Slave to Love (30 page)

They are seeing him tonight
. Beverly and Monica are seeing Hale at the awards dinner and not being there makes me feel so disconnected from the last decade of my life. I’m adrift and tonight I feel like I’m drowning. Again. Only this time, I’m the only one who can save myself. And maybe a little red wine might double as a lifesaver.

Grabbing a basket, I browse the prepared food section of Central Market. Sliced steak in a Madeira mushroom sauce, twice baked potato and wilted spinach with olive oil and garlic. Moving on to the bakery, I grab a box of scones for the morning and a small container of Miles of Chocolate for tonight. I need a great red wine for this. Mmm, mmm, mmm, alternating bites of the chocolate with sips of wine is going to be orgasmic. And tonight, I really need orgasmic. It’s cold enough for a fire, so I’m going to snuggle up in a cashmere throw with Vi Keeland and Penelope Ward’s book,
Cocky Bastard,
and lose myself in their characters’ world until Monica and Beverly call.

Reds, reds and more reds. The market has a sommelier named Andy with an amazing palate, so if the rack by the bottle has a sticker that says,
Andy’s Pick,
I know it’s going to be a great bottle of wine. Reading the back label of a Tempranillo from Spain, it touts undercurrents of cherry and plum, leather and oak. That feels about right for the cozy night I’m going to have trying not to think about the awards ceremony where some dude who doesn’t even know my old staff at all will be presenting them with their plaques. And Monica and Beverly will be seeing Hale.

“Sierra?”

I look up and gasp. I’ve just gone from thoughts of Hale to Hale. But it’s not Hale, though their resemblance is so strong.

“You’re Noel, right?”

“Yes, it’s nice to see you again.” Extending his hand, I can’t help but notice how similar it is to Hale’s and for one brief second I want to thread my fingers with his.

“Yes. It is.”

“Do you know where Hale is?” He looks concerned.

Odd that he’s asking me about his brother and what’s even stranger is, that after months of not knowing anything about Hale, this is the one night I actually do know where he is.

“Yes. He’s in New Orleans.”

Noel lets out a deep sigh and shakes his head. Something is not right. And then he starts talking and it feels like he expects me to know more of the story than I actually know.

“We are so worried about him. Being this down isn’t something I’ve seen in years. I really thought that when he saved you that would be the tide-turning pivotal moment in his life, the thing that righted his ship, so to speak, and that there would be no more heroics to save the world to compensate for the past. I’d hoped that one act would negate the other and he’d feel some kind of redemption, you know.”

I’m trying to catch up with what he said. So much of it is just gibberish to me. But the thing that catches my attention immediately, and retains my focus, is what he said about saving me.

“Noel, what do you mean he saved me?”

“When he pulled you out of the water, he saved you.” His tone is very factual.

I’m shaking my head, not understanding specifically what he is talking about.

“Sierra, when Hale pulled you out, you weren’t breathing.”

Opening my mouth to speak, nothing comes out. No one told me that I had stopped breathing that day and once again, I can’t get air into my lungs.

“You didn’t know?” Noel looks as confused as I feel.

Shaking my head, I’m not sure how to respond. I’m not sure if I can respond.

“You weren’t breathing, Sierra. Hale did mouth-to-mouth on you until you began to breathe on your own. I understand it was touch and go there for a while.”

Tears spring to my eyes, burning a passage down the middle of my skull. I’m not quite sure why I’m reacting this way, but that is an overwhelming realization. I didn’t start breathing on my own. Hale breathed for me.

“Hale saved me?” Speech finally returns.

Noel is nodding, “Yes, he did. And I thought that act in itself would right everything in his world, liberate him from his ghosts. Finally remove all the guilt and suffering he’s carried with him almost his entire life. It was his second chance. And then to see him so depressed. He didn’t even spend the holidays with us. It just doesn’t make sense. This should have been his salvation.” The pain in Noel’s voice is making my heart constrict.

“Salvation? Salvation from what, Noel?”

“Maggie,” the word is little more than a whisper.

The crack in my heart, the one that first appeared with Kemp’s phone call, just widened. I swear I heard the crunching sound as it split a little more, new fissures emanating from the main artery.

“His girlfriend Maggie.” My voice has a tone I didn’t intend it to have, but it does. I think I’m going to be sick.

“Maggie wasn’t Hale’s girlfriend, Sierra.” He pauses and I search his eyes for answers. His voice is choked, “She was mine.”

I never felt the bottle of Tempranillo slip from my hands. The crash itself presents as a faraway sound, yet I’m vaguely aware that my legs are wet. Looking down, the red puddle spreads like blood from a gunshot wound, my feet at the epicenter.
How apropos
, is my thought,
it looks just like my heart
.

Sitting across from Noel in Central Market’s Café, this time the red wine is in a glass and I take a healthy gulp before we start to talk.

“My grandparents owned a house on Nantucket that my parents now own and someday Hale and I will jointly own. Summers and all holidays were spent on the island and that is our family place.”

I’m trying to envision these two boys, hair wild in the sea breeze as they run through the surf. Two very handsome little boys. The beaches and streets of Nantucket must’ve felt like their safe place. In my mind it’s carefree summers and lobsters.

“Next door to us was the Myers. Their family had been there as long as ours and they were great friends of both my grandparents and my parents. Doors were never closed or locked and we just wandered from house to house. It was pretty idyllic.” Noel is lost in a memory and the look on his face makes him look like Hale and I just want to reach out.

“Anyway, the Myers had a daughter, a granddaughter named Maggie. She was between me and Hale in age, a little closer in age to me. There wasn’t a time we didn’t know Maggie. We were all eating sand together in our diapers. It was hard to know where their family ended and ours began. As we grew older, Maggie and I became a couple, it was something we always knew would happen. So, by the time we hit our teens, Maggie and I were boyfriend and girlfriend. We were each other’s firsts. First kiss, first date, first time holding hands and eventually we lost our virginity to one another.”

“What was her relationship with Hale?”

“Hale adored her and the feeling was mutual. He had a crush on her, it was impossible not to. The girl was like liquid sunshine. She could light up a room on even the darkest days. We were kind of like the Three Musketeers. Always together. But she was like a big sister to Hale. She babysat for him when he was younger and he loved her like she was family. She would spend hours playing with him on the beach, building sandcastles and walking the beach looking for starfish.”

Swirling the wine in his glass, I wonder if Noel can almost see them in the amber liquid.

“The summer I was seventeen, Maggie was sixteen and we were sneaking off, as teenagers do, every chance we could get. We were out of control. Sex was this forbidden high and we thought we were so mature and sophisticated. It was the end of the summer and Maggie had been in a bitchy mood for a couple of days. I had no idea what it was about and I know I made asinine comments about being on the rag and what a brat she was if she didn’t get her way. Well this one beautiful Thursday in late August she wanted to go sailing and for a picnic. There was this basketball game that day with some guys from Polpis, which is a town east of where we are on the island. We had a big fight about it and I took off with my friends to go play basketball.

“Hale saw her sail off that day by herself. She was in her Sunfish, so he just thought she’d be staying around the bay, just tooling around the harbor. It was a gorgeous day and he said he waved to her on her way out and she waved back. About an hour later, he was on the beach and a squall blew in from the west. Hale could see Maggie’s sail out on the open water. It probably wasn’t something she planned, but the winds were too strong for her to handle it alone. He stayed out there keeping track of it as best as he could see in the rain and then tried to swim out, but the current was crazy and she was too far out for him to get to. So he swam back to the beach, which was fairly close to the Coast Guard Station and ran there all wet and covered in sand to alert them. They got a rescue boat out immediately and recovered her craft, but she wasn’t in it.”

The tears rolling down my face are being shed for all three of the friends. One freak of nature thing and their lives would never be the same. Childhoods abruptly ended and guilt permeating everything that followed.

“Did they find her?” I manage through my tears, clenching my wine glass with both hands.

Nodding, Noel continues, “Her body washed up on the far end of the island later that day. Everyone was out searching all the beaches and coves. And it was Hale who found her. The last person to see her alive and the one to find her. He tried reviving her, doing CPR, but she was gone. And he didn’t want to accept that. When the coroner’s report came back, we learned that she was pregnant. Although he couldn’t have done anything, Hale never forgave himself for not being able to save her and the baby. My baby. And I’ve carried the guilt of not going with her and losing both her and the baby because of it.”

“What a terrible burden for two young boys to live with.”

“So when Hale dropped out of MIT and joined the armed forces and started taking on very risky missions to save lives, we always thought this was his, probably not so healthy, way of paying penance for Maggie’s death.”

“I can see that. Even though he certainly was not responsible for her death and did what he could do under the circumstances to try and save her.”

“So now you can see, when he was able to save you, and save you from drowning no less, I just thought this would be the act that would realign his universe. This time he saved someone he loved. He could stop risking his life trying to make up for it. But the last two times I saw him, he was so down. It was like he was after Maggie. I haven’t seen him that way in years and I don’t understand it.”

Unfortunately, I do. And if I thought my heart had been hurting before, I’m beyond devastated now.

“Noel, I haven’t talked to Hale since like four days after the incident. He wasn’t truthful about something that was very important to me and I ended things.”

I can tell by his blindsided reaction that Hale had not shared any of this with him before.

“So, he saved you. Then he lost you. What he thought he was able to recover ended up slipping away from him anyway. That was a two-times death for him.”

I’m chilled by Noel’s words.

And by the loss of Hale’s second chance.

Halfway through the bottle of wine and three-quarters of the way through the Miles of Chocolate, I check my phone for the three hundredth time. Nothing. The dinner and awards have to be over by now. They usually do some kind of entertainment afterwards, but it’s almost midnight. Beverly has to be dozing off in a chair somewhere, I know it, and Monica is getting some hot scoop. Maybe even from Hale. But no one has gotten back to me. Between what is going on in New Orleans and my conversation with Noel, I am bursting to talk to someone. I have to find out how Hale is.