The Heron and the Lighthouse

The trip started out as a simple getaway. Juliet had been buried in a research project all spring, the kind where she sat in a windowless room and watched people fumble with a banking app for six hours at a stretch, and by June she was fried. I was no better. Plumbing is steady work but it eats your shoulders and your patience, and I had spent most of May under other people's sinks listening to them explain what they had "done nothing to" while the pipe told a different story. So she booked us two nights at a campground near a river ford in Nova Scotia, a spot she found on some listicle, and there was a lighthouse nearby with a tour. That was it. That was the pitch. Two nights, a tent, a lighthouse, nothing complicated.

But for a couple of weeks before we left, my mind kept circling back to something that had nothing to do with lighthouses. I had been carrying this curiosity around for a long time. Longer than I liked to admit to myself. It was about anal, and it was about me being on the receiving end of it, which was the part I had never said out loud to anyone, including Juliet, who I loved and who I had been dating for two years. We met at a friend's wedding when I was thirty-two and she was twenty-nine, and we hit it off over the dessert table, and things moved the way things do. We had a good sex life. Honest, comfortable, pretty open in our talking. But this one thing I kept in my pocket like a coin I was afraid to spend. I would get close to saying it and then I would fold it back up.

I know how that reads. A guy who can't say a sentence. But it felt big to me, and I didn't know how she'd take it, and the longer I waited the bigger it got, which is a stupid way to live and I recommend against it.

We drove up on a Friday. The drive was long and pretty in the way that Nova Scotia is pretty, meaning water and rocks and water again, and Juliet navigated from the passenger seat with her phone held low so I could see it too. She is thirty-one now, dark hair, laughs easy when she's not working. She had her feet up on the dash by the second hour and I knew the trip was already doing its job.

The campground sat back from a shallow river ford where the water ran over flat stone and you could walk across it in boots if you wanted to, which we did, because it was there. The site itself was a mown patch with a fire ring and a wooden picnic table that had been carved on by what looked like forty years of teenagers with knives, except it couldn't have been teenagers exactly because some of the carvings had dates from the fifties, so call it forty years of people with knives and free time.

We pitched the tent together, which for us means I do the poles and she does the stakes and we argue mildly about which of us has the easier job. The tent was small, a two-person dome we'd had for a few years, and it went up fine. Then she sat down on the grass with the campground map and traced a route with her finger.

"Okay," she said. "The big thing. The lighthouse tour is tonight. Eight o'clock, after the place officially closes. It's a special thing, the keeper does it once a week in summer and you have to book ahead. I booked ahead."

"You booked ahead."

"Of course I booked ahead. There's like twelve spots and we have two of them."

She was pleased with herself and she had a right to be. I kissed the top of her head and went and got the cooler out of the car, and we ate sandwiches by the ford and skipped a few stones, badly in my case, and the afternoon went the way afternoons are supposed to go.

The lighthouse was a twenty minute walk up a gravel path, white tower, red trim, standing on a headland with the water going dark around it. Eight o'clock came and we walked up with maybe eight other people, and the keeper met us at the door. His name was Alden and he was somewhere past retirement and he had the exact voice for the job, slow and dry.

He walked us through the cottage first, which sits attached to the tower. It's kept mostly as it would have been a hundred years back, a stove, a table, a bed with a quilt. Then he took us up the stairs, and the stairs in a lighthouse are a specific kind of misery, and at the top he talked about the light and the lens and the range of it, and it was all good stuff and I liked it. But that isn't what stuck with me.

What stuck with me was the heron. It was in the cottage, on a shelf near the lamp in the front room, and Alden turned the lamp on for us because the sun was going and the room went dim. The heron was taxidermied, a great blue heron standing on one leg with its neck folded into that S shape they do, and it looked like it was listening. That's the only way I can put it. It stood so still and it held itself with such grace that I felt like I should be quiet in its presence. Alden said it had been in the cottage since the sixties, that a keeper before him had found it dead on the shore and had it done, and that its name was Bartholomew, which everyone laughed at, and I laughed too, but I kept looking at it. The way it held its stillness. The way it looked like it was waiting for something it knew would come.

Juliet caught me looking. She didn't say anything, just squeezed my hand, and we finished the tour and walked back down the gravel path in the dark with a flashlight, and the lighthouse light swept around behind us once and then we were under the trees.

Back at the tent we got ready for bed. Changed clothes, brushed teeth at the campground tap, the usual. Juliet zipped the tent flap and got into her sleeping bag next to mine and I lay there staring at the nylon ceiling and not saying anything, and I had been not saying anything for the whole walk back, and she noticed. She always notices. Two years will do that.

"You've been somewhere else since the lighthouse," she said. She was on her side facing me, propped on one elbow. "Not in a bad way. But somewhere."

"I know."

"Is it the heron? You liked the heron."

"It's not the heron. Well, it's a little the heron." I took a breath. The coin was in my hand. "It's something I've been thinking about for a while and I keep not saying it."

She waited. She's good at waiting, it's part of her whole research thing, she waits people out for a living.

"It's about sex," I said. "It's about me wanting to try something. Being on the other side of something. I want to know what it's like to be penetrated. To have you do it to me."

The tent was very quiet for a second. The river ran the way it always ran.

"Okay," she said. "Tell me more. And before you spiral, I'm not shocked, and I'm not upset, and I want to hear the rest."

I told her the rest, or most of it. That I had