While you prepare your cup of tea think of a forest, a cool rain forest at twilight. You’re walking on an ancient trail that winds through and between thick ferns, the air is full of the scent of wild orchids. There are no sounds save for your breathing and the wind passing through the impossibly tall redwoods that tower overhead…

Are you alone?

Is it possible to ever really be alone?

[Blind Faith \\ Can’t Find My Way Home]

Chapter 4

“Why, Mom? Why’d you do it?” Tracy asked her mother as they walked home after school.

“Mr. Murphy thought it would be a good idea. So did I – at the time.”

“So after all these years not telling anyone, now everyone knows he was my dad?”

Rebecca nodded as she walked into the house, then she walked straight into the living room and up to the huge window that looked out over the water. The afternoon fog she’d felt building was now rolling in and she held onto herself, warding off the coming chill. “Maybe we should get a few logs. This feels like a good night for a fire.”

“You’re changing the subject again, aren’t you?”

“I don’t know what to say, Tracy,” Rebecca sighed. She remembered an afternoon just like this one, only with Sam standing next to her as they’d watched another thick fog rolling in. She closed her eyes, could almost feel him standing by her side, feel his heart beating next to hers. They’d known each other only a few weeks but already she was sure he was the one.

“It’s getting cold out,” she remembered him saying. “Don’t you need a sweater?”

“Let’s put on a fire. My dad’ll be home soon and it’ll be nice to have a fire going.”

They’d gathered armfuls of split logs and Sam had stood back and watched as she got the fire going, then they’d sat and waited for her father to come home from work.

And they’d waited. And waited.

Until the assistant station master called and told Rebecca that her father had been taken to Tacoma General Hospital. It wasn’t all that far away but Sam drove her anyway, and when they arrived at the emergency room they learned her father had been rushed straight to surgery.

Yet no one there could tell her what had happened.

So she and Sam had sat and waited.

“What are you thinking about, Mom?” Tracy asked.

“Another foggy evening. A long time ago.”

“You look lost, Mom. Is everything okay?”

“I feel lost, Tracy. Lost inside an echo, like I’m caught inside a hall of mirrors.”

“Mom?”

“Hm-m? What?”

“You want me to cook dinner tonight?” her daughter asked.

She smiled at the echo, remembered Sam saying almost exactly the same thing when they’d finally returned from the hospital. The fire in the fireplace had grown cold, so cold that not even embers remained, and she’d felt so hollowed out by the pain of her father’s passing that the clinging fog outside had felt ambivalent. Without saying a word Sam had rebuilt the fire then disappeared inside the kitchen and made their dinner. He held her through the remains of the night and didn’t let go during the many gales that followed.

In the aftermath of it all, Sam’s oldest and best friend, Dave Mason, had driven up from Santa Barbara to lend a hand. There’d been the inevitable lawyers and the hospital bills and all the other paperwork Rebecca needed to sort through, and yet all those things had seemed to dull the reality of her father’s passing – at least for a while. But Dave had always been good at such things and as spring turned to summer the three had grown inseparable. They drove up to Paradise and walked the trails on Mount Rainier’s sun facing flanks, camped under the stars as the west wind carried them deeper into the night, and one weekend the three ventured north to Port Townsend and went sailing on a friend’s boat.

Then the boys – as she’d taken to calling them by then – did what they’d done since high school: they pulled out their guitars and their notebooks and they began writing songs. Rebecca sat and listened as their efforts took on a life all their own, and she knew those star-kissed nights and days on the sound had become a part of the tapestry her boys had created with her. 

She was majoring in English. She understood poetry – and it was over that magic summer that she realized Sam was something of a genius. A quiet Shakespeare kind of genius. He pulled words from the sky the way magicians conjured rabbits from hats, words that spoke to the soul, phrasing that seemed rooted in a deep understanding of life. And she was smart enough to keep her distance during these marathon writing sessions, contenting herself to sit bare-footed on the sofa and listen as the boys’ imaginations took on the shapes and forms of their summer together.

They made a demo reel and set off to downtown Seattle in search of someone who might listen to their work and perhaps lend a helping hand. They talked to other struggling musicians working the coffee houses, managed to get a radio disc jockey to listen once, but it wasn’t enough. They weren’t ready yet. Dave was shattered and limped back to Santa Barbara and as autumn approached Sam and Rebecca drove down to Portland to start their last year of college…

…yet something had changed…

…though Rebecca felt that change soon enough. Morning sickness and missed periods, followed by a trip to student health services, and she learned that motherhood beckoned. Sam smiled the smile of the terror-stricken, told Dave he could see his whole life unspooling in the dark like a cheap Saturday matinee and then someone told him that health services could point the way to an abortion – but the word hit him like a hammer blow, left him breathless and inexplicably sad. Rebecca had never once mentioned the word before and so he knew she wanted the child too, and there was never anything else said about the matter. They were going to have a baby; it was as simple as that.

They graduated from college and Sam moved into Rebecca’s father’s house on North 11^th Street in Tacoma, Washington. Dave came up again to lend a hand; Sam and Dave painted the baby’s bedroom and then they pulled Rebecca’s old baby furniture up from the basement and she scrubbed all the old bits and pieces until they were squeaky-clean – and Dave watched as Sam slipped into the role of expectant father while not giving this change in life so much as one carefree thought. 

‘So, that’s what love does?’ Dave Mason asked himself as he watched the change overtake his friend.

And then, a few weeks later Tracy came into their lives.

Rebecca turned away from the window and the fog and looked at her daughter. Sam had been gone for years, and Dave too, so Tracy was all that remained of that impossible love, of that unlikeliest communion. “I guess I thought our past might get in the way of the future, but Tracy, don’t take that secrecy to mean that I didn’t cherish every minute I had with your father. I think I wanted…didn’t want all of the confusion I felt…”

“Mom? Please don’t cry…”

Rebecca looked at her daughter, at Sam’s daughter, and she still recognized his eyes in Tracy’s. “It’s not easy, Tracy. Even now.”

“I remember him, you know? Every now and then I catch a flash of memory and I can see him again – just for a moment. Almost like I captured him inside one of those…a stereopticon, I think…and he’s with me again. It’s weird, Mom, because I can feel him. Like he’s really with me, even though I know that can’t really be true…”

“Are you sure about that?”

“What?”

“Are you sure he’s not still with you, maybe on some level you couldn’t possibly understand?”

“Mom? What are you saying?”

“I’m not saying anything, Tracy. I’m asking you a question. Can you really be so sure?”

© 2024 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, every last word of it…

[Sting \\ Down Down Down]