Chapter 55

55

And suddenly I am alone.

In slow motion I watch, completely detached from the situation, as Jamie lowers her head into her hands. I see the tears start to form in the corners of her eyes as if I were staring at a bullet being fired from a gun. They well up and discharge just before her face dives into her palms.

And suddenly I am alone.

John has stopped stirring his scrambled eggs, released his spatula, and turned to face Jamie and I’s head on collision. I feel as if he is reaching out to both of us with an amazing force of energy, but his attempts to stop our impending wreck are in vain. Once these events have been set into motion there is only one inevitable conclusion.
And suddenly I am alone.

We’ve been waiting for this day for too many years, wondering how the circumstances of life’s misfortune would turn out against us. We said goodbye on that gloomy day in June many years ago, but it seems like only minutes ago that she was gathering up her belongings into three brown suitcases, all varying in size. The moment she left the phone stopped ringing, the wind started blowing, and it began to smell like an eternal rain. We decided that we couldn’t live together anymore. But what I realized, once she had left, was that I couldn’t live without her anymore. I was useless. I was humbled.

And suddenly we are alone.

John has left the kitchen, turned off the burners and pre-rinsed his pans. The sun is shining through the window curtains draping Mary’s favorite floral patterns across the linoleum floor. Jamie is breathing heavily through the cracks in her fingers, desperately hiding her eyes from our spectral past. I pull out a chair and seat myself across from her. The table itself is the Golden Gate Bridge.

We are alone and we haven’t seen each other in a very long time. I reach across the table and instinctively push a bit of her hair back behind her left ear. She looks up from her hands and meets me eye to eye. It takes ages to gather up my strength.

“It’s been a while,” I smile, as the piece of hair I had just tucked away falls back in front of her face. “It’s good to see you, kid.”