Book of Days_ A Novel - James L. Rubart [9]
But she wasn't Jessie.
Nobody could be, and after he turned down the next five setups, his friends stopped playing matchmaker.
In the movies when the hero loses the love of his life, another perfect girl comes along full of liquid light and fills all the dark places. It didn't work that way in the real world.
Three or four times a week a dream of Jessie wrenched him from sleep. In those moments he wondered if his memories were true, or if the passage of time had made their marriage more wonderful than it really had been.
And now he'd started losing those memories of her. And some days—he clenched his teeth—he couldn't quite capture her face.
These days when he pulled up photos of Jessie and him together, he sometimes couldn't even remember where they'd been taken. Most times when he concentrated, the memory rushed back into his mind like the ocean filling a tide pool. But other times . . .
Cameron lingered on the edge of the cliff a few more minutes and gazed at the valley three-hundred feet below. He sucked in a breath and held it as long as he could before releasing the air.
Wasn't heaven in the clouds? He massaged his arms and stared at the darkening sky. Was that where Jessie was?
To his right a squirrel screeched. Cameron squatted and peered at the animal who sat ten yards away at the base of a western larch. The life of a squirrel. Simple. No pain. No maddening mysteries. Few questions and an answer with every acorn. He dug into his day pack, pulled out a large handful of trail mix, and tossed it toward the creature.
"You'll be able to feed all your kids for a week on that."
The animal squealed and skittered around the trail mix and stuffed its cheeks full before scampering off.
Cameron reached down and grabbed a baseball-sized stone, stood, and hurled it with all his strength at a quaking aspen. It smacked into the tree and tore off a section of bark. Strike. He picked up another rock. Then another.
Smack! Strike two.
Strike seven, eight, nine. You're out.
He ignored the pain knifing through his arm and shoulder and didn't stop throwing stones till the water in his eyes blurred his vision too much to see.
First Dad, then Jessie. People died. Why couldn't he get over it and move on?
Cameron slumped to the ground and massaged his eyes with his palms and tried to recall the first time Jessie and he had met.
The memory wasn't there.
Here we go again.
Cold sweat broke out on his forehead. What was going on with him? Impossible. How had his dad known? How could this be happening to him at thirty-three?
Cameron pounded his forehead with the flat of his palm. "You can't lose your mind, Cameron! You can't."
A few seconds later their first date surfaced like the sun cresting a mountain ridge at dawn. It didn't help the panic pinging through his mind.
One year for Christmas he'd framed a collage of all their most memorable days leading up to their wedding. First real date . . . their trip up to Vancouver, B.C., where they'd visited Flintstone Land and he danced with Wilma and stepped on her toes three times. First kiss . . . Larrabee State Park in Bellingham, wasn't it? First time they'd said I love you. First . . . The canvas of his mind went blank after that.
He used to know all the dates better than Jessie ever had.
Now all he had were fragments.
Cameron trudged back to his amber one-man climbing tent, pulled his iPhone out of his climbing pack, sat, and scrolled through his favorite pictures of Jessie and him.
"Where are you now? If you're in some blissful afterlife, can you see what's going on down here?"
A picture of Jessie holding her pilot's license, a big grin on her face, slid into view. Immediately he was back at the scene of the crash, and the memory surged up from his heart like a flash flood.
This time he couldn't stop it.
"Let me talk to her!" Cameron shouted into his cell phone. Through the phone he heard a siren wail through the night.
"I'm sorry, sir. Her condition isn't . . . she can't—"