by Nancy Adams
Juliette sat silently watching Orion’s Belt for a moment, its three stars shining extremely brightly.
After a while she asked in a timid voice, “Why do you forgive me so easily?”
“Because how can a person blame someone for their nature,” he replied immediately. “It’d be like being angry at the lion for eating the zebra. You were scared and guilty over the farmer—”
“Robert Barrymore,” Juliette added. “That was his name.”
Jules let out a sigh.
“The man was on top of me,” he began in a somber tone. “He’d bashed you in the face. You were suffering concussion. You were scared, confused and watching your husband being strangled by a man holding him down; a man who had previously waved a gun in both our faces. You picked the gun up and did what you felt you had to do in a confused and terrifying split second. No one—if they knew the facts—could say that you were guilty of anything other than saving my life. The reason I took the rap was that those asshole Louisiana hick cops wouldn’t have understood any mitigating circumstances. In fact, they wouldn’t have cared. I knew that when I confessed. Prison was rotten and hard, but I survived it. I was lucky to get out so early through good behavior. But how would you have survived, Juliette? Locked in a cell for eighteen hours a day. Only let out for a few hours to be met with the snarls of your fellow inmates, and then the even worse snarls of the guards. There’s no day in prison, Juliette. It’s all night.”
“Oh, Jules,” Juliette exclaimed. “But it was my punishment to take. It would have been my redemption also.”
“To take?! What obscene ideas you have of prison! There’s no redemption in those walls, just punishment. A punishment that strips you of your humanity and makes animals of men. It was so hard not to fall in on myself like some of those poor bastards did. Those poor souls that are bent and mutilated by that place, their souls poisoned by the wills of wickeder men, both within the population and within the guards. Out here you had a better chance of redemption.”
Jules paused and pointed to his heart. “In here,” he added, “is the only place you can find redemption; in yourself. Do you feel guilty for what you did?”
She sat musing for a moment, holding the question up to the light of her mind, before confessing, “I don’t feel guilty for pulling the trigger. I know that given the same choice between him and you, I’d pull it again. But I still feel guilty that a man’s dead. A man that died because he crossed paths with us. We should have never broken into that barn, Jules.”
“And that’s my fault,” Jules said firmly. “I was the one who decided to break the lock off, rather than check around some more to see if there was anyone about. I was cold, wet and pissed off. All I wanted was somewhere to sleep. If I had taken another five minutes to walk further down the lane and find the farmhouse, I could’ve knocked on the door. Even if Barrymore had come out with his shotgun, the worst that would have happened was that he would have driven us off his property and back into the rain. But I simply took a risk. I heard in court how that poor son-of-a-bitch had been broken into countless times already that year and was real angry at the lack of protection he’d received from the police. The whole thing was just an awful collection of terrible coincidences.”
“But you took the fall and then I left you to suffer that terrible place all on your own,” Juliette said sadly.
“When the shit hit the fan, you had to stay clear of me because of your involvement. They could’ve busted you for the pleasure and brought you in as an accomplice. You had to get outta there the first chance you got. It wasn’t cowardly or shameful: it was smart.”
“I didn’t feel smart.”
“Well, you were,” Jules asserted, before continuing his earlier thread of conversation. “Then, when I was inside, you felt guilty and ashamed because you blamed yourself, as well as feeling guilty over Barrymore’s death. For one, you didn’t write because you didn’t know what to say to me. And for another, you were dealing with your own demons while I was locked away. Margot told me how she found you.”
Juliette closed her eyes and was instantly cast back to that terrible time of shadows. She had been close to death in that L.A motel apartment, determined to drink herself into the grave. During the day she was turning tricks and at night she was pouring liquor down her throat, an endless cycle of depravity, each day bringing her closer to her goal: death.
“I was hurting everywhere,” Juliette muttered from behind her closed eyes. “I needed to die then. I’d lost Danny and then I’d lost you. Heck, I’d pretty much lost myself as well. The first days that Margot had taken me to her apartment in Venice Beach, I wasn’t even aware that I was out of that horrid motel. The sickness from the booze came on the moment she got me there—I’d been closer to death than I’d thought—and I began having these terrible fevers. I’d hallucinate you and Danny were in the room with me. And then I’d see that farmer standing there, all covered in blood, half his head missing. For nearly two weeks, I suffered in that room, Margot sitting with me, wiping my forehead with a damp cloth, calming me down during my worst times, giving me medicines and foods, my febrile mind torturing me as I prized myself from the clutches of the DTs.”
“You must let go of the past,” Jules offered her, before pointing up to the sky, and saying, “Look up there.”
Juliette’s eyes followed his hand and she once again found herself gazing at the stars.
“Because it takes thousands of years for light to travel across the galaxy,” Jules began in a soft voice, “many of those stars have probably reached supernova by now—exploded centuries ago—and aren’t even there anymore. What we’re seeing now is the last remaining remnant of them: their light. A light that once burned brightly; the star’s destruction yet to reach our eyes.”
“What are you trying to say?” Juliette inquired.
“That everything is transient,” he answered. “That we are nothing more than a fleeting spec of dust upon the gigantic desert of total existence. Our lives no more than a collection of moments that, due to the size of our egos, we apply too much importance to. Your obsession with the past, and your overanalyzing of its critical moments, is a waste of time. Learn from them. If you made a mistake—made the wrong decision—then learn to make the right one next time. Learn from the past, but don’t wallow in its indecency. Don’t let it eat you up. You’ll never change it—it is what it is and it will always follow you. But instead of wearing it as a fettered chain to a rock, you should instead allow it to guide you into not repeating the ills of the past. You spend too long letting yourself get wrangled into ‘what ifs’ that will never happen. You’re hypothesizing the impossible! Trapped in a loop.”
Juliette listened to his words and in them she recognized herself. Just the other day she had described herself to Margot as being trapped in a loop made up of her constant, repetitive thoughts on the past. She appeared to live within this past and was decaying along with it. Margot had given her some flimsy advice on it, before going off into her own thoughts. She was a good friend, but not the wise owl that Jules was.
“You feel guilt too readily as well,” Jules went on after an initial pause. “The guilt of initially abandoning me worked itself into your loop. With each passing day of not contacting me, you became even more unlikely to finally reach out. Plus, you were punishing yourself.”
“I was?” Juliette let out softly.
“Of course,” Jules said knowingly. “It’s like you said, I took your punishment and, in turn, you fled from me to punish yourself. To punish your heart. You always feel the need to chastise yourself for things out of your control. You did it when Danny died. There was nothing that either of us could have done. But still you felt guilty in the eyes of the world and threw yourself down into the dark abyss. As I was being driven to prison after the court hearing, it was all I could think about. That you’d be somewhere punishing yourself. It was all I could think about when I first went inside.”
“When I’m all alone
, it’s all I can do,” Juliette admitted. “My mother was the same. Bringing me up on her own, all she did was punish herself. My father died before I was born and she saw that as punishment for the fact that I was born out of wedlock, even though the circumstances of the time prevented their marriage. She never went with another man. She had me when she was twenty-two and then never once allowed another man to touch her body because of her so-called sin. I guess I learned to do the same. To see all of my suffering as being a result of my own previous actions.”
“We’re born to suffer,” Jules said. “All of us. It’s those that learn to accept their suffering and move on that escape the worst of it. You, my love, allow your suffering to linger far longer than it should. Now that I’m back, we can move forward together into a new dawn. We should release ourselves from the shackles of the past, spread our wings and fly off into the future.”
A smile had begun to emerge on Juliette’s face as he spoke. His words filled her with so much light and the warmth that flooded her soul impelled her to squeeze herself even more into him as they lay on the lounger.
The two then lay in silence, tightly embraced, watching the night sky, a new optimism in their hearts.
CHAPTER FIVE
A little over two weeks after Calloway’s visit, Sam was sitting in a wheelchair holding the trembling hand of Jess, staring teary-eyed at Marya’s coffin as it sat over a hole in the ground. A hole that it would soon be interred to forever.
It was the day of the funeral and the service was being performed out in the middle of St. Vincent’s cemetery in Massachusetts, not far from the MIT campus that Marya grew up on, where she and Sam had met fifteen years before.
Sam was dressed in a black suit, black shirt and matching tie. His legs were in casts and braces, metal rods going in and out of them, holding the shattered bones together. Right beside him, Jess was wearing a little black velvet dress with black tights and little black shoes. Down her freckled cheeks ran tears. She understood that it was her mummy in that box and that she would never see her again. In Marya’s brutal honesty with her little girl during her final days, she had made it plain that she was going away and only much later would she and Jess be reunited in the afterlife. Thinking of this, the little girl took ahold of her father’s arm and pressed her face into his side. Sam rested his chin on her little head and placed his free arm around her.
The priest was in the middle of his eulogy, but Sam heard nothing of what the man said, the world drifting around him like a ghost. A very large crowd was present, standing out in the cold and cloudy afternoon among the leafless trees, all hunkered around the coffin. The throng was made up of Marya’s wide circle of friends, senior members of her many charitable foundations, the board members of Techsoft, Bormann and Calloway among them, and, of course, her family. This included her parents, Brian and Stephany, her brother Peter, and various uncles and aunts. Brian and Stephany stood directly behind Sam, the old mother’s hand rested upon Sam’s shoulder as he sat with tear-filled blank face. No one from his own family was there.
As he sat glumly, holding Jess to his side, Sam became aware that the priest had stopped speaking, and realized that it was his turn to say some words. He’d made no notes—didn’t need to. He’d had plenty of time to think about it in the hospital, and the words he’d eventually chosen were the ones that felt most true to her.
“When I was fourteen,” he began, “a burst of color entered my gray life and made everything so much warmer. That color came from Marya, the daughter of Stephany and Brian Smith who I’d gone to stay with at the time. The subsequent years that I spent in that house were some of the happiest in all my life. Over those years Marya and myself became bound in love. When we were nineteen, we started Techsoft together. You could say that I was the mind and she was the heart. At twenty-one she then made me the happiest man on Earth when she accepted my hand in marriage. Then, four years ago, our lives were completed by the arrival of our beautiful Jess. Little did we know then that our time together was quickly running out. Only six months ago we were planning our future; the future of Techsoft and the future of our family. But…” Sam stumbled here, his words choked by emotion. “But,” he went on after his initial wobble, “life doesn’t work as we would want it, or as we’d plan it. Life is merciless and, in its mercilessness, it decided to take Marya away for no better reason than because it could. Marya was a shining light, one who infected everything she touched with that light. And that included me.” Sam now looked up at the cloud-laden sky and directed his next words to it. “Marya,” he said up to it, “your life deserved so much more than what it got. You were a star that burned so brightly that you were always destined to go out much sooner than the rest of us. I will always cherish the years we had together, the light you gave me, and the daughter we shared. I will forever love you, my…”
Sam trailed off into tears here and this marked the end of his eulogy. After that, several more eulogies were read out. Her parents, brother, several of her oldest friends and one or two from the charitable institutes. Like the priest before them, Sam heard nothing but a distant droning sound.
Eventually, there was no more talk and the coffin was lowered into the hole. At the sight of her mother disappearing forever, Jess fell into wretched crying and held onto Sam even tighter, the father doing his best to console her, the girl’s grandma also crouching down beside her and offering her soothing words. But nothing could stop Jess from crying out: “Mummy!”
Once the coffin was at the bottom, father and daughter threw some dirt into the hole, the handfuls of earth making a hollow thud as they hit the coffin. After that, Sam sat in a daze, Jess buried into his side, as people passed by, giving him and Marya’s parents their condolences. To ach person that stopped in front of him Sam offered no more than an automatic nod of gratitude, and he saw nothing before him but a shadow, his mind numb. When the crowd had all dispersed, Jess’s grandparents took the girl with them and Sam was all alone at the graveside.
Soon, it was just him, his assistant Karl and the two gravediggers who stood someway off, waiting for everyone to leave so that they could finish burying Marya. Sam simply sat there staring at the hole, attempting to get his head around the fact that this truly was the end. He would never see or hear her voice again. He recalled her phantasmal presence in the emergency room. He recalled her words. Her forgiveness.
Looking down at the grave, Sam brought his left hand up to his face and kissed his wedding ring before pulling the gold band off and tossing it into the hole. He let out a sigh and then waved his hand, signaling to Karl to wheel him out of there.
Sam had had to employ a private security team as well as the local police in order to keep the press away. Once Karl had helped him into the back of the Limousine they were joined by Sam’s security team, one car in front and one behind. The convoy then drove out of the cemetery and met with the thick cordon of reporters that hung around outside the gates like vultures awaiting leftover scraps of meat. As they slowly drove through the throng, photographers, reporters and cameramen pressed their faces to the glass, all struggling with each other to get a view through the thickly tinted windows of the car. Sam saw at least one mini-brawl open between them as they scrambled at the car, security and police attempting to hold them back in case they climbed on top of the limo as it plowed through.
“No shame,” Sam said out loud to himself.
It wasn’t long before they’d broken through and were heading to Marya’s parents’ place, where the wake was being held. Around that, there was another two-block security cordon to keep the vultures away. Jess had gone ahead with her grandparents, so Sam was all alone in the back of the car. He leaned forward and opened up the little polished walnut cabinet that sat in front of him. He pulled out a bottle of bourbon, took a glass from atop the cabinet and poured himself a drink.
He then slumped back into his chair, his busted legs outstretched, and sipped his whiskey. Sitting there, he began to feel an anxiety increa
sing inside of him like a growing mass of thorns. As the car moved through the suburbs, getting ever closer to Stephany and Brian’s, Sam felt an inescapable desire not to go there. In his mind, he couldn’t bear the thought of walking through those doors and seeing all those faces gazing at him, wishing him their sympathies—whether sincere or not—and showering him with their unwanted pity. Plus, he’d spent so much of his life growing up in that house and it had always represented happy times. Now, it represented the final chapter of his wife.
“Karl,” he suddenly said into the intercom.
“Yes, Sam,” his assistant replied.
“Take me to the airport and have my jet readied for our arrival.”
“But aren’t you going to—”
“No,” Sam said curtly.
“Okay, Sam,” Karl returned, before turning off the road at the next junction and heading the limo toward the airport.
Sam pulled out his phone and began ringing Stephany.
“Sam,” the old mother answered, “you nearly here?”
“I’m sorry, Steph,” Sam replied in a soft tone. “I need you to look after Jess for a few nights. Is that cool?”
“Of course, Sam. But what is it?”
“I gotta get away, Steph.”
“Oh, Sam,” the old woman soothed.
Sam had lived with the Smiths for five years before he and Marya moved out. Stephany Smith was as close to a mother as Sam had. She, too, felt a bond with Sam and felt in her heart as if he were her own son. His crash had worried both her and her husband and they hoped that it was a one-off. But listening to the crackle of despair in his voice now, the mother in Stephany worried even more for the fate of her son-in-law.
“You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?” she asked.
“It’s okay, Steph,” Sam answered in his most assuring voice. “I just can’t face everyone is all. I need time on my own, so I’m heading home. In a day or two, I’ll head back up to Massachusetts and spend some time with you and Brian. I’ll come in secret to put the press off. I just can’t face all those people at the moment. I’m scared that I’ll suffocate in there.”