She heard the front door slam.
* * *
The waves rammed the bumpers hanging from the side of the McConnell’s rowboat against the dock, each swell rocking it wildly. The water wasn’t cresting over the sides, which seemed like a good sign to Xander, though the beams of dock itself were slick with spray. They hadn’t had time to fix it yet, so it remained in disrepair. From the cliffs above he could see that the storm was worse out to sea, but the bay seemed to shelter them from the worst of it. The practical side of Xander’s mind told him that rowing a boat in this weather was probably not the best idea, but he was beyond caring about what was a good idea and what wasn’t. Part of him was excited to take out his anger on the storm. Besides, Hero’s dock wasn’t that far and he was certain he could swim to shore if necessary.
Xander climbed into the heavily rocking boat and held it steady against the dock as he untied the ropes. When he got back he intended to pull it out of the water entirely to keep it from getting swamped and sinking, but that was neither here nor there. He cast off and pulled hard on the oars. The waves were so strong that he moved back one stroke for every two that took him forward. The boat rose and fell across each crest and he angled out toward sea to cut through them instead of across. His muscles started burning almost immediately, but the challenge of it exhilirated him and with adrenaline charging through his veins, he screamed his anger into the rain and wind.
* * *
The storm was getting worse. Hero pulled into the Brighton House drive and drove up to the house. She was relieved to see Xander’s truck parked there and came to a stop behind it. She slipped Jaimie’s Beetle into park and turned it off. The lights were off in the house, but that probably meant he was in the library talking to Zach. Her heartbeat slowed a little, but she slipped out of the car as soon as it was off and ran inside.
“Xander!” she called as she tore down a hallway.
“Xander!” she yelled again.
A light flipped on as she turned a corner and almost ran into Zach.
“Hero?” he asked. “Are you ok?”
“Is Xander here?” she asked as she stopped in her tracks.
“No, he left hours ago and hasn’t come back yet. He won’t answer my calls. I figured he was with you.”
“Could he be upstairs?” she asked, not really hearing him.
“No, I told you, he’s not here.”
“But his truck is here,” Hero protested.
“What?” Zach asked rhetorically.
“His truck is here!” she repeated as she ran down the hall to the stairs, calling Xander’s name. She ran up the stairs to the cupola to find it empty, then ran back down to find Zach waiting at the bottom.
“Not up there?” he asked.
“No, where could he be?” she responded.
Zach shook his head and shrugged. Lightning flashed, lighting up the house like a flickering ghost of luminescence. Thunder cracked a few seconds after. Hero was staring out the window at the bay in disbelief. Zach looked at her curiously.
“Oh my god,” she said so quietly he could barely hear her.
“What?” Zach asked.
“I think he’s out there,” she answered as if in a daze.
“Out where?”
“On the water!” she shouted, suddenly coming back to life. Before Zach could say another word she turned and ran out of the house.
Winter’s Cold Fingers
The water pouring down had turned the steps down to the dock into a stream of tiny waterfalls and made the way treacherous. Hero rushed down them anyway, oblivious to her danger. She made her way as quickly as she could, the runoff pulling at her feet with each step. At one landing she misstepped and fell to her hands and knees. The skin tore from her palms and knees as she caught herself. Sudden fire from the pain broke through the coolness of the water. She could see the boat missing from the dock from where she knelt. Looking out over the bay without standing up, she finally spotted Xander, rowing hard toward the other side. She yelled his name, but it was torn from her lips by the wind. Scrambling back to her feet, she continued down as quickly as she could.
Xander’s muscles burned as he pulled at the oars. A couple of waves had threatened to swamp the boat, crashing over the side. A pool of water filled the bottom up to his ankles. The lights on the island were barely visible through the rain and he was already exhausted. When lightning arced overhead for the second time, he let reason win and turned the boat around. He could still make out the Brighton House’s dock though it seemed far too close for the length of time he’d been out on the water. As tired as he’d become, it was still much farther than he wanted it to be.
Hero clambered over the beams of the dock on all fours, agonizing over the slowness of it. When she finally made her way to the small platform at the end, she clung to the outermost pole as waves washed over her feet. There was nothing she could do but yell into the wind, and as useless as it seemed, yell she did. He was there, out on the bay, and not too far. Her heart leapt as the boat began to turn around. And then she screamed.
A large wave formed by a strong gust of wind lifted the small boat as it swept toward its inexorable death on the shore. It lifted the boat as if making a fist around it and with the flimsy thing firmly in its grasp slammed it down into the next swell, capsizing it. Hero watched in horror as Xander rose at first with the tiny craft, then was cast out of it, splashing soundlessly into the hungry ocean. She called for him again as she saw him break the surface far from the now upside down rowboat and as if he could hear her he began to swim toward the dock.
With her arms wrapped around her support, there was nothing Hero could do but watch helplessly. Her throat began to grow hoarse as she screamed his name again and again. At first he seemed to be doing well. The waves carried him closer as he struck out freestyle, arm over arm, with all his strength. His body rose and fell as each crest slipped beneath him and away, drawing him toward the shoreline, where the waves beat one after another against the cliffs. Occasionally he would disappear under the water, only to surface again. Hero’s breath matched his disappearance and reappearance. Each time she found herself holding her breath longer, only to let it out in a sigh of stressed relief when his head broke the water. Each time he did, she called to him again.
Finally, on what seemed to Hero to be the thousandth time he’d gone under and come back up, he made eye contact and his weakening stroke became strong again. Xander surged forward and hope rose in Hero’s chest. He was only 500 feet away when Zach rushed by Hero in a lifejacket with another in his hand and dove into the water. The fierce waves quickly ripped the spare vest away and his progress was impeded as he swam against the current. Hero yelled to Xander and pointed at Zach. Xander paused, saw his father and swam toward him. The two pulled toward each other ever so slowly while Hero tried to remember to breathe.
Another huge wave swept over Xander, picking him up and tossing him beneath the surface. Zach continued to make his way toward where he had disappeared while Hero waited for him to resurface as he had so many times already. A minute passed and Zach swam on while the waves pushed him back, only his life vest keeping him from being dragged under as well. Time crept onward and there was no sign of Xander. Hero began screaming his name again, begging him to swim, to fight, to come back. Zach finally reached the area he had gone under, but couldn’t dive with the vest. He thrashed around, searching for his son, but too quickly the storm carried him back toward the dock. There was no sign of Xander.
Five minutes, then ten, then fifteen minutes passed. Zach made his way back to the dock, where Hero helped him out of the water. She looked up at him hopefully, though she knew better, and felt her heart shatter when he solemnly shook his head. He looked drained. She threw herself into his arms, bawling into the padding of the life jacket. Zach held the girl while her body racked with sobs and stared out at the water. Quiet, broken tears rolled down his face, indiscernible from the rain.
* * *
&n
bsp; It was a bright morning, all signs of the storm gone. Hero sat with Zach in Ambrosia, drinking double mochas in Xander’s memory and barely speaking. Zach looked exhausted and Hero was certain she didn’t look much better. She had fallen asleep late that night in Xander’s bed, wearing an oversized sweatshirt from his closet that she had never seen him wear. By the time she’d drifted off into an uncomfortable, restless sleep, she’d had to trade one pillow for another. The first was too wet with her tears.
The smells seemed dull this morning, even the aroma of the coffee barely reaching through the ache in her chest. Search and Rescue had found no sign of Xander by the time they had called off the search for the night. The radio in the coffee shop was, of course, playing a song that made her think of him. She swallowed to keep herself from crying again.
Hero watched Zach as he drank from his mocha, sighing at the mannerisms her lover had obviously picked up from his father. He looked like a ghost of himself, though from the obvious intentional squaring of his shoulders she could see he was trying to stay strong. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose both the love of his life and his son both within two years. It was hard enough to imagine what tomorrow would be like without Xander.
A car pulled up outside the café, though it barely registered through Hero’s heavy thoughts. The door opened and closed, and a tall figure stepped out. She didn’t look up until he had started to push the door open and was halfway inside. His clothes and blond hair still looked wet and his blue eyes scanned the room, brightening when he saw them.
“Xander!” she yelled in her excitement, trying to get up out of her chair as the door closed behind him. The pullover she wore caught in the the chair and she struggled to free it.
“Hey!” he greeted them as he came up. Hero couldn’t figure out for the life of her how to get her pullover unstuck.
Zach stood and hugged his son tight. “I don’t have words for how glad I am to see you, Son,” he said.
“I’m glad to see you too, Dad. And you, Hero. Are you ok?” Xander asked, noticing her predicament.
“I stuck on this goddamn chair,” she answered as she found the hook she was caught on and started to work the cloth off of it.
“How did you get back?” Zach asked.
Xander nodded and answered as he waited for Hero to detach herself. “After I went under, I came up and bumped my head on a piece of driftwood. I clung to it and finally swam, well, washed up on shore ten miles down the coast this morning. I hiked to the highway and got a ride back. Took a while.”
“That’s amazing!” Hero exclaimed. “I’m so, so happy to see you.” She finally unhooked her shirt and threw herself into his arms. To her shock, she threw herself right through him like running through a ghost. A bewildered expression cross his face as she passed through his body and crashed to her knees on the floor. The shock of the pain woke her up.
Hero opened her eyes, her heart beating fast. She had finally cried herself to sleep in Xander’s bed, surrounded by his blankets and her arms wrapped tight around one of his pillows. Her parents had begged her to stay at Jaimie’s, but she had refused. If the Search and Rescue team called Zach with news, she wanted to be close by.
She wondered how long she had been asleep. The exhaustion in her muscles and the lingering headache from crying made her think it hadn’t been more than a few hours. The dream haunted her thoughts and after tossing and turning for a while longer, she wrapped a blanket around herself and went down to the library. Zach was there, his chair pulled all the way up to the fireplace. He prodded the embers absentmindedly with a fire poker and didn’t look up as she came in.
“Couldn’t sleep either?” he asked without a change in his behavior.
“No, I had a dream of him coming back safely, but it turned out he wasn’t really there.”
“I know what you mean. Every sound makes me jump a little, hoping Neptune only mistook him for Ganymede and will return him unharmed.”
“Is that from a poem?” she asked, curling up in the oversized chair Xander had always sat in.
“Your poem, actually,” Zach replied with a sigh.
“My poem? What do you mean?”
“There’s a poem by Christopher Marlowe. The female protagonist is named Hero. Her lover is taken by the god of the sea, but is returned with the gift of a bracelet that will protect him from drowning.” Zach sighed. “If only real life was like that,” he said bitterly. “I would be Orpheus and retrieve my wife and son both from the grasp of Hades.”
Hero’s heart ached for the pain in the strong, loving man who seemed to have dwindled to nothing in the last flickering shadows cast by the dying fire. His mini-lecture made her smile wistfully. “He was just like you, you know? Always talking about poems and Greek heroes.”
Zach nodded. “He was the best of us both, his mother and I. She would have loved you like the daughter she never had, Hero.”
“I’m sure I would have loved her too. She sounds like an amazing woman.”
“She was. You can thank her for Xander’s romantic streak.”
Hero smiled sadly and shook her head. “I think he had two wonderful examples, not just one.”
“Thank you,” Zach said quietly, lost in thought. The conversation drifted into silence, the tragedy of their lives weighed on them both so heavily it made it hard to speak further. Hero was surprised to find the quiet didn’t bother her as much as she expected it would. Zach’s presence was company enough. It wasn’t longer before she found herself yawning and slipped back into the arms of sleep.
The phone rang, playing ‘Run to the Water’ by Live, a song Zach’s wife had loved. It woke Hero and she looked up hopefully. Zach looked like she felt as he reached for the phone.
“Zach McConnell,” Zach answered. There was a pause as the person on the other line spoke. “Yes. Okay. I’ll be right there.”
“What is it?” Hero asked.
“Someone just reported a body on the shore. The sheriff wants me to come down to identify it. Do you want to come? I’m not sure it’s something you want to see,” he said gently.
“I’m coming. I want to know he’s gone.”
Zach nodded solemnly. “Alright. Let’s go.”
The Thorns of Life
“If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O Uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,
As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.”
Zach read from “Ode to the West Wind” as he presided over Xander’s funeral service a week later in the garden behind the Brighton House. The coffin was closed. Xander’s body had been found the day after he drowned, washed up on the rocks inland from the mansion. A picture of him that Hero had taken at her birthday party stood in a frame next to the casket, surrounded by white lilies. She sat in the front row in a simple, modest black dress and matching heels. To please her mother, she wore a black, wide-brimmed sun hat and a black mesh shawl over her shoulders. Her left hand lay in her lap while her right rested against her belly. She had not yet begun to show, but she imagined she could feel the life growing there.
“While we mourn,” Zach began, “my son would be complaining. He would want us to celebrate his life, to recognize the fullness of it, and how well he lived. He believed that we should seize the day, every day. When his mother died, he did as she asked and held a wake for her. He was too young to have put mu
ch thought into his own funeral, but I am certain he would have wanted those of you who dance to do so in his memory.” He lowered his head for a moment. When he lifted it again he went on.
“I have lost a son and a wife, so it is hard for me to find the motivation to seize this day. I feel as though Atlas himself shifted his burden, the world, to my shoulders. I want to run, to bury myself in books and work and leave life behind for a while. Xander, however, would have none of that. Where I have lost a son and wife, I have gained, in a way, a daughter.” He paused and looked at Hero, who nodded. Those in the gathering who knew her looked her way, curious as to what was going on. Anna took Hero’s hand between hers and patted it comfortingly.
“Xander found love before the ocean swept him away from us. In Hero DiBenedetto he found the one he imagined himself living, working, and spending his life with. When dancing in the rain had become something we’d lost with his mother, he found it again in Hero. He often spoke of their connection when they were dancing, how well they fit when they were working to restore the house, the way he couldn’t take his eyes off of her when they were in the same room. . . Even after she slapped him when they first met. If that’s not love. . .” He trailed off suggestively and laughter rose gently from the crowd.
“Hero has generously agreed to continue her work and will be a partner under her mother’s guidance in Brighton Contracting and Interior Design. Hero,” he said directly to her. “You were my son’s heart, and I would consider you family even were the circumstances different than they are.”
The West Wind Page 16