Point Hope (2 page)

For a second, he wanted to feel Rosette’s arms around him.

Trey headed down the stairs to the beach, where he always ended up. Always escaping, he thought. Today he wanted to get away from death. His brother’s death. His marriage’s death. He wanted to get away from his mixed feelings about Leena. He didn’t think any of those thoughts would have invaded his mind without her flirting. It wasn’t like he’d been having sexual fantasies about her. Instead he found himself thinking about her company—just talking with someone without all the complexity of his other relationships.

From down on the beach, he could see his renovated farmhouse up on the hill, its warm yellow glinting through the trees. Leena’s house was mostly hidden from this viewpoint. He tried picturing a different life, but it was fuzzy. Yet that was the reality: his brother was gone, his wife was probably leaving him after the funeral, and he might lose his family home. Trey had no idea how he’d even gotten to this point, so he turned his attention back to the physical world around him, something that didn’t slip away.

It was a quiet spring day, calm for the beach, with not too many people around. Of course, the beach was big enough that you could be alone even with other people around. The colorless sky was thinking about raining, with gray clouds that lightened toward the horizon. But he had the feeling it’d hold off for a while.

The water called to him today. Sometimes he meandered along the inland edge of the beach, close to the Scotch broom growing profusely on the bank, but today he headed straight down toward the ocean. The tide was in, so he didn’t have nearly as far to walk. He always viewed the mighty Pacific as having a rugged, rough, unforgiving beauty—like his life.

He thought of his wife and wondered, yet again, why he didn’t feel in love with her. Back in high school and the first year in the Navy, he was ready to tackle life. Everything waited for him. She waited for him. And he came back home and romanced Rosette. They had grown up together here, but when he came home and saw her, it was love at first sight for both of them.

All the excitement had faded since then, during his time treating wounded Marines. He’d seen the ugly side of life and what people can do to other people. Then, when he was counting down months until he’d get out, he was wounded.

They were close by when an IED took out one Marine and wounded another. The shock. Even as a Corpsman, it was still an awful shock to see someone’s flesh opened up, torn apart… He’d reached a point where he saw it and put the shock away for later. They’d had to in order to stay calm and treat the wounded. That’s exactly what they were doing with a second IED triggered.

Hot metal ripped all through him. But he was one of the lucky ones. He was so close to the blast that it gave him a concussion, knocking him unconscious. A gift from heaven in that situation.

He’d finally healed on the outside. Only scars remained now: white tears in his skin, like tally marks. Maybe he had one for each life that was lost under his team’s care.

Salty wind blew sand into his face as he hiked around the rocky bend to Bastendorff Beach. You learn to live with the taste of salt on your lips on the Oregon coast. It was home to him. At least that wouldn’t change. The rest of his life was another story.

He kept seeing Rosette’s face the last time they’d fought— a week ago, with hushed yelling and tears. He’d reached the end of sanity and control and had burst out, “Do you want a divorce?”

Within the span of two seconds, her face went from shock, horror, and hurt to plain angry. She’d turned on her heel and left the room in three steps. It was late afternoon, and the kids were home from school. Rosette might have been hiding in their bedroom or taking a bath; he wasn’t sure, so he made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the kids and sat at the counter with them, talking about their day. It was perfectly normal and routine except that everything was falling apart inside him.

When he’d heard her moving around upstairs, he kissed the kids on the head and told them he had to run some errands. He waited until eleven that night to come home and slept on the couch. She woke him up in the morning by standing at the far end of the couch, where his feet were uncomfortable wedged against the armrest, staring at him.

“I do want a divorce.”

Now he couldn’t figure out which end was the carriage and which was the horse. Did she want a divorce before he had asked? Or did he plant the idea? Did she really want to split up? Did he?

She had walked away after her declaration. He got up, showered, and tried to eat breakfast so he could talk to her without getting too upset. It seemed to him, even though they were to this point, that they should discuss it rationally. So he’d found her sitting in the office, staring at the papers and pictures on the desk. He stopped in the doorway and leaned on the doorjamb.

She turned her head a bit toward him but didn’t look at him. Apparently it was his job to begin. The phone rang, startling them both, but they ignored it until it stopped ringing. A couple seconds passed, and his cell phone rang in the other room. He debated if he should answer it for too long, and it stopped.

Rosette sighed. “Trey…”

The landline started ringing again. He grabbed it, saw Sinclair on the Caller ID, and still barked hello, knowing it was his sister-in-law.

“Tre-ey-yy,” Amanda sobbed his name into three syllables.

He didn’t panic right away, but instead slipped into EMT mode, pulling up his soothing voice.

“Honey, calm down.” He met Rosette’s gaze. She could hear the wailing over the phone too. “Amanda, just take a breath, okay? And tell me what happened. We’ll walk through it together.”

“Oh, God, they came in uniforms to the door.”

He visualized the two Marines in front of him, in full dress uniform. The horrible news hit him. It reflected in his wife’s eyes.

Ricky should be coming home from deployment in mere weeks—in time for his first child’s birth. Not this.
God, not this.

There were sparks in front of him, like Fourth of July sparklers, and Rosette’s voice mixed with Amanda’s crying. He even heard himself telling Amanda everything was okay (how was it okay?) as he fell back against the wall and slid down to the floor.

Was that only a week ago?

A week since his brother died and his wife asked for a divorce?

Trey stopped at the end of the jetty, startled to find himself there. For the life of him, he couldn’t remember turning onto the jetty in the first place. The ocean moved on both sides of him, slapping the rocks. It was time to turn around, or past time, but he kept watching the waves reach up and the sunlight turn the water green; then each wave would crash with magnificent anger onto the sand.

~  ~ ~

Rosette paused in the middle of the walk-in closet, looking down at the dusty suitcase. She’d walked in here at least ten times and stared at it, thinking about picking it up and packing. That was before they’d gotten the call about Ricky, of course. Once that happened, she knew she couldn’t just up and leave. But who was she kidding? There was no way she could simply pack a suitcase and solve things. What would she do, pack up the kids and take them with her? Leave them here with Trey? How would she explain all this to them in the first place?

She batted a tear off her cheek and set her mouth. This wasn’t a time for weakness. Instead of giving into the tears and the urge to crawl into bed and hide, she impatiently pulled her black suit off the hanger and got dressed for the funeral. When she left the bedroom, the house was quiet. No TV. No fighting kids. No teenager talking on the phone. The silence gave her the heebie-jeebies.

She wondered if everyone was outside, but as she walked down the hallway, she saw Candice and Jake playing together in Jake’s room, dressed in the church clothes she’d laid out last night for them. Even with the door open, they weren’t making any noise. Though Candice was seven and Jake was five, they were the same size. Jake wasn’t overly tall for his five years, but Candice had always been small because she was born early. With the same dark hair, they looked like twins. Watching them made her heart warm with love and pride, but it was tinged with the pain of knowing the recent deaths had already eroded their innocence, and now she was thinking about splitting apart their family.

Rosette had painted Jake’s room blue, and Trey had picked out the sports-themed accents. It’d really touched her when Trey had joined in and taken such a big part in decorating. Candice had a light pink room, dotted with Precious Moments figures, but she would have probably preferred an outdoor theme, if she’d picked it out herself. Rosette hadn’t planned on such a free-spirited, nature child—not that she’d change her daughter for anything.

She didn’t pause long enough in the doorway to see what kind of game they were playing. There was a jumble of action figures and Barbie dolls on the bedroom floor. Somehow they knew to get along today. They didn’t notice her, so she left them alone and started for the stairs.

She found Alex downstairs, sitting on the sofa in the living room, bent over with his elbows on his knees, his face in his hands. He was staring at the big window, but he wasn’t looking at the view of the ocean. He wasn’t even there, not mentally.

Trey was nowhere to be seen. Must be nice to be numb all the time. She was drowning in emotion and felt pulled away from the kids and Alex, and certainly Trey. How could she help any of them while falling apart herself?

They had an hour till the funeral. She poured another cup of coffee, stared at the breakfast dishes, and thought about all the things they’d need to do later today and this week. Well, at least a list was something she could manage.

~  ~ ~

“Ricky loved to laugh, and he would want us to remember him that way.”

This could have been any Saturday on the calendar, but this one would stick in Trey’s mind for a very long time. The rain still hadn’t come, as if the sky were holding its breath along with him. What they were waiting for, he wasn’t sure. There wasn’t going to be a phone call announcing that it was all a mistake, that Ricky was alive and well.

Trey and Rosette sat on the padded church pew with Candice and Jake between them. Alex sat on Trey’s other side, looking down. They surrounded Amanda along with her close friends. Summer, Amanda’s sister, sat rigidly on her right side. The two looked so much alike with their golden hair and sweet faces. They didn’t both inherit the same sweet personality, however. Summer might as well have been named Trouble.

Not that Trey’s life was perfect, not by a long shot, and he hated passing judgment on people. He might not be a hell raiser, but he was on the brink of letting everyone down. Maybe he already had. As far as he knew, no one else was aware of their marriage problems and especially not the recent divorce development. That almost didn’t matter today.

He looked at his pregnant sister-in-law, dressed in black over her swollen belly, and once again wondered how life could be so cruel. What would Amanda do now?

And Ricky. What would they do without Ricky?

He and Ricky had always been rivals. Trey was the firstborn, Jonathan Trevor Sinclair the third, so his little brother had always felt second best. It wasn’t the truth. Sometimes Trey felt like he had to be upstanding and responsible while Ricky got to be fun. Ricky was contagious—people inherently liked him. Trey and Ricky were teenagers when their parents had had a surprise third baby. Their brother Alex was almost like a nephew to them. Life was good until their mom died. Later they lost their dad too.

He’d give anything to have his parents here with them. On the other hand, it’d break both his parents’ hearts to lose Ricky and to hear how Trey’s life was turning out. Maybe it was a blessing that Mom and Dad weren’t here for this.

Trey had joined the Navy because he wanted something different. Now he couldn’t say what that was, but he’d wanted to go off somewhere. His grandfather and father both had been in the Coast Guard, and everyone was proud of that tradition. Then, Ricky had followed Trey’s lead of doing something else and joined the Marines. He could still hear his mother telling them, “But the Coast Guard doesn’t go off to war! They serve here at home, keeping people safe.”

Now Ricky was dead, and Trey’s life was a mess.

Chapter Two

How do you say goodbye? They sat together in the long pew, dressed in black, listening to people talk about Ricky, but Rosette didn’t think this would give her any closure. It was so weird to think you wouldn’t see someone again. It almost didn’t feel real, until she heard Amanda crying.

Oh, Ricky,
she thought
, you’ll never hold your newborn baby
.

She thought of Ricky’s laugh, his bright eyes, and the way his dimples and cleft chin gave his face such character. Trey and Ricky looked a lot alike, but they carried the features differently. Ricky was the funny guy who entertained everyone. Trey had a sense of humor, too, but he was quieter in groups. He made sure everything was taken care of. She glanced at Trey, her husband for at least for a while longer, with his straight, military posture and closed face. Some might think he was emotionless. She knew he was holding onto his emotions as tightly as he could. His father—the first Jonathan Trevor Sinclair—had put a heavy load on Trey. She had worried when they finally agreed to pass the name down to their own son, so she’d insisted they call him Jake. That was an easy name, but strong.

Jake and Candice, sitting between her and Trey, occasionally looked up to one of their parents. The kids didn’t know what to think. She was holding back her tears, too, just like Trey, hoping to ease the kids’ anxieties. 

She looked over her kids’ heads at her husband.
Trey, I need you.
In her heart, all this stripped away their stupid problems, and she just wanted to hold him and feel him hold her. But life wasn’t mirroring what she felt, and the two of them interacted through thick, foggy glass.