Through Life and Death

Emma and Scott knew each other’s minds and hearts after that. The stationary but deceptive sun and sky and the ocean’s depths and shallows shifting beneath the waves affected them equally. When they first stumbled from the ocean onto the shore, their existence changed. Holding each other, they had silently acknowledged that from now on time occurred as before and after.

They had witnessed Charlie, a man they both loved, disappear suddenly, swallowed by the ocean or—going solely by what they had seen—just as possibly extinguished between rays of sunlight or subsumed by a passing cloud.

[Click here to read the first episode, or here to read the previous one.]

Their shared bewilderment at what was obvious (Charlie was dead) and what just might be plausible (in movies the drowned man survived) altered their lives.

Striped by the shade from palm fronds, they had clung to irrefutable logic—Charlie was gone. It was either that or dive back into the ocean, determined to find him. Yet the faintest hope still seared the edges of their twin consciousness, a flickering, sickening chance that the impossible might in fact be possible. They looked at each other and shook their heads—NO! Of course there was no hope. They had to believe that. Any other possibility would only drown them.

The next day rather than return to Chicago as planned, they had returned to the beach. Emma and Scott sat among the fringes of shade and stared at the terrible, brilliant turquoise water. After a few hours the blinding heat and dizzying photo-optics in the air drove them back to bed until early evening.

When nearing sunset they drifted back toward the water to resume their watch, Nando waylaid them. “Go home, Scottie. Nothing you can do. You know that.”

They filed a report with the police. Mia held a service at the yoga farm. Emma sang and Scott played the keyboards. Mia chanted in Sanskrit, leading everyone in this chant and that in soft unison. Scott tracked down Charlie’s mother, who asked him if he’d arrange a memorial in Chicago, whenever he got back.

Night after night, Scott and Emma communicated in their dreams. They traced each other’s bodies, stared into each other eyes, and stopped each other’s mouths with their own. No need to ask out loud: What if? Or: Do you think, he might possibly have intended?

Scott’s thoughts answered Emma’s, hers answered his: Really, this question like all their others led nowhere. 

Years later, however, they still remembered Charlie so thoroughly it felt conceivable that he was likely to walk into the room any minute. They had not forgotten Emma grabbing Scott’s hand: “I don’t see him. I was watching and I don’t see him.” They had not forgotten Scott swimming out toward the horizon, shouting “Charlie! Charlie!” above and under the water.

They had three children, none named Charlie because whenever Emma privately recalled the name inside her head tears beaded beneath her eyelids. Scott used his family’s fortune to provide college scholarships. He ran the foundation in Charlie’s memory but not his name, which for him, too, unreasonably evoked much too much.

How much to remember and how much to forget? Emma and Scott managed to forget, but only in intervals. If Scott caught a glimpse of someone who reminded him of his friend, Emma recognized it in full when they found a moment alone together. If Emma heard a song Charlie used to play, recorded or live or running through her head, rising out of nowhere, Scott would see it in her expression. He’d notice how she swayed in the doorway and that song as their band performed it would set him swaying, too, his right foot tapping.

People distinguish continually what they know and what they believe; what’s possible and what’s not. They separate reality from fantasy without an ache or even a pause. 

But for Scott and Emma, Charlie’s voice resonated through life and death. He drank and took drugs. He acted stupid sometimes. He acted like he was always happy. And they loved him in a way that has never let up. He moved the air like no one else. He buoyed them up.

(The End)

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