One Summer

54

After Jack got back to his room, he dropped, exhausted, onto the bed, but he didn’t go to sleep. He lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Life was often unfair, insane, damaging. And yet the alternative to living in that world was not living in it. Jack had been given a miracle. He had already squandered large parts of it. That was going to stop. Now.

He opened his nightstand and pulled out the stack of letters. He selected the envelope with the number five on it, slid out the letter, and flicked on the light. What he’d just told Mikki, he firmly believed, because he’d once written down these same sentiments. He had just forgotten or, more likely, ignored them in his quest for the impossible. He began to read.

Jack slowly folded the letter and put it away. These letters, when he was writing them, were the only things he had left, really. They represented the outpouring from his heart, the sort of things you think about when the trivial issues of life are no longer important because you have precious little time left. If everyone could live as though they were in jeopardy of shortly dying, Jack thought, the world would be a much better place. But in the end they were only letters. Lizzie would have read them, and perhaps they would have made her feel better, but they were still just words. Now was the time for action. He knew what he had to do.

Be a father for my children. Repair that part of my life.

Jack rose and went from room to room, checking on his kids. He sat next to Jackie as the little boy slept peacefully, his hand curled around his monster truck. Cory slept on his stomach, his arms coiled under him. A tiny snore escaped his lips. Next, Jack stood in the doorway of Mikki’s room, watching the rise and fall of her chest, the gentle sound of her breathing.

He closed her door and went downstairs and onto the rear screened porch. From here he could see the lighthouse soaring into the sky. He had built it into some mythical symbol, but it was only a pile of bricks and cinder blocks and metal guts. It wasn’t Lizzie. It had no heart. Not like the trio beating in the bedrooms above. Three people who needed him to be their father.

In this last letter he had been lamenting that there were no second chances left to him. Yet that insane, unfair world that he had sometimes railed against had done something remarkable. It had given him another shot at life.

I’m done running.

Jack went back to bed and slept through the night for the first time in a long time.