The Stranger

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Eleanor

Eleanor had decided to go visit a friend who had had an accident and was semi-bedridden with only some help off and on. She found out about her through a close friend.

“We didn’t even like her or really know her in high school,” she had said.

“I know, but I guess I feel it would be charitable, I think.” Her friend laughed at her and looked at her shaking her head.

“Ok, I guess. Want me to go with?”

She shook her head.

“Whatever, cuckoo.”

She studied the ferry schedules, made lunch and dinner for her husband and daughters, and said she would be back about eight pm. Her husband asked some questions about her friend and she realized she couldn’t at that moment remember her last name. Her daughter Lesie chuckled at her.

“Must have been a close friend, Mom.” She was at that age. Her other daughter, Sage, looked at her intently. Without judgement.

“Your mother can help a friend. Doesn’t matter the name.” He hugged her and she kissed his cheek. “Call me when you get there.”

Her friend’s name was Dorothy Meyers. They hadn’t been close in high school. Really, she had hardly noticed her.

She was surprised when she called.

“Well, what a surprise, Elly,” she abbreviated Eleanor, which only her close friends had done back in school. “That would be lovely. I am happy to have you visit. Tuesdays are slower for the ferry. You sure?”

After she hung up, she changed her mind, told herself she would call next day with an excuse, went to bed, cuddled her husband while he studied charts and fell asleep.

But the next day, five am, she made coffee, put some sandwiches and a banana in a cooler and drove off. The house was quiet.

She felt she was leaving behind three slowly beating hearts.

Warming up in the car, she felt a flush of excitement and the first, unfamiliar twinge of guilt. It was easy to push it aside.

Nothing had happened, yet.

The drive from Quilcene to Port Townsend was familiar to her. She had used it over the years for trips mostly to Whidbey Island for the girls’ sports and for Sage’s debate team competition which, true to her name, she led her team to win three years in a row. But she had never gone through Deception Pass State Park and then to Anacortes to the San Juan Islands. When they did family trips there, mostly to San Juan Island, they drove to Everett, visited Johns’ parents, and then drove next day to Anacortes and took the ferry.

This time everything seemed “on the verge of”. Exciting and somehow unknown. Orcas Island. She was early. The ferry to Coupeville left at eight am and it was six. There was still a line of cars waiting so she pulled behind the last one. Luckily, she had used the bathroom at a restaurant off West Sims. The same cafe she and her family would stop and have breakfast at sometimes. The Blue Moose Café. Really great biscuits and hash.

She had brought some work with her. She love-hated her work. She did para-legal work for various lawyers from Port Haddock and Irondale. Her best two high school friends had become lawyers in those towns and had used Eleanor over the years because she was good and cheap. Eleanor had an office at home with fax machine and electric typewriter and recording equipment.

This time she was reading Doris McGuire Esquire’s client’s estate plan. Boring at first. Most assets went to his wife, some went to a son from a previous marriage. And, about twenty-five thousand went to “unknown” to be revealed at time of death. Oh, that was interesting, she thought. Eleanor wasn’t supposed to have legal docs with her but Doris knew she could be trusted. And she needed to study this one because of the template Doris would need to fit it into. Eleanor had often found holes and problems with earlier similar legal matters that Doris really should have caught. Doris was the pretty, coifed lawyer that could be seen in the window by passersby or the ads she put in the papers. Eleanor was the work horse behind the scenes. Pretty in her own way. Not usually noticed.

She dug in, sipping her coffee absently, moving her car ahead as the line started, hoping it wouldn’t overheat. It was a Volvo station wagon. John had had the cooling system replaced. But still she worried. Volvos were temperamental. Someone beeped. She moved ahead two spaces and then the line stopped again.

Eleanor paid the fare at the gate and then waited again. There were a few walk ons but like Dorothy had said, not as many as weekends.

She glanced over at the line of people who waited to walk on. She was about five cars from driving onto the ferry. A man with reddish-blonde hair and beard was looking over her, over the car. She stared at him. He had a P-jacket on and a backpack and a doctors black bag. He caught her glance and without pointing guided her to look at a flock of geese who were flying overhead. He smiled. She smiled back.

He walked on and she tried to follow him with her eyes until her attention was pulled to getting her car into the right lane and behind the car in front. She felt out of breath.

She thought-This-him-was what I made this trip for and then- I took this trip to find someone like him- and then- What am I thinking? She shook her head. Too much legal stuff, divorce paperwork, betrayals, too many silly novels.

She got out of the car, walked upstairs with her food kit and thermos, and sat inside near the window.

It only took her half a minute to find him again.

He was reading a newspaper, a coffee cup and scrunched up plastic wrapper on the table in front of him. He flipped over the section he was reading and briefly looked up and smiled at her. She smiled and then looked away.

The rest of the trip she pretended to watch the water and the shoreline which grew closer as they approached Coupeville.

Soon, passengers started to walk towards the disembarking walkways of the ferry. She got up with her kit and headed to the stairs, went down and found her Volvo and went in.

She felt the ferry’s engines throttle down and then up again as they helped settle the ferry in place. Men came and took away the barriers.

She drove off the ferry and looked for a place to park. She needed to decide if she should buy things for Dorothy before she went on to Orcas Island. She sat for a while feeling empty. It felt like a long ago first love. She had never even talked to the boy all summer but saw him, watched him, swam, and played near him until the day her family was leaving. He came and gave her a bottle with sand and shells he had collected for her.

She never knew his name. That kind of emptiness.

3 Sisters Market. That sounded good. And she could call John from the pay phone there.

The thought came back to her from that summer.

What did I miss?

Sage

Sage was born Millicent Sage Theroux. By the age of two “Milly” was replaced by Sage because she would not respond to “Milly”.

By the age of five she had found out that Theroux meant “by the well” and had decided it meant “by the well of knowledge”.

At ten her father had built out of doors he had bought from Gilson’s Construction, eight desk-tables which went against three walls in her room. She had arranged all her subjects by area so she could go from one to the next without having to reorganize everything. Texts, notes, special dictionaries as needed, files for each subject were at each station.

Later, she left one of desk tables open for Eric Silverman. He was into electronics, computers and stuff she didn’t care for, but his dad was an alcoholic and he ended up at their house a lot. Sometimes she didn’t even notice he was there while she studied. Or went to sleep under the desk after making a tent with a blanket. The dog Arnie would come in and join him usually.

Sage had studied Cicero and was allowed to join the debate team three years ahead of the usual requirement. After two years, she had the Quilcene High School going to the State Debate Championships.

And she helped her sister Lesie who was way more interested in boys. She would help her with homework, making sure she just didn’t do it for her and she would “argue” in favor of a life less devoted to what so-and-so thought of her or who was dating who.

Sage liked basketball because of its mathematics and actually made second team most grades and played in fifty percent of the games. She would also devise plays for the coach which eighty percent of the time worked.

By sixteen Sage was a beauty and didn’t know it. Lesie was pretty and boys found her attractive, so she dated a lot. But boys were fascinated by Sage but would sort of melt in her gaze and become speechless and stupid.

Sage was not looking for a boy. She did a lot of stuff with her Dad and helped him at work. He was a forest geologist. Not very organized but very good at observing geological, hydrological, and chemical events in the Park. Sage helped him with his files, records, even making a cross reference system that impressed his boss and his boss’ boss. She would hike with him on shorter trips. She used her knowledge of first aid when he slipped and cut himself in shale. She bandaged him, put his leg up, kept him cool and called in on his radio to get him evacuated.

Sage’s best friend, besides Arnie and her Dad was a girl everybody called the Tramp. She was also brilliant but didn’t like to study. She liked to read and hid it, except from Sage. But she liked “older men-boys” and had more than a few relationships with men in town, college boys and occasionally a high school boy.

No one liked her. Only Sage and her Mom. Lesie hated her and her Dad would just warn her.

Sage knew she “had a screw loose” because she was loose and had to screw but they could talk about books and ideas and the Tramp could debate her into the ground.

Her father was the High School grounds man. Her mother had left them. Her father did his best but she was too smart for him.

“Just don’t get knocked up” was his best and only advice.

Strangely Eric and the Tramp got along and sometimes Sage would come home and find them at his desk pouring over some manual with equipment laying out everywhere.

Sage wasn’t sure that computers would become a thing except for big business that needed to store data. She had written a paper in eighth grade on that. “Business Machines Replacing Us?”

She respected the early computer women-Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper. But she felt the human mind was far superior to what a machine could do, except store information.

But Eric and the Tramp had fun. Such an odd couple.

Sage had a big surprise for her parents. She had, of course, gotten into all the colleges she applied to.

She was going to take a year off. First, take a trip with her dad into the Park and help him. One week into the Evans Wilderness which in the summer was accessible.

And then, the surprise. She didn’t know what was next. She had gotten a VW bus, with money made from helping her mom with para-legal work and from more mundane work, babysitting.

She had always had a plan. Her plan now was to not have a plan.

Dorothy Meyers

Dorothy waited in her living room for Doctor Bob. She was flattered and fortunate that he would travel all the way out to see her on Orcas Island. He told her he was a new breed of “hippie Doctor” that preferred to see patients the old-fashioned way, in person at their home, their “pad”. Not in a cold, sterile, impersonal office.

She had pretty much recovered from her accident but told Dr Bob when he called, she was “almost there”.

Dorothy had slipped on the wet floor of the restaurant she managed, the Ruffled Feathers, and had pulled a muscle, an intercostal muscle, so it was hard to breathe. And she had twisted her ankle and tweaked her left wrist. In the beginning everything was hard, impossible, to do so her insurance had helped her with in home care. Even going to the bathroom was hard. Getting into bed was okay but getting out was rough.

After the first month, it was Dr. Bob’s visits that she looked forward to. And he would help her with ways of moving and getting out of bed and even cooking that seemed magical. He said it wasn’t part of being an MD, just things he had picked up here and there. Yoga or some Indian stuff he had learned. He would bring pain pills, but she started to not like the way they made her feel. And pot. That was better. They would smoke on her back porch and he would tell her stories of growing up, his girlfriends, all about the sex he had with various women, some even “older” women and sometimes since it got dark, spend the night on the hammock.

Then in the morning he would make her breakfast and hike on out. He hitch-hiked! She would think about him, his red hair and beard and his smile and gentle touch. She knew she had a crush on him, and he knew too it but he was always professional in his doctory, hippie way.

Being unable to work she had had time to see how lonely she had become. Before the accident and before Dr. Bob she never thought about it. She had had boyfriends and a few lovers but no husband except her boss Tom Milley, who although married, was the man she was with ten hours a day, six and sometimes seven days a week. Restaurant life was brutal and demanding but being away from it, Dorothy started to see it for what it was-A smaller game and one where the weeks, months and years sped by with paperwork, payroll, ordering, hiring, firing, electrical, mechanical problems, inspection. And handling underage drinkers, theft. It all created a blur. If she quit, what would she do? And what would Tom do? He was older than she was.

She heard a car. Dr. Bob was magical in getting people, particularly women, to drive him to her house. Some even went way out of their way. She lived in the town of Buckhorn not far from the north end of East Sound where the restaurant was. Many a flushed woman had said it had been “no problem” and then driven all the way back to Deer Harbor, or even one particularly red-faced gal, back to Anacortes. Dorothy understood. Dr. Bob took everything away. That was what she told herself.

The car scrunched up her driveway and stopped. She saw Dr Bob come out and then Eleanor. Eleanor Theroux! Ellie!

“Hey, there Dr Bob. Hey there Ellie,” she said through the screen door. “I see you two have met.”
“Hi, Dorothy M.” Dr. Bob said, funning her with the card file system name he used and kept in his knapsack. “Eleanor was kind enough to give me a ride…”

“Yes, I saw him, saw Dr. Bob was thumbing it outside 3 Sisters so I gave him a ride. What a coincidence that he was, is your doctor, Dorothy,” Eleanor said as she went into the living room with the bags of thing that she had bought for Dorothy.

Dorothy noticed that Ellie, too, like the others was flushed. She thought for a second, they- Ellie and Dr. Bob- had stopped somewhere, had sex. But Dr. Bob looked the same. He knelt down in front of her while Ellie put grocery things away. He put his hands on her arms which rested on the recliner and took a big smiling look at her.

“You are getting better!” he said. Dorothy smiled back as he took out the tools of his trade. He listened to her breathe, felt her neck and glands, checked her heat rate, looked at her eyes.

“Yup, confirmed,” Dr Bob said.

“Ok, then, time to get naked!” Dorothy laughed and then coughed painfully after she uttered those words. Dr. Bob poked around the muscles of her ribs until she barked-“Yow, that’s it! Yowser. Phew.”

“Intercostal can take a bit to heal. Luckily you didn’t break a rib. That can even more painful.”

Dr. Bob put away his things and went out to the porch and stretched. Dorothy got up slowly and went to the kitchen.

“Ellie, thank you so much for coming. And getting all this stuff.” She had brought bread and wine and cheese and eggs and salmon spread and pretzels and peanut butter and toilet paper. “Wow. I feel bad. I can get along okay even though sometime just moving slightly wrong hurts like hell, but my ankle is almost back to normal and my wrist only hurst if I twist it…”

“Can I make you something to eat?”

“Sure. Dr Bob! You hungry?” Dorothy shouted to the outside.

They sat out on the porch and ate grilled cheese sandwiches and chips and pickles. Dorothy noticed that Ellie was attentive to Dr. Bob, like they had known each longer than just a few hours. But maybe that was just the effect Dr. Bob had on women.

“You know, Ellie stole my one true love,” Dorothy said after they had finished eating.

“What! I did not! You only met John after we got married.”

“Doesn’t change a thing!”

“Oh, you. Well, he is a good man,” Eleanor said glancing at Dr Bob who had turned to face the sun and had tilted his head back.

“What does your husband do?” he asked. Eleanor blanked for a minute trying to remember her husband’s face, his vocation.

“Oh. He is a geologist for a National Park. Olympic.” When she said it, it sounded so dry, so mundane, so boring. She felt embarrassed.

“Cool. I was going to do that.”

“You were?” Dorothy said, causing him to turn and smile at her.

“You’re surprised. Yeah, I love nature, all natural things, and I studied natural healing for a while and that would take me to some wild places. And fell in love with rocks, formations, the way the earth was made, the way you can read its history and what is going on in the present.”

“And then your mother told you ‘you gotta be a Docta!’” Dorothy said and laughed.

“Yeah. No, I fell in love with the human body, the way it heals itself and tells its history and keeps it secrets. Rocks are cool but they aren’t alive. The body tells what is going on with the soul.”

They were quiet then and both women watched Dr Bob whose hair had red, blonde, and fiery colors. After a while Dorothy stood up shakily and Ellie helped her to her bedroom off the living room for her nap. She held her arms while Dorothy lowered herself down. Ellie covered her.

“I wish I could fuck him. But it would hurt too much,” Dorothy said as Eleanor left the room shutting the door. Eleanor was about to shush her, but Dorothy’s eyes had closed.

Doctor Bob

Robert Fishman Ward never studied, it seemed and still got fifteen hundred in four SATs at prep school and close to that in two others. He smoked pot at the boarding school, took “horse tranquilizers” and other drugs and lived above the law and above the struggling masses on the three floors below him in the fourth-floor dorm room.

After graduating boarding school, he went to India and Africa, not to France and England like the other kids. He studied healing techniques, yoga and kundalini and tantric yoga. He helped a couple who were medical missionaries in Ethiopia until he fell in love with the woman.

He came back to the United States and spent two years backpacking in the Rockies and exploring and studying herbs and natural medicinal plants. He met a woman who was travelling by herself and spent a few months with her. She was a medical student from the University of Washington Medical School. He followed her there in the fall. She married a professor, but he had discovered his passion and continued until he graduated top of his class, again without seeming to study hard or have any strain with exams or the Internship.

The human body. He thought it a marvel. A machine with mysteries that needed to be fixed. And the people who occupied those bodies. Equally mysterious, mostly easily healed.

Love to Dr. Bob, the love of women, was a form of therapy, of healing. If a woman wanted his love he would provide it, no questions or significances, or what-ifs. He knew that some women had lost the ability to experience love or maybe had never really experienced it. It wasn’t a mission, his mission, it just was. He knew that love, sex however brief or long, could resolve physical problems and emotional and spiritual problems. He did not consider consequences, or attachments. Dr. Bob took everything away. It was a gift.

Most men would never know what any women knew instantly, instinctively about Dr. Bob, the minute they saw him.

John Theroux

He put down the phone and Sage noticed his face had turned ashen. They were both packed up for the Evans Wilderness and their gear and packs were in the living room.
“See you bright and early,” he said to Sage in a strange, tight voice. “Your mother will be back after we are gone.” Sage noted that he had said “your mother” not Mom or “Elle”. So, something was up. She would try to get it out of him during their trip. Lesie was at a party, of course, so she wrote her a note.

John went to their bedroom and stood for a moment in front of their family photos which were on the wall behind their dressers. There were many, in no real order except as they were put up. It was one of the few haphazard things in his life, so he always enjoyed sorting it mentally and placing them in memory.

He stared at their wedding photos. They we so young.

He had first seen Eleanor at a restaurant where she was with some friends and he with his. Her table was loud, lots of laughter and his was quiet, serious, like the men-boys he was with. All scientists or trying to become scientists. Their talk was about exams, papers, certifications, professors, assistant professors, possible internships, jobs. His gaze kept wandering over to the loud table and to one particular women-girl who smiled back at him.

She was pretty, small compared to the other girls and had long brown hair in two braids with red beaded ties. The guys at his table saw him lose interest in their conversation and tried to get his attention away from the “townie girls”. But, in a random and uncalculated act, he stood and walked over to her and said-“I am John,” so seriously that everybody but the girl laughed. “I am Eleanor,” she said and stood up. They both walked out of the restaurant and were together from then on for twenty-two years.

John knew from his advanced physics studies that one haphazard act, one action or motion could cause, at some point in the future, another one to occur. And he was sure, since the beginning, that his love of her was way stronger than hers of him. There was no proof, but he had seen it with his parents and other couples. One was always true and the other vacillating.

There had to be a base to hold two poles apart for electricity to be made and he was the base. She was the current. (He had not realized he had it wrong.)

It was the impending fracture, the tiny tectonic slips that would occur day by day with Eleanor until one day, the quake would happen, he knew. The cracks started shortly after the honeymoon. Nothing definite, just time. Divergent boundaries. He knew that the earth behaved that way so it must be true with life. Eleanor was slipping away, little by little with no evidence until now. The phone call.

“Hi, honey. It’s me. I’m still at Dorothy’s. She is much better but we, I helped her, and the time flew by so I’ll stay the night here. I will put her to bed.” He heard a man’s voice and woman’s laughing. She knew it. “Oh, and that is..is Dr. Ward who comes to check on her. And helps her. So, you guys have a good trip. I know you and Sage will be gone when I get back. I will check in with the station. Don’t forget to feed Arnie. Love you.”

He didn’t sleep that night but lay fully dressed and ready to hit the road with Sage, four am. He could always count on Sage. She was a beacon that shone steadily and strong. Lesie was unpredictably predictable, a sometimes-working flashlight. He loved them both.

He would take the trip with Sage and then face whatever it when they came back. He was relieved a in a strange way, but it was still a soul punch. It took all the reason for what he did every day, away.

Yet, the call reassured him that his theory was correct. A woman is never in a state of equilibrium. The pretense of marriage to contain her can never work permanently. The diffusion of her interest, her attention, her affection will eventually happen.

What he did not know was that even though he had never spelled out this theory to her, Eleanor knew he had it and she had tried since the day they met to bring him over to the illogic and craziness and happenstance that was their love and their family. Despite the drudgery, sicknesses, upsets, bad moods, and sameness of daily life. To her, her family, even him were her one true art piece. And its real magic was being unpredictable with sparks of brilliance and revelation and not subject to man’s laws of physics and geology.

They had never talked about this. It was what made their marriage work and what could dissolve it. So, they avoided any revelation and carried on.

Eleanor Theroux

As she drove away from Dorothy’s house, she felt emotions that were new, liberating and frightening, all at the same time. The heater in the Volvo didn’t seem be warming her up.

She had cooked breakfast for Dorothy who studied her while they both ate.

“Dr. Bob likes to leave early when he stays the night. He says he like to “hike it”.

“Um,” Eleanor said, taking a bite of English muffin.

“I really appreciate you coming Eleanor and…spending the night…”

“Dorothy.” Eleanor looked at her with a frown.

“Just a tidbit?”

Eleanor wiped her face with a napkin.

“Let’s just say I will never forget it, but it may change some things in my, our lives.”

“Shit, no. I feel like I may have caused…”

“No, Dorothy, absolutely not! We…nothing… You know that feeling that we get, I think women get, that maybe we missed something, someone. After having kids and husband and doing everything right.” Dorothy leaned in intently, muffin paused midair. She didn’t know exactly.

“Yes, yes.”

“Well, it is important to face that and see where it leads.”

“Oh. Um. I may not be that deep, Ellie, but I think I get your drift. Particularly when you have kids, a husband, a job, a dog. Job, too. All that complicated stuff.”

“I think you get it anyway. I think it may be in all of us. You haven’t jumped across that cliff, chasm, whatever, and wonder what...”

“Mystical! Dr. Bob! He really casts a spell! All that kundalini rubatini stuff. Sometimes, honestly, I wouldn’t just mind being with a fisherman or truck driver. I am not a catch…”

“Dorothy. You are a catch. You are.” Eleanor took her hand. “Can I come back again…?”
“With Dr. Bob?”

“No, just to see you. And use your homemade hot tub again.”

“Aw, that would be great. And I will get better soon so you don’t have to take care of me. We should have been better friends back in school.”

She helped Dorothy ease onto the couch and kissed her forehead. Dorothy was pretty, she noticed.

The easy part was done.

*

Eleanor pulled over after Pass Bridge.

Deception Pass State Park.

She took the trail down where she could look up at the bridge. It was calm and nobody else had gone down.

She thought about Dr. Bob. The hot-tub, the wine. His body. Her body. She realized she still looked good, athletic, slim, very little cellulite. She hadn’t been naked with anyone except John, the kids when they were young and a few doctors in twenty years.

Dr. Bob’s face had started to glow a bit from the wine and a torch lamp that he had lighted. They hadn’t really talked that much. She had just followed his lead. But a growing urge to laugh started to come over her. It should have been guilt, passion, conflict. It was laughter. She smiled and brushed her hand over her mouth to try to distract herself. It had happened before, but not like this. John’s father had passed, and John was telling her very seriously about it and she could not help herself. It had not been a good moment between them.

“Destruction can lead to creation,” Dr. Bob said. Again, Eleanor stifled a laugh.

“Excuse me. What?”

“The cycle of creation includes destruction for rebuilding and re-creating.”

“That what you tell all married women in a hot-tub?” Eleanor realized that was mean. But was it true?

“Ouch.” He hadn’t touched her yet but wasn’t it inevitable?

“Did someone break your heart, Dr…Bob?” Eleanor wasn’t sure why she said it. The words came out easily with the wine.

“Ramona Esquivel,” he said, quickly and with the first boy-face she had seen. Up until then, he was all man. “She was a medical missionary, married and I was traveling with her and her husband. We fell in love. She chose her Tomas. I left.”

Eleanor let his words die away. She felt her body getting more and more comfortable. She spread her hands over the tops of the water, back and forth.

“You haven’t asked me about my kids.” Dr. Bob swished from his side of the tub to hers.

“Do you want me to?” His face was close. His chest was perfect. Was this, was he what she had missed all those years ago? Yet, she started to laugh, uncontrollably.

“This is a first,” Dr. Bob said. He wasn’t hurt, but curious. He stayed near her. She continued to laugh, and tears fell and fell. After a while she looked at Dr. Bob and saw him clearly. She felt wise, older-No, mature in a good way, like time had suddenly rushed forward and caught up to her with all its latent explanations and intents and it fell into focus, and it wasn’t that serious. She took a deep breathe.

“Well, Dr. Bob. That was fantastic!”

This time they both laughed, and he went to other side of the tub, and they leaned back to look at the stars. Eleanor felt like she had never seen stars so bright before. She had heard John talk about them sometimes after his trips from the park. She had half-listened to him. She had missed it.

Dr. Bob pulled himself out of the tub and helped Eleanor out. He wrapped a towel around her and smiled at her.

“Thank you for the ride.” Eleanor looked at him as he walked away to the porch to the hammock.

“Whoa,” she said to herself getting into the Dorothy’s single, lumpy guest bed.

*

Eleanor looked at the rocky shore of the small island. She was startled by two hikers who had come upon her suddenly.

“Just me here,” she said brightly and with a quick smile. They looked at her knowingly. Good pot. Nope. Just me.

She waited until they were gone and stood up, walked back up the trail.

Halfway, she stopped and looked up at the bridge. It hung magically, an arc between two worlds.

Over a chasm.

She would tell him everything.

She would tell her girls everything.

Lesie would be shocked and disappointed and become her best friend. Sage would be rational and calm and become John’s best friend.

Deception Pass State Park.

Back then the voyagers were deceived by the width of the waterway.

Eleanor realized she had been deceived by herself; not to see the brilliance of stars being described by her husband.

And because of that the time had passed or, none had passed at all.

She hurried up the trail and got in the Volvo. It started up with its familiar, comforting sound.

The Stranger

About halfway across the bay, a stranger on the ferry, noticing tears and shaking

shoulders, offered Eleanor tissues, tea, and a blanket. And a half smile.

In her fifty-one years of riding the ferry, she recognized the face and everything it expressed and could fill in all the specifics. She could read the story, imagine the details, the differences, and similarities, with one glance.

The stranger knew it was the bays, the fog, the inlets, the sound and shimmering sight of water passing underneath, the bridges, ferries large and small, the islands, and all the hiddenness that made the illusion of escape for women so within reach.

But looking at this younger woman’s face, the contraction in the stranger’s older heart brought back her own younger man who had waited for her years ago. And a young family splintered, its ruins never even returned in pieces to the shore.

She sat across from Eleanor, watched her shoulders starting to relax.

Maybe some pieces would float back to this woman, she thought.

There was that chance.

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