Every Breath

After that, Hope tried a more general approach. She contacted various government agencies in Zimbabwe, asking about a massive farm owned by a family named Walls. She’d held this option until last, suspecting that Tru had reduced contact with the family even further after learning what he had from his biological father. The officials there were less than helpful, but by the end of the conversations, she surmised that the farm had been confiscated by the government and redistributed. There was no information at all on the family.

Out of ideas, Hope decided to make it easier for Tru to find her, on the off chance he was looking. In 2009, she had joined Facebook, and she checked it daily for a long time. She heard from old friends and new ones, family members, people she’d known from work. But never once did Tru try to contact her.

The realization that Tru had seemingly vanished—and that they would never see each other again—had put her in a funk for months, and made her reflect on all the other losses in her life. But this was a different kind of grief, one that grew stronger with every passing year. Now, with her children grown, she spent her days and nights alone. Life was passing and all too soon would come to an end; despite herself, Hope began to wonder if she’d be alone when she took her final breaths.

Her house, she sometimes felt, was slowly but surely becoming her tomb.

At the cottage, Hope took a small sip of wine. Though it was light and sweet, it tasted foreign in the morning. Never once in her life had she drunk wine this early, and she doubted she ever would again. But today, she thought she deserved it.

As transporting as the memories were, as much as they’d sustained her, she was tired of feeling trapped by them. She wanted to spend her remaining years waking in the morning without wondering whether Tru would somehow find her again; she wanted to spend as much time with Jacob and Rachel as she could. She longed, more than anything, for peace of mind. She wanted a month to pass without feeling the need to examine the contents of the box that sat on the table in front of her; she wanted to focus instead on crossing a few of the big items off her bucket list. Sit in the audience of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. Visit the Biltmore Estate at Christmas. Bet on a horse running at the Kentucky Derby. Watch UNC and Duke play basketball at Cameron Indoor Stadium. That last one would be tough; tickets were nearly impossible to get, but the challenge of that was part of the fun, right?

Not long after her trip to the beach last year, on a day she’d been feeling particularly blue, she’d deleted her Facebook page. Since then, she’d also left the box in the attic, no matter how strongly she’d felt the pull to examine the contents. Now, however, the box was calling to her, and she finally lifted the lid.

On top was Ellen’s faded wedding invitation. She stared at the lettering, remembering who she’d been back then and recalling the worries that had plagued her when she first arrived at the beach that week. Sometimes she wished she could speak with the woman she used to be, but she wasn’t sure what she would have said. She supposed that she could assure the younger version of herself that she’d have children, but would she add that raising them wasn’t anything like the ideal she’d envisioned? That as much as she treasured them, there were countless times when they enraged or disappointed her? That her worries about them were sometimes overwhelming? Or would she tell the younger version of herself that, after having children, there would be times when she wished she could be truly free again?

And what could she possibly say about Josh?

She supposed it didn’t matter now, nor was it worth the time it took to even dwell on the questions. But the invitation nonetheless made her reflect that life resembled an infinite number of dominoes set up to topple on the world’s largest floor, where one domino leads inevitably to the next. Had the invitation not arrived, Hope may never have argued with Josh, or spent the week without him at Sunset Beach, or even met Tru in the first place. The invitation, she speculated, was the domino that, when toppled, set in motion the rest of her life. The choreography that had led to the most profound experience of love she’d ever had struck her as both scripted and improbable, but she wondered again to what end.

Setting the invitation aside, Hope reached for the first of the drawings. Tru had drawn her the morning after they’d made love, and Hope knew that she no longer resembled the woman in the drawing. In the sketch, her skin was soft and unlined, glowing with the last breath of youth. Her thick hair was shot with sunlit highlights, her breasts were firm and high, her legs toned and unblemished. He’d captured her in a way that no photograph ever had, and as she continued to study it, she mused that she’d never looked prettier. Because he’d drawn her the way he saw her.

Placing it on top of the wedding invitation, she reached for the second drawing. He’d completed it while she’d been at the wedding, and over the years, whenever she went through the contents of the box, she always lingered over this sketch. In it, the two of them stood on the beach, near the water’s edge. The pier was in the background and sunlight glinted off the ocean as they stared at each other in profile. Her arms were around his neck and his hands were at her waist. Again, she thought he’d made her more beautiful than she really was, but it was the image of him that captured her. She studied the lines at the corners of his eyes and the dimple in his chin; she traced the shape of his shoulders beneath the loose fabric of his shirt. Most of all, though, she marveled at the expression he’d given himself as he stared at her—that of a man deeply in love with the woman he held in his arms. She pulled the drawing closer, wondering whether he had ever again looked at another woman this way. She would never know, and though there was part of her that wished him happiness, another part wanted to believe that the feelings they’d had for each other were entirely unique.

She set that drawing aside as well. Next came the letter that Tru had written to her, the one she’d found in the glove compartment. The paper had yellowed at the edges and there were small tears in the creases; the letter had become as brittle as she had. The realization brought a lump to her throat as she traced a line between her name at the top and his at the bottom, connecting them once more. She read the words she already knew by heart, never tiring of their power.

Rising from the table, Hope moved to the kitchen window. As her mind wandered, she realized that she could see Tru walking past the cottage with a fishing pole draped over his shoulder, a tackle box in his other hand, and she watched as he turned to face her. He waved, and in response, she reached out, touching the glass.

“I never stopped loving you,” she whispered, but the glass was cold and the kitchen was quiet, and when she blinked she realized that the beach was entirely deserted.

Twenty minutes to go, one item left. It was a photocopy of a letter she’d written last year. She’d placed the original in Kindred Spirit on her previous trip to the beach, and as she unfolded the copy, she told herself how silly her gesture had been. A letter means nothing if the intended recipient never receives it, and Tru would never learn of it. Yet in the letter, she’d made a promise to herself, one that she intended to keep. If nothing else, she hoped it would give her the strength she needed to finally say goodbye.

This is a letter to God and the Universe.

I need your help, in what I imagine will be my last attempt to apologize for a decision I made so long ago. My story is both straightforward and complicated. To capture accurately all that happened would require a book, so instead, I will offer only the basics:

In September of 1990, while visiting Sunset Beach, I met a man from Zimbabwe named Tru Walls. At the time, he worked as a safari guide at a camp in the Hwange reserve. He also had a home in Bulawayo, but he’d grown up on a farm near Harare. He was forty-two, divorced, and had a ten-year-old son named Andrew. We met on a Wednesday morning, and I’d fallen in love with him by Thursday evening.

You may think this impossible, that perhaps I’m confusing infatuation with love. All I can say is that I’ve considered those possibilities a thousand times and rejected them. If you met him, you would understand why he captured my heart; if you had seen the two of us together, you would know that the feelings we had for each other were undeniably real. In the short period we were together, I like to think that we became soul mates, forever intertwined. By Sunday, however, it was over. And I was the one who ended it, for reasons I have agonized over for decades.