9. Jessie
Jessie
We stood at the edge where the shore curved, ice just beginning to form at the margins, the surface of the water still open at the center and reflecting mountains I was going to have to find new words for.
Huge, cold, extraordinarily beautiful in the specific way that places are beautiful when they've never needed to perform it.
"January," I said, remembering what he'd told me in the dark.
"When the light hits the ice right, it's blue all the way through." He stood beside me, shoulder to mine. "I've been walking out here for twenty years, and it still does something to me."
"That's why you stayed."
"That's part of it."
I looked at him. "What's the other part?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Duty, at first. My father patrolled this corridor before me, and when he was gone, someone had to.
Then it became habit. Then—" He paused, searching for the word.
"Belonging. It crept up on me. One day I realized I wasn't staying for him anymore.
I was staying because I couldn't imagine anywhere else making sense. "
"I understand that," I said. "I just felt it in the wrong places for a long time."
He looked at me.
"I confused urgency with purpose," I said.
"The field is very good at that. There's always something on fire and it's always real and it always needs you, and for years I told myself that's what I was made for.
And then one assignment—" I stopped. "I looked around at the work I was doing and I realized I was good at it and it mattered and I was completely hollowed out. "
"So you came home."
"So I came home." I turned back to the lake. "And then you held up a bus and looked at me like that."
"Like what?"
"Like I was the thing you'd been patient about."
He was quiet. Then his hand, healed now, the abrasions closed, the dressings gone, came around mine.
"You are," he said simply.
We stood there until the light started to go. No urgency. Just two people in the middle of their lives discovering that middle wasn't the end of anything, it was the part where you finally knew what to reach for.
When we walked back, I was already thinking about the clinic. About Havenwood. About which of my things in Vancouver I'd actually need and which I'd accumulated as proof of a settled life I'd never quite been living.
The trailhead came back into view, his truck in the gravel, the mountains holding the last of the light above us.
"I'll need somewhere to stay," I said. "Until I find a place."
"The cabin has a proper mattress."
"I noticed."
"The supply run only comes monthly. We'd need to plan."
"I'm good at planning under constraints," I said.
He opened the truck door for me, which was the kind of thing that would have annoyed me from someone doing it to prove a point. From Rob it was simply and attentive.
"Jessie."
I looked up.
"I'm glad you were on that bus," he said.
The straightforwardness of it. Just the plain, honest thing.
"So am I," I said.