before I run out of money, a week or two at most before my thirty-nine-dollars-a-night room at the Bay View Motel taps the last of my savings and I’ll have no choice but to stop the car. But for now, I keep driving. I had not intended to wait like this when I came. My first day back I drove straight from the Seattle airport to Greenbank. But when I pulled up to the house and saw Madeline’s bicycle on the porch and the old metal swing set in the front yard, something caught in my chest, and I knew I wasn’t ready yet.

I’m gone to them, I tell myself each morning when I drive by. What does another day matter? Another week?

In the afternoons I go to the beach at Deception Pass and watch the seagulls riding the air currents beneath the high trestle bridge. Sometimes I think about Brian, about his mouth against mine when he kissed me that first time in Marrakech. It seems right to me that we should each have found an island, that he is somewhere on a beach as well, with the soft green hills of Tortola in the distance. That night at Ivan’s when I told him about the meeting with Stringer, he listened without saying what I knew we both were thinking, that nothing was over, that Robert Stringer was only a tiny part of something larger.

Dr. Delpay told me once that memory resides mainly in our sense of smell. I didn’t understand him at the time, but I’m beginning to. There is something about the air here, the all-pervasive smell of the sea, the sweetness of wet cedar, the rich must of rain-soaked underbrush, that is so perfectly familiar. I know now that I will never remember everything, but I’m beginning to glimpse my past.

The last few days, I’ve grown bold enough to sit in the park across from Madeline’s school and watch her with the other children at recess. Last night I walked into the woods behind my grandparents’ house and spied while the two of them made dinner and Madeline sat on a stool at the counter, her feet dangling off the ground. It was just like watching myself.