Still Waters

by Rebecca Addison

  Chapter Forty Four

  Hartley

  I barely noticed the final week of the trial. I sat there daily, listening to both sides sum up their evidence, but I couldn’t tell you a thing that anyone said. When the Judge ruled in favor of The Sullivan Group and the EPA, I didn’t even realize until Gloria grabbed my shoulders and shrieked into my ear. I pushed her away and walked numbly past the shocked faces of my parents, out through the doors and into the sunshine. I didn’t stop walking until the sun went down behind the mountains.

  The following morning, my father’s lawyer delivered a letter to my hotel room explaining that my name had been removed from my parent’s wills and that I would no longer be receiving payments into my trust fund. My parents are petty, petty people. By then we all knew that wills and trust funds and houses by the lake were completely irrelevant. You didn’t have to be an accountant to know that once Preston Industries paid the settlement to The Sullivan Group there would be almost nothing left. He was just proving a point, twisting the knife one last time before I left town for good.

  And leave town I did. As soon as the trial ended I put my house at the lake on the market and packed what little I wanted to take with me into the trunk of my car. Then I turned my car out of Jefferson and didn’t look back.

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” Eleanor asks me on my second week back in Twin Heads.

  “I’m sure. But will it be ok with you and Jake? I don’t want to be the third wheel. Especially when you’re in the honeymoon phase of your relationship.”

  As soon as the words leave my mouth, I wish they hadn’t. I hate myself for being jealous of Jake and Nor. I wish I were a big enough person to be happy for them, instead of just sad for me.

  “Yes, of course,” she smiles. “It’s going to be great. We’ll be college roomies again.”

  “Except for the all night Lost marathons.”

  “And eating ramen noodles for breakfast.”

  She hands me the tape and I seal up the last box. Thanks to my foresight, most of the cleaning and packing was already done before I moved up to Jefferson for the trial.

  “I’ll give you a minute,” she says and heads out to the truck to talk to Jake.

  I walk slowly from room to empty room. I only lived here for such a short time, but this house is already full of memories. My little green cottage was meant to be a refuge from the storm. I arrived here frightened and panicked and in desperate need of shelter. It gave me that. But I can’t be here without thinking of what could have been. And I don’t want to make my home in a house that’s connected to Crew, even if my landlord is thousands of miles away. I take one last look in the bedroom and then walk down the hall. When I pass the bathroom and see the deep pink bath against the wall, I close my eyes for a moment before shutting the door.

  “You know,” Jake says meaningfully, a few days later, “he never said anything about writing.”

  When I look up, he’s sliding a piece of paper and a pen across the kitchen table to me.

  “You mean a letter? With paper?”

  He smiles. “Why not? It might surprise him into reading it.”

  “Why doesn’t he just talk to me?”

  Jake sighs. “He’s not talking to anyone.”

  “Not even you?”

  He shakes his head. “Not for over a week now. He’s seeing a psychiatrist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. He says he doesn’t want to talk to anyone while he does the work.”

  “Jake,” I say, looking across the table at him. “Just tell me the truth. Is there any point? Are you sure he doesn’t hate me?”

  He smiles sadly and reaches over to touch my hand.

  “Of course not. Hart, he knows that your intentions were good. He’s not angry with you, and he definitely doesn’t hate you. It’s the opposite. I think he’s trying to fix himself because he loves you.”

  “That doesn’t make sense,” I mumble. But it makes perfect sense. “I wanted to help him.”

  “Crew doesn’t want to be half a man for you, Hart. Don’t you get it?” he smiles and squeezes my hand. “It never mattered with the others. It matters with you.”

  “Jake,” I say, and my voice is barely more than a whisper. “I can’t keep waiting forever not knowing where I stand. This is killing me.”

  He nods sympathetically and looks into my eyes.

  “He knows that. He understands that you might not be here when he comes back. And he knows how hard this is for you. That’s why he asked me to take care of you until he’s able to do it himself.”

  He returns to the newspaper he was reading as I move the paper closer and fiddle with the pen. The blank page looms in front of me, looking bigger and emptier by the second. How can I possibly explain how I feel about him by scratching some lines on a page? Crew is the one who is good with words, not me. He's the one with a book for every place he loves. Words mean so much to him that he has them written on his skin. I read research papers and analyze data for fun. My notebooks are full of diagrams and procedures, not feelings or thoughts. I look back down at the blank page and slam the pen on the table. I can't write to him. We don't speak the same language.

  Jake looks up at the sound and watches me carefully. I glance at him quickly and then look away. The sympathy in his eyes reminds me of how very sad I am. And today, I'm sad enough.

  "Hart," he says softly as he walks around the table and kisses the top of my head. "Don't overthink it. Think of him and write what you feel."

  I take a deep breath and watch him leave the kitchen, wiping an angry tear off my cheek with the heel of my hand. I can feel. Feeling isn't the problem. I feel it all, loneliness and longing and guilt at hurting him. I feel too much. How ironic that with all of the languages I speak and all of the thousands of words I know, I don’t seem to be able to put together a single sentence. Think of him.

  So I do. I think about the scar on his arm that he got in a surfing accident when he was fifteen, the way it feels when I run my finger over it. The look on his face when he talks about his work, passionate and fiercely determined. The way he always held my hand, even if we were only walking from the bed to the door. The books he told me about on our walks along the sand. The way he has the perfect quote for every moment waiting on his tongue. And then an idea pops into my head. Maybe there is a way I can do this. I pick up the pen and quickly scribble across the page before I have time to change my mind.

  "I see you everywhere, in the stars, in the river; to me you are everything that exists; the reality of everything."

  V.W

  I tear the page in half and then rip around the words so that it's just a scrap of paper that can fit in the palm of my hand. I slip it into an envelope and write his address in Costa Rica on the front.

  “I’m going out Jake,” I call as I pull my coat off the hook and open the door. If I don’t post it right this second, I know I never will.

  Once I start writing to Crew in quotes, I can’t stop. I send them almost daily, scribbling words in between applying for jobs and helping at The Sea Shack and before I go to sleep at night. I write them quickly, without thinking, and on anything I can find. On a spectacularly bad day when I thought I’d die from loneliness, I wrote: What if I told you I’m incapable of tolerating my own heart? on the back of a takeout menu, before throwing it into the post box on my way home. Then, a couple of days later, I wrote: You can’t separate me from the person you’ve imagined me to be on a Post-It note in deep, sharp letters, and then shoved it angrily into an envelope before pushing it into the post box with a smack of my hand.

  But I never allow myself to imagine him reading them. As soon as the envelopes disappear I release the words from my heart and try not to think of them again. Sometime around the twentieth envelope I begin to wonder why I’m writing them; are they for Crew, or are they really for me?

  As the days since I saw him stretch into weeks, I notice that I’m writing less often. First it’s every second day, and then
every three or four. By the time spring comes to an end I find myself sitting at Eleanor’s kitchen table knowing that I’m about to write my two final notes. I choose them carefully and unlike the others, I’m still in the moment and take my time copying out the words. Taking a deep breath, I pick up the Spanish newspaper I ordered - Crew’s Twin Heads ritual read. I rip a shape of a sun from a page at the back and write the words neatly around the edges

  He smiled the most exquisite smile, veiled by memory, tinged by dreams.

  For my last quote, I pick up the luggage tag from my flight home from Venezuela months before. It feels like a lifetime ago. It feels like yesterday. I still my shaking hand and write the words slowly, looking at them without moving for a long, long time.

  The moment was all; the moment was enough.

  Chapter Forty Five

  Hartley

  And so, life moves on. Unfortunately, there are no little black boxes in life that we can crawl into and close the lid above us until we’re ready to face the world again. Bills need to be paid. Food needs to be bought, prepared, and eaten. At some point, the bathroom will need to be cleaned, and the laundry will have to be done. Life’s little reminders that despite your pain, the world keeps turning.

  Thanks to the sale of my house and the remaining money in my trust fund, I have some time to consider what I want to do next. I apply for jobs at various universities and read through the research I was doing at Preston on pollution management and oil spills. I tag along when Jake and Eleanor go to the movies or out for pizza. I try to move on.

  And one day, in the middle of the kind of summer you remember from your childhood - all blue skies and crickets and ice cream cones - I realize that I haven’t thought about him. And when I do think of him, I feel peace. I close my eyes and let the breeze coming off the ocean tickle the skin on my face and I walk home with a spring in my step that I haven’t felt in months. I kick off my sandals at the door and make my way to my room at the back of the house feeling light and free and miraculously happy. And so of course, because life’s like that, this is the day that the first envelope arrives.

  It’s small and white and unassuming, like the kind of envelope you’d find in a box of cheap Christmas cards. But to me, it’s a loaded gun. Someone, probably Jake, has left it propped up against my pillow for me to find. I sit next to it for a few minutes looking at Crew’s unmistakable handwriting. I pick it up and then put it back down again, debating with myself over whether I really want to read it, and if I do read it, will it make any difference now anyway? I walk to the door and shut it and then turn back to the bed.

  It’s a small scrap of paper, mimicking the little quotes I sent him. I feel a surge of happiness that he received them, but it’s soon followed by a sense of bitterness that it’s taken him this long to reply. With shaking fingers, I slip the paper out of the envelope and unfold it carefully. It’s written on lined white paper like the kind I use for taking notes.

  Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe.

  It’s Albert Einstein, of course, and it makes me smile. I know what he’s doing. I wrote to him in his language, and now he’s writing back to me in mine. Is he telling me that he's acted stupidly? Even if he's not, I tell myself that he is. I tuck the paper under my pillow and lie down, resting my head on top of it. And then I fall into the kind of sleep I’ve done without ever since I was in Venezuela, in that little wooden house amongst the trees.

  After the first envelope arrives, they come daily. If Eleanor or Jake collect the mail, they leave them for me on my pillow. I never tell them what’s inside, and they never ask. He writes out chemical formulas for reactions producing heat and light getting them all horribly wrong, and draws little scientific diagrams of the flowers I loved in Venezuela. I store them under my pillow and sleep with them at night. Some of them tell me nothing and others hint at secret meanings, but it's never enough to let me know how he feels about me. It's deeply frustrating, and I want to write him back demanding an end to the game, but lately the postmarks are haphazard; Costa Rica for two days, then Venezuela and the U.S the next. I’d never know where to send it. After a while the sight of a new envelope both thrills and sickens me because as much as I love the things he chooses to send me, I desperately need to know one way or the other. Does he still mean it? Because I do. I think I mean it more now than I did then.

  In the middle of summer, I take a long afternoon walk along the beach and up the steps to The Point. I return home wind blown and tired and when I walk down the hallway and open my bedroom door the first thing I see is an envelope sitting on the bed. I look at it for a second, briefly contemplating throwing it away unopened. But before I can help myself I'm bouncing on the bed holding it in my hands, delaying opening it for as long as I can stand it just so I can savor the anticipation of the moment. When I do tear it open and look inside, I notice that it's different from every other note he's sent me. It’s a postcard, and I pull it out slowly, looking at the picture for a long time. It's of a beach with white sand and turquoise water, but it's not rocky like the beach in Venezuela. A row of palm trees bow towards the shore and in the middle of the photo two scrubby looking trees stretch their branches towards each other as if they're holding hands. Their limbs are covered in tiny candles that sparkle and glint in the dusky light of early evening. Thin gauzy white fabric has been draped and looped up one tree, over to the other, and down again, creating a little covered gazebo. Or a cubby house. I trace my finger over the photo slowly, along the path leading to the gazebo, over the fabric and down to the bouquet of orchids abandoned on the ground as if they're waiting for someone to reach in and pick them up. I press the card to my heart and then put it down on the bed, only then do I notice the words he's written in the sand.

  The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

  I pick it up again, looking at the words carefully and then turn it over, hungry for more. There are just three simple words written neatly on the back in pencil. But to me, they mean everything.

  I mean it.

  “Feel like an ice cream?” Eleanor asks when I walk back out into the kitchen, my heart bursting through my skin. “Jake is working. You know what that means…”

  “Extra chocolate sauce?”

  “And all of the special flavors that he keeps out the back…”

  I look over at her and smile. “Let’s go.”

  We walk down the road and along the sea front to The Sea Shack, taking our time and enjoying the sun on our skin. Eleanor is on her summer break from school. She looks tanned and beautiful and completely loved up. I’m quiet, listening to her talk and enjoying seeing her look so happy. Unlike the winter months, in the summer The Sea Shack is bursting at the seams. A line of children snakes from the takeaway kiosk, around the building and down over the grass. Every table, stool, and booth is taken.

  We make our way to the front and Jake leans around the woman he’s serving, beaming in our direction.

  “Hey there,” he calls out over the noise. “I wasn’t expecting you two in here today. Can I get you something?”

  The woman he’s serving turns and glares at us in irritation.

  “We’ll wait,” Nor says, handing me her bag and sunglasses. “I’ll give you a hand.”

  In seconds, she’s pulled an apron over her head and is rolling ice creams like a pro.

  “Hart!” Jake yells at me, as I make my way to the back of the line. I turn around to meet his eyes.

  “Yeah?”

  “Guess who just arrived in town?”

  “What?”

  “Arrived this morning. My dad saw him pull into his driveway.”

  I’m rooted to the spot for a moment, getting in everyone’s way but completely unable to move. The noise level in the room suddenly drops to nothing, and I can feel my pulse roaring in my ears. But then a man with a sobbing toddler brushes past me
, knocking into my shoulder, and I just about jump out of my skin.

  “Hey lady,” he growls impatiently, “are you in the line or what?”

  When I look up, Jake is eyeing me from the front of the room. He winks at me mischievously before turning to greet his next customer.

  “I’m sorry,” I stammer to the man with the kid, stepping backward and starting for the door. “I don’t want an ice cream anymore. I just realized, I really have to go.”

  Chapter Forty Six

  Crew

  The house looks the same as when I left it. The boards still need repairing, and one of the windows will have to be replaced before winter comes. I shut the door of my Jeep and try to calm myself down as I make my way up the steps. I knock a few times and stand back, nervously pushing my hair off my face as I wait for her to open the door. I knock again, louder, in case she’s asleep or in the bath, but after a few minutes it’s obvious that she’s not at home. I walk around to the kitchen window and look in, my stomach dropping when I see that it’s empty except for a table stacked with chairs and a mop leaning up against the wall. I reach for my phone and bring up Jake’s number, feeling like an idiot for not calling to tell him I was coming into town. For not calling at all. The phone rings once, twice, three times, and then Jake’s voice fills my ear asking me to please leave a message. I shove it back into my pocket and climb in the car. I make sure I drive the streets slowly, making my way up to The Point and then down to Eleanor’s house in case I see her. I drive around for a full hour before I give up and head down to the beach. No matter how many times I see it, the crowds in summer still surprise me. Twin Heads is an empty, blustery kind of place for ten months of the year. And then summer break hits, and suddenly it’s like Disneyland.

  I pull open the door to The Sea Shack and look for Jake. He’s standing elbow to elbow with Eleanor behind the counter; they're rolling ice creams for waiting customers and sneaking looks at each other when they think no one notices. Everyone notices. Two old ladies next to me are watching them closely; their faces lit up by their smiles.