Bill the Dreamer

How an empty suitcase taught me about love and loss.

Photo by JD Mason on Unsplash

'Is this seat taken?' Bill asked, patting the empty space beside him. His water bottle clinked against the table.

'That depends, is Sarah traveling with you?' I checked my manifest again.

'Oh, she won't be joining us after all, she's going home.'

A shadow crossed Bill's face as he said this—my first clue, if I'd been paying attention. They had traveled for seven days on the cruise ship to reach Alaska, and now Sarah was gone.

Bill carried himself with the careful dignity of someone who'd once commanded boardrooms. His silver hair was always neatly combed, and despite the casual dress code of Alaskan tours, he insisted on wearing pressed khakis and collared shirts. His bright blue eyes still sparked with boyish mischief, belying the manifest's recorded age of 69.

Low clouds hugged the Chugach Mountains that morning as I stood by the door of the McKinley Express, plastering on my brightest smile for bleary-eyed passengers. That's when I noticed the discrepancy in my manifest: one empty seat at a four-person table, the kind meant for sharing vacation stories. Bill was there, but his daughter Sarah wasn't.

The train wound through the wilderness to Talkeetna. As the landscape shifted from coastal forests to interior valleys, Bill settled into our little community. Those first few days at the lodge went smoothly enough, the kind of peaceful interlude that always makes me wonder later if I should have seen what was coming.

At the cocktail party, the late afternoon sun finally broke through, casting long shadows across the lodge's deck. Bill held court, glass of Chardonnay in hand, his stories growing taller as the light grew longer. A couple from Minnesota sat enthralled with his tale of the lion on safari.

"The lion was this close," Bill gestured, nearly knocking over his wine glass.

"Weren't you scared?" Martha from Minnesota leaned in, her bifocals sliding down her nose.

"Terrified," Bill winked, "but I figured I'd had a good life."

I was training a guide that week, Kim, who had never done this itinerary. We hit it off—she was my age and had a great sense of humor. We bantered about the age-old traveler dilemma, staying hydrated and needing the bathroom.

We packed everything and continued our journey across the breathtaking Broad Pass, showcasing the power of glaciers. The morning fog was finally burning off as we pulled into the Denali viewpoint. Bill fumbled with a fancy camera he'd produced from somewhere, though I was pretty sure I hadn't seen it before.

"Here, let me help you with that," offered Janet from Ohio, probably in her early sixties herself. "My grandson has the same model."

"Oh, I've had this since my National Geographic days," Bill announced with complete conviction. "Photographed tigers in India with it." The camera was clearly a recent model, but Janet just smiled and showed him how to adjust the settings.

To my surprise, Bill suddenly rattled off a series of perfectly accurate photography terms—f-stops and shutter speeds—as if some door in his mind had briefly swung open to a room still perfectly preserved. Then he turned to Janet and asked if she'd seen any tigers on the trip so far.

That night at the Denali lodge, we had tickets for a dinner show, and Bill didn't appear.

I asked Kim to check on him. She returned minutes later, her face ashen.

"There's a problem," she stammered. "Bill has no clothes on."

She explained how he'd answered the door completely naked, holding just a pair of trousers in front of himself like a shield. When I went to check on him myself, he'd managed to get the pants on but stood there disoriented, insisting he couldn't find his clothes.

When confused, his eyebrows would knit together above his aquiline nose, transforming his usually dignified features into something more vulnerable.

That's when we discovered it—the empty suitcase. We'd been lugging around his baggage for days, never realizing there was nothing in it. He kept insisting he had put his clothes in a drawer. After checking every empty drawer, I realized he had unpacked at the last hotel but left everything there. With only the clothes he wore, I walked him to the show.

The next morning, the group headed out early for their Denali National Park tour. When they returned that afternoon, Bill was all smiles, taking long drinks from his ever-present water bottle. I admired his dedication to staying hydrated. I had managed to get his clothes delivered while they were away.

That evening, my phone rang—the restaurant manager needed help with one of my passengers. I knew exactly who it would be. I found Bill sitting contentedly at a table by himself, completely unaware of any problem. The manager explained how Bill had ordered dinner, excused himself to use the bathroom, then walked straight into a different restaurant, gotten another table, and ordered a whole new dinner. There he sat, happy as could be, probably wondering why his food was taking so long. I quietly cancelled the other order and asked to join him, watching his face illuminate as he launched into another story.

Over dinner, Bill shared tales about his diamond mine in South Africa, eyes twinkling with mischief as he described midnight shootouts with bandits. "Did I ever tell you about the time I had a run-in with bandits?" he asked, and I leaned in, caught up in his world of secret passages and dramatic showdowns. His real estate empire came next—stories of constructing buildings from coast to coast, each tale more incredible than the last.

The late summer light played tricks up here, stretching evenings into endless golden hours that seemed to multiply Bill's stories like shadows.

Later, helping him to his room, he asked where he could buy some wine. I offered to get it for him—two bottles of Chardonnay from the liquor store across the street. When I returned, he thanked me profusely, then cracked open the first bottle and poured it straight into that trusty water bottle. Suddenly, all those bright smiles and never-ending hydration made a different kind of sense.

Through the remaining days, Bill and I, sometimes joined by Kim, shared more dinners. The stories flowed as freely as the wine—some nights he was the hero of his own epic tales, others he couldn't remember which restaurant he was sitting in. He'd grow bitter sometimes, especially about his daughter, calling her a "gold digger" with such venom it made me wince. His wife was gone, he told me, had been for years. Maybe that's when the emptying started, like clothes vanishing from a suitcase, memories slipping through his fingers.

When he mentioned going on another tour directly after this one, I understood: his daughter wanted others to look after her father, maybe she needed a break. I worried about Bill getting confused in the airport, wandering alone with his empty suitcase, that wine-filled water bottle his only companion. At least someone would meet him at baggage claim in Seattle from his next tour. That final morning, I found Bill alert and focused, nervous but excited about his next adventure.

You want to know what keeps me up at night? It's not the 3:30 AM wake-up calls to catch the bus down to Whittier. It's the memory of that empty suitcase in Bill's room, and the way life has of slowly emptying out the things we hold dear.

Bill embodied joie de vivre. His stories were told with such warmth, with such clarity, such joy. As if even while his present was unraveling, his past remained technicolor-bright. Or maybe those stories were his way of filling the empty spaces his life had left behind.

I hope somewhere in that brilliant, fading mind of his, he's still telling those tales, still filling empty suitcases with adventures that can never get lost.