"Welcome home," Anne muttered to herself and saluted as she turned
onto the coast highway in the van she rented just hours earlier at the
airport.
She thought about the tone of her simple salutation. Anxious,
apprehensive,
admonishing as if to a child, she wondered? No, not the latter. She was
not a child, but a forty-year-old woman, a wife and mother. But was she
acting like one, she smiled, when her true home was back in Boston?
Perhaps
she should be there now in these days before Christmas–wrapping gifts
and
making plans for the holiday.
But she was here thousands of miles away for only one reason: to see
Sam.
It had been over twenty years since she and Sam Banks said their
goodbyes.
She said his name aloud. It sounded so strange, this name from the
past,
this name that would not let her rest. The sound of his murmured name
reminded
her of its quiet and constant iteration...over and over in her
head...for
so many years. How many more years could she have gone on masquerading
the feelings this name invoked?
When her husband Frank asked her what she wanted most for Christmas
this year, she spoke the words without thinking, the words held back
for
so long. "I want to go home for just a day." The home to which she
alluded
was on another coast, a gorgeous coast, a place far removed from her
present
home in the big city. It was a rugged and desolate region of land.
She waited for Frank’s puzzled face, his raised eyebrow, a gentle
reprimand.
It never came. A few days later he handed her a ticket, wrapped in a
red
bow. With a hug, he said, "Go, and do what you must. I’ll be here and
take
charge."
As she drove down the coast of the semi-deserted December highway in
the drizzle, she had second thoughts. She should’ve changed her mind
right
then and stayed, she thought, and the three of them—Frank and Anne and
their daughter-- would be listening to Christmas music, wrapping the
last
of the presents, and toying with the final decorations on the tree. She
blinked her eyes briefly and saw her family now without her, gathered
near
the cozy warmth of the fire, in the dim and festive-glowed living room,
the colored lights strung haphazardly about the walls. She saw her
daughter
Jenny’s face beaming, eyes aglow with eagerness and exhilaration.
Instead, Anne was miles away on a another coast, staring out at
hundreds
of seabirds riding the thermal air currents high over the rocky cliffs
of the Northwest. Falling, rising, floating, she watched them,
spellbound,
as they spread their wings to full capacity and played, suspending
themselves
in mid-air, not able to make any forward momentum.
Just as she was at this very moment, playing in time and space.
Anne slowed and leaned to peer up at the seabirds through the front
window of the van. She turned off the road and parked, then closed her
eyes and clutched the wheel for a long minute or two.
Stepping out, she walked up a winding pathway that led to the windblown
grassy bluff out toward the headland. Once there, she surveyed the
majesty
of the scene before her. Below were more birds, thousands, like white
raindrops
swirling over the once-familiar picture-postcard sand drifts and dunes
which rippled and stretched for miles, fronting the adjacent thick
timberland
peninsula.
After more than two decades she was back at this most rugged
section of the Oregon Coast. It greeted her like an old friend,
primping
and boasting its subdued grandiosity, as if to remind her of all that
she
had missed. And Anne saw its powerful beauty like she never had before.
Anne felt her senses besieged. In the mist the salt air was suddenly
swept with the sweet aroma of fragrant blossoms. Her eyes dallied over
the pink and purple wild flowers and deep rooted shrubs and bushes that
led the way up to the highest bluffs, jutting out over a wild and
churning
sea. As if on cue, she heard and saw in her mind’s eye the herds of sea
lions and their pups carousing on the rocks in the grotto below. Anne
smiled
and closed her eyes, seeing them frolic in the splashes of wild ocean
as
it surged in and out of the caves.
Suddenly hedging, she started to turn and walk back to her car. Then
in mid- motion she stopped and once again looked out to the sea. How
far
should she take it? There was still time to turn around and take the
evening
flight back. But the flame so long flickering was burning bright. There
had never been any way to put it out. Especially now.
Year after year it smoldered, haunting her with what if? What if she
had stayed behind and made a life here with Sam? Would she be happy
now?
Or peaceful with her lot in womanhood. Or would her heart nag still,
restless
and agitated, as in her youth when her heart drove her away?
Anne left Sam in that youth, right after high school, a dauntless,
self-assured young woman with stars in her eyes, college-bound with
scholarship
in hand. She promised Sam she’d return from Boston a fully-degreed
teacher.
Sam’s sadness showed, she supposed he knew he might never see her
again.
His face also showed he fully understood his destiny to stay behind:
the
eldest, he was chosen to carry on in the family business.
How quickly the two decades passed. And how quickly the strangeness
overtook her former optimism now that she was just minutes from seeing
him again. Anne knew he was divorced and had a teenage son for whom he
retained custody and was raising in the same beach house where he grew
up at North Point.
She recalled her hands shaking the day she was alone at home and phoned
him to announce her visit. His voice broke when he first heard hers and
for a few moments the two spoke awkwardly, stumbling over their words.
Anne listened as he talked, feeling almost a shared pride in his son,
Michael. "A great kid. Solid. Strong with values and a good heart," Sam
told her. "I’ve always wanted you to meet him."
She closed her eyes as he spoke, hearing his voice, this wraith
from the past. He sounded different and she wondered how he looked
after
all these years. Did he think of her, she wondered? Did he remember the
whimsical times they shared, walking hand-in-hand along secret
pathways--running,
playing ball, picnicking and sharing secrets and ambitions along the
miles
of isolated beaches?
Guilt stabbed at her briefly when she thought of her kind and
thoughtful
husband, Frank, a man she loved. He was a successful young attorney who
had courted her while Anne was a student at the university in Boston.
They
married soon after Anne graduated. After waiting ten years, they had
their
only child, a daughter named Jenny.
At first, when Frank proposed, she thought of Sam waiting for her back
on the coast and the promise she made to return. But by then he was so
far removed from what she was and was to become since leaving North
Point.
Anne was moving up at a fast furious pace.
Sam called each day to ask when she was coming home. She resented
his voice grown increasingly colorless, as she made her empty
assurances.
The calls ceased. At that time, Sam was a boy compared to her intended,
the teen-aged vows made on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, immature
and
frivolous and naive. Not as serious as her new life, nor marriage.
After graduation, Anne began teaching second grade. She and Frank
thrived
in the community with good careers and friends. So happy were they that
Anne vowed to coax her parents into following, no matter how long it
took.
Eventually they did and settled in a small town outside of Boston.
Anne’s
life’s plans had taken a detour. She found herself walking along a new
and different pathway.
Although her life was busy and full, she found Sam creeping into her
thoughts, always with her more and more over the years--his smile, grey
eyes, wavy black hair. Five years passed, ten, then fifteen. As she
grew
older, she began to daydream--to yearn for the boyish charm that she
once
ridiculed. At odd moments she could hear his voice as if he were in the
room, and even awaken at night after all this time and feel the tender
warmth of his arms.
Instead of diminishing over time, Sam’s image became more well-defined.
It bullied her, scoffing at her attempts to ignore and dismiss his
existence.
His reality had been pushing its way forward to the front line of her
thoughts
and she was powerless to block it.
She had to see him again—just once—to stop the longing that seemed
to overpower her with each passing day. It didn’t matter that she was a
good wife- a good mother- a good teacher. Time was her enemy. She still
missed him. It hurt.
Her recurrent memory was the evenings at dusk at Point Lighthouse.
They would lounge on their backs on the lush grass beneath the old
jutting
structure, staring up at the tower and its vagabond beacon and talk for
hours into the night.
"Listen," Sam would whisper in the dark of the night. And she would
strain to hear that faint moaning passing over them from the miles of
drifting
sand below. "Like angels singing," Sam would tell her, "a chorus just
for
us in the wind and sand."
This thrilling and eerie phenomena was common knowledge and variously
described. The worst of these explanations was the scientific one of
echoes
and whistles that Sam and Anne would laugh at, the combination of
weather,
humidity and wind. However, the windsongs of the sands were legendary
and
chronicled for many centuries from explorers and poets, to scientists
and
naturalists.
But Anne secretly never heard the ballad, only pretended to hear, to
reassure Sam. She remembered feeling cheated as he’d hum along with it
and whispered, "Hear it? Hear it?" And she would say, "Yes, yes."
She would strain to hear even a slight vibration of this famous song
that others claimed the wind carried from the dunes, but it was
useless.
"You must believe," her mother would assure her. "You can’t will it to
happen. It will come to you when you least expect it. When the gift
arrives,
it will never leave you. It will be with you always."
Anne sat down on the long grasses and closed her eyes. The winter
drafts
whipped about and her hair flew wildly about her face. She inhaled the
crisp coastal sea air and let her mind wander back in time. To the
beginning.
She and Sam were fourteen when they swore they would forever be best
friends. Anne remembered this solemn pact solidified with a
hug-and-a-half
and the two rings they exchanged, made from rolled aluminum foil. While
other teenagers in the area traveled in groups, Samuel Banks and Anne
Campbell
were inseparable. Nothing could have kept them apart.
On lazy summer days, the two spent hours at Sam’s beach house listening
to records, playing their favorite songs over and over. They would eat
pistachio nuts as they sat side-by-side on the front porch, cracking
open
the shells. Their fingers were forever stained red after eating
handfuls
of the salted nuts. By the end of the afternoon, empty bottles of cola
and piles of discarded shells were scattered about them.
On summer nights they ran barefoot across the wet sand, chasing the
evening tide, their bodies often weak from skipping and jumping,
breathless
from laughter. Then, they would collapse, laying on their backs on cold
sand at the water’s edge. As the night sea crept over their exhausted
forms,
it drenched them, causing them to sputter and squeal. Innocent fun,
Anne
knew, but much more: an invisible bond between them that kept them
close.
Sacred and privileged.
They never ridiculed each other or their individual dreams. Sam could
tell her anything almost by just thinking it. The same was true of her.
Their friendship grew with an intensity so strong, neither could fathom
a life apart from the other. Was it real love, Anne wondered? She
wasn’t
sure. All she knew was that she cherished each moment they spent
together.
At seventeen, their relationship changed as they matured into young
adults, both blossoming strong and winsome. Sam’s eyes were a deeper
grey,
the color of the winter sea. He stood well above Anne now, hovering
over
her head, she thought sometimes as if blocking intrusions from the
outside
world. Their teasing, their flirtatious bantering evolved into a raw
chemistry
that connected them, bouncing back and forth between their youthful
souls.
Anne found herself blushing when Sam put his arms around her for the
first time as mature bodied adults and held her tightly. She tried to
picture
their lives together as adults.
"When you return from school, we’ll build our beach house," he
promised.
"Then have a dozen kids running free over these miles of white sand."
On her eighteenth birthday Sam gave her a silver heart with their names
engraved on the back which she wore on a chain. Their kisses were
lingering
now, truthful and passionate.
Anne remembered that day she stood on the bluff at the lighthouse
waiting
for Sam with the letter of acceptance to college in Boston. They sat
close
together looking out at the vast body of water before them, watching
the
blankets of white foam roll in to shore around the jagged rocks.
He would not stand in her way, he told her, and hoped the time would
pass by quickly, then said, "Congratulations," and kissed her cheek.
"You know I’ll be back," she assured him, turning from his red eyes
and gazing back over the Pacific.
"Goodbye and hello again," she said out loud, now standing on that
same bluff, the Point Lighthouse in the distance. She began towards it,
hearing her heart pound, rehearsing what had been rehearsed countless
times.
"Oh, hi, Sam, do you remember our foil rings? Our hug-and-a-half? Or
have
I alone grown up silly and sentimental?"
Then, she saw him—the lone figure standing near the lighthouse, tossing
stones off the cliff to the water below. A youth of fourteen, with
black
wavy hair, and she knew even at that distance his eyes were grey like
the
December sea. His movements mesmerized her, called her back, to a boy
maneuvering
into the self—assured posture of a man-to-be, in the very same spot on
the grass under the beacon. She stared at this fraternal form, whose
manner
and movements were like her own, long ago.
She dared not move forward lest she jar that sacred vision of youth.
She was frozen as she feasted on the boy’s presence and prayed that he
would not turn and see her. For if he did and walked away, she would
wail
at the broken spell. She took a deep breath and cried inaudibly at her
breach in time. It looked and felt the same.
Tears flowed, her eyes unblinking.
From the side she sensed someone approaching, making his way up the
trail from the beach house. The adult figure continued nearer, but Anne
would not turn to it. Instead she kept her eyes on the boy, drinking in
his timeless picture. Until the boy turned, and cried out, "Dad!" And
waved
his hand at the approaching adult.
As the figure approached, Anne stepped back in shock.
"Hey!" she heard him call, but she would not look, instead she stepped
further back, two steps for his every one.
She would not look at his face, the face of a ghost. Ghosts were
invisible,
invisible they should stay.
Her eyes still remained on the boy as the boy approached the man.
Then, she turned on her heels and ran back, down the winding dirt
trails
towards her car.
The voice called her name. She ignored it. Soon its echo lost strength
as she made her way away from the bluff. Anne reached her car and sat
inside,
trying to catch her breath. The voice was gone. It was quiet. The waves
were calm, frothing peacefully under the setting sun.
Her eyes were dry, her head clear. And then...she heard it, the sound
coming from the sea of drifting sand. It was a whistle, a moan- a
chorus
of faint violins. It played to the dusk, and to the flat grey Oregon
sky
that was streaked with blue and yellow remnants from the sun’s farewell
glare.
Anne sat silent, drinking in the wind’s serenade.
"Merry Christmas to me," she breathed, grateful for the season’s first
gift.
It was the gift of the song and the gift of her past and she had
captured
it all. Now, so fresh in her mind she could put the past to rest, where
it belonged: in a special place in her heart.
Anne turned the car around and headed back. The wind serenade followed,
carrying with it the mystical refrain from the dunes. For centuries it
had played for others and now it had found Anne. It would stay with her
now... forever, in song and in spirit.
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