“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, Wild and June attended his five-year-old niece, Millie’s birthday party which was an extravagant affair on the palatial back lawn of his sister Abby’s house. When Wild hugged his sister, he discovered two things: she was pregnant and she would lose the child six weeks later. Distraught, they left the party and June convinced him that, while he couldn’t change what was going to happen to his sister, he could provide some comfort to her.
The visit from his old friend had stirred up so many memories for Wild and his head was filled with the bittersweet swirl of them this morning. Reminders of what he had lost were everywhere all the time, but objects didn’t bring a memory to life like another person could. Someone who had been there and breathed the same air as Boots had with Wild and June, could reveal dimensions of memories that cast shadows and brought new perspectives.
Notebooks. Boots had reminded Wild of June’s fetish for notebooks of all kinds, which he hadn’t really thought about for many years, not since they had all been boxed up and put in storage. Her addiction started young. She had kept a diary religiously as a brooding loner of a girl. In college and grad school the diaries were replaced with journals where she logged everything from observations and data from studies she was a part of, to her daily to-dos and a record of what she ate at every meal. Wild had thought it curious and cute in the beginning, but soon found it annoying. She was both scientific and thorough in everything she did. Only someone with these qualities could have kept Wild alive and given him a reason to keep on living in those early years.
He set his cup of tea on the table beside him, got up from his reading chair and walked over to the bookcase. What he wanted was on the very top shelf, so he pulled the rickety sliding ladder along its track and climbed up three steps. There were three slim volumes at the very end of the shelf, and they were partially obscured by a taxidermied piranha. He pushed the fish aside and grabbed all three of the notebooks with the same nondescript, brown leather spine before climbing back down the ladder and settling back into his chair.
Wild hadn’t thought about his ledgers in over a decade. He had stopped keeping them. It hadn’t been an abrupt decision but rather a gradual fading away of purpose so slow in its retreat as to not be noticed until long after it was gone. The ledger was not his idea, but June’s, of course. She had shown up with the first of three she would give him over the course of their six years together.
The idea, she had told him, was to begin to keep a log of all the people he encountered, when they would die, and something (this was important to her) that the person loved, cherished or that simply mattered to them. She insisted that by keeping this ledger, Wild could begin to externalize this burden of knowing, and maybe even find some clue as to what he could do to lessen it by degrees. June’s theory was that each death Wild had to carry was a debit, so they needed to find some way to balance the ledger. He had to find something of value he could offer that would be a credit to the life that he knew would be destroyed.
The most recent volume was on top, and he flipped through the pages. Only half of them had been filled and the last twenty entries or so had dates further and further apart. The last entry was December 4th, 2014. Ten years. He studied the name closely, but it brought no face, no memory, probably because in the white space after it, where the credit was supposed to go, there was only a hard, black dash. He had found nothing he could give.
He set that one aside and picked up the first one June had given him on that day they met in Piedmont Park. They had spread a blanket on the slope of a lawn beneath the shade of a massive pin oak tree where they talked all afternoon as they devoured a bag of pretzels and drank warm beer. He had been so relaxed that he fell asleep next to her. When he woke up, it was twilight. June was sitting cross-legged scribbling in a journal. He felt the weight of something on his chest. He reached and found the small notebook she must have placed there while he was sleeping. He remembered the way she had become so excited as she explained her strategy to him. He remembered how much he hadn’t been listening because he was so distracted by the way the light was touching her face and illuminating her green eyes which appeared as shimmering sea glass. He had wanted so badly to reach up to touch her face, to pull her down to him, and to kiss her. But he hadn’t.
She had insisted they break in the ledger that very first night, but they had stayed in the park so late that no one was around. Undeterred, June had spotted a homeless man sleeping on the sidewalk near the duck pond. She all but physically pushed Wild into him. When Wild had reached down to touch the filthy sleeve of his sweatshirt, the man shouted so loudly that Wild had jumped back and nearly fallen. After a grumpy, mostly incoherent exchange, Wild had recorded the following in the first ledger line of the notebook:
Reggie Garrett - August 4, 1992 - Sister named Jane Ferrell lives in Chicago and works as a nurse at the VA hospital.
That first entry marked a turning point for Wild. June had given him this gift which, on the surface, was so simple. You didn’t have to have some horrible curse of knowing when another person was going to die to exercise kindness. Wild had encountered regular people who did that kind of thing all the time and they weren’t all compelled by a loving or vengeful God. In the years that followed, he always felt like an imposter when anyone witnessed his acts of kindness and praised him for it. For him, the acts were motivated by self-preservation. They were the maintenance his body required to justify his continuing to breathe when so many more deserving people would die and he, like someone strapped to a chair, was forced to watch and bear witness.
He set the ledger back on top of its companions, straightened the stack, and pushed them away. He couldn’t be that accountant anymore. He picked up his mug with the remains of his tea, now gone cold, and cradled it to feel the memory of its warmth.
He was startled from his trance when his phone began to ring from somewhere in the apartment. The damned thing was always wherever he was not. When he finally found it on the shelf above the bathroom sink, he saw the missed call from Millie, his niece. A text message popped up as he was about to put the phone into his pocket.
Hi uncle Wild. I need to see you. I’m here in midtown today at the office. Can we meet?Wild knew why she was reaching out. Her mother’s time was fast approaching, and the inevitability of her death was probably bearing down on Millie now like a steamroller that you can’t outrun. Abby had been battling cancer for the last nine years. All the money in the world couldn’t save his sister but that hadn’t stopped them from spending a small fortune running down every clinical trial and experimental therapy across the globe.
He responded simply:
Come on, whenever. I’m here.An hour later he met Millie to let her in the backdoor of the theater. It had been a few weeks since he had seen her and, in that time, she had lost some weight she couldn’t afford to lose. Millie was a triathlete and worked out like it was a heroin habit, biking into the office, running in the park at lunch, and swimming after work. Unlike Wild, she had taken her place in the Thorne family empire, though what she did exactly, Wild couldn’t say. He was as unfamiliar with the inner workings of business as he was with how the device in his hand worked. But Millie was the product of her parents in equal measure. She had Abby’s kindness and generosity of spirit and her father’s drive and ambition. That much was clear.
When he opened the heavy steel door, there she stood in the blinding wedge of sunlight that sliced through the blackness of the theater which was blessedly dark for the next two days. Even through squinted eyes, he could see the torment on her face.
“Come here, baby girl,” he said, pulling her into a hug and letting the heavy door close behind her.
She clung to him and sobbed for a full minute, and he held her there in the echoing quiet and darkness of the old venue. When the tears subsided, he took her by the hand and guided her up the back stairs.
Millie hadn’t been back here in years. When she was a girl, she loved to visit her eccentric uncle. He indulged her in ways no one else did, but never with lavish gifts or fancy meals. Uncle Wild gave her his time and focused attention. Some days she sat in his library for hours telling him about her latest heartbreak or newest ambition. He always listened and asked questions that indicated he actually cared about not just what she was thinking but how she worked through it in her young mind.
Nothing about the place had changed since the last time she had been here five years earlier. It smelled the same to her, like putting your nose into the pages of an old library book, but also there was a lingering pungent and sweet smell somewhere between patchouli and bergamot.
“Wow,” she said once he had closed the door behind them. “I forgot how much I loved this place.”
“You go in and get comfortable, sweetheart. I’m gonna make you something to eat and don’t fuckin’ argue with me about it. You’re a scarecrow!”
Her uncle disappeared into the kitchen, and she heard him opening cabinets. Rather than sit right away, she walked the perimeter of the living room library, tracing her finger along the volume of books. She stopped and picked up a funny little wooden carving of the see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil monkeys she had loved so much as a child. More than anything, this little totem embodied her weird uncle Wild.
Millie’s mom had encouraged her relationship with Wild, but her father had done everything in his power to diminish it. That man is not a model of how to walk through the world, he told her on more than one occasion. Even as a child, she knew something was off about her uncle, the distance both physical and otherwise he kept from people, but he was never distant with her.
She dropped heavily into one of the old leather club chairs, the one that had not formed to the mold of her uncle’s body. She allowed herself to slump into the deep cushion of it, breathed in deeply as she closed her eyes. She couldn’t shake the wild-eyed terror in her mother’s skeletal face this morning. The doctor said she had days, maybe weeks before it was finally over. Home hospice care had been engaged.
Millie opened her eyes and glanced down at the table beside her. There was a neat stack of journals there. She lifted the cover of the one on top and read the inscription on the front page.
Dear Wild,
I hope you can use these pages to hold the burden of all the horrors you carry around. Trust the process of writing them down. Pretend it’s a ledger. For every debit, there’s always a credit to bring things into balance.
Love,
June
Horrors? The word was like an icy needle into Millie’s heart. What horrors was June referring to? She knew it was wrong to snoop, but the journals had just been laying there in the open. She picked up the volume, placed it in her lap and leafed through the pages. Every one of them was filled with names and dates and random notes describing people or places or things that seemed, in some cases completely vague, like “baseball game- pickle relish” and in others, absurdly specific like “call 404-989-2020 and ask for Peter.”
Millie picked up the next volume and flipped through the pages. It too was filled with similar entries albeit with different colored ink and a steadier, practiced hand. The third journal was only half complete. Among the last few entries, she recognized the name of her dad’s brother, Jim. What did these dates mean? Jim had died over a decade back in a car accident. She pulled out her phone and quickly scrolled through the timeline of her photos app to 2012 until she found pictures from the family gathering her father had hosted after the funeral. The date on those photos was less than a week after the date Wild had scrawled beside her uncle Jim’s name. What the hell was this?
Millie was so absorbed that she hadn’t heard Wild enter the room behind her.
“I didn’t mean to leave those out,” he said.
“What are they?”
Her emotions shot from a four up to a ten in the time it took him to formulate a response. Millie got to her feet and held the journal up as though it were a murder weapon, and she was the prosecuting attorney.
“What did you do to all these people?”
“Millie, it’s not what you think.”
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The Ledger