“Please, please tell me Daddy will be okay.” Words sobbed out of me, and Merry ran his fingers though my hair.
“Don’t you worry. I don’t even think he’ll need stitches.”
His face twisted up when he pushed himself to stand. He staggered behind the statue and came back holding the Judge’s gun. “Wait right here. I’m going to finish this thing with Wilkinson, once and for all.”
I cradled Daddy’s head in my lap while Merry stalked through the door and into the moonless night.
FIFTY-SIX
Tentacles of menace slithered through the air outside the Parthenon. They crawled along my body. Sucked at my skin. I stood on the grass, not understanding why I was still there. It didn’t make sense. Once Em found her father, I should be gone.
Wasn’t that my assignment?
A flash of movement drew my eye. Hulking. Unfinished. Its shadow crept along the side of the building, taking its time. When I squinted, I understood.
Wilkinson was wounded.
I limped around low bushes and tripped through piles of fallen leaves. I dragged myself up the grass and stumbled into the space under the portico. Stopped steps in front of Wilkinson. He was doubled over, holding his bulge of stomach with one arm.
His breath was shallow, and he leaned against the wall. A sheen of sweat coated his face. “Tell me something, Lewis.”
“What?”
“Did you ever think this was all that awaited you on the other side of life? This......place that isn’t a place, because you’re Nowhere without the person you love?”
My eyes burned with tears. Of realization. Of relief. “We’re not stuck here to make sure people remember our life accomplishments, to secure our fame. We already had our chance. Immortality comes when we pour our skills, our talents—ourselves—into someone else, and let them go.”
Even when we loved them enough to endure an eternity of Nowhere to keep them with us forever.
His form sagged on the concrete. “Just tell me you see my wife in that little girl. You knew her. Let me hear you say it, Lewis. Just once.”
When I looked at Em, I saw a strong female spirit swirling around inside, but that was all Em. A ballsy little girl who ran into the unknown to save herself. An expedition of will that ended up saving me. I stepped closer. “Just because Em reminds you of your Ann, that doesn’t mean she is. You can’t make her replace your wife.”
Wilkinson’s words sputtered out. “I...just...want to...love...her.”
His tears sprayed my face when he plowed his elbow into my chest. I dived into him, a lunging tackle. Bone crunched against bone as we rolled along the floor and clotheslined around a column. The impact jarred the gun to life in my hands and vaulted Wilkinson away from me.
He hovered above the floor, holding his stomach. His mouth moved, but no sound could breach the divide between us. His body shimmered. Insubstantial. Those eyes were the last thing to disappear. They lasered into me even after the rest of him was gone. Back to some Nowhere bar in some Nowhere place to start over.
Would he be able to find Emmaline again? Would he even remember her?
In the quiet, my thoughts raced back to my mission. To the little girl I loved like a daughter. I wandered into the grass and shouted her name.
And, as though I conjured her, I saw her there. Across the lawn. Through the trees. Lit by a streetlight, clinging to her daddy’s hand.
FIFTY-SEVEN
The cool draft of autumn streaked across my face. Mussed my hair as I watched them together from the wet grass. Lee sat up, and Emmaline flung herself into his arms. I finally had time to study him. Sandy blond hair with a curl to it. No doubt her hair came from him. A sturdy man, not unlike myself. Worn at the fringes. Battered by life, but not beaten.
I held my breath and waited for her to turn. To see me standing across the expanse. To call out for me to join them.
It didn’t matter what was next. My world was a little girl named Emmaline. She lit up my existence like some kind of angel. The days I spent with her were the happiest ones I could remember. Since I stared at the ribbon of a mighty river all those years ago on the mission that would make me. If I could stay with Emmaline…the daughter I was meant to have. She would be enough for me.
I watched Emmaline’s rapid-fire gestures. Taken by the sheen of Lee’s tears and by the hunger with which he drank his little girl in.
Still I waited. For her to say it.
One word.
Because she made me into a man who was merry. An explorer who sacrificed his ambitions on the altar of who she might become. I closed my eyes and waited. I willed her to say it. Just once. A single word to flutter along the current of the wind. To my ears. Before it was too late.
I opened my eyes, and the whole world swirled while I was grounded, watching everything drain away. The Parthenon spun in front of me. Uprooted trees pulled from the fringes, sucked into a void.
When I tried to call her name, I had no voice. Nothing that reverberated back to me through the rippling landscape. I felt the tearing away of time in the numbing of my body.
Was this the end of Nowhere? I reached my arms toward the draining earth, and my hands clawed toward the concrete roof of the Parthenon and tried to hook an arm around the gnarled branch of a tree. I grasped at anything that could anchor me where I longed to be.
Far below, Emmaline’s tiny form ran into the grass, followed by her father. Her head twisted and turned as she searched the park. Looking for me. Her mouth moved. She was calling my name. I strained to hear it though the thick and swirling silence. I willed my voice to slice through the space that separated us, but she receded, grew smaller and smaller even as I drained into an eternity without her.
I love you, Emmaline.
* * *
When we heard the gunshot, Daddy followed me outside. He held my hand to keep me close as we tiptoed around the building. The sky was the darkest I’d ever seen, and stars glittered everywhere. “Merry!” Are you hurt? Please, please answer me!”
Daddy’s arm slid around my shoulders. “Don’t shout. We don’t know where the Judge is. It may be that he shot Merry.”
“No. NO. If Merry was dead, I would know it. I would feel it, right here in my heart. I know he wouldn’t go without saying goodbye.”
Daddy held me in his arms on his unhurt side, like he always did when I was a little girl. He played with my hair and listened to me. I told him all about how Merry found me and never left me. Not once. Daddy nodded and hung on everything I said. That was the thing I loved most about Daddy. Whenever I needed him to hear something, he always did. Always.
I loved Merry so much because he reminded me of Daddy. When I talked, he always paid attention. He even ruffled my hair, just like Daddy did. And he took care of me, better than anybody, just like Daddy had when he lived with me. Now that I loved Merry, I couldn’t live without him. I would fight to find him, just like I did with Daddy, because Merry always had to be in my life.
Daddy’s fingers brushed my cheek. “What’s the last thing Merry said to you? Before I found you?”
“He kept telling me he had to go, that he might not see me anymore, but I wouldn’t listen. He even stopped me on the grass right over there—see —right before you found me.”
Daddy pushed the hair out of my eyes, where they stuck to my tears. “Stay close to me, and let’s keep looking, all right? If he’s hurt, we need to help him. Get him to a hospital. Anything for the man who gave my little girl to me.”
My eyes roamed across wet grass. I stumbled over a root, but when I looked down, it was Merry’s journal. All dirty on the outside. I picked it up and rifled through the worn pages. For all the time he spent writing, it was mostly empty. A few letters here. Some lines there.
Except for the last page. One complete sentence, written in Merry’s hand.
I love yo
u, Emmaline.
I tried to swallow the knot in my throat. “I love Merry, Daddy. He’s my hero. He fought and struggled and wouldn’t let anything stop him. And he promised me— he promised—he’d never, ever leave me. He told me he’d always be with me.”
Daddy wobbled a little on his feet. When he pulled my chin up to face him, his eyes were far away, and his lips were creased in a strange smile. His look was different but familiar, somehow.
“Daddy?”
I waved my hands in front of his eyes, trying to get him to look at me. A cool blow rippled across my face as he stroked my chin in his calloused hand. When he mussed my hair and spoke again, I knew where Merry was. Where he would be forever. Just like he promised.
“I’ll always be with you, Em. Always.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Immortality is both a physical impossibility and a psychological imperative. In this world, the closest we come to living forever is being remembered.
I owe much to the people who, knowingly or not, helped make this book possible. Thanks and recognition go to each of you for the contribution you made to this story.
Historians work to understand and interpret the past, and I’ve always been fascinated by both their tenacity and their passion. Thanks to John D W Guice, Jay H Buckley, and James J Holmberg for their book By His Own Hand? The Mysterious Death of Meriwether Lewis; Gary E Moulton, editor of The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition; the late Andro Linklater, author of An Artist in Treason: The Extraordinary Double Life of General James Wilkinson; and the late Stephen Ambrose, author of the acclaimed Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West.
Amber Deutsch, your observations on the earliest version of this book helped make it both readable and magical.
Helen Rice, you brought Meriwether Lewis back to life with your inspired drawings. You drew exactly what I imagined.
Robert Brewer at Writers Digest, you introduced me to the bad rabbit in Watership Down and changed the course of this story.
Signe Pike, your thoughtful edits made this book stronger.
Cheryl Smithem, you made key connections at the right moments.
Rowe Copeland, you had the stomach to take on an unknown writer with a genre-bending book. I’m proud to call you my publicist.
Alice Guess and family, and Lance Hiatt and Tim Parks, you gave me free places to write. That they had mountain views was a bonus.
Jessie Powell and Scott Merriman, you connected several dangling ends and tightened the manuscript.
Blog Subscribers, thank you for believing in me, for cheering me onward, for making me laugh, and for always telling me I could write books. You are among the best people on earth.
Roy and Linda Watkins, you are amazing parents. Thank you for supporting me and for putting up with my versions of you. Joyce Maher, thank you for having your son, and for believing in me as your daughter.
Michael T Maher, you are my love. My muse. My inspiration. You said hello and changed my life.
Readers, thank you for making time to read and for choosing to read my novel. You give words life when you breathe them into your imaginations and plant them in your souls.
You are the reason I write.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Andra Watkins lives in Charleston, South Carolina with her husband, Michael T Maher. andrawatkins.com
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To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis Page 25