The Water Keeper(85)
Ellie sat quietly a long time. Shaking her head. As the sun fell over our shoulders and people continued lining up to take their picture at the marker just on the other side of the fence, we sat in silence.
Finally, Ellie spoke. “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because sometimes it helps to know you’re not alone. That you’re not the only person on this planet who’s been betrayed by someone you love. You wear your wound out where the whole world can see it. As if the world owes you something.”
She stiffened. “Doesn’t it?”
“It won’t satisfy. You’ll still be empty.”
She dismissed me with a hand. “Oh, as if you’re an expert because one woman crapped on you. You’re no better than me. You’re just a bitter old man trying to understand why some hoozie didn’t love you. Earth to whatever-your-name-is.” She was screaming now. “Sometimes people don’t love you back!”
She hung her head in her hands. The ring from the envelope dangled from a chain around her neck. Summer sat, knees tucked to her chest, staring at me. She looked cold and in pain.
I debated with myself. I knew I needed to tell her the rest; I just didn’t want to. This hadn’t really gone the way I’d hoped. And given Ellie’s reaction, my next words could make it worse. But I figured she had a right to know. I pointed at the ring. “May I see that?”
She lifted it from around her head and threw it at me. I caught it and then sat next to her.
On my rock.
Chapter 39
The ring sat in my palm, glistening. “Twenty-two years ago, I was a junior at the Academy. I’d flown home for break. And without telling Marie, I went to see this jeweler in downtown Jacksonville. Had this office on the river. Harby was his name. By appointment only. One of those places where they buzz you in the front door. I told him what I was looking for, he sketched it, and when I nodded, he made it. Maybe one in ten thousand could do what he did. Took him a couple weeks. A one-in-a-million ring.”
I stared into the memory and laughed. “Cost me two years of savings plus my skiff. My Gheenoe.” A shake of my head. “She knew I was all in when I sold my boat. When I offered her the ring, she couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe I’d done it on my own. With no help from her. She slipped it on her finger, cried, and in that moment, I gave her all of me. And from that moment to this, I never asked for any of me back.”
I lifted Ellie’s hand, uncurled her fingers, and set the ring in her sweaty palm. “That ring is this ring.”
The disbelief drained deeper. She looked from it to me and back to it, finally shaking her head. “This was your wife’s?”
I nodded.
She looked up at me. “Does that mean . . . ?”
I shook my head. “She died. A year before you were born.”
“How do you know? With everything, how are you certain?”
The air smelled of charcoal and lavender. Somewhere seagulls were filling the air with noise. I swallowed. “I woke in the hotel room. Alone. A note on the pillow. And unlike the first time, she left nothing to chance with this one. This time she would pull it off for real. She rented a boat, took it out a few miles offshore, floating in about ninety-five feet of water. She turned on a video camera, tied a five-gallon bucket filled with dried cement to her feet, tossed it overboard, then stared at the camera a long time. Finally, she wiped tears, mouthed the words, ‘I love you,’ waved a final time, and followed the bucket. The Coast Guard found the boat and played the video for me in the hotel manager’s office. That was a year before you were born.”
The three of us sat quietly for a long time.
“After that . . . I checked out. Got drunk. For the better part of a year. Found myself on various beaches in the Keys, and then as if some giant hand lifted me up and set me down, I found myself here, on this rock, an empty bottle in my hand, staring up at that sun, asking myself some hard questions. I don’t think I smelled too great, since I hadn’t showered in a couple of weeks. And as I’m sitting about where you are, I hear this voice.” I chuckled at the memory. “At first I thought I was hallucinating. Hearing voices. Then he said it again.”
She turned sideways and looked at me. Asking without asking.
“He leaned down, casting a shadow across my face, and said, ‘Tell me what you know about sheep.’
“I didn’t know if the voice I heard was in my head and I was going crazy, or if it was real. When I responded, I spoke to the voice in my head. ‘I know they are the dumbest animals on the face of the earth and they have a tendency to wander and get lost.’
“Then he leaned in, so I could see him, and he smiled. ‘And,’ he said, ‘they need a shepherd.’
“I stood. Shoved my hands in my pockets and stared through my sunglasses out across gin-clear water. Then I fell in the water. To this day I don’t know how he found me, but he did. He lifted me out of the water so I didn’t drown, put me in a little flat about three blocks that way, and nursed me back to life. Again. Feeding me. Getting me sober.”
Summer whispered, “Colorado?”
I nodded. “Then one day I’m sitting on the front porch of this little efficiency roach motel where he had me sequestered. He was sipping wine. I was sipping iced tea. And he set a pad and paper in front of me. I looked up at him. I was not impressed. I was just angry. The more sober I got, the angrier I got. Which was the reason I drank. To drown the anger. I couldn’t have been any more unhappy or angry. I could have ripped someone’s head off with my bare hands. I knew I was about two seconds from choking the life out of somebody. Anybody. I was a walking time bomb and I didn’t need much to go off. He knew it too, so he set this pad in front of me and he said, ‘Tell me who you love.’