I listen, letting his words unlock doors I’ve closed for the sake of my own sanity. I’ve worked hard to convince myself that I’d never see him again. That he’d found a way back into the life he’d left behind, that my life needs to move forward without him in it.
‘Someone exceptional told me a while back that my heart hadn’t got the memo,’ he says. ‘But I’ve got it now.’
I nod, drinking in every inch of his face because I’ve missed him more than I thought possible. ‘And what did it say?’
‘It said to travel three thousand miles to ask you to dance to Springsteen on the porch because you deserve that kind of big-gesture romance.’ He glances over his shoulder. ‘Hell, I even ordered snow, Cleo. Do you have any idea how hard that shit is?’
He reaches out and holds my hands. ‘Look. I have to be, I want to be, where my kids are until they don’t need me around as much. But coming here, meeting you … you kind of blew my mind, you know?’ He pulls me closer. ‘Will you come to Boston? Not permanently, but sometimes? And I’ll come to you when I can, wherever you are. We can have a hundred holiday romances.’
He has no idea how perfect that sounds to me. After everything I’ve discovered about myself, if he’d asked me to bend myself fully into his complicated world, I don’t think I’d have been able to do it. But he hasn’t asked that of me because he isn’t that man. He’s this man, one who understands how much I’ve come to value my freedom and solitude, that my Salvation story has chapters still unwritten.
‘I guess I would like to see that weather tower,’ I say.
Relief softens the tension in his jaw and I realize how nervous he was, that it wasn’t easy for him to come here and lay it all on the line. We look at each other for a few silent heartbeats, and then he restarts the Springsteen track and squeezes my fingers.
‘Dance with me?’
Tears catch in my throat as he tugs me out on to the porch and folds me inside the warmth of his ridiculous red coat, into the familiarity of his arms. I lay my cheek against his chest as Bruce plays his bluesy harmonica, tears in my eyes as I look out towards the snow-dusted beach and remember the last time we danced like this. I don’t know what the future holds for me and my inconvenient American. I don’t know if he’ll ever be able to stand on one leg long enough to be my flamingo, and I’m okay that there are so many empty pages waiting to be filled. That’s a story for another time, though, because right now, this snow-globe Salvation moment feels just about as good as life gets.
Eighteen months later
Women Today
Guest editor: Cleo Wilder
Hello,
Remember me, the flamingo hunter who went away to marry herself on a remote island and never came home again? It’s been eighteen months now since my final sign-off, and I feel as if every cell in my body has been reprogrammed. Did I ever find my flamingo? Reader, I found more than that. I found my flock.
During my years as a dating columnist I made finding love my all-consuming mission, each new date a cocktail of hope, expectation, disappointment and despair. I downed hundreds over the years, and all I ended up with was a purse full of paper umbrellas and a jaded heart. I thought it was a numbers game, that the law of averages meant that if I just kept rolling the romantic dice, eventually I’d win. I was wrong. I was never going to win like that because although something essential was missing from my life, it wasn’t a partner.
They say you have a second brain in your gut, and despite trying to drown it with all of those unsuitable cocktails, my gut knew I was living the wrong life. It tried to tell me, but I couldn’t hear it over the day-to-day chaos I’d surrounded myself with. And then I came here to this island and, little by little, I listened. A quiet suggestion of change, a nagging surety, a liberating relief. I’m the kid who hung around to help the school librarian unpack the books, fanning the pages to inhale the smell. I’m the teenager who slept with her lime-green clamshell laptop under her pillow every night. And now I’m all grown up, and I’m a novelist, spinning words into worlds, living exactly the life I was meant for. Still on my island. Still in the lodge. It’s mine now, as if it was always here waiting for me to find it.
What am I going to do now? Drink coffee on the porch and watch the stars. The American （remember him? Big red coat and a ridiculous head torch?） is due here in a few days so I’m soaking up the space and the silence before he’s sitting beside me on the steps again, no chalk line required.