Locked Hearts

by D. Brown

  “Too long.”

  “Look at you, all grown up.”

  David smiled, “I do okay. I start college this fall.”

  So proud of his standing on the threshold of adulthood, Sam thought.

  He offered the second rocking chair and asked David if he wanted anything to eat or drink.

  “Not right now.”

  David watched the way he eased into the chair, reclining into the caress of weather worn pine slats like easing into a warm bath.

  “Well, just so you understand. You are staying for lunch, and I won’t take ‘No’ for an answer. I made some ham salad this morning out of the leftover pork shoulder. I‘ve got macaroni salad and some good sourdough bread, so, you‘re staying, understood?”

  “Still cooking for everyone on the island?”

  “Not as often,” Sam said. “Most of the old regulars are gone now. Remember Finch and the boys?”

  David nodded yes with a fond smile.

  “They’re still around. Well, Tin Can passed on over the winter and the others are getting older. It hasn’t been the same since you caught that whopper fish when you were just a small thing. I’ll still fire up the smoker around the Fourth for old time’s sake, but that’s about it, a different crowd of people here these days. Not near as friendly. I’ll get a few people, but not as many as I used to.”

  “You have any plans for the Fourth this year?” David asked.

  “I did, but I canceled them. My heart wasn’t into it, I guess.”

  David reached into his pocket and removed a photograph. It was one of those old Instamatic photos, outdated even when he was a little boy, but taken by a man, Bill McGee, who somehow refused to acknowledge technology past the year 1972.

  It was dog-eared and creased, faded, but still the subjects still discernible: David at 7-years of age, the biggest fish he had ever seen in his life – still, and Sam.

  “Remember this?”

  David handed Sam the photograph.

  “Holy cow, like it was yesterday,” Sam’s eyes moistened.

  “It was the best summer of my life,” the young man said.

  “It was,” Sam agreed.

  “You saved my life you know.”

  Sam’s eyes caught a faraway sparkle as he remembered the day. It forever changed his life as well.

  “Still a damned stupid thing to have done,” he said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “I do,” David said and left it at that.

  “I read your books,” David said changing the subject. “Locked Hearts was awesome.”

  “You read it?” Sam cut him a wry side-glance. “I didn’t think teenage boys were into romance. McGee would call you a sissy, you know.”

  “Hey, it was good,” he said, “It looks like that one is going to take off.”

  “So they tell me.”

  “You don’t sound real excited about it.”

  Sam shrugged. “You read the book. Did it sound real enough to you?”

  “I didn’t know quite what to think about you writing about my mom though,” David said, “but no, the ending was all wrong.”

  “That’s because the real life ending pretty much sucked,” Sam chuckled.

  “Maybe you can change it.”

  “Maybe,” Sam said, “But probably not.”

  “Well, Locked Hearts isn’t why I came back here.”

  “I wondered when you’d finally get around to telling me why you’re here.”

  David got around to it, and fired a very direct question at Sam.

  “And I’m wondering when you’re going to quit with the bullshit and ask me how my mom’s doing.”

  “I was angry with you for a long time, you know. You made my momma cry.”

  David looked into his lap, the little boy in him coming out again. Suddenly they were sitting out in the Adirondack chairs, David with one leg slung over the armrest, his lower lip stuck out in an angry pout. When it comes to talking about your momma, it doesn’t matter how old you are, you’ll always be her little boy, and David proved no different.

  “I don’t know what to say, David. I really don’t.”

  “There’s nothing to say. It happened, and Mom took it really hard.”

  “I can’t change what happened,” Sam said. “And I don’t think I want to. I‘m sorry this hurt you.”

  “You could have fought for her.”

  Sam sighed yielding in deference to the folly of Destiny and Fate.

  “It wasn’t meant to be son,” he said. “I wish I could say otherwise, I really do. I loved your mom, but she made a choice, and it was the right choice. She chose you kids. She always did. You always came first for her and that’s how it should be. Fighting for her then would have destroyed everything you had or knew as a child. I couldn’t do that, and neither would your mom.”

  “He’s my Dad,” David’s voice cracking, as he confessed the obvious. “But my Mom doesn’t love him.”

  He sniffed and quickly swiped the back of his hand across his face.

  “And she hasn’t loved him for a very long time.”

  Regret touched at his chest.

  “I don’t think that’s any of my business, son.”

  David looked up with tear stained eyes, and a quiet anger crept into his voice. “Oh, it’s all your business, Sam, when you’re the reason why she doesn’t love him anymore. She doesn’t love my Dad anymore because she’s still in love with you. She never stopped.”

  Sam sighed, “It’s been a long time, son.”

  “Eleven years.”

  “If she loved me, don’t you think she’d have done something about it by now?”

  “But she did,” the young man replied, his voice a barely audible whisper, his gaze again trained on that spot between railing and floorboard. “Mom and Dad divorced six months ago.”

  “Okay,” he managed to find his voice, “So, they divorced.”

  “Dad was the one who filed, and it’s funny you know? When Mom was faced with a choice between her own happiness and the wellbeing of her family, she chose her family, and lived with it all these years. The time comes when Dad is faced with the same decision, and he bolts.”

  David lowered his head in sad disappointment, “Just doesn’t seem right.”

  “They’re divorced.” Sam said again, not believing his ears.

  “He moved out, started seeing another woman. I don’t know where he met her. Don’t even know her name. He came in from work one day and said he wanted a divorce and was out by the next night.”

  The young man paused to regard the spot in the yard where he sat as a boy, and he remembered what was.

  “So, are you going to ask about my mom or not?”

  “Okay, okay, I’m asking, how is your mom?

  Sam was not prepared for what the youngest son of the woman he loved said next, “Not good. Not good at all. She’s dying, Sam. My mom is dying.”

  48

  NO!

  The porch spun.

  Tilted.

  Up became down and down became up.

  Thank God I’m sitting down.

  He could not move.

  Couldn’t breathe.

  He opened his mouth to speak, but only the hiss of empty air escaped his lips to fill the void where words should have been.

  Sam closed his eyes to let the last flashing waves of vertigo pass. The ringing in his ears rose in pitch and his heart hammered at the twisting tightness in his chest.

  This is what it feels like.

  I’m having a heart attack.

  “No,” finally crawled up the back of his throat and out of his mouth in a dry, rasping croak.

  Maggie’s dying.

  “How?” he managed to ask.

  “You have to go to her Sam.”

  Now.

  “Before it’s too late.”

  “How?”

  “A broken heart,” David said in a sad voice. “She’s given up and she’s wasting away. She dies a little bit more every
day, Sam. She’s lost all hope. She thinks she’s lost you for good.”

  “It’s not cancer.”

  “Sam, Mom is dying of a broken heart and I’m afraid she’s going to die. You are the only one who can save her. You’re her only cure.”

  A glimmer of hope shined down on him. Maggie’s not terminal.

  “If there’s hope you can win, you can save her,” David said. “Give her hope Sam. She’s let go of everything else.”

  “Did she send you?”

  “No.”

  David said, “She’d kill me if she knew I’d come here.”

  “Can I call her?”

  “Go to her Sam. She has to see face-to-face to believe in you again. Without you, she’ll fade away and die like Tinker Bell.”

  “Tinker Bell?”

  “Yeah, you know, from Peter Pan. The whole clap if you believe in fairies bit. If no one believes in fairies they die. Mom needs to believe in you again, believe you’re real. Sam, you are the love of her life. Please . . .”

  David was crying now, genuinely afraid for his mother’s health.

  “I’m going,” Sam said. “I’ll catch a flight in the morning.”

  “In the morning is too late. Go now. Do whatever you can. Get there.”

  Now.

  Sam leaned forward in his chair, “That’s why you came all this way? That’s what you wanted to ask me?”

  David nodded.

  “I thought I’d stay here for a few days, you know, at your place, and keep an eye on things for you. Enjoy the Fourth of July on the beach. That is, if you want to go to her.”

  “I do,” his second chance hovered before him waiting for him to take it. “I’ll go.”

  Now.

  “I want my mom to be happy,” David said. “And she hasn’t been for a long time. She’s given up hope.”

  “Save her Sam, please save my mom.”

  Sam stood to go inside to pack. He held out a hand.

  “Thank you David.”

  David stood and took his hand. He gripped it tightly.

  “Thank you, for what?”

  Sam looked at the boy who had grown into a fine young man and smiled, a smile beaming brighter than the Tybee Lighthouse on the worst winter night.

  “You gave me my ‘Happily Ever After.’”

  “Yeah,” and David cracked his first real smile, “It’ll better than that stupid book.”

  49

  Sam threw some clothes into an overnight bag, left David the keys to the beach house and told him to have a good time. He called his travel agent and explained where he wanted to go, and when, and twenty minutes later, Sam had a ticket on a 3:00 PM flight out of Savannah bound for Pittsburgh.

  Highway 80 cut a diagonal gray slash across the vast flatness of the backwater marsh that separated Tybee from the mainland. Tires voiced a brief squeal of protest as Butler Street turned ninety degrees to the left and the Island Expressway started the long cut across the marsh where the Georgia mainland begrudgingly surrendered to the sea.

  Traffic leaving the island dwindled to one or two cars and Sam was able to open it up a bit, though never one of those feeling the macho “need for speed.” He merely had to get somewhere in a hurry, and suddenly Sam couldn’t get there fast enough.

  The exodus of cars coming to Tybee for the Fourth stretched in a long line back across the causeway to Wilmington Island. Up ahead, Lazaretto Creek, which cleaved Tybee Island in half, spit its brackish backwater of bottom sediments and silt into the Savannah River’s wide-open mouth.

  The bare skeletal masts of the shrimp boats docked at the base of the bridge poked at the low bank of approaching storm clouds, dull white fingers of bone clawing at the afternoon sky as Sam shot across the Lazaretto Creek hump, trying to imagine what Maggie might look like today.

  He didn’t care.

  He always thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen before, and 11 years later, in Sam’s eyes, she was just as beautiful now.

  In Sam’s eyes, you haven’t seen her in eleven years, Sam, and even then, you were only with her for five days.

  How can you base a lifetime on just five days?

  Yeah, how can you base a lifetime on just five days?

  Damn.

  Keep driving.

  Uncertainty gripped his heart.

  She could have called – should have called.

  And didn’t.

  All those years, and now he’s running to her like a summoned school boy to the principal’s office?

  Where’s your pride?

  Sam gunned the gas and the car sliced across the two-lane highway.

  To hell with pride, this is Maggie, his voice of reason told him.

  Break laws if you have to but get to her.

  Sam found new respect for his voice of reason.

  How do you build a lifetime on just five days?

  Easy, Sam thought, one day at a time.

  “You always said you never knew how Locked Hearts ended,” he said. “Well, here’s your chance to find out.”

  Incoming traffic of weekend vacationers here for the Fourth caused the rush at Savannah International Airport, so being one of only a handful of passengers leaving, Sam was able to breeze through baggage check-in and security with a minimal delay.

  At 2:45, he boarded Delta flight 331 for Atlanta, and by 3:10, the wheels of the Boeing 737 jet liner left the asphalt and concrete runway, and lifted off and swinging out over the Atlantic, nothing more than a frosted pane of glass cast in deep blue, far below outside his window, before circling back and heading northwest into the sinking afternoon sun.

  It took Sam longer to drive from Tybee Island to Savannah Airport than it did to fly from Savannah to Atlanta. He’d made the flight several times before over the years, and actual time in the air seldom exceeded thirty minutes. The jet angled northwest into South Carolina and fell into the flight path of the seemingly endless line of jets following I-85 southwest into Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport that landed two at a time every 34 seconds.

  He switched flights in Atlanta, boarding an American Airlines flight that left at 5:06 for Pittsburgh, and as the sun sank behind a bank of cauliflower clouds piled in a long row above the western horizon, Sam settled back into his chair as the Atlanta skyline passed by beneath him.

  He closed his eyes and tried to catch a quick nap, but couldn’t sleep. His thoughts nervously danced behind his eyes, and the memory of the last words Maggie said to him so long ago replayed itself over and over, a broken record of a voice inside his head.

  “Sometimes love isn’t enough.”

  Sam was about to find out if love really was enough.

  50

  Pittsburgh welcomed Sam with a different kind of summer heat.

  Hot, but not as intense, or as thick with humidity as the Georgia coast, but still damned hot. Sam passed through baggage claim and picked up his rental car within twenty minutes of landing, and by 7:30, sped west away from the city heading for the state line, the West Virginia panhandle, the Ohio River, and the rolling foothills of Ohio’s opposite bank, chasing the setting sun.

  The sun had just touched the treetops along the jagged shoulders of the horizon when Sam crossed the bridge over the Ohio River, following the directions David had given him when it became apparent that Sam didn’t own a GPS.

  “Dude, you have to join the 21st century,” David had said.

  “Hey, I do email,” Sam replied. “But I don’t text.”

  “You are so old sometimes,” David laughed.

  When Maggie and Robert divorced, they sold the family place in the suburbs and Maggie bought a smaller place in town to be closer to her mother. The house was older, one of those quaint brownstones with a deep front porch, hugging the steep hillside rising out of the river that had survived the passing of generations since World War II.

  Dusk crept across the sky, a spreading stain of deepening sapphire, chasing the sarcastic smirk of a full moon. Sam saw the smile
as one of saying, “Job well done, this is going to be good.”

  The night’s first star blinked on overhead as Sam exited the highway and maneuvered through the oddly angled labyrinth of city streets blanketing the hillside rising above the wide brown band of the Ohio River.

  It took two passes down the narrow, tree-shaded lane before Sam found the right house. Cars lined both sides of the street, so Sam had to crawl down the narrow path left behind until he was sure he found the right one.

  Maggie’s house.

  “The hell with it, write me a damn ticket,” Sam said as he slammed the car into park and left it in the middle of the street where he stopped.

  He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, untying the knots in his shoulders. He raked a hand over his chin, more to still the shaking in his hands than to wipe the residue of a thousand mile flight off his face.

  His pulse hammered.

  He regarded his reflection in the rearview mirror blowing out a long sigh that snagged on a repressed sob.

  “You got old, my friend. Will she even remember you? You’re not the same man you were back then.”

  “I should have shaved,” he whispered and forced himself to relax.

  Will she even remember you?

  All this time Sam thought of little else.

  As for Maggie, he didn’t know.

  Only one way to find out though, his voice of reason told him.

  Get out of the damn car and go find your ‘Happily-Ever-After.’

  Dumbass.

  When he opened his eyes, he looked at the house, Maggie’s house.

  An upstairs window burned yellow behind drawn drapes, but the front stoop light had been extinguished, throwing the deep front porch into night shadow.

  He took another deep breath and released it in a nervous sigh.

  “This is it, Sam. It’s going to be all right. You can tell her now. You’ve been waiting a very long time for this.”

  Sam picked up the cloth wrapped bundle lying on the passenger seat next to him. He brought the bundle with him from Tybee.

  Sam opened the driver-side car door, and stepped outside. He took a quick look up and down the street and then at the house the numbers on the mailbox said belonged to Maggie.