Ghost Ferry

The ghost ferry on the I-5 overpass passed me going the other way, and it didn't even honk. They never do. No driver, no horn, just that low electric hum and a trailer full of somebody's widgets heading south at exactly sixty miles an hour. Twenty years ago I'd have been one of a hundred trucks out there. Now I'm one of about thirty human drivers left doing short haul in the Portland metro, and Moe says even that's generous.

"Willis, you got the Rivergate run Thursday and the airport loop Friday," Moe told me over the radio when I checked in from the yard. "Nothing weekend, so don't call me."

"Wouldn't dream of it," I said.

Moe has been dispatching me for fifteen years. He knows my ex-wife left three years ago, knows I eat the same gas station sandwich every Tuesday, and knows better than to ask about any of it. That's why we get along. I'm fifty-four, been driving since I was twenty-two, and mostly what I want out of a conversation is for it to end.

I got home around four on a Wednesday in April. My house is a Craftsman on a street that's half old Craftsman and half new duplexes with solar panels glinting on top like bad tinfoil. I parked the pickup, grabbed the mail, and that's when I saw the moving truck four doors down, at the duplex that had been empty since winter.

A woman stepped out of the duplex and stood on the front step looking around at the street like she was checking it against a memory. She was maybe forty-nine, fit, short gray streak in dark hair, wearing jeans and a flannel with the sleeves rolled. And I knew her. Before she turned all the way around, I knew her. Lyn.

She looked older, obviously. So do I. But the way she stood with her weight on one hip, one hand on the doorframe, that was exactly the same. Twenty years ago she was a cargo pilot and I was a long-haul driver and we had four months together before she walked off without much of an explanation. I was thirty-four. She was twenty-nine. Then nothing, no goodbye worth the name, and I married somebody else and divorced somebody else and here I was holding my mail with my mouth open.

She turned. I looked away too fast, like some kind of amateur, and went inside. Real smooth, Willis.

* * *

For the next two weeks, our whole relationship was mailboxes. Hers and mine aren't even close, there's four houses between them, but the mail always seemed to show up when she was out there.

"Morning," I said the first time.

"Morning," she said.

The conversation consisted of nothing more. It went like that maybe six more times. Once it was afternoon and I said afternoon instead of morning, which felt like a big innovation at the time. She'd smile a little. I'd smile a little. Then we'd both walk back to our houses like the mail had exhausted us.

The problem is I kept rehearsing things to say. Things like, hey, you used to fly cargo out of Troutdale, small world. Or, hey, you disappeared on me twenty years ago and I thought about it for a solid decade. Neither one of those seemed like mailbox material. So I said morning.

Mei figured it out before I did anything about it. Mei is my neighbor on the other side, thirty-two, works as a greenhouse technician up at the community agriculture co-op, and she treats my yard like a shared project I haven't agreed to yet. She was over pulling weeds I hadn't invited her to pull when she said it.

"You know the woman in the blue duplex, right?" she asked. "You always say hi like you know her."

"Old acquaintance," I said.

"Old acquaintance." She yanked a dandelion. "Willis. You talk to her like she owes you money. That's not an old acquaintance, that's an unfinished thing."

"It's a finished thing. It finished twenty years ago."

"Uh huh. So invite her to the block party."

There's a block party every spring on our street. It's mostly Mei running it and everybody else bringing chairs. I'd planned to go, eat a burger, go home by eight. Suddenly I was being volunteered as co-host of something.

"I'm not inviting her," I said. "You invite her. You're the friendly one."

"Fine, I'll invite her, and you'll be there, and you'll talk like a human being. Deal?"

"Deal" came out of me before I could stop it. That's Mei for you. She got me to put in a rain barrel the same way.

* * *

The block party was a Saturday in May, three weeks after Lyn moved in. Mei had strung lights between her porch and mine, which meant crossing my yard, which meant I'd agreed to something else I didn't remember agreeing to. There were folding tables of food, a couple of the duplex people had brought a speaker, and somebody's kid, well, somebody's adult kid, their son, who was twenty-six, was setting off nothing worse than a bubble machine.

Lyn came at six. She had a paper bag that turned out to be a pie, plum, homemade, which is not a thing you bring if you want to be left alone. Mei seated her at my table. I want it noted that Mei is not subtle.

"So," Mei said, "you two know each other?"

"Barely," Lyn said.

"Once," I said, at the same time.

We looked at each other. She laughed first, and that laugh was the same too.

"Portland," she said, shaking her head. "Of all the cities."

"You picked a duplex four doors from my mailbox."

"I picked a duplex with good solar exposure, actually. The mailbox is coincidence." She was drinking something out of a can, a hard seltzer, and she turned it in her hands while she talked. "How have you been, Willis?"

"Fat and employed. You?"

"Thin and retired." She said it flat, but there was something under it.

We did the surface stuff. She'd been flying cargo contract routes out of the region for years, mostly overseas runs, retired last fall. I told her about the ghost ferries, how they took the long-haul work, and she actually knew about them, more than I did. "Quantum-charge routing," she said, like that meant something. "They solved the charging problem. That's what killed the job, you know. Not the driving. The charging."

"Thanks, very comforting."

She laughed again. Twice in one night.

But every time I got near the past, she slid off it. I said, "Last I heard you were flying out of Boise," and she said, "That was a while ago," and pointed at the bubble machine and asked if I'd ever tried one. I said, "You still talk to anybody from the old outfit," and she said, "Not really," and asked if the gas station on Flanders was still there. It was. We talked about the gas station for ten minutes. It has a good hot case, apparently.

By nine the party was thinning out. Mei was over at the neighbor's table pretending not to watch us, badly. Lyn stood, gathered her paper plate.

"It was good seeing you, Willis," she said. "Really."

"You could say hi at the mailbox sometime. Words, even."

She smiled, and for a second the slid-off feeling was gone and she just looked at me, tired and something else. "Maybe I will," she said. Then she walked home with her pie tin, and I sat there with my beer going warm, and Mei came over and sat down across from me without asking.

"Well?" she said.

"I don't know," I said. "Something's off with her. She answers questions like the question costs money."

"Or she's just private."

"Mei, I've been private my whole life. I know what private looks like. That was private with a lock on it."

Mei chewed on that, and on a leftover cookie. "Then you've got something in common," she said. "Invite her to dinner. Worst case she says no."

I drove truck for thirty-two years. Backing a trailer into a dock two inches off a wall doesn't scare me. Writing down what I wanted to say to Lyn and knocking on her door did, a little.

I didn't invite her to dinner that week. I meant to. I wrote out what I wanted to say on a piece of scrap by the phone, crossed it out, wrote it again shorter. The short version was, "Dinner sometime? I cook okay." That's it. The plan consisted of nothing more, and I still couldn't get it from the scrap paper to her door.

Thursday I did the Rivergate run. Friday the airport loop. Moe called in my hours both days like always.

"You're distracted," he said Friday afternoon.

"I'm fine."

"You asked me to repeat a pickup address you've had memorized for six years. You're distracted." Moe can hear a mood through a phone line. "Is this about the woman?"

"There's no woman!"

"The pie woman."

"Who told you about the pie?"

"Mei told Doris at the co-op, Doris told her husband, her husband comes in for his commercial physical. This is how news works now, Willis. Nobody drives anything anymore, so they just talk."

I hung up on him, friendly, and went home.

* * *

Saturday morning Mei knocked on my door with a casserole dish in her hands. "Leftover party food party," she said. "Lyn's porch, noon. She said yes. You're coming."

"I have a truck to wash."

"The truck is fine. I've seen the truck. Come at noon."

So I washed the truck anyway, which took forty minutes, and showed up at Lyn's porch at twelve-ten with a six-pack I'd bought at the Flanders station along with my usual Tuesday sandwich, which I'd also bought, on a Saturday, out of some kind of nerves.

Lyn's porch had two chairs and a small table and a folding chair she'd set out for me. The other half of her duplex was still empty. Mei put the casserole down and started opening containers like she owned the place.

We ate off paper plates again. It felt like the party's smaller, quieter cousin. Mei did most of the talking, about the co-op, about a grant for the greenhouse, about somebody's water bill. Lyn listened and asked real questions, good ones, and I noticed she ate like a pilot, quick and neat, like the food might get called away.

Then she stood to stack the plates and the casserole dish slipped.

She caught it, mostly. But the glass plate on top, one of Mei's, went out of her fingers and I got a hand under it and we both ended up holding it between us, and for about two seconds I was looking straight at her hands.

They were glowing. Faint, like the light under a phone screen. Along her fingers and the backs of her hands, a pale blue, there and gone. She pulled her hands back fast and stuck them in her pockets.

"Got it?" she said. "Thanks."

I set the plate on the table. Nobody said anything for a second. Mei kept unfolding a bag like nothing happened, but Mei sees everything, so she'd seen it too.

"You dropped that like a rookie," Mei said finally, easy, giving her an out.

"Jet lag," Lyn said. "Retired last fall and my hands still think they're on a checklist."

She laughed. I laughed too, because what else do you do. But my stomach did a thing it doesn't do at thirty feet of bridge work.

Her hands had glowed. I've seen LED gloves. I've seen the ghost ferries' charging yards off Columbia, that blue shimmer over the pavement at night. This was like that. Faint, but like that.

Mei left around two, kissing us both on the cheek like a woman closing down a restaurant. "You two clean up," she said. "Teamwork."

So it was me and Lyn and a stack of paper plates and a wasp doing laps around the sweet tea.

"Your hands," I said. I hadn't planned to say it. It came out on its own.

"What about them?"

"Back there. When you caught the dish."

She didn't slide off it this time. She looked at the wasp, then at me. "You saw that."

"I saw something."

"Static," she said. "Some of us carry a charge. It's nothing."

"Some of us."

"Willis." She said my name the old way, two beats, Lyn the dispatcher of my whole chest. "It's nothing you need to worry about."

"I'm not worried. I'm curious. There's a difference."

"You were never curious enough," she said, and then she looked sorry she'd said it. "That came out wrong."

"No, it didn't. But okay!" I balled up the paper plates. "You know I'm going to ask again sometime."

"I know," she said. "That's why I moved in next to a man who asks again."

* * *

That was April turning into May, party and leftovers, and I still hadn't done the dinner. I got close twice. Once I actually had the scrap paper in my hand, standing on her walk, and her porch light came on and I pretended I was looking at the sky.

Then, the next Wednesday in May, she knocked on my door.

Lyn, on my porch, at seven in the evening, wearing a jacket and carrying a thermos. I stood there in my sock feet.

"Willis," she said. "I need a favor."

"Come in."

"No, it's a driving favor. I need a ride to the coast. Saturday, if you're free. I know you don't work weekends."

"I don't. Where on the coast?"

"Near Pacific City. There's something I have to check. Something I have to see with my own eyes." She turned the thermos in her hands, same as the seltzer can at the party. "And I don't want to take a ghost ferry."