“I was just thinking about that. What happened? I tried your cell, but it was disconnected or no longer in service.” I remembered the robotic female voice on that recording as clear as day, taunting me as if she knew something I didn’t.
He picked up one of my hands and pressed it to his lips, then looked into my eyes. “I took my cell phone with me everywhere. I never wanted to miss a call from you because I never knew when one was coming. I even brought it to the beach when I surfed.” He glanced up at the sky, as if pulling memories from the clouds. “It got wet one day after I’d been in the water. Completely fried the thing. It wouldn’t even turn on.”
“And yo
u never got a new one? You couldn’t call me from your house phone?” I asked, suddenly feeling fourteen again, recalling pacing the floor in front of our home phone while I willed it to ring.
“I didn’t have your phone number written down anywhere. It was only in my cell phone. And yes, I got a new one. Eventually. But my parents made me work around the house to earn the money to pay for it, so I didn’t get another phone for almost three months. But your number was gone forever by that time.”
“I left you voice mails,” I said softly. “So many voice mails. Until your phone stopped taking them.” The memories still felt fresh, my teenage self crying into the phone and asking him why he wasn’t calling me back. Thinking back, it seemed like I was nothing if not overdramatic. But I remembered being so truly heartbroken at the time, I’d convinced myself that I would never get over him. Eventually I had, but not before crying until the tears would no longer fall. Every emotion, especially love, was so amplified when you were a kid. Hell, I didn’t even know what love truly was at that age, but I thought I felt it for him.
“Those messages broke my damn heart, Madison. Especially when you never left your phone number in any of them. I heard them all back-to-back when I got my new phone turned on. It took everything in me to not smash the damn thing to pieces.”
“That would have been counterproductive,” I teased, trying to lighten the mood.
“When I got to the last voice mail you left me, I knew in my heart that you’d given up.” He squeezed my hand.
I sighed. “I think I actually said that in my message, if I remember right.”
“You did. But I didn’t want it to be true. And you never called again.”
“Well, you stopped calling back. I just assumed the worst. You know, that you were sick of me calling you and that’s why you changed your number. Or that you found someone new. But it all went back to you being over me.”
His face pinched with pain. “I hate hearing that. You have no idea how much I hate hearing that right now. I tried to find you. I looked everywhere I could but there was no Facebook then. No social media like there is now to stalk people effectively.”
“There was MySpace,” I reminded him.
“But you didn’t have one.”
“You didn’t either.” I recalled a conversation we’d had on the beach one afternoon where we confessed that we weren’t obsessed with computers like our friends were.
He laughed and my face flushed. “Not that I would have had much luck trying to find Madison from the valley.”
I listened to the surf breaking nearby and felt numb, as if everything inside me had disappeared. I was certain my heart wasn’t beating, my lungs weren’t working, and whatever else in there was either broken or gone. This was all so surreal, I still couldn’t believe it was happening.
“I can’t believe it’s you. I can’t believe you’re here.” I turned my head to look out at the ocean across the sand. “We made so many memories together at this beach.”
He nodded. “It’s why I brought you here. To this day, I can’t come here and not think of you.”
“It’s why I didn’t want to come,” I said softly, still struggling to regain some sense of composure.
His eyebrows lifted and his expression brightened. “Was that why? I wondered, but of course I couldn’t ask.”
“I never come here. The last time I was here was with you. That day we said good-bye.”
“Don’t remind me. That was one of the hardest days of my life. Even now, when I add up the days in my life that have royally sucked, like this morning, it still ranks up there at the top.”
• • •
“You’re leaving?” Scotty had asked, his hazel eyes etched with pain that even as a teenager I could recognize.
My heart had constricted so tightly I could barely speak, so I had nodded instead as tears flowed freely down my sun-kissed cheeks. The breeze whipped my hair, causing strands to stick to the wet tracks on my face.
“Don’t cry, Madison. We’ll still talk. I’ll call you every day. And we’ll figure out a way to see each other again. I promise.” His words were insistent and determined, as though he believed them.
“I don’t want to go,” I choked out through my sobs. My hands reached out to stroke back the wavy sun-streaked strands that the breeze stirred in front of his eyes.
Scotty wiped at my tears, plucking my own stuck strands free and tucking them behind my ear before pulling me into a hard hug. “I don’t want you to go either. I’m not ready to say good-bye.”