Message in a Bottle - Nicholas Sparks [118]
There were dozens of photographs of Catherine. At first Jeb seemed uncomfortable when she saw them, but strangely, they didn’t really affect her. She felt neither sadness nor anger because of them. They were simply a part of another time in his life.
Later that evening, as they sorted through the last few pictures, she saw the Garrett she’d fallen in love with. One shot in particular caught her eye, and she held it in front of her for a long time. Noticing her expression, Jeb explained that it had been taken on Memorial Day, a few weeks before the bottle had washed up at the Cape. In it Garrett stood on his back deck, looking much the same as he had the first time she’d come to his house.
When she was finally able to put it down, Jeb gently took it from her.
The following morning he handed her an envelope. Opening it, she saw that he’d given it back to her, along with a number of others. With the pictures were the three letters that had first enabled Theresa and Garrett to come together.
“I think he would want you to have these.”
Too choked up to respond, she nodded a silent thank-you.
Theresa couldn’t remember much about her first few days back in Boston, and in retrospect she knew she didn’t really want to. She did recall that Deanna was waiting for her at Logan Airport when her plane touched down. After taking one look at her, Deanna immediately called her husband, instructing him to bring some clothes to Theresa’s because she planned to stay with her for a few days. Theresa spent most of the time in bed, not even bothering to get up when Kevin came home from school.
“Is my mom ever going to be okay?” Kevin asked.
“She just needs a little time, Kevin,” Deanna answered. “I know it’s hard for you, too, but it’s going to be okay.”
Theresa’s dreams, when she could remember them, were fragmented and disorienting. Surprisingly, Garrett never appeared in them at all. She didn’t know if that was an omen of sorts or even if she should attach any meaning to it. In her daze, she found it difficult to think about anything clearly, and she went to bed early and remained there, cocooned in the soothing darkness for as long as she could.
Sometimes upon awakening, she experienced a split second of confused unreality when the whole thing seemed like a terrible mistake, too absurd to have actually occurred. In that split second, everything would be as it should. She would find herself straining for the sounds of Garrett in the apartment, sure that the empty bed meant only that he was already in the kitchen, drinking coffee and reading the paper. She would join him in a moment at the table and shake her head: I had the most terrible dream….
Her only other recollection about that week was her relentless need to understand how this could have happened. Before she left Wilmington, she made Jeb promise to call her if he learned anything else about the day Garrett had gone out on Happenstance. In a curious twist of reason, she believed that knowing the details—the why—would somehow lessen her grief. What she refused to believe was that Garrett had sailed into the storm without planning to return. Whenever the phone rang, her hopes rose in the expectation of hearing Jeb’s voice. “I see,” she imagined herself saying. “Yes… I understand. That makes sense….”
Of course, deep down, she knew that would never happen. Jeb didn’t call with an explanation that week, nor did the answer come to her in a moment of contemplation. No, the answer eventually came from a place she would never have predicted.
On the beach at Cape Cod, one year later, she reflected without bitterness on the turn of events that had led her to this place. Ready at last, Theresa reached in her bag. After removing the object she had brought with her, she stared at it, reliving the hour in which her answer had finally come. Unlike her recollection of the days immediately following