The Last Resort

by Marissa Stapley

  Who knows what Miles would have done to him, in the end? Maybe Sol would have healed her husband, eased his mind. They never got the chance to find out.

  Which was why she understood the man before her. Which was why, as exhausted as she had been, moments before, she was glad Colin had come. She knew she could help him, and that helping him would help her, too. This was the way it had always been. Why she did it, year after year.

  She waited for his sobs to subside, for him to sit upright again. Nothing to do but wait, she knew, for time to do its job.

  “Take a breath,” she said. “It’s all right now. Breathe. Just breathe.”

  He did, long and deep. “When you go through something like that... I think some couples come together but we fell apart. Shell did what you’re supposed to do when you’re grieving, at least at first. She moved through all the phases, while I stayed stuck in one. Denial. She was alone, completely. I just stood by and said nothing. Because it was my fault that we lived out there. My job that had brought us somewhere no one could save Zoey when she was hurt. Damn it, it’s no wonder she started to drink. No wonder she started to try to numb herself against all that. That night, the night she died, I was so hasty. Practically pushing Pam and Zoey out the door. I didn’t take enough care. I just wanted to be alone with Shell. What were my last words to them? I don’t even remember. Shell lost her daughter and mother, everything in one moment. And all I probably said was, ‘Have fun, you two.’”

  “Does Shell tell you that? That it was because of you?”

  “She doesn’t have to say it. It’s just the truth. But no. She would never say that.”

  “She loves you.”

  “She did, once. I don’t know how she feels anymore.”

  Only the sound of the ocean and the rain, outside the window. She wished for sunlight for him, though she knew it wouldn’t help.

  “Are you angry with her ever? Do you ever get angry about the drinking?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes. But it’s not all that mystifying that she would choose that poison, of all things, even if it’s what killed our daughter and her mother. Shell stopped drinking, years ago, when we were in school. She knew it was a problem. She conquered it. The condition was that I was supposed to stand by her. We didn’t say it. We didn’t have to. It was just us—who we were. Stronger together. But I abandoned her. It turns out I don’t know how to take care of her when she’s weak, only when she’s strong. I’m a terrible husband.”

  “You can’t take all of this on yourself.”

  “I can’t put it on her, either.”

  “Don’t you think she does the exact same thing? Do you really think she sits there alone, blaming you? No. She sits there alone trying to think of all the things she could have done differently, too.” Or, she sits there with my husband, while he tricks her, in her weakened state, turns her mind into something she no longer recognizes. We have to do something, Colin. I have to.

  “What she could have done differently is not marry me.”

  “But then you wouldn’t have Zoey.”

  “We don’t have her. She’s gone.”

  Grace leaned in. She put her hand on his arm and made him look at her. “She’s not,” Grace said. “She’s with you. All the time.” She felt something in the room with them as she spoke those words. Maybe it was a little girl with shimmery hair and blue eyes, maybe it was a father’s love. It’s not what Miles would have said to him. Miles would have talked about heaven and being together again someday—but Grace knew how long a lifetime could be, waiting for that. She knew what people needed, to get through every day.

  Colin was crying again, silent tears. Grace saw Shell alone in that house, saw Colin asleep at a desk in a portable, beside a gaping hole in the ground that reminded him, every time he looked at it, of the grave he had left his daughter in. She understood the depths of that hole. Grace saw Colin standing at the edge of the mine, saw the landscape of it, a stark, empty cavern, full of such potential, but only if you managed it properly. A place to escape to. To disappear into. A well of grief. She understood this so well—that you could believe that with enough searching, with enough mining, you could bring your child back. Time did not heal that. You had to step away from the ledge.

  And he did. She saw it. He shook his head, came away. He could see her again. “I had a dream once that Shell was drowning. And I tried to save her. And she pulled me under and we both sank. I’m afraid of her grief. It’s bottomless. That dream had me convinced that we have no future. Don’t all couples who lose a child break up eventually? I came here with hope, but there’s no hope, is there? I think she suggested it because she wanted to prove that we were finished. So we could say we’d tried it all.”

  “That’s a myth. More often, it’s not true. Couples often get stronger after a loss like yours.”

  “What’s wrong with us, then?”

  “Nothing is wrong with you. You just need to find your way back to each other.”

  “And in order to get us to do that, you separate us?”

  “That wasn’t my choice.”

  “It wasn’t?” A flicker of surprise.

  Oh, but she was so, so tired. She shouldn’t have said that. Grace turned and picked up the phone, using her good hand, as she had been all day. Trying to hide how much her wrist hurt. She called the front desk. “Yes, I am authorized to be given such information,” she said, and she worked hard to keep the frustration out of her voice so he wouldn’t see through it to the rot and ugliness and betrayal she was trying to cover up. “Thank you.” She hung up and turned to Colin again.

  “Your wife is in Bungalow 4. It’s closest to the ocean. Beside—” she swallowed hard “—Miles’s office. Go to her. Hold a hand out to her. I think you’ll see that she doesn’t pull you under, Colin. But you have to reach out first, because someone always has to be first. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “And stay with her. Bring her with you for your session with me tomorrow. It’s very important that you do that. Don’t leave her side.”

  * * *

  Grace said goodbye to Colin, then waited a moment before closing and locking her office door. She couldn’t go to dinner. Not now. She was too exhausted. And she didn’t feel like herself. She felt like Grace Tyler. The veil was so thin. She couldn’t go out.

  She took a ring of keys from her desk drawer and walked to her bookshelf. She unlocked the bottom cabinet and ran her finger along the spines of the books that were inside. Reparative Therapy. Shame and Attachment Loss. She opened the first book, but instead of reading the words, she ripped out a page and crumpled it in her hand, tossed it on the floor. Soon, she was surrounded by balls of paper. Now she sat, curled up, held her knees tight to her chest and pressed herself against a wall.

  Hello, Grace. We’re glad you’re here. We praise the Lord that you have decided to wrest your soul away from the devil. This is Miles Markell, our new youth minister. We thought you might be more comfortable with him here.

  She stood and crossed the room to the hidden bookshelf again. There was a photo in there of Grace and Miles at their wedding. She kept it in here, made sure there were no wedding photos on display in their home or throughout the resort because she had been so young, too young, a child. Married at seventeen. It embarrassed her, now.

  Lord, help us exorcise this demon from this child’s body.

  There she was: her seventeen-year-old self, a child in a wedding dress, a look on her face that was full of naïveté and hope, instead of grief. Her brother was dead. Miles had convinced her he was a sinner, had encouraged her to pray on it over and over. You won’t ever see him again, Miles had said to her. He won’t be waiting for you in heaven. Forget him. It’s too late. Who knew you could do that? Forget someone. She had, for a while. That had been the true sin. The wedding had been strange, like Sunday morning church but with the focus entirely on the
two of them. It had almost felt like sacrilege, to be so shining and perfect and deity-like, in a church. Whispers as she walked down the aisle, but not the ones she had grown used to. It just took a few minutes, a practiced series of I dos and I wills, and then Grace Markell was as whole and pure as Grace Tyler had been broken and sullied. When they became famous, there had been a few headlines. Grace Markell, child bride? Did Miles take advantage of one of his flock? But none of it stuck, because look at them: the perfect couple! Who could find fault?

  Except that their entire lives had been built on a fault line.

  In the photo, Grace was looking up at Miles like he was a savior. And he was looking at her like he believed he was exactly that. You make me feel perfect, he used to say to her. You make me feel like I can do anything. She had given him too much power by letting him believe he had healed her. She had turned him into a monster. She had.

  Outside, the wind blew. She put the photo back, stood, and walked to the huge window, where she had a panoramic view of the furious sea, the suffocating blanket of clouds, the darkness rolling in. The stars were coming out in patches, where the clouds parted to allow it. She watched them out the window and wondered, as she often did, what else was out there. Miles would tell her nothing, that they were the only ones—but on nights like this she knew, just as she knew many other things, that this could not possibly be true. And she liked to think this: that there were other planets just like Earth. Making herself and her kind matter less made her problems seem less huge. She had learned this from a client, actually, from a conversation in her office, a client confiding in her about the relief he sometimes felt when contemplating his own potential insignificance.

  She learned so much from them. She was going to miss that more than anything, when it was all over. Because it had to be over. Today, this week, had made her see that. She could not do this anymore. She could not live this lie. The work wasn’t saving her anymore. It might kill her if she wasn’t careful, might make her want to die again. For years, it had felt like having a creature inside the walls of a house. She had heard it scrabbling in there, trying to get her attention. It had been much easier to ignore—but now the creature had died. The death and the rot and smell and the presence of it couldn’t be ignored any longer. It couldn’t. The way she was feeling about Johanna Haines—it was wrong. It was simply wrong. And the way she had been standing by and letting Miles wreak havoc on women’s lives was wrong, too. Let him make his own bed. She couldn’t do it anymore.

  She was not Grace Markell. She was beginning to feel there was no way back. She was Grace Tyler, broken, bruised—but real. She was going to have to find a way to live with that.

  “I’m leaving,” she said to the stars out the window, but they disappeared as soon as she said it.

  When?

  Soon.

  It broke her heart, but it also made her feel like there could be a chance, someday, that she actually would be healed.

  She went to her desk and opened a notebook. She started a list.

  Passport.

  Cash.

  Plan.

  When?

  ?

  ?

  Laptop/Phone

  ?

  She stopped. She knew she was going to have to go into Miles’s office. It had the information about her secret bank account in an encrypted file, and that bank account contained the money from her inheritance.

  She could do this. She would pick the right moment. She would get the laptop and the information, and then she would slip away one night, unnoticed, and by the time dawn broke, she would be gone.

  But not yet. She had to help Colin Williams and she had to help Johanna Haines—

  Help Johanna Haines. That was all. And then never see her again.

  She picked the books up off the floor and put them on her desk, turned them spine in and placed her clipboard on top, ready for the next day. She cleared the floor of the crumpled pages. But when she made it to the door of her office, she found she couldn’t bring herself to open it. She was safe in here. Out there, she was not. The exhaustion overtook her, and so did the fear. The throbbing in her wrist. If Miles broke her any more, she would not have the strength to escape when the right time came. And she would certainly not have the strength to help anyone.

  So she did something she had never done before. She stayed where she was, even though she knew her husband was waiting for her to join him and spend the night pretending to be different people than they were. She had granola bars in her desk drawer. She had water. She had her couch, and a sweater to cover herself if she got cold. She’d survive. And he wouldn’t come for her, not here. He might tap at the door softly and call her bad names in a whisper, tell her stories about her special place in hell, but he would not bang at this door or break it down because her office was in among all the other bungalows. Everyone would hear him and understand what and who he really was. A man too damaged to help any of them. A man who, more and more, wanted only to help himself. She closed her eyes. It was such a relief.

  It was dark outside when Shell woke up. No clock in her room. She ordered dry toast and tea from room service. “No. Thank you, that’s all,” she had to say twice. Then a knock at her door. She expected the room service attendant, but instead it was Miles, holding a plate domed with metal flat-palmed in one hand and a bottle of sparkling water in the other.

  “What are you—”

  He stepped past her into the room, and turned. “Room service,” he said with a lupine smile. “Close the door, please.”

  She did, but at the last minute left the door very slightly ajar. “What are you doing here?” A frown passed over his face but he replaced it with the smile again.

  “Bringing you dinner.”

  He put the plate down on the small table by the window and lifted the metal dome with a flourish to reveal a plate filled with yellow rice and big chunks of chicken smothered in a deep brown sauce. She put a hand to her mouth to stifle a gag.

  “That’s not what I ordered. I ordered dry toast,” she said.

  “This is my favorite. You have to try it. Come. Sit.”

  She did sit, but mostly because her legs felt weak. This was not normal. She knew this should not be happening. It had been a slow dawning, as the effects of the pill wore off. But she knew that what was happening, it was not right.

  “Do you hand deliver meals to all your clients?”

  “Only the ones who need it. Man cannot live on bread alone. Woman, either.” He smiled wider at his own attempt at a joke. His accent twanged at her. It didn’t sound so warm anymore. The smell of the chicken and spices continued to turn her stomach. He was pouring the sparkling water into two champagne glasses. When he put the water in front of her, she sipped it, grateful for that at least.

  “I’m really not feeling well. That pill—”

  “This is our chef’s specialty.” He picked up a fork and cut a piece of chicken with the side of it, then sat and held the fork up to her.

  “Please... I really can’t.”

  He held the fork there for another moment, then put it down with a sigh.

  “What were you doing, just now?” he asked.

  “Thinking.”

  “About?”

  “Home.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “I miss the way it used to be,” she said cautiously. “I don’t think I have anything to go back to.”

  He pushed the plate aside and leaned toward her, eyes alight with intensity.

  “Maybe you don’t have to go back,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Her heart had started to beat rapidly.

  “Let’s test it. Let’s do some more EMDR. Right now. Please?”

  She felt a chill, as if the air conditioner had suddenly been cranked up. “I don’t want to.”

  Another sigh. “Do you know how
close you are? To feeling better, to feeling whole again? You are so, so close. And you keep fighting me. Do you really want to live like this?”

  She realized he expected her to answer. “No.”

  “Do you know what your husband has been doing, these past two days? He’s been on his phone, taking calls and meetings. He hasn’t attended a single counseling session. He is completely out of touch with his emotions, and with you. More than ever. But I am here. I see you. Your beauty, your strength, your great potential. To be whole. Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was small.

  He stood and put the dome back on the chicken. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll go back and get you some toast after this. And some tea with honey. Maybe a little cinnamon, too. That always helps me when I’m feeling under the weather.” His voice was gentle. “But let’s—can we sit on the bed where it’s more comfortable?”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Shell.” The sharpness was back. “You’re being a bit ridiculous, don’t you think?”

  She followed him slowly. He was already sitting, and when she sat beside him, he held out a palm. A pill.

  No. Not this time. “This is not right. You need to leave.” She was about to stand but he put his hand on her arm and held it, hard. It scared her, his strength. She tried to stand again and couldn’t.

  “Was I wrong about you, Shell?”

  “Stop it. Let go. I can’t get up.” She struggled and he held tighter. “That hurts.”