her eyes are as wet as the ground beneath their feet. Those brilliant blue eyes are shining in the moonlight, and he wants so badly to kiss her, dive into those Caribbean blues, but there is a bang and a burst of sudden light in the sky.
Fireworks.
John is up. The sun won't rise for at least another hour, but he'll stay in bed until it shines. He doesn't want to risk waking Maddie, who's softly sleeping beside him.
He was halfway between sleep and wakefulness when he saw her standing near the boathouse. It was sixty years ago, and, yet, there she was, awash in moonlight, standing in the damp grass. That image of her, that moment, lived and moved forward as if it were playing out on the projector of his mind.
John's memory of that evening is still remarkably clear. That singular image of her standing in that white dress is as clear to him as any memory. Seeing her shoes dangling from her hands, it might as well have just happened. But the rest of what happened that night is less clear. The conversation they had that night is mostly a mystery, but his sleepy mind has no problem filling in the uncertainties. He does know that she grabbed his hand that night, and that he knew in that moment how easy it would be to love her.
But the fireworks… Well, he's not sure. They were certainly popping into the memory, but they might've been one of memory's clever embellishments.
As the scene ended, he felt fully awake. Maybe it was the fireworks. But, suddenly, he was faced with the darkness of the night. And he immediately knew in his bones that he was not a young man, not the man from that memory. It occurred to him, quickly and cruelly—nothing is as cruel as the certainty of time—that almost sixty years had past, and that he was old and losing more and more of himself everyday. He also knew that he wouldn't be finding sleep again on this morning. And, he was slowly reminded, these hours in the morning will be among his only lucid hours of the day.
Ever since he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's several years ago, he's been losing more and more during the days. At first he would just zone out for a minute or two, not quite knowing where his thoughts had wandered. But then he started to lose larger portions of time. Minutes became hours, and then eventually he started losing entire evenings. He's heard one nurse refer to him as a sundowner. It's a term some in the health care field use to refer to someone who goes further away as the day progresses.
Truth is, he doesn't know how he got to bed last night. He can't remember the last time he knew how he got to bed. And, worse than losing his evenings, he's begun losing whole days altogether. Not just recent days either. He's losing entire pages from his past.
This is probably why he's holding so tightly to this picture of Maddie in the moonlight from the night they met. That's the last thing he can afford to lose. He can't imagine what he would have left to live for if he were to lose those beginnings with Maddie, if he were to lose all the reasons he fell in love with her. Would he forget that he loved her? It's unfathomable, and yet it's a very real fear. And, so, he's been playing the story of their beginnings over and over again, trying to hold tight to the loose sand of his memory.
Still, he knows it's a battle he will eventually lose. And, as he looks over at Maddie, watches her quietly breathing beside him, he wonders how she's coping with it all. How is she dealing with losing him in bits and pieces? The guilt he feels in these moments is immeasurable. He knows how much of a burden he's become. She tries to put on a brave face, tells him that things are fine, that it's not as bad as he thinks, but he knows it's not true. She can no more escape the certainty of his perpetual fade than he can. But at least he is spared having to witness his long absences by the sheer fact of his goneness. She has to watch, everyday, her once vital husband be slowly erased. And each day is a microcosm of a painfully slow erosion of a man, her husband. Sure, he has some hours every morning to remind her he's still inside the aging shell of his skin. But then she has to watch his fade. She has to see him go quiet, go elsewhere, move behind the mask of his face and travel somewhere she can't go. And she has to watch this disappearing act everyday. She has to watch him climb into the fog of his present, and know that he's fighting that fog from enveloping what's left of his past.
And he knows that she knows that one day he'll stare off into the distance and never come back. One day he'll be enveloped by the fog.
He sits up, rests against the headboard of their bed, careful not to wake her. Her body eases up and down under the blankets with each sleeping breath, and he thinks of how much smaller they've both become over the years. It's not just a physical presence that has shrunk away, but something vital and important has deflated in them. A spirit and a confidence has diminished in them, a spirit and a confidence they didn't quite know existed until they began to lose it.
Still, for all the diminishings that come with aging, John is still a large man. He's not particularly overweight, but he is quite tall. And when he thinks of Maddie struggling to get him into bed every night, it breaks his heart. When he thinks of the pain and the trouble he's given her these past few years, he's ashamed, embarrassed by his ever-increasing decline. He used to be strong, used to carry her to bed before love making. And, now, he depends on her to get him into bed. It just isn't right.
And the past few months have been the worst. The worry of how bad things might be on any given day has had to take its toll on her. Even though she has remained the portrait of patience over these past months, he knows it can't last.
John has already volunteered to move into a supported living facility. They even visited a few places last winter. At first, they planned to move into a place together. This way Maddie would have access to on-site help with John if she needed it.
They did find a place they liked just a town over, only about fifteen or twenty miles away, but they decided to hold off a while longer. As long as he still had lucid days, they didn't want to surrender their house on the lake. They both loved it too much. That house had become a symbol of their life together. The idea of getting rid of it felt like they would be selling away all the memories it held. Also, they knew that if they left they would be surrendering any hope of future independence. There would be no going back.
The finality of it scared them.
But things have changed since then. Though only a year has past, his lucid hours have dwindled, and once he fades, he almost never comes back. His late afternoons and evenings are almost completely dark to him now. But, even in his lucid hours, he doesn't get around as easily as he did a year ago. And, honestly, neither does Maddie. They both move slower and with less easiness then they used to. When you get to be their age—both just a nose over eighty—each step becomes a possible tragedy. One bad step could mean a never ending hospital stay, or, worse, a surgery that you might not survive.
So, he's been offering lately to go stay at the facility alone. Maddie could ride up every morning for a visit. She doesn't drive anymore, but their daughter, Lily, has said she'd drive her up everyday. But Maddie won't have any part of this plan. And John understands her reservations. It would definitely mark an ending to a life they've shared together for almost sixty years. He can't imagine looking over in bed and not seeing Maddie's form, watching her breathing under the blankets. No matter how small she gets, she is his touchstone.
Still, he knows that the day is coming when she won't be able to handle him anymore, and when that day comes, he wants to be sure that he has given her his blessing to let him go. She can't risk injuring herself, and once he loses his mornings, what will she have left to hold onto anyway? All he'll ever be is a shell of himself, and that can't be a good thing for her to be reminded of constantly.
He looks at the clock. It's just after six a.m. He doesn't want to lie here and feel sorry for himself all morning. But Maddie won't be up for at least another hour.
So, he allows himself to go back to the boathouse, to visit that image of her standing in the moonlight. The lake is covered under the slightest fog, the kind that hovers after an evening's rain on a hot night. As he digs deeper i
nto the memory, he watches the fog burn away until all that remains is the moonlight withering over the water.
He remembers telling her that night, as she was leaving him, that he was at the boathouse in the afternoons if she ever needed to talk. He wanted to give her a reason, any reason, to return to him. And from that day on, he knew he would spend every afternoon that summer on the deck of the boathouse until she came to him. He would find any excuse, any work to occupy him there. And he knew that he would spend every remaining day of summer with an eye out for her.
But he didn't have to wait long.
The next day, in the middle of the afternoon, as he was standing outside sanding the hull of a newly built dinghy, he felt the shade of someone standing over him. It was her, and he knew then that her arrival marked the beginning of something magnificent.
"You came," he said.
"I did. I probably shouldn't have, but I did."
"Couldn't stay away, huh?" he asked, smiling at her, though he could barely see her expression through the brightness of the sun swarming behind her.
"You might say that," she said.
He shielded his eyes to block the light as best he could, and he could see now that she was smiling, and