Return to the Beach House

by Georgia Bockoven

  She opened her Photoshop program and clicked on the picture of Abbey twirling in foam left behind from a wave, her arms clutching her sides, her head thrown back, and her mouth open wide in a smile. Lindsey tried to reconcile the images of two little girls half a world apart—one absolutely convinced she was the pearl in the oyster, the other knowing without question she was the gritty grain of sand.

  Lindsey abandoned the computer and went outside to sit on the back deck, ignoring both the wet chair and the fog that eventually left her as wet as if she’d gone swimming.

  Matthew wasn’t surprised when he returned and found Lindsey missing. He’d originally gone outside to walk off his anger. Almost before he knew it was happening, the walk became a run. He ran blindly, trying to escape what waited for him back at the house. He’d always believed he knew what drove Lindsey, why she felt compelled to tell the stories no one wanted to see. Her passion and compassion were what had attracted him to her in the beginning.

  With the insulation of youth, he hadn’t understood that every battle Lindsey would fight would claim a part of her soul. Slowly, over their years together, he’d watched the laughter disappear as profoundly as the playful light in her eyes. She was dying in infinitesimal pieces, and he didn’t know how to save her.

  What he’d come back from the run knowing was that, despite the need to protect himself, he couldn’t just walk away. He would do what he could, when he could. And he would love her as he’d always loved her, even if, in the end, they wound up taking separate paths. Until then, he would take his cues from her, letting her decide whether being bound to him was a benefit or a curse.

  He took a shower and dressed, then headed for the kitchen to start lunch. Almost by accident, he spotted Lindsey on the back deck.

  For several seconds, he considered not disturbing her. Plainly, she was still in the middle of working things out. Then he remembered how cold he’d been when he was running, even uphill. She was too mentally and physically fragile to do something this stupid.

  He stepped outside and planted himself on the foot of the lounge chair. “Don’t you think—” When she looked up, he saw the red circles around her eyes and the rest of what he’d had to say stuck in his throat. “Goddamn it, Lindsey. When are you going to tell me what’s really going on with you?”

  She came forward and put her arms around his neck. “I can’t do this anymore,” she sobbed.

  Her robe instantly soaked his shirt. “Me either,” he said, both relieved and defeated. “Seeing you like this is killing me. Maybe if you stop trying so hard to make us work, you’ll find a little peace alone. Maybe even a little happiness.”

  She stiffened and pushed him away. “Are you saying what I think you are? You want out?” Her face became a mask of agony. “When did you decide this? Is it because of the Syria thing?”

  Shit. He’d completely misjudged her meaning. “Come inside.” She slapped his hand away when he reached for her.

  “Why?”

  “So we can talk.”

  “What do you call this?”

  “Freezing our asses off.” He stood and pulled her up beside him. She didn’t come willingly, but she didn’t fight either.

  They went into the living room, where Matthew took off her robe. “I guess this should have been a clue,” she said, moving to the fireplace. Her teeth chattered a ragged Morse code. “Do you think it was some subliminal kind of thing—a way for me to keep warm when you weren’t around anymore?”

  He actually laughed. “That has to be one of the dumbest things you’ve ever said.”

  Her shoulders sagged. “Yeah, I’m not at my best right now.”

  He grabbed a blanket off the back of the sofa and wrapped it around her. “So what is it that you can’t do anymore?”

  “Why do you want to leave me?” She was good at using anger to cover hurt, but there were wide cracks in her defenses this time. “What did I do?”

  He held her closer. “You didn’t do anything. You’ve stayed true to who you are. It’s me. I’m the one who’s changed.”

  “Why?” She stopped trying to hold herself rigid and melted against him, pressing her face into his chest. “How?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered honestly. “I didn’t recognize what was happening for a long time, and then I woke up one morning missing you so badly it felt like my heart was in a vise. I don’t want to live like that anymore. It hurts too much.”

  “And you think leaving will make you miss me less?”

  All the resolve and direction he’d gained on his run disappeared like Halloween candy in a dorm room. “I’ve been using hope like a drug where you’re concerned. If I get off that drug, maybe I’ll be able to get on with the rest of my life.”

  Looking up at him, she said, “Don’t you know I am who I am because of you? You’re the only home I know. Without you, I’m like those kids in the Congo—looking for something I’ll never find because it isn’t there anymore.”

  “It isn’t here now,” he said as gently as he could. “Think about your life, Lindsey. What you are and who you allow into your circle are of your own choosing. You have a wonderful family, and you treat them as if they were objects you could shelve and pull out when it’s convenient. I’ve never understood why you treat them the way you do.”

  “I’m their big disappointment, their one failure in life.” She pulled the blanket closer. “I don’t fit their mold, and I never have. From the time I was a little girl, my father would tell his friends he was sure they’d made a mistake at the hospital and that I really belonged to someone else. He’d laugh and say things like, ‘Can you imagine how those people feel, raising the sweet, compliant, ruffle-wearing daughter they wound up with?’ You can only hear things like that so many times before you stop thinking where you grew up is home.”

  Lindsey’s cell rang before Matthew could reply. She crossed the room to retrieve her phone from the recliner, the blanket trailing behind her as if she were Linus walking away from a bruising confrontation with Lucy. Skipping the amenities, she said, “Find someone else, David. I’m not going. And don’t call me again until I tell you it’s okay. I’m going to take some time off.”

  She dropped the phone back into the chair and looked at Matthew. “I’m assuming you were telling the truth when you said you still love me?”

  “I’d stop if I could, but I don’t know how.”

  She gave him a sad smile. “As it turns out, I may know a way to take care of that for you.”

  Chapter 6

  Matthew added a log to the fire, laying it on the bed of glowing embers, where it immediately caught fire. He considered making coffee or tea or anything to delay whatever it was Lindsey wanted to tell him. Instead, needing contact to soften the blow for both of them, he brought her down to sit next to him on the sofa and allowed her space to burrow into his side. She chose to keep her distance, sitting forward instead, her hands covering her face.

  “You’ve suspected something was going on for a long time, haven’t you?” she asked.

  His mouth went dry, and his throat tightened in an unfamiliar fear. “I’d rather not play that game, Lindsey. Why don’t you just get it over with and lay it out for me.”

  She took a deep breath, then sat back and stared at the flames, the fire taking and giving at the same time. “When I told you I couldn’t meet you in Italy last year, or in Cyprus, and then in Turkey, because I had assignments, I was lying. It’s why you could never reach me at where I said I would be.”

  She spoke as if she were reading lines from a speech she’d given a hundred times, betraying none of the guilt that had controlled her life for two agonizing years.

  Matthew was too stunned for words. Trust was the fuel of their relationship. Without it, everything stopped working.

  She glanced at him and winced at the look in his eyes. “Say something,” she pleaded.

  “If you weren’t where you told me you were going, where were you?”

  “Virgini
a.”

  “Here? In the States?” The idea that she had found someone else and had gone there to be with him was so far out of the realm of possibility that it couldn’t even gain a toehold in his mind.

  “I told you that I had seen a doctor. What I didn’t tell you was that the doctor was connected to a hospital.”

  “And you felt you couldn’t share this with me because . . . ?”

  “You would have tried to rush to my rescue like the knight in shining armor that you are. And you would have tried to talk me into quitting. I wasn’t ready then. I was convinced I could work through it with a little help. You probably never saw it, but I even talked David into doing a piece on PTSD in returning vets so I could get inside the military hospitals where they were treating it.”

  Matthew got up and started to walk away, but immediately came back. “You’re right. If I’d known, I would have dropped everything to go wherever you were. You would have told me you weren’t ready to quit, and we would have fought about it, and in the end you would have won, like you always do. What was different this time? Why did you leave me on the outside?”

  More importantly, what was different now? Why had she actually shown up at the beach house instead of making up another excuse? She sure as hell wasn’t cured.

  Lindsey used the corner of the blanket to wipe tears from her cheeks. Speaking through hiccuped sobs, she said, “I thought it would be so obvious. This time I want you to win. I can’t go on this way. I discovered I have a breaking point, and this is it.”

  She held her hands out in a pleading gesture. “But I don’t know how to stop. I can’t let go, Matthew. I’ve tried. And it always comes back to the fact that what I do can make a difference. How can I turn my back and walk away from all the Sittinas of the world? Who is going to tell the stories of the soldiers who go through three tours of combat and then come home and put a gun in their mouth?”

  He sat next to her and pulled her into his arms. Snapshot memories of his disappointment when she’d canceled seeing him at the last minute merged with imagined images of her in a hospital room huddled in a corner, desperate to find a way out of the dark world she now inhabited.

  “What finally pushed you over the edge?”

  “I was flying back to base camp in a helicopter with a kid who was barely old enough to vote. A couple of medics worked on him as if he actually stood a chance and then just stopped and turned to help another medic working on a girl who’d lost her leg. I couldn’t stop staring at the tattoo on the dead kid’s arm—FOREVER. Eighteen years is a long way from forever. He had so much life ahead of him. And it’s not as if he died in isolation. The dreams of all of the people who loved him died with him. His parents might learn to cope with his loss, but they will never recover. They will spend the rest of their lives looking into the eyes of babies, and before they go to sleep at night, they will wonder and imagine, and their hearts will break all over again.

  “One of the medics told me later that by the time we landed I was unresponsive and they had to carry me into the hospital. It was my first big breakdown.”

  Her doctor in Virginia had taken her back to that day a dozen times, practicing cognitive behavior therapy and then eye movement desensitization while prescribing a variety of antidepressant medications. Hating the way the antidepressants made her feel, she stopped taking them.

  “I’m not going to pretend I know what to say or what to do to help you,” Matthew said. “You’re going to have to help me help you.”

  “Make love to me.”

  “Is that really what you want?”

  “More than anything. Right now all I want is to be lost in a world where you take care of me in every way possible. I’m so tired of being brave and strong.”

  He cupped the sides of her face with his hands. “I am your new forever, Lindsey.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before. We’ll live a lifetime of regret if we don’t try to work this out. We have a month, and if that’s not enough, I’ll do whatever it takes to get us more time.”

  “Define ‘whatever it takes.’ ”

  “I understand why you don’t believe me, but I know how to say no. And I will. My photography might be my passion, but you’re my life. I can’t do what I do without knowing I have you to come home to.”

  “You’re the most independent person I know. You only think you need me.” Matthew tucked the blanket closer around her. “It’s hard at first, but you find ways to survive.”

  “You learned the wrong lesson when you lost Christine. You think you survived, but you’ve always refused to recognize that a part of you died with her. You have a hollow place in your heart. You guard it like it contains something precious, when all it holds is loneliness and fear.”

  They weren’t her words. Lindsey didn’t talk or think that way. If she weren’t sitting so close, keeping him from escaping, he would be gone. “Sounds like you and the psychiatrist talked about more than your PTSD,” he said, his anger tangible. “You had no right to—”

  “What? Tell her about my life? About yours? We’re a couple. There’s nothing either of us can do or say that doesn’t affect the other.”

  “You should have said something to me.”

  “I am.”

  “A long time after the fact.”

  “What are you afraid of?” she almost shouted.

  “Nothing.”

  “Liar.”

  He tried to move her. She refused to go. “You had no right.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said softly. “You want to know what pushed me over the edge the second time, Matthew? It’s so simple it’s almost laughable. It was in Pakistan when I believed I was going to die and that I would never see you again.” She pressed her cheek against his arm. “That was when I decided I had to find a way out of my dark place. I thought all it would take was a month in the hospital to get my miracle cure. You can see I misjudged it by quite a bit.”

  Long moments passed with only the distant sound of the waves and the crackling fire to break the silence.

  Finally, standing, he held out his hand. “Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  “For a walk.”

  She couldn’t hide her disappointment.

  “For a very short walk,” he added, his voice husky with wanting her.

  “What should we do today?” Lindsey asked, bringing the down comforter up to her chin. They’d let the fire go out the night before and forgotten to turn on the heater. It was cold in the bedroom even with her head resting on Matthew’s shoulder and her bare leg lying possessively across his. Her hand on his chest, she absently outlined the edges of the jade pendent his sister had given him.

  He propped a second pillow behind his head and gave her a satisfied grin. “More of the same?”

  “Sounds perfect. Then what should we do tomorrow?”

  “What would you like to do?”

  “Something normal people do when they come here. I want to see if I can remember what it’s like to be a tourist. You know, one of those people who take pictures to show off to friends and family when they get home. I was trying to figure out how long it’s been since I sent my parents a picture of us and thinking about how excited my mother would be to hear from me.”

  “We could head down the coast to Big Sur. Maybe stop in Pacific Grove to see how many monarchs are still wintering over. Tonight we can go for pizza. Julia told me we can’t leave without going to Pizza My Heart at least once.”

  “Can you handle a half meat and half veggie? Or are you one of those vegetarians who—”

  “Careful,” he warned. “You’re about to stumble into fighting territory.”

  She laughed. “I figure if you’re still eating cheese you can’t be a complete fanatic.”

  “She also told me about Gayle’s Bakery. Supposedly it’s right up there with the pizza.”

  Lindsey propped herself up on her elbow and looked down at him. “Pizza and a bakery in the same day? You’re going to make
it your mission to fatten me up, aren’t you?”

  “I’ll make you a deal—I’ll match you pound for pound.”

  “And that’s supposed to impress me? You can drop twenty pounds in a month by running an extra half mile and cutting ice out of your diet.” She kissed him. “Tell me you love me.”

  “I love you.” He returned her kiss. “We are so connected I honestly don’t know where I end and you begin. If I ever commit a crime, they’ll send my DNA out for testing and it will come back that I’m the guy who loves Lindsey Thompson.”

  “That’s pretty impressive.”

  “It should be. I’ve been working on it for hours.”

  Suddenly serious, she said, “I’m scared.”

  “Me too,” he admitted.

  “But not for the same reason I’ll bet. We were so cocky ten years ago when we told my parents that we were different, that our love was so special we would succeed with our long-distance relationship even though everyone else who tries ends up failing. And now look at us. Turns out we’re no different than any other egocentric couple.”

  How could he argue with her? They’d given themselves four weeks to figure out how to make something work that they both knew had no real solution. Take away all the fancy words and proclamations of love and what they were left with was nothing more than two people looking for a painless way to say good-bye.

  Chapter 7

  Lindsey put on a pair of jeans and Matthew’s old sweatshirt that had a picture of a pair of elephants with locked trunks. The caption read: WAS IT AS GOOD FOR YOU AS IT WAS FOR ME? He thought it was hysterical. She thought it belonged on a frat house wall.