Frost at the Coast

Frost at the Coast

            The arctic air blows early, bringing frost, thick, that piles up like snow. Out the window Jane sees the new crystals growing on the porch. They take the place of what she just swept toward the edges of the deck, clearing a path to leave if she must. But she’s not sure she would, even then.

            The wind, heavy with mist, keeps blowing in, across the beach and up the short bluff. When it hits something, like her frozen flower hanging in its pot, it instantly crystallizes, sticks and grows. She tells the devil, out loud, “I guess I owe you this,” as she stumbles out the front door into the storm and sweeps her porch boards again. Her thick, cotton pajamas, and fisherman’s sweater on top, fill out a yellow rubberized rain jacket with matching Farmer John pants and knee-high muck boots.

The salty mist has a freezing point far below the thirty-two degrees she learned about in school. Super-cooled, after blowing off the whitewater of the breaking waves, it spray-paints another coat of white crust onto everything outside. Storms out of the Gulf of Alaska spin counter-clockwise, bringing down the arctic air, growing gales that can blow away a fishing shack on the coast of the Togiak Refuge or bury it in frozen sea water.

            She leans the broom against the outside wall to freeze by itself as her slim legs slide her clumsy boots back into the house. When she gets the door closed behind her and hangs up her slicker top and bottom, placing the boots under them, she prepares to stay in, thinking, If I had known I was going to live this long, I would have had that wall reinforced and insulated, for God’s sake.

In the now-dimming light of mid-day winter Alaska she adds one log to the hot coals in the stove. Chopping thick carrots fast with a big, sharp knife, she stops to pour a box of chicken broth into a pot and finds the lid that fits, for later—not now because she wants the aromas to fill the one-room house first. After crumbling just a test amount of the dried herbs onto the surface of the water she checks to be sure that they begin to rehydrate and mix with the saline broth. Her memories briefly flash to pictures of last summer when she picked and dried this marjoram, thyme and rosemary. 

Then she grabs another two pieces of wood from the pile that she split last summer and adds them to the hearth in the wall across the room, hoping for two real sources of heat. She waits for the liquid to approach boiling before she moves it to a less intensive hot spot on the stove. Slicing an over-sized onion, she slows down to smell the sweetness that comes only from onions grown in the summertime and pulled from this dark northern soil, soil that at one time was either ocean floor or river bottom.

            She sees the three bullet holes in the wall as she moves from the onion to the washed but unpeeled potatoes, quarters them and cuts them again, gazing at the half-white sea through the window.

            And then Prescott is there. It’s not just a hallucination—his car is parked on the side of the road and he’s walking across the frozen brush and      

frost-covered dirt to her porch. Tall and still slim, he’s certain in his stride and heavy-footed in his cowboy boots. 

            “Jane?” he knocks. 

She lets him in, quickly closing the door on the salty snow blowing into the face of the house. He looks at her, pauses, and says, “I remember you now,” something they used to say when there was a long gap between meetings while she was on tour, which was most of the time. 

            Another pause follows. “That stove, even with this fireplace, isn’t going to be enough heat, I can promise you that. It’s starting to come in now, the weather, all of it.”

            He takes charge, and she doesn’t complain, but it feels strange to her to see a pile of logs in the fireplace much higher than she has ever stacked them.

            “There’s a fan,” Jane explains, “It’s battery-operated. It’ll push air through hollow spaces in the andiron and out the front. It’s more efficient than what we had in Malibu. We’ll heat up just fine, you’ll see,” she explains. She knows he’s nervous, so she lets him do what he thinks is best. 

That’s how it always was when she came back from the road, where she earned the three platinum-album trophies on the mantle, wooden plaques with disks that now reflect the orange light of the fireplace, “First Love,” “Best Love” and “Last Love.” 

She never had full-on stage fright, just the stomach-tensing nerves of anyone stepping out in front of tens of thousands of people, so she didn’t mind performing, but she didn’t love it, either. She was proud of her work, but found the travel wearing, and lacking a natural rhythm. Whenever she returned to him, she was always reminded that he could not have handled the life, anyway. He needed to control things, and the road had its own ways. Now she understands the need for control.

            Prescott walks over to the window to check the speed of the growing wind and sees the three bullet holes, in a tight pattern, in the wall a foot to the left of the four panes of glass in the window frame. He fingers them and sees the frost starting to seal each hole as the crystals grow on the outside of the boards.

            “I remember you now,” she says and finally grows a smile. “I remember you just fine. I didn’t know if I would, although I did expect that someday you might find me.”

            “So, may I stay?”

            “You can stay until you’ve gotten what you want, if that’s what you mean.”

            “Well, that’s a deal, but you should understand, I didn’t come over that horrendous road to this edge of frozen Armageddon for sex.”

            “That’s a lie,” she says seriously at first, but then she starts to grin again. “I’ve never known you to do anything that wasn’t somehow, directly or indirectly, related to sex.” Her expression gets flat again.

“I couldn’t put you through it, holding my hand during all that treatment. That’s why I sent you away.”

            “That can’t be your excuse for all the breakups, not all three.”

            Jane’s face turns to thoughtful acknowledgement. “After school, well, that’s what we had to do. We had to go on with our lives, and we had separate paths.  The second time, that was just a star-on-the-sidewalk Hollywood breakup. Life was so wild and hectic on the road, so much screwing around and drugs and drinking. I just thought it was simpler to leave you than to marry you and then divorce you. But the third time was because of the cancer.”

            “Well, now, bullshit. I say we’re a couple, always have been and always will be. I’ll take it all, the good, the bad, and whatever this is. I was always willing to do that—just couldn’t catch up to you long enough to make you believe it. I wanted to be there with you. We were going to go through it together, all of it, no matter what.”

            “Were we?”

            “We still are. I came here to tell you that I sold my businesses—the cattle, the ranch and the restaurants, even the horses. Cashed out. No more waiting for you to come back from tour, or hiding out, or whatever. I’ve decided you and I need to be together, all the time.”

            “Do I get a vote in this?”

            “Only if you’re gonna acknowledge that love has something to do with it. You’ve outlasted your demons. Time to mix some Mai Tais into that daily whiskey habit. This ice is going to get worse, entomb this little shack, and make the winter too long and too dark."

            “Seems like a good way to check out to me, peaceful.”

“My job is to put the hope back into you. I don’t know where it went, but it needs to come back, because of the new treatment, even if you do relapse, which you very well might not.”

            “What’s this now? Hopeful?”

            “Two reasons. One, there really is a new treatment,” he says while holding up a finger. “Two, because you have someone to be hopeful with,” he says louder, flashing two fingers, and walking over to the whiskey bottle and finding a glass.

            She sits down next to the stove.

            “I loved you in school, I adored you as a star, and I loved you when you were diagnosed. I loved you when you were sick and I still love you now, in remission. I want to be with you no matter what comes, and for as much time as we have—which, for all we know, might just be good old-fashioned forever. I’m gonna stay here with you until we get a break in the weather, and then we need to get out of here, together.”

            “Are you telling me it’s time to go back and face the x-ray?”

            “That’s why I’m here, to take you home. Home as in Hawaii, not New York, not even L.A. I bought us a house on the coast near Lahaina, and there you can grow your herbs and flowers and anything else that will grow next to a jungle, which I think is everything.”

            Silently pondering his proposal, she walks over to the last vaseful of wildflowers she collected before the storm. 

“Every day, when I take a shower, the scent of the shampoo makes me remember periwinkle flowers and their sweet, heavy-plant ether. They make one of the 

chemotherapy drugs from those little purple buds,” she said. “As soon as the drugs were injected into my IV, I could smell that scent.”

            “You smelled it? How?”

            “It came out my nose. After it went into the IV and into my blood, it went to my lungs and I exhaled it. Then I learned about Pavlov’s dog. The smell made my brain stem remember my prior treatment, the last time I smelled the fragrance, each worse than the other, and it triggered a hell of a response. The nausea-prevention pill was the first thing to hit the bottom of the plastic bag I had lining the trash can next to my bed. Then I knew I was on my own. But I felt it was right to be on my own. I didn’t want anyone around then, and this isn’t over. 

“This illness doesn’t own you, Jane.”

“I was a P.O.W. I knew I was going to die, and I was tortured every day, and that belief imprisons me each of my days now. I still don’t want anyone in that misery with me, no one at all, not even me!” She pounds on the stove top, forgetting it’s hot, and pulls her arm away quickly as she turns her back to him so that he doesn’t see the tears beginning to form.

            He takes two steps to her and steadies her, turning her to face him, and puts a hand around each elbow. “Even if you do relapse, there’s the new treatment. No more shaving your hair off to avoid watching it fall. No more nausea and vomiting yourself unconscious. It’s an immunotherapy, with an injection of some immune-stimulants into just one lymph node. It unblocks those immune cells in that lymph node. Your own white 

blood cells kill that tumor and then take the show on the road, circulating through your body, and they kill all the tumors.”

“This sounds like science fiction—you know that.”

“You’ve got to come back. If you do relapse, I’ll insist you be considered for the next clinical trial. The first one just finished at Stanford, and now the University of Hawaii is a study expansion site. But you have to be there to sign up, and I need to take you.”

            She pulls away gently and walks over to the window. 

“You see those three bullet holes there?” she says, pointing at the wall. I was the one shooting. There was this guy. I was in town, drinking a little, and getting some company, some of which I liked, and some not so much. I had to yell my sincere disinterest into this one guy’s face, and I left the bar. He must have followed me because I was settling into my number four tumbler when he started walking across my yard from the street, but half a revolver full of persuasion turned him around.”

            Prescott gulps his whiskey and takes his heavy leather jacket off. 

“Do you remember the prom dance I took you to? Where the nuns monitored the slow dances? Remember how we had to keep a safe distance from chest to breast, how they proctored us to ‘Save room for the Holy Ghost!’”

            “I do. Didn’t we have our first sex that night on the couch in your Dad’s basement?” While he’s not answering, she’s pours single malt from her crystal decanter. She pours it into her favorite glass, which is broad and short, allowing the fumes of peat and chocolate to rise to her face, available for her to inhale. 

 “How did you fly in here in this storm, anyway?”

            “I landed a couple of days ago, just before the weather. I have no idea what the pilots have been doing. I hope staying mostly sober. It was concerning when they asked for a twenty-four-hour warning for when we wanted to go, something about a legal requirement of time from ‘bottle to throttle.’”

            Jane looked puzzled, still trying to add things up. “It took you a couple of days to drive out here? I’m only two hours away from the Dillingham Airport.”

            “No, I came right away, even though it was night, but with the winter darkness, it took a little longer. Then I arrived for this less-than-totally-welcoming greeting.” He’s wearing a snap-button shirt, so he just pulls the front open, exposing his hairy chest and his flat stomach. Then he quickly drops the right sleeve, but too quickly, and he grimaces, in some degree of pain. She sees the bandage wrapped around his right upper arm with a little blood seeping through. “I lost a small chunk of me that night, but only one of the three bullets actually wounded me this time, probably just a fragment, actually. I was hoping you were merely in a bad mood, and maybe a couple of days would help. Then I thought coming in the daylight, before the drinking lamp gets lit, might be better. So, I went back to town and found the Emergency Room for some morphine and stitches. The doc overdid the morphine. I had to wait in the hotel for the injection to wear off a bit, so at least I could talk straight. Then I tried coming to see you again, here, today, now.”

            She slaps one hand flat against her chest and the other instinctively reaches out for him. She shakes her head back and forth, now grinning. “Oh shit oh dear, I did that?”

            “Look, taking one through the fleshy part of my arm is easy. It’s when all three shots go straight through my heart, like you do with this leaving bullshit—that’s what hurts.”

            She pauses and walks slowly toward the stove. She picks up the cutting board and slides the chopped carrots, potatoes, mushrooms slices and some minced garlic into the pot.

            “The soup isn’t done yet. We have some time before dinner, I’m starting to see some remaining early-winter sunlight through the cracks in the clouds.” She opens her jar of Italian spices again and tosses in a small handful, which re-starts the herbal aroma circulating throughout the room, combining with the onion’s sweetness. “I mean, you remember how long the carrots can take?” She pulls off her sweater. “And the potatoes can take even longer.”