Good Sam

by Dete Meserve

  “I stayed on the buoy too long.”

  “The buoy?”

  “Brian’s lucky buoy was floating in the water. At first I thought I was imagining it, because I couldn’t see anything more than a foot or two in front of my face. I grabbed it and hung on through the high waves. I was exhausted but somehow found the strength to hang on to it.”

  A tear wet the corner of his eye. “But I stayed too long. I wasn’t thinking about my brother or how I should have been trying to find him. I was only trying to save myself. That was my mistake—because if I had gone to look for him sooner, he’d still be alive.”

  His shoulders slumped as though he carried a heavy burden. He looked tired and much older. “When I finally got to him, he was hanging on to a life vest that had fallen from the boat. There was so much blood. Blood everywhere.”

  He rocked gently back and forth, his hands clenched so tightly that his knuckles were bone white. “But he wasn’t dead. Somehow he was alive, even with a six-inch gash that went from his left eyebrow to the back of his head. And he spoke to me. He said…”

  He closed his eyes tightly and didn’t say anything for a long while. When he finally spoke, his voice was shaking. “He said, ‘Take care of them for me. Take care of them.’ And then he went into cardiac arrest. He was dead. I couldn’t save him, Kate. Even though it’s what I do for a living. Even though it’s what I’ve trained for my entire life.”

  I said nothing for a moment, knowing there were no words to say to lessen the pain.

  “I should have been able to save him.” He turned to look at me. “Remember the accident in the gold mine I told you about?”

  I nodded, glancing at the scar that ran the length of his forearm.

  “I pulled that man out of the shaft with my arm nearly cut in two. I rescued a boy from thirty-foot waves in Malibu and came out alive. I freed a woman trapped in a burning car suspended from a highway overpass. But I couldn’t save my own brother.” The muscles in his jaw twitched. “I’ve put my life in danger in hundreds of rescue operations, and every time I came out alive. Brian never took risks like I did. The only time he did something a little risky, he paid for it with his life. Why was my life spared so many times and Brian’s wasn’t? It should’ve been me who drowned that day—not Brian.”

  I rested my head on his chest because I didn’t know what else to do or say. We were silent then—not an awkward or repressed silence that pressures you to say something but the kind of silence that comes about naturally when two people are comfortable with each other. A silence of understanding.

  “That day I didn’t just lose a brother. I lost my sailing partner, my best friend, someone who shared my childhood memories, the one person in the world who’d known me nearly all my life. I lost it all.”

  I wanted to comfort him and tell him it wasn’t his fault. But instinctively I knew no words would make it all better. So I hugged him tightly, like I remember him doing when we went swimming for the first time.

  “Let me make you a cup of tea,” I said softly.

  He nodded but didn’t look at me.

  I didn’t think he was much of a tea drinker, but I wanted to do something to comfort him. As I scrounged around the kitchen cabinets looking for tea bags, my gaze fell upon the buoy in the corner.

  I peered at the cracked number eight painted in red on its side and ran my hand along its brittle edge. This was the buoy Eric had clung to during the storm. I wondered why he still had it. Had he kept it here as a constant reminder of his failure to save his brother?

  A lump formed in my throat. I’d never lost anyone in my family, but I can imagine you never really get over losing a brother. And although Eric had done everything possible to save Brian, even that wasn’t good enough. In his mind he could have done more.

  When I came back with a cup of tea, Eric was silent, staring at his hands.

  “Gypsy Cold Care,” I said, handing him the mug. “It’s the only tea I could find in your cabinets.”

  “I’m not much of a tea drinker.”

  “I kind of suspected that. Do you want something else?”

  He took a sip of the tea and grimaced. With shaky hands, he set the mug down.

  I saw beside him. “I saw the buoy in the kitchen. What happened to The Crazy Eight?”

  “After the accident, she was completely wrecked. The sails were shredded, and part of the hull was splintered into pieces. I was surprised, though, when the insurance company sent me a check for just over five hundred thousand dollars. I told them they’d made a mistake; the boat had belonged to my brother, not me. But they said that a few weeks before the accident, Brian had transferred ownership to me.

  “At first I didn’t believe it. Brian had never said anything about giving me the boat. He had his eye on a boat named Dream, a fifty-seven-foot Gulfstar yacht, but I never thought he’d let go of his favorite sailboat. Then I remembered him teasing me about a big surprise he was planning for my birthday and realized he had intended to give me The Crazy Eight.”

  “That would be a very generous gift.”

  “One I didn’t deserve,” he said quietly. “But Brian was that kind of guy. So when the insurance check came, I tried to give it to Patricia, but she rejected it.”

  “Why?”

  “Brian had plenty of life insurance and lots of real estate, so she didn’t need the money. That’s what she said back then anyway. She came here today because she’d changed her mind. She wants the money after all. She has two kids to put through college someday. But what I couldn’t tell her was that I didn’t keep it. It would have been like keeping a dead body in my house, another reminder that my brother wasn’t alive to enjoy what he loved most—sailing. I’d failed my brother, and I wasn’t about to profit from it. I had to let the money go.” He paused. “I considered donating it to a charity. Then I remembered what Brian had said before he died. ‘Take care of them.’ So I gave it away to the people Brian cared about, the people who truly made a difference in his life.”

  “His best friend, Larry Durham,” I said slowly, as the blur of confusion began to clear. “His babysitter, Cristina Gomez. His reading tutor in college, Lauren Haywood. The doctor who saved his life. And the teacher who helped him to start his own real-estate firm.”

  He nodded silently.

  The pieces were falling into place.

  “I never expected anyone to find out what I’d done. I never imagined anyone of these people would alert the media, and even if they did, I figured it wasn’t the kind of story anyone would care about anyway.”

  I smiled because what he said was true. “And the number eight was stamped on the canvas bags because the boat was named The Crazy Eight?”

  “Brian had the bags made up after he bought the boat. Turns out they weren’t waterproof, so we could never actually use them on the boat,” he said. “When someone else began to put money in canvas bags with the number eight on them, I thought it was some kind of cruel mockery of my brother’s death.”

  “Why did you give the money secretly? Why not just tell these people you were giving them money because Brian would’ve wanted them to have it?”

  He shook his head. “I tested the waters and tried to give a few thousand dollars to Larry Durham. But he turned it down. Said it felt too much like taking charity. So I figured the only way to give the money away was to not tell any of them where it came from.”

  A lump formed in my throat as I thought about him placing the money in bags and dropping it anonymously on the five front porches. I thought about the pain he must have experienced when he did it, but also the true generosity that was behind it. “I wish you had told me this earlier.”

  He looked down at his hands. “I wanted to, but I was afraid of what you would think if you knew the truth. I thought you’d see me for what I was—a failure. Someone who put himself first and let his brother die.”

  “I see you as someone who did the best you could in terrible circumstances.” I pressed my hand to his
cheek. “Maybe in time you can forgive yourself. For being human. For being exhausted and afraid when you wanted to be strong and brave.”

  Eric’s eyes locked on mine. “For a long time now I’ve wanted to tell you the truth about what I’d done. Lying to you like that, day after day, was eating away at me. You have to know that I would never deceive you like that again.”

  He touched his hand to mine, and his eyes pleaded with me for understanding. And that’s when I fell in love with Eric Hayes.

  There have been rare moments in my life of such blinding clarity that they are forever engraved in my memory, frozen in time. The day I nearly drowned in Mexico is one of those moments. Falling in love with Eric is another.

  It caught me by surprise. Less than twenty-four hours before, I’d walked out on him, convinced he was yet another liar I couldn’t trust.

  How then could I explain how I felt, wanting him more now than I ever had?

  “I never expected my heart to open up to anyone so soon after the accident. But then you came along and changed everything. That’s what I meant yesterday when I told you that maybe you were the one rescuing me.”

  Even though we weren’t touching, I felt like we were. He’d shared his deepest grief and opened himself up to me in a way I’d never experienced before. And now I understood. He had been trapped in a drowning machine of his own and somehow, in a way I couldn’t yet comprehend, I had helped rescue him.

  He touched his hand to my face, and I felt my anger dissolve. In its place was a new, unfamiliar feeling—the beginnings of forgiveness.

  “You can walk out that door again, but that won’t change how I feel about you,” he said softly. “Nothing will change that.”

  “I’m not walking out that door.” I felt my face grow warm. “Because I think I love you.”

  I’d always thought that when I finally said those words and meant them, it would have been after long thought and deliberation and with measurable certainty. But they slipped out of my mouth easily and naturally, as though I’d always known it, as if I’d said it many times before.

  Over a bottle of wine and some leftover chicken soup, Eric and I talked for hours. He told me more about his life when Brian was alive—weekends and vacations spent sailing with friends, boat trips to Hawaii and Mexico. We talked about my childhood, when I wanted to be just like the girl in Harriet the Spy. I told him how I’d put on an oversize yellow raincoat, spied on everyone in the neighborhood, and then returned home to give my father a “report” of everything I’d seen.

  “The seeds of my news career were in those reports,” I said, “even though I looked silly in that big raincoat.”

  “I can’t imagine that you ever looked silly,” he said. His eyes, shining with interest, focused on my face. For once, I didn’t fill the silence with words or questions, trying to hold on to the still perfection of the moment.

  “What’re you thinking?” he asked.

  I wasn’t sure where to start. I loved that he was Good Sam. He had given anonymously and generously from his heart, without expectation of reward. He was precisely what I thought didn’t exist—someone doing good without ulterior motive, not only as Good Sam but every day as a firefighter. At the same time, he wasn’t perfect.

  I brushed a lazy kiss across his lips. But what started out gentle and tender quickly took on a life of its own. His hands caressed my body. I’d wanted him for so long that I was greedy, wanting to feel all of him, to let the heat that had been building all these weeks between us finally play out.

  I’d been in this territory before—groping and rushing, fueled by fire and desire, frantically shedding clothes, racing to get there fast. But we didn’t rush. We took our time exploring each other, reining in the need, not knowing how far either of us would take it.

  Would he stop as he had the last time we had come this far? Would he just hold me in his arms as we slept the night away under soft covers? As if reading my mind, he whispered, “Do you have any idea what I was thinking the other night?”

  I kissed him in the V of his neck. “No, tell me.”

  “I was thinking how much I wanted to make love with you, but it didn’t seem right, knowing I was lying to you. But now that you know everything there is to know about me…”

  “Not everything,” I said quietly. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Then I answered his unspoken question by tracing the light stubble around his mouth with my fingertips. I covered his mouth with my own, parting his lips with my tongue, our lips and our mouths mingling in a long, lingering kiss.

  I wondered what he would be like as a lover. Would he be calculating and careful, like he was on a rescue scene, knowing that everything gained comes from preparation and planning? Or would he be aggressive and wild, taking risks like I’d seen him do as he hung from a wire beneath a helicopter?

  He was both—at once tender and rough, in complete control of his body yet abandoned and free with it. And his confidence with his body made me unrestrained with my own, touching him as he touched me, loving him as he loved me.

  I felt the power and strength in his arms as he pulled me close, the warmth of him burning into my skin. A wave of uneasiness passed over me as I realized there was no turning back. I was racing full bore down the steepest hill of the roller coaster, and I had to trust him not to break my heart.

  Eric lifted his mouth from mine, and we looked at each other for a long moment. As his eyes caught mine in their silent dance, the shaky feeling drifted away.

  “I love you, Kate,” he said softly.

  Men say many things in the throes of passion, but I knew he meant it. I felt it in his every move, saw it in his face.

  “I love you too,” I whispered back. I was no longer surprised by how easy it was to say these words—but how deeply I felt them with each passing moment.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Hours later I awoke tangled in the sheets of Eric’s bed. I glanced at him, expecting to find him still sleeping, but instead he was lying on his side, resting his head on his bent arm, looking at me.

  “ ’Morning, beautiful,” he said, kissing me.

  I glanced at the window. Sunshine burst through the sheer curtains, and I heard the drone of a lawnmower in the distance.

  “It’s not morning already, is it?” I said, curling my body into his.

  “It’s already seven.”

  “How long have you been awake?”

  “About an hour,” he murmured.

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  “I’ve been watching you sleep, pinching myself every so often to prove I’m not dreaming.”

  I leaned up and pressed a soft kiss to his lips. Then I hovered next to him for a long moment, breathing in his scent, relaxing into the warmth of his body.

  He sat up. “My shift starts at eight, so unfortunately I have to get going.”

  “You mean you have other people to rescue besides me?”

  “Now and then.” He ran his strong hand along my arm. “You know, the Chinese believe that when you save a person’s life you become their blessed protector, and it's your duty to do that for the rest of your life.”

  I smiled. “Are you saying that any time I get into a body of water, it’s your duty to rescue me?”

  “You’re stuck with me, yes.”

  From the way he kissed me then, I knew we both were going to be late for work.

  Jack was waiting for me when I arrived at the station that morning. “He’s in the conference room,” the receptionist said. “Been here for an hour.”

  I frowned. There’d be no time to even grab a cup of coffee.

  “Would you let David know I need to see him?” I said, heading upstairs to the conference room.

  Jack had shuttered all the blinds in the glass-enclosed conference room and turned out all the overhead lights, so only by a small halogen lamp on the credenza lit up the room. I paused a moment to allow my eyes to adjust to the dark.

  “Where have you been?” he said
hoarsely. “I’ve left messages for you everywhere. I even waited in front of your house late last night, but you never came home.”

  I’d never seen him like this before. An air of desperation clung to him, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, light wrinkles in his Savile Row trousers.

  “Your receptionist said you’re always on time. Eight o’clock sharp every day. It’s nearly nine. Where have you been?”

  A sharp chill seeped into my bones. “Why do you want to know?”

  His eyes flashed angrily. “We left things on a sour note the other night. I want to talk about it.”

  I sat in the chair beside him. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “Then you’ve decided not to tell the Good Sam story?”

  “No, I’m still going through with it.”

  “Don’t,” he said. It was the first time I actually felt frightened of him. “You’ll kill my chance to win this seat in Congress, and you’ll ruin my reputation—not to mention your own.” He ran his fingers through his already tousled hair. “What does the ‘real’ Good Sam think about your telling the story?”

  “I didn’t ask.”

  “I’m sure he won’t like it either. Did he tell you why he gave all that money away?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did he do it?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “It won’t be private once you tell your story. You’ll expose him too. Don’t you see, Kate? Everyone loses if you tell the truth. You will. I will. He will.”

  Jack was right. Everyone would lose if I told the truth, especially me. But how could I call myself a reporter if I concealed the truth?

  “Don’t do it,” Jack pleaded in a rough whisper. “Don’t do this to us.”

  “There is no us, Jack.”

  He closed his eyes as if to shut out my words. His shoulders slumped and his jaw slackened. For the first time, I saw a defeated Jack Hansen. As much as I’d once fantasized about seeing him like this after he’d hurt me and lied to me, looking at him now only made me sad.

  We sat in icy silence. The sound of the door opening caught our attention. A sliver of light from the hallway pierced the heavy gloom in the room. David poked his head in the doorway. “Kate, were you looking for me?”