“Uh-uh. None of that. You will be there,” Ben says, adamant. “I want to see you.”
“I want to see you too, brother.”
“So what prompted the spur-of-the-moment visit?”
I start to make light of the question with some fluff version of an answer, but find that I can’t. “Just felt the need,” I say, and it’s more true than I could ever express.
“Glad to hear it. How’s the doc business across the pond?”
“A little crazy these days.”
“Copy that,” Ben says, and I wonder how it is that my neurosurgeon brother can as convincingly shoot the breeze in truck-stop vernacular as he can lay out the complexities of brain surgery to a room full of surgeons.
“Marie and the kids excited about the trip?”
“Just about over the moon. Marie says I have to learn how to surf.”
“There’s a mental picture I didn’t need.”
Ben chuckles. “Hey now, long as I don’t forget to sunscreen my bald pate, I should do fine.”
“Just get video, okay?” I say, smiling. “Where are you calling from?”
“L.A. flight leaves in a couple of hours.” Ben hesitates and then says, “Kids didn’t want to come with you?”
I hesitate and do my best to avoid a blatant lie. “They kind of have their own lives now.”
“Maybe we can get over there for Christmas this year. Sure would be nice to get everybody together.”
The words fall on my ears like glass jars to a marble floor. I feel their crack inside me and offer back a hollow sounding, “Yeah, it would.”
“Well, then, let’s don’t just say it. We’ll do it.”
In the background, I hear an airport announcement, and then my brother says, “I’ve gotta run, Sam. I’ll give you a call in two weeks. I’ll drive out to the lake the weekend we get back.”
Part of me wants to stop him from hanging up, to hold onto the first thread of normalcy I have felt in days. I feel an unexpected calm in just hearing my brother’s voice, its warmth and familiarity an anchor for the emotions I’ve been trying to keep my head above. Part of me wants to blurt everything out, let him help me make sense of it the way he used to do when we were kids, and he was the kind of older brother all my friends wished they had.
I’ve never needed his level-headed common sense more.
But now isn’t the time. I don’t want to ruin this trip he and Marie have looked forward to. It can wait.
“That sounds great,” I answer in an even voice. “It’ll be good to see you, Ben.”
“You too, Sam. Talk to you soon, okay?”
We hang up on that, and I picture him jogging off through the airport, cracking one of his corny jokes to Marie, who considers it an act of love to always laugh, even when no one else does. I’ve always thought that was as good a definition for love as any I can think of.
I try to remember in the last years of my marriage a time when Megan and I laughed with each other, or even at each other. And I honestly can’t bring one to mind. The stone wall of silence had been erected for so long that laughter seemed like a completely out-of-place notion.
I spot the turn-off just ahead, the smaller paved road that leads to my family’s summerhouse. There are no cars in front of me now, and I press the accelerator, anxious to get there.
The houses are fewer and farther between on this road, the pastures wider and dotted with Black Angus cows and calves. Ahead, I can see Smith Mountain, green and beckoning. I’m relieved that it is still free of houses, that its graceful slopes have not been pocked by development.
I take a left and follow the road at the mountain’s base. It winds and narrows until I spot the sign for Hayden’s Marina on the right. It’s been updated. That’s the first thing I notice, its colors muted and appealing as the backdrop for the words:
Boat Slips for Rent, Gas, Grill, Picnic Supplies and More! Turn Here!
I pull off the road and find myself gripping the steering wheel, hard.
Gabby Hayden.
I say her name out loud then, and it sounds odd against the brrrrr of the Explorer’s engine. I haven’t let myself say it in so long that it almost feels like I’ve committed some kind of grievous faux pas in doing so.
What would I do if she came driving up right now, spotted me sitting here like some kind of dazed stalker?
Twenty-five years have come and gone since we were both those sixteen-year old kids falling in love for the first time.
How is that possible?
A lifetime has unfolded since then. One we have lived without each other. There was a point in my younger life when I never would have believed that was possible. Living without Gabby.
I sit until the sun sinks behind the mountain, and, for the first time since I left England some thirty hours ago, I let myself admit that my trip here is about more than seeking my brother’s opinion or seeing this place I’ve never forgotten.
It is also about seeing the girl that I once loved with ever fiber of my being. The girl I have never forgotten.
*
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You, Me and a Palm Tree Page 10
