The Bell Tower Date

My cousin Sheena has been telling me for years that I'm set in my ways. Not stubborn, mind you. Set in my ways. There's a difference, apparently, and the difference is that stubborn people at least argue back.

"You eat the same breakfast every day," she said last Tuesday, over coffee at her kitchen table. "Oatmeal, Tuesdays and Thursdays you add raisins. That's not a life, Lloyd, that's a bus schedule."

"I like knowing what's coming."

"You're sixty-four! When are you going to do something unplanned?"

I'm sixty-four, and I've been happily single since I was twenty-eight, which is when Haley and I decided we were better as friends. Thirty-six years of deciding my own schedule, and honestly? It's been lovely. But Sheena has this friend who has this cousin, or maybe a cousin who has this friend, and somehow that became my problem.

"She's a climbing guide," Sheena said. "Sixty-two, divorced ages ago, funny as anything. She works at the bell tower in Trinity. Lloyd. Say yes and I'll never mention your oatmeal again."

"You'll mention it by Friday."

"Wednesday. Say yes."

So I said yes, out of spite more than anything. That's the honest version. I figured the worst case was a dull hour and a story for Sheena. The best case was that I'd get to stop hearing about my raisins.

Then, the night before the date, I did something unplanned, and it wasn't even on purpose. I was at the thrift shop looking for a decent jacket, and behind the counter there was this battered green duffel bag with an airline tag still on it. The girl at the register told me it had been sitting there for two years. Unclaimed lost luggage, shipped in from St. John's, nobody ever came for it.

"Nobody knows what's in it?" I asked.

"Nobody's bought it, if that's what you mean. We're not allowed to open it, technically, but..." she shrugged, and I understood the shrug to mean that technically went about as far as you'd expect.

I paid eleven dollars for it. Eleven dollars for a mystery! I didn't buy it as a gift, exactly. I bought it because I panicked. What do you bring a woman who climbs church towers for a living? Flowers seemed thin. A bag of somebody else's lost belongings seemed like a conversation, at least. Or a crime. Fifty-fifty.

The bell tower in Trinity is attached to one of those old churches that's older than the country that sells postcards about it. I got there at seven, exactly, because I am who I am, and the bag was heavier than I remembered. I stood at the bottom of the stone steps looking like a burglar who'd gone soft.

"Are you Lloyd?"

She came down the stairs from inside the tower. Grey hair chopped short, climbing shoes hanging off one shoulder, jeans with honest-to-God chalk dust on one knee. She looked me over, then looked at the bag, and her whole face did something delighted.

"Silvia," she said, and stuck out her hand. "And you've brought luggage."

"Is that a problem?"

"It's the best thing anyone's ever brought me, and I once had a man bring me a live lobster. Which, this is Newfoundland, so the lobster was arguably romantic. But the bag! Where did you get it?"

"A thrift shop. It's unclaimed airline luggage. I thought... well, I didn't think, honestly. I saw it and thought, that's a conversation."

"Eleven dollars says it's mostly socks."

"How did you know what I paid?"

"You have the face of a man who haggled and lost." She was already pulling at the zipper. "Come up. There's a bench up there and the light's better, and if I open a stranger's suitcase at the bottom of a dark stairwell it'll look bad."

I followed her up. The stairs spiral, stone on the outside, worn wood in the middle where four generations of feet have gone. She talked the whole way up, not even winded, which I found obscene for a woman of sixty-two.

"I climb the tower Tuesday through Saturday," she said over her shoulder. "Maintenance checks, the bell rope, the viewing platform for the tourists. Most people think it's a boring job. It's not boring, it's just quiet, and there's a difference!"

"What's the difference?"

"Boring means nothing happens. Quiet means everything happens slowly." We came out into the bell chamber, ropes hanging down like the world's worst maypole, one big bench under the window. She dropped her climbing shoes on it and patted the space beside her. "Sit. Open the bag."

"You don't want to?"

"It's your bag. You paid eleven dollars, you've earned first pull."

So I knelt on the stone floor as a man praying to a duffel, and unzipped it. Silvia leaned in. The smell that came out was old perfume and airplane, which I will note smelled like an airport in 1998, that is to say like duty-free and carpet.

"Oh my God, a blazer." She pulled out a navy jacket, women's, size tag gone. "Someone flew somewhere important and never got their clothes back. Look, there's a receipt in the pocket."

"There is?"

She fished it out. "Hardware store, Corner Brook. Paint, drop cloths, a paint scraper. That's not a business trip, that's a renovation."

"Or a very dull affair," I said, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down.

"A dull affair. In Corner Brook. 'Meet me at the paint counter, darling.'" She wiped her eyes. "Oh, you're funny. Sheena said funny, and I thought, sure, Sheena thinks her accountant brother-in-law is funny because he does voices."

"I'm Sheena's cousin, not her brother-in-law, and I don't do voices."

"Even better, I got it wrong already. That's a good sign. I like a man I can be wrong about." She dug deeper. "A paperback. A hymnal? No, wait, it's a novel with a hymnal cover. Somebody was hiding their reading from somebody."

"From a spouse, probably."

"Or from a mother-in-law. Or from themselves. People hide books from themselves all the time." She held it up. "Should we play?"

"Play what?"

"The game. Obviously. Someone packs a bag, someone loses a bag, and we invent them. Who were they? Where were they going? Why Corner Brook? It's the best game in the world and it requires nothing but a stranger's laundry."

"You do this often?"

"I do this every time I find something lost. It's why I like the tower. People leave things in the viewing platform, hats, glasses, one prosthetic leg, no kidding, and I sit up there and make up their whole lives." She looked at me sideways. "Unless you'd rather talk about the weather. We could do that too, if this was going to be that kind of date."

"It is not going to be that kind of date," I said, faster than I meant to.

"Good." She patted the bench again, and this time I sat. "Because I get one hour of weather talk per season and I've used mine up on tourists. Now. Blazer, novel, what else is in there?"

I dug. A man's dress shirt, a tie with ducks on it, a camera, and a small wooden box that rattled.

"Oh, careful with that one," Silvia said.

"Why? Is it a bomb?"

"It's obviously not a bomb, Lloyd. It rattles. Bombs are quiet, that's the whole trouble with them." She took it from me gently, which I noticed, and shook it once, next to her ear. "Dice? Or buttons?"

She opened it. Inside were six dice and a folded note, and she read the note and went still, and then read it again.

"What? What is it?"

"It says," and here she had to stop and breathe, "it says 'Winner picks the restaurant. Loser tells the truth. See you in Trinity, R.' It's a date. Someone was coming here for a date and lost their luggage."

"Coming here? To Trinity?"

"It's postmarked here. Look at the stamp." She shoved the note at me. "Two years ago somebody planned the best date in Newfoundland, and their airline ate it, and they never... do you think they rescheduled?"

"I think they probably went home and had a normal dinner."

"That's so sad. Lloyd. Lloyd. We have to finish their date for them."

"We do not."

"We absolutely do. They never showed, so the date is unclaimed, like the bag. It's sitting there. Unclaimed." She was up off the bench now, pacing among the bell ropes, and I want it noted that she gestured with a duck tie while she did it. "We play the game, we figure out who R is, and we finish the evening they lost. It's the polite thing to do."

"It is not the polite thing to do, it's a wild thing to do."

"Those overlap constantly. Haven't you noticed?"

I had not, actually. In thirty-six years the wild and the polite had kept very separate offices in my life. I looked at her pacing in the last of the light, chalk on her knee, holding the tie like a trophy, and I thought, Sheena is going to be insufferable.

"Fine," I said. "But I get to be R."

"Why you?"

"Because I paid eleven dollars, and you said that earns something."

She stopped pacing and grinned at me, and it was a real grin, the kind that crinkles everything. "Deal. R. Now pick up those dice and shuffle them, you've got a reputation to invent."

"Shuffling dice is not a thing," I said. "That's not how dice work."

"Everything is a thing if you commit to it. Come on, up. We can't play the game down here in the dark like ghouls, we have to go up. The tower has the light and the view and the bench I personally consider mine."

"You have a bench?"

"I have a bench. Forty-one years I've climbed things and this bench has the best attitude of any surface I've rested on." She scooped up the duck tie and the dice box and headed for the stairs like someone who owned the building, which in a way she did, since she was the one with the keys.

The stairs were stone and narrow and corkscrewed the way old church stairs do, and about two turns up I asked the question. "So these guided climbs you do? People pay you to walk up here?"

"People pay me to not be stupid about it! Which is more valuable than it sounds. There's a door up top, a hatch really, and a winch, and the bell rope runs down through all three floors. On Tuesdays I check the rope for fraying, Wednesdays the pulleys, Thursdays the platform boards, and Friday and Saturday I take small groups up if the weather agrees, which around here it usually does not, bless it."

"You have a schedule."

"I love a schedule. You spend enough years on rope and you learn the difference between a routine and a rut. A routine keeps you alive. A rut drops you off the lighthouse." She said it lightly, the way people say things that used to not be light at all.

"You worked lighthouses?"

"Twelve years. Then ferries, then a stint rigging for a film crew that treated me like an oracle because I knew which knots held." She stopped on a landing and put her hand flat on a rope hanging out of the dark. "Feel that. That's the bell line. It goes up through the ceiling on a drum, and there's a brake up top that would take your thumb off if you were rude to it. Everything in this tower is honest. It either holds or it doesn't, and it tells you which one it is before you bet your life on it."

"That's more than most people do."

"Isn't it though." She kept climbing. "The hatch is the last bit, it's heavy, give it a shove with your shoulder, mind the frame."

The top room was small and open to the weather on the viewing side, with the big bell squatting overhead like a fat bronze relative who arrived early. The last of the sun was out on the water, all orange and gold and showing off. The harbor sat below with its boats and its little wake lines, and somewhere a gull made a complaint about something.

"Oh, that's decent," I said, which was the understatement of the year, and Silvia knew it.

"Decent. The man says decent. Lloyd, I have watched sunsets on four continents and this one is in my top five, and I don't say that to flatter the sunset."

"Where's your bench, then?"

She pointed. It was an old plank bench against the inner wall, worn smooth in two places, which I guessed were where she sat and where she put her coffee. We sat. She put the dice box between us like a centerpiece. The wind came through the openings and it was cold in a clean way, and she handed me a thermos without asking, which I decided was the correct way to handle me.

"Rules of the game," she said, pouring. "We draw an item, we invent the owner. Full name, history, reason for travel. You can't say 'I don't know.' You can't say 'probably a salesperson.' Commit or lose a turn."

"Those are strict rules."

"The strictest. Ready? Item one." She reached into the duffel with ceremony and pulled out a long scarf, navy and grey, wool, expensive-looking, the kind of scarf that has an opinion about itself.

"Ooh," she said, holding it up to the sky. "Oh, this is good. This is not a local scarf. Look at the weave. This scarf has been to Milan."

"It's been to a thrift shop in St. John's."

"Lloyd, we're not doing facts, we're doing truth. Truth is bigger." She draped it around her own neck and became, instantly, someone else. Shoulders back, chin up, a woman who has never once waited in a queue. "There. Meet her. Fiftyish, maybe fifty-five, travels for work, something elegant and slightly ruthless. She buys scarves in airports. She has four just like it in different colors and she thinks of them as one scarf."

"One scarf in four colors."

"One scarf in four colors. You're getting it. Her name..." She looked at the water for inspiration. "Her name is Beatriz. Beatriz is an art restorer. She flies into St. John's to look at some church ceiling that's flaking, and she is furious about the flaking, personally furious, because nobody has maintained it properly and she takes that as an insult to her whole profession."

"Beatriz sounds exhausting."

"Beatriz is exhausting. That's why she travels alone. Men propose to Beatriz roughly once a year, on airplanes, and she says thank you and returns to her crossword." She wound the scarf tighter, considering. "She came to Trinity two years ago to see the flaking ceiling, and she brought luggage because Beatriz does not travel light, and she lost it, and did she come back? No. Beatriz does not return for lost things. Beatriz buys a new scarf and moves on."

"You've thought about Beatriz a lot in the last thirty seconds."