Coming Together - Anne Wright

Out West

He’d promised. If only he hadn’t told her those words, circled her with his fancy language, and caused her to forget herself, she wouldn’t be sitting in the upstairs window searching for some sign of him. He’d told her he loved her and wanted to marry her when he returned from Alaska. He had some loose ends to take care of.

At first he wrote to her every day, describing the fishing boat and the harsh conditions of wind and cold, how at night the men would sit in the bar and talk about the poor catch, engine trouble, wanting food that wasn’t from tin cans. He told her of the darkness of the days, the black starry sky and the pure white crags of ice floes in the center of the indigo sea.

It was almost Spring. She found her mailbox empty one day, and she worried that her letter was forgotten on a shelf at the postal annex. A week passed before his last letter arrived and she could see from his handwriting, once a swirl of open scrawls, that maybe he was in trouble: the words were tight and pressed into the paper.

It was so short, only a few lines, that she read it before she could exhale. “Things have not been what I expected, and it’s possible I’ll be delayed,” he wrote. She crumpled the paper and hurled it onto the floor, then picked it up and smoothed it, rereading it, thinking she missed something.

It was when the winds ceased and the sun withered the last green stems that she lost her desperation to find some small hope. He was not returning. The truth was set out in the bright light of long days.

One day, while buying some supplies at the general store, she thought she saw him walk by outside the window. Another time out of the corner of her eye, there he was, turning the corner, his long booted legs disappearing from sight in an instant. Some days she could see the back of his faded jacket, and in that moment she’d blink and he’d disappear. When she saw him, his image, what he had been, a longing bubbled up inside and choked her, squeezing stinging tears from her eyes.