Lost: The Novels

by Catherine Hapka

  Jeff comforted himself with the conviction that his serial womanizing was not a crime and, even if so, it was a victimless one. He made no promises of fidelity; there was no talk of forever. He always made it plain—at least it was plain to him—that the encounters were enjoyable, even thrilling, but their life span was finite; a good time had by all, no hard feelings.

  Of course, things might go just that way with Ivy. Certainly she had offered herself to him and he had given in only reluctantly. Surely she had no expectations, wasn’t trying to back him into a serious relationship. Yes, Jeff thought with a tentative feeling of relief, this one is no different from the others. Ships, as they say, passing in the night. But, he felt with a tremor of dread, maybe…

  His reverie was interrupted by the doorbell. Quickly jumping out of bed and throwing on a robe, he walked over to the door and opened it.

  A man in the gray uniform of a London delivery service stood there with a large manila envelope in his hand. When Jeff opened the door, the man squinted at the address label.

  “Mr. Jeffrey Hadley?” he asked. Jeff could detect a trace of Cockney in his accent.

  “That’s right,” Jeff said.

  The deliveryman pushed a receipt book at Jeff. “Special delivery,” he said. “Please sign on line nine.”

  Jeff signed, then accepted the envelope.

  “You any relation to that singer Hadley?” the deliveryman asked.

  “Singer?” Jeff asked. “No, I think I’ve rather lost touch with popular music.”

  The deliveryman looked deeply offended. “He isn’t a pop music singer—he’s an operatic tenor, he is.”

  Jeff smiled apologetically. “Sorry, I don’t think so. I’ve never heard of a singer named Hadley.”

  The deliveryman looked at Jeff as if he were more to be pitied than censured. “Well, there is one,” he said.

  Jeff nodded politely, waiting for a follow-up, but the deliveryman wheeled around without another word and walked back down the hallway toward the stairs.

  When he saw the return address, Jeff felt a surge of anticipation. It was from the Robert Burns College of Lochheath, Scotland. He opened the envelope with excitement. The letter read:

  To Mr. Jeffrey Hadley, Esq.

  Dear Mr. Hadley,

  It is with great pleasure that the Board of Regents of Robert Burns College of Lochheath extend this offer to you to serve as the school’s artist-in-residence, to begin on August 15, 2002.

  This position has been filled only rarely over the one-hundred-and-sixteen-year history of Burns College, and is offered only to individuals whose work, teaching skills, and character are of the highest calibre. The board have voted unanimously in your favor and we will feel ourselves honored and proud to count you among our faculty.

  Upon your acceptance, you will be contacted by the college bursar for information regarding your lodging, salary, and other particulars.

  We do look forward to a favorable response as soon as possible and eagerly anticipate your arrival at Robert Burns College.

  Most sincerely yours,

  Arthur Pelham Winstead

  President, Robert Burns College

  Jeff nearly started dancing around the apartment. He had first been contacted by the college nearly six months earlier and had talked with various faculty members on numerous occasions since. They were always careful not to actually offer him the post of artist-in-residence, but it was clear to him early on that it was his if he wanted it. At first, he had been disinclined to take it. Lochheath was just north of Glasgow and was in a surprisingly remote area for such a prestigious educational institution.

  But the more he thought about it, the more Jeff began to think that it was the perfect next step. He was just about to turn thirty-two and his paintings generally sold as fast as he could churn them out. But he knew that a wise man had to look to the future. He was realistic enough to realize that, while he might be an enduringly popular artist for the rest of his life, he might also be the flavor of the month. The position at Burns would give him both a steady income and plenty of free time to continue to paint. And perhaps it would even offer him a future he could count upon.

  Besides, he had to admit that he got a real charge out of teaching. What were students, after all, but blank canvases on which he could paint colorful layers of knowledge, of curiosity, of promise?

  He would regret leaving London, but Scotland was not so far away that he couldn’t come in for a bit of excitement now and then. And both Glasgow and Edinburgh were relatively close by. Neither of those cities was London, not by any means, but at least they would offer a taste of the urban experience when the solitude of the remote highlands grew too heavy upon him.

  There was one other matter of reluctance. Lochheath was also near the island of Arran, where Jeff had been born. Arran was bleak and forbidding—adjectives that could describe his childhood as well. As soon as he could make a break for it, he had. Jeff left Arran when he was barely sixteen and never looked back. But when he was ensconced on the faculty at Burns College, Arran would be virtually in the neighborhood.

  At about four-thirty, another knock came on the door. Jeff was putting the finishing touches on his painting of Venus of the Apocalypse and he walked to the door with brush and palette in hand. Ivy stood there, a large paper bag in her arms. Jeff was a little annoyed at being interrupted, and Ivy sensed it immediately. She smiled nervously.

  “I thought…” she said timidly. “I thought I’d cook you dinner.…” She looked down at the floor as if she expected to be shouted at, or hit. God, Jeff thought, what has her life been like?

  He smiled warmly and stood aside, inviting her to come in. “A great model and a great cook?” he said heartily. “You are certainly the rarest and most precious of jewels.”

  Ivy smiled with relief. She set the bag down on the counter and began extracting groceries and wine. “I’m certainly not a great cook,” she said. “But I make a rather wonderful spaghetti sauce, if I do say so myself.”

  “Then go to it,” Jeff said. “Let me finish up here and I’ll come make a salad.”

  Ivy said, “That would be lovely. I’ll open the wine.”

  Ivy’s spaghetti sauce was indeed wonderful, or perhaps because they were well into the second bottle of Merlot when they began to eat, it merely seemed so. Jeff lit candles and set the table with the charming ancient china he had inherited from his grandmother. They laughed, ate, drank wine, and made small talk. And then they moved into Jeff’s bedroom and made love. It was, at least to that point, the perfect evening.

  Afterward, they lay in bed, breathless from exertion. Jeff sat up a little, his arm around Ivy. She rested her head on his chest.

  “I’m glad you came over,” Jeff said.

  Ivy smiled and replied, “I’m glad you’re glad.”

  “Your presence makes this even more of a celebration.”

  Ivy raised her head and looked into Jeff’s eyes. “Is it your birthday?”

  “Oh, no,” Jeff said. “I’ve just had some rather spectacular news. You know, of course, what a brilliant and learned lecturer I am.”

  Ivy nodded with mock solemnity. “Oh, yes, I remember every moment of your lecture last week,” she said. Then she grinned. “But I was so busy drinking you in that I’m afraid that I didn’t hear a word you said.”

  “It’s a good thing I wasn’t grading the class,” he said. “I’d have to fail you.”

  Ivy snickered. “Even when I’m willing to work for extra credit?”

  They both laughed and she settled back down onto his chest. Jeff was encouraged. This was going to be easier than he thought.

  Ivy said, “So why are we celebrating? Are you giving another lecture at the university?”

  “Not exactly,” Jeff replied. “Something quite wonderful has happened. I’ve been offered a place as artist-in-residence at Robert Burns College.”

  Ivy sat up. “Where is that?”

  “It’s in Scotland,” Jeff said
. “In Lochheath, on the shore just north of Glasgow. Burns College isn’t a hugely influential school, but the position is a great honor. It makes one feel as though one has really arrived, you know?”

  Ivy brought her knees up and wrapped her arms tightly around them. She looked straight ahead. “How long will you be gone?”

  Jeff shrugged. “It’s hard to say. I’ll be there for the year, at least. And I’ve been given to understand that, under certain circumstances, the position is offered permanently. Not that I’d want to stay for a very long—”

  He stopped talking when Ivy’s body began quaking with sobs. He was surprised and flustered by the outburst and tried to pull her to him. “Oh, my dear…” he said.

  Ivy pulled away sharply from his embrace. She continued to weep inconsolably for several minutes as Jeff looked on helplessly. When she finally began to stop crying, Jeff asked, “What’s wrong? What have I said?”

  She looked at him. Her eyes were red and puffy and her cheeks still wet with tears. “Nothing,” she said. “You’ve said nothing. I was an idiot to have thought…”

  “Thought what?” Jeff said.

  She got out of bed and began pulling on her clothes. She said nothing until she was completely dressed. She picked up her bag and walked toward the door.

  “Ivy…” Jeff said.

  She turned and looked at him with deep sadness in her eyes. “I was an idiot to have thought you were different from the rest.”

  He stood up and reached for his robe. “But surely…” he began.

  “Surely I knew I was just a one-night stand,” she said bitterly. “Or, to be technical, a two-night stand.”

  Jeff said, “I’d rather do anything than hurt you.”

  Ivy opened the door. “Anything? I believe you’re exaggerating, Jeff. You have hurt me. You’ve hurt me more than anyone else ever has. I respected you so much. I was so honored…”

  She walked out and closed the door quietly behind her. For a moment, Jeff considered running after her. But for what? Even if he could make her feel better now, it would only delay the inevitable. Better to end it quickly, he told himself. She’ll feel better tomorrow.

  He had told himself something similar on many occasions. Now he wondered if it had ever been true. Jeff sat down on the edge of the bed. I am, he thought to himself, a terrible person. A terrible, terrible person.

  5

  SITTING ON THE BEACH, Jeff had plenty of time to remember and reflect upon the way he had treated Ivy. He would have considered it one of the low points of his life if it hadn’t turned out that he would quite soon after treat someone else far worse, and pay a far greater price for it.

  In many ways, all that seemed so far away now—London and Scotland and the women whose lives he had touched, and who had touched his. All those things were distant in a sense greater than geography; they almost seemed like places, beings, and happenings from a completely different world. Now Jeff’s entire existence consisted only of this island and the people who had survived with him. There was no escape from either and so, as far as Jeff was concerned, this place was its own planet; he had rocketed there like a space traveler from Planet Past.

  Actually, he thought with grim humor, a rocket would have been far safer than the conveyance that really did bring us here. He thought back on that day with the most banal of laments: Had I but known…

  No one ever boards an airplane without experiencing even a subliminal frisson of fear that the plane is going to crash. Most people suppress the thought quickly; the tedium and discomfort of flight takes the mind to other places. But even though everyone fears it, most passengers don’t truly believe that they are boarding a machine that will kill them in a few hours or minutes. It is an abstract fear, one that is, we tell ourselves, only in our minds.

  And so it was with Jeff Hadley that day. He was not a particularly religious man, but he always uttered a quick and quiet prayer as the plane began its ascent. After he had made his peace with a merciful God, he closed his eyes, hoping to make the talkative tourists seated on either side of him believe that he was asleep. It worked so well that soon he was asleep. And when the screams of terrified passengers and the ear-cracking roar of tearing metal jolted him awake, he viewed the scene of chaos with a strange kind of detachment. He hadn’t really believed he was going to die, despite the content of his prayer. And now, even when the prospect seemed ever more likely, Jeff remained surprisingly calm and distant, almost bemused. So this is how I go out, he thought. Not how I would’ve guessed. Crazily, he found himself listening to an almost mocking voice in his head, singsonging, Oh well, we all gotta go sometime!

  Jeff had never believed all that guff about out-of-body experiences, but he realized that he was experiencing something like that now. He felt almost as if he were seated in a different part of the plane, serenely watching a film about his own impending doom. His life didn’t flash before his eyes, and he was slightly disappointed to realize that this cherished cliché probably wasn’t going to come true in his case. The only thing that flashed before his eyes was his death; or, at least, what he assumed would soon be his death. The tourist to his right, an overweight man in a loud orange shirt and unbecoming Bermuda shorts, unbuckled his seat belt for some reason and tried to run down the aisle. When the back of the plane broke away and row after row of screaming passengers was sucked out into the abyss, the brightly hued tourist followed them headfirst. He held his hands out before him and he looked to Jeff a little like Superman as played by Buddha.

  A young Asian woman in the row in front of him twisted around at the noise of the split and for a moment her terrified eyes met Jeff’s. He wanted to smile at her and he tried to think of something comforting to say. But when he opened his mouth, Jeff was rather surprised to find that, instead of speaking, he was actually screaming at the top of his lungs.

  Later, Jeff hoped that he would find the young woman among the survivors, to make sure that she had come through the ordeal all right. But even though he often felt a momentary thrill when he caught sight of Sun, he always immediately realized with a sinking heart that it wasn’t the same woman. Jeff guessed sadly that she and her terrified eyes had followed the portly Superman.

  The young woman’s face was the last sight Jeff remembered seeing in the air. He’d grabbed at the oxygen mask that had dropped before his face but could never remember if he had actually put it on. At first he thought all the air had been sucked out of the cabin, because suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He jerked his head upward and inhaled with a deep gasp and only then realized that he had been lying facedown in a shallow tide pool. He sat upright, dimly trying to work out how he had gotten from a seat in the economy class section of an airliner to this little pool of seawater.

  Jeff gingerly flexed his arms and legs and found everything to be in working order. He felt warm liquid on his face, wiped it, and came away with a bloody hand. He had several small cuts and scratches on his forehead and cheek and a fairly nasty slash across his chin, but nothing too serious, at least as far as he could tell.

  An intense young man with close-cropped hair and a disheveled business suit came sprinting over to Jeff.

  “Are you all right?” the man asked.

  Jeff nodded. “I think so.”

  The young man peered at the cuts on Jeff’s face. “I don’t think any of those are real bad. Clean the wounds with seawater and try to get a bandage around that chin.”

  Jeff nodded again and started to rip the sleeve from his shirt. The young man said, “Good. And when you’re ready, come help. There’s a lot of people in worse shape than you.”

  “I will,” Jeff said. Using the torn-off sleeve as a washcloth, he sat in the tide pool and cleaned his minor wounds. The chin kept bleeding freely, so he pressed the cloth hard against the cut for a few moments. Then he rinsed the blood from the sleeve and wrapped it around his face, just under his mouth. He tied it at the back of his head.

  My God, he thought. I must look like a bandit w
hose mask has slipped off.

  For Jeff, the rest of that terrible day was a blur of activity—helping to rescue luggage and provisions from the broken body of the plane, giving whatever aid he could to other hurt passengers, trying to convince himself that he had not slipped into some nightmare from which he could never awake.

  That first night, Jeff was too exhausted even to try to seek shelter. The weather was cool and the night sky clear and shimmering. He lay down on the sand just out of the reach of high tide, and immediately fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.

  In the days and weeks that followed, Jeff worked alongside the others but said little. His mind seemed to have completely emptied itself. He gathered food and firewood and helped build rudimentary shelters for himself and others almost as if he were a robot, programmed to complete necessary tasks. He learned a little about his fellow survivors. The young man who had looked at Jeff’s cut face on the first day was named Jack. For reasons that Jeff never really understood, Jack emerged as the de facto leader of the castaways. He seemed to inspire respect and loyalty among the others—at least, most of the others. There was a rough, rather ill-tempered man named Sawyer who had a contentious relationship with Jack and sometimes, it seemed to Jeff, the two of them were on the verge of attacking each other.

  This kind of drama would have been of interest to Jack back in Scotland, but somehow here it meant little. Others doubtless knew why Sawyer and Jack appeared to hate each other, but Jeff just didn’t care. In fact, he didn’t seem to care about anything.

  As Jeff continued to gaze out at the gentle sea, he almost missed the blankness of those early days. He supposed he had been in shock, that merciful state that shuts down the mind and emotions when they can’t handle an overload of stress or horror. And as he emerged from that shock, he found himself once again facing some of the truly terrible things that had been hiding in his head. And that was when the dreams started.