“You remembered that . . . you remembered it,” she said.
“Yes.” He hadn’t realized he knew the exact words until he said them. “It’s true.”
He saw a change, an instant shift in her eyes as she returned to the present, to who she was now. She turned away from him and plucked a leaf from the moss spilling from a live oak beside them.
“Tell me the story,” she said, and this time she bowed her head in surrender.
Nick closed his eyes and attempted to see the night that had changed everything. He wanted Amy to know it, to feel it, to understand it without any gaps. He wanted her to be there.
“It was late—the middle of the night, almost early morning—humid as hell. It had rained all day and the fog was thick. It was our last night and we were celebrating. We’d survived the rain forest, the poisonous frogs, the local water, the assignments we thought we’d never finish. I was driving. I always was. I seemed to be the only one who knew how to maneuver the beat-up Range Rover they gave us for transportation. There were seven of us . . . remember?”
“Seven students?”
“Yes. And we were piled in one truck.”
“What happened?” Amy whispered.
“A woman. She was crossing the street. It was late . . . and she wasn’t looking.”
He closed his eyes and forced himself to see the one moment he avoided, the crash he saw in horrid dreams with vivid blended colors and screeching sounds.
“I looked up and there she was . . . like an apparition of the Virgin Mary or something. Long black hair, long skirt. Her mouth was open as if she wanted to scream, say something, but she didn’t. She had a shawl over her head. She looked at me from over her shoulder. I jerked the Range Rover, but it responded in its own time—it was stubborn. We skidded and I heard it, felt it like a ride on the whirly thing at a carnival. All six voices in the truck were screaming or yelling instructions. It was a moment that lasted maybe five, ten seconds, but really lasted days—hell . . . it still lasts. I don’t remember anything after that. I woke up on a metal cot with a piece of foam that was supposed to be a mattress. I had a broken leg, cracked ribs and shooting pain every time I took a breath. Everything I know about the time between the accident and carcel—jail—came from Eliza and the lawyer.”
“Eliza.” Amy’s face paled, moved too far away, fading, and Nick wanted to pull her back. He was losing her. Panic welled up inside him—the same panic as the night he’d awakened in the jail infirmary.
“Listen, please.”
“I am. I’m not going anywhere. I’m listening. What happened to the rest of the students. To Eliza?”
“Sam, another student, broke his arm, and the others had some minor cuts and bruises. Eliza had some cracked ribs. But they all—all except Eliza and the student advisor, Mr. Rivera—went home the next day as planned.”
“I don’t get it. Why were you in jail? Why did Eliza stay?”
Nick looked away, weighing now what to say, how much to tell her, as if his life dangled from the very rope of his words. He hadn’t planned this speech well—or dared to hope she would really listen to him—and he hadn’t decided what to tell her and what not to tell her.
So what he said—the partial truth—became the full truth for her, and now, for him.
“The woman . . . she died.”
“What do you mean?” Amy looked as though she would stand, move, leave. The feeling of abandonment rose again in Nick—the unspoken disapproval when she never came to him. It was true . . . she would not accept this sin of his.
“The woman crossing the street, the one I swerved to miss—I hit her. I have no memory of it—the roll bar of the Range Rover knocked me out, or at least that’s what they told me.”
“Oh, God.”
“We later discovered that she was drunk, and staggering home in the middle of the road, but that was later—a year later. And extradition did not come easy in Costa Rica in the seventies. There was very little communication with the outside world and—”
“And Eliza?”
“She had—has—a lot of connections. Her parents are good friends with the guvnah and all that.” Nick affected his mother-in-law’s pattern of speech, the way in which she spoke of her intimate relationship with the governor of Georgia. “Eliza contacted people at home. They hired lawyers, bigwigs—hell, anyone to get me out of the mess I was in. They sent down a lawyer.”
“And in all this . . . mess, you never thought to contact me?”
“Amy . . .” He reached across the fallen tree they sat on; somehow she’d slipped to the end of the log, farther away. His hand found empty space and his fingers closed in on his palm. He sighed and looked down at the moss growing in the split cracks of the rotting wood.
“You’re the only one I thought about contacting. It worked like this: I was allowed one phone call to the American Embassy, which then contacted my mother. Eliza called her parents and they sent a native Costa Rican, who was an American lawyer, to be responsible for all my legal stuff and communication. Mr. Rivera, the student advisor, told the University of the ‘situation.’ Then he returned home and legal assistance was . . . secured. I asked this lawyer—God, what in the hell was his name?” Nick closed his eyes. “Mr. Miguel Carreira—I couldn’t even pronounce his name, but he was friendly with the locals, knew his way around. He said he couldn’t reach you at your dorm. He said they even tried your house. He was supposed to send you a telegram right away, with a phone number. God, what I would’ve given for e-mail, cell phones—anything but a telegram.”
“I didn’t . . . get one.” Amy closed her eyes.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing. Finish the story. Finish.”
“I sent another, then another.”
“No, not the telegrams. What happened to you?”
“It took a full year, a little longer, to prove it wasn’t my fault—vehicular homicide, don’t ya know?”
“You were in jail for an entire year?”
“Yes.” This time when he reached to touch her, he found her. She buried her head in his chest and he wound his fingers in her hair, pulled her closer. There were so many things he wanted to say to her. So many. In his sleepless nights he’d practiced entire speeches.
She lifted her head and looked at him, her eyes wet. “Was it horrible . . . just horrible?”
The sun began its descent below the oak and moss-rimmed horizon; the others would be waiting for them on the beach. But he wasn’t done telling her the story and nothing seemed of more importance than this—than telling Amy.
“Yes. I was convicted of homicide—of a local, for God’s sake. I was not the most well-liked man in jail. Seems everyone knew her . . . and loved her. It did get me my own jail cell, for safety reasons. Mr. Carreira visited me in jail. Eliza wasn’t allowed in. I would ask him about you and he would give me the most pitiful grimace. It was horrible. And then he’d say, in that Spanish accent of his, ‘No, no, nothing from her yet. Let’s just give her a little while to absorb the information. I’m sure she’ll call us.’ ”
“I’m sorry—so sorry.”
Nick held up his hand. “I do not want to talk about the jail, ever. It took a full year of research, getting to know and live with the locals, before Eliza and Miguel Carreira finally found the man the woman was with that night. They received a signed confession from him that proved she was blitzed, stumbling home through the streets. Eliza and Miguel got the man to testify at what, in Costa Rica, counts as a hearing. Seems the woman was from some big influential family and they didn’t want her name defamed. They dropped the charges.”
“Eliza helped the lawyer? She stayed and did all that to get you out? She loved you.”
“No . . . it was after I got out.”
“No. That’s not possible. She stayed. She didn’t return to school, or family, or her faux-antebellum mansion in Garvey. She stayed in some
foreign city for an entire year, or more, to get you out of jail. She loved you then.”
Nick glanced at the ground.
“That was sacrifice. That was . . . love,” Amy said.
“This is not what I want to talk about. Us. That’s what I came here for; us—how this possibly could have happened.” The anger he usually squelched with the preoccupations of his job, of his friends, of the forest and wilderness he loved, or with a good beer or three with his buddies, rose now. He stood with the force of his own rage, kicked the base of the stump, bark scattering at his feet. “This is bullshit. All these wasted years. All this wasted time. And you didn’t even know.”
“No. But I tried to find out. I called the school, your mother, your friends.”
“What did they tell you?” He sat down next to her again.
She stared off, up toward the gnarled oak branches. “Your mother wouldn’t talk to me. She just kept telling me you decided to stay on to help with the preservation program. The school gave me the same information—like a broken record: ‘He has decided to stay, he has decided to stay,’ over and over. It was all I could get from anybody. I wrote letters to the student P.O. box you gave me—they were returned. I went to your mother’s house—one time, Nick. Imagine the embarrassment. I drove all the way to Gunter, knocked on the door. She told me that, if you decided to stay and not contact me, I should grant you the right to get on with your life. She shut the door on me.”
Tears now fell in a single stream down her right cheek. He placed his lips on the tears that should never have dropped for him. The sky filled with strips of sunset; they needed to walk toward the beach before the light disappeared with the final crest of the sun. It’d be easy to get lost on the island, with its maze of marsh that circled back on itself, and he didn’t have a flashlight or matches. He hurried through the rest of his explanation.
“A year later, when I got out of jail, the first thing I did, my very first call, was . . . to you. I called your house . . . your mother answered.”
“She never told me.”
“I was angry when I called. More than anything I wanted to know why you never came or even sent a telegram back, sent a message . . . nothing.”
“You must have hated me.”
Hated her? All he’d ever done was want her . . . just want her.
“I never hated you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. Your mother answered the phone, but I don’t think she knew it was me. It was a bad connection, and I’d been sick with the flu the last month in that hellhole, so my voice was scratchy. Your mother told me you weren’t there, that you’d gone out. I told her I was a college friend and she told me you were out, with your fiancé.”
“Phil.” She exhaled his name.
“And then . . . back then, I thought I knew why you’d never contacted me. I found the reason. All I wanted then was to know why . . . and the fiancé was why.”
“But that wasn’t why.”
“And Eliza was there waiting. In every sense of the word, waiting. And you . . . you had gone on. My misery was more than I can possibly explain to you. My grief was . . . nauseating. So I tried to forget. But, of course, there was no forgetting. I have tried.”
“But now here we are. With different lives, different families—and there is nothing we can do about it.”
“How can you say that?”
“There isn’t. There just isn’t. I see no way . . .” Another tear, a blessed tear that let him know she cared, ran down her cheek.
“You still love me,” he said.
“Nick, don’t say that. You don’t know that. I love my family—my husband, my children.”
“Yes, I know. But I know you still love me.”
Her voice rose; she lifted her hands. “Do you want to tell me how you could possibly know that?”
“Because I still love you. I always have. Other things in my life have been . . . uncertain. Not this. Don’t you see now?”
“See what?”
“Our vows are still there, never broken. They were . . . covered by other vows. But ours were never broken. You didn’t leave me. I didn’t leave you. They-—our promises—are still there.”
Amy groaned. “I’ve made other vows since then, Nick.” She bowed her head. “I’ve always wondered what happened . . . and I wanted to find out, finally, where you were. And I’m so sorry that you had to go through all that. But you married a wonderful woman. I married an amazing man. We have lives, children, other vows. I don’t, can’t see any way around this . . . fact.”
“It’s more than that.”
Amy pointed to the horizon. “We have to get back to the beach. I don’t want to talk about this again. I’m sorry you went through that hell. I am. There’s nothing I can do to turn back time and fix it.”
“Well, I’m here now.”
“Let’s leave this alone. It’s dangerous and ancient ground.” She grabbed his hand. For that he was grateful. “This is so hard.” She let go, then turned and walked toward the beach, staring straight ahead.
He stood, dizzy, to follow her. He shook his head, taking one step to every two of hers. Leaves disintegrated with a whisper under his feet as he walked behind Amy, wanting to say something, anything intelligent. But all he could find inside his head were begging words and the abysmal breach between the man he’d meant to be when he was with her in college and who he was now.
He reached to touch the back of her hair; she whipped around. Something reflected on her face in the last crest of light—ah, tears. She turned from him and continued walking; but now he knew that she, too, felt the sting of what they’d lost.
Amy attempted to stay her tears as Nick walked behind her. If she turned and reached out, he would be hers. Once that was all she’d ever wanted; now it was impossible. She kept looking straight ahead until they broke through the low palmettos and marsh grass to the beach.
Brenton sat behind Norah and she leaned into his bent knees while he stroked her hair; her eyes were closed. Reese bent over a pile of driftwood and dry leaves, lighting a match for a fire. Revvy squatted at the sea’s edge, lifting handfuls of sand, then letting it dribble from his fingers.
He looked up at them first as they returned—the same people, but different. All previous assumptions were now false, and the ground Amy had once based her other decisions on shifted beneath her.
“Hey, dude, where’ve you two been?” Reese called out.
“Sorry, Reese. We got turned around and I thought I found a tiny-leaved buckthorn . . . time just got away from us,” Nick said.
Time just got away from me, Amy thought.
They gathered around a campfire built with Reese’s adept hands, and conversation turned to life stories, as it tends to do when the sun has set, the waves are slapping and the fire lights faces as magical as they were originally meant to be.
Revvy tossed a ghost-crab backbone that looked like a snakeskin necklace into the fire and they watched it crackle. “Man, what’s your story, Nick? How do you know Mrs. Reynolds?”
Amy was sure she wanted to hear his answer more than they did.
“We went to college together.”
“And?” Revvy asked.
“And our children are dating now. Amy told me about this island and what you were trying to do—and I thought I could help.”
“Your kids are dating? Like each other?” Revvy asked.
“Like each other—yeah,” Nick said.
“Okay. Well, whatever brought you here, I’m psyched you showed up. We could use one more person—Brenton over there is the blooming botanist, but we could definitely use an expert.”
“Revvy, you been to any more of the islands around here?” Nick asked him—adroitly changing the subject.
“Totally. I camp out on Otter Island all the time, and kayaking through the rivers and Sound is my main escape.”
As Revvy and Nick talked of
islands and wildlife and escape, the last pulled-taffy strands of sunset faded. Amy leaned back on her elbows into the sand, lifted her face to the sky. The stars were clearer out here—like scattered embers.
“I can’t just sit on the beach all night,” she finally said into the peaceful silence.
“Yes, you can,” Nick said.
He was right, but she was too comfortable—it was a scary, loose-jointed feeling and she’d felt it before. She needed to get back to her dorm room, her real job.
“I have a ton of papers to grade tonight.”
“We’ll get you home before class,” Reese said, and everyone laughed.
Someone, she thought it was Revvy, started singing a song by the Doors and everyone joined in. By the last verse she’d lifted her voice with the rest of them to the wild rising moon, to the endangered species, to the decaying home at the center of the island and to the ghosts of all time past. While singing, she stashed away everything Nick had told her; she would stare at it when she was alone. There wasn’t a safe way to ponder the newfound information while sitting on the beach with Nick in the firelight.
Reese put out the fire and they loaded up the boat to return home. The tide had risen and the slapping waves reached to Amy’s waist. The others laughed and splashed and climbed into the boat. She slithered onto the back, knowing she looked every year her age—teacher, housewife, middle-aged woman. But they laughed and gave her high fives, and she rode home on the incoming tide with the hope that one of them might have enough information to save the small island from a tacky home, inground pool and putting green.
Amy dreaded the drive back alone in Nick’s warm pickup truck, and felt saved by Reese’s request for a ride. Although it was out of the way, Nick dropped him off at a beachside shanty that looked like it was about ready to return to the sea.
“Reese.” Amy grabbed his hand as he jumped out of the truck. “Thank you so much.”
“I believe y’all are gonna save it. I really do. You’ve got the big guns now.” Reese nodded to Nick.
“Yes, we do.” Amy laughed and crawled out of the backseat, slipped into the front. As soon as they left the gravel drive, Nick grabbed her hand. She pulled away.
Losing the Moon Page 13