Otters
“Look,” she said. “There's an otter!” With a broad smile she handed me her binoculars while pointing to a mass of kelp shifting back and forth in the ocean swell. This path beside the sea on Vancouver Island was a good spot for them. I peered through the eyepieces, squinting at the sun on the water. The otter lay on its back, a sea urchin resting on its belly, the water moving its fur the way wind blows through a wheat field. It clasped the urchin in its paws, while its pink tongue emerged between a fan of whiskers. We watched it break the test, eat the orange roe and then discard the shell fragments.
“That urchin has a long scientific name,” she said. “Strongylocentrotus purpuratus.”
“Good to know,” I said.
***
Her breathing may be too shallow to cause a movement of the pale blue coverlet. From the doorway I look at her huddled form in the bed, a tiny figure that neither sinks far into the mattress nor creates much of a hump under the bedspread. They have told me she is dying; that’s why I am here.
She has drawn up her knees to form a slender zigzag mound. Always rather slight she is now disappearing, and I am reminded of coming into an unused bedroom to discover that the cat has dug its way under a bedspread to spend a quiet morning.
The long dark hair I remember is now grey and cut short. She had a course of chemo before Christmas.
I move towards her, thinking about what I might say, walking on the edges of my leather-soled shoes; there is no rug on the yellow pine floor. My neck muscles relax with the distinct sound of her swallowing, and my fingers unfurl from tight fists, before they clench again. 50 years have passed since we have seen each other; living on her own for so many years she will have thought about what to say.
Gazing at her sleeping form, I try to recapture what hides within me. My wistfulness is as much born of my failure to remember, as it is from the recall of some poignant image, some moment in our past. Why can't I remember our good-bye, the end of it?
I am 70 and she is 75. She is dying of leukemia while I visit her likely death bed. And my feelings bother me. I ought to be thinking of her, but instead my focus is inward, on myself, my emotions, my unease, me. Was it the same back then?
A hard upright wooden chair stands beside her bed; I sit on its edge, perched, careful not to scrape its legs along the floor, concerned it may creak if I sit back. Her breathing is regular and shallow.
A smell of some cleanser partially covers a lingering suggestion of bedpan; the windows are closed on this rather warm and stuffy room where a buzzing spring fly fusses at the window for a moment before it plops onto the sill to continue exploring on foot. There is no way out.
I flinch when she abruptly stretches her legs. She rolls towards me smiling. “I heard you come in; I must look a fright.”
“No, you don’t,” I say, and she doesn’t. I can see the woman I knew in this face whose skin is drawn tightly over familiar cheekbones. Her widow’s peak is there above a forehead smooth and unlined. Her mouth is the same, its corners suggesting a recurved bow. She smiles again, raking her fingers through her hair. With a sigh, she hikes herself up on her pillows. Her eyes have not lost their sparkle, and her chin, raised as if awaiting an answer, is the chin I remember. Her eyes blink; her tongue emerges to wet her lips. She often looked back over her shoulder at me, her head tilted to the side, her eyes clear, holding my gaze.
Moments pass. She asks if I will pour her a glass of water. A jug and tumbler stand on the bedside table. I pour, looking at the cover of a book lying there, a British mystery. I hand her the glass and pick up the book saying: “I read this; it’s quite good.” These are my first words, spoken in a voice that isn't mine.
“It’s complex,” she says. “I keep losing track of who’s who.” She smiles again, more relaxed than I am. It is her room, her home, her life. “Maybe I’m not paying close enough attention.”
She looks down at her fingers. Then, without warning, she plunges right to the heart of what hangs between us. “There is no unfinished business, you know; what we had was long ago, we were different people.” She pauses to look up at me. “But it wasn’t trivial, I know that. It wasn’t trivial.” Her lips compress forming a social smile below a now wrinkled brow. I wonder what she has seen in my expression. A moment passes before her face clears. “I have been thinking about us," she says. "You know how you might see something in nature that fills you with pleasure, something unexpected, exciting to witness, but necessarily fleeting? Like one of my wild otters that lets you watch it play for a moment, before it slips out of sight? That’s what it was like.” She raises her eyebrows; her smile is real. “And much has happened since.”
I nod.
But I don’t agree exactly. He was away that summer, in the arctic collecting data. I was a graduate student with few plans. I can see the headlights that illuminate the autoroute I sped along while I watched the kilometer markers flick by. More than an hour passed before I ran up to her door, breathless, to try the knob. She glanced to left and right along the street, before pulling me quickly into the house. There were no lights, but a shaft of moonlight caught children’s toys scattered underfoot, and her husband’s briefcase on a chair. Her face, now lifted to me, twisted into a frown, her lips compressed in a concerned line, her eyes narrowed. I felt the hopelessness of the situation. This was her home, her life.
We met in the countryside, climbing over fences to make our way to secluded spots under trees on soft grass. I spread a blanket, she unpacked a lunch. We sipped wine and made love, swatting the odd mosquito, shifting our weight to escape an uncomfortable twig or rock. Then we would lie back to watch clouds. We held hands, her head on my shoulder, her hair with its shampoo scent close. We escaped.
In her front hall at three am, in the life where I didn’t belong and never would, I was shushed by her raised finger. Her children were asleep upstairs. I saw no future.
An otter, bobbing on its back amongst the kelp weed, a sea urchin on its chest, the sun dancing about it, is pleasing to view. But when it dips below the surface, not to be seen again, you aren’t left with a distinct pain in the pit of your stomach and an icy feeling in your chest. You are still interested in food and don’t find yourself sketching its picture on envelops. You don't find the curve of its lips precisely rendered in the margins of your notebook. I held on to images of her fingers grasping a pencil her way, of how she would draw up her feet to sit cross-legged on a couch, of how her ponytail swung when she walked, and of her greeting smile. I kept these in a partition of my memory where they slowly faded but never altogether disappeared.
“What are you thinking,” she asks, and I return to her sunny room.
***
This is how I have imagined her, with the white walls, the yellow pine floor, the buzzing fly and the light blue bedspread. But like a glimpse of an otter it was too quickly over. She died before I could visit, leaving me with this imagined encounter. It is a flash in the sea under bright light on a morning when otters swim and life and regret stare hard at me.
CHARLES COLEMAN is a retired biology and physics teacher at Colorado Academy and now finds time to mine his past for memoir ideas. Ten years studying marine biology in Scotland, five summers in the Galápagos Islands, and many treks in the Amazon rainforest combine with a Canadian childhood to give him his material.