The West Wind (17 page)

Hero hated his message, it was corny. It beeped.

“Xander, call me back! I’m not at home!” she told the answer
service.

Xander was walking along the boardwalk when Hero’s first text
came. The rain beat down on his head and foot high waves crashed against the
pylons. His clothes were soaked and his phone was slick as he tried to shield
it from the falling water. Large drops still managed to find their way onto the
screen. He walked as he texted her back, hunched over the tiny object. He was
wet, irritated, and confused. It had not been a good day so far. It was nice to
hear from Hero, but if she really wanted him to go out to the island in this
weather, it wasn’t going to get any better. He shrugged. The things you do for
love, he thought to himself.

He had just hit send after typing, “I love you,” when his toe
caught on an uneven board. He tripped and caught himself without falling, but
his phone went flying. It soared through the air almost as if in slow motion,
then bounced once on the wooden planks and skidded across the boardwalk. One
arm reached out for it uselessly as it slipped between a wide crack and into
the bay.

“God damn it!” Xander yelled into the wind. He collected himself,
pulled his coat tight and headed for his truck. Hero would just have to wait
until he got there.

When Xander pulled into the driveway, none of the lights were on
in the Brighton House, though his father’s Ford F250 was still there. Smoke
rose almost imperceptibly from the chimney above the library. It didn’t matter.
He wasn’t going to go in to talk to him anyway. He stepped out of his pickup
directly into a puddle, soaking his already damp pant leg further. He slammed
the door of the truck, cursing, and headed down to the dock.

In Jaimie’s estimation, Hero was doing what she called “freaking
out.” She had spent ten minutes uselessly trying to get ahold of Xander and the
last ten pacing while they waited for him to show. Hero was worried. Terrible,
frightening scenarios were playing through her head. The most peaceful of those
was that he somehow knew she was pregnant and no longer wanted anything to do
with her. Or that he’d fallen for Jessica after all and was leaving her. Maybe
he’d gotten in an accident on the way over. He’d known she was in town for the
day, so he had to realize she wasn’t at La Casa Noble.

“Where is he?” she demanded of the empty air.

“How am I supposed to know?” Jaimie asked, irritated with Hero’s
behavior and secretly disappointed her friend had been stupid enough to get
pregnant.

“You do think he’s coming, don’t you?”

“Do you know how desperate you sound?” Jaimie said unkindly.

“Excuse me?” Hero whirled on her.

“All you’ve done is whine, complain, and mope about some stupid
boy not calling you for the past half hour. I don’t even know where Evan is or
what he’s doing and you don’t hear me crying about it.”

Hero took a deep breath. It took all her willpower not to call
Jaimie a selfish bitch. She took another breath before she spoke.

“Jaimie, I just found out I’m pregnant,” she said with forced calm
pervading her tone. “I can’t get ahold of my baby’s father, the man I
love
,
mind you, who doesn’t even know we’re having one. If he were coming here, he
should be here by now. I’m
worried
about him.”

Jaimie tried to find some sympathy, but it wasn’t coming. She’d
never really liked Xander that much in the first place, and now this. “You did
this to yourself. If you want him so badly and he isn’t here, why don’t you go
find him?” She stressed the last three words.  

Hero’s answer was to glare at her friend, collect her purse and
coat, grab a set of keys off Jaimie’s dresser and head out.

“Hero?” Jaimie called after her. “Those are MY keys!”

She heard the front door slam.

The waves rammed the bumpers hanging from the side of the
McConnell’s rowboat against the dock, each swell rocking it wildly. The water
wasn’t cresting over the sides, which seemed like a good sign to Xander, though
the beams of dock itself were slick with spray. They hadn’t had time to fix it
yet, so it remained in disrepair. From the cliffs above he could see that the
storm was worse out to sea, but the bay seemed to shelter them from the worst
of it. The practical side of Xander’s mind told him that rowing a boat in this
weather was probably not the best idea, but he was beyond caring about what was
a good idea and what wasn’t. Part of him was excited to take out his anger on
the storm. Besides, Hero’s dock wasn’t that far and he was certain he could
swim to shore if necessary.

Xander climbed into the heavily rocking boat and held it steady
against the dock as he untied the ropes. When he got back he intended to pull
it out of the water entirely to keep it from getting swamped and sinking, but
that was neither here nor there. He cast off and pulled hard on the oars. The
waves were so strong that he moved back one stroke for every two that took him
forward. The boat rose and fell across each crest and he angled out toward sea
to cut through them instead of across. His muscles started burning almost
immediately, but the challenge of it exhilirated him and with adrenaline
charging through his veins, he screamed his anger into the rain and wind.

The storm was getting worse. Hero pulled into the Brighton House
drive and drove up to the house. She was relieved to see Xander’s truck parked
there and came to a stop behind it. She slipped Jaimie’s Beetle into park and
turned it off. The lights were off in the house, but that probably meant he was
in the library talking to Zach. Her heartbeat slowed a little, but she slipped
out of the car as soon as it was off and ran inside.

“Xander!” she called as she tore down a hallway.

“Xander!” she yelled again.

A light flipped on as she turned a corner and almost ran into
Zach.

“Hero?” he asked. “Are you ok?”

“Is Xander here?” she asked as she stopped in her tracks.

“No, he left hours ago and hasn’t come back yet. He won’t answer
my calls. I figured he was with you.”

“Could he be upstairs?” she asked, not really hearing him.

“No, I told you, he’s not here.”

“But his truck is here,” Hero protested.

“What?” Zach asked rhetorically.

“His truck is here!” she repeated as she ran down the hall to the
stairs, calling Xander’s name. She ran up the stairs to the cupola to find it
empty, then ran back down to find Zach waiting at the bottom.

“Not up there?” he asked.

“No, where could he be?” she responded.

Zach shook his head and shrugged. Lightning flashed, lighting up
the house like a flickering ghost of luminescence. Thunder cracked a few
seconds after. Hero was staring out the window at the bay in disbelief. Zach
looked at her curiously.

“Oh my god,” she said so quietly he could barely hear her.

“What?” Zach asked.

“I think he’s out there,” she answered as if in a daze.

“Out where?”

“On the water!” she shouted, suddenly coming back to life. Before
Zach could say another word she turned and ran out of the house.

The water pouring down had turned the steps down to the dock into
a stream of tiny waterfalls and made the way treacherous. Hero rushed down them
anyway, oblivious to her danger. She made her way as quickly as she could, the
runoff pulling at her feet with each step. At one landing she misstepped and
fell to her hands and knees. The skin tore from her palms and knees as she
caught herself. Sudden fire from the pain broke through the coolness of the
water. She could see the boat missing from the dock from where she knelt.
Looking out over the bay without standing up, she finally spotted Xander,
rowing hard toward the other side. She yelled his name, but it was torn from
her lips by the wind. Scrambling back to her feet, she continued down as
quickly as she could.

Xander’s muscles burned as he pulled at the oars. A couple of
waves had threatened to swamp the boat, crashing over the side. A pool of water
filled the bottom up to his ankles. The lights on the island were barely
visible through the rain and he was already exhausted. When lightning arced
overhead for the second time, he let reason win and turned the boat around. He
could still make out the Brighton House’s dock though it seemed far too close
for the length of time he’d been out on the water. As tired as he’d become, it
was still much farther than he wanted it to be.

Hero clambered over the beams of the dock on all fours, agonizing
over the slowness of it. When she finally made her way to the small platform at
the end, she clung to the outermost pole as waves washed over her feet. There
was nothing she could do but yell into the wind, and as useless as it seemed,
yell she did. He was there, out on the bay, and not too far. Her heart leapt as
the boat began to turn around. And then she screamed.

A large wave formed by a strong gust of wind lifted the small boat
as it swept toward its inexorable death on the shore. It lifted the boat as if
making a fist around it and with the flimsy thing firmly in its grasp slammed
it down into the next swell, capsizing it. Hero watched in horror as Xander
rose at first with the tiny craft, then was cast out of it, splashing
soundlessly into the hungry ocean. She called for him again as she saw him
break the surface far from the now upside down rowboat and as if he could hear
her he began to swim toward the dock.

With her arms wrapped around her support, there was nothing Hero
could do but watch helplessly. Her throat began to grow hoarse as she screamed
his name again and again. At first he seemed to be doing well. The waves
carried him closer as he struck out freestyle, arm over arm, with all his
strength. His body rose and fell as each crest slipped beneath him and away,
drawing him toward the shoreline, where the waves beat one after another
against the cliffs. Occasionally he would disappear under the water, only to
surface again. Hero’s breath matched his disappearance and reappearance. Each
time she found herself holding her breath longer, only to let it out in a sigh
of stressed relief when his head broke the water. Each time he did, she called
to him again.

Finally, on what seemed to Hero to be the thousandth time he’d
gone under and come back up, he made eye contact and his weakening stroke
became strong again. Xander surged forward and hope rose in Hero’s chest. He
was only 500 feet away when Zach rushed by Hero in a lifejacket with another in
his hand and dove into the water. The fierce waves quickly ripped the spare
vest away and his progress was impeded as he swam against the current. Hero
yelled to Xander and pointed at Zach. Xander paused, saw his father and swam
toward him. The two pulled toward each other ever so slowly while Hero tried to
remember to breathe.

Another huge wave swept over Xander, picking him up and tossing
him beneath the surface. Zach continued to make his way toward where he had
disappeared while Hero waited for him to resurface as he had so many times
already. A minute passed and Zach swam on while the waves pushed him back, only
his life vest keeping him from being dragged under as well. Time crept onward
and there was no sign of Xander. Hero began screaming his name again, begging
him to swim, to fight, to come back. Zach finally reached the area he had gone
under, but couldn’t dive with the vest. He thrashed around, searching for his
son, but too quickly the storm carried him back toward the dock. There was no
sign of Xander.

Five minutes, then ten, then fifteen minutes passed. Zach made his
way back to the dock, where Hero helped him out of the water. She looked up at
him hopefully, though she knew better, and felt her heart shatter when he
solemnly shook his head. He looked drained. She threw herself into his arms,
bawling into the padding of the life jacket. Zach held the girl while her body
racked with sobs and stared out at the water. Quiet, broken tears rolled down
his face, indiscernible from the rain.

It was a bright morning, all signs of the storm gone. Hero sat
with Zach in Ambrosia, drinking double mochas in Xander’s memory and barely
speaking. Zach looked exhausted and Hero was certain she didn’t look much
better. She had fallen asleep late that night in Xander’s bed, wearing an
oversized sweatshirt from his closet that she had never seen him wear. By the
time she’d drifted off into an uncomfortable, restless sleep, she’d had to
trade one pillow for another. The first was too wet with her tears.

The smells seemed dull this morning, even the aroma of the coffee
barely reaching through the ache in her chest. Search and Rescue had found no
sign of Xander by the time they had called off the search for the night. The
radio in the coffee shop was, of course, playing a song that made her think of
him. She swallowed to keep herself from crying again.

Hero watched Zach as he drank from his mocha, sighing at the
mannerisms her lover had obviously picked up from his father. He looked like a
ghost of himself, though from the obvious intentional squaring of his shoulders
she could see he was trying to stay strong. She couldn’t imagine what it would
be like to lose both the love of his life and his son both within two years. It
was hard enough to imagine what tomorrow would be like without Xander.

A car pulled up outside the café, though it barely registered
through Hero’s heavy thoughts. The door opened and closed, and a tall figure
stepped out. She didn’t look up until he had started to push the door open and
was halfway inside. His clothes and blond hair still looked wet and his blue
eyes scanned the room, brightening when he saw them.

“Xander!” she yelled in her excitement, trying to get up out of
her chair as the door closed behind him. The pullover she wore caught in the
the chair and she struggled to free it.

“Hey!” he greeted them as he came up. Hero couldn’t figure out for
the life of her how to get her pullover unstuck.

Zach stood and hugged his son tight. “I don’t have words for how
glad I am to see you, Son,” he said.

“I’m glad to see you too, Dad. And you, Hero. Are you ok?” Xander
asked, noticing her predicament.

“I stuck on this goddamn chair,” she answered as she found the
hook she was caught on and started to work the cloth off of it.

“How did you get back?” Zach asked.

Xander nodded and answered as he waited for Hero to detach
herself. “After I went under, I came up and bumped my head on a piece of
driftwood. I clung to it and finally swam, well, washed up on shore ten miles
down the coast this morning. I hiked to the highway and got a ride back. Took a
while.”

“That’s amazing!” Hero exclaimed. “I’m so, so happy to see you.”
She finally unhooked her shirt and threw herself into his arms. To her shock,
she threw herself right through him like running through a ghost. A bewildered
expression cross his face as she passed through his body and crashed to her
knees on the floor. The shock of the pain woke her up.

Hero opened her eyes, her heart beating fast. She had finally cried
herself to sleep in Xander’s bed, surrounded by his blankets and her arms
wrapped tight around one of his pillows. Her parents had begged her to stay at
Jaimie’s, but she had refused. If the Search and Rescue team called Zach with
news, she wanted to be close by.

She wondered how long she had been asleep. The exhaustion in her
muscles and the lingering headache from crying made her think it hadn’t been
more than a few hours. The dream haunted her thoughts and after tossing and
turning for a while longer, she wrapped a blanket around herself and went down
to the library. Zach was there, his chair pulled all the way up to the
fireplace. He prodded the embers absentmindedly with a fire poker and didn’t
look up as she came in.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” he asked without a change in his
behavior.

“No, I had a dream of him coming back safely, but it turned out he
wasn’t really there.”

“I know what you mean. Every sound makes me jump a little, hoping
Neptune only mistook him for Ganymede and will return him unharmed.”

“Is that from a poem?” she asked, curling up in the oversized
chair Xander had always sat in.

“Your poem, actually,” Zach replied with a sigh.

“My poem? What do you mean?”

“There’s a poem by Christopher Marlowe. The female protagonist is
named Hero. Her lover is taken by the god of the sea, but is returned with the
gift of a bracelet that will protect him from drowning.” Zach sighed. “If only
real life was like that,” he said bitterly. “I would be Orpheus and retrieve my
wife and son both from the grasp of Hades.”

Hero’s heart ached for the pain in the strong, loving man who
seemed to have dwindled to nothing in the last flickering shadows cast by the
dying fire. His mini-lecture made her smile wistfully. “He was just like you,
you know? Always talking about poems and Greek heroes.”

Zach nodded. “He was the best of us both, his mother and I. She
would have loved you like the daughter she never had, Hero.”

“I’m sure I would have loved her too. She sounds like an amazing
woman.”

“She was. You can thank her for Xander’s romantic streak.”

Hero smiled sadly and shook her head. “I think he had two
wonderful examples, not just one.”

“Thank you,” Zach said quietly, lost in thought. The conversation
drifted into silence, the tragedy of their lives weighed on them both so
heavily it made it hard to speak further. Hero was surprised to find the quiet
didn’t bother her as much as she expected it would. Zach’s presence was company
enough. It wasn’t longer before she found herself yawning and slipped back into
the arms of sleep.

The phone rang, playing ‘Run to the Water’ by Live, a song Zach’s
wife had loved. It woke Hero and she looked up hopefully. Zach looked like she
felt as he reached for the phone.

“Zach McConnell,” Zach answered. There was a pause as the person
on the other line spoke. “Yes. Okay. I’ll be right there.”

“What is it?” Hero asked.

“Someone just reported a body on the shore. The sheriff wants me
to come down to identify it. Do you want to come? I’m not sure it’s something
you want to see,” he said gently.

“I’m coming. I want to know he’s gone.”

Zach nodded solemnly. “Alright. Let’s go.”