by Ward, Susan
My chin jutted out as I nodded the way I did when I was struggling with something. “No. Can’t do it. Not even for you, doll. Those are the wants of a narcissistic man. A man who knows nothing of love. And no matter what you think of me, even you would never think that Jackson Parker didn’t love.”
Shortly after dawn spread across the sky above the Pacific, Lena left me.
Thirty-Six
The present…
A tap against the bar makes me look up.
Oh crap—a leather check holder.
I thought we’d resolved the check.
“It’s not what you think,” the waitress says, amused. “You’ve been here all afternoon, just staring at the ocean. I didn’t want to disturb you, but my shift is done. And”—she does a cute little grimace—“when I told my mother who I had parked on a stool at my station today, she made me promise to get an autograph before I clocked out. I thought the check holder was a sly way to do it.”
I laugh, even though I could have done without the for her mother part.
Smiling, I grab the check holder and the pen she has in her hand. “Sure thing, doll. Anyone in particular I should make it out to?”
Her face lights up. “Gretchen.”
My eyes drift to her name tag. “Gretchen, huh?”
She blushes. “OK, it’s for me, but I’m not allowed to ask for it so don’t tell. But I said, what the heck, when is the next time I’m going to run into the genius who wrote “Take Back the Dawn’? It really is the best sad breakup song ever.”
I shake my head as I try to scribble out something appropriately charming. “Sweetheart, it’s not a breakup song. It’s a love song. The lyrics are from a letter I wrote to my wife from jail.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh…the bars between us. I get it. Jail cell. How romantic.”
Romantic.
Fuck—it had been anything but that.
I continue to write, and tell myself to stop trying to explain the lyrics. It was a song I never talked about to anyone. It was Lena and me. And, fuck, who could ever understand us except us?
“Not jail bars,” I say, snapping closed the holder. “The bars of who we are. Our flaws. I was begging my wife to forgive me my flaws. I wanted her to come back to me and I couldn’t ask her to.”
The girl’s mouth scrunches as she turns dewy-eyed. “I would have come back to you. Did she?”
I nod. “Yep.”
She smiles. “Are you still together?”
I point down the beach toward my property. “We were, until she died, right there on those cliffs.”
I put down the pen and leave quickly.
Fuck, why did I tell her all that?
I walk toward the beach and head for home. As I climb the stairs up to my lawn, I debate making a pit stop in at Patty’s.
My phone hasn’t rung since the time Chrissie fixed the restaurant check for me. Maybe Patty’s heard something from Rene.
Was I a great-grandfather yet?
At the top of the cliffs on my lawn, I turn and stare. I can see Lena twirling in circles on the edge of the cliffs. If this was my house, Jack, this is where I’d be every dawn and every evening. I’d sit right in this spot, to watch the sun rise and set. It’s like the edge of a magical kingdom.
It’s funny how all the women in my life—Lena, Chrissie, Linda—find this spot on their own. Does Lena draw the others here? She draws me here.
Instead of going to Patty’s, I sink down on the grass, on Lena’s spot on the cliffs. It’s shaded by a eucalyptus tree and above me the leaves rustle with the wind.
I am closest to Lena here, on the edge of her “magical kingdom” where she died. I am also my most honest with myself here.
They say if you remember the ’60s you weren’t really there. That maxim always elicits laughs from my generation. But the phrase is anything but funny when I think of it in the context of me. It is painful and defining.
Even after retracing every bit of my marriage today, I don’t know which parts of my life with Lena were real and which parts were fantasies. Even as I lay bare my story, somehow at the end I’m still Jackie unsure of anything, seeing too many things how I wished they’d been.
I was an alcoholic by the time I married Lena, and make no mistake, it was the cause of every heart-wrenching moment we shared, no matter how the moments play out in my head. I can see now things I couldn’t see then.
Lena was five years older than me when we met. It seemed significant when we were young, but we’d both been fledglings.
She married me only because she loved me. I know that now. No woman would have held on to a man the way she did for any other reason.
Still, to hold any of it in my heart too much how it really was would have killed me long before this. When I look back, of course I remember parts differently, in a way I can live with.
Remember, sometimes seeing things how you want rather than how they are is the only thing that carries you into the next day.
I was never drunk with Linda, not after the first night we met, but the mistakes I made with her I own as well. They are a different kind of mistake, the ones we make when we are trying to love well to atone for something we’ve done badly.
Unlike my wife, the memories I hold of Linda are untempered by rose-colored glasses or painful denial. They are more real and more vivid than any others in my life. Not just because I was sober when I loved her, but because she is more real and more vivid than any woman I’ve ever known.
And just like the first miraculous girl I loved, she was difficult to love well. But then, Linda entered my world as unexpectedly as Lena did and, yet again, at a time when the man life had made me made me ripe for the picking for the right woman.
Thank God that woman was Linda.
Thirty-Seven
1980…
It was October 31, our son’s birthday, and I’d failed every promise I’d made Lena before she died in less than four years.
Sammy was dead of a heroin overdose.
After I buried him, I grieved inside a bottle.
Walter stepped in, taking Chrissie, threatening to go to court for full custody, and I wasn’t sure I shouldn’t let him.
I was on a road I no longer wanted to be on, and the only thing worse was making my daughter travel it with me. It was as if the good had gone out of me and our life when Lena passed. Who I was, what had worked while she was here, didn’t work anymore, not for anyone.
One by one my friends walked away from me—Georgie, Liam, and a few others that mattered—and I was ready to walk away from myself.
“Fine, Walter,” I said into the phone, leaning my head against the stone of the fireplace in my bedroom. “Keep Chrissie two more weeks. But I want her home then or I’m coming to Pasadena to get her myself.”
“I won’t bring her home until you’re sober, Jack, and can take care of her. You can’t keep her hostage in that house with you. She needs to be around other people. She needs to be around kids her own age.”
“She has other people, Walter. She sees Patty and Rene, and we have Maria.”
“The neighbors and the housekeeper,” Walter scoffed. “Do you hear yourself, Jack? Do you hear Chrissie?”
“She’s my daughter, damn it.”
“And my granddaughter. Don’t push me. Pull yourself together or I’m taking her away permanently. Lena wouldn’t want me to leave Chrissie there with you. The children always came first with her. It’s why she left you in ’66. She loved you, but she had to get Sammy away—”
I threw the phone against the wall.
Fuck—the bastard had never liked me, and he could be vicious when it suited him, even now that Lena was gone and I shouldn’t have matter anymore to him.
I stared at the urn resting on the mantle, my finger tracing the inscription there. Light shines in the darkness and darkness has not overcome it. But Lena had been the only light ever in my life, and my light was trapped in a
fucking bottle designed to look like a Fabergé egg.
I lifted Lena from her resting place and sank down on the bed. “I’m sorry I’m drunk, doll. I just don’t know how to do any of it without you.”
I brushed at my tears and lay back on the bed.
Yep, I’d failed her completely.
Even in her final wish.
Lena hadn’t wanted me to keep her ashes.
She wanted to be set free in the ocean.
I couldn’t bring myself to do it, let go, and if I tried, I was afraid I’d follow her, just as it had always been between us. It was what I wanted—to be with her—and yet selfishly I kept her with me. Still loving her as I wanted to and not how she needed me to.
I took Lena to the kitchen, grabbed another bottle, and headed out into the yard. Everything around me was quiet. It was late, a full moon overhead, but I switched on the back lights anyway.
I trotted down the steps built into the cliffs, hit the sand, and then hit a log.
“Fuck,” I growled. There hadn’t been a tree lying there earlier in the day.
I rolled over to find both the urn and bottle, and rapidly rummaged through sand trying to pick out Lena’s ashes. But they were gone, blending into the beach a mere twenty feet from the water.
I collapsed, half laughing and half crying. I couldn’t even fucking carry out Lena’s last wish right, the final indictment of the man I’d become.
I reached for the bottle.
Fucking empty as well.
I lay back in the sand, feeling the mist-coated coolness of it against my cheek, and then the feel of her rose through my body, touching my cheek lovingly.
“OK, Lena, message received,” I rambled, though I wasn’t so drunk not to know that she wasn’t there and I was utterly alone. “The problem is, you can’t stop me. This won’t work. All the sand eventually goes back into the ocean. All making me drop you means is this time you follow me. It doesn’t change what I want to do. You’re not here and I don’t want to be here without you.”
I stayed flat on my back, wanting to spend a few moments with her before we were separated—briefly—one last time. But her ashes would follow me to the water, there was no way she could change that, just like I wasn’t changing my decision to follow her.
I picked up sand, letting it dribble through my fingers, and in my memory was the sensation of her hair and her lips and her—
“Are you OK? Are you hurt?” I heard an anxious female voice near me.
Oh fuck. Now I wasn’t just talking to people who weren’t there, I was imaging them.
I waited a moment, trying to shake my alcohol haze from my brain.
Nothing but the sound of the waves.
Yep, I’d lost it.
I was about to sit up when I heard a scrunch, scrunch growing louder.
Feet in the sand.
Moving toward me.
That one was definitely real.
Oh fuck—this was going to be humiliating.
Even worse than humiliating if she was part of the press that’d been spying on me for a year. This story hitting print would definitely make Walter’s day.
Maybe if I don’t move, she’ll go away.
“Do you need help?” she asked.
Do I need help? Really, girl, that’s what you’re wondering? I’m lying in the sand next to an empty bottle and a broken funeral urn.
She dropped to sit beside me. “Are you OK?”
“OK?” I looked at her, frowning. “Of course I’m OK. This is my beach. Why wouldn’t I be OK?”
She lifted a brow and then made a face. “Really. How lucky you are. I thought all the beaches in California were owned by the state. Since you don’t need help, I think I’ll just sit here for a while and enjoy the crashing waves.”
My eyes came into focus enough to see her clearly. Christ, she was hardly more than a girl. Definitely not press. She didn’t have that rude, soon-to-be overly invasive kind of expression about her.
As my guard relaxed, my heart jumped in my chest as my gaze hungrily roamed her from head to toe. Dark curls. Big, brown—oh, they had to be brown—eyes. Beautiful face, and the way she sat, hugging her knees with her arms, chin high as I studied her, warned me she was smart, strong, feisty…Jesus Christ, she looked so much like Lena they could have been sisters.
“Who are you?” I asked, and then I figured out what she had tied around her body. “Or maybe I should ask what are you? A ghost? Why are you wearing a sheet?”
Her shoulders did a slight roll and her dainty chin went higher. “Perhaps I should ask why you are alone on the beach in the middle of the night, drunk.”
My limbs—uncooperative until now—I was able to rally enough to turn onto my side, and even able to recline on my hip with my cheek in my palm to study her better.
“Perhaps we can skip that part,” I said quickly, glib and charming, surprising myself that my brain was working again. But nothing gave a man a blast of sober like a woman staring at him with eyes like that, and this girl was gorgeous.
She laughed.
“Sure thing. It’s nothing to me. I’m just a girl in a toga who wandered onto your beach. You don’t owe me any answers.”
I laughed and brushed back the hair from my face. I could tell she didn’t know who I was and it couldn’t have pleased me more.
“You’re very funny, whoever you are.”
“I’m Linda.”
I held out my hand. “Jack.”
Her skin was soft and warm—yep, no ghost, Jack—and her fingers held onto mine for a little longer than they should have as her enormous eyes rapidly searched my face. Then her brow crinkled and she pulled back her hand.
“So is this what you’re going to do tonight? Just lie here alone on the beach?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m not alone. I’m with you. A much better plan than I had twenty minutes ago.”
“And what was your plan before me?”
Nope, not answering that one. I like where this is going…
“I don’t remember,” I answered, laughing and lying back in the sand.
She jumped to her feet. “Why don’t you let me take you home?” She pointed at the stairs built into the cliff. “Do you live up there?”
My gaze locked on her. “You want to take me home? Plan getting better each minute.”
She rolled her eyes and I had to stifle a grin. It was clear she thought I was more drunk than I was, but out of nowhere I was Jack quick on his feet with a ready line and this girl was having none of it. It was the first thing that had felt good in a long time.
Her eyes grew determined and serious. “I don’t plan to stay there. I’m dropping you off and going on my way.”
“In a sheet? Which way would that be? I might want to go your way instead of mine.”
Just a hint of a smile rose to her lips—that one slipped through her guard.
“I’m making sure you get home safely and then I’m going back to LA.”
I grimaced. “Bummer. I hate LA.”
I took her offered hand, and she rolled back, using all her weight to get me to my feet, though she didn’t need to. I could have gotten up on my own, but Linda was a take-charge kind of gal, and it surprised me how much I wanted to let her take charge.
Though it shouldn’t have.
Women and booze had always been my two problems.
In the past year, the booze hadn’t helped lessen the pain or heal.
Maybe a woman would…
One night, just not to hurt.
The ocean would be there in the morning.
I draped my arm around her shoulders and nearly knocked her to the ground. OK, not as steady as I thought I was, and she was on the smaller side for a woman. All curves. All woman. But barely up to my chin and I was easily twice her weight.
Be careful with her, Jack. She’s not as strong as she thinks—then I looked deeply into her eyes and amended
—inside or out.
She nodded toward the stairs. “Up there?”
“Up there. Are you sure you can manage me? We could just sleep on the beach in your sheet.”
Her eyes rebuked me, stern, but she couldn’t do crap to hide that smile on her face. “You’re not the first drunk I’ve had to deal with tonight, so keep your hands to yourself and don’t be smart with me.”
“No.” With an index finger I made a cross over my heart. “For the beautiful lady in the sheet, I’ll be a perfect gentleman.” We manage fairly well to the bottom step, where I paused and lifted her chin with a finger. “Unless you don’t want me to be.”
Her eyes turned into giant saucers, then she quickly arched a brow and said in a voice I’m sure she intended to kill my interest in her, “I’ll let you know when I get you to the top of the stairs. My opinion of you might change after this, but I doubt it.”
Feisty. Wasn’t wrong about that. She was quick and gave as good as she got.
I laughed. “I’m not going to ask if that means change for the better or worse.”
“Smart move.”
I let her help me up, step by step, but I could have sprinted them, and at the top she looked more winded than I did.
She froze, staring at the yard in wonder.
“This is your house?”
“Yep. I’ll introduce you to the neighbors on our second date.”
She glared at me. “This is not a date.”
“OK, we’ll have it your way. I just wasn’t sure what to call this encounter.”
That made her more flustered. “This isn’t a date. This isn’t an encounter. Is there anyone home at your place?”
I grinned. “No. Why?”
Her eyes flashed. “Because if someone were home I’d just dump you on the lawn for them to find and take care of.”
I laughed and gave her a bullshit expression. “No you wouldn’t. You’re not that kind of girl.”
“How would you know?”
“If there is one thing I definitely know, it’s women.”
