Eyes wide, the crowd held their breath as the fast-moving water below the bridge enveloped the car and dragged it, and me, to the bottom of the channel, leaving nothing but bubbles. Over a hundred stunned people simultaneously dialed 911, several shined flashlights and searched the water’s surface, while a few others jumped in only to need rescue moments later. Emergency personnel boats were summoned and divers were dispatched but the channel current was too much. They shook their heads and stared east. “Probably washed out to sea.” Much like my life. Grief counselors arrived and consoled those affected by what they saw. Two days later, beachcombers found my torn shirt along with my pants and one shoe. A half mile downriver, the car was discovered in eighty feet of water and hauled to the surface. Articles were removed. A gym bag containing half a bottle of gin, an empty bottle of tonic, Costa Del Mar sunglasses, a spinning rod and reel, a fillet knife, sunscreen, a five-gallon gas can, and several laminated maps. DNA tests confirmed it was my car.
While some of the country was immune to my death, much was not. A memorial service was held a week later. Crowds of mourners, gawkers, and the just plain curious filled the beach east of the bridge, stood in the rain holding tear-stained books, pressing ever closer to an impromptu and growing shrine. The national media were in full attendance. A local priest officiated. He regretted that he had not met me and said something about “beauty for ashes.” If there was beauty, it escaped those standing on the beach.
In the months that followed, news agencies milked the story for everything it was worth. Documentaries, hour-long features, two- and three-part investigative pieces. Conspiracy theories abounded. An unauthorized biography, “years in the making,” hit the shelf three months after the crash. My backlist titles climbed the best-seller lists once again. A concrete marker was erected on the beach, giving permanence to the shrine. A local vendor, claiming to be an eyewitness, sold T-shirts, cups, mouse pads, coolies, and paperback copies of my books. “Signed” first editions that I don’t ever remember signing popped up for sale from collectors. A local university endowed a writing scholarship for the verbally challenged. Another endowed a chair in the writing program. On the first anniversary of my death, the movie of the story of my life was released in theaters across the country. One of my favorite actors played me. Did a good job, too. Fans stood in line. At the end of the day, I became far more famous in death than I’d ever been in life. In the five years that followed, journalists, commentators, bloggers, prognosticators, and anyone with a voice and the energy to broadcast it exhausted every detail of my gifted, tragic, and short-lived life, leaving no stone unturned.
But… they never found the book.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I woke on the beach. Naked. Cold. Sea foam clouding my face. A fiddler crab nibbling at my nose. I knew a couple of things: I did not know how I got there but to get anywhere else was going to require help. I knew I was alive not because of the blinding sunlight, smell of salt, or sound of seagulls but because of the searing pain in my chest and throat.
I lifted my head, looked around. Beach left curving out of sight. Beach right curving out of sight. White sand. Lots of trees. Noisy birds. No people. My thoughts were thick, garbled, and slow in coming. Must be something of an island. Oddly, when I closed my eyes I found the same condition.
I did not want to be alive and wasn’t quite sure how I’d managed it. Evidently, I swam a distance farther than people thought to look. I heard footsteps. Crunching sand. Then he appeared. Dressed in white. Robes flowing. He stooped down, shading my face. My eyes took a second to focus. He said, “There are a lot of people looking for you.”
I nodded.
He paused, stared down the beach, then back at me. “Do you want to be found?”
It was a simple question. It was the answer that was complex. “… No.”
He nodded. Another pause. “For how long?”
There used to be a British rock band named Queen. Maybe there still is. Anyway, I think I remember them singing a song called, “Who Wants to Live Forever?” I think it was part of the sound track to a movie, Flash Gordon, about a guy who died. Woke up in another world. I heard the song in my head and knew it was not me. For the first time my eyes focused on his face and I was quite certain I’d never seen eyes that blue. I whispered, “F-forever.”
He stood up. “Well, come on then. If you stay here you really will die.”
I stood up, then fell down. Stood again, and fell a second time. Stood a third time and he caught me. I leaned on him. He said, “You can’t very well go walking around like this.” He lifted his outer robe over his head. Beneath it, he wore black slacks, black shoes, black shirt, white collar. He slipped the robe over my head and shoulders, helped me feed my arms through. It draped about me.
One foot in front of the other.
We walked through the woods to the other side of the island, where he’d beached his boat in a protected cove. A twenty-four-foot Pathfinder with a Yamaha 250. Turns out, he was a priest with a fishing addiction. I fell into the bow. My head was spinning. I wasn’t sure if it was the gin, or the crash, or both. I scratched the back of my head, where I discovered that most of the hair was missing. Singed short. I tenderly touched the skin on the back of my head and shoulders. It was tender. I remember seeing flames wrap around me but nothing after that.
I said, “H-how long ago did I…?”
He lifted the power pole, cranked the engine, and spoke without looking at me. “Three days ago.”
It was not the gin. Dehydration maybe. “D-do you h-have any water?”
He handed me a bottle. It was cold. Condensation dripped down the side. I drank it. Then another. And another. Focus became easier.
He put the engine in gear and began idling out of the shallow water. He turned to me. “What shall we call you?”
I hadn’t thought about this. I hadn’t thought about any of this. The thought of not dying had never occurred to me. My mind was reeling with the question, What do I do now? I didn’t want to be called anything because I didn’t want anyone to call me. I shrugged, shook my head.
He nodded, pursed his lips, considered this. A moment passed. “How about ‘Sunday’?”
“What?”
“Sunday.”
“You mean l-like the d-day of the week?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
The world was still fuzzy and not much was making sense, but this made no sense at all. “Why… S-Sunday?”
“It’s my favorite day of the week.”
That made even less sense. I guess my blank stare convinced him of this. “What…?
“It marks the beginning. A fresh start.”
I suppose there was some method to his madness. The word “Sunday” rattled around the inside of me. I looked at him. He’d slipped on some sunglasses. I stood, squinting. He flipped up the seat behind him, grabbed a second pair, and handed them to me. “Here, this’ll help with the glare.” They did. Muting the pounding in my head. He pushed the stick forward and quickly shot us up on plane. The wind tugged against the sheet I was wearing. I turned to him. None of this made sense. “Wh-what do I call you?”
“Steady.”
I shook my head and grabbed the stainless-steel bar that framed the center console. “No, I’m n-not feeling very s-steady.”
He smiled. “No, that’s my name.”
“ ‘Steady’ is your n-name?”
He nodded.
I stared across the water. The world had changed since I’d left it. Little made sense. I shut my mouth, moved to the front of the boat, closed my eyes, and let the breeze press against me. I thought about the kids. The hospital. Jody. Rod. Monica. The orphanage. My bunk. Life as I once knew it.
A lot changed that day. Everything changed.
Well, almost.
With no spouse and no children, Steady had one hobby. One addiction outside of the church. Fly-fishing. He was a tarpon fanatic. And I thought I knew a lot about fishing. Years back, he’d bought a
small island and fixed up the cabin on it. It was his retreat. His quiet place on stilts. His waterfront view of the world. He took me there. “This island has an odd history. Folks used to make moonshine here during the Depression. Then, others used it to store dope when they were running it up from Cuba. Then, still others moved cocaine through here from South America.” He waved his hand across the mangroves and mosquitoes. “Make yourself at home.”
I didn’t know much about its history but people who do those things don’t do them in places that are easy to find. They pick places that are tough to get to. That don’t appear on maps. This place was one of those.
My life changed. No phone. No address. No expectation. I changed the way I slept, ate, drank, and how I spoke. Folks once told me that I couldn’t overcome my stutter; well… they hadn’t lived my life and didn’t drive off a bridge at a hundred and forty miles per hour. If my thoughts don’t stutter, why should my mouth? At least, that was my thinking. The only thing that did not change was the way I thought. I could not change who I was before I opened my eyes. I studied the water’s surface. Read fish movement. And told stories. The thing that told me I wasn’t dead was a broken heart. I could still feel that. I retreated into the Glades, the Ten Thousand Islands, the waters of the gulf in and around Florida, and I’ve been there ever since.
Once I recovered, I started remembering in bits and pieces. I remember feeling the car break through the concrete, vault over the side of the bridge, dive, and rotate slightly. I remember the shatter of glass, the heat on my neck from the flames, the engine whining, and then the impact, the airbag slamming against my face and the water pouring in. Swallowing me. I remember watching the manuscript in the plastic bag, the much-awaited book, lift off the seat as the water rushed in. I could have grabbed it but I didn’t. I just let it go. I didn’t want to be a writer anymore and I didn’t want anything to do with that or any other book. For so long I had believed in the divine power of words. But there was nothing divine in Jody’s death or what her death did to the hospital.
As the water rushed in, pinning me against the seat, the thought running across my brain was not the next breath or swimming to the surface, but why?
That was nine years and 197 days ago.
People have long asked how could the death of an innocent young woman who was not my daughter or wife affect me so much? Did I have an “inappropriate relationship” with Jody? The question offends me and, no, I did not. I loved her but everybody loved her. Jody’s death hurt me but it wasn’t her dying that sent me through the concrete wall at a hundred and forty miles an hour.
The bus that hit Jody broke or shattered thirty-seven bones in her body. After all she had already suffered and survived, I simply could not—then or now—make sense of that. Jody died of internal injuries and the bleeding that resulted. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men could do nothing but stand around and watch. In shock and disbelief, I drove to the spot where she was hit, her blood still staining the street, and found myself screaming at the top of my lungs, “If this is how all our hopes and love and good intentions end, then why not put a bullet through each one of us and call it a day? Why put us here, give us each other, and fill us with dreams and gifts and expressions, only to spill them across the street like cheap paint!”
We buried Jody, her tender echo faded from the hospital halls, and I found myself in an angry place where joy is fleeting and suffering is constant. Where the power of words rests not in what they could do, but in what they couldn’t. So I pushed my foot through the floorboard and took a meteor shot off the southern tip of the continent hoping to drown myself in gin and salt water, and bury me and my gift at the bottom of the channel. Three days later, I woke naked on the beach to a wrinkled old man in a white robe, smoke rings exiting his mouth, and a fishing pole in his hand.
Steady took me home, did his best to address the wound. But I never let him at it, so I’ve been hemorrhaging for a decade. Then a few weeks ago, for reasons maybe only Steady understands, he shoved the jagged piece that is you in the gaping hole that is me.
And it worked. I stopped bleeding. The evidence is in your hands.
There’s one more thing: Door number three is not an exit. Not a way out. For you, it’s a backstage dressing room where you can hear the performers on the stage and the audience response, but you’re forever barred from joining the show. For me, a world filled with paper, but no ink. On this side of the door, we live alone with our memories, stripped of the expression of the gift but not the remembrance of it—or the need to use it. That remains and grows. Unsatisfied.
Katie, turn around, walk back through. Write your own story. Start with a clean page. One with no words. Where the ending, the next turn, next twist, next reveal, next conflict that demands a resolution, is unwritten. And where the resolution is unscripted. And when you get there, standing in the spotlight on a pedestal made for one, spill your bag of pieces on the stage and tell the world—tell them all the way back in the cheap seats—“This was once me… but it isn’t anymore.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I hitchhiked home. Couple of guys in a thirty-year-old Ford pickup carried me to Everglades City. I wasn’t very hungry, but I bought some groceries. Fifteen minutes after being home, I admitted that in all my time aboard this or any boat, I’d never felt more alone.
The argument in my head was two-sided: I should’ve done something, anything, to keep her from hurting herself. The flip side argued that, in reality, what could I do? Even if I hovered over her like a helicopter 24/7. If someone is bent on hurting herself, she’ll find a way to do it. She was a grown woman; sooner or later, she was responsible for herself.
It didn’t help much and I didn’t believe it, either.
I spent the evening on the back of the boat, staring out across the Milky Way, watching shooting stars scratch the underside of heaven’s floor. Mosquitoes were buzzing my head. I lit a citronella candle and when they finished laughing at it they kept buzzing my head. I was chewing on something Steady once told me: “By your words you’ll be acquitted, and by your words you’ll be condemned.” When he said this, he was pointing his finger in my face.
Sitting on the back of that boat, I was wrestling with that. I thought a lot about Jody, Rod, and Monica, the kids on the floor gathered around me as I read, the shuffling feet, long faces, big round eyes, the scars, Band-Aids, IV lines, approving looks from doctors and nurses, my life before this one. There was a time when I would have done anything for those kids. Anything. When the reservoir of my hope was deeper than I ever imagined. Deep enough to live by. But, now? Some might say I’m a coward. Maybe that’s true. Pain is a powerful deterrent. Especially pain of the heart. I know that. And I think Isabella Desouches knows that, too.
I sat there trying to name that thing that scared me. The fear I walked around with, or walked around with me. The fear that had me living all alone on a boat in the middle of nowhere where nobody could get to me and nobody could hurt me and nobody could make me cry. And yet, there were tears on my face. The image appeared: the hospital. The idea of setting foot in that hospital, sitting on the floor and reading a story to a bunch of misfits, scared me. I’d seen what it had done. Could do. Then I saw what it couldn’t. And somewhere in there, I broke.
I cried loud and long. Ten years’ worth of tears.
I woke as the sun cracked the tops of the mangroves. I’d slept in a chair so I was stiff. I brewed some coffee and sat with my legs in the water. Trout in the current called to me, my poles hung above me idly, but I didn’t want to fish. I didn’t want to do anything. I spent the day moping around. Feeling sorry for Katie. Feeling sorry for me.
At noon, I called Steady. He listened, and said little. The truth hurt him. And, in retrospect, his tone of voice told me he was disappointed. That we’d failed. That I’d failed. I told him I’d stay close to home in case, for some reason, she decided to find me. She might feel safe here. He hung up quietly and I didn’t wander out of
eyesight or earshot from my boat until the days ran into weeks.
But Katie never showed.
By April, I was knee-deep in a pity party so I drove out to the memorial. The place was packed. Three hundred boats dotted the waterline. People were swimming and partying everywhere. The swollen masses surprised me. I stopped and asked one man in a float tube with a beer in his hand, “What’s all the commotion?”
He looked at me like I’d lost my mind. He proffered his beer at me. “Dude, it’s Easter.”
In my solitude, I’d lost track. “Oh yeah, sure. Right.”
I circled the growing circus of anchored boats. Kids in floats, Jet Skis cutting the water, go-fast boats sitting restless, bikini-clad Coppertones from South Beach, beached whales from Long Beach, and the purely curious. The air smelled of coconut rum, cigarette smoke, suntan lotion, and pot. The number of white PVC crosses driven into the ocean floor numbered more than a hundred. All shapes and sizes. It looked like a game of pick-up sticks gone awry.
I shook my head and put the whole scene in my wake. Soon they really would have a reason to mourn. In the few times I’d talked with Steady, he had not heard from her. No email. No voicemail. No “To whoever finds this letter” letter. We called her cell phone, the one from the safe-deposit box, but she never answered and neither did voicemail. My guess was that Katie had gone quietly. In her own way. Her own time. No witnesses. Regardless, I felt it was only a matter of time before someone found the body.
The pain in my chest was an ache without expression. I found it difficult to breathe.
I took to the backwater and got lost in old alligator and mangrove trails that no man had ventured into in a long time. Late afternoon I made my way home. The sun was setting.
Katie was ever on my mind. In truth, she was all I thought about. I wondered how she’d done it. And how was I going to live with myself when I found out. While I couldn’t answer any of that, I knew I needed closure. Maybe Steady did, too. I’d stayed gone long enough.