On our walk back, it starts to sprinkle as I throw a stick far into the water. As Sadie comes out of the water, it starts to pour and we both start running back toward the house. Just before my house, I notice that the woman is still standing in the exact same spot as when we first jogged by. She hasn’t moved at all, but now she’s mid-shin deep in the water. Instead of Sadie running with me to the house, she takes off running along the shoreline toward the woman. I’m surprised Sadie wasn’t going through withdrawals with the lack of people on the beach, but leave it to her to run toward the only person on the beach in a downpour.
“Sadie!” I call.
No surprise, she ignores me. Sadie is in a full-on gallop toward the woman and I’m afraid at this speed, she’s going to knock the woman over. I speed up my pace as she continues to quickly approach the woman. The closer I get, I see that the woman is drenched, and her white skirt and tank top are completely soaked and stuck to her body. Her petite frame shivers as Sadie comes almost to a complete stop next to her, then she looks up at the woman. She then gently places her nose in the woman’s hand and leaves it there. I’ve never seen Sadie do anything like this before.
“Sadie!” I call, again.
Sadie is usually on the hyper-friendly side, nosing her way in between people, or helping herself to their beach towel, but I slow my jog down to a walk when I see how gentle Sadie is being with this woman. The woman looks down at Sadie, who is now beautifully heeled to her left side, then she smiles at her. I don’t know what it is about the woman’s smile, but as beautiful as it is, it’s also laced with a thousand sorrows. And since when does Sadie heel? I’ve had her in at least ten obedience classes and she’s never heeled for me, not to mention she’s even on the correct side. Don’t get me wrong, Sadie is completely obedient and knows every command, but it’s usually on her terms, not mine.
The woman’s hand gently strokes Sadie’s head, and she rests it on the woman’s thigh. She continues to stroke Sadie’s ear as she sits perfectly still. It’s almost as if Sadie knows this woman.
It couldn’t be. Is this Sadie’s owner? My heart sinks at the thought. I don’t know if after having Sadie for two years that I could give her back.
“Come on Sadie, it’s time to go home,” the soaking wet man gently calls to his dog.
I look down at the beautiful black dog that I’m guessing is named Sadie, and she whines in my hand again. She gently nudges me again, but doesn’t remove her nose from my hand.
“This isn’t your dog, is it?” he asks cautiously, coming closer.
Wait? What? This isn’t my dog? What in the hell is this guy on? They jogged down the beach together not thirty minutes ago and he calls her Sadie. He has her leash in his hand, that clearly matches the pink collar with black skulls on it around her neck, and he’s asking me if this is my dog? Just as I finish that thought, the rain completely stops.
“Uh . . . no,” I answer, looking at him like he’s crazy, then I shiver.
Instant relief washes over his face, then it quickly turns to one of concern.
“Do you live close by? I think we should get you home before you catch pneumonia,” he says.
“I just live back there,” I say, pointing in the general direction of River’s house. “I was just about to head home when Sadie and I here became friends,” I continue, looking down toward Sadie, stroking the top of her head.
“We’ll walk you home,” he offers, then Sadie stands on all fours and removes her snout from my hand.
“Really, it’s not that far,” I insist.
Sadie noses her face back into my hand and whines as her soulful eyes look up at me.
“I think Sadie insists we walk you home,” he says with a chuckle. “I’m Cooper Sullivan,” he continues, holding out his hand toward me.
“Kate Mason,” I say, removing my hand from around Sadie’s nose, then placing it in his with a firm handshake.
“Your fingers are like icicles,” he says, wrapping his other hand around my hand to warm it.
My hand instantly warms, as well as my cheeks, and I smile up at him. I study the features of his face and he’s quite a handsome man. He’s probably in his late twenties. He has medium brown hair and striking green eyes. He has a sprinkling of short, dark stubble low on his sharp jawline and chin, and short stubble just above his lip that is tipped up into a gorgeous smile.
“Is this you?” he asks, stopping at River’s back deck.
I hadn’t even realized that we had walked back to the beach house. Sadie prances up the stairs, turns around on the top step, then looks at us, and sits down.
“Oh, ah, yes,” I say and start to walk up the wooden steps.
When we reach the top Sadie stands up, then goes to the back wall of doors at River’s house, smooshes her nose on the impeccably clean glass, and wags her tail.
“I’m in the pool house,” I say, pointing in that direction. “This is my brother River’s house,” I continue.
“Wait?” he says, looking toward River’s wall of doors. “Not the River Mason of Mason Group, River Mason?” he asks.
“That’d be him,” I confirm with a nod.
“That’s funny. Sadie and I actually met him and a pretty brunette down at the beach not that long ago. Well, Sadie does what she does best, and she more introduced herself by nosing her way onto their blanket, trying to eat their ice cream,” he says, chuckling.
“That was probably his girlfriend, Joss. She lives here too,” I say.
Just then a bright flash of lightning streaks across the sky, quickly followed by a huge crack of rolling thunder. Cooper practically jumps out of his skin. Sadie tucks her long tail between her legs and positions herself between Cooper’s legs, while I look up at the sky and smile. I absolutely love the sound of thunder. It’s another one of the few things loud enough to cover up the sounds in my head. The only bad thing about thunder is it only lasts a few seconds.
Cooper quickly looks at me to see if I saw him jump, but his face quickly turns up in a smile when he takes in my delight. Sadie comes to my side and puts her nose in my hand like she did down at the beach. Then, just as quick as the first, another bolt of lightning lights up the sky with jagged streaks, then the sky opens up and it starts to pour.
“Come on, Sadie. We better get home,” Cooper calls loudly, over the sound of the rain hitting the deck.
“Thank you for walking me home,” I shout, as they both jog down the steps.
The rain is coming down in sheets sideways, and I can barely see them as they disappear down the beach. I open the door to the beach house, run inside, then quickly close it. Once inside, I lean against the door and bring my thumb between my teeth and smile. Rain drips down my face and off my chin, as I think that it was really nice of Sadie and Cooper to walk me home.
There’s something really special about Sadie. She pulled me out of my dark place when she put her nose in my hand, and her eyes . . . her eyes were captivating. I saw something in them that I’ve never seen in another human being. They held understanding, compassion, and a healing power I’ve never seen or felt before.
The thunder that follows the last streak of lightning, is muffled by the door being closed, so I turn around and crack the door open. I take in a huge breath of the cleansing, rain-filled air, then I sit down on my ass just inside the door to enjoy the thunder.
After about an hour, the storm passes. I get off the floor, grab a tank top and comfy shorts then head into my luxurious en-suite bathroom to take a hot shower. I grab the remote off the marble counter and click on the radio. After I moved into River’s pool house, he did some remodeling to make me feel more at home. He upgraded the small kitchenette with all new appliances and counter tops, he added new furniture throughout the house, spruced up my bedroom with all new bedding and decorations, and had the bathroom completely made over. He had a state of the art shower enclosure installed with a built-in speaker system. Not only are there speakers in the ceiling, but there’s one in the showe
r stall as well. River knows how important music is to me and I love him for that. There isn’t a room in the house that I go into that doesn’t have a speaker in the ceiling.
After my shower, I climb in my comfortable bed, switch on the television for the flicker of light, place my headphones on my ears, and crank up my favorite satellite radio station. Simply having the television on by itself isn’t enough sound for me. In order to fall asleep, I need the noise to be loud and as close to my ears as I can get it. I don’t sleep much as it is, but in order to fall asleep, I need it loud enough to shut up the phantom noises in my head.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve never needed much sleep. I can fully function on as little as four hours of sleep a night. I think it’s both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I can function on that little amount of sleep, but it’s a curse because every waking minute is a struggle for me to consciously fight the turmoil that goes on in my head.
I have a routine, and if I stick to it, most days I can fight the good fight with my doubts, the noises in my head, my self-worthlessness, the guilt, and the urge to down a bottle of pills.
Pills . . . that’s my poison.
A little over a year ago, I lost the good fight. I let the voices of the past and the thoughts in my head take over, and they consumed me. I talked myself into believing that everyone would be better off if I weren’t here. I felt like I didn’t deserve to live. The voices and noises in my head became too loud to hear the voices of hope and reason. My head crowded with too many words, too many screams, and too many noises, that it consumed me and emptied my heart of everything good.
I felt like I was taking the coward’s way out, but none of that mattered. None of anything mattered.
I am my own worst enemy.
I wrote a letter to River, and I asked him for his forgiveness for killing our parents and for being the reason that he’s blind. I took a bottle of my roommate’s prescription strength painkillers from her bathroom medicine cabinet, then I sat on the floor in the middle of our family room with a bottle of water. As I sat there, the screams of my mother, the gurgling of my father, the guilt, all the words jumbled together and started chanting at me, telling me to grow a pair and finally do what I deserve. River’s cornflower blue eyes morphed into aquamarine, then turned black. I grabbed my hair with both fists and pulled as hard as I could to try to get them to stop.
There was no hope.
There was no forgiveness.
I felt no love.
I was dead inside.
I twisted the top off the amber colored bottle and poured a handful of pills into my palm.
I didn’t even hesitate.
I believed those tiny, white pills were the only thing that could shut it all up and make it all just stop. I begged them to make it stop.
I slapped my palm over my open mouth and swallowed as many as I could dry, then forced them down with water. I choked on the bitterness and regurgitated them back up my throat, but swallowed it back down. None of them could go to waste. I poured another handful of pills, then swallowed those too. Some went flying past my face and bounced on the floor by my side. I repeated palmful after palmful of pills until the bottle was empty. I held the bottle up in the air and I swear, I saw a ray of hope at the bottom. I picked up as many stray pills as I could find on the floor, put them in my mouth, then I gulped down more water to make sure they were all good and swallowed. I needed to make sure that what I had taken was enough to get the job done.
There was no turning back. I felt victory over finally doing what I had longed to do for so many years. I had finally done something right.
When I was done, the bottle of water fell from my hand, and the remaining liquid poured into my lap and onto the wooden floor.
I didn’t have a single ounce of regret.
I laid my head down on the cool, wooden floor and closed my eyes with a smile on my face. I knew that when I woke up, I’d see my mother’s beautiful face and the love I longed to see again in my father’s eyes. As I drifted off to sleep, the gurgling and the screaming . . .
Finally . . .
Stopped.
It wasn’t silent, though.
The dreadful noises I fought with for two decades were drowned out by a piercing, loud, wailing sound of ringing in my ears. It was so loud it felt like my brain itself was ringing inside my skull.
The next thing I knew, I started violently throwing up. I didn’t care. I threw up all over the floor and all over myself. The vomit was endless. It was so relentless that I couldn’t get a breath in between vomiting.
I don’t know if it was a hallucination or wishful thinking, but the last thing I think I remember is the warm feeling of River’s hand slipping into mine.
Everything . . . was suddenly right.
The sounds of death and self-worthlessness were finally gone, and that feeling I adore so much when River put his hand in mine, calmed me. I couldn’t help but feel like River was holding my hand into death, passing it to my mother in heaven.
But my life didn’t end that night.
The sounds of my parent’s dying, the guilt, the sadness, and self-hatred, all returned the second my eyes opened in a hospital room the next morning.
I laid there for days in a catatonic state. I didn’t know if I was happy I was still alive, or if I was mad at myself for, yet, another failed attempt. One thing I was sure of is that I didn’t see my mother’s beautiful face or my father’s adoring eyes. But, for a fraction of a second, the voices did stop. Did I want that back?
After I was released from the hospital, I was placed directly into a strict rehab facility by River, and I felt as if I no longer had any human rights. I was forcefully medicated for what they said was severe depression, put on a strict diet and exercise program, and I had mandatory daily counseling sessions. But, as time went on, I slowly stopped fighting the counselors and for the first time, I actually started listening. For the first time, what they were saying wasn’t annoying hot air and it started to help. I was given the tools I never knew existed to help cope with the noises in my head.
Along with continued medication, diet, music in my ears, and weekly counseling sessions, the thing I fell in love with most was being turned on to yoga.
Yoga became my saving grace.
Practicing yoga brought my mind, body, and spirit together into a calm, rejuvenating place inside myself. There’s no other experience quite like it.
Every day before the sun comes up, I take my yoga mat out onto the back deck with the peaceful, calm ocean as my foreground and do at least one hour of yoga. On bad days, after River gets home from work, all I have to do is slip my hand into his, and he leads me into his home gym where we do yoga side-by-side, usually while Joss makes dinner. I’ve even started to teach Joss and her best friend, Nina, some basic yoga moves.
I recently started working for River at our family owned company, Mason Group, as the receptionist. Yes, I know it’s not a very glamorous position at a company I own a third of. I actually insisted that I start as the receptionist. I’ve never taken an active role in Mason Group, and I didn’t think I was entitled to, or deserved a corner office and a prestigious title straight out of the gate. I wanted to earn River, Stephen, and the other employees’ respect and trust.
River, Stephen, and I hold equal shares in the company. It wasn’t always that way. We thought my father’s best friend and attorney, Sebastien, held the majority until a few months ago. As it turned out, after River hired a PI to investigate, he was lying. He drafted a separate will and made it seem like he owned the majority of the company until River turned thirty. It also turned out that he was never supposed to raise my brothers and me. We had an aunt, which we had never known about, that was supposed to raise us. Upon my parent’s death, Sebastien killed her so he could get his money grubbing hands on the Mason fortune. I can’t let myself think about the fact that a woman, a family relative, was supposed to raise us. I just can’t go there. I think knowing in
the end that my dad’s best friend ultimately stabbed him in the back, is what makes me keep friends at an arm’s length.
I actually don’t remember too many details about my childhood, until about the age of sixteen. There are little bits of details here and there, but sometimes I don’t know if they’re real or if I made them up in my head. I know it sounds strange, but there seems to be a really huge, blank space in my memory. I sometimes wonder if it’s best left that way. They say your brain closes the door on certain memories to protect ourselves. But if that were true, why can I recall the day of the accident like it happened yesterday, in vivid, graphic detail?
Saturday morning, my eyeballs pop open, and like every morning, they immediately find the clock sitting on the nightstand. I don’t know why I bother to look at it, really. It’s always between 4:30 and 4:45. Today it’s 4:37 AM. I remove my headphones from over my ears and set them next to the clock. I roll out of bed and stretch my arms over my head while bending from side to side. I slip on my yoga outfit, grab my headphones, rest them on my neck, then head to the kitchen. I start a pot of coffee and dig the ingredients out of the refrigerator to make a power kale smoothie.
I blend all the ingredients and take the first delicious sip, then set it on the counter. I grab the ends of my headphones off my shoulders to place them over my ears, when I hear a scratching sound at the front door. It’s not uncommon for River to come into the pool house and start my coffee for me. Like me, he doesn’t sleep much either. If he hasn’t come in to make coffee, that means he’s still in his room. I’ll start my coffee, then go to the main house and start their coffee. But River has a key, he generally uses that and doesn’t scratch on the door.
I pull the white curtain away from the windowed door and see Sadie sitting directly in front of my door with her tongue lolling to the side, waiting patiently. Her beautiful eyes come up and fix on my face. Her whole body wiggles with excitement, she gets off her hind legs and stands, then wags her tail excitedly back and forth.
I Hear...Love (A Different Road #2) Page 2