Shadows

A story of everlasting love

Chapter One

All love affairs don’t last forever. All dreams don’t come true. But sometimes love finds a place for itself, and it lives and grows and becomes more than the mere mortals it surrounds. It becomes a dream. And dreams, like the spirits within them, can live forever — even through the shadows of our final storms. — From Sirena’s journal

June 1, Present Day: The sun never rolled out of bed the morning I hit town. Apparently, it preferred to keep its overrated face hidden somewhere behind the heavy pillow of soggy clouds and a blanket of sour sea air. Well, that was just fine with me. Lost is lost, whether the sun is shining on you or not. And this feeling that I was somehow standing in the shadows — shadows I needed to step out of so I could go home — had not vanished as I hoped it would when I finally arrived in Galveston that morning. If anything it had grown stronger.

Later, I would tell people it was a dream — an eerie, recurrent one — that had caused me to climb out from under the security of my soft sheets and strike out for this languishing island seaport town in the middle of what my grandfather, Roy, would have called the Devil’s Downpour. But I know now, it was Augie and Miss Lillian who started it all. They were the ones who shook me out of my sleep and prompted me to load Rosebud, my aging Golden Retriever, along with several canvases, my oil paints, some rickety easels and my own shattered dreams into my Jeep and drive the five hell-bent hours from Dallas to Galveston.

More than a hundred years had passed since this haunting couple had walked upon the sands of Galveston in the flesh and blood, but it was them all right. It was the spirits of Augie and Miss Lillian and the lingering images they dragged in behind themselves to show me. I saw visions of a house painted so pink it was the color the gods splash across the horizon just before they let the sun slip out of the sky for the night. I had memories of a green-eyed sailor and a lasting feeling of warmth from swilling wine and lying in someone’s arms.

The smell of roses overwhelmed me. Oh, I was following this dream and I was following it now. Come hell or high water, I wasn’t going to let this one slip away.

My mother, Ruthie, had been dead 27 years and my grandfather, Roy, for just over a month, when I left Dallas behind and started for a rain-soaked Galveston. It was a few minutes past two o’clock in the morning, on a Sunday that would dawn gray and, as if by spite, become even bleaker, that I backed out into the storm. I took a deep breath and glanced at myself in the rear view mirror.

With no makeup on and my hair pulled up haphazardly into a ponytail on top of my head, I looked younger than my 32 years, but there was something else I noticed. It was my eyes. In the fleeting blue light from the street lamps, my dark eyes shone with all the expectation and fear of a diver plunging off a cliff.

No one is really an orphan at age 32, but now that my family was gone, that’s exactly how I felt. Twice-engaged, but never married — I had turned running from honest, desirable men into an art form and tweaked it into a joke by falling madly in love with losers — losers who I could climb on top of, in every sense of the words. Men never covered me with their bare bodies. I was always on top. And with that I protected myself from the smothering fangs of love that can bite into your heart and leave you there to long for their return.

Yes, I was smart enough to guard my heart, and now, all I had left for my wisdom and my trouble was memories — those and the $ 50,000 I’d managed to save from selling my oil paintings.

I also had a promise and a postcard. The promise came from Roy. That morning before he died, he penciled in the phone number of an old caretaker in Galveston — a Mr. Martin Vail — on a notepad and slipped it into my hand. Roy told me to drive to the island to meet this man, face to face. “I promise you, Sirena,” Roy said in his fading voice, “he’ll show you that a house can be a home.” Just how a stranger was supposed to do that, I had no idea.

The postcard came from Ruthie, my mother. It was frayed and old but its color was surprisingly bright. On the front, was the picture of a young lady in a yellow swimsuit. She was waving and standing beside a deep blue sea. On the back of the postcard, Ruthie had fashioned these words in her bold, childlike script:

Our souls are on a journey that our bodies can’t complete.

So, now, here I was, with Rosebud sprawled across my backseat between my suitcases and my easels, heading south into the Devil’s Downpour to find out if my dead grandfather was right. Rosebud’s eyes were closed and one glance told me that she was dead asleep as the two of us darted into the night. Sheets of rain made the noise of crazed spirits all around us. They were dancing on the metal roof over our heads as the storm fueled itself with throbbing waves of its own pulsating spirit.

As we made our way to Interstate 45, I shifted my body to make room for my long legs and we raced from the silent sanctity under one overpass to another. All the while, the flashing shadows of the storm reminded me that my life was so tenuous it could be swept away by nature’s fury without so much as a moment’s notice, and no one would be powerful enough to alter the course of my fate.

I was five the morning Roy lifted me out of my bed upstairs in our house in Galveston and told me my mother, his only child, had drowned. Accidentally, or on purpose, she was gone and she wouldn’t be coming home to us again. The next day, Roy packed us up, single-handedly, and we left.

We left Galveston. We left the pink house. He just closed the door and locked it. And we left our past behind us. For Roy, who was born on the island, whose parents, wife and daughter were born and buried there, the voices echoing from Galveston’s shores were too loud for him.

But for me, they were only whispers that wouldn’t die. Most five-year-olds don’t remember their tender years, but I do, and like seeds strewn in a garden, the secrets to my past were buried now. I had been so alive in Galveston, before Ruthie died. But after she left us, that life pulled the covers up around it, and we trampled it underfoot.

From then on, days and nights and all the people who had been there vanished. Roy closed the door to our lives. Slammed it fast and walked away.

But now I was on my way to change all that. The stormy quest for my past had begun. I was ready to push open — no I was ready to burst through that door if I had to — and step to the other side.

Dear Reader: My goal is always to make you feel good about yourself and your life as your journey here on earth unfolds. Uplifted is the feeling I hope to leave you with.

This first chapter of my historic romance novel, Shadow of the Final Storm, steps readers back in time to the Galveston hurricane that destroyed a thriving society. The good news is:

Our souls are on a journey, our bodies can’t complete. — Carol McClain Craver

I self-published in 2012. With this wonderful ILLUMINATION platform, I am preparing this long needed, edited version.

Review: Readers’ Favorite gave it 5 stars and called it one of the best books of the year.

Craver, Carol McClain. Shadow of the Final Storm (The Pink House Series) (Kindle Locations 93–117). Carol McClain Craver. Kindle Edition.