Welcome back, gentle reader. This is another tale borne of long drives and not much to keep my brain occupied. Per my normal approach, this one is a slow burn to get to the exciting bits.
I didn't have an editor this time, so all mistakes are mine and I apologize advance for those. As always, I welcome any feedback (whether good, bad, or indifferent). Thanks for reading!
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I opened the car door and shivered as cool Pacific air swirled inside. Sounds of distant surf mingled with the low hum of the car's heater. I closed the door without shutting off the engine.
Gravel crunched under my shoes and the breeze tickled my hair. I glanced at the overcast sky, thinking that appropriate for the moment. A few paces brought me from the car to the guard rail. I stepped over it and approached the cliff. The cliffs here near Heceta Head weren't tall, though there was some drop-off to the surf below.
I smiled sadly. Carolyn had loved the coast near Florence. Half the time we came to see the kids at school in Eugene, I thought it was just an excuse for her to book us overnight near the coast. She would sit in silence and overlook the ocean for hours. I often wondered what she was thinking during those times.
Now, I really didn't want to know.
I glanced at the waves slapping into the rocks. Anything tossed to that tempest was likely lost forever. Objects, people ... memories ...
The weight of my thoughts elicited one final sigh. There was no point in wasting time.
#
I won't spend too much time talking about how Carolyn and I got together. We were freshmen in college at the University of Oregon when I met her, through friends. She was pretty without being gorgeous, with a slender figure, shoulder-length light brown hair she wore most often in a ponytail, bright blue eyes, and an incredible smile. It wasn't love at first sight or anything like that, but we got along well, and over time, that grew. We dated off and on for the whole four years we were in school, sometimes seeing other people when we were "off."
But I think that by the time we graduated, we both decided that the other was "the one." We got married when I was twenty-three, and her twenty-two. Kids followed: Josie, David, and Clarissa. They all had the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, and they were all good kids.
Carolyn and I both advanced our careers--me in financial consulting, her in sales. At our eight-year mark, Carolyn asked me what I thought about her starting her own business. She'd harbored a dream of owning her own boutique. Financially, we were stable, so I told her to go for it. I knew she was capable but her store was more successful than I dreamed possible. I guess I underestimated the power of trendy-retro-style clothing with the hipster set inhabiting Portland. I was also a little worried that the business would take Carolyn away from the family too much but she balanced her time well and hired capable, trustworthy people, and ended up spending as much or more time with us than before. The extra money allowed us to landscape, fully fund all the kids' college accounts, and enclose part of our back deck and put in a hot tub. Carolyn was happy with it all, so I was too.
Carolyn was warm and bubbly, and well-liked by most people that knew her. She was a good mom and attentive wife. Our sex life was varied and consistent and we both made sure over the years to show our affection to each other. I knew she'd been with other people during our times off--as had I--but she never showed any hint of dissatisfaction with our intimacy. She initiated as much as I did and was willing to experiment and adventure. In fact, I think Clarissa, our youngest, was conceived when we had sex in the middle of a hedge maze after I dared her, with the voices of other tourists drifting near and close. But I digress.
One thing I will highlight. When we got married, Carolyn came to me with a leather-bound book. She told me she wanted to keep a song of our life together. I was amused by the idea but it was important to her, so we wrote lyrics together--usually a verse or two--at every major high point of our lives together: our first anniversary, the births of our kids, the opening of her business, our thirtieth and fortieth birthdays, and so on. She called those milestones, "writing the next line of our song."
The cadence of the tune was simple--something on the difficulty of "Happy Birthday" and it got so long that anyone who actually tried to sing it would have been at it for hours. But it made her happy. Every now and again, she'd take the book, snuggle against me, and flip through the pages, whispering or humming the verses to herself. She'd usually want to make gentle love on the nights she did and I was always happy to oblige her.
So things were good. Life upheavals happened, as they do. Kids grew up, Carolyn and I just got older and more attached. Recessions put us in financial pinches. Josie got pregnant by accident and married her then-boyfriend Lucas. It worked out and they were happy, though the stress about put me in the ground. But I had few real complaints. I was happy. I thought we all were.
Which made it all the more jarring to have it all come crashing down in flames.
Those life-defining moments persist in memory. I've heard people describe it as the brain locking those important moments in stasis, to always be remembered, even when lesser memories, like what you had for lunch Tuesday last week, fade into obscurity.
I think that understates the mental violence of such an event. It's more akin to the shadows of the victims of Hiroshima, etched in stone forever at the instant of exposure to something so terrible.
February twenty-seventh. It was a Wednesday evening. Five-fifty-six, to be precise. Carolyn was due home at any moment. I'd been home about an hour and was, as per my normal, assembling things for dinner. We normally prepared things together, especially since Clarissa had left for school the previous fall, leaving us empty nesters.
I smiled at the thought. We'd both fought the depression of our youngest leaving home ... but at the same time, we'd reveled in having the place to ourselves. For a few weeks, the sex had been off the charts. I knew with us being left alone, it was a bonding mechanism, but I wasn't complaining. And with Josie graduated, living across town with her husband and kid--and a second one on the way--not to mention David and Clarissa still coming home on breaks and weekends--life had not left the house.
A wider smile crossed my lips. Our twenty-fifth anniversary was coming up later that summer. I had almost convinced her to go to an adults-only resort in the Bahamas--not for swingers or anything, but just someplace catering to couples rather than families. We'd both put on a few pounds over the years but Carolyn still looked excellent in a bikini, and out of one. I'd been eyeing a honeymoon suite at one resort for us.
I'd even written two sets of lyrics about our twenty-fifth, for our book, so that Carolyn could choose which one she wanted to incorporate into our song. If she didn't like either, I'd be happy to write something else with her but I thought she'd appreciate the effort.
The doorbell roused me from my daydreams. I wiped my hands and answered. I expected one of my neighbors.
Instead, I was greeted by two Portland city police officers. I raised an eyebrow. "Can I help you?"
"Are you Mr. Theodore Kellogg?"
