Shadows

a story of everlasting love

Chapter Two, Part 1 — Romance, stepping into your past, hurricane, ghosts, loneliness, suspense

Galveston Island emerges off the southern shores of Texas, stretching its long, lazy brown legs out into the warm coastal waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Its past is as ripe with scandal and delight as any showgirl’s. Its future is anyone’s guess. — From Sirena’s journal

It was the morning of a new day when I swung my Jeep into an empty space along Galveston’s Seawall Boulevard and killed the engine.

Rosebud groaned and struggled to her feet in the backseat. Rolling down my rain streaked window and staring out across four lanes of almost no traffic, I saw a cluster of sagging palm trees looming over the skeleton of a grand hotel.

“A once-was-but-is-no-more kind of place.” I informed Rosebud. “A shadow of its former self.” I turned to face a close-up view of my best… my only, friend’s, eyes.

The Golden Retriever positioned herself a half-inch from my face and set up slow wags from her tail section. As soon as I put my hand on the door handle, she scrambled over me and we climbed out into the morning and onto Seawall Boulevard together.

Colorful Storm Festival banners flapped overhead from every lamppost enticing visitors to come to the September 8th “Storm Festival — A Celebration of Survival.”

With Rosebud leading the way, we trotted across the walkway and down seventeen concrete stairs from the top of the seawall to the hard packed brown sand below. When we got to the bottom, I glanced back up at the empty street, and out of the corner of my eye, I caught a fleeting glimpse of the top of what appeared to be a horse-drawn trolley. I heard the clip-clop of hooves on pavement. In the distance, a child was calling for her mother.

As vague shadows drifted across the sand, I stood still and looked out on the beef broth-colored ocean that I’d driven all through the night to see.

My dreams came back to me. Vivid, crashing dreams that first came to me the night the doctor told me my grandfather, Roy, was not long for this world. In sleep, I saw the island as it was so long ago. It was not the island of my childhood.

Survivors of the 1900 hurricane peered out at me with hollow eyes. I knew it was them. Their souls, not their faces, were clear. These were the ones who raised their city on silt and sand that they reclaimed from the ocean’s greedy belly. They were my friends and my neighbors, even though I was far too young to have ever met them.

They built this seawall I’d just descended to protect themselves from the fury and the horror that had swept in and taken away their lovers, their families, their lives.

Dreams flickered and flashed like old home movies in exaggerated color full of screeching sounds and pulsing shapes. I saw wild-eyed mothers whose babies were snatched out of their arms by cascading walls of water. Little boys with laughing eyes and determined looks raced outside to ride metal washtubs through the streets, and were never seen alive again.

And now, here I was standing on that very beach I’d been dreaming about with the hard sand solid beneath my feet. The sea was calm now, even enticing, but it wasn’t fooling me one bit. Scattered fragments of seaweed, tiny shards of shells and remnants of long-ago sea creatures told me that it held deep secrets beneath its watery surface.

Just as children who have done something shameful are on their best behavior when adults walk into the room, that’s how the ocean was that morning. Oh, I was on to its destructive nature. I’d heard whispers in my sleep.

“We’re lucky we weren’t here last night,” I told Rosebud as I scanned the debris that the waves had tossed across the sand. Tiny prickles of heat and cold danced on my arms and I glanced over both shoulders to see who was murmuring beside me.

The eerie feeling of being lost took me by the shoulders and gave my whole body a shake. It was an overwhelming sensation that I was surely vanishing from this world. It was the same one that I’d felt since that morning Roy first told me that Ruthie, my mother, was never coming home again.

Until then, I didn’t know grief was all tied up in numbness, but it is. And that sensation of having no sensation at all hadn’t left me as the days passed after Ruthie’s death, as outsiders assured me it would. After all, Ruthie was not a blue ribbon mother, and we all knew it. She was a wanderer who would disappear from our lives for months at a time.

But still, the grief she ushered in with her death had a way of making me feel as if I was slowly drifting to the bottom of the sea.

I floundered my way through adolescence and my teens looking for love everywhere, and if not love, lust. I painted portraits of people I’d never seen, and pictures of the deep blue sea. Sometimes, the sea had a stormy face, and sometimes, it was deceivingly calm. But always it was deep and dark and blue.

Running became my first line of defense against the labyrinth of life, and through the years I’ve logged more 10-minute-miles than I care to count. The good part is — I’ve built strong calves and thighs. The bad — I always end up right back where I started.

Now, I kicked off my flip-flops and trotted across the sand. As I picked up speed, Rosebud caught me, and we moved parallel to the water. In the pale morning light, waves rolled in beside us with a deceivingly gentle SWISH, swoosh, SWISH. But I knew what they’d been up to.

And then I saw it. A waterwheel whirled toward me from beneath the surface. As it rose above the gentle waves, it pulsed and gathered water, only to spill it out on the other side.

We ran west toward the Ferris wheel on the Pleasure Pier for several minutes when I saw a strange play of lights near the horizon. If the bursts of sparks had been orange, I would have thought they were fire, but they were shades of aqua and lime and rose, and they were translucent, more like bubbles than sparks, more like crystal orbs than bubbles.

I slowed to get a better look. When I did, the colors dispersed and fell back into the sea. Trying to make sense of the images, I moved just to the lip of the water, and not wanting the spray to dampen my shorts and t-shirt, I stepped gently into the surf. The ocean’s salty tongue licked my toes.

With my feet planted unevenly in the sand, I forced myself to think of everyday things, things that made sense in this world. It was only half past seven in the morning and already I was playing what I called my Calm Down game.

I’d find a convenience store to buy Rosebud’s dog food. I’d check into the Hotel Galvez as soon as they’d let me. I’d order breakfast. I’d take a nap, and then I’d call the man that Roy had sent me here to see. All reasonable, logical tasks I could easily accomplish.

I was comforted by my list, but my mind wouldn’t let me forget the cacophony of lights and sounds rising up from its rolling tide. Instead of walking away, I waded in deeper and stood still letting the surf lick my ankles, then my knees, now my thighs.

What happened next did nothing to comfort me. There were no more fragments of dancing light. Instead, what I saw was a quivering shadow. On this almost sunless morning a dark outline of a ship drifted toward me.

Sunlight broke through the morning haze, and glittered on waves that sloshed in heavy gulps over the ship’s slow-churning, side-mounted waterwheel. The hulking vessel slid into focus and showed a flat deck that sat so low in the water a person could easily fall off its sides.

Two smokestacks belched clouds of coal black smoke into the looming gray sky. For some reason I’ll never understand, I lunged toward it. Instead of recoiling from the site of this ghost ship, I raised my arm, as if I were hailing a taxi, and fell face first into the surf.

Someone pulled me in and held my body under. For several seconds I wasn’t sure which way was up. Daylight came from beneath me and cool water swirled in my ears. When I finally got my head above water, I kicked and sputtered and reached desperately for Rosebud, but she was unimpressed. She took a watery look at me, and slowly paddled back to shore. I followed her and stood, dazed, in the sand.

I smelled the ship’s smoke. It smelled like burning leaves. I heard its waterwheel churning. It went ca-chug, ca-chug, ca-chug. And then I saw him. On the deck of the ship stood the bearded old sea captain I’d been dreaming about back in Dallas. White whiskers flowed out in waves from his cheeks. A broken-brimmed cap pulled well down over his brow. He wore a long coat and rumpled black pinstriped trousers.

He moved closer to me, without his ship, and as he drifted past me, I followed him until finally, he stopped.

In front of me was the apparition of a small but sturdy man who looked as old as the sea itself. He raised his arm in the direction of a cloud of mist. Like the sparkling white spray that explodes off the crest of waves, the image of a buxom woman rained down beside the sea captain and me. The most audacious, taffeta-wearing lady I’d ever dreamed of was standing right there with us.

In slow motion, I turned and reached out to her, but no flesh or bones met my hand. Pale light shone through her gussied up clothes. I tried again, putting out both hands this time, but only a circle of cold air greeted me.

The woman turned toward the bearded man and said, “Just cast your eyes on this sight, Sir! Our dream! She is alive!”

“What in the world is happening to me?” I asked out loud, even though I expected no answer. But I got one.

“It’s life that’s happening,” the woman’s voice said. “And it’s flowing out all around us.”

I peered into the woman’s bright face and saw her raspberry lips, her shock of up-swept hair, and her smile that said “Wahoo!”

I was surprised that I had no urge to run away. Instead, I smiled back at this woman. “Miss Lillian?” I asked.

She put a hand on her hip, opened her mouth wide, and let out a howl of laughter — and that’s when I was sure it was her. This was indeed Miss Lillian, the woman who’d been coming to me in my dreams. And the old sea captain beside her? That was Augie, her husband, her lover and her friend.

I was as sure of that as I was of my very own name. Miss Lillian’s laugh wasn’t dainty; it was loud. It wasn’t nice; it was bawdy. But somehow it was joy itself, and it made me smile. At long last, I could feel a smile on my face that wasn’t a stranger to my heart.

In Chapter 2 (part 2) Sirena Texana Vestal — Ruthie named her for the mythical sirens that summon sailors into their arms — delights in a dance with ghostly relatives as she continues her search for herself. Her full self. The self who knows…

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

Chapter One: Shadows, a story of everlasting love

Dear Reader: My goal is always to make people feel good about themselves and our lives as our journey here on earth unfolds. Uplifted is the feeling I crave. I am a former humor columnist and a retired publication editor.

I self-published my book entitled, Shadow of the Final Storm, in 2012. Now, with this wonderful ILLUMINATION platform, I am preparing this long needed, edited version.

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