Crossing the Strait

I leaned on the rail at the stern and watched Dover shrink behind us. The cliff lights got smaller and then they were just a smudge, and then nothing. Fifty-three years old, three weeks into a solo job in Kent, and I had booked a night ferry crossing for no reason I could name except that my rented cottage was quiet in a way that had started to feel like pressure in my ears.

The sundeck at the back had a strange little garden. I hadn't known ferries carried gardens. It was a rectangular plot maybe eight feet by four, raised bed, lavender and rosemary, with a small brass plaque saying the nuns of some order had planted it decades ago and the company kept it up out of tradition. Most of the passengers were inside at the bars. The wind out there was serious. The rosemary was flattened sideways and still smelled sharp through it.

I was alone for about ten minutes. Then I heard heels on the wet deck and a woman came around the lifeboat housing, stopped at the garden, and lit a cigarette. She cupped the lighter against the wind and swore at it twice before it caught.

She turned to shake the match out and stopped.

"Ronald?"

I knew the voice before I placed the face. Twenty years will do that. Then it placed itself and my stomach did something I wasn't ready for.

"Dianna," I said. "Dianna Jacobson."

"Oh my god!" She laughed, and the laugh was the same, low and quick at the end. "Of all the boats in all the seas." She came over and we did the awkward dance, hug or handshake, and settled on a hug that lasted a beat longer than a polite one. She was fifty-one now and looked it in the good way, lines around her eyes, gray coming in at her temples that she wasn't hiding. She'd been beautiful at thirty and she was beautiful now, and neither of those facts helped my balance any.

"What are the odds," I said. "I'm on this ferry because my cottage was too quiet. That is the entire plan. Ride to France, drink coffee, ride back."

"Get in line," she said. "I'm moving to Calais. New contract. I packed up my whole flat in Norwich and I'm crossing at night because the daytime crossing makes me sick."

"What's the contract?"

"Hospice. Palliative unit outside Calais. Eighteen months, maybe longer." She took a drag and looked at the cigarette like it had betrayed her. "I quit these eleven years ago, by the way. Tonight doesn't count."

"Tonight doesn't count," I agreed.

We leaned on the rail and told each other the last two decades in compressed form. She'd finished nursing, gone into hospice work, married a man named Peter for six years, divorced him without drama, and never had kids, which she said plainly and without sadness, the way you say something you checked a long time ago and found to be simply true. I'd kept the carpentry shop, built bespoke staircases mostly now, the kind that cost more than cars, had one marriage that lasted four years to a woman named Camila who decided she'd rather live in Bristol, and no kids either.

"So you're the fancy staircase guy," she said.

"I'm the guy who measures twice and charges three times," I said. "It's honest work. It's just quiet. I live alone, I work alone, and I take a ferry to France because it's louder than my kitchen."

She looked at me then, really looked, and something in her face opened up. "Ronald Reese on a ferry because it's too quiet. Some things don't change."

"What's that mean?"

"You always talked like a man telling on himself. You just never noticed." She flicked ash into the wind. "You're still alone too much. I can tell. I do this for a living, you know. I sit with people in their last months and I can smell solitude on a man at forty paces."

"That's a terrible professional skill."

"It pays well," she said, and we both laughed, and the laugh broke something loose that had been sitting in my chest since Dover.

We walked the garden's little perimeter while we talked. She told me about the dying, in the unflinching way she'd always had. She said the work had made her honest, because you can't spend your days next to people running out of time and keep pretending your own time is infinite. I told her about the staircase I was building in Kent, a spiral in oak for a couple who fought the entire time I was in their house and cried when they saw it finished. She said that sounded like most marriages and I said probably.

Then she reached into her collar and pulled out a pendant on a thin chain. A little silver diving bell, tarnished, the size of a thumb joint.

"You still have that," I said.

"I never took it off." She turned it in her fingers. "Guernsey, 2005. You bought it at that awful souvenir shop because the ferry tour guide said the bell divers used it and you got that look on your face."

"I got what look."

"The look of a man about to spend eleven pounds on junk because a story touched him." She smiled. "I told you it was junk. You bought it anyway and put it on me before we got back to the hotel and I wore it every day after. Peter asked me about it once. I told him it was from a trip and changed the subject."

I remembered that week with a clarity that embarrassed me. The harbor, the rented room with the crooked window, the way she read in bed with one knee up. I had been thirty-two and she thirty. She'd ended it that autumn for nursing school in another city, and she'd been kind about it, and I'd been mature about it, and it had still taken me two years to stop checking my answering machine out of habit.

The tannoy crackled overhead and a crew member's voice announced something in French and then English, night shift change, passengers to keep clear of the aft deck crew areas. The garden lights dimmed. The wind picked up and Dianna shivered in her thin coat.

"My cabin is 214," she said. She said it fast, like ripping tape. "Lower deck, starboard side. I have a kettle and bad tea and a window that doesn't open, and I would like to keep talking to you somewhere the wind isn't trying to kill me. If you want. If you'd rather not, that's fine too, and I'll see you at the coffee machine in Calais and we'll say wasn't that funny."

"I want," I said, before she'd even finished. "Yes. I want."

"Okay," she said, and exhaled, and I understood she'd been holding her breath for the answer. She stubbed the cigarette in the little bin by the garden and we went inside.

Her cabin was narrow as a coffin and twice as warm. Bunk bed, folded to a single, a porthole with black