Bella says she doesn’t feel much of anything besides regret these days, and for the most part she’s fine with that, she says, says there’s plenty worse things to feel all the time, among other things a sharp stick in the eye, for one, she says, and if anything she says or does leads to me leaving her she’s fine with that too, in the long run, because she’s already regretful.

She leans forward and rustles through her bag and comes back up with her pills, opens the bottle and takes one out and swallows it with the bottled water in her other hand and then asks me if I’ve taken mine yet today, which I have, I say I have. We take the same pills, myself twice the dose she does which is convenient when she runs out and I can cut one of mine in half and give it to her or if I run out and she can give me two of hers. Neither of us can tell if this means I’m twice as crazy as she is or if she’s just half as medicated as she should be, though we both have thoughts of our own on the matter.

We’re in a car, I’m driving, heading north along the Olympic Peninsula to Port Angeles, Washington and the grave of Raymond Carver. This is her idea, though it could just as easily be mine, and we’ve each brought copies of our favorite stories, the same stories, each in our own equally-tattered editions with the intention of reading them to each other on the drive to reacquaint ourselves. We haven’t touched them yet and nor do I think we’re likely to, still sitting on the floor of the backseat underneath my toiletry kit and her handbag where we first tossed them three hours ago in our rush to miss the traffic, which we didn’t.

She doesn’t say anything while I drive and I don’t ask, but can’t help but wonder if it’s us or this pilgrimage we’re on which can’t help but affect us somehow, wonder what we’ll say when we finally stop somewhere, at a motel somewhere nearby, what will we say to each other? Chaucer’s pilgrims of the twenty-first century is what we are, I think, chain-smoking cigarettes and listening to sad old country songs and drinking Rainier beer and searching for something to save us in silent conversation.

It’s just like I said, like I thought, a small motel just outside Port Angeles where there are a lot of motels and also hotels because of the ocean and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the ferry that crosses or ferries, I suppose, people everyday from here to Victoria, British Columbia, though we go to one of the cheaper motels, cheaper because it’s a motel instead of a hotel, which I remember hearing or reading once means it’s just one or two stories instead of more and also it’s a hell of a lot cheaper and shows. It’s late and we’re both tired even if we are a little hungry, walk across the highway to the convenience store and buy some chips, a pint of ice cream and two plastic spoons and a six-pack of beer that isn’t Rainier but comparably tasteless: dinner, go back to our room and eat and drink and have sex and fall asleep.

In the morning we drive into town for breakfast and to look around and find out where we can find the cemetery. At a small diner we each have a cup of coffee and she orders the French toast while I order the biscuits and gravy, and when the coffee comes I remind her not to forget to take her pills and she tells me not to forget to take my pills either. The French toast is bad, she says, too soggy, she says, and the biscuits and gravy aren’t that great either but I don’t say anything. There are more people in town than we’d expect, even considering the ocean and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and they’re younger than I’d expect the average tourist in Port Angeles to be considering the ocean and the ferry, most of them thirteen or fourteen by the looks of them although I find it harder and harder to gauge the ages of teenagers these days, I think, think this means I’m getting old or else everyone else is just getting a little harder to identify.

In a kitsch shop we discover there’s been a movie filmed in town in the last year or so, or else the movie was set in the town or the town figured in the plot of the movie in some significant way, about vampires or Mormons, I don’t entirely understand, but the movie or maybe the book the movie was based on or both have become quite a hit with the kids, says the older lady behind the counter of the kitsch shop, and since then they, by which she means the kids, have embarked on a kind of pilgrimage of their own, to see for themselves where this or that happened and how it compares to their imagination, which I suppose isn’t really so different from ourselves and our little pilgrimage in a way I don’t entirely have the objectivity to see right now because unlike Bella and I they’re all excited and giggling and squealing almost and we decide it’s time to find the cemetery.

The older lady in the kitsch shop makes a map for us to the cemetery on the back of the Victoria Express ferry brochure, down South C Street to West Eighteenth, past the airport until you get to Ocean View Cemetery Road, she says, and then we park anywhere and we won’t have any difficulty finding it, just north of the only large tree we’ll see among the plots. “Thank you,” we say, and as courtesy Bella decides to buy a snow globe, inside the Victoria Express crossing the Strait of Juan de Fuca on Christmas day. “Now it’s snowing,” says Bella, shaking the globe. “Now it’s not.”

Outside it’s raining, relatively warm and not especially cloudy before but now it’s raining and considerably colder, just like that, and we walk back to the car where we left both of the windows open, not much, just a crack, but enough to wet the vinyl armrests on the inside of the doors and the sides of the seats. We get in, roll up the windows and I turn on the defrost to clear up the front glass which has become fogged from the rain outside and now our body heat in the car with all the windows rolled up, I turn the defrost on one below high because the air coming out is still cold since it’s the first time all season we or I have turned on the heat in the car, the defrost, and then sit in the car with the engine running waiting for the glass to clear.

It’s taking longer than I’d expect, like I said because it’s the first time all season, all year for that matter, I’ve turned on the defrost, but I’m in no hurry and fine with waiting, but then Bella takes the arm of her jacket and wipes it up and down across the interior of the glass, clearing it, sure, but she knows I hate this, knows how much, hate how it creates the little moisture drops that eventually dry when the defrost kicks in, not to mention the streaks it makes, how it makes the glass harder to see out of in the long run and if she’d just have a little patience the defrost would have cleared up the fog in a nice and uniform manner, but she can’t wait, she’s impatient, and now it’s going to make for more work for me since now I’m going to have to wait for it to dry, tomorrow or some time later, and get out the Windex and spend an extra couple of minutes clearing out the streaks, which isn’t really that big of a deal, sure, I realize that, but it’s indicative of something larger, I think, between us, that right now feels like everything.

So I put the car in gear and pull out down South C Street, take a left on West Eighteenth and I don’t say anything and neither does she, silence the lingua franca we both seem to have adopted, which is fine by me and fine by her too I imagine, past the airport which seems to be really nothing more than a strip of blacktop and a handful of single prop Cessnas, and then there we are, a small signpost saying this way to Ocean View Cemetery Road and I take a right, park midway around a small cul-de-sac and the both of us get out.

It’s not hard to see where the grave is, a well-worn walkway through the grass and like the older lady said, only one large tree among the plots, overlooking the water, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the mountains in the distance that I guess are Canada. It’s beautiful I suppose, suppose just because it’s not really beauty I’m expecting or looking or hoping for but something a little more solid, something I can hold on to, something to tell me what to do and where to go from here, which it doesn’t, but it’s beautiful.

The grave is larger than most of its neighbors, a slab of ebony or black granite with the engraving, “Raymond Carver, May 25, 1938 - August 2, 1988,” and then just below that, “Poet, Short Story Writer, Essayist,” and that’s it. Simple and austere, I guess, and brevity’s the soul of wit, I think, wouldn’t imagine purple prose on his grave, Nabokov or Jack Kerouac maybe, with “All that hitchhikin and all that railroadin” but not him. There’s an empty bottle of Jack Daniels which I think isn’t very generous, leaving it empty like that, and also some shells, seashells, picked up no doubt on the shore just below us. I shove my hands in my pockets and all of a sudden think about leaving her here, at Raymond Carver’s grave, just getting back in the car and driving home, leaving, and by the time she makes it back if she ever does make it back I’ll be long gone, all my things sold or given away except for what I need most or what means most to me, which isn’t much these days, a change of clothes and a pack of cigarettes rolled up in my sleeve because I think this is what we came here to do and any other time it’d just be a shitty thing to do but right now it’d be poetic, I think. Right now, before she turns and looks back at me and we start walking back to the car, pick up our bags at the motel and drive home, right now is the time to do this, right now, before she turns.

She turns, looks back at me and smiles, and now it’s just not poetic anymore.