Locked Hearts

by D. Brown

  “I saw your husband leave,” Sam said and picked up a dish towel, “Where did he go?”

  “Golfing.”

  Sam agreed with the disdain that laced Maggie’s reply, “It’s a monumental waste of space if you ask me.”

  Robert spent most of the morning acting like the put upon child, sulking around the house, brooding and snapping at the kids. He couldn’t understand Maggie’s outburst of temper over a silly piece of beach junk, and a bullet at that.

  Around ten he left to play golf with a cursory peck on the cheek good-bye and said he’d be back by lunch, and one of Maggie’s special tuna melt sandwiches sure would hit the spot.

  Maggie thought as she watched him drive away, it’ll be a cold damn day in hell before Maggie makes one of her special tuna melt sandwiches.

  “Where are the kids?”

  “Anna Beth is out on the beach getting a tan most likely. Robbie went out to the pier fishing. David is with Anna Beth and building sand castles.”

  “Sounds like you have all bases covered. So, what are you doing?”

  “Dishes, with this crowd every meal is a production.”

  Sam frowned, “They didn’t come out for breakfast?”

  It struck a nerve.

  “My crowd is more a milk and cereal bunch,” Maggie said. They followed their father’s lead there.

  “I’ll keep that in mind next time.”

  “I’m sorry, Sam. I know you went to so much trouble.”

  “Hey,” he said, “Nothing to be sorry about. I cook for whoever wants to eat.”

  He looked around the room, then at the stack of dishes in the kitchen sink.

  “So, they left you all alone with all dishes.”

  “Again.”

  “To hell with the dishes then, let’s go for a walk.”

  “They’ll be waiting for me when I get back.”

  “Then I’ll help you,” he said and waved the towel.

  “You want to help?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You finish washing, I’ll dry, and you tell me where everything goes.”

  “Just give me the dishes, I’ll put them up.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  “All right,” Maggie smiled. “You’re on mister.”

  Sam grabbed a towel and took to drying the rest of the breakfast dishes and passed each plate, cup and bowl off to Maggie who stacked them in their respective cabinets.

  “For a cereal and milk family, you sure do generate a lot of dishes.”

  “With this bunch, you generate a lot of everything.”

  “Use paper plates,” Sam said. “This is vacation. Throw the damn things away when you’re done.”

  “We recycle,” Maggie said.

  “This is vacation, screw the environment; let our grandkids worry about the landfill mess.”

  “You're joking, I hope.”

  “Maybe,” Sam smiled and winked.

  Maggie’s tone of voice betrayed more resigned sadness than humor. “Robert doesn’t care to eat off paper plates and it has nothing to do with the environment.”

  “Jesus,” Sam said. “You know? You latched on to a real piece of work there. Is there anything he actually likes?”

  “Yeah,” Maggie said. “He likes things his way.”

  Obviously.

  Sam tossed her a damp washcloth. “Here you need this.”

  Maggie caught it, “For what?”

  “To get that “WIPE FEET HERE” tattoo off your forehead; it seems everybody here thinks you’re a welcome mat.”

  She threw the washcloth back at him.

  “Funny.”

  When they had finished with the dishes, Maggie told Anna Beth to keep an eye on David and to make sure she kept liberal amounts of sunscreen applied. Anna Beth replied with a bored, “yes mother,” and turned back to her CD player and headphones.

  “Where are you going?” she asked pulling one of the tiny headphone speakers away from her ear.

  “Sam and I are going to take a walk. You remember Sam, from last night?”

  “Sure, from last night,” Sam said and extended his hand.

  “Does Daddy know you’re going for a walk?” she asked ignoring Sam.

  “Your father is playing golf,” and that’s all Maggie chose to say, “I’ll be back in a little while. Watch your brother.”

  With that, Sam and Maggie started down the beach for the cedar walk bridge and the slope of sand falling away to the water line.

  “I apologize for my daughter’s rudeness.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Sam said, “She’s going to break hearts someday.”

  “What do you mean by some day?”

  “I take that to mean we’re too late?”

  “Anna Beth has a boyfriend,” Maggie said. “This vacation has become what she likes to call her prison sentence in hell. Seventeen year old girls don’t care to spend time with their families.”

  “Mine didn’t either, but then that carried over to when she turned eighteen, and now nineteen. I’ve decided she maintains a certain level of pissed-off when it comes to me.”

  Sam watched the easy way Maggie walked. She didn’t trudge through the loose sand so much as glide over it.

  Her steps were easy, graceful.

  Sam glanced away then found his eyes drawn to her again.

  There was something about her.

  Something wild and unbridled, just like her spirit.

  There was something about the sparkle in those brown eyes when she looked up at him, the smile on her face as she laughed when he said something funny.

  Sam wanted to make her smile and laugh, a lot.

  “Which way?” he asked when they reached the packed sand at the water line.

  Maggie looked north up the beach, and south, beyond the pier, and pointed in the direction of “that-a-ways.”

  “That-a-ways it is.”

  They walked south, beneath the high, octagonal cone of the pavilion and municipal pier and out the other side. Seagulls darted back and forth in a game of tag with the encroaching surf. Kites bobbed overhead.

  A nice start to what Sam hoped was a great weekend.

  “The original pier burned back in 1966, an old structure that had been around since before the turn of the century,” he said.

  “The heat here is intense,” Maggie said as they stepped out of the shade of the pier and into the noonday sunlight.

  “I wouldn’t wish South Georgia on my worst enemy,” Sam said, squinting into the sun. “Once you get away from the beach, you understand the true meaning of the word ‘sweltering.’”

  The beach homes on the island’s southern tip were older and of a more eclectic design than its younger, more stylish and sterile designs that sprouted like dandelions along Tybee’s northern bend. The homes down here were short squat structures built of tin, cinder block and cypress, and raised on struts to guard against storm surges in the event of a hurricane.

  They followed the shoreline south nodding hello to passing beach walkers on their return trip north. Some Maggie remembered from breakfast and she smiled hello as they passed.

  Sam seemed to know everybody.

  “This is as far as we go,” Sam said and pointed at the wide channel yawning between where they stood and the outcropping of land about two hundred yards south. “The beach ends at the point. The sand gives way to silt and river bottom sediment from the back channel.”

  Here is where the mouth of Tybee Creek opened up to swallow great heaves of ocean every high tide. The creek cleaved the island nearly in half, and eventually spilled out into the Savannah River in Lazaretto Creek on Tybee’s north side.

  They sat on the seawall and watched the tide recede.

  They talked, watching the nasty purple bruise blossom above the southern horizon. The heavy humidity rose like steam out of the marsh and spawned the daily thunderstorms during summer months.

  The dark cloud towers stretched to the top of the sky.

  A low rumble of di
stant thunder rolled up the shoreline.

  “We’re going to get wet,” Maggie said.

  “We have a little time. The storm will push out to sea first. Anything directly hitting us will come from behind, off the marshes.”

  Sam found it easy being with Maggie. Accommodating others had never been one of his strong suits. People irritated him to the point where he kept to himself most of the time.

  I don’t suffer idiots and fools quietly.

  But Maggie, she was different.

  She gets me.

  He enjoyed her company. It was as simple as that.

  8

  “You can tell me about it,” Maggie said in a soft voice as they watched the slow march of the storm head out to sea.

  She was surprised at her sudden candor, and now wanting to hear Sam’s story, wanting to know the emotional cancer that ate away at his soul. And that’s when Sam turned to her, and Maggie saw the torment reflected in his eyes.

  “It’s not out of love that I miss her,” he began, surprised at how easily he opened up. “That love died years ago.”

  So Sam told her.

  He started at the beginning; at what he felt was the beginning of the end of their marriage and the final months of his wife’s life.

  “I found out that Diane had been having an affair,” he said, “She’d been having one for quite some time.”

  He paused debating if pouring his heart out to a complete stranger was the right thing to do.

  “I had no idea.”

  Sam never told anyone what he told Maggie now.

  Not his kids.

  Not the array of therapists lined up to offer their counseling services.

  Not even the police.

  His shoulders relaxed as if a great weight had finally been released, something he’d kept inside, his private shame for way too long now.

  Sam wanted to tell her.

  He wanted to tell Maggie everything.

  What she thought, and what she thought of him had become very important.

  “I knew we had grown apart over the years. Any idiot would have seen the signs, but I’d grown comfortable with my lot in life and couldn‘t see far beyond the end of my nose. I was making advances in the newspaper industry and Diane worked in corporate relocation. We were parents, raising two children. Our kids became our number one priority. I didn’t think, at the time, that anything else mattered. The rest would take care of itself.”

  He offered a long low sigh of regret.

  “I guess I was wrong.”

  Maggie didn’t reply. She didn’t want to do anything to interrupt the flow of his words, afraid that if she did so, he would change his mind and then the subject and she’d never know his story.

  “Diane took her career very seriously. Sure, her children were her number one priority, but I wondered sometimes if they didn’t trade places every now and then with her career. She had always been a fiercely independent woman. She kept her maiden name when we got married. Diane thought the hyphen was a demeaning compromise for women. A woman should be entitled to keep her own name. Marriage, she thought, was an equal partnership, and taking the man’s name was a concession to his superiority, and I can tell you this, Diane took a back seat to nobody when it came to who she considered her superiors, especially men.

  “So, I never gave it much thought when she’d stay late at work some nights. That’s just the way Diane was made, the first to arrive, last to leave. She never gave me any reason to suspect anything.”

  A sad chuckle rolled off Sam’s lower lip.

  “I didn’t think much of it when I saw Diane having lunch with Frank Wiley one afternoon. They worked together. I knew Frank. I knew Frank’s wife. We’d met on more than a few occasions at company Christmas parties and summer picnics. Diane worked in corporate relocation and Frank in benefits and administration. I knew their jobs often overlapped and required collaboration that might take place over a business luncheon. I had no reason to suspect otherwise.

  “This time, things were different. Call it that sixth sense of foreboding, I don’t know. I noticed the way they looked at each other. I’ve seen that look before. I’m not an idiot. His hand disappeared under the table and I’ve seen that before too.

  “I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest. I thought I was going to be sick. I should have done something then. I should have kicked Frank Wiley’s ass nine ways to Sunday right then, but I didn’t. I left. And what would kicking his ass have accomplished? Diane certainly didn’t mind. She liked it. She wanted more of it.”

  “So, when Diane came home from work that night, she offered the usual ‘another-day-another-dollar’ story about the Monday to Friday drudgery of work life and never said a word about lunch with Frank Wiley. I cooked a nice dinner. We ate, watched some TV, put the kids to bed, and actually had sex that night, which I considered unusual, as our sex was limited to the occasional Saturday nights and never during the week.”

  His lips pressed into a thin determined line and he stopped again to watch the faint line of the horizon, as if out there the elusive answer he’d been searching so long for, awaited his discovery.

  “That was the last time I was intimate with my wife, three weeks before we came to Tybee Island for our annual vacation around the Fourth. Diane’s thirty-eighth birthday fell the Friday before we left, and that’s when she decided it was time to tell me that our marriage was in trouble. She never came out and said she had found someone else, just that she wasn’t happy anymore with the one she married.”

  Maggie watched the way the wind played with his hair and the first wild thought to enter her mind right then was how in the world could any woman be anything but happy being married to someone like Sam.

  “I stood there and took her criticisms about my shortcomings as a husband. I accepted blame for the current state of our marriage, and agreed that she had gone above and beyond what could be expected out of a wife and mother. She’d done more than her share and I clearly hadn’t done enough.

  “We went to bed that night resolving nothing, and came down here the next day with this massive wedge driven between us. We said little. The kids suspected something was up, and during those first couple of days our vacation was a complete disaster. We didn’t speak to each other besides the required necessities like what’s for dinner and where do you want to go today. Frank Wiley, or the fact that she’d found someone else was never openly discussed. She admitted to nothing, but then I never asked either.”

  Sam looked down at his feet dangling above the barnacle crusts.

  “I tried to dismiss what I saw as paranoid jealousy, something my imagination concocted. I get that way sometimes.” he laughed, “I get that way a lot. I tried to pretend what I saw didn’t happen and convince myself that I was mistaken about what I saw going on between them. All of this, all our marital problems was my fault. She said so, and I believed her. I needed to do more for Diane. It was my fault she wasn’t happy right now.”

  He sighed.

  “Still, I saw his hand slide beneath the table, and I saw Diane’s legs move and I saw that on her face. I know what I saw. I know that look. Hell, every man knows that look.”

  Sam said, “On the Fourth of July, Diane’s disposition improved. I used to think the random cell phone calls at odd hours of the night and weekends were just a necessary nuisance that came with her job. A phone-call at nine in the morning on July 4th, a Saturday no less, and Diane disappears outside for twenty minutes.

  “When she came back inside, she was visibly happier, and all set to have a good time. She looked excited and was looking forward to the fireworks show that evening on the beach.”

  “She went for a run,” Sam continued. “She was gone another half hour. While she was gone, I went to her cell phone and hit caller ID. The number that came up had been entered into her address book and said simply: Frank. I dialed it. Frank Wiley picked up on the second ring and said, ‘Hello beautiful. I can’t wait to see you.’

&nbs
p; “I clicked off without saying a word. Diane called from outside that she was going for a quick swim to cool down. I didn’t say a word. I couldn’t breathe. The room spun and I sat down to keep from falling down.”

  This was hard for him, Maggie noticed, even now.

  “Frank Wiley was in Savannah. I was outraged. I wanted to hit something, or worse yet, someone – Frank Wiley. Not on my vacation. Not on my God damned vacation Diane.”

  Sam looked up at Maggie, a hurt and sorrowful expression on his face. “I know marriages fail, I do, but not like this.”

  “I stormed outside,” he said, “Ready to have it out with Diane right then. To make me feel like her unhappiness was my fault. I couldn’t believe what was happening to me, to us, and to our family.”

  Sam paused, as if he just remembered he needed to breathe, and he reached his story’s defining moment.

  “That’s when I saw Diane,” he pointed to the north at the pier, “She was out about fifty yards, not far, but the bottom falls away fast out there, and there’s a nasty undertow too. I watched her swim. I never understood Diane’s compulsion to push her body to the physical limits. In her mind, she hadn’t accomplished anything unless she pushed herself to the point of collapse.”

  He paused again, as if standing at oblivion’s precipice – no turning back now – and in his mind he said to hell with it all and leaped off the ledge of truth.

  “The intense summer heat here can suck the fluids from you like a drying sponge. They say that’s what happened to Diane. I watched her swim. No one had any reason to suspect anything was wrong. I certainly didn’t. Diane was a little more than sixty yards off shore when I went inside, trying to figure out what I was going to do, should I confront her about this or let it slide? I was a mess so I went back inside. I was disgusted with myself, with Diane, hell, with everybody.”

  His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper that was swallowed up by the hiss of rushing waves before Maggie could hear them. He looked at her with the same wounded expression that made her heart want to break.

  “It happens in this kind of heat if you don’t take measures to hydrate yourself ahead of time, brutally hot temperatures, harsh humidity, Diane was swimming in water more than twenty-five feet deep when she cramped up.