The Wait

Can't be long now.

She lights the wick of a rosemary candle, and the incentary scent is released immediately with the thin spirals of blue-ish gray smoke. Outside, she knows, the sea is the same colour, but the hues are darker, somehow less pacifying. She tells herself that she deserves this little treat, and inhales the sweet odour greedily. It's her anniversary, after all.

For a long while that she does not care to register in seconds or minutes, she gazes, transfixed, at the light and melting wax. When at last she is satisfied, she rises, crossing the room to the chair by the window. The sky is clouded, but not dark. The ocean isn't silent, nor the wind, but there's no sense of drama, nothing noticeably unusual in the weather. It will be a nice day for the long walk.

The door of her cottage opens, and as she steps outside a gust of wind slips past her like a rude visitor and elegantly snuffs out the candle, so that the room at once looks darker. No matter. If she closes the door properly, that pleasant smell won't find any cracks through which it can escape, and will linger, perhaps for several days. She locks, leaving the key in the flowerbed where he will know to look for it, in case he returns before her.

Buttoning up her windbreaking coat against the harsh Atlantic breeze, she makes her way to the cliff. She walks carefully closer to the drop, as close to the edge of rock as she dares, and scans the horizon. Just as she did with the candle inside, but for far longer, she loses herself completely. Like a statue, she doesn't move, only her hair and clothes are caught in the dance of the wind. Green eyes are constantly on the lookout, waiting for a ship that seems, always, on the verge of appearing.

A seagull's cry as it circles overhead breaks her reverie, and without a second glance at the distant waves, she turns toward the path that she walks every year, on this very day.

It is an almost four-mile walk. She picks seven flowers from her well-kept flowerbed, mixing in some heather from the side of the path to compliment her boquet. And then there's nothing but the walk.

The wind grows in strength and is cooler now than it has been for weeks, perhaps months. She shudders and hugs herself, striding patiently onwards. Her knuckles, clutching the flowers that now and then lose white petals to the breeze, whiten, then relax, for every ten yards or so.

She goes through her plans and scenarios. She knows the meal she will prepare for him, she knows there are fresh sheets on their bed. She imagines, yet again, what kind of stories he will tell her about the sea, the sailors and far distant shores that he'll promise to take her to. In her mind, he will  have discovered Shangri La and fought with native savages, and she will listen to his tales in amazement. He'll spoil her with Chinese silk and bracelets from the Ivory Coast. They'll make love at sunset and then walk in the moonlight, and he will bend down to smell her flowers, and at last she will witness his smile again. Like always, the feeling in her stomache tells her that any hour now, he'll be standing in the doorway. She decides to hurry.

Can't be long now.

A cry overhead tells her that the seagull has followed her. She smiles and waves up at the distant scavenger. It feels good to have a companion with her on the road.

The village draws nearer. She can't see it yet, but she knows, she feels it, like she's walking across a a bedroom in the pitch black of night and can sense the lamp, its existence pulsating against her open hands. This, an inexplicable sensation bourne from routine, combined with the lead of the white bird above, will guide her to her ritual destination.

She can hear a car close by, and sure enough, as she ascends a rise in the terrain her path is revealed to be just a tooth in the fork of the paved road. The car frightens her as it rumbles past, and she pauses, hesitantly poised right before the tarmac, until the blue mechanical monster is well and gone in the distance, then she stays yet a while longer. The gull shrieks, encouraging another brave step, and she smiles up at the considerate creature.

Another few units of time that might be hours or minutes, and she can at last see the town ahead. She quickens her pace. This year, it fell on a Sunday, and she is grateful. There are few cars, and blessedly few people to bear witness. There are quite a few more houses, though, and this confuses her slightly. But the signs point her right, and although it takes her a little longer than last time, she finds the old Catholic chapel on the outskirts of the village.

The wind picks up. She opens the white-picket gate and closes it behind her dutifully. Now the way is as clear as it was before the car broke her focus. She manoveurs her way to the family lot, right up against the fence, on the far side from the church itself. 

Kneeling down beside the twin tombstones of her parents, laying her boquet between them, she sobs for a while, very quietly, as befits a mourner of the long dead. This part of her annual pilgrimage is not planned, nor routine. She cries and cries, never expecting it before she sees their names carved in granite and lays down her flowers. And yet again, she doesn't keep track of time. She waits patiently until the seizures of grief have completely subsided. Then she gets to her feet for the homeward journey, glancing at the third dark stone next to her father's.

The one with her name, her birthday and another date, many long and lonely years later. She gives the inscription a brief, sad smile and looks up into a sky promising rain.

The gull is gone.