The North Watch

The duffel was heavier than it needed to be, and that was my own fault. I'd packed for a week on a rock in the North Atlantic like it was a wine trade show. Two sweaters, rain shell, wool socks, and a bottle of Sancerre I'd won in a raffle at work, because apparently I planned my emotional crises the same way I planned a tasting flight.

I'm Tabby, I'm twenty-eight, and I was standing at the mainland dock on a Tuesday morning asking myself questions I already knew the answers to. Why does a person book a week at a weather station with no road, no store, and one other human being on it? Well. Because the other human being was my ex, that's why.

Jules and I dated two years. We met at a wine-tasting course, of all places. She spat out every sample like a professional and I got tipsy on a flight of Rieslings and told her she had kind eyes. She said she had kind hands too. God, I laughed so hard I snorted into the spit bucket. That was two and a half years ago. We ended it six months back, and I'm the one who walked, and I've regretted it in a slow, grinding, teeth-at-three-in-the-morning kind of way ever since.

So when I saw the station takes a part-time guest through some researchers' housing program, I told myself it was a vacation. A reset. Fresh air! Sea birds! Absolutely not an ambush of my own heart.

Right.

The ferry man dropped me and didn't even kill his engine. "Weather turns Thursday," he shouted over the motor. "You sure about this?"

"Sure as I'll ever be!" I hollered back, and then he was gone and it was just me and the wind and the smell of diesel and kelp.

And there was the island. Low and gray-green, with the weather station squatting on one end and the lighthouse tower standing at the other like it was the only thing that had ever been there on purpose. The beacon cycled every eight seconds. I counted. I used to count it with her, lying in the loft bed, her hand on my hip. Some habits don't die, they just wait.

There was a canoe pulled up at the little jetty, and there was Jules.

Thirty-one now, and the sea hadn't softened her one bit. Same steady hands wrapped around a painter line. Same laconic stance, like standing still was a job she was good at. Her hair was shorter. Her jaw was the same.

"You came," she said.

"You sound surprised."

"I didn't think you'd book the whole week."

"I book things," I said. "It's what I do. Rooms, menus, catastrophic personal decisions."

Almost a smile. Not quite. She took my duffel off the dock like it weighed nothing and dropped it into the canoe.

"No motorboat?"

"Fuel's for supply runs. You came light. We canoe."

I looked at the canoe. I looked at the cove, which was not a friendly little harbor, it was a cold gray mouth of water with whitecaps already showing. Then I looked at the post at the end of the jetty, because there was something tied to it that I genuinely could not process for a second.

It was a puppet. A faded cloth boy, sun-bleached to a pale tan, with stuffing coming out of one shoulder. One arm. Just the one. He hung there against the post, turning slowly in the wind, staring at me with stitched eyes.

"Jules. What is that?"

"Marker," she said, like that explained everything.

"A puppet is a marker?"

"Shallows run out that way. Buoy washed off in the January storm." She nodded at the little figure. "Found him on the beach after. He marks where the water goes thin. His name's Armless Al, far as I'm concerned."

"You named him?"

"Kenji named him. I just agreed."

"Who's Kenji?"

"Meteorologist. Lives in the east room half the year. You'll like him. He mostly doesn't talk."

"And the puppet just... hangs out here forever?"

"Until the buoy gets replaced. Spring, maybe." She held the canoe steady against the jetty with one boot. "Get in."

And that was it. No how have you been, no are you sleeping, no I thought about you every night for six months. Just get in. I got in, because apparently I still did what she said, and sat in the bow with my knees up like a cargo of awkward.

She pushed off, stepped in behind me, took the single paddle, and started across the cove.

Here's what I learned in the first thirty seconds: one paddle, one paddler, and a passenger is not a shared journey. It's a freight arrangement. I sat there with nothing to hold but the gunwales while she leaned into every stroke, unhurried, exact, cutting us across the chop in a line so clean it almost hurt to watch.

"You could've brought two paddles," I said.

"Could've."

"You didn't."

"Nope."

"Is this a metaphor, Jules?"

"Wind's from the northeast. It's a canoe."

Spray came over the bow on the third wave and soaked straight through my jacket, and I mean straight through, like the Atlantic had personal opinions about my outerwear. I yelped. The water was the kind of cold that doesn't feel like water, it feels like being slapped with a freezer.

"It's cold!" I shouted, and immediately hated how that sounded.

"It's Newfoundland," she said.

Another wave, another shot of it down my collar. I hunched, I gasped, I did not swear, mostly. And Jules just kept paddling, steady as a clock, like cold water and a useless passenger were both just facts of the morning. Which, to be fair, they were.

Halfway across I realized something. She wasn't punishing me, exactly. But she wasn't carrying me either. If I wanted to arrive warm, dry, or useful, that was going to have to be my project, not hers. Two years together and I'd forgotten that about her. Or maybe I'd never let myself see it. I used to plan everything, wine lists, dinner parties, the future, and she'd just sort of existed next to me, and I called that boring, once, in a fight, and I have wanted to eat those words since the day I said them.

"Lean left," she said, quiet.

"What?"

"When I say. Weight low. Helps me track."

So I leaned when she said, and the canoe stopped yawing, and we came at the island beach like we'd done it a hundred times, which we had, just not with me in the bow. The shallows went glassy, and there was the jetty marker's twin stuck in the sand, the same little one-armed faded boy watching us come in, and I swear I greeted him in my head like he was an old companion.

"Armless Al," I murmured.

"You remember," Jules said, and there it was, finally, the almost smile.

The keel ground onto sand. She held the canoe while I climbed out with numb fingers and a soaked jacket and a bottle of Sancerre in the duffel I was absolutely not going to drink alone.

"So," I said, teeth chattering a little. "Which room's mine?"

Jules pointed at the station, a low plywood thing crouched against the wind like it was hiding. "West room. Bed's made."

"You made my bed?"

"Kenji's schedule says the housing program sends someone. I made a bed." That hurt, honestly. It really did. I want you to know I stood there in the sand dripping like a sad candle and felt something in my chest do a complicated fold.

Inside, she made coffee without asking how I take it. Which she remembered. Black, no sugar, because I got mocked into black coffee at a wine-tasting course and never went back. She set the mug in front of me on the scarred kitchen table and sat across from it, hands flat, as if for a formal meeting.

"Rules," she said.

"Rules?"

"Three. One, no locked doors in this building. Not your room, not the washroom. If you lock one, I take the door off."

I blinked. "That's a rule?"

"Two, you don't leave the island without telling me. Weather turns Thursday, and the cove is not a joke. Three." She slid her own mug around between her palms. "If you want any of this to stop, at any point, for any reason, you say one word."

"Sancerre?"

She almost smiled. Almost. Her mouth did that thing where it started and quit. "You brought a safeword with you?"

"I brought a raffle bottle! It was the only wine I own, Jules, I won it at work, I wasn't planning a whole scene in the ferry line."

"It'll do." She drank. "Sancerre stops everything. Locks stop nothing. Say it back."

"No locks. Ask before leaving. Sancerre if I want out." My heart was doing something unbecoming. "And if I say it, what happens?"