Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks [117]
He wasn’t going to make it.
The water was up to his chin when he finally stopped trying. Looking upward, his body exhausted, he still refused to believe that it would end this way.
He let go of the side rail and began to swim away from the boat. His coat and shoes dragged heavily in the water. He treaded water, rising with the swells as he watched Happenstance finally slip beneath the ocean. Then, with cold and exhaustion beginning to numb his senses, he turned and began the slow, impossible swim to shore.
Theresa sat with Jeb at the table. Talking in fits and starts, he had taken a long time to tell her what he knew.
Later, Theresa would recall that as she listened to his story, it was not with a sense of fear as much as it was one of curiosity. She knew that Garrett had survived. He was an expert sailor, an even better swimmer. He was too careful, too vital, to be bested by something like this. If anyone could make it, it would be he.
She reached across the table to Jeb, confused. “I don’t understand…. Why did he take the boat out if he knew there was a storm coming?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly. He couldn’t meet her eyes.
Theresa furrowed her brow, bewilderment making her surroundings surreal. “Did he say anything to you before he went out?”
Jeb shook his head. He was ashen, his eyes downcast as if hiding something. Absently Theresa looked around the kitchen. Everything was tidy, as if it had been cleaned moments before she arrived. Through the open bedroom door she saw Garrett’s comforter spread neatly across the bed. Oddly, two large floral arrangements had been placed atop it.
“I don’t understand—he’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Theresa,” Jeb finally said with tears forming in his eyes, “they found him yesterday morning.”
“Is he in the hospital?”
“No,” he said quietly.
“Then where is he?” she asked, refusing to acknowledge what she somehow knew.
Jeb didn’t answer.
It was then that her breathing suddenly became difficult. Beginning with her hands, her body started to tremble. Garrett! she thought. What happened? Why aren’t you here? Jeb bowed his head so she wouldn’t see his tears, but she could hear his choking gasps.
“Theresa…,” he said, trailing off.
“Where is he?” she demanded, leaping to her feet in a surge of frantic adrenaline. She heard the chair clatter to the floor behind her as if from a very great distance.
Jeb stared up at her silently. Then, with a single deliberate motion, he wiped the tears with the back of his hand. “They found his body yesterday morning.”
She felt her chest constrict as if she were suffocating.
“He’s gone, Theresa.”
On the beach where it had all begun, Theresa allowed herself to remember the events from one year earlier.
They had buried him next to Catherine, in a small cemetery near his home. Jeb and Theresa stood together at the graveside service, surrounded by the people whose lives Garrett had touched—friends from high school, former diving students, employees from the shop. It was a simple ceremony, and though it began to rain just as the minister finished speaking, the crowd lingered long after it was over.
The wake was held at Garrett’s house. One by one, people came through, all offering their condolences and sharing memories. When the last few filed out, leaving Jeb and Theresa alone, Jeb pulled a box from the closet and asked her to sit with him while they looked through it together.
In the box were hundreds of photographs. Over the next few hours she watched Garrett’s childhood and adolescence unfold—all the missing pieces of his life that she had only imagined. Then there were the pictures of the later years—high school and college graduations; the restored Happenstance; Garrett in front of the remodeled shop prior to its opening. In every one of them, she noticed, his smile never changed. Smiling with him, she saw that for the most part his wardrobe hadn’t,