Locked Hearts

by D. Brown

  They walked the beach, heading north this time, as dawn’s first touch of gray bleached the black veil of darkness to the east.

  Sam had fetched Maggie one of his shirts, his favorite, to wear over her T-shirt, since she left her bra hanging from the closet doorknob in her bedroom. She didn’t want to chance waking the kids by going inside to get it, especially when it was still dark.

  She’d have a hard time explaining that one away.

  Sam wore a similar denim shirt, only this one a bleached khaki. He cuffed the sleeves as usual, and left the buttons undone.

  “We’re going to have to do something about your wardrobe.”

  Sam looked at his shirt, and then pulled at Maggie’s sleeves. “What’s wrong with my shirts? They look fine.”

  “Is this all you wear? Duckhead cotton? Sleeves cuffed?”

  Sam laughed, “It’s an image.”

  “An image. What kind of image?”

  “Hemingway, the intrepid world explorer,” he said, “The grizzled writer.”

  “Oh boy,” she laughed, “L.L. Bean must send you a Christmas card every year.”

  “Yeah, I know. I don’t play it very well, but hey, it works. They're comfortable and the readers here love it.”

  “I don’t care,” she laughed back. “You still need variety. You need color. One of these days you and I are going shopping. I’m going to buy you some shirts with color, and my God, some socks.”

  “Socks?”

  “Socks. What is it with you people and no socks?”

  “Who wears socks in summer? It gets hot down here in case you didn’t notice.”

  “You wear socks Sam.”

  “Not me.”

  “Not even in winter? What happens if it snows?”

  “Stay home. It’s cold. People are bad enough drivers in the South in good weather. Only idiots get out on the roads down here when it snows. You go buy your milk, bread and eggs, stay home and make French toast.”

  “You are insane,” Maggie laughed and punched his arm.

  “Nothing that anybody’s been able to prove,” he laughed, “At least not yet.”

  “So, tell me about your writing.”

  “There’s nothing much to say,” Sam said. “I haven’t written anything for a long time. I don’t know what happened. I dried up after Diane died. I lost the creative wit. The words weren’t there anymore, nothing involving more than 500 words anyway.

  “I write a weekly column for the local paper. That’s about all I’m good for these days.”

  “What about before?”

  “Before Diane died?” Sam shrugged. “That’s a whole other lifetime that no longer exists.”

  “So what did you write then?”

  “Just about anything: columns, sports, news, features, whatever came down the pipeline.”

  Maggie curled her arms through his left, and pulled herself close. It was still dark. She didn’t have to worry about being seen down here. With the tide out, the beach slope obstructed the view of the homes above.

  “Besides work stuff,” Maggie said. “Do you write anything else?”

  “Of course, all writers do. I like to think I can put something down on paper that is substantial enough to require a more significant investment of the reader’s time than what he can finish in one sitting on the crapper.”

  “You sound so cynical.”

  “I’m far enough past forty that I notice fifty looming up ahead. Until last night, I hadn’t been with a woman in more than three years.”

  “Is that how men judge their own sense of self-worth?” Maggie asked. “By how long it’s been since they last got laid? I didn‘t know writing and sex were so intricately linked.”

  “It’s in our DNA,” Sam laughed. “We haven’t done our part to help sustain the species.”

  The horizon faded to a shade of charcoal, though dawn was still a good hour or so off.

  Sam watched the horizon as last few grains in an hourglass of darkness drained; knowing his night with her would be over soon.

  He hated that.

  “Diane used to constantly harp about my writing,” he said. “How I never finished anything I started. She always thought newspaper work was beneath me.”

  “Sam, you wrote for a major newspaper. Atlanta is a major league city, in everything.”

  “Hey,” he said. “I’ve been on Sportscenter.”

  “And she wasn’t impressed with that?”

  Sam shrugged, “She hated sports.”

  “Where did you meet this woman anyway?”

  “Umm, same place you met your prize catch Ms. Pot.”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Kettle?”

  There wasn’t much else to say about that so they didn’t.

  Sam said, “I’ve really tried in earnest to complete some of these projects after she died if for no other reason than to prove her wrong, or maybe do for her in death what I didn’t do for her in life.”

  “Any luck?”

  “No. I have a couple novels in work. I’ve got a few ideas I’ve been knocking around, but when I sit down to a keyboard it’s like my brain gets all gunked-up.”

  “Gunked-up?”

  “Yeah, gunked-up, like when your kids would stuff their peanut butter sandwiches into the VCR, gunked-up.”

  “For someone who can’t write, you still have a way with words, Sam.”

  “What about you?” Sam asked. “Was it always your goal in life to be a mother? No secretly harbored ambitions? Any hidden dreams left unfulfilled?”

  Maggie laughed at that one, “Unfulfilled dreams? Plenty. Not that I regret being a mother and a homemaker. My father always had much loftier ambitions for me.”

  “Any other family?”

  “Two sisters, and a brother,” she said.

  “Where are they?”

  “Scattered to all points of the map.”

  “Do you keep in touch?”

  “During the holidays,” she said. “Robert doesn’t get along with my family. He has a big family and most holidays are spent with them.”

  “When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up?”

  Maggie thought about it for a long moment and said, “I wanted to get into Interior Design. It’s what I went to school for, but Robert would have nothing of it, especially after Anna Beth and Robbie were born.”

  “And you just conceded to his wishes? That doesn’t sound like you.”

  “I created the monster, I know, and I have to live with my creation. It was never a choice to have three kids; you know how these things happen.”

  Sam agreed, “Vaguely.”

  “I wouldn’t have traded any of them for any career.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “I just think somehow, I always disappointed my father, if just a little bit.”

  “Because you stayed home?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “There’s nothing wrong with staying at home,” Sam said.

  “There is when your husband forbids you to work. I guess dad saw it as Robert keeping me under his thumb.”

  “What does he think now? You’ve got great kids, Maggie. There’s nothing for anybody to be disappointed about. You are the foundation of your family. You hold them together, that much is very easy to see.”

  Maggie sighed, “My father died two years before David was born.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” Maggie smiled and squeezed his arm. “It was sudden. He suffered a heart attack. My Dad was one of those people who never got sick.”

  “Leaving you to live with the ‘unrealized potential’ albatross around your neck.”

  “He died in my arms. There was nothing anybody could do to save him. He just looked up at me, smiled, and said, ‘It’s my time, sweetheart,’ and he died.”

  “Damn,” Sam said. “That’s some heavy emotion to deal with.”

  “I find it comforting sometimes. I was the last thing my dad saw before he passed on.”

>   “How old was your Dad?”

  “Sixty-one.”

  “That’s young.”

  “Too young.”

  “Well, I promise you Maggie, I’ll wait around until I start to lose bladder control, then I’ll keel over. I refuse to live in diapers. I did that once already, didn’t like it much.”

  Maggie hugged his arm tightly again, only this time she didn’t let go.

  “You scared me.”

  “I’m sorry. Trust me, that wasn’t my intent.”

  “I know, but you still scared me.”

  Sam stopped and slid his arms around Maggie’s waist. He pulled her close and kissed her softly, a long, slow, passionate kiss, more affectionate, than sensual. “I will consider myself blessed if I die in your arms.”

  And they held each other, standing there in the advancing tide, as the ocean surf crept up around their ankles, not wanting this moment to end, and trying their best, to hold the tides of reality at bay.

  Reality had a way of rearing its ugly head unannounced, as Maggie was soon to find out.

  33

  The house was quiet and dark when Maggie slipped inside.

  She tiptoed across the room in the dark, easing around furniture to her bedroom door.

  Maggie collapsed into bed exhilarated and exhausted at the same time.

  Smiling, wanting desperately to sleep, but wanting more to savor the tingling surge of complete contentment and almost giddy happiness coursing through her. It helped push the nagging prods of guilt and betrayal to the furthermost points of her consciousness.

  She surrendered to the pull of sleep tugging at the precarious grip she had on consciousness. She rolled over and out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a red flash. On the nightstand beside her bed, Maggie’s cell phone blinked, the missed call red light flashing on and off.

  Oh hell.

  Robert.

  A missed call at this hour meant one thing: Robert tried to call.

  Many times.

  Seven, she found out when she flipped open her cell phone.

  The times appearing on the call log were spaced throughout the night, from ten minutes after she left to meet Sam, until around twenty minutes ago.

  Damn.

  So much for the fantasy.

  Maggie picked up the phone and hit redial.

  “Where have you been?”

  No hello.

  No good morning.

  No I miss you.

  Just, “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you all night.”

  “I’ve been asleep, Robert.”

  Maggie’s mind raced.

  Oh God, how she hated lying.

  She hated lying to Robert.

  She was horrible at it.

  Plus, it was wrong.

  Yet, here she was lying to her husband.

  She found out, quite easily at that.

  “I had the ringer turned off, I’m sorry,” and closed her eyes against the dull throbbing of a headache.

  You are such a hypocrite.

  “You know better than to do that, Maggie. We’ve discussed this. What if we needed to get in touch with one another?”

  Hide behind the anger.

  It’s not even six thirty, a Sunday morning, and one of her biggest bones of contention lately has been somebody always waking her up at some odd hour with some kind of problem, to the point that she was exhausted.

  “Robert, are you dying?”

  A moment’s confused silence then, “Umm, no.”

  “Are you ill?”

  Another no.

  “Has anybody died? Mother? Is it your parents? Anyone?”

  He answered, No to all of the above.

  “Then, why would you feel the need to call me seven times in the middle of the night? What could you possibly want? Were you able to resolve the contract issues?”

  “No, I haven’t. There’s been no progress.”

  “Then, what do you want, Robert?”

  “I just wanted to know where you were,” he said.

  “I was in bed, Robert. Asleep! I’m exhausted.”

  Another lie.

  “But I missed you. I was lonely.” That damned whine, and not even a ‘why are you exhausted?’ out of him. “You know I can’t sleep without you here.”

  The guilt pangs poked through the anger, but she had enough to be angry with her husband over so she turned this on him – paybacks are hell, she thought.

  “Is that all you can do is think about yourself?”

  “That’s not it, Maggie,” he said.

  “Have you even asked after your son? Do you even care about what happened to him yesterday? What could have happened to him?”

  Robert found his sarcasm and tried to redirect the guilt back at her.

  “I know you didn’t need me there at all,” he said. “Sam seems to be doing a great job taking care of you.”

  “Robert,” Maggie hissed into the phone. “I’m going back to bed. I’ll talk to you later in the morning.”

  “It is morning,” she heard Robert say as she took the phone away from her ear.

  She didn’t bother telling him good-bye. Maggie just flipped the phone close and turned off the power.

  Her hand shook as she set the phone back on the nightstand.

  She had lied to her husband.

  Badly.

  Well, hell Maggie, you just hit the Wife of the Year Trifecta. You covet another man, you slept with this same other man and violated your wedding vows, and then you lied to your husband to cover up the first two, not to mention the string of lies you told your children, on top of the fact you nearly let one of them drown.

  While two wrongs may not make a right, after three wrongs, chances are you’re not going to care anymore about the first two.

  You’re really knocking them dead Mags.

  When Maggie closed her eyes, she drifted away, a wayward leaf on the stream of oblivion. Her sleep brought no relief this morning. A barrage of fitful dreams haunted her uneasy sleep. Images of her husband and children on one side, Sam on the other, and Maggie caught in the middle, forced to make a choice, and regardless her choice, someone would wind up getting hurt.

  A choice?

  There is no choice.

  A voice spoke to her, Robert’s voice.

  What choice, Maggie? There shouldn’t be any choice to make.

  David’s voice this time now, calling for her to come, to his side, to choose him.

  Sam said nothing. He simply stood there with his hands stuffed in his front pockets, and watched her with expressionless anticipation.

  He looks so lost.

  “Mommy?”

  Maggie opened her eyes against the squint of the bright morning sunlight, to see David standing next to her bed, rubbing his fist in his eyes. She rolled over, stretched underneath the covers and reached out to stroke her son’s cheek.

  “What’s the matter honey?”

  “I had a bad dream.” he said, his voice groggy and heavy from sleep.

  Maggie held up the covers and let David crawl into bed next to her. Sunlight wedges streamed through the breaks in the curtains. The air conditioner clicked on and a rush of cool air washed over the room. She pulled the blankets up around her little boy’s chin. David snuggled into Maggie and nestled his head under her chin.

  “Where were you in the night, Mommy?” his tiny voice drifted from under the covers.

  Maggie’s heart clutched.

  “I was here, honey.”

  And now Maggie lied to her children as well.

  “I had a bad dream,” he said. “I came in here to look for you, and you weren’t there.”

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” she said with an inward wince. “I couldn’t sleep, so I sat out on the porch and drank some tea.”

  “Oh,” David said through a yawn. “Okay.”

  Maggie held her son close as he drifted back off to sleep. The guilt knots snarled around her sinking heart. Despite the sting of fatigue in her e
yes, Maggie didn’t drift off to sleep again right away. The guilt that tethered Maggie to her thoughts held her fast and secure.

  My God, what am I doing?

  Sam slept like a baby.

  No dreams.

  No fitful worries, just the sweet abyss of deep and contented sleep.

  The sounds of Sunday afternoon at the beach filtered through his window. The ever-present metallic squawk of seagulls serenaded him. The steady distant rush of cascading surf lulled him to that netherworld existing between sleep and wake, allowing sleep to tug at his eyelids. A faint cacophony of music, everything ranging from Latino salsa to hip-hop, metal and country wafted along the breeze, aromas of sound to be savored by the ear.

  A sea breeze kicked at the curtains and when they billowed inward, provided Sam with glimpses of a pristine blue sky overhead, married to the deep green tones of the Atlantic, frosted white at spots, and throwing light diamonds back at the afternoon sun.

  He swung his legs out of bed and sat there for another long moment, his back clammy from sweat.

  New sheets today and took to stripping the bed. In the back of his mind lurked the probability and hopeful possibility he might have company in his bed tonight, at least for a little while.

  He tossed the sheets in a pile next to the washer, and then stripped in the hall outside the bathroom. He slept in the same clothes he wore last night. When he came to bed finally this morning shortly after sunrise, Sam flopped, face-down and fell asleep where he landed.

  He turned the shower full on cold to flush away the last dregs of sleep. Then, after a minute of letting the ice-cold water wash down his face and neck, Sam turned the nozzle to hot and turned his face up into the steaming hot water.

  After the water revived him, Sam made short order of his shower. He shaved, it was Sunday, his only concession to reverence, washed his hair with whatever was on sale at Wal-Mart, and scrubbed all the places his mother taught him not to miss.

  In ten minutes, he was done, towel drying his hair, splashing on some aftershave and finally brushing his teeth. Dressing, Sam grabbed a pair of khaki shorts and went to reach in his closet for his favorite shirt, the cream colored cotton Duckhead one, when he noticed it wasn’t there.

  It took him a moment, to remember that he’d given it to Maggie to wear last night, and she had worn it home this morning when they‘d said good night.