It's the fourth day that's the worst.
Jill has known this her whole life, the knowledge acquired over a lifetime of being a fisherman's daughter. The process starts when they actually leave Dutch, because when they're still at the docks there's at least spotty cell phone service, and really you could jump on a plane and be there in a day, that doesn't ever happen, but there's a measure of comfort in knowing the option is there.
The first day after they leave Dutch for fishing is horrible, but you've been anticipating horrible so it's almost not as bad, when all you want to do is crawl in bed and cry, it just meets expectations. Days 2 and 3 are bad because of the emptiness, you're acutely aware of the fact that you can't just pick up the phone, the plane ride would be worthless and the house is so empty it feels like your thoughts echo against the walls.
But it's day 4, the day you pull yourself up and out of bed and have to start to live again, that's the worst. After 3 days of not being able to think of anything except how you're going to survive this, it's almost a relief to have something else to think about. But as soon as you start thinking of something else, about living, you get kicked in the face by something. It's that unexpected pain that sucks the most, she gets all the way to his voice-mail twice before she remembers why he isn't answering the phone.
But as time went by Jill really did start to adjust, she worked even longer hours without feeling guilty, because Josh isn't hanging out waiting for her to come home. She went cleaning crazy on her days off, organizing the closet in the master bedroom, filling the trunk of her Subaru with clothes to donate to St Vincent de Paul. She had girls' night with her mom and sister, pedicures and movies that make them all cry.
Sometimes they get together for dinner or shopping with all the wives and kids who live close. Having a touch-point with people who understand exactly what's going on seems to make it easier. In passing they call themselves a survivors club, but mostly they take advantage of the time to be distracted. Time to be with people who understand exactly how you're feeling, where they talk about anything but fishing and their noticeably absent husbands, fathers and brothers and secret boyfriends.
She can't help thinking that maybe the only reason that she's good at this is because they managed to keep their relationship a secret for a month and a half. No one knows she has any boyfriend, and certainly no one suspected that in the last 2 months she's somehow managed to fall in love with Josh Harris. So when she's sad everyone assumed she's missing her dad, or her brothers and she let them. That way no one asked any questions and she doesn't have to deal with the task of coming up with an answer.
And the truth is she really was not that good at it, she didn't want to answer questions because a lot of the time she's barely hanging on to her emotions and the tenuous hold she had on the secret won't last forever. To maintain her sanity she buried it in work, goes for long solitary runs in the rain, listened to an iPod playlist aptly named "the most depressing songs in the history of ever" and watched a lot of Private Practice with a glass of red wine. She pulled doubles at the hospital as often as they let her and took a temporary assignment as a scrub nurse for a neonatal cardiologist. Because doing baby heart surgery is complicated and that means there's no room for having any emotions much less thinking about anything but the task at hand.
But in between she just really fucking aches for him.
As far as phone calls are concerned they have a system, she can't carry her phone around when she's shuffling between the NICU and the operating room so they have to work to sync up their schedules. Usually she leaves herself a voicemail with her schedule on it and when he calls and she doesn't answer he checks her messages and figures out when she'll be home. Phil helps out too; after Josh accidentally left the half sheet of notebook paper with her schedule scribbled on it in the wheelhouse he ended up with a really well-timed wheel watches and the old man had a little twinkle in his eye.
When they're lucky they talk twice a week.
She tried to lace as much joy and happiness and warmth into their conversations as she can, she makes notes on scraps of paper about things to tell him, saving all the funny stories she can, because she can't handle silence over something close to 4,000 miles. She saved up all her energy for his phone calls, because it takes every ounce of energy she had not to cry as soon as she hears his voice, she makes jokes about needing him to come home to kill spiders and bait mouse traps and take out the trash because otherwise she'll just tell him over and over again how much she misses him, how badly she wants him to come home, how badly she wants him next to her forever.
She almost says "I love you" every time they hang up, but the thought that he might not say it back always held her back.
She started wearing the ring when it's been 2 weeks since she's heard from him. It's normal, they're way up north and there's something about the satellite phone and the angles and the time of day and she really isn't worried, but just recently she's achieved a kind of shaky balance between missing him and making it through the day so the prolonged silence of her phone threw her right back into the limbo of trying not to fall.
It's a simple silver band that he wore sometimes. Since he left it's been with his watch in a little dish next to the second sink in her bathroom, his sink really, because if she was honest they were living together, are living together. His car is parked next to hers in the garage, his clothes are hanging next to hers in the closet and his shampoo sits next to her body wash in the shower. Little pieces of him left laying around in hopes of reminding herself that she didn't imagine it, he was here, he was with her and he's coming back to her.
The ring only fit her thumb and she liked it because it's something solid for her hands to do when she's distractedly thinking of him. She clicked it against the counter while she's charting at work, smiled when it caught the sunlight when she's driving, worried her fingers over it when she's stressed.
The fishing was just OK and the weather was just as snotty as it always was. As the season goes on he got more and more tired, his mind ran on auto-pilot, bait pots, set pots, nap between strings, pull pots, sort crab and then start all over again. His body felt broken, tired, used. Josh wondered if this is what it felt like to get old. What it felt like to finally have your body just fall right out from under you.
Something about the cold and pulling more empty pots than half full pots and missing Jill made him snap at Jake even more than normal. When he took a swing at his brother after Jake called him a "PMS-ing little bitch," Josh caught the old man looking at him like he's considering the idea of finishing the season with duct tape permanently over both he and Jake's mouths.
Before he left he was prepared to miss her, but it turned out he wasn't as prepared as he'd expected. His heart hurt, he's always thought that was a stupid thing to say but there really was a little spot of pain between his ribs right below his heart, like he'd run too fast or twisted wrong or lifted something too heavy. For the most part he dealt with it, god knows there's enough to think about on deck that he can't spend a lot of time thinking about how he didn't expect missing her to manifest into actual physical pain. Sometimes it's just a dull ache, a reminder that there's someone waiting at home for him and other times it's so raw, so searing he can hardly stand up straight, but one way or another it never goes away.
Every time he called her it was like 20 minutes of vacation. He tried not to look forward to it too much but that's a joke, it's the best part of what is otherwise the world's longest, shittiest Monday. Every time he dragged his bony ass up the stairs and into the captain's chair that's really only made for his dad's ass, her laughter soaked into his bones like warmth, like home. In between those times he tried to carry that feeling with him, storing it for the times when they've been up for 30 hours and the cold and the wet is seeping through layers toward skin so he can wrap her happiness around him like armor against the daily grind.
When they're finally done, the quota finally filled and off-loaded, he was almost too tired to be happy.
But he's been doing this for long enough to know that finishing the off-load doesn't really mean done on the boat. There was still a list of chores as long as his arm to do before they could even think about driving to the airport and even getting to the airport was still at least a day of flying away from actually being home.
Flying out of Dutch is always a crapshoot, when they're lucky there are 4 flights a day. But depending on the weather sometimes they've been stranded for days with nothing to do but drink and kick around the boat with all the other people who are trying to get to somewhere else.
This time they're lucky, making it out on the 2 pm flight packed with fisherman done for the season. Anchorage is better, it's a bigger airport, there are more flights and bars and there's coffee and reliable cell phone coverage and McDonald's.
They're not booked on a flight to Seattle until the next afternoon and after weeks of togetherness the guys all went their separate ways for at least a couple of hours. Josh sighed with relief when Jake hooked up with a couple of guys from one of the other boats and grabbed a motel room for the night, showers and a night of drinking on the agenda, he loves his brother, but he needed a break.
Phil was hunkered down with Sig and Keith in a dimly lit corner booth at the airport bar to discuss what Josh could only imagine was very important captain business, most likely his dad bitching about shitty January weather, his worthless sons and their inability to get along even for just one damn second.
Far away from the rush, Josh slouched in an uncomfortable plastic airport chair and pulled his phone out of his pocket. He pushed a series of a buttons to check his messages. Leaning his head against the grimy airport window he grinned when Jill's breathlessly excited voice came through the phone. "Hi babe, it's me, but you knew that already. I'm at work but I just snuck into the bathroom to check my messages for the hundredth time and you're coming home! I'm working 18 hours today, so I won't be home from work until probably 1 or 2 tonight. Then I'm going to pass out because I've worked something like 60 hours this week but I have 9 days off now and by the time I wake up you'll practically be here!" She paused for a minute and finished quietly, "Hurry home Joshua, I miss you."
Josh shoved his phone back in his jacket pocket and rubbed the back of his neck. Resting his elbows on his knees he considered his options, find somewhere to shower, take a nap, maybe find some buddies and hit some bars or find a way to get home a little quicker. Standing up quickly he walked back to the Alaska Airlines counter. He flashed a grin at the harried looking agent and asked to be put on the stand-by list. She tried to talk him out of it, the flights were mostly full and even if he got on a flight his luggage was still going to be on his later flight. With Jill's voice ringing in his ears he told the gate agent that was no big deal and headed back in to wait at the gate.
"Hey I'm going to try to get home on an earlier flight," dipping his hands into his pockets he stood in front of Phil's empty glass-filled table. "Can you grab my bag if I'm not on your flight?"
"OK," Phil replied absently, lifting his glass to his lips. "Where'd your brother get off to."
"I think he's with some guys, something about showers and then maybe going downtown for the night."
"Probably fuckin' end up in jail, that one."
Josh shrugged, because that's pretty true, and clapped his dad on the shoulder, "I'll call you if I get on an earlier flight. Don't do anything I wouldn't do." His dad and the other captains guffawed as he walked away.
He jammed his earbuds in and leaned his head against the window, grateful for silence, for going home, for not being trapped on a boat in the middle of the ocean with 5 guys who he loves, but seriously could do without seeing for at least a day and probably more like a month.
He was half asleep when they paged him for the 10 pm flight, "Alaska Airlines paging passenger Harris, passenger Joshua Harris."
He called his dad and left a quick message with his flight information and reminding him to grab his duffel since he wouldn't be on the flight. On the plane he buckled his seat belt and tried to tamp down on the excitement fluttering in his belly. He rested his head against the window and didn't wake up until the plane was landing in a rainy Seattle.
He paid the cab and pulled his keys out of his pocket. She'd given him a key not long after the party at her parents' house, leaving it on the counter next to an extra garage door opener and a yellow post-it with a heart on it. Looking up the deserted suburban street he jogged through a light rain toward her front door . Standing in the darkness of her doorstep he was thankful that she hadn't left the porch light on, her neighbors were nice, but people were invariably suspicious of a guy in a stocking cap with 3 weeks of stubble on his cheeks and a key, especially at 3 a.m.
He kicked his shoes off just inside the door and took the steps 2 at a time toward the bedroom.
She was asleep, curled around a pillow, her tiny frame drowning in one of his cut-off Cornelia Marie crew t-shirts. He stood at the foot of her bed for a minute, just looking at her, and soaking in the quiet, because it's never quiet on the boat, he can sleep through damn near anything because there's always the hum of diesel exhaust through the hull and when they're working there's music to keep them awake and when they finally do sleep there's usually some sort of bass pumping so his dad can stay awake to drive the boat.
He slid his jeans down his legs and yanked his hoodie over his head, anxious now for sleep, to fall into bed next to her and sleep for at least a week straight. Pulling the covers back he slipped in beside her, finally home.
Her mind registered the shift in the bed, the warm body spooning against her, strong arms wrapping around her. She'd had this dream intermittently the entire time he's been gone and it always felt so real and so comfortable that waking up in the morning often resulted in frustrated tears. She tried to fight through the layers of sleep back into reality hoping to stave off the sadness. When the mists failed to clear she gave in and snuggled back against him.
"Mmmmmmmm Josh." She laced her fingers with his.
"Shhhhhhhh Jilly-bean, it's late, go back to sleep," he kissed the sensitive skin behind her ear and shut his eyes.
"Why are you home," she mumbled, "you're coming home tomorrow, I have to go grocery shopping and make dinner, and shave my legs and clean the bathrooms and wear something cute."
"I caught an early flight," he adjusted the pillows, pulled the comforter up to his chin, "I wanted to get home."
"I'm so glad you're home," her voice trailed off, "I missed you."
"I missed you Jilly-B, a ton." He pulled her closer, relished her smooth skin against his and relaxed into the smooth cool pillows and the scent of clean sheets.
"Tomorrow," he was almost asleep when her voice whispered through the darkness, "When this turns out to be a dream," she curled tighter against his body, "I'm going to be so pissed."
His smile lit the night.
