Any Port

They’d had a brief but perfect marriage.

Seven days from tip to tail. Seven days from top to bottom.

She’d worn a long cream-colored skirt and a peasant blouse to their union at City Hall. He’d had on his jeans and a suit jacket snagged from his older brother’s closet. They pretended to be grownups. The rings were from Salvation Army.

His band was still on his finger.

It had been decades since they’d parted, but he’d kept track of her whereabouts and she remembered his birthday, and his best mutual friend told him she’d recently been widowed, and she knew that he was on his own and rudderless.

Maybe they’d been too young, or headstrong, too willing to get drenched in righteousness rather than help each other weather the weather.

He’d never stopped loving her.

That was the truth he’d realized when he had stopped dating. He’d never gotten over her.

The rain was relentless, as rain often is. Until it relents. He was solo, and he ended up at his neighborhood liquor store, buying a bottle, walking through the streets wet, as one gets if one eschews rain gear. Which he did. He didn’t like the way raincoats felt.

“That means you just get wet a lot, doesn’t it?”

“I’m not made of sugar,” was his pat response, what the nuns had said, “I won’t melt.”

But instead of walking home, he walked to her house, and he stood outside the door.

He knew where she lived because he’d always kept track. He didn’t want to admit that he’d moved back into the neighborhood hoping they might run into each other randomly.

They had been young, but he didn’t think that’s what had broken them up. It had been the rest of the world, her father, his mother. They’d eloped and been gone together for a week—a truly electric week—and it had rained every day. The motel room ceiling had leaked. They’d never been fully dry, and they hadn’t cared.

One night, they’d gone to a liquor store and bought the same type of bottle he now held in his hand, and they’d headed to a lake, and they’d sat in his truck bed, and drank a little and kissed a lot. Drank a little more, and kissed a little more than that.

They’d whispered plans to each other of the future, a possible future, a future neither one of them would have believed was a fantasy because it felt so real.

But it had been a fantasy.

Out of money, back home, an annulment, which was a lie, because they had. He’d wondered if they’d just gone the other way, would they have stayed together? He’d never remarried. Or married at all, if you believe in erasing reality. He’d dabbled. But mostly he’d just gone where the wind blew him, working here and there, staying in one place for five years at the very longest. He’d lived lean, and he had thought of her. Sending a postcard every so often.

It was pouring now, and he was getting wetter, and there was a light on inside, and what we going to say? What do you tell someone after forty years? When all your postcards every said was, “The weather is beautiful. Wish.”

Wish.

He took a breath. He let it out. He pushed his hair away from his eyes. Dark hair tipped silver. Would she recognize him?

They’d sat in his truck and they’d watched the raindrops on the lake, and she’d climbed onto his lap. She smelled of honeysuckle, and he always thought of her in the spring. But also the fall. And the summer and winter.

He always thought of her.

Things are different now, he knew. Modern. What happened then wouldn’t necessarily happen now. They’d been off the grid for a week. Nobody had known where they were. They’d eaten in diners, and made love on a sagging mattress in the cheapest motel they could find.

After twenty years, he saw her in an airport. She was walking fast, but he knew that walk. He imagined being on the same plane with her, sitting at her side, sharing stories about what had happened since they’d last met. He trailed after her for a few minutes, trying not to appear like a stalker, and he made it all the way to her gate.

But she was heading to a different coast, and he found he didn’t have the nerve.

When he was in her town one random weekend, he’d left pink carnations on her doorstep.

Sometimes, on his birthday, he’d get an unsigned card. Her messages often had to travel to find him.

Deep inside, he believed—he hated to say it he couldn’t even imagine that he did believe it—but he believed in soul mates.

They’d tried to be grownups. They’d bought a bottle of cheap port. She’d joked as the rain poured down on his truck: any port in a storm.

The rain pounded now.

He was drenched.

He remembered her, and the way she’d looked at him, and the way her hair felt, and the way she smiled in the morning.

They’d only had seven days together as husband and wife. Seven perfect days. Come rain come shine.

Sometimes he thought he’d imagined those days. Sometimes he thought that he balanced that week in his memory against all that had happened since, elevated those days in a way they couldn’t possibly have been. The way memories grow hazy. The way the edges become blurry.

And then he’d gotten her letter, that was an invitation. She’d written all that he’d thought, validated his feelings, but included her worry that he might rather recall who she’d been at 21 vs. who she was at 60.

If you want us to stay preserved in amber, she’d written, then let me stay young in your mind.

It was a message in a bottle. Arriving forwarded from one place to another to the apartment he’d rented just in case.

He’d been 21, with no prospects. He’d listened to the authority figures who said they were too young. Didn’t know what they were doing. Had their lives in front of them.

He’d never taken off the ring.

Any port in a storm?

He knocked.