“Departures” is a supernatural thriller and love story published as a serial novel with new episodes dropping every Tuesday morning. Anyone can read or listen for free. Paid subscribers gain early access to new episodes. Watch the trailer or visit the table of contents to browse all the published episodes.
Previously…
In the last episode, present-day Wild had a surprise visit from an old friend who was passing through as part of the working crew on a show staged in the theater. Wild invited him up for dinner. In the course of the evening, their conversation turned to Wild’s past and the fact that he never got over losing June, the love of his life.
June didn’t know where she was when she woke up suddenly. In her dream, she was drowning, thrashing violently as she was being tugged downward by ropey, black tentacles. In contrast, the stillness of the blank, white room with weak morning light filtering down from a large circle of cyan sky above made her feel for a moment that she had died, and this was the other side.
Then the events of the day before came back to her. She sat up too fast and her skull felt two sizes bigger than her brain, sloshing around up there. She blinked and looked down at the large t-shirt she was wearing. It was Wild’s. He had given it to her to sleep in last night before insisting she take his bed. The sequence of events was muddled. She had gotten more than a little drunk. Had they? No. She was certain they hadn’t. She hadn’t been that far gone.
June splayed her hands across the softest bedding she had ever felt. The downy white comforter and Egyptian cotton sheets were a world apart from her scratchy polyester blend set from JCPenney. Rich people, she thought, as she tossed the comforter back and swung her legs out of bed. The room was actually small, but it felt much bigger because it was mostly empty, and the ceiling had to be more than fifteen feet high. There were several cardboard boxes lined along one wall, a couple of them opened and half unpacked. There was a dark antique wardrobe closet on the opposite wall beside a door that led to the only bathroom which she realized she needed to use with some urgency.
After, she padded quietly into the main living space where she immediately saw Wild asleep on the floor. His legs were wrapped in a mummy-style green sleeping bag from which his naked torso emerged like some large, exotic snake shedding its skin or maybe a moth mid-metamorphosis. He had no pillow except for the curl of his bicep. It looked seriously uncomfortable to her, and she felt a small twinge of guilt which was mostly obscured by her other warring feelings of lust and remorse. What was she doing here? What was she getting herself into? This was not how she lived her life. She made intentional, rational choices. Coming here last night was a mistake in a moment of weakness and she decided the best thing was to go before he woke up and she had to make an excuse. But she didn’t move. Instead, she sat down on the rug in front of him and pulled her knees up into the t-shirt, noticing for the first time it was promoting her favorite band, The Replacements.
His breathing was slow and steady. She studied his face. He had a small, faint crescent moon scar above his right brow. His lashes were thick and long which she realized is what softened his otherwise masculine face with its strong jawline and thick stubble. His nose had a bump on the ridge like it had been broken. Sleeping, she could see more of the boy she remembered from childhood. He had been an asshole, everything you’d expect from a rich kid in a John Hughes movie. And yet, he had changed. This crazy thing that had happened to him made him transform. She saw the weight of that thing in the purple-gray shadows beneath his eyes. His eyelids fluttered, and his lips parted, releasing a long, sleepy sigh. Her heart jumped for fear that he might wake up and see her gawking. But then his face smoothed like the surface of a pool of water after the last ripples from a stone had reached the edge.
She had the OCD-like impulse to put her hand on his chest, to touch him. It was the most natural thing to want to do. He was attractive. She was attracted. But he had forbidden it, and he had been deadly serious. That much she remembered clearly from the night before. Sitting in the small, private box to watch the concert, he had deliberately sat with a seat between them. Each time he returned with another beer he had set it on the wooden rail in front of them rather than hand it to her. The more she thought about all this, the crazier it seemed. She was a rational person. She was a scientist. There was no explanation or precedence for this condition Wild claimed he had. What seemed completely plausible to her in the upside-down logic of yesterday’s events was utterly ridiculous in the cold light of morning. It was a coincidence. He had written down a bunch of names and dates and it was a coincidence that he just happened to get one right.
The loop of Jillian’s death started to replay again in June’s mind, and she clenched her teeth. Jill was really dead. That much was beyond dispute. She had died precisely on the date this man sleeping in front of her had predicted. June wanted to come up with some statistical model to calculate the exact odds of this kind of coincidence. This is what she did when confronted with anything murky. She was her father’s daughter. There was an explanation for everything if you looked hard enough at all the facts and you kept your objectivity. As her brain worked the calculus of probability, her eyes followed the smooth curve of his deltoid to where it interlaced with his bicep which was more pronounced by being squeezed against his forearm. Her eyes continued the journey across the bridge of his forearm to his hand. The veiny plane of it and the relaxed curl of the fingers reminded her of a marble statue she had studied as a kid once when her high school art class had taken a field trip to the High Museum. June had always been one for details. She was entranced by them. The human hand had twenty-seven bones and thirty-four muscles all of which had to work together in perfect orchestration to pick up an apple, guide a scalpel, or caress a lover. And yet, among the complicated network of tendons, ligaments, and nerves, the hand had no magical facility to predict the date another living human would die. It was a leap too far for her.
She slowly extended her hand across the imaginary DMZ and her fingertips were just inches away from the soft blond hairs on Wild’s forearm when she paused. Even if this thing he claimed to have was real, did it only work when he was conscious? If his brain was sleeping, then by extension whatever this Loch Ness Monster was that swam in its depths would also be sleeping. What would be the harm in touching him and breaking this ridiculous seal? The more she thought about never being able to touch him, the more excruciatingly aroused she became. June was so lost in thought, her eyes so focused on the space between her fingertips and Wild’s arm that she hadn’t noticed his eyes were open. Her heart stopped as he lunged back, retreating from her outstretched hand.
“June, what are you doing!”
The fear in his face was like that of so many patients she had seen over the last few years. The fear was real, even when the object of the fear was only a trick of the mind. She shuddered and took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you… I only meant to…”
“You only meant to what?” he asked, his voice settling back to its normal register. He looked conflicted and embarrassed.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking. I just saw you sleeping there, and I thought it might be okay if I touched you. Why is that so wrong?”
“It’s not. There’s nothing wrong about you, June. It’s me that’s wrong.”
“But is it? I know I said I believed you last night, but this morning it just doesn’t make any sense at all. It’s…”
“Crazy? Yeah, it’s fucking crazy. I thought we had established that.” He sat up so they could be eye to eye. “But crazy is just something we don’t have an explanation for, right? It doesn’t matter what you believe. It doesn’t change this thing that I have from being real.”
“Okay, but this is one isolated event. You’ve given me no other evidence. How can I just accept anything based on that. Surely you can understand.”
She wasn’t getting through to him. She could tell by the way his jaw was set and his nostrils were flaring. She tried again.
“Look, you’ve got to get out of your own head and see this from my perspective. Forget you’re who you are and imagine you’re me. Would you believe you?”
“Of course not but I’m not you. I’m not as smart as you or as kind as you. I’m a selfish, entitled fuck who took everything for granted and walked into a hall of mirrors that I’ll never be able to get out of.”
“You don’t know that. Whatever this is, whether it’s real or not, there’s no way to know that it’s permanent. Nothing is permanent. What, why are you smiling?”
“Nothing,” he said, shaking his head. “You didn’t refute that I’m a selfish, entitled fuck.”
“Only a selfish, entitled fuck would expect me to refute that.”
He laughed and when he did, his entire face changed. In that moment, all she wanted to do was make him laugh again and again, to keep him above the waterline, to keep him breathing.
“You’re good,” he said. Still smiling, he looked up to meet her gaze. “I’m going to have to watch out for you.”
“Yeah, you will.”
He squirmed into a standing position holding the sleeping bag at his waist like a kid at the starting line of a sack race.
“Can you um, turn around so I can put my pants on? I don’t think I can bunny hop into the next room.”
“I think you should try,” she said. “Or you could just drop the bag.”
Was she flirting? Who was this person she had become overnight.
“C’mon, you’re really not going to turn around?”
“Nope.”
She released her legs from the worn t-shirt and let them stretch out onto the rug as she settled back on her hands. She had never been a fan of most of her body, but somehow, she loved her legs. Her opinion was validated by the way his gaze lingered on them. This was completely juvenile. June realized she was playing a game of chicken which had likely been a regular pastime for the man-child in front of her but was as foreign to June as cliff diving in Acapulco. What would the entitled fuck do? She suddenly worried about her breath, sure that he would drop the sleeping bag and kneel to kiss her.
But then Wilder Emerson Thorne IV began hopping across the room around the club chair toward the bedroom. He looked completely ridiculous, and she couldn’t stop laughing. When he tired and continued to move forward in scooching baby steps, she laughed even harder.
“Where the hell are you going,” she called out.
“To put on some pants,” he said over his shoulder with played-up indignity and then added, “And to collect some more evidence for the defense.”
Thirty minutes later they were sitting across from each other and sipping coffee at the Formica-topped table in his kitchen that looked like it was stolen from a 1950s era diner. June was holding a camcorder with the pop-out viewfinder paused on a video Wild had queued up as exhibit B in his case to convince her.
“What exactly am I going to see here?” she asked, wary. She had already encountered too much violence in the last twenty-four hours.
“It’s nothing bad. I mean, it’s bad, but nothing that will upset you exactly. Just watch it, okay?”
June pressed the tiny play button, and the video started with an old man talking mid-flow. He was standing in a restaurant, maybe a deli and he was behind the counter. He spoke with a thick, New York accent and a booming voice.
“...you want I should do what?” the man said, tossing a rag onto the counter in front of him.
The next voice, coming from behind the camera, was Wild’s. It was his performing voice she had come to recognize.
“First, just say your full name and then give me the three predictions we talked about earlier: the date you think your daughter will get married, the date of a historic event you will cherish, and the date you think you’ll die?”
“And this is for some kinda picture you’re making?”
“Yeah, remember, you give yours, then I give mine.”
“Okay,” the man said, straightening up and hoisting his pants up over his belly. “I predict I’m going to pass in my sleep on New Year’s Day in 2010 after a nice meal with the family. I predict my Julia will marry on the first Saturday in June of 1996 and her husband will be a stockbroker who loves kids. And what was the other thing?”
“A historic event you will cherish…”
“Right, right. Let’s see… on October 14th, 1988, the Mets will sweep the world series. Is that it? Are we good?”
The camera jostled and swung around and suddenly a younger version of Wild’s face was in the frame, backlit by a bright storefront window. The camera struggled to auto-focus because it was too close. Then Wild spoke.
“Alright, now it’s my turn. I predict your daughter will not marry a stockbroker. I mean, c’mon, we’re talking about Julia, here. But she will happily marry a guitar player with very big hair on June 2, 1990, and he will love kids. I predict the Mets will lose in the seventh game of the series on October 21, 1986, and I predict you will die on August 5th next year, 1986 if you don’t lay off the pastrami!”
The camera swung back around to face the old man who was laughing as he wiped the counter, “Ya breakin’ my fuckin’ heart here. Does your mom know what a mean little bastard she raised?”
“She does indeed,” Wild said. “And just for posterity, please tell me today’s date Mr. Gambino.”
“It’s April Fools, 1985, now get outta here. I gotta open up the store.”
The screen dipped to black and there was a few seconds of snow before the picture came back and it was Wild sitting alone on the floor of an empty room. There was a bottle of liquor half-empty beside him and he was holding a newspaper. His shoulders were slumped and his eyes hooded. When he spoke, his words were thick and slurred.
“Well, it happened. Big surprise!”
When he said this, he made a big sweeping gesture with the newspaper before folding it over and beginning to read.
“Mr. Arthur Gambino died suddenly of cardiac failure on August 5, 1986, while at work in his beloved family-owned restaurant and delicatessen, Gambino’s. He is survived by his wife, Margaret and their daughter, Julia, and son, Vincent.”
Wild looked up at the camera, swayed a bit as he rose to his knees so he could hold the paper close up for the camera lens.
“That’s it,” he said. The footage bobbled and then cut to snowy static.
June pressed the stop button, set the camera down, and looked at Wild. There was a solitary tear bending a path down his cheek.
“I loved him and his sandwiches. I felt awful tricking him like that. Please don’t say I did it for nothing.”
June felt tears spring to her eyes. Her heart was racing, and she laid her palms flat on the cool surface of the table. She took a deep breath.
“No, I believe you, Wild.”
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