Timothy (2 page)

And since my secrets were not just my own to share, baring my soul—telling her the truth—was something I could never do.

I have never told anyone the whole truth of what happened that summer—the things that have shaped me into the person I am now. I will never be able to trust someone enough to know the secrets I carry with me now—the burden I shall undoubtedly carry to the grave.

Yet, with the passage of time, it
has
gotten somewhat easier. I sometimes can go for several days without remembering. I sleep better than I did, and no longer need the prescription drugs doctors prescribed for me without question or need of an explanation for so long. I can climb into bed every night without worrying that my dreams will take me back there again.

At some point—I didn't mark the date—my dreams stopped being about the house on the shore, and began to be about other things, things that didn't cause me to toss and turn in torment until I awoke, gasping and terrified, until I finally remembered I was not there anymore.

But I am still not yet completely free of the spell cast over me by the great house called Spindrift, nor do I think I shall ever be.

There are still nights when I lie in bed staring at the shadows on the ceiling, hoping and waiting for sleep to come. Those are the nights when my mind will again hear the sound of the waves coming ashore at Spindrift. It all comes back to me then, like it all happened just yesterday, that it was only yesterday that I left the beautiful house on the Atlantic shore knowing I could never return.

The sound of the breaking waves was the only constant in my life during the brief months I lived there. You couldn't go anywhere in the house or on the grounds where the sound couldn't be heard. I eventually became so used to the sound that I didn't hear it anymore—it was just background noise, always there.

When I first came to live there, the waves crashing against the white sand beach were a comfort, lulling me into a deep restful sleep every night when I went to bed, no matter what happened during the day. I would pull the covers up to my face, with both the balcony doors and all the windows wide open to catch that wonderful salty, cold breeze off the ocean. The music of the breaking waves inexorably worked its magic on my tired, stressed brain and I would drift away to a dreamless sleep that refreshed and revived me. Every morning I woke to their perpetual rhythm. That sound was always there, whenever I ate or walked the dog, it was there—cold water crashing against the land and sucking the sand back away as it receded in the age-old battle of land versus sea.

That battle is eternal, of course—it will continue on eternally, long after I have turned to dust in my own grave, long after the house itself has crumbled into nothing and been forgotten, that struggle will go on.

Long ago I ceased to wonder why I sometimes still hear the waves on certain nights while I lie in bed waiting for sleep to come. It is a reminder there can be no escaping the past for me.

And it is on those nights, those nights when my tired mind hears again those waves, that I have the recurring dream that drove me to see Dr. Weisbrook in her tasteful office near Trafalgar Square in the first place.

It was always the same dream, with no variation that I could detect.

In the dream, I am back at Spindrift, like I had never left. It is night, and I am standing at the front of the wide, lushly green lawn with the gorgeous marble fountain of Apollo and Daphne splashing water with the paved driveway circling it, the towering bushes still hiding the house and the grounds from the road and the prying eyes of neighbors on either side.

In the dream I start walking along the driveway, around the house and past the sparkling blue water of the swimming pool just behind it. Over to my right is the small building—the studio, with all of its windows dark and its door sensibly shut and locked.

Ahead of me I can see where the lawn ends and the sand begins, the white sand glowing in the soft moonlight, the waves at night much bigger than those of the day, and the white foam created when they break also incandescent.

I walk down, as I always do, to the cool, damp white sand, and just stand there unmoving, barefoot, feeling the wind blowing through my hair for what seems like almost an eternity before I walk to the water's edge and feel the cold surf against my skin.

Then, and only then, do I turn and face the great house.

It draws me forward, away from the water, beckoning me to leave the peaceful beach behind.

As I walk across the beach, the waves continue to crash against the sands behind me. The sound is hypnotic, as it always was. I look to the windows of my rooms and they are dark, the French doors closed against the chill of the night air. White clouds dance across the dark bluish black velvet sky over my head, and the moon is full and a pale yellow, countless stars winking wherever they could be seen through the moving clouds. The cold wind begins to blow more strongly, scented as always with the smell of fish and brine, off the dark water, enveloping me and making me shiver, raising gooseflesh on the bare skin of my arms. The sand beneath my bare feet becomes slippery blades of soft grass as I make my way toward the great house.

I pause there, shivering, on the edge of the meticulously manicured lawn and just stare at the magnificence of the house called Spindrift—the beautiful house that has graced the pages of design and architecture magazines almost from the time it was built—the famous house that never once felt like my home.

And as I stand there, shivering, I am overcome with an overwhelming sense of—of
defeat.
This is a place where I will never belong, that will never be my home, that will never welcome me.

It is a horrible feeling, and one experienced all too often that summer when I came there as a newlywed—awkward and insecure and unsure of myself.

The house never welcomed me, scorning me instead as a pretender.

I could never replace my predecessor—something I had always known but became acutely more aware of once I walked through the front doors of Spindrift.

I just stand there, staring at the dark house. Not a single light burns in any of the many windows, and there is no sense of any life anywhere inside the house. It just sits there, in my dream, in silence, brooding and watching like a hungry animal waiting for the right moment to pounce on its prey.

The house seems
alive.

But it is only a house—a beautiful historic mansion where people have loved and hated and laughed and danced and died. Houses cannot have feelings, houses cannot reject humans. I berate myself for giving the house human emotions.

Only humans can hate, as I know all too well.

Despite the dread I feel all the way down to my bones, in my dream I am always compelled to start walking across the back lawn, that horrible sense of my own defeat and failure growing with each step forward toward the beautiful house that never felt like my home, helpless to turn and run away down the beach as I so desperately want to do. Each time my bare feet touch the cool, damp grass I have to resist the urgent need to escape, to run around to the front of the house, get behind the wheel of one of the cars and flee.

The swimming pool is dark, but the howling wind from the sea is creating little waves that gently lap at the sides. The tennis court over near the towering hedges is also dark, and I can see fuzzy green tennis balls nestled in the grass alongside, waiting for someone to pick them up. Each slow, hesitant step takes me closer to the wide stone steps leading up to the gallery running the entire back length of the house. I am cold, so terribly cold, and the sense that the house wants me to come inside grows even stronger. The tall bushes on either side of the big lawn sway and wave in the wind, the leaves and branches rustling and rubbing together so that they seem to talk, sending me urgent warnings to run, that I am in danger, that I need to get away and never come back.

Yet I ignore these warnings, because I know that I must finally get the answers to the questions I've obsessed over, wondered about, for so long—and somehow I can get them if I can get inside the house. But the wind gets steadily colder and colder, my teeth begin to chatter and my body shakes with shivers, and the sense of dread and foreboding keeps rising within me, my heart is pounding and my breathing far too rapid for my own good—but yet somehow the compulsion remains, irresistible, driving me forward, my legs refusing to obey the commands from my brain to stop.

I am terrified of what I will discover, yet desperately want, and need, to know.

And I know somehow that it will not end well, it cannot end well—not now in the dream nor ever in real life, yet I keep walking.

I finally reach the steps to the back gallery, and the stone is bitterly cold against the soles of my feet. Knowing I have no other choice, I start climbing.

In my dream there are many more steps than there are in reality. I climbed up and down those steps many times, and it never took more than a matter of minutes. Yet there are so many in my dream that it seems to take hours for me to make it all the way up, shivering from the cold, to the gallery. The moon disappears behind a silvery cloud for a moment as I place one foot in front of the other, step by step making my way to the gallery itself. A light comes on in the farthest window to the left from where I stand, shivering, forever an outsider, never welcome, never wanted, always a stranger, in this stunningly beautiful home.

And I know that light is in my bedroom.

Wondering—and fearing—who might be in my room, I finally reach the back gallery, the wood made soft by exposure to the elements and the ever-present sea air. The wind dies down like it was never blowing, and the chill I was feeling fades quickly away.

There is a wrought iron table, with matching wrought iron chairs on each side of it, sitting just outside the huge cut-glass French doors that lead inside to the great room. Many mornings I sat at that table, watching the sea and drinking coffee. I walk toward the table, as I did so many mornings when I called Spindrift my home. The table was one of the only places at Spindrift where I ever felt at peace, where I drank my morning coffee and could forget about the empty day stretching before me, where I could fantasize about making my escape from this life I wasn't born to, wasn't meant to lead, was never meant to have.

There is a large ashtray made from Murano glass sitting in the direct center of the table, and a cigarette still smolders in it, its red ember glowing.

The burning cigarette is a mystery puzzling me in my dream, and I always pick it up, holding it between two fingers as I wonder, in my dream state, to whom it could belong, who could have left it behind, and where the smoker could have gone. For I saw nothing, no movement, no sign of life on the gallery as I made my slow walk up from the shoreline, and the person to whom it belonged must have only just recently abandoned it.

The wind picks up again as I sit at the table, the table I once thought of as mine, as no one else used it other than me. It was one of the few things at that time I could think were mine, as nothing else belonged to me. Nothing in that house belonged to anyone who still lived there. There was always a sense that the house was merely ours for the moment, and it was waiting, always waiting, for the true owner to return.

And I know, deep inside my heart and soul, who the cigarette truly belongs to—even though I cannot admit it to myself in my dream or when I am awake and remembering. It is a name I refuse to say, a name that is forbidden and must never be said, a subject that must always remain closed and never to be discussed.

Even though it haunts my dreams and my memory, it must never be said.

It is while I am holding the cigarette that I wake, and every time it is the middle of the night—it is always around three in the morning when my sleepy and tired eyes finally can discern the time on a nearby clock. I sit in my bed, my arms twisted around me, and I shiver as the memory of those dreadful, horrible days at Spindrift replay over and over in my mind and tears spill out of my eyes as I hug myself in the darkness, waiting for the kaleidoscope of memory to finally run down—memories of a time I must never allow myself to speak about, a time of which I would not be able to bring myself to speak even were the subject not firmly and determinedly closed forever.

And as I sit up in my bed, slowly getting my emotions under control as the memories begin to fade away again when the warm breeze off the Aegean Sea warms my cold skin, I know that what happened at Spindrift will always be a part of me, always lurking in my subconscious.

I might go days, weeks, even months without having the dream—but it will come again.

Of that much, I can be certain.

Because even now, after all the time that has passed and the many miles that have been traveled, Spindrift is never really far from my thoughts.

It is a name that must never be mentioned, never spoken, never discussed. Spindrift belongs to another time in my life, a chapter that is now closed, a time that would be best forgotten.

And I do try. Each day I smile and go about my business, shopping, eating, touring. I greet acquaintances and take great pleasure in knowing that they see nothing beyond the pleasant, placid façade I have built around myself. My hands do not shake, my voice is firm and strong, and I always lose myself in minutiae, making sure that everything is packed and nothing left behind, booking seats on airplanes and trains, returning rented vehicles and ordering town cars, making excuses and refusing invitations—all the minute little details that keep my mind busy so that my subconscious cannot sneak up on me unawares and bring it all to the front.

Oh, yes, my conscious mind can put all the thoughts and memories of Spindrift aside. It can easily pretend I have moved on, that we have both moved on, and neither of us has any care about what happened there—but my subconscious will never allow me to forget.

There are always triggers, of course—a certain brand of cigarette, an unexpected cold wind from the sea, the smell of a wet dog.