A Pair of Ibis

by

Ken Sieben

The first thing I see when I open my eyes is a large pink bird flying with a white one, an egret, though whether it's a great or a snowy I can't tell. Hell, without my glasses I can't tell men from women.

But I can see color, and this bird is definitely pink, against an iron-gray sky. Charlotte sees it, too, because she reaches for her camera on the night table.

"There they go," I say, as the two birds fly off together, sweeping out over the river and past the pier next door. They're gone before Charlotte has the lens cap off.

"Was that a flamingo?" she asks. The old Red Skelton routine pops into my mind, along with the recollection that neither of my kids ever thought him funny. Generation gap, I guess.

Anyway, my close vision is good uncorrected, so I'm the one to get up and hunt for our raggedy old Peterson's in the suitcase.

After studying the descriptions and checking the maps, we agree that the bird must be a hybrid scarlet/white ibis descended from a successful rearing of hatched eggs in Miami some years back. And the egret must have been a white ibis. What are they doing so far north? Perhaps they escaped from a zoo.

"I'm sorry you couldn't get a picture," I tell Charlotte.

"I have a mental picture of them, Albert. I'm happy to have come awake when I did."

"Well, catching it on film would have been a great way to start your birthday."

"Waking up with you so we could see them together was a great way to start my birthday."

Charlotte has the most genuine smile I've ever seen, so I know she means exactly what she says.

She harbors no regret over missing the rare shot. Her smile broadens as she adds, "And don't forget, I'm older than you now. I'm sixty-eight."

"I'll catch you next June," I say, then instantly wish I could suck back the words. But Charlotte continues smiling as she tells me, "No, we both know that won't happen and we're not going to let it bother us."

It was Charlotte's smile that first attracted me to her nine years ago. She's a natural person, content with who she is, what she does, and how she lives. I remember rambling on about myself for much too long before I asked what she did for a living, and she smiled at me and said, "I live." What she meant was that she tried to get the most she could out of every experience.

She never frets about the past or worries about the future; she just lives each moment.

In the kitchen I put on a pot of coffee and set the table for breakfast, looking out the window every minute or so hoping to spot the ibis again, but fog is developing over the river and I can barely see the other side. We've rented this little bungalow in Waterwitch Beach for the last week of September because I need to smell salt air and watch the tides rise and fall and see the waves roll in and the sun rise over the ocean and set over the river one last time with Charlotte.

It's kind of funny, as when I finished my twenty in the navy, I wanted to head far inland. But my wife, Helen, had come to love the north Jersey shore during the three years my ship was home-based at the Earle Navy Pier. I figured she deserved to finally put some roots down, so we bought a house.

It's about a mile from here on the mainland side of the river.

The kids went to Waterwitch High while I went to college. Then I started teaching industrial arts at the high school, and Helen opened a little antiques shop in town, and we were really enjoying our life together, especially after the kids went off to college and got married -- until Helen died. She'd been diagnosed with diabetes when she was thirty-five, but controlled it pretty well with insulin for twenty years. Then one bitter cold January day she had a stroke. It put her into a coma which lasted about two weeks before the end came. I was devastated.

Nine months later I met Charlotte at a lean-to in the Adirondack Forest, eleven miles from the nearest road. We'd both hiked by ourselves on the same trail to Spruce Lake, but I had been about a half hour ahead of her. I'd been planning to begin the long trek out after lunch, but it started to snow and we thought it best to hike together the next day. So we spread out our sleeping bags next to each other and traded life stories as we watched the snow fall over the lake.

That was Columbus Day weekend. For years Helen and I had driven up through New York state on the long October weekend in search of antiques, so part of my reason for going was to keep up a tradition, to pay tribute to my late wife. But I'd never been able to get Helen into the woods, so the backpacking part was for me. I'd always wanted to see what lakes and streams really look like from within a forest. On the long drive up and the first day's six-mile hike in, I thought of Helen. I was at the stage of grief where I could remember only the good times and missed her terribly.

When I got home two days later, I still missed Helen. But I missed Charlotte, too. We'd exchanged phone numbers and addresses but something stopped me from calling her. I guess it made me feel disloyal to Helen. Then one December day in the drug store I spotted a Christmas card with a snowy woodsy scene and sent it to Charlotte, with a little note about how much I'd enjoyed talking with her and that I'd be spending Christmas Day with my daughter and her husband. On Christmas Eve a tubular package about three feet long was delivered. When I saw the return address, I guessed it was a rolled-up canvas painting. That was what Charlotte did -- painted wildlife and landscapes.

I think I was as excited as a kid trying to tear the wrapping paper off. And I'd been right; it was an oil painting -- Spruce Lake and its surrounding mixed evergreen and deciduous forest covered with newly-fallen snow. In the foreground was the lean-to from which two pairs of fresh bootprints headed up into the woods. I couldn't get over the way she had captured on canvas the essence of Adirondack beauty. The lake, the trees, the lean-to, the fresh snow-they all looked exactly as I remembered. But the tracks through the snow were what gave the painting its aura of artistry. They showed that two people had been there and witnessed the beauty and the grandeur- and also the potential danger and terror. It was a celebration of life's wonder.

I called Charlotte immediately to thank her and praise her work. She apologized for not having the time to frame it, but I reminded her I was a woodworker; I even had some spruce stock in the shop that would make an appropriate frame. We chatted for a few minutes, then she invited me to spend Presidents Day weekend with her in Lake Placid. I accepted. When I told my daughter and son-in-law about Charlotte the next day and showed them the painting, they seemed surprised-maybe a little disappointed. I'm sure Patty was on the phone to her brother in Phoenix the moment I left…

I return to the bedroom where Charlotte lies waiting for me, having removed her nightgown while I was gone. At home, that is, at Charlotte's little cottage in Lake Placid where I've been living for five years now, we make love at night, rarely in the morning, because one of us usually is slept out and gets up before the other. But whenever we're away, sleeping in a strange bed, she wants sex in the morning, too. This is our first morning at the Jersey shore. I hope I can manage the whole week.

That first time I met Charlotte at Spruce Lake, I sensed that she would be a passionate lover. Of course, when I was thinking about my impending weekend visit in February, I didn't know what to expect. It was thirteen months since Helen's death, almost fourteen since the last time we'd made love. I felt attracted to Charlotte physically but had no idea if the feeling was mutual. I knew she had never been married and that over the years she'd had a few short-term romances with men that she had been fond of but not in love with.

In late January she sent me a lengthy letter which I guess was an offer of permission to change my mind. She'd had breast cancer two years earlier, the in-situ lobular type that's usually treated with removal of tiny tumors and follow-up mammographies every three months.

"But I couldn't see myself going through the anxiety every time I went to see my doctor," she wrote, "so I opted for a double mastectomy. At the age of fifty-seven, my old breasts were sagging so much, I figured I'd be better off without them. I just thought you'd want to know."

I wasn't sure I could pull it off by phone, so I sent her an e-mail: I had always been a leg man and knew how good and strong hers were.

I drove up on Friday after school and arrived around nine, armed with a dozen red roses and a bottle of champagne. She was wearing a red running suit. Her gray hair was combed out and longer than I recalled. She looked beautiful.

She said that the wood stove in the living room made it too hot for the flowers, so she put them in a vase in the kitchen, filled the vase with water, carried it into the bedroom and placed it on the dresser. "It stays much colder in here," she said. "I hope you brought your night cap."

After I carried my suitcase inside and took off my coat, Charlotte offered to make me a sandwich or heat up some onion soup, but I was too excited to eat. Instead, I popped open the champagne while she got us two glasses, and we sat down on the rug in front of the wood stove to talk. Halfway through the bottle we undressed and made love and I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

********

After breakfast, Charlotte and I put on sweat suits and take a slow walk on the beach. We hear birds and boat engines and foghorns all at once, and in the distance a rhythmic clanging. "Is that a bell?" Charlotte asks, stopping and cupping her ear.

"A bell buoy. The nearest one is three miles northeast"-I point in the direction-"but sound travels far over water, especially in the fog, and that's where the wind is from."

"It's eerie-hearing all these sounds but not being able to see their sources."

"Remember how startled I was by that loon on Spruce Lake. I'd never heard one and couldn't imagine such a strident noise came from a bird."

"I remember."

"You know, I love the Adirondacks," I tell her, "but I miss these sea sounds."

Charlotte resumes walking and, after a few more minutes of listening to sea sounds, asks, "Have you decided to move back here permanently?"

"I don't know. I'll admit I've thought about it. I'd be close to Patty and Bob, though that might not be a good idea. I think I've gotten along better with Patty since I've been living three hundred miles away. Maybe if they had children I could be of some use."

"You have two grandchildren in Phoenix."

"Oh, it's great to visit them but I could never live in the desert. I need salt water and green mountains … at least one of them."

"I'm not sure you'd even consider the idea, but I promised Etta Parker, the president of the Art Guild, to mention it. She was wondering if you'd like to stay on as a sort of caretaker. I'm sure you could work out an arrangement to live rent-free upstairs and, of course, have use of the kitchen."

We can hear the terns squawking almost violently now, though heavy fog conceals them from view. They must be working a school of sand eels or spearing. I wonder if bluefish have started chopping through yet.

"Or," Charlotte continues when I offer no response, "I could simply add a lifetime occupancy provision for you in my will. That way they couldn't just kick you out."

"No, they need the room and you made that decision long before you knew me. I'll give some thought to the caretaker idea, but don't go changing your will on my account. I have lots of options."

"Well, I just don't want you to feel any pressure."

I reach for Charlotte's hand and give it a squeeze. "Whatever pressure there is, I'll deal with at the time. Right now I just want to be with you, and judging by that nasty-looking sky I think we ought to head back."

I also don't want to tire Charlotte. Her legs sometimes go numb, which makes walking difficult. Curtailing her walking bothers her more than anything else because she's always had such stamina. Just last summer we hiked the 135-mile Northville-Lake Placid trail again. It took us eighteen days this time but that was in deference to me, not her. She did it in nine once by herself. The good thing, the thing I admire so much about her, is that she doesn't dwell on her declining abilities. She feels the loss but doesn't feel cheated because she appreciates how fortunate she's been. "I try to live each day as if it were my last," she told me at our first meeting. "That way I'll never have any regrets. I hope that doesn't sound too morbid."

It didn't sound morbid to me; in fact, it made a great deal more sense than living in the past or the future. Now Charlotte has the chance to put her theory to the ultimate test. I believe she's looking forward to the experience. I know she's been keeping a journal for me to read after she's gone. Leg numbness was the first symptom that the cancer had metastasized in her brain. When headaches started soon after, she decided it was time to check with her oncologist. But the man who had treated her breast cancer was dead, so Charlotte had to deal with someone new and apparently very different in manner and style.

A MRI scan showed a brain stem tumor that probably could not be removed without impairment of major neurological functions. When Charlotte refused to chance becoming a vegetable, the oncologist recommended twice-daily radiation for five to ten weeks along with steroid medication to relieve the swelling the radiation would inevitably cause. "I'm already an eleven-year breast-cancer survivor," she told us. "All these years I've been prepared for death but not for more treatment. Let's just let nature take its course."

When I suggested this trip to Waterwitch, Charlotte quickly agreed. I think she wanted to watch how I behaved on my old turf and make sure I, too, was prepared. When we get back, unless she changes her mind, we'll continue pretty much as before for as long as she can. She's sent for literature about hospice care and plans to start taking anti-seizure drugs. And, as she told me yesterday on the drive down, "I'll continue to watch my diet and get regular exercise just to give my old body's immune system one last chance to do its duty. That's only fair."

I know what your new state-of-the-art doctor would say about the statistical probability of that happening, I thought. But I kept the thought to myself. At least, I thought I did.

We make it back to the bungalow just as the rain begins. Charlotte sits down at the kitchen table and looks out the window toward the river. "You certainly know this seashore weather, Albert. I thought it would have cleared up by now."

I shake my head and frown, taking the chair opposite hers. "The chances of clear weather today are about as good as that pair of ibis flying by again." I immediately regret sounding so negative, so I add, "Tomorrow, maybe. Once the wind shifts to the northwest, it'll lift the fog and blow these clouds right out to sea."

"And the sun will come out?"

"By early afternoon is my guess."

"Then you'll go catch us some nice fresh fish for tomorrow's dinner? I remember how delicious those flounder were the last time we were here."

"You won't mind if I leave you alone?"

"I'll sit on the beach with you and read. I spotted a seafood cookbook yesterday when I was putting the groceries away. I can look for recipes."

"I catch 'em and you cook 'em?"

"Or else we starve to death. And by the way, Albert?"

"Yes, dear?"

"What were the chances of those ibis being this far north?"

This time I smile. "About as good as clear weather today."

"Well, here's what I think: Just because something isn't likely to happen doesn't mean it won't. Your weather prediction is probably right, but the wind might shift to the south, right?"

"That's not the normal pattern, but it could happen."

"And that might signal the ibis to turn around and fly north again, right?"

"Extremely unlikely, but possible."

"And my body might heal itself, Albert. Now I certainly don't expect that to happen, and I'm not foolishly hoping for a miracle. I know I'm going to die, but if death comes today or tomorrow, I also know it won't be from brain cancer. It'll be from getting run over by a car or being shot by a drug dealer."

I get up and stand behind Charlotte and put my arms on her shoulders. "Suppose the day after tomorrow, we rent a boat and go crabbing."

"I might fall into the water and drown."

"You can wear a life jacket."

"I think you're finally getting it."

"I'm prepared to enjoy the rest of our lives together, Charlotte for however long or short as that might be."

"Then I'm as happy as I've ever been, Albert."

I bend over to kiss her hair and she adds, "But you'll have to cook the crabs. I could never drop them into boiling water."

END

Copyright 2001
by Ken Sieben