When the Doorbell Betrays You

I am thirty-six years old and supposedly a professional, and I sat on the bed of a portside inn in Nova Scotia with a pen in my hand, because apparently that is still the kind of person I am when I get nervous.

Dear Kev, I wrote, which is a hell of a way to start a letter to a man I have been dating for two years, but here we are.

I have been in this room for four hours and I have unpacked and repacked my bag twice, and I keep picking up the same three outfits and putting them back down again, and I want you to know that none of this is about you. It is about the fact that I have spent the last six weeks photographing women fourteen years younger than me, and it has done something to my head that I do not like and cannot seem to stop.

We met in Rotterdam at that stupid conference where the wifi never worked and the coffee tasted acrid and burnt, and you asked me out after that late dinner by the water, and I said yes before you even finished the sentence, and for two years that has been enough. Long distance is a lot of waiting punctuated by airplanes, and I am usually fine with it, and right now I am not fine with it, and I figured the honest thing was to write it down instead of carrying it up your gangway like luggage.

Yours, Melissa. P.S. The inn has a cat that sits on my windowsill like he is charging me rent.

I walked the letter down to the harbor office and paid the courier to carry it out to his boat, which was ridiculous since I could have just texted him, but some part of me wanted paper between us for this one, the way you want a handrail on stairs you already know.

His reply came the next morning, eleven minutes after I woke up.

Professional photographer eyes, he wrote, and I could hear his dry little laugh in it, you have photographed grain elevators and rusted tanker hulls and one very famous politician's bad haircut, and you think three outfits are going to defeat you. I have a lounge on this boat that looks like 1987 threw up in it and a doorbell at the cannery that rings by itself, and I have been saving both for you. Thirteen hours, Mel. Bring the wrong outfits. Bring all of them.

I laughed alone in my inn room like someone who had lost her mind, and then I wrote back one word, which was when, and he wrote back a time, and it was settled.

The ferry sat low and working in the gray water off the cannery, lights on in the wheelhouse, and Kev was on the deck when I came up the gangway, thirty-eight years old, hat pushed back, looking at me like I was the assignment he had been waiting on all week.

"There she is," he said, and he hugged me, a real one, both arms, and the cold came off his jacket and onto my cheek. "You look great. You look like someone who wrote me a very dramatic letter."

"I packed three outfits, all wrong," I said into his shoulder. "That's the headline. One of them has a belt that I now realize was a mistake at the store, let alone today."

"Good. I was worried the trip would be boring." He pulled back and looked at me, quick and plain, no inspection in it, and something in my chest let go a little. "Come on. I want to show you the cannery before it gets dark. There's a doorbell."

"Why is there a doorbell at a shuttered cannery, Kev."

"That is the correct question and I will answer it inside."

The cannery floor was huge and empty, steel tables pushed to the walls, dust hanging in the light from the high windows, and we were maybe forty steps in when a bell rang. It was a plain, dumb, cheerful ding dong, the kind of sound a shop makes, and it came from a wall with nothing on it but an old painted sign and a small brass button that no one was touching.

I grabbed his arm hard enough that I probably left a mark. "What was that. Kev. What was that."

"That's Gary," he said, completely calm, like he was introducing a coworker. "Not really. The bell's been doing this for years. Crew says it rings when nobody's near it, nobody's wiring it, nobody's doing anything at all. Some old circuit in the wall, probably, some ghost of a circuit anyway. It goes off a few times a shift and everybody ignores it."

"You're not fazed at all," I said. "You are standing here like a man at a bus stop."

"I've heard it forty nights running. It stops being a ghost and starts being a roommate." He shrugged, and I watched him, and what I noticed was that nothing in him braced. He had made his peace with a bell that rings for no reason in an empty building, and he stood there easy, and I thought about how I had spent four hours repacking a bag.

It rang again while we were walking out, and this time I laughed, actually laughed, and he grinned at me like I had passed something.

The lounge was exactly as advertised, brown vinyl chairs, a television bolted high in the corner, a coffee maker that had clearly outlived several administrations of crew, and we sat across from each other at the little table with tea, because he had gone and bought actual tea for me at some port somewhere, and we traded the letters.

I had written him a second one on the ferry crossing, mostly about my daily routine, the 6 a.m. light check, the coffee, the way I talk to my camera like it's a coworker, and he had written me two pages in pencil about grain. Actual grain. Moisture readings and a hold he had crawled through and the way the light comes down the hatch at noon, and it was boring in the way that only true things are boring, and I read every word.

Then he turned my letter over and read the part I almost hadn't sent, the part about the models, and he took his time with it, and I watched his face and could not read it, which made me want to crawl under the table.

"You know what I do all day, right," I said, before he could say anything. "I photograph people. That's the job. And lately the casting sheets have all been twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, and I stand there with the lights and the reflectors and I look at them and I look at the contact sheets after, and somewhere in there I stopped