The Wave by Kristen Crusoe (ebook reader online txt) 📗

and devotion. Not Clair. She couldn’t accept it. That was when they had divided. But, oh, the memory of that trip to Baja. Clair was there all the time. Her beauty. Her passion. He had fought so hard against it. Damn himself.

How had he missed all of this for so long? It had been right in front of him. He loved her. And now he was losing her all over again. To this thing he had no control over, a viper hidden in the tall grass, striking without choice. A convergence of wind, water, the circling of the earth, gravity pulling everything down into a hurricane of destruction. Cells nesting, then finding purchase, spreading and invading soft tissue, feeding on the essential nutrients that sustained life. Clair’s life. His life with her. And Devon, before. He laid his head on the steering wheel, grinding his forehead into the leather, needing the pain. ‘If only I could go back,’ he moaned. ‘To when it all started. I would love them better. I would watch over, protect, harbor them from danger.’

He heard a car’s engine revving behind him. Looking over his shoulder, he noticed a driver waiting to take his spot, others circling the lot. So many, he thought, reversing. How did I think I was unique, special and that nothing monstrous would ever touch me? That I had somehow paid my dues in childhood. And that my acting would cover up all that was real, human. I was, no am, a fool. So much time wasted playing a part. And all the while, time was diminishing me, lie by futile lie.

The car righted itself, moved forward. Stopped at the signal, reflexively looking right to left. Advancing. He didn’t know where he was heading, he just drove, like a shark, the need for movement compelling. Images of Clair’s hands, those beautiful hands that had touched him in intimate places, red and inflamed, colored his vision. Knowing the cancer was happening inside her, in her stomach lining, lungs, brain, made him feel like slamming his car into something solid. A moment of agony then over. Not like the drawn-out process of being eaten alive from the inside that Clair was suffering. Who would care, he thought? Or even notice. I struggled so hard all my life to escape, to not become the kind of man I hated, the kind of man my mother loved, I became him. The kind of man who watches another woman’s ass while sitting with his wife, and making sure she sees him doing it.

The road took him west, across the wide four-lane road separating town from coast. Once on the two-lane road, formerly a wagon trail, named Seven Devils for the wicked turns that caused many to crash and die, his brain registered his location. Looking right, the ocean held center stage. Chugging into the narrow cut, waves breaking over the bow, a tug was leading a massive freighter from Japan into the harbor to load Douglas fir timber. Normally, he would begin a diatribe on the idiocy of this, of a ship from Japan, picking up timber grown and harvested in the Pacific Northwest, to take back to Japan to cut into logs, manufacture paper products, and then sell back to the United States. No wonder he would rail, the once booming timber industry here was nothing but a museum of times past, and not too long. One generation ago was all. Many of his students came from those families, first members of the family to attend college. Today, he didn’t have it in him. He noticed, then thought, what the fuck does it matter? What does anything matter, really? He drove on. Knowing now where he was going.

When he arrived at the turn off, wind was blowing rain sideways in gusts that shook the car. He looked around for his coat. It wasn’t in the front seat. It wasn’t in the back seat. Could he have tossed it in the trunk? Clearing his mind, he went back through the afternoon. Fuck. He had left it at Clair’s. Just saying that, thinking that, that Clair had a separate home from him, sent him into a paroxysm of emotion he couldn’t name. His sense of loss, of harm, was so great, he felt like a child, bereft of all protection and care. Wrenching the door handle, he pushed against the wind. Leaning into it, he muscled out of the car, flailing as he shoved the door back closed. His hair, wet, stung as it whipped his eyes.

The walk through the woods was slippery, rain uprooting debris, causing puddles and small lakes to form. Light was fast fading, the sword ferns and bracken creating eerie shadows on the path. Struggling to remain upright, the realization that ‘this is me’ hit him like a boulder, like an avalanche of clarity. The wind and rain pelleted him. He was not prepared, had nothing between him and the elements except his shirt, vest, slacks, all designed for clean, dry inside work, not a wet forest. His fine leather shoes no match for the thousand years of mulch built up underfoot. Sounds like a freight train swirled through the last of the blue-gray space above the tree-line, a symphonic climax to the normal synchrony of tree talk. And still he walked, or fell forward. His gait like a mad man. When he reached the opening, where forest met sea, he knew why he had come. This was where it had all fallen finally, and fundamentally apart. This was where they lost not only Devon, but each other, and in the doing, themselves.

Adam stumbled across the small, rickety, handmade bridge, made of narrow timbers, slick now with rain and salt from ocean spray. Slipping, one foot hit the creek beneath, running strong with all the water flowing down from the coastal range. He managed to stay upright, holding onto the sides of the timber as he pulled his leg back up onto the bridge.