In Buddhism, there are four noble truths, all having to do with suffering. The Bible has four gospels, four points on a cross, and four horsemen of the apocalypse. There are four seasons, four sides to a square, four directions on a map, and four types of human blood. The heart has four chambers, the mouth four wisdom teeth. There are four states of matter. Earth, air, fire and water make up the four elements. Four temperaments. Four humors. Four strings on a violin. Four-letter words are said to be bad, though I say them often, while rounding four bases makes a run and a grand slam is four runs off one hit. In the Asian world, four is unlucky because it stands for death.
4. The number imprinted on that woman’s forehead was now branded into my brain. Why 4? What did it mean?
I slammed my hand against the Jeep’s steering wheel. What difference did it make? The numbers that really mattered were 4, for the hours spent searching, 12, for the number of acres covered, 15, for the number of officers involved in the sweep and 0, for the number of weird spastic ladies found. The number of times Sam would be teased for having a psycho girlfriend, countless.
And coincidentally, four things bothered me: the missing redhead, TIBA’s tauntings, my pesky panic attacks, and where was Sam?
Sam and I have been together, officially, for 46 days. I count it from the day I realized that no matter how messed up my life was, he had managed to squeak into the number one spot in my priorities. I couldn’t stop thinking about him. Forty-six days ago, I told him how I felt, and we followed it up with the most romantic boat ride of my life. He let me drive.
Sam likes to count it from the day I moved to Tipee Island because he says he knew the moment he saw me again that he loved me. His math would put us at 63 days.
Still, our love feels as comfortable and deep as the day we both fell into it, and that would put it at something like fourteen years and two weeks. Except for God, my family and books, that’s the longest I’ve loved anything.
Whatever the count really is, I’ve learned a few things about Sam Teague. He’s annoyingly tidy, competitive, and stubborn. He calls rap music modern poetry (sneer) and doesn’t read anything but sports statistics and Sunday comics (tear). He gets jealous at the drop of a hat, plays video games, and can eat or drink anything (and does) with absolutely no consequences to his stomach, waist, or face (I bloat, expand, and break out if I even look at sweets or junk food. But, hey, that’s the way God made me so I don’t obsess over it). Sam has little ambition, except maybe (hopefully) when it comes to me.
Still, he can turn me to mush with a smile, has the most beautiful eyes I’ve ever seen, and usually knows exactly what I need or what I’m thinking, unless, of course, it’s about some stupid, nerdy fact like where the expression “head over heels” comes from.
“Head over heels” doesn’t make much sense if you picture it. Our heads are usually over our heels, unless you’re a circus performer or seriously deformed. Originally, the phrase was “heels over head”, like a cartwheel, which makes more sense for an expression that means helpless or out of control. In the 1800’s, the phrase did its own cartwheel, and also took on a new meaning: that beautiful, crazy, upside-down feeling called love.
However backwards, the phrase fits. It describes exactly how I feel about Sam. And until the last few weeks, our romance has been rather “heels over head.”
Everything about us was lovely and strange. I was wrapped up tightly in the most intimate relationship of my life, and we’d yet to be intimate, at least by normal standards. While in the Delilah Duffy manual of life, emotional intimacy trumped the physical kind any day of the week, even I was ready to tear my hair out for the dinosaur-sized tension that had built between us. After all we’d been through – fourteen difficult years apart but dreaming of each other, a reunion that uncovered the truth, and almost losing each other again when I was nearly killed twice – you’d think we would have made up for lost time with a dizzying marathon of togetherness. But, no. I was all for it. Sam held back.
And now, this. In the last 46 days, I’d known exactly where he was all the time. I knew his work schedule, and I pretty much filled up the spaces in between, along with his sickeningly disciplined jogging and surfing routines. I wasn’t a stalker girlfriend, determined to account for every minute of his time, but knowing his routines had become well, normal, just as he knew mine. Sam should have been at work tonight. And for a girl who’d had men treat her heart like a soccer ball, kicking it around without picking it up, I was anxious to hear his explanation.
Willie groaned when I came home. He didn’t like being woken up in the middle of the night. I sat on the floor next to him and cuddled him closely. “What’s up with Sam?” I asked him. I suspected that Willie knew the answers to all of my questions, but simply lacked the ability to share them. I had to ask anyway, just in case.
I fell asleep at the kitchen table after four sips of coffee and making the mistake of setting my head down just for a minute. My phone sat beside me. I’d tried to call him twice with no luck. Next thing I knew, Willie growled, and there was a sudden rush of thuds up the stairs.
My head swung up when Sam came in the door. Willie put his head back down.
He smiled. “Sorry I missed the party.” I rose from the table and fell into his arms as if I hadn’t seen him in years. It took about four seconds for my four troubles to melt. Heels over head felt like a beautiful and dangerous place to be.
Sam pulled back and told me, “Nice dress.”
“Where were you?”
“Fayetteville,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “Had some business there. Ended up being a complete waste of time.” Sam was tired and irritated. He sat down at the table, and I poured him what was left of the coffee.
“What kind of business?”
Sam yawned. “Um, nothing important.” My cocked eyebrow urged him to tell me anyway, but he shifted in his seat. “I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe another time? I’d rather hear about the party. Williams called me. You okay?”
I thought about what I’d overheard in the ladies’ room and wondered if I should start there first. But, I didn’t. Nothing will turn a man’s heart away quicker than a woman who nags him about every little thing, my mother once told me, much to my father’s amusement.
“They didn’t find her,” he told me once I’d explained the long story. “No missing persons reports, no women matching the description at any hospitals or urgent care offices in fifty miles, and no other emergency calls in Tipee. Maybe it wasn’t a medical emergency-”
My face crunched. “You don’t believe me?”
“Of course I do,” he said, cutting me a funny look, “but she could’ve been faking.”
“Why would anyone do that?”
He huffed. “Why does anyone do anything? Most of what I see, I don’t get. People hurting other people or themselves. It’s rarely reasonable. Just is. God works mysteriously. Devil does, too. She could’ve just been some whack-job who saw an opportunity to freak you out and steal your shoes.”
“My fifteen dollar Walmart pleather pumps? Doubtful.”
“You could have been targeted.”
“No, whatever this was,” I said, “it wasn’t about me. She didn’t know me, and she couldn’t have been faking. Her heart was racing. She seized and shook. If that was an act, then she deserves an Oscar.”
Sam gave me a tired smile, soft and easy. “Well, you’ve done everything you can do.”
“Yeah, everything I can do to insist that everyone in this town thinks I’m a lunatic.”
“I don’t.”
I smirked. “You’re just blinded by love.”
He laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right, but what is it they say? Ignorance is bliss?”
“Did you know that Thomas Gray, one of the Graveyard Poets, coined that phrase in 1742? It’s in his poem called Ode On a Distant Prospect of Eton College where he writes ‘where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise’,” I sputtered out.
Sam yawned, and said, “So, it’s smart to be dumb?”
“Pretty much,” I agreed. “So, it’s probably dumb of me to ask, but who is Backwoods Buddy?”
The name made Sam laugh as he rubbed his eyes. “Why are you asking about him?”
I shrugged. “Overheard some officers mention him.”
“Backwoods Buddy is a truck driver, who shows up in Tipee every few months to shack up with his girlfriend over in the Breakers. This guy looks like a countrified, redneck Albert Einstein – all bushy haired but bald up top – but many sandwiches short of a picnic in the intelligence department,” Sam explained. “Last week, Williams and I responded to a domestic disturbance call at the girlfriend’s cottage. Buddy had his truck parked in the cul-de-sac, and was raising Cain about his lost load. ‘I dun lost my load!’ he kept yelling. Meanwhile, the girlfriend was carrying on about how dumb he is, parking that truck across the whole road and not keeping it locked up properly. Buddy broke the padlock on the back door on the way to Tipee and didn’t bother replacing it. Moron wasn’t too worried about getting his load stolen-”
“People say men have a one-track mind,” I grinned. “He just wanted to see his girlfriend.”
“Guess so. So anyway, he’s freaking out about how his boss is going to kill him. Takes him a good twenty minutes to get up the nerve to make the phone call, you know, because he has to make up a good story about where he is. Finally, he tells his boss that he stopped at an I-95 rest stop and his load got stolen, a better story than the truth, that he was two hours off the interstate on a booty call. Come to find out, he never had a load.”
“What do you mean?”
Sam shrugged. “The dummy was sent to pick up a load, not drop one off. His boss told him his truck was empty. I wish you could’ve seen him, scratching his head, checking and rechecking his logs, and the girlfriend calling him a ‘plum idiot’. Hilarious.”
I pinched my lips together. The story would have been amusing if Sam’s coworkers hadn’t compared me to him. I cringed.
“You okay?” he asked, eyes on my face. I nodded. “Is there anything I can do? Make you breakfast? Rub your head? Shoot someone?” He chuckled, but since he had shot someone for me before, I could only smirk.
“You don’t have to take care of me,” I sighed.
He played with my fingers. “But, I like taking care of you.”
Sam treated me like a bubble that had landed in his hand. Any wrong move, and I’d pop and be gone forever. I’m not sure why. Maybe he felt that way about any person he loved because his parents had abandoned him, traded him to his aunt and uncle for money to feed their drug habits. Maybe it was because he’d almost already lost me a couple of times. Or maybe it was because I’m me and I’m needy and delicate and oftentimes most people don’t know quite how to handle me.
Moments like these, I felt handled.
Though I’d learned a great deal about Sam Teague over the last 46-63 days, there were two distinct areas of his life that had remained mysterious. Sam could spout story after story about his childhood (post-adoption), his teenage years, time as a police officer and all those in between days. But not one anecdote about his war-life or even a mention of his married-life. Those lives were sealed away, like boxes in an attic. And they didn’t seem to impact the rest of him, completely compartmentalized. To look inside, I’d have to open those lives up, and wasn’t sure I wanted to. So, I didn’t press – not about his before-lives or his present one – maybe because I felt he was like a bubble in my hand, too.
The numbers in my head swirled into a murky stew. My eyes drooped into my coffee. Futilely, I wished the hour wasn’t what it was because instead of crawling into bed and drifting off to much-needed sleep, I had to go to work.