by C.L. Bevill
Chapter 9
As I Stand Alone…
Zach spun me around and held onto my shoulders tightly as he yelled, “Calm down! It’s just me!”
I bit off the scream and closed my eyes for a minute. My chest was heaving with the adrenaline rush his unexpected presence had caused. The moment before he had touched me, the moment I had finished reading the note taped on the door, was an instant in time where I had felt so incredibly alone. No one had been there. No one would ever be there. It was a heartfelt shock to find out I wasn’t all by myself.
“Do you have to do that?” I finally accused, snapping my eyes open. “Do you have to sneak up on me?”
Shaking his head, Zach let go with an abruptness that bothered me. It felt as though he was afraid to touch me any longer. “You were gone longer than you should have been. You’re still tired, weak, what was I supposed to do? Assume everything was peachy keen fine?” He ran a hand through his hair and stepped away, trying to put much-needed space between us.
I stared at him, my arms wrapping around my body as if I was protecting myself. I wanted to ask the question, “How did you know what I looked like before?” But I suspected that he would brush me off. It would be, “I didn’t say that.” Or, “I didn’t mean it like that.” Or, “You misunderstood.” It was up to me to decide what he meant. It was up to me to decide whether or not I could trust Zach, last name unknown.
“There’s a note,” I said instead, my voice was a thread of sound, not like myself at all. I pointed at the glass doors. Then, while Zach looked at the note, I went to use the bathroom. The house was neat and clean, the way the owner had left it. I guess he wanted his wife to know that he had kept it up for her. Her name had been Marie. He hadn’t signed his name except with an initial, J. It could have stood for a multitude of names…James, Jake, John, or Jason. I knew inside that it didn’t matter, but I still speculated. I could have looked through his papers to find out, but I made myself resist. After all, I was still thinking about Gigi and Eddy.
When I came back outside, Zach was sitting on the same Adirondack chair I had sat in. The note was clenched in his hands, but he was staring out to sea. I sat in the other chair because I wasn’t sure what to say. There was a feeling of transient wretchedness that stretched far and away.
Even from where I sat, I could see the words that started the note. His neatly cursive letters were easy to read. “Dearest Marie,” it began lovingly, “As I stand alone here, my thoughts are with you. When I woke up two weeks ago, I was alone. I thought you had gone to the store, but the car was still in the residents’ lot. Then I couldn’t find anyone. The electricity stopped working, and I barely noticed. I realize that you probably won’t return. Your empty nightie on the couch next to your wedding rings on the floor, tell me that this was not a woman who simply stepped out on her marriage. I can’t live without you, my darling love, my wonderful wife. The sea is calling me and I’m going…” I couldn’t read any more because Zach compressed his fist together and crumpled it into a tight ball of useless paper.
“Would you have…?” Zach asked suddenly. His chocolate brown eyes met mine with the force of a locomotive going down a mountain. It forced me to stay focused on him. I literally couldn’t look away. “If you hadn’t found anyone?”
I looked at his beautiful features. He was such a handsome man. Gruff, too. Controlling. Protective. Was it out of fear? Did he think that if he didn’t protect us, then he would be alone? Was it that he didn’t want to be alone anymore than we did? Was this his way of shielding himself?
And there was something about the way he looked at me that cause a trembling deep in my soul. I didn’t know how to identify it, nor was I certain that I was ready to do so. I shifted back to his question. “I don’t think I would have done what he did,” I answered candidly. “He went into the ocean and deliberately…” I sighed sorrowfully for J’s loss. There was so much pain intrinsically bound into the few brief words he had written on a plain page of notepaper. Would it have made a difference to the man if he knew that there were other survivors out there? Looking for each other in some cases?
“Not deliberately,” Zach repeated my words broodingly. He paused and added calculatingly, “But you would have died nonetheless.”
“If I hadn’t found someone like you and Kara,” I said. “I probably would have died soon enough.” Was it cold of me to say that? It was the truth. Even if a gryphon hadn’t raked my flesh, even if a madman hadn’t attacked me, even if I had blithely continued down Highway 101 by myself, I would have slowly wasted away. Human beings weren’t meant to be alone, and I wasn’t an exception.
Then something else occurred to me, “And if I hadn’t been touched by the firefly pixies.” I had to give them some credit, as well.
Zach looked away from me. I think he was satisfied with my response. He wasn’t happy, but he was persuaded by the truthfulness of my statements. He glanced at the note in his hand. “Do you think he changed his mind at the end?” he asked pensively.
“He loved his wife very much,” I said. “And I don’t know the answer to that. I hope it ended quickly.”
There was such a look of intense sadness on Zach’s face as he stared west across white cap-strewn waters. I reached over and touched his shoulder. He cast me a look and wryly smiled at the reaction of the contact. “He thought he was alone,” I said. “Perhaps he didn’t want to feel the pain anymore.”
“Life is always going to be painful,” Zach said prosaically. “Things have a way of happening whether you like it or not.”
I struggled to find a way out of this melancholy mood we were both in. “It doesn’t have to be painful,” I said firmly. I reached over and gently took the crumpled note from him. I stood up and went back to the glass door. I carefully replaced it on the door, making sure the tape would hold it again. “It’s up to us to make sure it’s not.”
Zach rose from the chair and carefully drew me to him. He tucked my head into his shoulder and buried his face into my hair. It was a platonic embrace. I was comforting him as much as he was comforting me. We held each other until a seagull came gliding over the rail and surprised us both with a cawing cry of complaint. He let me go with a crusty, “Kara is going to think we went skinny dipping or something.”
“Or something,” I said with half a forced laugh. “We don’t even have a good sea monster story to tell her.”
