“I know I said I just wanted a house on the water,” she intoned.
But…How would she put it so that he could hear her?
She tried again. “You know, darling, how much I love our little Cape Cod cozied into the bay.”
But…
Maybe she should just come out with it.
She craved open waters, longed for the growl of surf. Her body needed it like air, like water. She was shriveling in the dreary, forested coziness of it all.
Now she had little memory of the end of her daily two-mile constitutional.
She was on her way to the open beach. She knew that much.
Her headstrong Cadillac simply knew what she needed. It was headed there of its own volition.
Soon she was filling her nostrils and lungs with the salty, sweaty, fishy wind of the ocean as her ears filled with the deeply repetitive rhythm that had brought her here.
One foot followed the other as her eyes embraced the full scope of it all. Nothing but silver movement and driftwood sculpture forever. She had the sense that she could be dissolved in it all and die empty, happy.
Now her feet took her further, stronger, longer, straight out toward Japan, she thought.
That’s it. She’d tell him,
Honey, you know how I’ve always been drawn to Japan? I’d like to move a little closer, dear. Right over there…on the horizon.
She was so drawn to the unknown edge of things that she stubbed her toe on it, just as she felt the moisture seep through her light canvas slip-ons.
It was nothing more than a green lip of something hard. Her fingers scratched through the wet sand, just as the tide reached her ankles.
A pull toward the sea. A yank toward land.
No. It couldn’t be. A bottle.
Seriously? A bottle with a cork?
By now she had it firmly in her hands. She had won the tug of war.
And what a prize!
As she rinsed off the sandy water, another surprise.
Really?
No way.
There seemed to be a message inside.
This was hers. Hers alone. Here was the sign she’d been praying for.
She looked over each shoulder to make sure she truly was alone.
Broke the neck of the bottle on the black basalt rock looming nearby.
As she shook it hard, a yellow paper tumbled into her open hand.
Her hands trembled, full of hope.
The figures were beautiful, exotic zen symbols of some kind.
A long, curved line. Something that looked like a roof of a house, and a figure that looked vaguely human, and female, walking away.
