One True Loves (18 page)

I can only imagine that everyone else here wants to do that same thing.

It must be so overwhelming to be him, to be the person everyone is staring at, the person everyone wants to see with their very own eyes and hold in their own hands.

As I watch Jesse interact with his family, I feel suddenly like I don't belong here.

Jesse is holding his niece, Ginnie, for the first time, trying to remain calm. But I know him. I know what the downturn of the corners of his eyes means. I know why he pulls his ears back, why his neck looks rigid and stiff.

He's uncomfortable. He's confused. This is all so much for him. Too much.

I catch his eye. He smiles.

And I realize it's everyone else who doesn't belong here. There may be twenty people in this room but there are only two people in the whole world to Jesse and me and they are Jesse and me.

When his family has calmed down, they all start discussing how they will make their way back to Francine and Joe's house. I watch Jesse pull apart from the pack and then I feel his arm on me, pulling me aside.

“Is your car here?” he says.

“Yeah. Just right outside.”

I can't believe I'm talking to him. He's right in front of me. Talking to me. Jesse Lerner. My Jesse Lerner. Is alive and talking to me. Nothing has ever been so
impossible
and yet
happening
.

“All right, great. Let's get out of here soon, then.”

“OK,” I say, stone-faced.

“Are you OK?” he asks me. “You look like you've seen a ghost.” The moment he hears it come out of his mouth, he closes his eyes. When he opens them back up, he says, “I'm sorry. You are seeing a ghost. Aren't you?”

I look at him and I am hit with a wave of exhaustion.

Do you know how tiring it is to see a dead man in front of you?
To have to remind your brain every half second that your eyes aren't lying?

I'm overwhelmed by the stunning incredibility of the truth. That I can, right this very second, reach out and touch him. That I can ask him any of the questions I've spent years of my life wishing I'd asked him. That I can tell him I love him.

The desire to tell him, and the belief that he would never hear me, has gutted me year after year after year.

And now I can tell him. I can just open my mouth and say it and he will hear it and he will know.

“I love you,” I say. I say it because I mean it right now, but I also say it for every single time I couldn't say it then.

He looks at me and he smiles a deep and peaceful smile. “I love you, too.”

It all hurts so bad and feels so good that I'd swear my heart is bleeding.

There is such immense relief of an ache so deep that I fall to pieces, as if I hadn't realized until now how much effort it was taking to seem normal, to stand up straight.

My legs can't hold me. My lungs can't sustain me. My eyes stare ahead but don't see a thing.

Jesse catches me before I fall to the ground. Everyone is looking but I barely care.

Jesse supports my weight and leads me around the corner, into the bathroom. When the door shuts, he puts his arms around me, tightly, holding me so close that there's no air between us. For years there were immeasurable miles separating us and now, not even oxygen.

“I know,” he says, “I know.”

He is the only person who can understand my pain, my astonishment, my joy.

“I'm going to tell my family we need some time, OK?”

I nod vehemently into his chest. He kisses the top of my head. “I'll be right back. Stay here.”

I stand against the bathroom wall and watch him walk out the door.

I look at myself in the mirror. My eyes are glassy and bloodshot. The skin around them is blotched red. The diamond ring on my finger catches the dingy yellow light.

I could have taken it off before I came here. I could have slipped it off my finger and left it in my car. But I didn't. I didn't because I didn't want to lie.

But right now, I cannot for the life of me understand why I thought wearing it was better than tossing it in my jewelry box and replacing it with my little ruby ring.

Both of them are only half the truth.

I close my eyes. And I remember the man I woke up next to this morning.

Jesse is back.

“OK,” he says. “Let's go.”

He grabs my hand and leads me out through a back door. He walks toward the parking lot. His family is still inside. The wind blows through our hair as we run toward the bank of cars.

“Which one is yours?” he asks. I point to my sedan at the corner of the lot. We get into the car. I turn on the ignition, put the car in reverse, and then I put the car right back into neutral.

“I need a minute,” I say.

Sometimes I think this is a dream that I'm going to wake up from and I don't know whether that would be good or bad.

“I get it,” Jesse says. “Take all the time you need.”

I look at him, trying to fully process what is happening. I find myself staring at the space where the rest of his pinkie used to be.

It will take us days, maybe weeks, months, or years, to truly understand what each other has gone through, to understand who we are to each other now.

Somehow that makes me feel calmer. There's no rush for us to make sense of all of this. It will take as long as it takes.

“All right,” I say. “I'm good.”

I pull out of the spot and toward the road. When I get to the main drive, I take a right.

“Where are we going?” he says.

“I don't know,” I tell him.

“I want to talk to you. I want to talk to you forever.”

I look at him, briefly taking my eyes off the road.

I don't know where I'm driving; I just drive. And then I turn on the heat and I feel it blaze out of the vents and onto my hands and feet. I can feel the smothering warmth on my cheeks.

We hit a red light and I come to a stop.

I look over at him and he's looking out the window, deep in thought. No doubt this is even more bewildering for him than it is for me. He must have his own set of questions, his own conflicted feelings. Maybe he loved someone out there in the world while he was gone. Maybe he did unspeakable things to survive, to get back here. Maybe he stopped loving me somewhere along the way, gave up on me.

I have always thought of Jesse as my other half, as a person that I know as well as I know myself, but the truth is he's a stranger to me now.

Where has he been and what has he seen?

The light turns green and the sky is getting darker by the minute. The weather forecast said it might hail tonight.

Tonight.

I'm supposed to go home to Sam tonight.

When the winding back roads we are traveling get windier, I realize I'm not headed anywhere in particular. I pull over onto a well-worn patch on the side of the road. I put the car in neutral and pull up the hand brake, but I keep the heat on. I unbuckle my seat belt and I turn to look at him.

“Tell me everything,” I say. He's hard for me to look at, even though he's all I want to see.

Wherever he was, whatever he was doing, has weathered him. His skin has a leatheriness that it didn't have when he left. His face has wrinkled in the overused spots. I wonder if the lines around his eyes are from squinting off in the distance, looking for someone to save him. I wonder if his pinkie isn't the only wound, if there are more beneath his clothes. I know there must be a great deal beneath the surface.

“What do you want to know?” he asks me.

“Where were you? What happened?”

Jesse blows air out of his mouth, a telltale sign that these are all questions he doesn't really want to answer.

“How about just the short version?” I say.

“How about we talk about something else? Absolutely anything else?”

“Please?” I say to him. “I need to know.”

Jesse looks out the window and then back to me. “I'll tell you now, and then will you promise that you won't ask about it again? Nothing more?”

I smile and offer him a handshake. “You've got yourself a deal.”

Jesse takes my hand, holds it. He feels warm to the touch. I have to stop myself from touching more of him. And then Jesse opens his mouth and says, “Here it goes.”

When the helicopter went down, he knew he was the only survivor. He declines to tell me how he knew that; he doesn't want to talk about the crash. All he'll say is that there was an inflatable raft with emergency supplies, including drinking water and rations, that saved his life and got him through the weeks it took to find land.

Land is a generous description for where he ended up. It was a rock formation in the middle of the sea. Five hundred paces from one end to the other. It was not really even an islet, let alone an island, but it had a gradual enough slope on one side to give it a small shore. Jesse knew he'd traveled far from Alaska because the water was mild and the sun was relentless. Initially, he planned to stay there only long enough to rest, to feel earth under his feet. But soon, he realized that the raft had been punctured along the rocks. It was almost entirely deflated. He was stuck.

He was almost out of water and running low on food bars. He used the old water containers to collect rainwater. He searched the rocks for any signs of plants or animals but found only sand and stone. So he figured out how to fish.

There were some missteps along the way. He ate a few fish that made him vomit. He drank the water faster than it replenished. But he also found oysters and mussels growing on the shoreline and during a particularly relentless rainstorm managed to store over a week's worth of water—getting him ahead of the game. During the scorching sun of midday, he hung the deflated raft between two rocks and slept in the shade. Soon, he figured out a fairly reliable routine.

Jesse was eating raw fish, barnacles, and food bars, drinking rainwater, and hiding from the sun. He felt stable. He felt like he could make that work for as long as he needed to until we found him.

But then, after a few weeks, he realized we were never going to find him.

He says he had a breakdown and then, after, an epiphany.

That's when Jesse started training.

He knew that he couldn't spend the rest of his life living alone on a small patch of rocks in the Pacific. He knew his only way out was the very thing he had been raised to do.

He trained to swim a race.

He counted his strokes and each day swam out farther than he had the day before.

He started out slow, frailer and more fatigued than he'd ever been.

But after a few months, he was able to make it far out into the ocean. He felt confident that one day he'd be strong enough to swim the open water as long as he had to.

It took him almost two years to work up the stamina and the guts to do it. He had setbacks both minor (a jellyfish sting) and major (he saw a shark circling the rocks on and off for a few weeks). And when he finally set out for good, it wasn't because he believed that he could make it.

It was because he knew he'd die if he didn't.

He had run out of food bars long ago and the oysters had dried up. Half of the raft had been torn and lost to the wind. He feared that he was not growing stronger but weaker.

There was a rainstorm that brought him days' worth of water. He drank as much as he could and managed to strap a few bottles on his back using pieces of the raft.

And then he got in the water.

Ready to find help or die trying.

He does not know exactly how long he was out in the open sea and he lost count of the strokes. He says he knows it was less than two days when he saw a ship.

“And that's when I knew it was all over,” he says. “That I would be OK. That I was coming home to you.”

He never mentions his finger. In the whole story, in his telling me everything, he never mentioned that he lost half of his finger. And I don't know what to do because I agreed not to ask anything more. I start to open my mouth, to ask what I know I'm not supposed to. But he cuts me off and I get the message. We're done talking about that now.

“I thought of you every day,” he says. “I have missed you for all these years.”

I start to say it back and then realize I'm not sure if it's true. I thought of him always—until one day I thought of him less. And then I thought of him often but . . . that's not really the same thing.

“You were always in my heart,” I finally say. Because I know that's true. That's absolutely true.

No matter how much history Jesse and I have shared, no matter how much we may feel like we understand the other, I'm not sure I can ever understand the pain of living alone in the middle of the ocean. I don't know if I can ever truly appreciate the courage it takes to swim the open water.

And while I'm in no way comparing the two, I don't think Jesse can understand what it feels like to believe the love of your life is dead. And then to be sitting across from him in your car off the side of the road.

“Now you go,” he says.

“Now I go?”

“Tell me everything,” he says. The minute he says it, I know that he knows I'm engaged. He knows everything. Between the acute awareness of his voice and the sense of “here it comes” that lives in his focused eyes and tight lips, I can tell he figured it out on his own.

Or he noticed my diamond ring.

“I'm engaged,” I say.

Then, suddenly, Jesse starts laughing. He looks relieved.

“What? Why are you laughing? Why is this funny?”

“Because,” he says, smiling, “I thought you were already married.”

I feel a smile erupt across my face even though I can't tell you where, exactly, it comes from.

And then I start laughing and playfully hit him. “It's practically the same thing!” I say to him.

“Oh, no, it's not,” he says. “No, it absolutely is not.”

“I'm planning to marry someone else.”