I paused. “I remember laughter. My dreams had all come true. Hands down the happiest day of my life. No question. Nothing even came close.”
I paused while the bitterness returned.
“We danced, took pictures. She was never beyond arm’s reach. Never let go of me. Then we sat to eat, and my feet were killing me ’cause my tux shoes were two sizes too small ’cause they’d messed up my order, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t planning on being in them too much longer. Or the tux for that matter. Then the toasts started.”
Another pause.
“Several people said a lot of stuff I can’t remember, and then Roger, my best man . . . clinked his glass. And I remember that when he did, Marie grabbed my hand and squeezed it hard and her eyes were teary and she was trying to smile and . . . he lifted his glass and . . .”
I faded off. Tried not to look into the memory, but it was too late. It had returned.
“He was smiling when he said, ‘David and I have been best friends a long time. I’m honored he would ask me to stand with him. Really. And I have a gift for the bride and groom. It’s one of my favorite memories. One of my favorite moments. Something I’ll never forget. I’ve also given each of you a copy.’ Something in his tone of voice caught me as just a bit off, but he was already reaching beneath the chair I was sitting in. He pulled out a manila envelope taped to the underside. He lifted it and said, ‘Each of you has one as well.’ I watched as people began opening their envelopes and their faces changed from smiles to horror. One hundred–plus people sucked in a collective gasp that turned the room into a vacuum. They covered their mouths and looked at me.
“Roger lifted his glass. ‘To David and Marie.’ Marie opened the envelope, the light drained out of her face, she dropped the photos, and the color of her skin matched her dress. She looked at me. Shook her head. The slow motion returned. I reached down, flipped the photos over, and stared at the first. It took a minute to register. It was a picture of a hotel room where we’d had the rehearsal dinner the night before. On the bedside table was yesterday’s newspaper, and in the bed were two naked figures.”
I swallowed as my voice broke down to a whisper. “The next four pictures were variations of the first. Just different positions.” I stared out across the water. “My best man and my wife. And—on her hand was the ring I’d given her.”
Summer and Ellie stared at me dumbstruck. Jaws resting on the ground.
Chapter 38
I kept going. In the middle of it now.
“It took a minute for the images to register. For the meaning to register. People began quietly leaving the reception. Walking out. When I looked at where Marie had been sitting, her chair was empty. She was gone. I stood, and my best man was standing there with a content and satisfied ‘What are you going to do about it?’ look on his face. I still couldn’t believe it. I tried to run after Marie, but he caught my arm and whispered, ‘I’ll always be her first. And she’ll always be mine.’ For some reason, it struck me then that he’d done this intentionally. Like, to harm me. Get back at me for something. I stared at him as the difference between what was real and what was not blurred inside my head, and then he smiled. Nodded. Laughed. His coup d’état complete.
“While I’d been laid up, he’d moved in and convinced her I wouldn’t make it. That she needed to prepare herself. Psychological warfare. Emotional terrorism. Preying on the weak.”
I paused again. Summer swallowed. Ellie didn’t move.
“Bones pulled me off him as I was doing my best to kill him. Roger was unconscious, several of the bones in his face broken, teeth shattered. He spent the next couple months in the hospital, but as he lay there, crumpled like a broken pretzel, I could still see that smug smile on his face.
“I ran after Marie, but by then she was gone. She’d taken one of the boats and left the island. A tattered white wedding dress floating in her wake. I took a leave of absence from work and started looking. I used every available technology at my disposal, and given my job with the government and the fact that Bones was still shepherding me, I had access to a lot. I chased her for months. Months turned into a year. I’d find a clue, get close, and she’d disappear. I learned how to live out of a backpack and with very little. How to not eat for days. Sometimes a week. I went days and even weeks in the same clothes. Watching. Waiting. Sifting through receipts or video footage or a hotel dumpster where the nastiest stuff on earth is thrown—stuff that would gag a maggot. I was reading every piece. Every scrap.”
“Then one day I got lucky, or she got tired of running, and I caught up to her. Staying at a high-rise hotel. Thing must have been sixty or seventy stories. The porch of each room hung over the water. In the guest book, she’d signed a fake name. I convinced the attendant I was her husband and he gave me a key. Before I walked in, I watched a couple of pigeons fight over some bird seed, and then I unlocked the door and walked in. The room was neat, bed made, her bag and clothes on the floor. There was a letter addressed to me on the bed and the patio door had been swung wide open. I picked up the letter, walked out on the patio, and saw where she’d taken off her shoes and socks before she’d climbed up on the railing. I saw where her feet had stood in the morning dew maybe sixty seconds before. Then I read the letter.”
I stood quietly a long time.
“They never found her body. Deep water and a rip current. Several guests in the rooms below us reported having seen something like a person fly past their window heading to the water below. I returned home, numb, and told Bones to send me somewhere. Anywhere.
“He did. Evil doesn’t care what pain you’re in. We had plenty to do. I thought if I worked hard enough I could forget. Problem was, in chasing her I’d gotten very good at finding people who didn’t want to be found or whom others didn’t want me to find. So I medicated the pain myself, thinking that somehow finding all these other people would make up for not having found her ninety seconds sooner.” A group of pelicans flying in formation flew low across the horizon. “For years, I had this recurring dream. I’d barge in the door. She’d be standing on the railing. Wearing her wedding dress. Holding a bouquet. Smiling down at me. I’d lunge. But I never did reach her. I’d wake up sweating, unable to breathe, my arm cramped from reaching.”
Summer and Ellie looked cold.
“In the years following, I found eighty-one people. Girls. Women. Children. Victims all. In each one, I’d look for Marie’s face but I never saw it. I worked ninety or a hundred and twenty hours a week. I wasn’t human. Wasn’t anything. I didn’t feel cold. Heat. Hunger. Didn’t love. Didn’t sleep. I just was.
“Six years later, I was in West Palm at The Breakers. Studying the movements of this hedge fund guy who liked little girls. Paid handsomely for what he liked. Anyway, they brought in these three Asian girls. Eight, nine, and ten. One wore braces. Other two wore pigtails. So we arrested him. Which he didn’t like. Offered me a lot of money to forget I’d ever seen him. I broke one arm, shattered his jaw, dislocated both elbows, slammed his hand through a sliding-glass door, and told him to enjoy prison.
“While he rode the elevator to the ambulance, I walked back to my room. The seven-year anniversary of my almost wedding. I was tired. My soul was tired. I was sitting there staring out across the water when there was this light knock at my door. I thought maybe they’d come to clean the room. I opened it and Marie was staring at me. I thought I was hallucinating. Then she touched me. Trembling fingers . . .”
Ellie and Summer stared dumbstruck. I just tried to breathe. Gunner sat next to me. My voice softened.
“Seven years prior, Marie had tired of running so she faked her death to throw me off. Which she had. Obviously, I’d stopped looking. The years since had not been kind to her. She was thinner. More tortured. There was a tiredness behind her eyes that sleep wouldn’t cure. Needle scars dotted the inside of her elbows. Over the next several hours, she circled around me. Never crossing a four-foot bubble between us. Four feet might as well have been a
million miles. She told me the truth about our wedding, Roger, and how it had started after I’d been shot. How she was afraid I was going to die. How often she’d wanted to tell me. And how she was sorry. I sat in disbelief. Stunned. Sometime around two or three a.m., I cracked and cried like a baby. I let out all the tears and anger that had been seven years in the making. She didn’t say much. She just sat there. A cold breeze. When I woke at daylight, she was gone. Another note.”
Ellie sat quietly a long time. Shaking her head. As the sun fell over our shoulders and people continued lining up to take their picture at the marker just on the other side of the fence, we sat in silence.
Finally, Ellie spoke. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because sometimes it helps to know you’re not alone. That you’re not the only person on this planet who’s been betrayed by someone you love. You wear your wound out where the whole world can see it. As if the world owes you something.”
She stiffened. “Doesn’t it?”
“It won’t satisfy. You’ll still be empty.”
She dismissed me with a hand. “Oh, as if you’re an expert because one woman crapped on you. You’re no better than me. You’re just a bitter old man trying to understand why some hoozie didn’t love you. Earth to whatever-your-name-is.” She was screaming now. “Sometimes people don’t love you back!”
She hung her head in her hands. The ring from the envelope dangled from a chain around her neck. Summer sat, knees tucked to her chest, staring at me. She looked cold and in pain.
I debated with myself. I knew I needed to tell her the rest; I just didn’t want to. This hadn’t really gone the way I’d hoped. And given Ellie’s reaction, my next words could make it worse. But I figured she had a right to know. I pointed at the ring. “May I see that?”
She lifted it from around her head and threw it at me. I caught it and then sat next to her.
On my rock.
Chapter 39
The ring sat in my palm, glistening. “Twenty-two years ago, I was a junior at the Academy. I’d flown home for break. And without telling Marie, I went to see this jeweler in downtown Jacksonville. Had this office on the river. Harby was his name. By appointment only. One of those places where they buzz you in the front door. I told him what I was looking for, he sketched it, and when I nodded, he made it. Maybe one in ten thousand could do what he did. Took him a couple weeks. A one-in-a-million ring.”
I stared into the memory and laughed. “Cost me two years of savings plus my skiff. My Gheenoe.” A shake of my head. “She knew I was all in when I sold my boat. When I offered her the ring, she couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe I’d done it on my own. With no help from her. She slipped it on her finger, cried, and in that moment, I gave her all of me. And from that moment to this, I never asked for any of me back.”
I lifted Ellie’s hand, uncurled her fingers, and set the ring in her sweaty palm. “That ring is this ring.”
The disbelief drained deeper. She looked from it to me and back to it, finally shaking her head. “This was your wife’s?”
I nodded.
She looked up at me. “Does that mean . . . ?”
I shook my head. “She died. A year before you were born.”
“How do you know? With everything, how are you certain?”
The air smelled of charcoal and lavender. Somewhere seagulls were filling the air with noise. I swallowed. “I woke in the hotel room. Alone. A note on the pillow. And unlike the first time, she left nothing to chance with this one. This time she would pull it off for real. She rented a boat, took it out a few miles offshore, floating in about ninety-five feet of water. She turned on a video camera, tied a five-gallon bucket filled with dried cement to her feet, tossed it overboard, then stared at the camera a long time. Finally, she wiped tears, mouthed the words, ‘I love you,’ waved a final time, and followed the bucket. The Coast Guard found the boat and played the video for me in the hotel manager’s office. That was a year before you were born.”
The three of us sat quietly for a long time.
“After that . . . I checked out. Got drunk. For the better part of a year. Found myself on various beaches in the Keys, and then as if some giant hand lifted me up and set me down, I found myself here, on this rock, an empty bottle in my hand, staring up at that sun, asking myself some hard questions. I don’t think I smelled too great, since I hadn’t showered in a couple of weeks. And as I’m sitting about where you are, I hear this voice.” I chuckled at the memory. “At first I thought I was hallucinating. Hearing voices. Then he said it again.”
She turned sideways and looked at me. Asking without asking.
“He leaned down, casting a shadow across my face, and said, ‘Tell me what you know about sheep.’
“I didn’t know if the voice I heard was in my head and I was going crazy, or if it was real. When I responded, I spoke to the voice in my head. ‘I know they are the dumbest animals on the face of the earth and they have a tendency to wander and get lost.’
“Then he leaned in, so I could see him, and he smiled. ‘And,’ he said, ‘they need a shepherd.’
“I stood. Shoved my hands in my pockets and stared through my sunglasses out across gin-clear water. Then I fell in the water. To this day I don’t know how he found me, but he did. He lifted me out of the water so I didn’t drown, put me in a little flat about three blocks that way, and nursed me back to life. Again. Feeding me. Getting me sober.”
Summer whispered, “Colorado?”
I nodded. “Then one day I’m sitting on the front porch of this little efficiency roach motel where he had me sequestered. He was sipping wine. I was sipping iced tea. And he set a pad and paper in front of me. I looked up at him. I was not impressed. I was just angry. The more sober I got, the angrier I got. Which was the reason I drank. To drown the anger. I couldn’t have been any more unhappy or angry. I could have ripped someone’s head off with my bare hands. I knew I was about two seconds from choking the life out of somebody. Anybody. I was a walking time bomb and I didn’t need much to go off. He knew it too, so he set this pad in front of me and he said, ‘Tell me who you love.’
“I looked at him like he’d lost his ever-loving mind. I said, ‘Love?’ I shook my head. ‘I’ll never love again.’ He sat back, shrugged, sipped, and said, ‘You can choose that if you want, or you can realize that we are all just broken, and sometimes no matter how hard we try and no matter what we do, people just don’t love us back.’ He scooted closer, his breath on my face. ‘And when they don’t, we have a choice. We can hold on to that, let it fester and live out of that puss-filled bitterness, or . . .’ He tapped the pad of paper. ‘We can learn to love again.’
“He sipped some more wine and poked me hard in the chest. ‘Every heart is made to pour out. But sometimes we’re wounded and what we pour has soured and turned to poison. You get to choose. Poison or antidote? Life or death? You choose. So what’s it gonna be, David Bishop?’”
Summer gave a little start, followed by a low moaning sound of which it seemed she was not entirely conscious.
I shrugged. “I guess maybe that was my moment. Maybe that’s when I came to. When I saw more than just my own pain. Maybe I saw his too. The fact that I was hurting had hurt him. Deeply. Somewhere in there it struck me that love is what we’re made to do. It is the thing our hearts are made to pour. I would later learn it was his own wound surfacing when he told me, ‘We don’t love because people love us back. We love because we can. Because we were made to. Because it’s all we have. Because, at the end of the day, evil can take everything save one thing: your love. And when you come to realize that, that the only thing you really control in this life is your love, you’ll see, maybe for the first time, that we’re all just lost.’
“He leaned in and whispered, ‘Apollumi. And the needs of the apollumi outweigh the needs of the ninety-nine. So . . .’ He tapped the pad again. ‘Tell me who you love.’”
Chapter 40
I stare
d down at the water. Remembering.
“I used to come here every day. And I’d write. I didn’t know anything about writing. I just knew that when I did, it was like letting pressure out of the cooker. I’d dig the pen into the paper, scarring it more than marking it, but pretty soon I’m remembering the beautiful and not the painful. And I’m wanting to look into those memories where we shared laughter and hope and tenderness, so I wrote them down. Pretty soon I’m talking through the mouths of these characters I created.”
Summer stiffened and her head tilted. “The older mentor I named Fingers, modeled after Bones.” Summer’s jaw dropped open, but I kept talking. “The younger I gave my name. Because I didn’t want it anymore. Because I thought maybe I could rewrite the life he lived. Bones gave me a leave of absence from my government job. He came down once a month to check on me, and every time he found me writing. I took a job tending bar”—I pointed—“down there. An oceanfront watering hole. Lots of singles. Looking for love in all the wrong places.
“I’d been sober and writing a year when this woman, this lady who didn’t really fit in, sat at my bar and studied me. She wasn’t like the usual customer. This lady held power somewhere else and she was just here alone, letting her mind unwind. I’d cleaned my bar and nobody was ordering, so I was sitting down there with a pencil and pad, continuing my story, and she says to me, ‘What’re you writing?’ And I thought about her question.
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