Ordinary

The words don’t come easily now. Descriptions do not come to mind when I see a puddle, a child, a cloud. Ideas do not lace themselves together in lines and patterns.

I sit at the keyboard. Open a file, reread the lines. Stare at the screen. Close the file. Open another file. Open a blank file. Stare some more.

I think about it; I don’t think about it. I give myself a break; I apply pressure.

I am, I believe, running out of time.

________

The boat sped through Resurrection Bay, the water deep beneath us, a fjord formed by a glacier now gone. I put on my gloves and knotted my daughter’s scarf as the wind, cold for June, sliced through our hair, our new rain jackets. Most passengers sat inside at plastic banquettes, but my daughters stood at the bow, holding on as if flying, so, so alive. I watched the girls and the jagged coast from a perch off to the side, the psalmist’s words looping in my mind:

I will lift up my eyes to the mountains;From where shall my help come?My help comes from the Lord,Who made heaven and earth.

I had brought my two daughters to Alaska because I wanted an adventure, a grand trip with them, for them, for me. I had just finished a year of chemotherapy for recurrent ovarian cancer. My course consisted of two drugs, one of which is known as the Red Devil. I had, I thought, danced with the devil fairly well, my side effects unpleasant but minimal, the drugs sliding past the immune system to the cancer cells. I had kept my hair and inched as close to clear as I’m likely to get. A year of treatment remained, but my numbers looked good. Fantastic, even. The figures my oncologist uttered while leaning cross-armed against the sink in the exam room usually did not qualify as fantastic (cure rate: 0 percent), but I’d been with him long enough to know that with cancer, very little is certain.

I tried to stay still, to steel myself against the chilled metal of the boat and stem the coughing, to allow my lungs to fill completely with air. I had been coughing for four days, two days before we flew to Anchorage and two days after. Each morning I swallowed some antibiotics my mom slipped me before we left for the airport. The cough worsened. The day before our boat trip, we hiked nearly a mile up a mountain path toward the receding Exit Glacier. I propped myself against a boulder and stared out at the perfect peaks of the Kenai Mountains, each iced with snow down to the tree line. Another hiker stopped and asked if I needed a ranger. I shook my head and thanked her. “Bronchitis,” I explained as my chest heaved.

At the Safeway in Seward, I bought a bottle of cough syrup and, though the pharmacist told me they were useless, two bags of cherry cough drops. I coughed all night, buttressing myself with pillows and eventually sitting straight up, my head lolling against the wallpaper as I faded between waking and sleep. The cough syrup, dyed an overripe violet, dripped down around the measuring cup and stained a perfect circle into the laminate counter in our hotel room.

I did not consider that I had mistakenly self-diagnosed a bad case of bronchitis once before, some three years earlier, when my abdomen was actually swollen with tumors.

________

At the mention of puffins, I stood and joined my daughters at the rail. The puffins bobbed, their orange beaks like tiny sails in the wake. I lowered the brim of my baseball cap and tightened my hood. My older daughter straddled the rocking deck as she squinted through the phone, composing the best shot to send to her friends. Having sabotaged many such encounters by trying to capture and hold onto them, I just gazed the birds as they floated and flew away.

The boat slowed and eased into Spire Cove, where rocks twisted from...