The Water Keeper(105)
Torn and tormented by her own life’s decisions, her own selfishness, she photocopied the first notebook and sent it with a note to a woman she’d met in the Hamptons. An editor for a New York house. The note read, “There are sixty more of these. He tends bar at the ‘End of the World.’ Key West. You have one week to order a drink or I’m sending elsewhere.” Five days later, she watched from the second-story window of a dilapidated bed-and-breakfast as the woman who would become my editor sidled up to the bar.
A year later, lying in the bed at her cottage, a bedside table full of steroids and medications, Marie and Sister June read the first release. Out loud. Five times.
When Sister June pressed her about telling me the truth, Marie shook her head and squeezed the hardcover to her chest. “I want his heart to heal.”
Sister June had challenged her. “That all?”
Marie had shaken her head. “I want our love to live forever.”
And she was right. It had. Until it didn’t. Until thirteen years had passed and I could write no more. So I burned every book, loaded into my Whaler, and intended to return to my rock where I would walk out into the water and scatter our ashes and our memories and our hope and all my love into the waters where the Gulf kissed the Atlantic.
But love is a difficult thing to kill. Actually, it’s the only thing in this universe or any other that you can’t kill. No weapon that has ever been made can put a dent in it. You might punch it, stab it, whip it, and hang it out to dry—you can even drive a spear through it, pierce its very heart. But all you’re going to get is blood and water, because love gives birth to love.
Marie settled into what she thought would be her last months. But with four book releases over a two-year period, the process slowed. There were days when she sat by the water’s edge, her toes digging into the wet sand, my words in her hands, and felt as though she strengthened. As though the very words I’d written had reversed the virus. She watched in amazement as millions upon millions of copies circled the globe, movies were made, and yet this anonymous writer never came out of the shadows. Never stepped into the limelight. He simply wrote for love. She said there were days when her joy squeezed more tears out of her eyes than she thought humanly possible. But in the crying there was a washing. A cleansing.
Water does that.
Thirteen years passed, and she was still hanging on. Weakened, breathing extra oxygen, skin and bones, a shadow of her former self, paying the consequences of years of bad decisions—and yet there she was, just like the rest of the world, awaiting the next installment. An injection of words from his heart to hers that would give her a few more months.
But internet rumors suggested the author had come to his end. That he’d written his last love story. She and Sister June, oxygen tank in tow, boarded a train, rented a sleeping car, and didn’t get off until the Hamptons. They rode into the city and took the elevator to floor seventy-something, and Marie introduced herself. At first, the editor was standoffish. Disbelieving. But only two people ever knew about the package of photocopies she’d received in the mail. Herself and the person who’d sent it. That person was sitting in front of her.
Marie confessed that she knew the identity of the writer and that she’d heard he’d written his last. The editor glanced at a printed manuscript sitting on her desk. Stained with tears. Marie asked to read it.
The editor responded, “And if I don’t?”
Marie shook her head. “I’ll go home. Brokenhearted. Same as you.”
The editor agreed, and Marie spent the day wrapped in a blanket in her office staring down over a blanket of snow covering Central Park. When finished, she dried her eyes and sat shaking her head. The editor said she had begged me not to do this, but even she could hear it in my voice. I, the anonymous writer, was done. Well empty.
Marie ran her hand across the pages. “He’s saying goodbye. He has come to the end of us. The end of me.”
When Marie stood to leave, the editor asked, “What are you going to do?”
Marie had stared out the windows at the snow falling. “Give him a reason not to.”
Then the waiting began. She did not know about Angel, Ellie, or Summer. She simply knew I was returning to Key West with a box and the ashes of our love. Fourteen years ago, love had brought me back to her. Now, some twenty-one years since our wedding day, maybe love would bring me back again.
When we’d appeared at Sisters of Mercy that afternoon, asking questions, she’d looked in the mirror and chickened out. Instructed Sister June to deny her existence. Turn us around. Then she saw us on the rock. Saw Ellie and found herself mesmerized. Knew her immediately. Saw me wade out into the water and spread the ashes. Saw the names tattooed across my back. Saw me trying to be strong for everyone else when she knew I was cracking.
When she saw Summer she knew I’d be okay.
When she finally made up her mind to summon us that evening, the virus struck with a vengeance. Given her weakened condition, it left her with hours rather than days. She spent her last hours with her daughter. Telling her who she was. Who I am.
I stood in the waters around my island, tears cascading off my face, clutching two jars. In one, I held Marie. My love. My heart. The middle of me. And in the second, the purple urn from the kitchen table, I held all the words I’d written about her over thirteen novels. It held everything I’d ever wanted to tell her.