Part 12 (1/2)

”I'm the boss of you always.”

”Not true.” I was trying to smile.

”No one will ever love you as I have.” He got the words out and stood there a moment, then closed the door and slipped out into the night.

After he left, I opened the card. ”Christina Christina Christina Christina I miss the name-I've started notes to you many times that could have burned holes through wood.” Before I reached the end, I fell apart.

That's the thing about timing. It has nothing to do with love.

That January, the film about Stieglitz and O'Keeffe was finally happening. My part was smaller, but I was excited. No longer a feature, An American Place An American Place would air on PBS's would air on PBS's American Playhouse American Playhouse, with Christopher Plummer as Stieglitz and Jane Alexander's husband, Ed Sherin, directing. In the interim, I discovered that Dorothy Norman was still alive and through friends was able to meet her. Oddly, I had grown up around the corner from her modern town house and had pa.s.sed it on my way to school each morning. Glancing up at the strange, gla.s.s-block windows, I'd always wondered what it would be like to be on the inside looking out.

At the end of February, as soon as the love scenes with Mr. Plummer ended, I got on a plane to c.u.mberland Island. Behind, in my apartment, were red roses from John, now dried, that I hadn't managed to throw out, the comforter he'd given me at Christmas, and a letter asking me to wait for him. In it, he wrote how difficult the separation had been and how he might have done things differently.

He went on to describe the recent funeral of Murray McDonnell, outside of whose barn we'd had our first kiss. In the eulogy, one of Mr. McDonnell's sons had said that most of his father's life before he married was spent trying to capture the heart of his wife, Peggy. ”I thought, that's me,” he wrote. ”I spent most of my teenage-adult years trying to capture the heart of the girl next door-you. I realize you can't be in contact, but it can't be that way forever. Let's wait a season or so and see what the times bring us. The stakes are different now and I understand what they are. In the meantime, I think about how cold it is outside and I hope you are warm warm warm.”

On c.u.mberland, I stayed with friends. I slept and I read. I walked the soft paths. I rode horses on the north end and gathered clams and oysters for midnight feasts. I played with my friends' towheaded children, and we hunted for arrowheads in the marshes near Dungeness. Gogo Ferguson, Andy's sister, had invited me. ”Come, I'll take care of you,” she'd said. And she did. Slowly, in a place that held memory, I began to shake the sadness. I tried not to think of his letter. There were shards of hope in it, hope that pulled at me, hope that had become what was most painful.

The day before I left the island, I walked the wide beach alone and wondered if my heart would ever heal, if I would ever fall in love again. I spoke aloud as if the air would answer. At the lip of the sh.o.r.e, pipers, oystercatchers, and gulls stood as silent witnesses facing the sea and a bruised sky. It had been warm for February, but now the wind was picking up, and thick clouds rolled in from the west. The winter beach was different from when I'd walked here with John almost five years before. It was littered with moon sh.e.l.ls and the broken backs of horseshoe crabs. Soon it began to rain, spotting the pale sand gray.

A red truck drove up alongside me. It was Pat from the Inn. His hair, once wild, was short. He leaned over the pa.s.senger's seat, and we caught up. He was married now with daughters. He asked if I wanted a ride back to Greyfield.

”Thanks, I'm going to walk.”

”Looks to be a downpour.”

”I'll take my chances.”

He stared at me, bemused. ”You've changed.”

”How's that?”

”You don't remember?” He grinned as if it were an answer. ”You don't, do you?”

I shook my head.

”When you first came here years ago, you really really didn't like the rain.” didn't like the rain.”

It took me a moment. A dry truck. A flowered dress. August heat. A boy I loved. I began to smile, remembering. ”No...No, I didn't. But I like it now, I like the rain.”

I watched as the truck pulled away. It turned inland, got smaller, and disappeared over the high dunes on the path to Greyfield. I dug my hands into my pockets and kept walking. I walked past the Rockefeller gazebo and the Nightingale Trail. I walked past a herd of horses at Sea Camp and the salt marshes near Dungeness. I walked as far as I could on the empty beach in the cool winter rain.

I had bought him a compa.s.s, but I never gave it to him that night. It was there in the pocket of my jacket as I walked, my fingers warm on the metal. I kept it with me for a time-in a drawer or on my bureau; sometimes I held it. Until one day, without knowing how, I could no longer find it.

He had called me his compa.s.s, but he was wrong in that.

He had been mine.

After

Remembrance is a form of meeting.

-KAHLIL GIBRAN There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.

-THORNTON WILDER

It was early June 2000, almost a year to the anniversary of his death, and I was driving across the country with a man I was in love with, afraid of the grief I would feel the closer we got to New York and July 16. We'd been in the Grand Canyon for two nights, and John had been present in my mind. He loved this place. Ten years before, we'd planned to go, but a play had kept me in New York, and he had gone without me. I got a postcard from him, telling me how much he loved it, how hot it was, and how he would have much preferred me in the sleeping bag next to him rather than his friend Dan, aka Pinky. ”Ha! Ha, Baby!” he wrote.

There's a picture he gave me: John in a tank top, green-and-black nylon shorts, mirrored gla.s.ses, and hiking boots, dancing the funky chicken in celebration of the seven-thousand-foot descent on the Bright Angel Trail. The light is failing, and there are shadows on his face.

On the drive northeast to Durango the next day, we stopped at the Navajo National Monument to see the ancient cliff dwellings. We paid the fee and walked through the small museum. My friend went on ahead while I lingered by the headdresses and the labeled pottery shards. When I was done, I stepped into the open-air courtyard and began to cross toward the turnstile entrance to the dwellings across the gorge. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a small girl, maybe five, twirling like a dervish for an older couple, who sat with folded hands, watching. You couldn't help but watch. Half-wild in a dirty T-s.h.i.+rt-with hair in her mouth and her arms spread wide-she lifted her face to the sky, as if she was pivoting from the very center of her heart.

What freedom, I thought. I used to be that girl: asking people in airports if they wanted to see me dance, singing songs in kindergarten I made up on the spot instead of bringing a favorite toy to show-and-tell. I had a dispensation from Miss Mellion and even a t.i.tle, ”Make-Up-Song Girl.” I used to be that girl and I wasn't anymore.

I smiled, dazzled by the heat. Then, at the turnstile, with my eyes on the ruins ahead, I heard her say something to her grandparents, to the bright sky, and to no one in particular. ”Do you know where John Kennedy is?”

How odd, that I should pa.s.s by just now. Maybe she meant his father. Maybe I hadn't heard right. The heat.

She kept spinning. ”Do you know know where he is!” she insisted in singsong. ”In the ocean?...Noooo. In heaven?...Noooo. In the Indian spirit world?” She paused briefly, then answered herself, ”Yes! Yes! He's in the Indian spirit world!” where he is!” she insisted in singsong. ”In the ocean?...Noooo. In heaven?...Noooo. In the Indian spirit world?” She paused briefly, then answered herself, ”Yes! Yes! He's in the Indian spirit world!”

Laughing, sibyl-like, she spun faster.

I stood for a moment, half-expecting her to disappear. When she didn't, I lowered my hands to the s.h.i.+ny metal bar in front of me and pushed until it clicked. I didn't look back until I'd reached the bench where my friend was waiting. I sat near him, unable to grasp what I had just heard. Across the gorge, shadows began to dart like swallows from the ancient portals in the rocks, and finally, when I could speak, I told him the story.

It was only later that I knew, on a trip I took alone to Gay Head and the lighthouse, to the wild gra.s.ses and the smooth road near his mother's house called Moshup Trail and the view of the sea where the plane had fallen. I stayed at a bed-and-breakfast nearby, an old whaling captain's house, with sand on the floor and a ball-and-claw bathtub in the small room. It had been eight years since he'd died. I needed to go back, but on the ferry from Woods Hole, I argued with myself. What are you doing, you don't need to come here; you've already said your goodbyes What are you doing, you don't need to come here; you've already said your goodbyes.

At dusk, on the day before I was to leave, I walked back from the beach through the thick dune to the road. It was September and warm, and for some reason I thought of the girl. I'd remembered her from time to time, as if she were a piece of a puzzle. Her spinning; her words; the laughing. And the precarious fact that my lingering over a particular shard of pottery had made me a witness.

By then, the sun had fallen fully, vanis.h.i.+ng into the water at the end of the cliffs, and I knew, in that violet light, miles and years from where it had happened, that I had been given a gift among the rocks and the wide sky of the Anasazi. One of acceptance.

I believe G.o.d speaks through others. Maybe John's spirit is at peace in the places he loved. Dancing in a canyon. Swimming off the Vineyard. Flying in the clouds. In all the wild places, where he was free.

On May 3, 2004, I was driving north on Highway One thinking about silence. When the car began its climb up the narrow coast road, pa.s.sing the sign that divides Monterey and San Luis Obispo counties, I opened the windows and let the sea breeze in. It was the heat of the day, and the sky was cloudless. On the pa.s.senger's seat beside me was a white cowboy hat with a blue jay feather tucked in its brim, a present from my friend Rebecca. Tomorrow was my birthday. I would turn forty-four, and I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer.

I had seen the heavy wooden cross sunk into the side of the road at Lucia many times in my sojourns to the Central Coast over the past fifteen years, but I'd never stopped. Like a pilgrim to the s.e.xy stuff, I kept moving on to the heart of Big Sur, to the places whose names were chants-Deetjen's, Nepenthe, Esalen, Ventana. But less than two weeks before, when I heard my surgeon, Nora Hansen, say the words that left me with none, when she held her blue eyes steady on me as I cried, I knew this was where I had to come. I knew that somehow, in this place I'd never been, I would be changed. Against the advice of doctors and family, I delayed the second surgery and booked six days of silent retreat at the Hermitage, a Camaldolese Benedictine monastery high in the Santa Lucia Mountains.

At Ragged Point, I stopped for gas and to stretch my legs. I had driven more than 250 miles from LA with only the radio for company, and for the last hour or so, it was static. Harleys in caravan roared by on their way to San Francisco. Silence. A silent retreat Silence. A silent retreat. What was I thinking? Was I crazy? I'd been baptized, and my bloodlines stretched back to the peat of Galway, Cork, and Kerry, but I wasn't sure I was still a Catholic.

And how could I be silent? In the past month, my mind had become like an unruly child, chattering, wandering, obsessing over details, ever since the mammogram report came back ”Birad IV: Suspicious Finding.” Sleep meant nothing; stillness was a memory. I spent hours on the computer memorizing medical studies, percentages, risk factors. I stared at the ghostly pattern of calcifications, a crescent of moondust on a negative. To the handful of people I told, I talked of nothing else. I was gripped by fear-fear of death, fear of change. I had no script for what was happening to me. And at that moment in the parking lot at Ragged Point, I was terrified of silence. I pulled the top strap of the seat belt under my chest so it wouldn't hit the st.i.tches, and started the car anyway.

At Lucia, I came to the cross I had pa.s.sed before and took a hard right. The long afternoon light had begun and rabbits darted on either side of the car. I downs.h.i.+fted and drove up the two-mile dirt switchback. At the top was a simple church built in 1959, the flax-colored paint faded. A bookstore stood alongside it, with the monks' enclosure behind. The smell of chaparral was everywhere.

”We've been waiting for you. Welcome.” Father Isaiah was a slender man, bearded, in a white robe and Tevas. We had spoken on the phone two days before, and as he led me to the retreat house, a semicircle of nine rooms that faced the Pacific, he explained the rules. Silence was to be observed except in the bookstore. Meals were to be taken alone in one's room. Food and showers could be found in the common area at the center of the house. A hot lunch was prepared daily. If I wished, I could join the monks for the Liturgy of the Hours, but it wasn't required. Nothing was.

”Vigils begin at 5:30 A.M A.M. And Lauds are at 7:00.”