The Place That Shouldn’t Be Empty

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The Place That Shouldn’t Be Empty

“Lily.” Her name left Jeremiah’s mouth like the rustling of sheets when you lay down into bed. “Oh Lily,” he sobbed through his palms as he cradled his face. When it came to Cole, he needed to be strong. The hole in his heart had to be hidden from his son because his son was grieving, too. After the talk about his grades, which he felt went well, they had both retreated to their separate rooms. Every ounce of will and strength he had constructed for his son collapsed like a house of cards once the bedroom door was closed. Jeremiah could be strong no longer.

The room he sat in used to be a sanctuary of peace. A refuge. Now, it was a sanctuary of hauntings, of things as they used to be. As they ought to be. Lily’s bedside table remained untouched, except for the daily tender dusting he gently performed to keep her artifacts from appearing forgotten. There was a bookmark more than halfway through the pages of a paperback book named Anne of Green Gables. The corners of the cover curled and the spine had a crease down it from the several times she had read this story in their seventeen years together. Lily would give off signs she was reading it again when she would ramble on about “Anne with an ‘e’ wearing dresses with puffed sleeves.” In those moments, he had been bored. He couldn’t be bothered with things like stories, especially ones about silly little girls. Now, he didn’t dare touch the book, even though he longed to finally understand it, because he was fearful to disturb the gossamer memory of the final time Lily placed her mark in those pages.

Too little too late. There were serious things to be dealt with. Work to be done. Fish to be caught. Money to be made. Stupid. “How could I have been so blind?” Jeremiah asked to an empty room as he lifted his head. The ghosts of memories and squandered opportunity were more damning than any specter could be. An apparition could come up out of the floor right now to stab him with a glowing blue spirit blade but it wouldn’t cut as deep as the memory of how he would nod his head in feigned interest when Lily talked to him about her books. All he could see was the task at hand right in front of his nose. He stood from the bed and walked to the window.

Jeremiah had always loved his wife, but in the several weeks since her death, his saw that he had never treasured her. There were things that she had done that irritated him. Who twirls around every morning when they get out of bed? She did. She would stretch in the bed, toss aside the covers, twirl like a leaf in a breeze and then walk to the window he now leaned against . The waves mesmerized her, even after living in this house for ten years. Like a child, she would stand in wonder at that window as if she was asking the ocean to do it again. Send the waves. Raise the sun. Her awe didn’t seem to get old.

What did get old was how she wouldn’t brush her hair in the morning. Couldn’t she have gotten up just a few minutes earlier to take care of herself before breakfast? She was a pretty woman, but Jeremiah wished she would take that one extra step to put herself even more together before he had to “go out into the coal mines,” as he called it. He always appreciated her setting the table and making him bacon and two fried eggs with black coffee. Just the way he liked breakfast. She would have a bowl of sugary cereal poured for Cole, too. But the hair made his gears grind, every time. Now, Jeremiah stood at the window watching the waves, as he had done every morning since Lily died. It didn’t take many of these mornings for the scales to fall off his eyes. His vision cleared gradually until he saw the truth: he was the one who had grown old.

This slow awakening started to come upon on Jeremiah when Lily began to have coughing fits. He thought there would be time to fix the hole he had cultivated, but time proved uncaring. This too shall pass not only applies to the hard seasons of life; it applies to the days he didn’t know how good he had it. In trying to wrestle her out of the tentacles of death, he handed her over to them when he took her to that rock. Jeremiah leaned against the window frame and hung his head. Signs and wonders had manifest before his own eyes on prior trips past that cursed rock. What had been different about Lily?

No matter now.

No force in this world or realms beyond could shred the life out of his heart the way his past actions did. Regret pierced him like a white hot knife. No amount of work or money or fishing could ease the pain of what he had held in his hands and allowed to slip through his fingers.

Yet, the waves didn’t stop rolling. He would discover Lily’s wonder from the window even if he couldn’t bring himself to explore the pages of her book. He couldn’t just drown beneath the waves of grief. There’d been enough drowning. Now, there was Cole, and Cole needed him.

Jeremiah left the window and the empty room to check on his son after their earlier conversation about his grades. The real world hadn’t taught his son that there was more to life than grades but he knew that imaginary measure still mattered to Cole.

Jeremiah knocked on the door and gave a half-second pause before he walked in. “Hey son…” The room was empty. “Cole…?” He checked the bed, the closet, behind the door. Nothing. Jeremiah left his son’s room and called out his name in the hallway. “Cole?” No response. Same thing in every room of the house. Except for him, the house was empty. He opened the front door and stood in the open doorway with one hand still on the knob. “Cole!” he shouted. The tree was there, Spanish moss lightly swaying in the breeze. The road with no lines painted on it stretched in either direction. No boy.

Jeremiah walked through the house again and went through the back door and stepped down the to wooden dock. “Cole!” he shouted again. Nothing but the waves lapping at the wood and shoreline. The Downs lived next door. After the grades conversation, he couldn’t see why Cole would have gone to see the kid who was giving him grief.

As Jeremiah walked to the side of the Downs’ house, he noticed a long patch of yellowed grass among the green. It was roughly boat shaped. He paused.

As he turned, he lifted his hand to shield his eyes from the dying light. In the distance, the giant rock blade Tannigath, the location of legend and prominence of promise, loomed in the blaze of the setting sun. Just below it, which he had to squint to see, was a boat. One figure stood at the bow, another paddled. A canoe.

”Cole!”

Panic flushed through his veins. His boat was at the dock near the market. Jeremiah ran inside, grabbed his keys, got in his Toyota Tacoma and sped towards the market.

They got his wife. They wouldn’t get his son, too. Not if he could help it. If it wasn’t too late.

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See y’all at the rock.

~ J.P. Simons