by D. Brown
She’s gone.
As quickly as she had come into his life, she had disappeared.
She’s gone.
I’ll never see you again.
“I love you Maggie,” Sam said to the crackle of hiss in his cell phone. “I’ll always love you.”
And with that, Sam pressed his face against the cool pain of glass and cried.
40
The light went out of Sam’s eyes when Maggie left.
He stood at the window and watched the house, long after Maggie disappeared.
He heard the muted voices out front at the street – Robert’s, and the kids’, their confusion as to why they have to cut their vacation short and leave like this in the middle of the night.
Robbie and Anna Beth knew why.
David though, did not.
“I don’t want to go! I want to go fishing! I want to say good-bye to Sam!”
This obviously did not help.
Sam thought he picked up a stray remark or two from Maggie.
He heard car doors open and close.
He heard the scrape of footsteps over the crushed oyster shell driveway.
He saw the lights in the windows extinguish one at a time, and then the outside lights flashed off, and the darkness swept in and swallowed the fading light whole.
The screen door fronting the street opened with a whine, and thwacked close for the final time, followed by one, then two car doors doing the same.
Sam heard the ignition turn over and the engine catch.
The twin headlight sabers sliced briefly through the darkness again, and for a moment, swept away the shadow horde.
The car shifted into gear, tires popped and crackled over the oyster shells, brakes squealed briefly, and then the engine roared as the car sped away, leaving Sam alone in the dark, standing at the window, with only the steady rush of the ocean surf to serenade him.
She’s gone.
Just like that.
Gone.
As if she had never been there at all.
Sam stood at the window and watched the house for a long time.
He was still standing at the window when the first traces of gray daylight seeped into the inky blackness of the night.
He didn’t move when the silhouette of the beach house appeared as a sketched outline through the shadows.
He didn’t move when the first fingernail sliver of sunlight appeared above the horizon.
Sam didn’t move until he saw the SUV pull into the front drive shortly before noon, and three kids spill out of the back, racing, screaming and laughing, as they took off for the beach.
The vacation lease terminated early, it didn’t take the leasing agent long to find another tenant for the beach house to fill out the Fourth of July week.
Sam fixed a pot of coffee and made his way to the back porch.
When he opened the back door his heart seized in his chest.
Hanging from a post hook on a coat hanger was Sam’s shirt, the one he gave Maggie to wear; his favorite shirt in fact. It danced slowly in the breeze, an odd flag a solemn testament to the short time they spent together.
There was no note attached.
Nothing that might give him any hint as to what might be going through Maggie’s mind, simply a shirt draped over a hanger, nothing more. The only thing he knew for sure about her was that she was gone. He took the shirt down and returned it to his bedroom closet, certain he’d never choose it to be worn again.
Then he retreated to his chair and that’s where he spent the remainder of the day reliving the past five days with Maggie, every moment, every morsel of conversation, savoring the sound of her voice, as if her words were just spoken only moments ago, and she stood there patiently, awaiting his reply.
Finch came by around dinner time, started to give him grief about not making it out to the pier for their day’s fishing ritual, but then stopped when he saw the haunted, empty glaze cloud his eyes.
“What happened?” was all he asked.
“She’s gone,” was all Sam answered.
“That sucks,” Finch added, and the two of them said nothing more until the sun faded from the afternoon sky, and the partially hidden face of the rising moon laughed at Sam with an I-told-you-so smile.
“Want to tell me about it?”
Sam said not now, and Finch left it at that.
Wednesday morning matched Sam’s mood, gray and cold.
A low front settled over the southeast and stalled out between Savannah and Jacksonville.
A light, misting rain fell as a gray shawl.
A chilling, damp breeze swept in off the ocean and seemed to work as nature’s cleanser, washing away all traces of Maggie and her family, and leaving Sam to wonder, were it not for the vivid memories of seeing her waving at him from the walk bridge, if she’d ever really been there at all.
The tides washed away David’s sand castles, returning the pockmarked beach slopes to a smooth and pristine drift of brown.
All ready for the next round of castle builders this coming weekend.
Sam walked the beach in the misting rain, his solitary line of footprints leaving a meandering trail in the sand, and reminding him that wherever he walked from this step forward, he’d walk alone. But in his heart though, despite the empty ache of grief that stretched like a great dark chasm to the core of his soul, Sam was not alone.
He had Maggie in his heart.
He sat along the retaining wall where he and Maggie sat, looking out into the gray haze at the line of white caps floating like ghosts toward the shore, and wondered what Maggie was doing right now, what she was thinking and if any of her thoughts included him.
Sam pulled the windbreaker collar up around his ears trying to fight off a chill that had nothing to do with the weather. He pulled his cap low over his eyes as the misting rain mingled with the tears spilling down his cheeks.
It feels like she died, he thought.
She’d been yanked from his life so suddenly Sam didn’t even get the chance to tell her good-bye.
You knew this would happen.
You knew it was only a matter of time. She had a husband, and the man wasn’t so much a fool to suspect something might be going on.
Sam chuckled at the irony.
I was a husband too and I never knew.
Not until he heard Frank Wiley’s voice on the other end of his wife’s cell phone.
Sam had no clue.
He was sure Robert Scott had no clue either.
Because he trusted his wife, just like Sam did.
It took a phone call from his daughter to tell him to come back and claim his straying wife. To fetch her home like a runaway pet, and cinch tight the leash another notch so she won’t stray like that again.
Sam knew this day would come. He just had no idea it would come so soon.
Or come so quickly.
Soaking wet, Sam walked home, the beach deserted from the rain, a day of vacation lost for those sitting along the hotel balcony hopefully watching the skies for any snippet of blue peeking through the gray gloom.
He stopped at the base of the beach slope below his house, when on their first day, what seemed like a lifetime ago, when they met, when she came to borrow a cup of sugar and caught Sam with a gun in his mouth.
Even then, on that first night, when sleep proved a stranger to him and he came down here, because already this fascinating woman had tattooed her thumbprint on his heart.
He came down here to this very spot and drew a single heart in the sand.
This morning, he did it again.
Only this time, he drew two, intertwined, a pair of locked hearts, but added, “Sam loves Maggie,” and stood there watching, until the surf and high tide finally washed it away.
41
Sam didn’t leave the porch for three days after Maggie left, except to eat what little he cared to, if he slept, he slept in his rocker, a few fitful hours a night. Except to take care of God’s business, Sam sat there, w
atching the ocean as if waiting for something, or someone, that will never come.
“You have to get up sometime, you know,” Finch said.
Lately he’d spent a good deal of time sitting in Sam’s extra rocker. He was worried about his friend.
Tragic, he thought. Everyone knew this had train wreck written all over it.
Sam sat in his rocker and said nothing.
He just looked out to sea.
Something’s out there.
She is perhaps.
To Finch, Sam looked terrible, didn’t smell much better.
There was nothing worth saying and “I told you so,” didn’t help.
Nothing to do but sit here and hope Sam finds a way to piece back the broken shards of his heart and get on with his life.
The dark circles under his eyes and the thickening shadow of the beard shading his jaw, told Finch Sam hadn’t found his way yet, and wondered if he ever would.
“I’m going back to Atlanta,” Sam said simply.
Finch sighed, “Leaving, are you sure that’s the answer?”
“You expect me to stay here?” and turned his gaze back to the advancing stain of night seeping to the top of the sky.
“I know this sucks Sam. I know there’s nothing I can say right now that will make this any easier or make it hurt any less.”
A true friend is someone who stands – or sits – beside you during the worst of times and these surely were the worst of times for Sam.
“Whatever you decide, I’m right here with you, Sam,” Finch said. “I hate it that this is happening to you. I wish there was something I could do.”
“There’s not,” Sam said, a ghost’s voice, a faint echo lost in the vastness of the deepening twilight.
“It will work out, Sam.”
“Don’t,” Sam said. Then he stood and disappeared inside.
A few moments later he returned with his laptop, flipped it open, and began to type.
Sam hadn’t looked at this file since before Diane died.
His story.
Finding Mudville.
A baseball fantasy and a love story all in one, part Field of Dreams and part The Natural, his was a story about a man who wished for a second chance to right the wrongs committed over the course of his life.
The crux of the story to Sam was if you wished hard enough for something, that wish will come true.
What other choice did he have right now?
So he started writing.
Finch said he’d be back later to check on him to see if he was okay.
“Not until I finish this,” Sam said. “Don’t come.”
Seated in his rocker, here, where he and Maggie found each other, where two hearts became one, Sam pecked a tentative word or two, searching for that elusive flow.
The word or two bled into a complete sentence, a thought fragment, and then the sentences started stringing together to form paragraphs, the paragraphs filling empty pages, and after that, complete chapters.
He started typing, remembering old story lines, once forgotten, found lurking among the recesses of his memory.
He wrote furiously, all afternoon and into the night, his words flowing forth faster than he could capture them on his keyboard.
I’m not leaving until I finish this.
Sam talked to Maggie through his words, telling her his story just like the morning they met, and the words he wrote, they worked.
“I have something here, Maggie,” he said to the memory of her lingering in the rocker next to his, “I really do.”
He never left except to eat what little he cared to, sleep a few fitful hours a night, and take care of God’s business.
He didn’t move until he finished some 275 pages and 100,000 words later.
Then he packed his bags, closed up the house and went home.
Time Passes
42
The Next Eleven Years
Sam came back to Tybee Island every summer, like clockwork.
He’d sneak down for the occasional weekend during spring, before baseball season started, but you always knew the Fourth of July wasn’t far off whenever you saw Sam McKenna show up on the back porch of the beach house and take up residence in his favorite rocking chair.
Beyond the occasional weekend though, Sam stayed away.
It took him six days to finish the initial rough draft of Finding Mudville, but another 15 months to submit, including rewrites, and grammar and typo corrections, and another nine months after that to market the manuscript to agents and publishers.
After a dozen rejection letters from literary agents, Sam hooked up with a small brokerage firm out of Tampa. It’s an odd place to be when the heart of the publishing industry waits more than fifteen hundred miles to the northeast.
Sam signed the basic author-agent agreement and let his new agent market his manuscript to every major publishing house in New York City, and as he expected, most major houses passed on the story.
Too regional they said.
Not enough national appeal.
A nondescript publishing house out of Atlanta, Huffnagle and Morris, a subsidiary of a larger national publishing house, liked his book.
They liked it a lot, and made an offer to publish Finding Mudville the following spring.
Great summer reading, they said.
Jillian Whitaker, Sam’s agent, an attractive blue eyed blonde, very nice, he thought, took him out to dinner to celebrate his signing the book deal. She took him to a Midtown steakhouse on Peachtree Street. She ordered a bottle of champagne and then handed Sam a proof soft cover copy of his book.
Oh yeah, and a check for $80,000, after her twenty percent fee.
“You signed a six figure book deal, Sam. They want Finding Mudville and your next two books. You got anything else rattling up there between your ears?”
Sam said he had a love story he’d been working on, a simple guy-meets-girl-who-happens-to-be-married story but it wasn’t finished yet.
“You know the story, ordinary people living ordinary lives, find extraordinary love.”
“That’s great,” Jillian said, “Sounds awesome. Women love to read love stories written by men. Look at Nicholas Sparks, hell, even James Patterson is trying his hand at it. Next thing you know, Stephen King will be putting one out. Do you have a working title yet?”
Sam thought a second, smiled and said, “Yeah. It’s called Locked Hearts.”
“Nice title,” she said. “So, tell me a story.”
So Sam did, filling in some blanks with ideas he made up in his head, changing some names here and there, but basically recounting for her, Sam and Maggie’s love story for five days last summer on Tybee Island.
“Damn,” she said and touched a napkin to the corner of her eyes. “You need to finish that book, Sam. You’ll help improve the sex life of every 45-to-54 year-old-woman in America. This stuff is gold.”
Sam and Jillian dated casually, off and on, more out of a mutual need to fill those social gaps in their schedules, but Sam drew the line when Jillian let him know he could take things to the next level if he wanted when she slipped her hand beneath the table and placed it on his knee.
He apologized, and said his heart wasn’t in it.
“I want to meet her,” Jillian said, with a hint of indignation, embarrassed, a woman not accustomed to being told, No, and decided to call it an early evening before touching her salad.
“Meet who?”
“The woman who fucked you over.”
43
On Labor Day three years later, Sam resigned from the Atlanta newspapers and moved to Tybee Island permanently, though he continued to submit a weekly Finding Mudville column, as much because it helped stimulate book sales due to the name, and to keep his by-line on the front page of the Sports Section.
Joey graduated from Georgia Southern and dropped the “Y” in his name. Joe was accepted to the Mercer University School of Law and did the law school thing for three years. He graduated, pas
sed his bar exam and got his feet wet working for a law firm in a small mountain town about an hour north of Atlanta. Eventually he started his own high-profile law firm in Atlanta.
He married his college sweetheart, owned a home in Dunwoody, and a house on Lake Lanier, and made Sam a grandfather at 55.
Taylor married during her senior year at Brenau University.
Sam walked her down the aisle wearing black tie and tails, ever the proud father and took his seat alone in the front row. He looked at the empty spot in the pew next to him and thought about Diane for the first time in several years.
“You should be here,” he said to the empty space beside him.
There was sadness in her absence, but no more guilt.
Taylor and her husband moved to Savannah after she graduated with a degree in Interior Design, and in two years, made Sam a grandfather for the second time.
Still, neither Joe nor Taylor ever came back to Tybee Island.
Sam spit out two more books ahead of Locked Hearts, begging off on Jillian’s inquiries as to an estimated completion date of what she anticipated to be his breakout book.
“It’s not finished yet,” he kept telling her.
Both books enjoyed better than marginal success, though neither performed up to the level attained by Finding Mudville.
The first was an out of left field supernatural mystery titled 3:15, and the second, an Internet romance gone bad thriller called Lurker.
The books were good, and sold well, but neither were what his agent and his publishers wanted.
“Locked Hearts, Sam,” Jill Whitaker said, “They’re chomping at the bit here. They want your love story. You sold them on it years ago. Finish the damned thing.”
Beverly Huffnagle, president of Huffnagle and Morris cried when Sam told her the ending to his story.
“Why won’t you finish it, Sam?”
“I hit a big snag,” he replied.
At Christmas that year, Sam came home to Atlanta to spend the holidays with the kids. Taylor and her family were in town, and everyone gathered together at Joe’s place on the lake.
Sam had weathered the years since Tybee Island well.