Widow's Walk

Holly led me up the stairs to the widow’s walk on top of her house. It was our place to get away… or at least as far away as a pair of ninth graders were going to get. We liked to come up to the little structure built on top of the old house to sit. We would hold hands, sometimes kiss… knowing any moment her father or her mother could climb the steps and see us.

That was more than forty years ago, and I can still smell her perfume. I’ve never known the name of it, but I can’t pick up its scent without thinking of her. I can feel my fingers slipping through her blonde hair. I see her bright green smiling eyes. I hear her joyful laugh. The soft crush of her lips on mine.

Sunrise was the best time… the sun coming up over the Chesapeake Bay, over the beach only a block away. But it was rare that I would be there that early in the morning. Second best was sunset. The fiery color was behind us, but the boats and the star would twinkle against the deep blue of the evening sky as it faded from blue into black.

Even now, just the idea sends me back in time. Looking at her as the last rays of the day filtered through her hair, lighting a halo around her angelic face. Sitting across from her, holding hands across the divide… her feet next to me, mine next to her. Her smile.

“So, what is a widow’s walk?” I asked her father one night as we stood next to the grill on their balcony. They had a small thrift shop on the first floor of the building, an apartment occupying the two floors above that, and finally the widow’s walk snaking along the peak of the roof.

“This house was built by a sea captain a hundred and fifty years ago. Looking around,” he continued, “you can still see a lot of his touches… the joinery in the wood, the details.

“He built it for his wife, Ophelia. Her picture is in the hallway. Beautiful woman, dark hair and eyes. And he built the walk on top so that she could look out to the sea. If you look, over in the southeast corner, there is a socket set into the rail. She had a telescope in a locker in the cupola that she could set into the socket and watch the sea when he was gone.

“The captain disappeared on one of their voyages. I guess that would have been around 1830.

“When the ship was due in, she went to the roof, out on the walk, and scanned the horizon with the telescope. A day turned into a week. A week turned into a month. ‘He’s lost,’ they told her. A month turned into a year.

“Every day, rain or shine, she would go up to the walk and scan the horizon for a sign of the man she loved.

“Even before that she was a widow of the sea. She knew her man couldn’t leave his first love, no matter how much she wished he would. And like any widow of the sea, she wanted to know when her lost love would return.

“That’s why it’s called a widow’s walk,” he finished. He had a far-off, wistful look in his eyes.

“He loves to tell that story,” Holly said softly in my ear as she snuck up behind me, wrapping her arms around me and squeezing.

“I guess I do,” he said. “I guess the romance of the sea has a place in my heart.”

After that, sometimes when I was riding my bike to her house, I would catch Holly on the walk watching me come down the street… sometimes with a telescope. I would wave and she would raise her hand to me. Even from the ground, I could see her brilliant smile.

***

Ophelia looked through her telescope in the failing light of the evening. It had been so long. Day after day she waited, watching. James had never lied to her, and he said he would come back. His last voyage was to be three months. Cuba, Brazil, the Canary Islands, Italy, Portsmouth and then home. Then he was retiring.

But the three months turned into four, then six. Then a year. She didn’t lose faith. Even when sailors came back talking of a storm in the Atlantic, and word filtered in that his ship never made it to the Canary Islands, her faith was steadfast.

James would return for her.

A decade passed, then two. Every morning at sunrise and every evening just before sunset, she would be on the walk, her eye to the spyglass. Her spyglass trained on the horizon. She knew every ship that sailed the bay, but none of the sails were the ones for which she was looking.

In 1853, she disappeared. A dinner for two was set on the table, uneaten. Everything was perfectly placed. All the captain’s favorite foods were laid out. A single candle burned much of the way down in the center of the table.

Clarinda, Ophelia’s best friend, looked from her window at sunset. She didn’t see Ophelia and rushed across the street to her house. She rushed up the stairs to the private apartment over the small shop Ophelia owned, calling her friend’s name.

That was when she discovered the dinner laid out. She quickly looked around the apartment, then ran up the outside stairs to the walk.

The telescope was heeled over in its mount. She scanned the horizon, then looked through the telescope. She almost thought she could see something at the edge of the sea, where it and the sky met.

Ophelia was never found. Locals combed the shoreline, thinking she had lost patience and swam out to sea to join her husband. Clarinda never uttered what she saw while looking through the telescope that evening on the widow’s walk, only leaving it in her journal.

But later, she would say that she could see Ophelia pacing the walk, usually at sunrise, but sometimes at sunset as well. She would always be wearing a black dress, as many had seen her in, wrapped in a bone-colored, lace shawl. And if she looked to the sea, she would see those same sails on the horizon. When she would look back to Ophelia’s house, her friend would be gone.

***

I had never seen Ophelia, but Holly said that she had seen her a few times. I thought maybe one evening when we were sitting in the cupola, holding hands, quietly watching the light fade, we might catch a glimpse of the woman that had so loved her captain.

“What is she like?” I asked one night at the sun dipped below the horizon behind us, a cargo ship’s light rolling slowly south in the bay.

“Sad. She was heartbroken. She would walk along the course, looking to the sea. Sometimes, she would bend as if looking through a telescope that was no longer there. Then, the last time I saw her, she was looking, as she normally did… and she jumped.

“Her movement, solid, but ethereal, startled me. She looked directly at me, but also through me. I could see the joy on her face… it emanated from her. She glowed. Then, she ran along the walk to the steps, spun and climbed down them… and disappeared.”

“You haven’t seen her since?” I asked.

“I thought I caught a glimpse of her glow out in the bay that night, but I don’t know.”

Holly slipped off the bench opposite me in the cupola and sat next to me, my arm wrapping around her. She snuggled into me as I held her tight.

“I think she found her happiness. I think her captain came back for her like she knew he would,” I said.

Holly turned to me. Her hand touched my cheek. I pulled her close and felt her soft lips with mine. Everything about that moment burned into my memory.

“I hope so,” she said after the kiss, as I took in her perfume and felt her hair between my fingers.

***

Holly is long gone. Her parents passed away a decade ago and she has her own family on the other side of the country. I’ve moved away as well, with a family of my own. But I still visit my mother nearby.

The shop her family owned is boarded up, the house in dire need of a renovation. It was built over two hundred years ago, and its age showed forty years ago when I was last inside. But it is sadly abandoned.

I often stay in a hotel a few blocks away, overlooking the beach and the bay beyond. It isn’t far from my mother’s house where I grew up. Sometimes, I sit on the hotel’s balcony so that I can watch the light fade to night, see the sky go from brilliant blue to black, and watch the twinkle of stars and ships on the water as they grow and take over the night.

But one night was different.

As I sat on the wicker chair, an ice-cold beer on the table next to me, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move on Holly’s widow’s walk. I spun… Ophelia was walking the course. I watched her look out to sea. After a few minutes, I saw her jump and could see her aura brighten.

I set down my drink and sprinted from the room. I ran down the stairs from my fifth-floor room, not willing to wait for an elevator. Reaching the ground floor, I tore through the lobby and out the door, sprinting down the boardwalk.

The glow from Holly’s roof passed in front of me, a hundred yards away. I chased after it as fast as my aging body would allow. She moved over the ground like a shimmer, quickly, but not hurried.

Forty yards away, she crossed to the sand. I angled toward the water, cutting diagonally to where she was headed. I needed to be closer… to see her.

Twenty feet away, I skidded to a stop. My hands were on my knees and my heart thudded in my chest.

Ophelia turned to me. “Thank you,” she said.

I looked up, and there was a glowing launch from the ship sliding onto the sand.

“The love between you and Holly allowed us to be reunited,” the captain said. “This is our celebration.”

He lifted her onto the boat, a moment later it slid back out into the bay, cutting through the waves.

***

“Hi Holly,” I said into my phone, sitting again on the balcony.

“Oh my gosh… I haven’t talked to you in forever,” she replied.

“I saw Ophelia… and Captain Morgan. They told me that we freed them to be together again. I think it was that kiss.”

“That was forty-one years ago tonight,” she said. “I was actually just thinking about it.”

***

Clarinda’s Journal:

There, upon the horizon, lit by the setting sun were the sails of a schooner. As I continued to watch, I could see a woman on the aft deck, her hair dark, flowing in the wind.

The two-masted ship began to turn out to sea, away to the south.

If I didn’t know better, I would have thought it Capt. James Morgan’s ship. She was as sleek and beautiful a vessel as I ever saw sail. Watching through the spyglass, I could see the woman and the captain kiss. If it were Ophelia, she was twenty years younger. Always a beautiful woman, she had again the radiance she’d lost when all thought her love gone.

I turned back, an otherworldly boy and girl sat in the cupola, intertwined. There was a flash as they kissed, then they were gone. It was calm.