Receding

In September the sea turned cold, and he began to recede.

Not all at once. A notch at a time. First the lighthouse fell off our walks, and we shortened to the breakwater. Then the breakwater fell away, and we were down to the front steps. Then the steps, and what remained was the distance from the bed to the chair by the window. His world drew in ring by ring, quietly, no protest — the way the tide leaves a beach, each retreat one line lower than the last. Watch it and you see nothing move. Look back and the wet sand is very far away.

My body receded with him.

Nobody warns you about this part. On his pain nights, my own bones ached without a cause. The afternoons his fever climbed, I'd be downstairs in the kitchen when a wave of nausea rolled through me. I blamed exhaustion — until one night, asleep in my own room, I dreamed a wet cold stone pressing on my chest, so heavy I couldn't pull a breath — and woke at the exact second the coughing started next door.

I sat in the dark, and the last piece fell into place: Italy. Those flutters of panic. Positano — the cold, in full sun, seeping outward from inside the bones. Borrowing the mirror was never just watching. My mirror faces him; when he sinks an inch, my water shivers an inch, no matter which sea I'm standing beside.

I told him. Debated it a long time — we had our protocol, but protocols exist to be broken.

He listened, and was silent a long time. Then he said: "I'm sorry."

"Not this again."

"Not for that." He looked at me — those eyes thinned down to their color now, still that grey-blue of northern water. "Daisy, I need to ask you for something. It's a large thing."

"Ask."

"Don't block it." he said. "I know what you're doing. You don't sleep, you count my breaths, you keep sliding yourself underneath me like padding under a falling object. But I'm not falling. I'm receding. Those are different events. Falling is an accident. Receding is—" he considered, and chose his family's word, "—receding is the tide, going where it goes. You can't block a tide. You can only stand in it until you're as cold as it is."

"So what would you have me do?" My voice came out sharp, because my throat was burning. "Stand on the shore and watch?"

"I'd have you with me," he said. "With. Not between. They're different words."

That afternoon he slept long and deep, rare for him now. I sat in the window chair and watched him for the length of it, taking those two words — with and between — apart and reassembling them a few hundred times. When the low sun came in he woke, unusually bright, eyes lit.

"I've decided," he said, like a man announcing a long-plotted scheme. "Next week, you're coming with me to the cottage. The summer one. From when I was a boy."

"Sure — depending on how you're feel—"

"Not depending." he said. "Next week." He looked at me, and laid the words down one at a time. "The flowers are open, Daisy. I asked my father this morning. He says this year they've come in better than any year he can remember."

My heart missed one beat.

I didn't know why. Truly didn't. Only that in that instant, somewhere in the room, something swung open a crack — something very old, very familiar — and through it came a draft that smelled of salt, and underneath the salt, faint as a signature, flowers.

"Okay," I heard myself say. "Next week."

He said: a tide you can't block, you accompany.

When I agreed, I didn't yet know the place he was inviting me to was the one place I'd already seen ten thousand times.