The Cannery Watch

The cannery at night is a big dead animal. That's how I think of it, anyway. Ten years closed and still breathing a little, pipes ticking, wind pushing through the broken vent on the north wall.

I've been the night guard here for two years. Five nights a week, eight hours, walking the same route. It pays the rent and it asks nothing of me, which after my divorce sounded like exactly what I wanted.

I did my rounds like always. Front doors, locked. Loading bay, chained. The old processing floor, empty except for pallets and a rusted forklift nobody ever sold. My flashlight made a small circle on the concrete and that was my whole world for most of the night.

Fifty-two years old. Divorced three years. Twenty-five years married before that, which is a long time to go from sharing a bed to sharing nothing. My doctor says my blood pressure is fine. My sister says I should get out more. I say the night shift suits me, which is a lie we've all agreed not to examine.

Here's the part I don't tell people. There's a cardboard box in the office down the hall, tucked behind a filing cabinet where nobody looks. In that box is a woman's blouse, cream colored, silk-ish, and a pair of low heels. The blouse was Alex's. I took it out of a suitcase in 2019 and never said so, and I have never been able to explain why. The heels came out of the plant's lost-and-found. Some nights, when the building is quiet and nobody's coming, I put them on. I don't fully understand it. It started maybe a year ago, out of nothing but boredom and a strange feeling I got holding the fabric. It calms me down. It makes the loneliness feel like a choice instead of a sentence.

That night, a Thursday in November, I'd done it again. Blouse, heels, sitting in the office with the little space heater going, doing a crossword on my phone. I keep my own clothes folded on the chair by the door so I can change back fast. Twenty minutes, that's all I ever give it. Then I hear a knock at the main door and my whole life narrows down to one fact: I am a fifty-two year old man in my ex-wife's blouse, a mile from anywhere, and someone is at the door.

I froze. Listened. Wind. Then the knock again. Three knocks, patient, like whoever it was had all night.

"One minute," I yelled, and my voice came out weird and high.

I got the heels off, got the blouse off, folded it back into the box, wriggled into my jeans and flannel and jacket. My hands were shaking. Socks, boots. I looked like myself, mostly. I hoped.

The main door of the cannery is a steel thing with a small barred window. I opened it six inches and the cold came in like it had been waiting all night for the invitation.

Then I stopped breathing.

"Hi, Mason," said Alexandra.

My ex-wife. Fifty-one years old, standing on the wharf in a wool coat with her arms crossed against the wind. Snow in her hair. The harbor lights behind her, the fishing boats knocking against their pilings. She looked cold and tired and beautiful, and I hated that my brain did the beautiful part without asking me first.

"Alex," I said. "What in God's name!"

"My car died," she said. "Down the road there. The little rental, it just quit. Lights, everything. I walked. It's about a mile, maybe more, I lost count."

"You walked. In this."

"In this," she agreed. "I need my passport, Mason. It's here somewhere. The old office, second floor maybe. I left it in July when I was doing that captioning contract for the college. I need it for a job. In Ireland. I fly in nine days."

The passport. Right. She'd been here in the summer, freelancing captions for the online courses the community college runs out of the annex. I'd known that. I'd known she'd been in the building and I'd somehow never put it together that her stuff might still be here.

"It's freezing out there," I said. "Come in."

She came in and I shut the door and the wind dropped away like a curtain. She stamped her boots on the mat and looked around at the lobby, the peeling paint, the dust. Then she looked at me.

"You're working nights here."

"Two years now!"

"Your sister told me. Actually she told my sister, and my sister told me, which is a stupid way for two adults to know anything about each other."

I laughed before I could stop myself. "Yeah, well. That's this town."

She unbuttoned her coat halfway and I saw she was shivering. I got her the space heater from the office and set it by the reception desk and she stood over it with her coat open and her hands out, and for a minute neither of us said anything and the heater did the talking.

"There's coffee," I offered. "It's terrible. It's been on since seven."

"I've had worse," she said. "I've had your coffee for twenty-five years, I know what I'm walking into."

So we sat in the lobby with two paper cups of terrible coffee and the heater ticking away, and I have to be honest with myself about how that felt. It felt like coming home to a house you'd moved out of. Everything in the right place and none of it yours anymore.

"Twenty-five years," I said, and immediately regretted opening that door.

"Twenty-five," she said. "And three apart. I was doing the math on the walk. Thirty years of you, Mason. That's more of my life than not."

"Met you when we were twenty-two," I said. "Grad school. You were the only person in the seminar who'd actually done the reading."

"You did the reading. You just never said anything."

"I was shy."

"You were terrified." She said it kindly. "There's a difference."

The wind grabbed the building and shook it a little. Out on the water the boats knocked and knocked. She asked if I was seeing anyone. I said no and asked her the same and she said no, and we both looked at the heater like it had asked the questions.

"Sometimes I think," she started, then stopped. She blew on her coffee. "Never mind. So. The passport."

"Which office?"

"The one with the window facing the water. Second floor, east side. There was a desk, I had a lamp, I did captioning for the marine biology course. Dead fish and Latin names for six weeks." She smiled and the smile did something to the air between us. "I could have sworn I took everything."

"The college pulled out in August. Nobody's been up there but me."

"Then it's probably still sitting in a drawer waiting for me." She finished her coffee and stood. "Can we look? I don't want to make your night harder, but I can't exactly call a taxi at this hour, and I can't be on a flight to Dublin without it."

"We can look," I said.

I took a flashlight and she took my arm on the stairs, not because she needed it, she said, but because the stairs were dark and her legs were still shaking from the cold walk. Her hand on my arm through two layers of coat. I hadn't been touched by anyone in I couldn't remember how long.

The second floor smelled like salt and rust and old paper. Our footsteps were loud in a way footsteps shouldn't be. Doors stood open down the corridor like the whole floor had stood up and left mid-shift.

"This one," she said.

The office with the window facing the water. Moonlight came through the salt-fogged glass and lay across the desk in a long pale strip. She went to the desk and started pulling drawers and I stood in the doorway holding the light.

"Mason," she said suddenly, and turned around. She was looking past me, down the hall, at the office where I keep the box. The door I'd closed but not latched. The light was off in there, but I knew what she'd seen. Or I was sure she'd seen something.

"What's in that office?" she asked.

"Storage," I said. Too fast. "Nobody uses it."

She tilted her head. Fifty-one years old, and I still couldn't get anything past her. "Mason. What's in that office?"

I could have lied better. I've had three years of practice at lying to her, mostly by phone, mostly badly.

"My coat's in there," I said. "That's all."

"Mason."

"It's nothing. It's a box."

She set her flashlight on the desk, on that strip of moonlight, and walked past me. What was I going to do, tackle her? I followed her down the hall like a dog that knows it's in trouble.

She latched the door open and looked in. The chair with my folded clothes. The box on the desk, lid half on. I'd left the blouse folded on top, which was stupid, and the heels sitting beside it, which was stupider.

She looked at the box for a long time. Then at me.

"When did you start wearing my blouse?"

"How do you know it's yours?"

"Mason. I bought it in Halifax in 2019. I lost it that summer and tore the house apart looking for it, and you let me believe I'd left it on the ferry." She picked it up carefully, like it might fall apart, and then, without seeming to decide to, tucked it and the heels under her arm. "You've been wearing my blouse."

"Sometimes," I said. "Not often. Twenty minutes at a time. There's a whole system."

"A system."

"I sit at the desk. I do the log. I take it off before my shift ends." I heard how it sounded and kept going anyway, because she was going to stand there until I said it all. "I don't know why. I started about a year ago. Maybe I wanted something of yours the divorce didn't get. Maybe it's simpler than that. I don't know why."

She put the blouse down. She sat on the edge of the desk and looked at her hands.

"I wore your flannel shirt for a year," she said. "The gray one. Slept in it until the elbows went."

"I wondered where that went."

"You never wondered where that went. You never once called."

"That's fair."

She laughed, a short wet laugh, and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "We're