The Other Shore: Two Stories of Love and Death

with one hand, cradles a cup of coffee in the other.

  "No, it's downright mild for February."

  "I think Lily might be coming for lunch today."

  "That's good."

  "Other than that, though, I don't think we have anything else."

  "Seems like there's been a lot of those kinds of days."

  "Things have definitely slowed down."

  "They have," he says, but he doesn't say that the last few months have absolutely flown by for him. Honestly, when he looks at a calendar, he can hardly believe all the time that has passed. It's like he closed his eyes some time in October, and when he opened them it was February.

  And when tomorrow comes, this morning, the coffee, Maddie clutching his arm, it will all enter an indecipherable swirl of time he won't quite be able to grasp.

  "Do you remember much about the night we met?" he asks.

  "A little."

  "What do you remember?"

  "I remember standing alone near the lake, staring up at the moon. I remember the moon was particularly big and bright that night."

  "And you made a wish."

  "I did make a wish. How did you know that?"

  "You told me."

  "I did?"

  "The next day, on the boat, you said you made a wish to God, the moon, the stars, or whatever might listen."

  "I did do that. I was so scared. Desperate, really. I remember feeling as though my life were spinning away from me."

  "You were going to have to marry Henry."

  "It was looking that way. I'd like to say that I was girding myself against it, but things were different then. Sometimes it's hard to remember how things were for us in the fifties. I felt that I had to try and honor the desires of my parents. And there were social pressures. Even though I was barely twenty-two, there was an enormous amount of pressure for a girl to marry right after college. And since I had just graduated hardly two months before, marrying seemed like the thing I was just supposed to do next—the sooner the better. Not to mention that everyone other than me thought that Henry was a great catch. So, I was starting to think that something was wrong with me. But I still believed in love, and I knew I didn't have it with Henry. I wanted to wait for love."

  "Then we met."

  "Yes, and you saved me," she says, squeezing his arm, leaning her head on his shoulder.

  "I've always thought it was you who saved me. I was nowhere when I met you. Like I said, I don't remember anything concrete about my life before I saw you that night. I'm starting to believe you might've actually conjured me from the moonlight with that wish."

  "You never know. It was a magical night."

  "It was," he says, "and it never really stopped."

  "No, it didn't," she says, looking out at the lake, her head still on his shoulder.

  "How did we ever manage to get you out of that engagement?"

  "You don't remember?"

  "I think I do, but I'm having trouble trusting my memory."

  "You proposed."

  "On the boat that day, right?"

  "Right."

  "I thought so. I knew I proposed on the boat, but it just seemed too preposterous to think I proposed that day. We'd only just met."

  "I didn't even know your last name."

  "And I did it with Henry's ring."

  "See, you remember it all as clearly as you ever did."

  The phone rings inside the house.

  "I'll get that. It's probably Lily," Maddie says, and walks back into the house.

  John stays put, stares out at the lake, lets himself drift away on the cold, crawl of its current.

  "Can I see your ring again?" he asked, holding out his hand to Maddie.

  "You don't want that. Let's just forget about it. Besides, it's his ring, not mine."

  "But he gave it to you."

  "Yeah, but on the condition that I agree to marry him."

  "Come on, just let me see it."

  She looks away from him, ignoring him.

  "Don't make me rock this boat," he said, placing a hand on each side of the boat.

  "Okay," she said, grabbing the side of the boat with one hand to steady herself, and reaching into her skirt pocket with the other. She pulls out the ring, and holds it out to him.

  He takes it in his hand, perches it atop his fingertips, examines it. "That's quite a ring."

  "It's big."

  "Very big," he says, still staring at it. "I take it this Henry guy is pretty wealthy."

  "He is, yes."

  "And you? Are you wealthy?"

  "My family is pretty well off, but—"

  "I'm not. I mean, don't get me wrong, my family does alright. My dad has the boat business and all, but we're not rich."

  "Why are you telling me this? I don't care about that."

  "I'm telling you because I want you to take it into consideration when I ask you to marry me."

  "What?"

  He gets down on one knee on the floor of the boat. He places his left hand on her leg, near her knee, and holds up the ring with his right hand. "Maddie, I haven't known you for even twenty-four hours, but you're the only thing I've been able to think about since I first saw you, and I can't imagine wanting to go one more second without you in my life somehow. I don't think I can know that you're in the world and that I'm without you. And I certainly don't want to know that you're out there with someone you don't love, especially when I'll always be here loving you. So, will you marry me?"

  "What are you doing? Are you joking?"

  "No. I've never been more serious about anything in my life. I'm so drawn to you that it frightens me. But, as crazy as it might sound, I'll do anything to save you from being with him, and to save me from knowing that you're with him. So, I hatched this plan to get you out of your engagement, and to save me from losing you."

  She stares at him for a moment, looking stunned.

  "Just say yes. After all, it's just an engagement. No big deal, right? We could always back out—"

  "Yes," she says, tears welling up in her eyes, "I will marry you."

  He grabs her hand, kisses it softly, and then places Henry's ring on her finger. She laughs out loud, a nakedly happy laugh.

  "You know we can't keep this ring, right?" she says.

  "We'll get a new one as soon as we get off the boat."

  "Seriously?"

  "A smaller one—much smaller."

  "Good. I don't want this huge rock on my finger anyway."

  "You're just saying that to make me feel less inadequate."

  "No, really," she says looking at the ring on her outstretched fingers. "It's too loud and obnoxious. It seems like bragging to wear a ring like this. And it reminds me of him. I want something that will remind me of you."

  "Cheap?"

  "No. Quietly confident. Someone who can express emotion with words or eyes or a touch. Someone who doesn't depend on material things to express themselves."

  "You won't have to worry about that with me," he says, smiling at her. He takes her hand again. "How do you feel?"

  "Very happy, like my life trajectory has just shifted in such a wonderfully unpredictable way. And it has. Meeting you… You've just lifted the weight of the world from my shoulders," she says and leans into kiss him.

  He places his hands on her hips and pulls her close. She wraps her arms over his broad shoulders, and they let all restraint go and just kiss. They spend several minutes just ravaging one another. The only sounds that surround them is their breath and the water that slaps against the boat. All other noises of the world, all the pressures, all the judgments were off somewhere being noisy on firmer earth.

  Around the time they found out about John's Alzheimer's, their daughter, Lily, began the long, arduous process of making it her personal mission to keep his memory alive. Even at the time, he knew her efforts would be as futile as climbing a mountain of sand, but he empathized too much with her fears to dissuade her efforts. It's truly terrifying to think of a loved one looki
ng at you with the distance of a stranger's eyes.

  Even John has made his own attempts at memory excavation. This is why he's been combing over the details of he and Maddie's beginnings. It's like he's trying to keep the sinking ship of his memory afloat, though he knows there are leaks popping up everywhere. It's almost as if he's decided there are certain memories he must protect no matter what else he loses. He worries, though, that no memory is impervious to this disease.

  It was Lily who called while he and Maddie were out on the porch this morning. Turns out, she won't be coming for lunch after all, which is fine by John. He loves his daughter, and is always happy to see her. But she's begun to look at him with pitying eyes, and he doesn't feel he has the authority, or the heart, to tell her to stop pitying him. He wants her to look at him the way she did when she was a kid. She used to look at him like he was the most powerful, most perfect man in the whole world. And he tried to be that for her. But now… It's all gone now.

  Whenever she's around now, she peppers him with questions about the past, name-dropping people and places as if she were testing him. And, all too often lately, things have gotten fuzzy. There are names, places that have disappeared altogether. He tries to play it off, says that it's just aging, but he knows that she knows that it's all getting wiped away.

  Still, when she called this morning, she was sure to remind Maddie to get him to go through the photo slideshow she'd made to help preserve his memory.

  This slideshow was a massive undertaking by Lily, and a major part of her effort to keep his past in tact. She must've spent weeks and weeks scanning old photographs, and there were several thousand—boxes and boxes, album after album. She said she had a little machine that did the work, but he knows she spent many hours digitizing them for him.

  Maddie took up photography shortly after