Page 103 of The Spirit of Love
I open the door, which requires more hip grease than I expected. I gesture for Jude to walk in first.
“Wow,” he whispers. “It’s the same.”
But when I follow him in, I have to hold back a gasp, because in the space of four hours, everything has changed.
The walls are bare. The furniture is gone. The air is thick with dust. Cobwebs cover all the windows. The bookshelf andthe ladder and the handmade bar and the fireplace still stand, but they’re shadows of what they’d been before. The cabin looks abandoned to the point of being condemned.
Like no one’s been here in ten years.
“What happened?” The words slip out, even though I know. A lump rises in the back of my throat.
Oh, Sam.
Jude walks the perimeter of the room, his hands running over Sam’s—his—handiwork. He pauses where the couch had been, where a ghost and I once sat, staying up all night and then listening to the sunrise.
I wish I could make this place go back to the way it was. I wish I could have kept them both.
“I was just here this morning, and everything was different.” My voice trembles. “He was here.”
“Who?”
I turn to look at Jude. “Sam.”
“I don’t understand.”
I step close and put my hands on Jude’s shoulders. I look into his eyes. “We deal with the impossible every day. We make fantasies real. We kill people, and we bring them back to life. And I know, like I know you know, that every single thing that’s magic on TV is pulled from the collective unconscious because it’s also actually real. We use special effects, and tricks of light, and makeup, and editing. But once upon a time, when I was just a kid, I didn’t know how to do any of that. But I knew that what made fantasy feel real was the magic of the human heart, which is capable of anything.”
“Yes,” Jude whispers.
“So right now,” I continue, “in the face of some deeply inexplicable, time- and space-defying occurrences, I’m going to lean on what I know. What I guess I’ve always known.” I put my hand over my heart and close my eyes. “The truth I hold in here. One month ago, I met a man on this island in the middle of a storm. He took me to this cabin. He showed me his world. His name was Sam. He was twenty-three.” I sniff, but the tears are starting. “He was tall and built and hadn’t yet grown into himself. He was thirty-two service hours away from completing his Search and Rescue training certification.”
“This can’t be possible,” Jude whispers.
“He couldn’t make toast without burning it, but his boeuf bourguignon rivaled Julia Child’s. He loved spearfishing and hummingbirds and listening to the sunrise, right out there.” I point out the window facing the sea. “Sometimes while doing shirtless one-armed pull-ups. I could have filmed a two-hour feature film of him doing shirtless one-armed pull-ups.”
“That sounds like more of a film-festival-circuit short,” Jude jokes, but his eyes are shining with tears, too.
“I don’t know how to make this make sense,” I say, “and I don’t know where Sam is right now. I don’t know what happened to this cabin since I left it four hours ago. But I do know that I loved that man.” I close my eyes. I sound ridiculous. “Or at least, I was starting to love him. Or if not that, I loved what he was becoming. He was kind and funny and open, and when we slept together on the beach—”
“Yousleptwith Sam?”
“I felt like I was touching the core of the earth.”
“You slept with my—wow. I’m trying to picture that.”
I thwack Jude gently. I’m still crying. “And I miss him. We fought this morning. And I’m scared I did something that made him disappear. I’m scared I’ll never see him again. And I really wanted you to meet him. Do you understand?”
He nods. “I’m trying.”
“It’s a lot.”
“What did you and Sam fight about?”
“In the end,” I say, “I think it was because he wasn’t you.”
Jude cups my face in his hands. He closes his eyes now and a tear slips out.
“My doctors were so proud when I recovered,” he says quietly. “Of me. Of themselves. I was a medical miracle. No one could believe they brought that shell back to life.”
