Day #11: Love Boat by Amber Averay
They’d fallen in love on a cruise. It was many years ago now, but he remembered it as if it were only yesterday. Margaret – his Maggie – had been a beautiful girl, porcelain skin, delicate frame, crystal clear gaze, and a will of steel. He was drawn to her immediately, and she to him, and despite their families’ protestations they were wed merely months after first meeting.
Despite their desire for a large family God had had other ideas, and the only child they’d been blessed with was their son, Gordon. But they’d been happy, so happy, and on their tenth anniversary they took their boy with them on a cruise – the same ship on which they’d met.
Over the years it became tradition, their own little piece of heaven, and each time a new decade of marriage was marked they would board a ship and relive the old memories together. Each time those memories seemed easier to access, clearer than the time before, and they would hold hands and stroll the decks, reminiscing and smiling together.
Their world, never large, suited them and they had all they could ever want. But the idyll was shattered when Gordon was cut down in Vietnam, leaving behind a young fiancee who lost herself to grief and passed soon after.
A salt-kissed breeze caressed Arthur’s worn face, and he closed his eyes and imagined his Maggie standing beside him, her hand slipped into his own. The Ocean’s Pearl – the ship they’d first met upon, which they’d sweetly termed their love boat – had been decommissioned, stripped of all its riches, and sunk off the western coast of Australia some years ago now. So when they’d celebrated their fiftieth anniversary Art and Maggie had by necessity sought another vessel, the far more modern Diamond of the Waves.
A tear tracked down Art’s weathered cheek, and he let it mingle with the salty air spraying across his face. Nostalgia gripped him, stronger than ever before, and he was certain he felt Maggie’s palm pressing his own reassuringly. She’d begun to forget things, soon after they’d disembarked the Diamond. Her memories became fractured, great slices of time lost to the past, and Art could only watch helplessly as his wife slipped away until all that remained was a blank-eyed shell resembling his beautiful bride.
The tears came stronger now, faster. She had joined Gordon some months ago; leaving Art to remember and mourn in solitude. It gave him some peace that, seconds before dying, that glorious smile he’d thought stolen by dementia spread one last time across her face, her eyes shone with lucidity, and she’d breathed, ‘Gordon, my son!’
Then she was gone.
Now Art stood at the rail of the Diamond of the Waves, his shaking, spotted hands – hands that had tenderly closed Maggie’s staring eyes after the light had faded, hands that had stroked her beloved face, cupping it as his tears fell – cradling his wife once more. Her ashes were to be poured to the ocean she loved, loosed to the winds from the deck of the last ship they’d travelled on together. Not their love boat, but a pleasant substitute.
Carefully he eased the lid free, whispered, ‘Goodbye, my love,’ and through eyes blurred with tears watched as her ashes were swept into the air and swayed downward to settle upon the surface of the sea.
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