When I was sixteen I knew I would never love anyone like I loved Rhonda

We were high school sweethearts and dated (on and off) for three years. I went through all of those years assuming in the back of my mind that we would have all the years of our lives together. I would go off and do my time in the service. When I got back and was ready to go to college, she would be almost finished. We would get married. That’s the way it would be. Singing doowah diddy diddy dum diddy dee.

There is something I believe only happens once in your life. This blanket statement is based on the exhaustive research of my fifty-seven years. For me it happened that fall when we were sophomores. We started talking to each other in the hall at school because I’d lost an assignment. But we kept talking. And talking. We met for lunch and talked. We met at football games and sat together. And talked.

At homecoming that fall, I asked her to go to the dance with me. We were both just old enough to date at school events and nothing more. We talked until the music got so loud we couldn’t hear anymore, and then we got up and danced until we were sweaty and exhausted.

The dance ended and I walked Rhonda home. It was after 11:00 and we had midnight curfews, so we weren’t talking much as we walked through the Ballard neighborhood where we lived.

Then it happened.

The backs of our hands touched as we walked along. Once. Twice. The third time they seemed to stick together and we walked with just the backs of our hands touching for nearly two blocks.

And we didn’t say a word.

I’m not even sure I breathed in that whole time.

When you are sixteen, you can transfer every nerve ending in your body to a single square inch of skin that is touching a girl for the first time. Not that we’d never touched each other before. But for those two blocks, there was no other reason to be touching each other than that we wanted to.

And it completely took my breath away.

For forty years after that night, every time I thought of it everything around me stood still and I lived in that square inch of contact. It is the single moment in a lifetime that you realize that someone outside your own skin can become so important that the rest of the world disappears. And that first realization happens only once.

There is never a second first time.

Two weeks later we went into the football stadium and took seats next to our friends Randy and Kay. Kay and Rhonda sat between Randy and me which was okay because both of us guys were more interested in the girls than in each other. As we got settled, I reached over and Rhonda took my hand in hers. We sat there holding hands.

“That was fast!” Kay said. We looked at her with complete lack of comprehension until I saw the disappointed look on Randy’s face as he held his hand palm up on his knee being ignored by Kay. To us, it was where our hands belonged. Randy and Kay on the other hand married right out of high school, had three kids, and lived happily ever after.

That first experience isn’t necessarily an omen of the future.

I was a good student in math and science. Rhonda was an artist. She was, in fact, a very good artist and it was her skill at design and art that kept her active in everything from decorating for the prom to editing the school newspaper. I loved to look at what she painted, even though I couldn’t tell her that the colors she described to me as she painted were no more real to me than the numbers in the national debt. There was a lot more of them than I would ever see.

In the fall of our senior year, we went with friends up to Whidbey Island and climbed to the top of Goose Rock. Rhonda wanted to look at the sunset so she could paint it some day, and we managed in the process to get separated from our friends. It turned out that we liked it up there, and the sun was moving westward over the Straits of Juan de Fuca. We sat up there watching the sunset, holding hands on the rock. I couldn’t remember ever watching a sunset like that. There are pretty ones in Seattle, but looking out to sea and seeing the sun sink into it was a breath-taking experience.

I didn’t know what I’d missed until about nine months later.

It was the week before high school graduation and for all practical purposes seniors had cut out of school. We were meeting for parties and making general fools of ourselves. I wasn’t too surprised when Rhonda invited me over to her house one afternoon. In fact, I had hopes that this might be a sign that we were going to consummate our relationship. We’d had some rocky patches during the year, but everything was great as far as I could tell.

The surprise she gave me wasn’t sex.

She had me sit on her sofa in the living room while she went to get my surprise. I closed my eyes as she instructed and when she told me to open them she was standing in front of me holding a painting. It took me a few minutes to recognize it as the sunset on Goose Rock.

“This is a going away present,” she said. I had already enlisted in the navy and would have about thirty days after graduation before I reported for duty. You might think it was crazy for me to enlist right out of school, but I didn’t have the money to go to college, and if I didn’t enlist I was sure to be drafted. I figured the Navy was a good place because North Viet Nam didn’t have one.

“It’s nice,” I said. “But I’d rather have you.” Neither subtlety nor tact was my strong suit. She looked at me steadily, but I could see a glistening in her eyes. I was afraid I’d really hurt her.

“It’s also a good-bye present,” she said. That totally didn’t sink in. She sat down beside me on the sofa and held the picture in front of the two of us, almost in the position that I remembered looking at the sunset from Goose Rock. She really captured it, I had to admit. I could almost feel that same awe and tug that I felt watching the sun fall into the sea.

“I’m not going to be here when you get out of the service, Dag,” she said. “I’m going away to college and we are going to start living different lives. Someday you’ll find the perfect woman for you, and you’ll live happily ever after like a fairy tale. But she’s not me. I realized it the day we sat up on this rock.”

“But… I don’t get it,” I said. “I thought we were, you know… that we would… How did you know then?”

“Remember what we did?” she asked. I nodded. “Everybody else headed down off the rock to get down to the cars, but I kept you there to watch the sunset. That wasn’t actually what I wanted. I wanted you to show passion and smother me with kisses when we were alone. I wanted to make love.” Now that was a shock to me. She’d wanted that? Then?

“Instead,” she continued, “you held my hand like a perfect gentleman and stared out at the sunset. Then you were worried that we’d get in trouble if we didn’t get back down and you carefully led me back to the group. I appreciate you being a gentleman, Dag, I really do. But I want something more in my life. And I realized up there that you want something more, too.” She called my attention back to the painting that I found was a little blurry due to an abundance of water in my eyes.

“See that?” she asked.

“The sunset?” I responded.

“No, down here.” I looked and on the beach there was a tiny figure.

“It’s someone on the beach.”

“It’s you.”

“I was up on Goose Rock. I was never on that beach.”

“Yes you were. I was holding your hand up on that rock and you were a mile away looking out at the ocean. I could see you on the beach as clearly as if I had a telescope. And when I painted the picture, I couldn’t stop until I’d put you out there on the beach where you belonged. I knew that even though I’d always love you, we weren’t connected in the kind of way that we wanted.”

“But we are, Rhonda,” I began. “I’ve never wanted anyone but you.”

“Shhh,” she said. She kissed me a long lingering kiss that I tried to push a little further, but I knew one thing for sure, I would never force myself on her. I could taste her tears when our lips parted.

Or maybe they were mine.

I didn’t understand then, or at anytime after. I thought at first that if I sat and stared at the painting, it would all come clear to me. I left it at home when I went into the Navy, but two years later, it was still there, hanging on my bedroom wall. I took it with me to college and hung it in my dorm room. I hung it in my first home with Brenda and would still sit in front of it while I played music trying to discover if I had found what I was looking for out there.

Perhaps if I could really see the colors in sunset, I’d know what it was that she was trying to tell me. I just knew that I’d never love anyone else like that. I’d never feel what I felt when the backs of our hands touched that first time.

Until I touched the top of Riley’s head.

Last night when she lay sleeping on my shoulder, I held my breath as I stroked her scalp. All the nerves in my body seemed to end in the tips of my fingers.

When she drove me back from Las Vegas after my heart attack last spring, I was set to rent two hotel rooms when we stopped for the night.

“Oh, no you don’t Mr. Håmar,” she said at the registration desk. She turned to the desk clerk in that little town in Utah. “Mr. Håmar is my patient,” she explained. “She showed him her ID and continued, “It is my responsibility to see him safely back to his doctor in Seattle. I can scarcely respond to him if he has another heart attack in the middle of the night if I’m in a different room. A single room with two beds will be quite sufficient.”

I paid for the room and we went to it.

“What did you show him?” I asked.

“My nurse’s ID,” she said smiling. She handed me a card. It was a perfect replica of the ID badges that the nurses in the hospital in Las Vegas wore.

“How did you get this, Miss uhh… Winchester?” I read the name on the badge.

“I found it in the hospital. It was pretty simple to insert my picture and reseal it. They weren’t going to let me into your wing when I first got to the hospital.”

“So you forged an ID? Oh, excuse me… found one?”

“Sometimes you have to improvise.”

The truth of the matter is that I was too tired to care how she had done it after our day on the road. And it was oddly comforting to know she slept just a few feet away. I dropped off to sleep immediately.

Sometime early in the morning I woke and padded into the bathroom. I returned to my bed and lay trying to get back to sleep. No matter what she tells you, Riley snores. Lightly, but she still snores. Until she started talking and thrashing in her bed. I didn’t understand what she was saying, but it was obvious she was having a nightmare. I called her name a couple of times, but to no avail. I rose and stood beside her bed, a little uncertain of what to do, but I decided to gently nudge her shoulder and perhaps she would roll over.

“Don’t. Please don’t,” she whimpered. “Don’t hurt me.”

“Riley,” I said as I touched her shoulder. “Deborah. You’re having a bad dream. Roll over and go back to sleep.”

She reached up and grabbed my hand so suddenly that I was afraid the brown belt she said she had was kicking into play. But she didn’t throw me across the room. Instead, she pulled my hand to her cheek, rolled over on it and was quickly, peacefully asleep. It was as if she just needed my hand to be safe. I was moved. I didn’t have a lot of experience with this sort of thing, and I knew I would have to extract my hand from beneath her lovely cheek, but for some reason I felt so protective of her.

“You’ll never have to be afraid when you are with me, Riley,” I said softly. “You will never need to be afraid.”

I withdrew my hand and went back to bed. When I woke up next she was just bringing Maizie in from a morning walk.

I knew I’d never love anyone else like that.