the held breath

I drove an hour to get here. The car smelled like the hospital because the cardigan I was wearing smelled like the hospital and the cardigan was now in the passenger seat. I had brought it in case the beach was cold. It was cold. I had not put it on. I was sitting on a piece of driftwood with my hands on my knees and I had been sitting like that for an hour and a half.

The doctor had said any time on Tuesday. The Tuesday before this Tuesday. Eleven days ago. Eleven of any time. I had been counting them. I had not meant to. The counting had started on its own.

The waves were big today. Not violent. There was no wind. They were simply tall. Each one rose up out of the water as if it had decided something, and then, without breaking, slipped back. They had been doing this all morning.

I had watched maybe forty of them. Maybe sixty. I had been keeping count and then I had stopped, and then I had started again, and then I had stopped.

The driftwood I was sitting on was angled. Cantilever, I would have said in 1975, when I was nineteen and still drawing. I had stopped drawing in 1983. The drafting table was in the basement under a tarp. I had not opened the tarp in twenty-eight years. The tarp was its own kind of wave that had not broken.

The big one was forming now. I could see it. It was further out, gathering. I knew before I knew. I felt my shoulders go up.

This is the one, I thought. This one will break.

I watched it come.

It rose. It rose more. The water at its top went thin and translucent, the way water does in the moment before a wave commits, and I held my breath the way you hold your breath at the dentist when you are seven and the drill is about to start, and the wave reached the top of itself, and it paused, and it slipped back into the ocean without breaking.

I let out the breath I had been holding.

I had been holding the breath for forty-seven years.

I had loved him for forty-seven years. He had said what if we just got married, by accident, in 1979, in a Volkswagen, and I had said yes before he could take it back, and we had been holding our breath together since.

There had been a woman named Diane at his office, between 1992 and 1997. She had moved to Phoenix when she retired. He had said her name, once, in the kitchen, in 1995, in a way I would have asked about if I had been the kind of woman who asked about things. I had decided not to be. I had decided at the sink, with my hands in dishwater, that the wave of that conversation would not break that day, and it had not broken any day since.

The cardigan had been with me at the hospital when my mother had died. Same hospital. The smell of it had not changed in fifty years. I had been holding her hand. She had not looked at me. I had waited for her to look at me. She had not looked at me for two and a half hours. Then the nurse had come in, and my mother had closed her eyes, and three weeks later she had died. The wave of being seen by her had been building ever since.

A bird went past. I did not look up at it. The wave behind the one I had watched was forming. It was tall too. It would not crash either. I knew that now.

I did not know how I knew. I just knew.

I had thought, when the doctor said any time, that any time meant a small window. A day. Maybe two. I had not known then that any time could mean any time forever. I had not known that some things rise and almost crash and slip back, and rise again, and almost crash, and slip back, and that this can be a kind of permanent.

I had thought love was the breaking.

I was finding out love was also the not-breaking. I was finding out love was the standing on the beach and watching the wave that should have broken, and not knowing what to do with my body while the breaking did not happen.

I was finding out a great many things had been building for a long time.

The drafting table. The conversation in the kitchen in 1995. My mother's hand. His breathing now. They had all been the same wave. They had all been almost cresting, for years, in different rooms, while I had been holding my breath about something else and pretending each one was the only one.

I had been holding the breath for forty-seven years.

A second bird went past. The wave I had been watching was now nothing. The next one was building.

My daughter would call soon. She would say Mom, where are you, and I would say I went for a walk, and she would say come back, the nurse called. I knew this. I had known this for an hour and a half.

I picked up the cardigan. I did not put it on. I held it.

I walked back to the car.

The wave behind me kept building.

— tilt