“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, the afternoon after Wild’s psychedelic trip in the Amazon, he wandered off into the jungle, his head still reeling from the visions he experienced the night before. The trip had surfaced his latent guilt over the origin of his family’s wealth which was built on the backs of enslaved people. When Millie found him, he tried to explain what he was feeling but it only angered her. They fought, and she stormed off.
Two years, three months, and five days. That’s all the time he had left with June, and every day that passed felt like a sliver of him was sliced away. Wild wasn’t sleeping. He was losing weight and drinking too much.
One morning when June found him passed out on the couch, they had fought, or more accurately, she had fought, and he had sat there with his head in his hands.
“Why are you doing this?” Her tone started even but leveled up with every question until she was nearly screaming. “Is this what you want? Is this who you are now?”
Here she checked herself, perhaps remembering her training. She took a deep breath before continuing. “I know it’s hard for you, but you’ve got to talk to me. This thing with Eileen and her boy. You can’t save them.”
In response, Wild just glared at her. His head was throbbing. This was all her fucking idea. She was the one who cast him in the role of savior and made him keep a goddamned notebook to catalog his failures.
“Right, so it’s my fault you’re in this position. Is that it?” she said, answering the response he hadn’t given.
“Damn it, June. What do you expect me to do? That boy’s gonna to die tomorrow and his mama thinks this surgery is the one that’ll save him.”
“She calls you all the time. You’re with her more than you are with me. Sometimes I think…”
“You think what? You think I’m having an affair with her? Really?”
“No,” she said, hot tears springing to her eyes. “But I do think you’re involved with her more than is right.”
“So, tell me, Dr. McGowan. How does one conduct oneself when performing the role of a savior who can’t fucking save anyone? Tell me what I’m supposed to do, and I’ll do it.”
“Just be honest, Wild! For once, just be honest. I know you’re withholding something from me. I can feel it. I can smell it in your sweat. If you’re not having an affair, then what the hell is it you’re hiding?”
The blood drained from his face, and he could feel the confession lodged in his throat. But when it didn’t come, she picked up her purse and her keys and walked to the door. Before she left, she said, “I don’t want you to be here when I get home. I think we need some time apart.”
When he heard her car pull out of the driveway he screamed like a wounded animal until his voice was hoarse. Eventually, he showered, got dressed, and drank two cups of coffee before getting in the car to head to the hospital where Eileen would be waiting for his measured reassurance.
Since he met them the year before, when Millie had decided to take a bite out of her little boy at the Chuck E. Cheese’s, Wild had done everything in his power to improve Eileen’s situation. He got her a part-time salaried position working as a legal aid in his brother-in-law Gerry's office and he made sure she had the best health insurance because he paid for it himself. It was not easy to get the HR benefits person to agree to the unorthodox arrangement and Wild ultimately had to get Gerry to overrule the woman’s protestations about setting an unfair precedent. It had been June’s idea to suggest they create a special grant program that applied to single mothers who were seeking professional degrees. Eileen had been grateful for the better paying job and hadn’t paid much attention to the health insurance until that first visit to the Children’s Hospital when Marvin was wailing in pain from a crippling headache and had to be admitted.
From that point on, if Eileen had suspected Wild was ultimately paying for all her son’s care, she was too overwhelmed with fear and grief to say anything. She didn’t understand why this strange man had become a constant in her life, checking in nearly every day after Marvin’s first hospitalization but she had come to rely on him. For Wild’s part it was a special kind of torture to witness and foster her hopefulness while knowing there was no hope as he tried to prepare her for something no one could be prepared for.
When he arrived at the hospital, Eileen was sitting alone in the lounge that was just a few doors down from her son’s private room. She was staring through the wall, her mouth slack. The flesh beneath her eyes was puffy, dark and bruised from losing too many battles with sleep. Her hands trembled around a Styrofoam cup of coffee that had long gone cold. She didn’t notice him or even answer when he called her name. Wild knelt in front of her and gently took the cup and sat it down on the table. When she finally saw him, the smooth planes of her face gathered and clenched into a horrifying mask of pain that made him stop breathing. She collapsed forward into his arms and began to sob with such force, Wild felt her body might fly apart. He held onto her and began to rock slowly back and forth like a metronome set to adagio. Soon, her sobbing slowed to his tempo, and she quieted.
“What is it? What happened?” he asked.
“What if the surgery doesn’t work? The doctor said it’s a fifty-fifty chance because of the swelling and the pressure. What am I gonna do if…”
She pulled back but her hands remained clenched to his, urging him to say something, anything that might make this better.
“I don’t know. This is terrible and I’m so sorry.” He looked down at his feet, fighting the urge to cry. He took a deep breath and looked up to meet her eyes. “Can we go see him?”
“He’s sleeping right now. They gave him something, finally. We were up all night, and he was just crying and crying.”
“We need to get you out of here for a little bit.”
“I can’t leave him.”
“We’ll just go next door, and we can sit in the courtyard. It’s a beautiful morning and you could use some fresh air.”
Outside, they sat at a table beneath a bright red umbrella that cast a warm, rosy glow on and around them. The rectangle of cloudless sky above was deep blue. It was the kind of spring day that mocked the sad and suffering. There was an untouched breakfast sandwich in front of Eileen and Wild sipped on his third coffee of the day, scowling at its burnt bitterness. Here he was, at the end of his doomed mission and there were no words he could conjure. He looked up from his coffee after a long silence because he could feel her staring at him.
“Why did you come into our lives?” she asked, in a tone he couldn’t read.
“Well, you remember. Millie bit Marvin.”
“Yeah, I don’t mean that. Why did you stay? Why are you so invested in what happens to us?”
“I don’t know, I just…”
“You just what? You saw a poor black woman in distress and wanted to be the white knight, is that it?”
“No,” he said, flushing. “It’s not that. I just saw you needed a little break and that was something I could help with. And then Marvin got sick and…”
“I’m sorry,” she said, reaching to touch his hand. She didn’t let go of it. “I’m so grateful to you. All I want is for my baby to be okay. I wish it was me. Why in God’s name can’t it be me instead of him. It’s not fair.”
“No, it’s not fair but you’ve got to find a way to keep living.”
“Do I? For what? I’ve got nobody. No family, at least none that’s worth having. I don’t even know if I want to be a lawyer now. Nothing seems to matter anymore.”
“Yeah, I suppose not. What can I do? How can I help you get through this?”
He felt her looking at him again, but he didn’t look up.
“What’s your story, anyway? I’ve never met a man with such sad eyes, especially a man who’s got so much.”
It was like her to deflect help and try to turn it around. She had asked him some version of this question several times in the past year, and he always evaded answering. She asked June in a roundabout way when they had come for dinner back in the fall before Marvin got too sick and June had been equally vague without being rude. Depression, she had said. Maybe it was lack of sleep or being hungover or just the bottoming-out feeling of being so close to someone at the precipice of unimaginable loss but whatever the reason, he opened up to Eileen.
“I uh… I feel things very deeply is one way to put it. Things that other people don’t feel or maybe even notice about each other.”
“What do you mean exactly? You mean you’re an empath?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s one word for it.”
“So, you felt something about Marvin, about me when we first met.”
“Yeah, I did. It happens with some people I meet. Not everybody of course.”
Eileen absorbed this. She continued to wind the paper wrapper from a straw around her finger as she stared into their reflection in one of the windows onto the courtyard.
“My grandma, she believed there were angels. Not the kind with wings and harps, but ones in the form of people who walk through the world taking care of others. Is that what you are? Cause if you are, I’d give anything for you to save my sweet boy.”
Wild’s eyes pooled with tears, and he clenched his teeth to keep from crying out. When he spoke, his voice cracked with emotion.
“I wish to God I could. Your boy’s such a bright little light, and so strong.”
Her lips bent into a deep frown, and she nodded slowly. She reached up and touched his cheek with the palm of her hand. It was a tender gesture and Wild felt shame for enjoying the comfort of it. She kept it there.
“You see things, don’t you?” she asked, not allowing him to break eye contact. “You knew something was going to happen to my Marvin.”
Wild was too stunned to answer, much less come up with some believable denial. She squinted as if trying to look into him. Finally, she took her hand away and let out a sound that was something between a laugh and a sigh.
“Listen to me, talking nonsense. Now I sound like my grannie. Whatever it is you are, I’m grateful to you, Wild. If there’s ever anything I can do to repay your kindness…”
Wild’s face must have done something he couldn’t control, made some desperate plea like a kidnapped victim scribbling a message on a fogged car windshield. He opened his mouth to speak but stopped.
“What?” she asked. “What can I do?”
“Nothing.” He looked away and made a show of cleaning up the small mess of his coffee creamer and napkins.
“Tell me. I can see when somebody’s carrying something they can’t carry any longer. What is it?”
“Okay, say you loved someone more than you’ve ever loved anyone in your whole life, and you knew something really important about them, something devastating. If you tell them, then you know it will change everything forever and you can never go back to how it was before. If you don’t tell them, you feel like a monster, harboring some horrible secret. What do you do?”
“That’s a dilemma. I don’t guess you’re gonna give me anymore to go on. Is this thing you’re carrying some trespass on your part, something you did?”
He could see that she would make a fine lawyer if she survived the death of her Marvin. “No, it’s not like that. It’s more something terrible I know about them that they don’t know.”
“Then I guess it comes down to one thing.”
She pushed the plate with the untouched breakfast sandwich away from her.
“And what’s that,” he asked.
“Which one of you’s tougher?”
An hour later, they stood by Marvin’s bed where he was still sleeping. The heart monitor beeped steadily which was a reassurance to Eileen but Wild could only hear it as a countdown. He was standing somewhere two years, three months, and five days into the future looking at Juniper. Would he get to say goodbye? Would it be slow and painful or sudden? How would he bear it? How could he continue to breathe in and out through these precious few days he had left with her?
He had the most powerful urge to run out of the hospital, drive across town, break into whatever therapy session June was conducting, and take her away somewhere. It didn’t matter where, just somewhere he could have her all to himself, to spoil her, to spend every waking moment beside her. But would she even want that? If she knew, would she choose to be with him?
The thought was like swallowing an ice cube. It froze him all the way down and settled in his gut. Between him and June, Wild wasn’t sure he was the tougher one, but he had a powerful need to try to be.
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In the reality show competition for Houze, a revolutionary eco-home, six contestants face a winner-takes-all challenge. Beneath the surface of sustainability, altruism battles greed, turning a hopeful vision into a life and death struggle. Fans of “Nine Perfect Strangers” by Liane Moriarty will love this story.
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