Unbearable heat. Nothing else to talk about but the sweat on the backs of necks and the uncertainty of weather. Winter Island dreads this kind of heat, the kind that breaks people. The kind that draws people into dark caves. The kind of heat from which even after a swim, there is no relief.
Me explaining the growing of roses is me explaining that it’s like the cycle of a woman—all her waiting, and watching, and sprouting, and dying. There’s an exact window of time to plant a rose bush. It comes with strict rules and science, and there are miracles involved. I say this to Liam. I say my window of time is now. I’m trying to say everything.
Tommy has gone back to Rook, this time farther, somewhere in San Diego County, to a small apartment with a pool. When he calls to tell me about the pool, I can think only that life must just be longing and longing. Maybe it’s my broken heart, the losing of so many things after all the years. What’s really on my mind: I may no longer be the person I once was. But I can muster up the courage only to say, Is it hot out there, too?
“Unbearable,” Tommy says.
The dogs have been slow. The cats, lazy. Our bodies not ready for the kind of mainland heat that has been desecrating our island. The Earth has been changing, the news tells us, and now, we are living in the extremes.
I ask myself, when Liam is away, or when he’s sweaty, or asleep with his full head of hair in my lap, whether I was ever not living in a moving sea of change. And sorrow. And joy. And whether I have been living too quietly. Or too loudly. I ask myself, while touching the earth that feels like fire, whether I have been forgiving. At least to myself. When this forgiveness finally happens, really happens, like a pop in the brain, everything after slows down. This evolution of us is slow. It lingers. This is what I say to Liam. And things about the unbearable heat, and our unbearable love.
• It has taken 25 million years for whales to learn to be whales.
• They have enormous hearts.
I agree that an air conditioner will save us. The final thing we will need to be our real selves. To find our truest love. We get the truck serviced before we take it to the ferry, then we sit on the ledge watching for seals as we pass through the channel, before driving off into the heated and congested streets of Los Angeles, to the hardware store that sells the discounted air-conditioning units. Liam drives on the way there, and I say I’ll drive on the way home. He wanders through the lighting, the plants, the sinks, the carpets, and then there are only a few air conditioners left.
“I think this one will work for the bedroom, at least,” he says.
The box has been damaged, and a receipt has been taped to its side, but we don’t care if it’s damaged. We buy it anyway, because we are suffering, and when the checker asks if we want a bag, the joke goes unnoticed, because we are hot, and worried that our island is no longer ours. Not in this heat.
Liam says we should explore the mainland, that we don’t need to be back soon, and I don’t say that I have plenty of work to distract me. The truck’s AC is working steady. I agree. Even in the traffic, the heat, the smog, it’s nice to be cool together. Though the small of my back is sweating against my shirt and the seat, we keep driving, with the nearly broken unit fastened in the back. I keep checking out the window, at the sun, the big box, everything.
“I tied it down pretty good,” he says.
The rest of the world exists outside this truck. There are so many streets, freeways, people. Sometimes, that’s everything I want. We take the coast north, through the loathsome Malibu traffic, and then we wind past the county line into Oxnard, then Ventura, then past my mother’s hill, all the way to Santa Barbara. Liam pumps gas, and I buy bags of bad snacks. From the gas station, we can see the rest of the Channel Islands. I point to the island where a woman was left behind, and I say her grave is nearby. I say she was dead in only a few weeks after the white men took her to the mainland and fed her things like wheat, and gave her diseases.
I don’t ask where we are going, or when we will stop, and as we inch alongside the uneven edges of California, I begin to calculate how long it will take to get back, until I don’t care anymore. Until the sun is not overhead and I’ve stopped counting the hours.
We stop at a diner, and we sit on the same side of a booth, our bare legs pressed against the seat. Our thighs meet. We acknowledge that we hate this kind of people, the kind of lovers who must always touch. We say we are not those kind of people, even when Liam feeds me bites from his fork. We share a slice of pie.
There is more driving, we trade off, and neither of us asks the other when to stop. We just keep going.
Once, Liam let me take a lick from his ice-cream cone. Knowing that his tongue had touched the ice cream first. It must have been the end of our first week. Our second date. It has been the most courageous thing I’ve done in my life. We’d spent so much time together in the beginning there was a quickness to our commitment, and we holed up in the lighthouse listening for rain. He said he loved me, underneath the blankets, and even if our love were to last forever, that he’d have to eat. That we’d have to go outside, and live like people, and go get things like food and toilet paper.
I liked us standing together, him so much taller than me, everything different than me: his sandy-blond hair and broad shoulders, blue eyes, freckles and sun damage, and bad hearing. His strength from pushing and lifting and swimming and moving. I was so drawn to him, his holding my hand even if I started to let go. I worried about having a man in my things, in my home, one who wanted to stay forever.
When I met Liam, I said something terrible and dramatic, something like, Hey, men always go to the sky or the sea. He told me something like, But I’m always going to be with you. I can’t remember if I told him I loved him, too, but our lives crashed together, and even when he was gone, I could feel him deep inside my bones. At first, it was so easy to be anyone we wanted to be. Then we had to learn to be ourselves. To say what we wanted. To decide what we wanted together, too.
A side-of-the-road woman asks if we want to pay the hourly rate for the room. Sure, we say, and Liam and I rinse off in the shower and I don’t wash my hair, and we collapse on a bed together because driving is tiring. It’s so late, we say. Running away is tiring. Evolving is exhausting. I have set an alarm to wake us in four hours, when there will be light, when we will check out of our hourly motel. We sleep tangled in the double bed closest to the air conditioner in the window. We play Twenty Questions until we’re almost asleep. I ask him if he remembers the ice-cream cone, and my tongue against it, but he’s already dreaming.
• Tympanic bulla: the part of the whale’s ear that hears echolocation
• What if we could know when all the unbearable things were coming?
In the daylight, we stop at a zoo in Northern California and stare at the hippos. There’s a man with khaki pants and a khaki shirt standing on a rock, saying that this hippo, the big one he is pointing to below in a pool of water, is related to ancient whales. I roll my eyes, and Liam is proud that I know more than this khaki-colored man.
I follow Liam to the apes, and they are loud, banging on the glass, and he tells me that he wishes the animals were not in cages. He says he wishes they were free. But I explain how captivity works: They are bred into it. They cannot survive without the cage. He slumps onto a bench made of a massive slab of redwood and places his hand over his heart. He believes that they might make it on their own. Sometimes, things can overcome those kinds of pressures, he says.
We eat the zoo fast food. It’s still hot, even up north. We look at a map of California.
“I should call Tommy,” I say.
There is a standoff, and neither of us asks when we should go back. We keep the silence.
I have thought of other islands, the entireties of mainlands, the caverns to explore, and I tell Liam, as we keep driving, that if he wants, I’ll leave Winter Island. That maybe we should try fly-fishing in Montana. That I’m ready now, to be anything with him, anywhere, and that I’m sorry it took so long. I’ll need all of him from now on.
From a McDonald’s parking lot, we can see the faraway kind of mountains.
“I’d live anywhere with you,” I say.
He leans his head on my shoulder and dips a French fry into my ketchup, and everything smells like trees and grease. He tells me he loves me, more than anything could ever love anything, that he’s sorry for hiding for so long in the light and the dark, and he checks the back to make sure the air-conditioning unit is still secure for the ride.
We have been cracked open again. Maybe for a second time, we are in love.
“I think we can make it back for the seven a.m. ferry,” he says.
• Whales evolved because they had to.
My roses need to be in the ground for a few months before the first fall frost. They must establish themselves before it gets cold. Before they go dormant. Liam and I sweat while working on the garden planters that line the house. He offers much of his time to repair what the spring storm damaged. It’s the longest he’s been home, and there is a list of things to fix. The porch steps, the broken windows above the garage, the bleached coral from the too-warm waters, and us. Everything, slowly, is being mended.
We talk of donating Ferry Lands to the public, or selling it to rich men, or moving to the top of a mountain, or trying to do it all underwater. But we keep moving and working and fishing and mapping and living so that we don’t make any decisions with consequences. We work on our house, our flowers, ourselves, and we continue to sweat. The machine that makes the new, cool air, helps. We sleep soundly.
Liam isn’t bothered when I work through the night, and he attends the fundraising events for the Sea Institute throughout the summer. He wears the same cheap suit each time, and I rotate through a series of dresses my mother has given to me over the years. He says I look beautiful, though I take off the heels on the way there and the way home. Some nights, we rent hourly motel rooms on seedy blocks in Los Angeles, and other nights, we are perfect parents and have dinner with Rook and Tommy.
It feels like there is so much change, but nothing has changed at all. I live a few blocks from the house where I was born, and some mornings, we walk by, dog leashes tied to our hands, and Liam asks me all the questions that have no answers. Some mornings, there are answers, and we talk for hours.
His fishing money lasts us for a few months. We spend most of our days locked in our bedroom, touching, working, reading, or sleeping. It’s the only space that is cool enough to keep us calm. We do the rest of everything in the darkness, because it’s the stillness of dark that is most comfortable. We keep the lights low, the oven off. We eat cold salads and other things from the fridge. Sometimes we suck on ice cubes. The dogs are restless, and they are panting, and they spend most of their time nestled in dirty towel piles on the bathroom floor.
• Humpbacks are nothing like their ancestors, except for their wild energy to endure.
One night, I tell Liam that I don’t want him to go. That I want him to take only the local charters. Or to clean the bottoms of boats. That we don’t need that much money. That we aren’t obligated to buy Tommy backpacks and shoes anymore. That I’d eat from the garden each night and sleep under a moon if it meant he’d stay with me. I’m not sure I say it as articulately as I imagine, because I really want to say: I’m ready now to love you forever, even though I’d already promised that.
In the morning, he makes me say it again. Then, in the afternoon, too. He wants to hear it, again and again, until it’s become a funny poem that he says when he makes scrambled eggs for dinner. Then, it becomes a song. So loud that everything can hear.