Читать книгу The Compass - Tammy Kling - Страница 5

‘This path we were forced to take as best we might, in single file, and there I was—the flames to the left of me, and the abyss to the right.’

Dante Alighieri

There are moments in your life that change the course of your destiny for ever. Some people, like me, have already had them. Others have not, but that moment is ahead as certain as a shark prowls the ocean floor.

We are merely helpless swimmers on the surface above, thinking we’re in control and seeing only the shore in the distance. For most it’s worth swimming towards, worth fighting for. The shore provides hope, the horizon above it an entrance into a new world. We swim, achieve, work hard and all the while keep moving towards the future, yet what lies beneath is everything because it has the power to change your world, envelop you in darkness and alter everything you thought you believed.

After the accident I remember thinking of the mind as a battlefield. I was three days into detention, as I called it, a place my family had checked me into to save me from myself. It was an intake facility in Tucson, where the counsellors treated you with drugs for depression and daily doses of therapy. The tables were littered with books with intentionally uplifting titles. It was different than the therapist they had sent me to in California. Different ways of pulling things out of you. I had been driven there by my brother and I remained a few days, talked it out, then escaped a month before he was due to pick me up again. Rode a Greyhound bus back home and went into work the next day as if nothing had happened.

On the bus ride I discovered a newspaper on the seat, a headline about a woman who had opened the door of an airplane mid-flight and jumped. They found her body in a field of flowers with a note still in her pocket. It is on this day she had written, that I have lost all hope.

I tore the article out and kept her picture in my pocket for months. Blonde, red cherub cheeks, a smile of sunshine and daisies like the field they had found her in. The face of hope.

On the day I left suburbia for the desert, I had no illusions I’d ever return. On that day, all hope was lost. I’d exhausted all options. Worked, without working. Slept, without sleeping. Talked, without remembering what I’d said or whom I’d said it to. After weeks of this, they agreed to let me leave. They had no choice.

‘So what’s next on your journey?’ Marilyn asked. She pulled a music device that looked like an Ipod from her pocket as the morning sun lifted over the mountains behind her. I lifted my arms towards the sky, stretching them wide. I gauged my feelings, as I had become accustomed to doing. In grief therapy the psychotherapist who tried to crack open my skull and pour sunshine in had outlined the stages of mourning, and they were fixed there for ever. One tool was to get your body moving. Even if it was something small, like stretching. In the mornings I thought of those grief stages without trying to. Sadness, anger, despair, forgiveness. I was stuck in the first three without any hope for the last. Each morning it was despair, pure and black. The darkness that defined my life now was etched into my soul. It’s almost as if his life has been divided into two sections. Before the accident, and after.

‘Did I sleep?’ I asked. I didn’t attempt a smile.

She nodded that indeed I had, and I guessed it was for the first time in months without meds.

‘You snored a little,’ she said. ‘It was a deep REM sleep.’ She put the headset in her ears and turned it on, smiling.

The world was silent, but music emanated from where she was sitting.

‘What are you listening to?’ I asked, pointing to my ears.

‘Breathe,’ she said.

She removed the sound piece and walked over slowly, placing it against my ear.

I can feel the magic floating in the air. Being with you gets me that way. I watch the sunlight dance across your face. Never been this swept away.

I pulled back. ‘A love song?’

She shrugged.

‘You don’t seem the love song type, if I might say that.’

‘I was in love just once, and this song reminds me of him. The artist is Faith Hill.’

‘Where is he today?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure, Jonathan. He was from the country. Loved country songs. We met on a subway in New York City when he flew there on business, and he wore cowboy boots with his suit. That really stood out. He had been there only once in his entire life, so it was a chance encounter.’

I smiled and shook my head. An old woman, hardened by years. A New Yorker, no less, listening to Faith Hill. Her eyes clouded over.

‘So you didn’t marry him.’

‘I wanted to, but he was already married. I never told him exactly how I felt, because I just assumed it was an impossible situation. But it was electric. Not just lust, but love. True love.’ She closed her eyes.

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘You know when you know, Jonathan. I know because I never felt that way again in my life about anyone else. I had relationships, but I never felt that way.’

‘So you don’t know where he is today? Maybe he’d want to know you’re dying, and that you loved him.’

‘I came to the conclusion years ago, that sometimes you meet someone who changes your life, but that doesn’t mean that your life has to change.’

I pondered that thought for a moment.

‘But what if he wanted to say goodbye one last time?’

‘To what end?’ she asked.

‘Because you could tell him how you really feel. How you’ve felt all these years. What if he feels the same?’

‘’What if?’ she said, looking into closed hands. She seemed to be studying them, as if the crevices would provide answers. ‘If I told him, and he loved me back, what then? He’d be engulfed in grief. If he had loved me, at least all these years he’s had the hope that I’d return. Hope is everything, Jonathan. You know that.’

‘You don’t make much sense to me. You’re not what you seem,’ I said.

‘Are any of us?’

I stood, walked to my backpack and reached inside. I pulled out the last protein bar and tore into it, famished.

‘Are you angry?’ I asked. ‘I mean, angry that your years will be cut short?’

‘Oh no,’ she said quickly. ‘Let’s face it I’d only have 20 more, anyway. I’m 70 now. See, life is worth living, Jonathan. We’re not guaranteed anything, you know, yet we come into this world feeling entitled as if we are. We arrive acting as if we’ve been handed a manual for life with a certificate for 100 years.’

‘But there are reasonable expectations…’ I answered.

‘Like what?’

‘It’s reasonable to think you’ll live to the average lifespan. Don’t we all expect we’ll do better than that?’

‘We do.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘Because we’re selfish. Human beings are self-absorbed. We think we’re in complete control of the beginning, the end and everything in between. But we’re not.’ She looked at me intensely. ‘Of course, you know that.’

I thought of Boo and what Lacy and I had done with her the day before the accident. It was July, a month I would now detest for eternity. We’d been standing in the park, feeding the ducks one day, and the next, they were gone. One day you’re at the apex of your life, standing in all your glory before the sunrise, full of hope and possibility. The next you’re at the sunset, darkness encroaching. Night falls fast.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It does.’

I looked at her, knowing with complete certainty that I had not said a word. I’d not said anything, yet she had heard me.

‘There’s a helicopter coming to pick me up in an hour,’ she said finally. ‘My son rented one to allow me to fulfil this dream. He’ll be taking me on home if you’d like to hitch a ride.’

‘A helicopter?’

‘Might as well travel in style if it’s one of your last trips!’

‘I guess you’re right. Where are we headed?’

‘New York. I live upstate, so we’ll land in a small airport in the Adirondack Mountains and you can continue your journey from there, or you’re welcome to come stay with us.’

I thought about her offer. I had never been to the Adirondacks before, and had always wanted to see the region. But I had been gone less than a week, and I wasn’t ready to spend time around people I hardly knew. ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘But I want to go hike up into the mountains.’

Marilyn smiled. ‘Whatever suits you!’

An hour later the chopper landed about 500 feet away. It was shiny and black, with stripes across the side and a compact cabin that appeared to seat no more than four. The blades cut through the desert sky, kicking up dust until they sputtered to a stop. She tossed her backpack on her shoulder and headed towards it and I followed.

Marilyn ducked into the chopper and sat in the back as if she’d done it before. The pilot motioned me into the seat beside him, and handed me a headset to protect my ears. Marilyn buckled up and placed a wrinkled hand on her son’s shoulder and squeezed hard. He placed a gloved hand on hers and squeezed back.

‘I’m Conrad,’ he said, smiling. ‘Ready to go?’

The blades roared, much louder than I’d expected. As we lifted I felt a moment of adrenaline rush through me, my body suspended. I felt alive, like I was being prodded out of a coma into life. We soared over canyons and majestic white mountains. We dived deep through the centre of long stretches of brown desert and watched a herd of animals below. We were headed east, though I didn’t care where we were headed because I had no expectations for the journey. An hour in, Conrad explained that we’d be landing at a remote airport to switch to a small Cessna he owned for the remainder of the journey. Once we arrived, I would leave them and go my own way.

Floating over the clouds I realized that at times I could still feel her, and I wondered if there was any difference in the scope of eternity between what was and what is, or what will be. Boo had only been on this earth for four short years but her soul was ancient, as if I’d known her for not one lifetime, but many. Lacy and I had been connected from the start, not like the other women I’d met and conquered but different, as if our souls were intertwined. A cord of three strands is not easily broken.

As the helicopter floated across the horizon I remembered what the shrink back in Orange County had said. Some people come into your life out of circumstance, while others arrive because they had to. They are there for your soul. They were sent to you. They were sent to deliver a message. To bring, or take away.

I glanced over at Conrad effortlessly navigating the chopper through the clouds. He was the kind of man I’d wanted to be, the kind every man wanted to be, a James Bond type that both men and women were drawn to. He instantly reminded me of an old friend of mine from university. His name was Jason and he had the same square jaw and rugged exterior. He had entered one relationship and then the next, with whatever woman he’d met at the time. The last time I saw him he’d been through his second divorce, onto another. Because of his good looks, women entered and exited based on geography or convenience, versus selection. I had spoken with him about my theory that convenience was the enemy of happiness. That it led to settling, instead of sustaining. Jason had said that women were like sweets in a vending machine. You find one and then another behind the glass. You put in your money, own one, and then after a while you get tired and it’s inevitable you’ll move on to another.

You have to listen to your heart, I told him, instead of selecting someone geographically desirable, someone easy, in your sphere. You have to choose someone you’d still want to be with if you had to travel to Dubai to see them. Only then will your heart be authentic. It’s like the difference between choosing the milk in the front of the display case with the expiry date on it just because you need milk, or driving to a different shop for the organic milk you really want.

Lacy was never easy. But she’d been worth it. We were light drawn to darkness, dark to light, like opposite sides of the same coin. Her moods varied because of her past. It had been a tragic childhood, and as an adult the memories remained. Sometimes she was day, sometimes night. Day and night is still the same day.

The chopper hovered over a tiny airport in a desolate brown field. Music drifted in through the headset. It was an old song by Rush.

Thirty years ago, how the words would flow

With passion and precision,

But now his mind is dark and dulled

By sickness and indecision.

Some are born to move the world—

To live their fantasies

But most of us just dream about

The things we’d like to be.

C S Lewis once wrote that grief is a long valley, and that sometimes you wonder if the valley is a circular trench.

Conrad landed the helicopter gently, and we unloaded and waited inside a hangar while the Cessna was fuelled for the remainder of our journey. When we boarded the small plane Marilyn was so alive, with eyes wide open, that it was impossible to think she was dying. Her son naviagted the small craft down the runway and it lifted into the sky, gliding in a completely different sensation than the ride before, my blood moving horizontally this time. He flew across different terrain and we coasted in silence, until I spied an airport in the centre of a mountain range that was overflowing with green and thousands of trees. We lowered deeper, and touched down on a small runway.

Conrad removed his helmet and turned to me. His eyes were blue.

‘Welcome to New York!’