by Nancy Adams
“Sorry, sweetie,” Beth said with a benevolent look.
“It’s okay. You’re not the only one that wants to know everything about Sam Burgess.”
“I wasn’t being nosey, sis,” Beth contested. “I was generally worried for you. I mean, you got no one to talk to about this, I at least thought I’d offer you a shoulder if this latest news was getting you down.”
“You’re actually not the only one that knows,” Claire commented.
“No?!” Beth exclaimed in a whisper. “You told Paul?”
“Yes—well, not exactly; he found out.”
“How’d he find out?”
“When we got back from the hospital, he switched on the TV and it was news about Sam and this woman he’s been seeing. Anyway, I couldn’t help but become sad the moment I saw it. I’d just gotten back from having his baby and there, on the television, was his face, gazing at me with news about some woman he’d been recorded having sex with. I went cold; it was awful. Paul saw my reaction and figured it out.”
“He figured it out just from that?” Beth asked incredulously.
“He knew that I’d been in the hospice with Marya and Sam already and he remembered me going cold when Sam was mentioned before. I guess he went on a hunch.”
“Some hunch,” Beth remarked.
“Anyway, when he asked me directly—if Sam was the father—I couldn’t help but tell him the truth.”
“And how’d he take it?”
“He was angry at first. But then he realized how hurt I was and he became really supportive. Since then, he’s not mentioned it.”
“Man, he’s good,” Beth let out as she took another sip of coffee.
“Yeah,” Claire mused as she too drank a little java.
“But, anyway, seriously; you good about it all?”
Claire gently sighed and her eyes became a little misty, a sad frown creeping its way across her features.
“I guess that I’m moving on,” she said after a moment’s pause, “and why shouldn’t he? Not only has he got me to think about; he’s got Jess and Marya. They’re in his thoughts too.”
“I don’t know,” Beth said thoughtfully. “All those things you told me about him; how sensitive he was; how much he cared for his wife; how much he loves his little daughter; how you felt you could open yourself up to him; how he loved you. All those things don’t add up when you consider that only six months after his wife dying and after he had an affair with you—told you that he loved you—he’s getting with this psychiatrist.”
“He’s a lonely guy who’s just lost the only woman he ever knew,” Claire declared in a soft tone to her friend. “When he’s in his most dark places, he reaches out for someone to hold him. When he was young, he had Marya to hold onto. When she was slipping away, he turned to me. Now he’s lost both of us, it’s obvious that he’d turn to someone else. I don’t judge him for any of that. I just hope that she loves him too and that she’s not what the papers originally said she was. He deserves that, love.”
Beth looked her friend in the eyes and whispered, “You still love him, don’t you?”
Claire sat with a blank expression on her face before muttering the word: “Yes.”
Beth reached across the table and brushed the back of her hand delicately down the side of Claire’s cheek.
“It’s okay, sis,” Beth whispered to her with a motherly smile on her sympathetic face.
Just then, the door burst open and in barged Will from the lounge.
“Hey, ladies,” he said loudly as he went to the fridge, “what you girls talking about, huh? Boys? Girls?! Boys and Girls?!”
“You know what, Will,” Beth said loudly, turning to her man, “you always have a habit of falling asleep long before me at night.”
“Yeah!” he exclaimed with a confused scowl on his face. “What do mean by that?”
“I mean that you fall asleep pretty quickly at night and pretty soundly too, is all.”
Will stood there with the confused expression still furrowing his brows as he took two beers from the fridge, placed them on the counter and removed their caps.
“I still don’t get it,” he said when he’d shoved the fridge door closed with his shoulder.
“I’m just saying that you shouldn’t be so rude to someone who watches over you as you sleep,” Beth put to him.
“Is that a threat, Bethykins?” Will inquired with an impudent grin as he reached the door.
“I’m only saying is all.”
Will left the room and the two friends giggled to themselves after he’d left, Claire’s melancholy of only moments ago having faded through watching the antics of her friends.
An hour or so later, it was time for Paul and Claire to drive back to Claire’s parents for their last night at the Prior house. Because Paul had drunk a few beers with Will, Claire was driving June’s Ford Explorer back. The two sat listening to music as they moved slowly through the nighttime roads of Denver.
About twenty minutes into the trip the latest song ended and Paul pressed pause on the CD player. They’d just emerged out of the city and were motoring along the freeway now, the silhouette of the mountains in the distance standing starkly with the bright night’s sky.
Wondering where the music had gone to, Claire asked, “What’s the matter? You didn’t like the CD?”
Staring forward at the road ahead, Paul said, “Maybe it’s because I’ve had a couple of beers.”
“What’s because you’ve had a couple of beers?” Claire inquired, glancing over at him as she drove. “That you don’t like the music?”
“I was gonna say something when we got back to Maine,” he continued, ignoring her questions, “but seeing as we’re going in the morning, I may as well say it now.”
Claire’s heart dropped. She wasn’t sure what he was about to say. Something in the tone of his voice scared her.
Paul continued, “I didn’t want to create an air of tension these past two weeks, so obviously I was never gonna say anything, but it’s been real hard to keep my mouth shut—especially when that…”
Paul stopped himself here and his face screwed up into a vicious scowl for several seconds, before he got his composure back and it softened.
“Anyway,” he went on, “what I need to tell you is about that first night when I came in your room at night and you were with your dad.”
“Yeah,” Claire muttered, her face taking on a horrified look.
“Anyway, I hadn’t just been passing. I’d been outside for at least five minutes before I came in. I wasn’t lying about going to the bathroom, it’s just it was much sooner and I couldn’t help but stand at the door for a moment and listen. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t’ve done it—it was wrong. But I heard some of the things he said and I couldn’t believe it. Then I heard you and…and…”
Tears had welled up in Paul’s eyes and emotion tugged at his dry throat as he went through what he’d heard come echoing through the door that night, hearing it in his head for the thousandth time these past two weeks. Tears were slowly dropping from Claire’s eyes also, and she wiped them with one hand as her other gripped the steering wheel.
“I’m sorry you got to hear that,” she sobbed. “I didn’t want this to stand between us.”
“Poor Claire,” Paul said tearily as his eyes filled up, “how you carry such immutable secrets around in your heart.”
He reached his hand across the car and touched her cheek with the back of it, catching several of her tears.
Facing her with wet eyes, he announced to her in a soft voice, “You never again have to carry these burdens around on your own back, Claire. All alone. I will help you. Always.”
Claire took his hand in her own, brought it up to her lips and kissed it dearly. For all the darkness, heartache and pain she’d been through over the last ten months, she’d found a true blade of shining light to come crashing through it all and illuminate her soul once again.
In that moment, Claire realized on
ce and for all that she loved Paul.
Just, of course, as she loved Sam.
PART TWO
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Sam,” a female’s voice echoed through the woods like a ghost’s, traveling along a gust of wind that blew leaves into his face and chilled his bones.
Sam held his body tight as he shivered in the windy forest, wondering how he’d gotten there. As the leaves blew about him, he pressed his hand out to fight them away. As he violently pushed them to the side, he began to make out a figure standing ahead of him within the trees.
“Claire?” he mumbled as the figure watched him with its brown eyes.
“Sam,” she called out again in the same ghostly voice.
“Claire?” Sam burst out as he stumbled in the tempest of leaves that whirled around him. “CLAIRE?!”
Sam bolted up in bed, his chest heaving. Someone sat up in the dark next to him and took Sam in her arms. He quickly realized that it was Jenna. She switched on the light and looked at him with compassion. He glanced around and perceived that he was back in the master cabin of his yacht.
“Are you okay?” she asked him in a nurturing voice.
“Yes,” he let out, clutching the chest of his sweat-soaked t-shirt. “Just a bad dream?”
“You wanna tell me about it? I did used to be a shrink, so I know a little about dreams.”
Sam sat there gazing blankly into space for a moment, before turning to her and saying, “You know, I can’t even remember what it was about.”
Having said this, he smiled at her before leaning over and kissing her on the forehead.
“Let’s just go back to sleep,” he said as he laid himself back down.
“Sure,” Jenna replied as she too lay down on the soft mattress of the bed.
She turned the light off and, as she lay there in the dark, falling back to sleep, she felt Sam come up behind her and take ahold of her, spooning his body into hers. He kissed the nape of her neck and they both fell to sleep as one.
The next day they awoke early and went up on deck for breakfast. They’d been sailing around the Mediterranean for two weeks now and were approaching Sicily, where they were due to disembark and stay at a luxurious villa that Sam had bought several years ago. It wasn’t very big, but its situation overlooking a stretch of cliffs made it beautiful, especially as it was over three hundred years old and very rustic, with wooden beams showing in the ceilings and tall, shuttered windows.
Sam and Jenna sat at a table up on deck toward the bow of the hundred-foot, luxurious super-yacht. The crew were bringing them a breakfast of boiled eggs, buttered toast, croissants with jams, Spanish cantaloupe melons, freshly squeezed orange juice and Italian coffee. The total number of crew was nine, including the captain, the first officer, the bosun, two chefs and several deckhands. The crew laid the breakfast out in front of them as Sam and Jenna read newspapers. Surrounding them on all sides were the twirling, crystal blue waters of the Mediterranean sea, the sun’s rays dancing across it in silver sparks. It was a beautiful sunny morning as the boat slid effortlessly through the water toward the large Italian island of Sicily.
After breakfast, they anchored the yacht about half a kilometer off of Sicily and went swimming in the ocean, lowing the jetty off the back. Both Jenna and Sam were proficient swimmers and they dived into the blue water with relish, swimming down into the endless crystalline sapphire, a whole ocean surrounding them. As the pair stretched their bodies through the expanse of liquid, several fish glided by them, their scales glistening in the bright water. Sam and Jenna began circling each other underwater for a while before returning to the surface and then immediately ducking back down into the crystal world of the water. Back down there the two lovers came together and took ahold of each other’s bodies, wrapping their legs together, the sun’s rays bursting through the surface and lighting their bodies up in caustic, wavering lines that traversed their flesh. Under the water, they began kissing, blowing air into each other’s mouths and gripping tightly as they slowly floated downward through the water. Each appeared to hold the other in some kind of dare, who could stay the longest, their oxygen running out, the surface getting further away.
Almost at the same time, they both let go of one another and began racing back to the surface. Seeing that it was quite far away, Jenna began to panic as she scrambled up there. But just as she felt doomed, she burst through the surface and into the sun, gulping in a huge lungful of air. Beside her, Sam burst through too and the pair met back up again, taking ahold of each other and gazing longingly into the other’s eyes.
“My gosh,” she said breathlessly as they embraced at the back of the yacht near the jetty, “I thought I wouldn’t make it.”
“Me too,” Sam replied, his own voice breathless. “I think we should think next time we decide to kiss for so long while underwater.”
“Yeah,” she grinned.
After that, they went back on board and the crew took them to a nice little part off the coast of a small, uninhabited island. In the rocky shallows there were lots of little rock pools and reefs with plenty of colorful fish populating them, all dashing in and out of the rocks and coral. The yacht anchored just off the edge of the shallows where the rocks began. Sam and Jenna took snorkeling kits, and soon after that, they were swimming in the shallows, holding hands as they glided through the water spying all the many fish that inhabited the area.
Finding a suitable rock that stuck out of the water with a flat top, Sam climbed up onto it and offered Jenna his hand. He helped her up so that they both sat there in the sun, cuddled together, gazing out across the series of colorful reefs and rock pools that surrounded them in the bright blue water, the yacht anchored in the distance, the small island behind them, nothing more than a few trees and some jagged rocks upon it.
“It’s so beautiful here,” Jenna said. “Have you ever been here before?”
“To Sicily, yes, but never here. My crew found it recently when they were taking out some clients of ours. But I have to say it’s very nice.”
Glancing back at the island, Jenna said, “That island is so desolate all the way out here. Those trees, how they’ve survived for probably hundreds of years all the way out at sea.”
“Shall we eat lunch there?” Sam asked glancing back at the desert island himself.
Jenna grinned and said that she would like that very much.
They sat there for another twenty minutes, holding each other and gazing out at the divine magnificence that enveloped them. After lowering themselves back into the water, they swam back to the boat. When they came on board, Sam informed the captain that he and Jenna would be taking lunch on the island. Several crew members loaded the small dingy that was attached to the back of the yacht with a table, chairs and everything else they needed to set a small space of the island up as a dining area. They set off and a little later came back to fetch the food, Jenna and Sam.
Soon, the couple was sitting on the island eating Shrimp Fettuccine Alfredo and drinking a nice Italian Pinot Grigio. Leaning over them were the great, knotted branches of the largest of the three trees on the island, acting like a sheltering arm and keeping them shaded from the bright sun as they ate.
All around them, the shimmering sapphire sea moved in choppy little waves and the two felt, once the crew had returned to the yacht, completely isolated out there. It was a wonderful feeling and Jenna, her back to the yacht as it bobbed in the background, imagined that the two of them were the only beings in the whole world, like Adam and Eve, forever destined to play with one another in the Garden of Eden, to feel no shame, no fear, no outside eyes watching them mercilessly.
“I could live like this forever,” Jenna commented as she sipped her wine.
“Someone would find you eventually,” Sam replied. “Plus, this place isn’t as isolated as you think. Each morning, and then at the end of each day, hundreds of fishing boats come past here not far from this island. You’d have hundreds of eyes belonging to Sici
lian and Neapolitan fishermen on you twice a day, so it wouldn’t be that private.”
“It was only a dream, Sam,” Jenna said with a little grin.
“A good dream, though,” Sam remarked, raising his glass. “To dreaming,” he added as a toast.
“To dreaming,” Jenna replied as she brought her glass up to his.
They sipped their wines, before finishing their food and sitting at a little rock ledge that hung over the water, Jenna nestled into Sam’s flank, their eyes cast out to sea all the way to the glinting horizon.
And beyond.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was the day of the fake letter’s arrival at the Prior household and Claire sat in the lounge of her apartment in Maine, waiting by her mobile telephone, Paul next to her holding her hand. It was now two months since they’d been to Colorado and Claire had waited nervously for this day to come. Maine was two hours ahead of Colorado and it was now half past nine at Claire’s. The mail arrived no later than half past seven in the Prior house and Claire knew that her mother would eagerly be awaiting her results to arrive in the mailbox. In fact, the night before, Claire had spent an hour on the telephone with June, and the mother had constantly gone back to the subject of the exam results and how she was looking forward to them. Claire had felt awful as June had told her how proud she was of her, and had attempted to temper her mother’s enthusiasm by reminding her—as she had many times over the past months—that she’d found this year hard and wasn’t that optimistic. “Nonsense, honey,” June had retorted. “I believe in you. You’ve never failed anything in your life.”
The phone rang out beside Claire making her jump as if it had screamed. An abyss opened up inside of her when she lifted it up and saw ‘Mom’ on its display. She instinctively turned to face Paul and he gave her a soft look.