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Chapter Ten
Elise would never growused to saying goodbye to her children.
Each time she gripped them in hugs, kissed their foreheads, and whispered to them to “stay safe” and “keep yourself healthy,” she felt an element of loss, this feeling of time she could never get back. Still, as she watched them from the rental vehicle outside of the Traverse City Airport, she knew with her whole heart that they were headed back to where they belonged.
“I’m proud of you for building this, Mom,”was what Penny had said to her on the way.“I’m proud of you for going into the world and getting what you want.”
Elise arrived back on the island just after one in the afternoon on November 3. She found Wayne waiting for her at the dock, his winter coat unzipped and his beard scruffy and his cerulean eyes catching every last bit of that terrifically bright November day.
“What do you say me and you go out on the boat?” he asked.
Elise hadn’t expected this. They hadn’t been out on the boat since the weather had switched so dramatically, and she feared the chill of the water and the whipping winds. Something about Wayne’s crooked smile left her weak at the knees, her tongue unable to do anything but articulate the words, “Why not?”
Out on the water, she watched as Wayne worked diligently, tugging the ropes and whipping the sails out to catch the breeze. They sailed across the chilly waves as Elise held on tight, her chin lifted so that her cheeks caught the sun. It was no California warmth; it was harsh, even in its friendliness.
Still, her heart felt light.
“There’s something about being out on the water,” her father had told her a few weeks before. “Something that makes me see everything a little more clearly.”
Once out near the Mackinac Bridge, Wayne stabilized the sails a bit more and was able to talk. He scooped around her, his sturdy arms the greatest warmth she had ever experienced, and said, “How did it go in Traverse?”
“Ugh. Painful,” she said with a heavy sigh. “But I know I’ll see them soon. They’ll probably be here for Thanksgiving, and of course, for Christmas... I spoke with Courtney on the drive back up from Traverse, and she said she wants me out in LA for part of December for some script editing. I’m bringing Haley and Mia along with me. But that means...”
She bit hard on her lip as Wayne’s beard scratched soothingly across her cheek.
“Say it,” Wayne urged her. “Whatever it is.”
“That means we might be apart.”
She felt foolish. These were childish words for a relationship that had been founded on adult principles.
Even still, her emotions for Wayne were just as powerful as they might have been if they’d met age seventeen, age eighteen.
It was just as her father had said. Time had no say on love.
It’s exactly like the movie they filmed together said as well.
Somewhere in Time, we’ll always be together.
Wayne didn’t speak for a long time. His hand stretched out across her stomach, and she laced her gloves through his fingers.
“I know it’s still early,” he breathed. “But it feels like we’ve lived so many lifetimes together already.”
“Countless,” Elise whispered.
“And I want to live countless more with you. If you’ll let me,” Wayne said. “Already, I have Michael as a part-time partner of The Grind. I can see it in him: he wants to settle down with Margot. He needs some time off the road, which leaves me plenty of opportunity to run around with you—for a little while, at least. California, back to Mackinac—maybe off to Timbuktu or Denmark or wherever else you want to drag me. Show me the world, Elise Darby. I want to know what it’ll make of us together.”
Elise couldn’t breathe. She turned herself around slowly in his arms, lifted her chin, and kissed him tenderly. Above them, the wind thrust itself hard against the sail and knocked them sideways; they were saved only with the mad reach of Wayne’s arm, who forced them back upright so he could fix the sail. Elise giggled as she collapsed in the little plastic chair and wiped her eyes.
“Look at us,” she said. “We must be losing our minds, out here on such a chilly day.”
“I think insane is the word for us,” Wayne said. “And I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
It was difficult to imagine what would come next. As they settled in together on that boat on this, one of the final sunny days of the year, Elise wondered if she would find solace in his tiny house a few blocks away from Main Street. She wondered if she would learn to ride horses properly; if she would write any number of stories and screenplays set on this warm and inviting island; if she would learn to drink her weight in Rum Runners and remember the story years later to tell her own grandchildren. And then—the next spring and summer, surely she would be stationed as the script editor on the island set itself for the very film she had written that year. The result would echo back timeless memories between her father and mother; it would build more of her own.
She had never belonged anywhere outside of her mother’s arms, not truly—and this newfound solace, this new safe-haven, was all she had ever dreamed of.
“Thank you for the generosity of your love, Wayne,” she murmured as he wrapped her again in a warm embrace. “I was drowning without it.”
