Any time, any place, any way I could.
“Love you,” I murmured into the wind before I sucked a deep breath into my lungs, coating them with needed oxygen, and then…
I jumped.
King
* * *
I’d always been able to find solace in nature. It might have been my poet’s heart that found the complexities of the earth profound, echoes of my own thoughts and emotions hidden in the movement of the trees and the aching crash of waves across the shore. And I’d picked a good house, a little one, on a cliff of all places just outside Sitka, Alaska, where the trees stood as sentries at my back and the ocean unraveled like a rumpled carpet at my feet. There was beauty in so much of this place, and it was one of the reasons I’d settled on it, but it did little to soothe my desolate soul.
The woman I loved had eyes like the forest floor, dappled in golden daylight, dark with evergreens and light with spring frost. I got lost in the woods behind my house and imagined I was getting lost in the depths of her eyes.
The sea, the sky, and the eternal sunlight of an Alaskan summer reminded me of her too, and I wrote poem after poem about the way she haunted me, but nothin’ could purge the sorrow from me.
So I lived. If you could call it that. Chopped woods, fed the fire at night, read book after book, always returnin’ to The Prince and Paradise Lost because she’d loved those best, and at night in the darkest hours, I thought of her while I held myself in my palm and spilled across my chest. Went to the store, bought groceries, ignored the look of the cashier with red hair who wanted me too much, and went home to do it all again.
It was borin’ as hell, but at the moments when I almost got on the shit second-hand Harley I’d bought to fix up and headed back to Entrance, I reminded myself that Zeus would be home with his babies because of my sacrifice.
It was only a matter of time.
And Eugene kept me updated, sendin’ old-school postcards through the mail filled with his cramped, chicken-scratch writin’ I only had a hope of decipherin’ because I’d been makin’ furniture with him for years and knew his hand.
Danner’d disappeared after my “murder”, but he’d turned up some days later, hog-tied and beaten to a bloody pulp on the steps leadin’ to a Vancouver police station.
Now, seven weeks later, he was finally on trial for murder, corruption, assault, and more. I had no doubt Mr. White’s firm would put him in the metaphorical ground where he belonged.
It wasn’t right of me or fair, but I’d been hopin’ over the last weeks that Cress would’ve made sense of the clues I’d left her and found me. With the help of Uncle Eugene, I’d left a slight trail of bread crumbs, some poems well placed, a hint on the globe, and an email in her inbox advertising a vacation in Sitka. She still wasn’t with me, and I had a feelin’ I’d done a gross disservice to her grief. Even just parted from her as I was, knowin’ she wasn’t dead, I felt half sentient without her.
I sighed gustily, then laughed, thinkin’ of my Cress and how often she sighed dramatically, even when she didn’t mean to be passive-aggressive. Closin’ my eyes, I gave up on the poem I’d been writin’ and flopped back on the grass. The warm sun glowed tangerine behind my lids, and the soft caress of the ocean breeze moved like velvet over my cheek.
“I imagined you in a heaven looking something like this. Warmed by the sun, easy with death, writing in your journal.”
Fuck, but I missed her voice. It was a smooth alto that pealed like bells when she laughed. It was what I almost missed the most, her laughter and makin’ her do it while she stood in my arms and frothed over with mirth.
“Never knew when I joined you there I’d be so angry with you as I am now.”
I frowned because in none of my imaginings was my babe mad at me. A second later, a hot splat landed on my cheek and rolled into my ear.
It was not raining.
My body stilled, bloated with a hope so big it seemed I would fuckin’ burst if I so much as opened my eyes.
But I did.
I had to.
And when I open them, I saw the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen in my fuckin’ life, and that included the day Cress walked to me in a dress caught like dew on her skin durin’ our wedding.
Because she was there, gilded by the sun, dripping hot rain on my face, eyes awash with tears and pain and relief so acute I felt it like a knife in my chest.