Authors: L.L. Muir
Jamison’s first reaction would have been to say “Hell no, I’d never do that.” But if he did, that would leave Skye thinking that her memory of him should be worth more than life itself, and that just wasn’t so.
He wanted her to live, to be happy. If he couldn’t be with her, then...then he couldn’t, but she deserved happiness. She deserved to fall in love with her high school sweetheart, just as he had.
Just as he had.
“You do understand, then? Why I don’t take the loophole?”
“No. You’re wrong, sweeting. And I’m going to prove it.”
She shook her head, not wanting to hear.
“Tell me the truth, now. Why you don’t want to have a life? Is it because you don’t want me to be alone in my misery? Do you think it would be more fair for me to be miserable if you are out there, doing your angel duties, pining away for me, too?”
“I don’t want to forget you.”
“And I don’t want to forget you, but I will. If that’s what it takes to keep you from worrying about me, I’ll do it. After the—” Oh, he couldn’t say it. Couldn’t think about tomorrow. It was miles and miles and miles away. He swallowed hard. “After I get back home, I’ll go to Lucas and ask him to take away my memory of you.” He hugged her to his chest to keep her from reading the lie on his face. He was beyond the ability to act anymore, not with the truth spilling out of his eyes and getting them both wet.
Finally, she spoke.
“You said you didn’t think you could survive my leaving. If you can’t remember, I won’t worry about you so much.”
“And if you take the loophole, your heart won’t be broken either, and I won’t have to worry about you.” He loosened his hold and stepped back. “So, no more talking about how horrible it will be, all right? We have until three o’clock to be together. You’ll take the loophole, promise?”
Eventually, she promised.
“And I will go to Lucas, and we’ll both live happily ever after. Maybe we’ll meet up with Granddad on the other side and have a good laugh.”
“That would be lovely.”
Jamison led her to the blanket and they sat. “That reminds me, though. Will you see Granddad when you get...home? Can you give him a message?”
“I’m sorry. I won’t see him. We won’t be in the same place.”
“Won’t you both be in Heaven?” Jamison took a deep breath and held it.
Skye laughed. “Of course we will. It’s just that Heaven isn’t like one great big room where everyone walks around shaking hands. Life moves kind of in a line. It has nothing to do with time, more to do with progress. Once you enter the flow of life, you are constantly moving, progressing, like a leaf in a stream.
“Sometimes you progress faster than other times. The water moves, you move, but always flowing in one direction.”
“Downhill?”
“Yes. But not in a bad way. Everything just flows. It would be against natural law for something to move against that flow. And since Kenneth is part of that flow, he’s moved on. And who knows where I’ll be dropped into the stream. It could be tomorrow. It could be fifty years ago. To The One who tends to the flow of life, time means nothing.”
Jamison couldn’t help but be excited.
“So, Skye. There is a chance I could go open a phone book and find you. Your life could be overlapping mine right now.”
“Yes. Of course. But Jamie, which name are you going to look for? And how long would you look before you gave up?” She ran her hand down one side of his face. “That’s why you must go to Lucas, when it’s over. I will not have you torture yourself like that.”
Jamison knew she was right. He wondered how many of those hoarder people, with three foot stacks of phone books in their houses, had started out loving a Somerled.
The hours flew by as they lay on the quilt and watched the sun go down and the stars come out. For her sake, he set an alarm on his phone; he only wished they’d gotten no reception up there. And maybe the car could have broken down. With his luck, though, Lanny would send out a search party for them around two so they’d have plenty of time to make it back to the ranch.
They talked about silly things; about how he needed to take the pig shed wood off the tree house. He tried to describe how it smelled, but gave up when he realized they could be discussing other things.
He told her how she was going to love flowers, how she could bite the tip of a honeysuckle bloom and taste what bees spend their short lives dreaming about. Cutting her finger, skinning her knee, and even being stung by those sweet-toothed bees were things that would pale in comparison to chocolate fudge, roller coasters, and band-aids when applied with a kiss.
They spent a good hour talking about kisses alone, then another one testing their theories. When they were done, Jamison nearly wished they’d stuck to the subject of food—nearly.
The final hour was anguish again. 2:05 he held her tight and sobbed, all promises and cheerful subjects forgotten. At 2:30 the alarm went off and he walked her, slowly, to the car, his eyes having finally emptied. By the time he left for home, those reservoirs would be full again, he was sure. Maybe he’d float half-way to Flat Springs. Save gas.
He drove up to the ranch, numb. Around back a single figure stood with a flashlight and waved them over.
“We’ll walk from here,” the Somerled told Skye and took her elbow.
“Let go of her.” Jamison couldn’t keep the growl out of his voice. He might have reacted differently if the guy hadn’t taken her arm, like he wasn’t giving her any choice.
He took her hand and started walking. She didn’t.
“You’re coming?” Skye’s mouth hung open.
“Of course I’m coming. I don’t want you looking at one of these dopes when you...at the last minute.”
She gifted him with a beautiful smile that wobbled through the few tears he’d neglected to shed earlier.
The field could have at least been a bit further away. He was so not going to be as tough as he’d planned.
Lanny stood there, smiling, damn her.
“I’m so glad we didn’t have to send the boys after you.”
Jamison realized she’d dug into his thoughts for that, that there had never been a plan to send anyone after them. He still toyed with the idea of not letting her go so he could see what would happen.
“Stop that.” Lanny gave him a little squeeze. “Be tough for her, Jamison. It’s the last thing you can give her.”
Buchanan was next. “Old Jamison gone, then?”
“Yes.”
Buchanan nodded.
He didn’t know anyone else. That Shawn kid tried to get her attention, but she ignored him, turning instead to Jamison. He started to lift his arms, but a tiny shake of her head stopped him.
“We’ve said it all, haven’t we?”
“Yeah. I guess we have. I love you, sweeting.”
“And I love you, Jamie. You’ll always be my high school sweetheart.”
She was backing away! He hadn’t noticed.
“And you’ll always be mine.” His voice was so small. Did she hear him?
“She heard.” Lanny put a hand on his shoulder.
Skye was near the center now. The Somerleds started humming.
He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t just stand there!
He pulled his shoulder out of Lanny’s grasp and ran to the center, throwing his arms over Skye’s shoulders as if she was that balloon and he couldn’t let her go.
Her face was twisted in a tearless cry.
“Let me go, Jamie.”
“Promise me! Promise me you’ll take the loophole!
“I promise, Jamie. Promise me you’ll speak to Lucas.” She lifted off the ground and put her hands out a little for balance. He would have grabbed her around the waist, but she shook her head. “Promise!”
“I promise.”
“I’ll love you forever.”
He fell to his knees, his empty arms wrapping around his body, his hands digging into his sides.
Skye was whisked into the air and was gone. Burning traces, like sparklers, rained through the air high above him and he watched until there was nothing left.
He rolled into a ball on the ground and waited for the Earth to open up beneath him. When that didn’t happen, he cried Skye’s name for hours, long after his throat was raw. That physical pain was a merciful distraction from the tear in his soul.
In a daze of misery, he mistook the brightening sky for some kind of reprieve, only to realize it was just the sun. It was too much. Fresh tears flooded his bloody throat and he ground his forehead against the soil and fell asleep cursing God.
Jamison woke to the crow of a sick-sounding rooster. A second later, he was hit with cruel joke number one, and number two. Two thirds of the people he loved on this Earth had been taken from it.
He tried to roll over, but something held firm against his back. Cornstalks. The crop circle was gone. Of course.
With little sense of direction in the tall corn, he made his best guess and headed uphill. If he ended up spending the day finding his way out, who cared?
When he emerged at the end of the row, a tractor rolled past him. The driver, dressed in white, tipped his straw hat to him. Jamison flipped the guy off.
He made it to his car and opened the back door to find his change of clothes. Then he changed them, right there, in front of God and everybody. He folded the white clothes and put them in a neat little pile, in the dirt, and...peed on them.
The ladies were standing on the back porch. He didn’t care. Nor did he care how many Somerleds watched him drive over the now-yellow pile, then back over them, then drive over them one last time on his way to the road.
Granddad might have liked that. Or maybe not. But the old man wasn’t around to complain.
By the time he got to the gas station, it was no use. He pulled over and searched his car for his phone. He’d left it in the white pants, then he’d peed on it.
There wasn’t even a bit of change in the car for the phone booth. Hell, there wasn’t even a phone booth to use.
Just as he was trying to remember what his mom had packed in the picnic—so he might trade the attendant something tasty for the chance to use his phone—a pickup pulled in next to him.
Somerleds. Too bad his bladder was empty.
Buchanan jumped out of the back of the truck and walked to Jamison’s window. He considered ignoring him, but rolled his window down an inch instead.
“Yeah?”
“Scoot over.” Buchanan opened his door before he ever thought to lock it and started to sit on him. He escaped to the passenger side just in time. Buchanan’s big white butt missed him by a hair. “You just sleep. We’ll get you home.”
But Jamison couldn’t sleep. He had too much crying yet to do.
***
Seven months later...
“You’re such an idiot.”
Ray grinned as he watched his paper airplane glide out the glassless window to join two-dozen others wedged in the baby cornstalks below, and Jamison was swamped by a wave of déjà vu.
He imagined a flash of brilliant red and yellow leaves covering the ground between tall drying stalks, a smattering of magazine-page airplanes adding to the chaos. Though considering all the times they’d sat up there in the tree house as kids, doing just what they were doing, it was no wonder he’d witnessed this scene before.
His memory blinked and he saw a crop circle superimposed on the field ablaze with afternoon light, but he knew there was only one time of day when most crop circles appeared...and disappeared. Three a.m., the exact hour he’d awakened every night for the past seven months. It was the hour when spirits moved between Heaven and Earth, or so he’d been told. Nurses at his granddad’s Recovery Center had confirmed that more often than not, a patient died between the hours of three and four in the morning.
Jamison believed some spirit brushed past him at that hour every night. He’d sit up, heart racing, eyes and ears straining to catch any little disturbance in the air. It had been getting worse lately. He could swear someone was thumping on him, trying to wake him up. Every night. Like clockwork.
Nothing ever happened. He’d get a drink of water and go back to bed, never feeling the presence again. Was it Granddad? Or was it a young girl in white, forever in white, dancing in his dreams, waking him with a kiss, then gone?
More like a bum internal clock, reset last fall, never to be reset again.
He’d known it was going to be hard to live without her. Bad days were expected, but when those bad times hit—bending him in half with a thought, his lungs collapsing from the weight of his heavy heart—he couldn’t imagine them ever re-inflating, or ever again being able to stand straight.
He was so tired all the time. What he wouldn’t give for a full night’s rest. A quiet house, a wood-burning stove, and a soft plaid blanket. But those things would only invite ghosts, memories draped in white. Better a dark motel room, a knocking radiator, and a broken clock, stuck on eight p.m.
What he wouldn’t
take
was another thing. His mom had tried to get him to try anti-depressants, but he wouldn’t do it. What he felt was a deeper problem than a couple of imbalanced chemicals. Could those drugs drain a hundred pounds from his heart or fill in the gaps of his bones where Skye should be?
Yeah, he remembered her name, though every time he said or thought it, a pain, fast as electricity and mean as a dull blade, would shoot through him. No. Better to remember her as the young girl in white, always in white, dancing around in his dreams.
“You lied to her,” Lucas had accused, the day after Buchanan had poured him out of his car and into his mother’s arms. “I was told you’d be coming to see me, to have alterations made to your memory.”
“I promised I’d come talk to you, and I have. We won’t discuss...her...again.”
And they hadn’t. They’d met with lawyers, drawn up contracts for the Somerleds to lease Granddad’s fields, and left the option for Jamison to end that lease with one planting-year’s notice.
He was going to be a lawyer, and if that didn’t work out, he’d have the farm. What he really meant, when he’d told his mother his plans, was that if the law profession kept alive his painful memories, he’d drop it like a freaking hot potato.
“I still think they’re aliens.” Ray said, bringing Jamison’s mind back to the tree house.