The Compass

by Tammy Kling

  “I love you, daddy,” she said, beaming.

  The woman in the desert looked at me and waited for my thoughts to leave.

  “Jonathan, none of us knows anything. We think we know, then it turns out that we don’t. The universe has a way of intervening. Of changing you. In the end, you don’t know what you’re seeking, and you don’t know what you’ll find.”

  I shook my head, baffled.

  “But it’s all irrelevant, anyway,” she said. “Because it doesn’t matter what you seek or what you find. What matters is that you allow your compass to guide you, and let your gifts and knowledge rise to the surface, so you can live out your life’s purpose.” She thought for a moment.

  “It’s worth the journey,” she said.

  Chapter 2

  ESCAPE

  “This path we were forced to take as best we might, in single file, and there I was—the flames to the left of me, and the abyss to the right.”

  —DANTE ALIGHIERI

  There are moments in your life that change the course of your destiny forever.

  Some people like me, have already had them. Others have not, but that moment is ahead, like a shark that prowls the ocean floor.

  We are merely helpless swimmers on the surface above, thinking we’re in control and seeing only the shore in the distance. For most people, it’s worth swimming toward, worth fighting for. The shore provides hope, the horizon above it an entrance into a new world. We swim, achieve, work hard, and all the while keep moving toward the future.

  Yet what lies beneath is everything because it has the power to change your world, envelop you in darkness, and alter everything you thought you believed.

  After the accident, I remember thinking of a different analogy—of the mind as a battlefield. It was three days into detention as I called it, a place my family had checked me into to save me from myself. It was an intake facility in Tucson, where the counselors treated me with drugs for depression and daily doses of therapy. The tables were littered with books that boasted intentionally uplifting titles.

  They tried to heal the wound on my jaw, but it refused to cooperate.

  It was different from the therapist they had sent me to in California. There were different ways of pulling things out of you. I had been driven to Tucson by my brother, and I remained for a few days, talked it out, and then escaped a month before he was due to pick me up again. I rode a Greyhound back home and went in to work the next day as if nothing had happened.

  On the bus ride I discovered a newspaper in the seat, a headline about a woman who had opened the door of an airplane in mid-flight and jumped. They found her body in a field of flowers with a note still tucked in her suit pocket.

  It is on this day, she had written, that I have lost all hope.

  I tore the article out and kept her picture in my pocket for months. Blonde, red cherub cheeks, a smile of sunshine and daisies, like the field they had found her in. The face of hope.

  On the day I left suburbia for the desert, I had no illusions that I’d ever return. On that day, all hope was lost. I’d exhausted all of my options. Worked without working. Slept without sleeping. Talked without remembering what I’d said or to whom I’d said it.

  “So what’s next on your journey?” Marilyn asked. She pulled a music device that looked like an iPod from her pocket and untangled the cord.

  The morning sun rose over the mountains behind her.

  I lifted my arms toward the sky, stretching them wide. I gauged my feelings, as I had become accustomed to doing. In grief therapy, the psychotherapist who tried to crack open my skull and pour sunshine in had outlined the stages of mourning, and they were fixed there forever. One tool was to get your body moving, even if it was something small, like stretching. In the mornings I thought through all of those grief stages without even trying to.

  Sadness, anger, despair, forgiveness.

  I was stuck in the first three without any hope of achieving the last one. Each morning it was despair, pure and black. The Darkness that defined my life now was etched into my soul.

  It’s almost as if his life has been divided into two sections: before the accident and after.

  “Did I sleep?” I asked. I didn’t attempt a smile.

  She nodded that indeed I had, and it was for the first time in months that I had done so without meds.

  “You snored a little,” she said. “It was a deep REM sleep.” She put the earbuds into her ears and turned on the device.

  The world was silent, but music emanated from where she was sitting.

  “What are you listening to?” I asked, pointing to my ears.

  “‘Breathe,’” she said.

  She removed the sound piece and walked over slowly, placing it against my ear.

  I can feel the magic floating in the air.

  Being with you gets me that way.

  I watch the sunlight dance across your face.

  And I’ve never been this swept away.

  I pulled back. “A love song?”

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t seem the love song type, if I might say that.”

  “I was in love just once, and this song reminds me of him. The artist is Faith Hill.”

  “Where is he today?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure, Jonathan. He was from the country. Loved country songs. We met on a subway in New York City when he flew there on business, and he wore cowboy boots with his suit. That really stood out. He had been there only once in his entire life, so it was a chance encounter.”

  I smiled and shook my head. A woman hardened by the years. A New Yorker, no less, listening to Faith Hill.

  Her eyes clouded over.

  “So you didn’t marry him.”

  “I wanted to, but he was already married. I never told him exactly how I felt because I just assumed it was an impossible situation. But it was electric. Not just lust, but love. True love.” She closed her eyes.

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “You know when you know, Jonathan. I know because I never felt that way again in my life, about anyone else. I had relationships, but I never felt that way.”

  “So you don’t know where he is today? Maybe he’d want to know you’re dying and that you loved him.”

  She shook her head.

  “I came to the conclusion, years ago, that sometimes you meet someone who changes your life, but that doesn’t mean that your life has to change.”

  I pondered that thought for a moment.

  “But what if he wanted to say goodbye one last time?”

  “To what end?” she asked, genuine curiosity in her voice.

  “Because you could tell him how you really feel. How you’ve felt all these years. What if he feels the same?”

  “What if?” she echoed, looking into closed hands. She seemed to be studying them, as if the crevices would provide answers. “If I told him, and he loved me back, what then? He’d be engulfed in grief. If he had loved me, at least all these years he’s had the hope that I’d return. Hope is everything, Jonathan. You know that.”

  “You don’t make much sense to me. You’re not what you seem,” I said.

  “Are any of us?”

  I stood, walked to my backpack, and reached inside. I pulled out the last protein bar and tore into it, famished.

  “Are you angry?” I asked. “I mean, angry that your years will be cut short?”

  “Oh, no,” she said quickly. “Let’s face it, I’d only have twenty more at the most, anyway. I’m 70 now. See, life is worth living, Jonathan. We’re not guaranteed anything, you know, yet we come into this world feeling entitled as if we are. We arrive acting as if we’ve been handed a manual for life with a certificate that guarantees us a hundred years.”

  “But there are reasonable expectations . . . ” I answered.

  “Like what?”

  “It’s reasonable to think you’ll live to the average lifespan for the country you live in. Don’t we all expect we’ll do
better than that?”

  “We do.” She shook her head slowly. “Because we’re selfish. Human beings are self-absorbed. We think we’re in complete control of the beginning, the end, and everything in between. But we’re not.” She looked at me intensely. “Of course, you know that, too.”

  I thought of Boo and what Lacy and I had done with her the day before the accident. It was July, a month I would now detest for eternity.

  We’d been standing in the park, feeding the ducks one day, and the next, they were gone. One day you’re at the apex of your life, standing in all your glory before the sunrise, full of hope and possibility. The next you’re at the sunset, darkness encroaching.

  Night falls fast.

  “Yes,” she said. “It does.”

  I looked at her, knowing with complete certainty that I had not said a word.

  “There’s a helicopter coming to pick me up in an hour,” she said finally. “My son rented one to allow me to fulfill this dream. He’ll be taking me on home, if you’d like to hitch a ride.”

  “A helicopter?”

  “Might as well travel in style, if it’s one of your last trips!” she replied with a grin.

  “I guess you’re right,” I admitted. “Where’re we headed?”

  “New York. I live upstate, so we’ll land at a small airport in the Adirondacks, and you can continue your journey from there. Or you’re welcome to come stay with us.”

  I thought about her offer. I’d never been to the Adirondacks before and had always wanted to see them. But I had been gone for less than a week, and I wasn’t ready to spend time around people I hardly knew.

  “I’ll take you up on the offer of a lift,” I said. “But I want to go hike up into the mountains.”

  Marilyn smiled. “Whatever suits you!”

  An hour later the chopper landed about five hundred feet away. It was shiny and black, with stripes across the side and a compact cabin that appeared to seat no more than four. The blades cut through the desert sky, kicking up dust until they sputtered to a stop.

  Marilyn tossed her backpack onto her shoulder and headed toward the helicopter. I followed.

  She ducked into the cabin and sat in the back as if she’d done it before. The pilot motioned me into the seat beside him and handed me a headset to protect my ears. Marilyn buckled in, placed a wrinkled hand on the pilot’s shoulder, and squeezed hard. He placed a gloved hand on hers and squeezed back.

  “I’m Conrad,” he said, smiling. “Ready to go?”

  Before I could respond, the blades roared, much louder than I’d expected. As we lifted off, I felt a jolt of adrenaline rush through me, my body suspended. I felt alive, like I was being prodded out of a coma.

  We soared over canyons and majestic white mountains. We dove deep through the center of long stretches of brown desert and watched a herd of animals below. We were headed east, although I didn’t really care where we were headed because I had no expectations for the journey.

  An hour into the flight, Conrad explained that we’d be landing at a remote airport to switch to a small Cessna he owned for the remainder of the journey. Once we arrived in New York, I would leave them and go my own way, I told him.

  Floating over the clouds, I realized that at times I could still feel her, and I wondered if there was any difference in the scope of eternity between what was and what is, or what will be. Boo had only been on this earth for four short years, but her soul had been ancient, as if I’d known her for not one lifetime, but many.

  Lacy and I had been connected from the start, not like it was with the other women I’d met and conquered, but different, as if our souls were intertwined.

  A cord of three strands is not easily broken.

  As the helicopter floated toward the horizon, I remembered what the shrink back in Orange County had said. Some people come into your life out of circumstance, while others arrive because they had to. They are there for your soul. They were sent to you. They were sent to deliver a message. To bring or to take away.

  I glanced over at Conrad, effortlessly navigating the chopper through the clouds. He was the kind of man I’d wanted to be, the kind every man wanted to be—a James Bond type both men and women would be drawn to. He instantly reminded me of an old friend of mine from college. His name was Jason, and he had the same square jaw and rugged exterior. He had entered one relationship and then the next, with whatever woman he’d met at the time.

  The last time I’d seen him he’d been through his second divorce and was on to another relationship. Because of his good looks, women entered and exited based on geography or convenience, but never from selection.

  I had told him my theory that convenience was the enemy of happiness. It led to settling, instead of sustaining. Jason had said that women were like gumballs and came in many colors. You find one and then another in the glass jar. You put in a quarter, own one, and then after a while you get tired of chewing, and it’s inevitable that you’ll move on to another.

  “You have to listen to your heart,” I told him, “instead of selecting someone who’s convenient and happens to be in the right place at the right time. You have to choose someone you’d still want to be with if you had to travel to Dubai to see her. Only then will your heart be authentic.

  “It’s like the difference between choosing the milk in the front of the display case with the expired date on it, just because you need milk, rather than driving to a different store for the organic milk you really want.”

  Lacy was never easy. But she’d been worth it. We were light drawn to darkness, dark to light, like opposite sides of the same coin. Her moods varied because of her past. It had been a tragic childhood, and, as an adult, the memories remained. Sometimes she was day, sometimes night.

  Day and night is still the same 24 hours.

  The chopper hovered over a tiny airport in a desolate brown field.

  Music drifted in through the headset. It was an old song by Rush.

  Thirty years ago, how the words would flow

  With passion and precision,

  But now his mind is dark and dulled

  By sickness and indecision.

  Some are born to move the world—

  To live their fantasies

  But most of us just dream about

  The things we’d like to be.

  C.S. Lewis once wrote that grief is a long valley, and that sometimes you wonder if the valley is a circular trench.

  Conrad landed the helicopter gently, and we unloaded and waited inside a hangar while the Cessna was fueled for the remainder of our journey. When we boarded the small airplane, Marilyn was so alive—with eyes wide open—that it was impossible to think she was dying.

  Her son navigated the small craft down the runway, and it lifted into the sky. Gliding in a completely different sensation from the ride before, my blood moved horizontally this time. He flew across different terrain and we coasted in silence.

  Finally, I spied an airport in the center of a mountain range that was overflowing with green and thousands of trees. We dropped lower and touched down on a small runway.

  Conrad removed his helmet and turned to me. His eyes were blue.

  “Welcome to New York!” he said.

  Chapter 3

  THE STORM

  Here briefly, in this forest shall you dwell . . .

  —THE PURGATORIO

  I woke from a dream at three in the afternoon and sat up for a while, staring out the window. A storm was coming, and as I watched the bending of the trees, I wondered if one of them would break.

  We’d landed in the heart of the Adirondacks, and when I asked an airport employee to recommend a hotel, he said he knew just the one. It was remote and at the edge of the lake.

  It was a bit of trouble to get there, he said, but without snow it would be okay. His uncle owned it, the key would be under the mat, and the caretaker would be up to bring wood for the stove in the morning.

  Marilyn and Conrad and I had embraced in
a triple hug like old friends, standing in the small Adirondacks airport. People drifted by slowly, like souls floating past, unlike the way they scurried quickly to claim baggage in other airports. And it was in that moment that time stood still. I would not see them again, I realized. There was no past, no future. Only now.

  One of us broke, and we wept like infants, as if a strong dam had set free.