Page 46 of The Spirit of Love

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I lead Jude through the rain, along the wildflower-hedged path, and up the rickety porch stairs of the cabin at the edge of the island and both of our worlds.

“I don’t understand,” he says, bewildered. “How do you know about this place?”

“Sam.”

“Uh-huh?”

I stare at him. I’d only been answering his question, explaining that I know about this place because of Sam. But Jude replied so naturally. As if I’d been addressing him.

“Why did you answer to that name?”

He blinks. “Samuel Jude de Silva. That’s my given name. Before the accident, I went by Sam.” He touches the front door, his eyes far away. “I went by Sam, and I lived here.”

Okay. So this is actually happening. Sam is Jude and Jude is Sam, splintered off by time and trauma. Somehow brought back together by me. But what happens when I open this door and the two of them face off?

“Are you okay?” he asks. “Have I freaked you out?”

“Did Tania mention anything about ghosts?” Saying the word aloud feels true in some ways, and very wrong in other ways. Sam was no ghost when we saw that sunset on the beach. He was no ghost when I took off my dress yesterday and he got down on his knees.

“Why do you ask?” Jude says.

“Um.”

What if by inviting Jude here, I’m making an irreversible mistake?

Will I get stuck in the time loop with him?

Will planets wheel out of the sky? But then I think about what Jude said back at the ravine.

About the piece of him that’s missing. That he needs to be whole.

I think about his explanation for why he wants to be whole in first place…

Because he’s falling in love with me.

He sounded clear. As clear as I suddenly feel right now, standing at his side, at the threshold of a ghost. I’ve spent the past month wrestling with my feelings for what I assumed were two different men.

But they weren’t. They were just one fractured soul.

I don’t know if they’ll even like each other. I haven’t had time to run through all the dozen ways this introduction might go very wrong. But I can’t go on knowing what I know right now and not let Jude in on it. Whatever the cost.

I take a deep breath. “I think there’s someone you should meet.”

I open the door, which requires more hip grease than I expected. I gesture for Jude to walk in first.

“Wow,” he whispers. “It’s the same.”

But when I follow him in, I have to hold back a gasp, because in the space of four hours, everything has changed.

The walls are bare. The furniture is gone. The air is thick with dust. Cobwebs cover all the windows. The bookshelf and the ladder and the handmade bar and the fireplace still stand, but they’re shadows of what they’d been before. The cabin looks abandoned to the point of being condemned.

Like no one’s been here in ten years.

“What happened?” The words slip out, even though I know. A lump rises in the back of my throat.

Oh, Sam .

Jude walks the perimeter of the room, his hands running over Sam’s—his—handiwork. He pauses where the couch had been, where a ghost and I once sat, staying up all night and then listening to the sunrise.

I wish I could make this place go back to the way it was. I wish I could have kept them both.

“I was just here this morning, and everything was different.” My voice trembles. “He was here.”

“Who?”

I turn to look at Jude. “Sam.”

“I don’t understand.”

I step close and put my hands on Jude’s shoulders.

I look into his eyes. “We deal with the impossible every day. We make fantasies real. We kill people, and we bring them back to life. And I know, like I know you know, that every single thing that’s magic on TV is pulled from the collective unconscious because it’s also actually real.

We use special effects, and tricks of light, and makeup, and editing.

But once upon a time, when I was just a kid, I didn’t know how to do any of that.

But I knew that what made fantasy feel real was the magic of the human heart, which is capable of anything. ”

“Yes,” Jude whispers.

“So right now,” I continue, “in the face of some deeply inexplicable, time- and space-defying occurrences, I’m going to lean on what I know.

What I guess I’ve always known.” I put my hand over my heart and close my eyes.

“The truth I hold in here. One month ago, I met a man on this island in the middle of a storm. He took me to this cabin. He showed me his world. His name was Sam. He was twenty-three.” I sniff, but the tears are starting.

“He was tall and built and hadn’t yet grown into himself.

He was thirty-two service hours away from completing his Search and Rescue training certification. ”

“This can’t be possible,” Jude whispers.

“He couldn’t make toast without burning it, but his boeuf bourguignon rivaled Julia Child’s.

He loved spearfishing and hummingbirds and listening to the sunrise, right out there.

” I point out the window facing the sea.

“Sometimes while doing shirtless one-armed pull-ups. I could have filmed a two-hour feature film of him doing shirtless one-armed pull-ups.”

“That sounds like more of a film-festival-circuit short,” Jude jokes, but his eyes are shining with tears, too.

“I don’t know how to make this make sense,” I say, “and I don’t know where Sam is right now.

I don’t know what happened to this cabin since I left it four hours ago.

But I do know that I loved that man.” I close my eyes.

I sound ridiculous. “Or at least, I was starting to love him. Or if not that, I loved what he was becoming. He was kind and funny and open, and when we slept together on the beach—”

“You slept with Sam?”

“I felt like I was touching the core of the earth.”

“You slept with my—wow. I’m trying to picture that.”

I thwack Jude gently. I’m still crying. “And I miss him. We fought this morning. And I’m scared I did something that made him disappear. I’m scared I’ll never see him again. And I really wanted you to meet him. Do you understand?”

He nods. “I’m trying.”

“It’s a lot.”

“What did you and Sam fight about?”

“In the end,” I say, “I think it was because he wasn’t you.”

Jude cups my face in his hands. He closes his eyes now and a tear slips out.

“My doctors were so proud when I recovered,” he says quietly. “Of me. Of themselves. I was a medical miracle. No one could believe they brought that shell back to life.”

“I didn’t mean it when I called you that.”

“Yes, you did. And you were right. I changed everything about myself after the accident. I changed my name. I changed my career. I changed my lifestyle and all my plans for my future. I never wanted to look back at the kid who made that reckless mistake. I threw him away. I let him die that day.” He looks around the cabin sadly.

“And the worst part is, I didn’t think I missed him.

I didn’t know I was missing anything—until I met you.

This past month. You’ve got me seeing everything differently. You’ve got me wanting…”

“Wanting what?”

“To reinvent myself yet again. To turn into someone you’d want to be with.” He smiles, sadly. “I didn’t see you coming, Fenny. I didn’t know that the part of me that died that day was the part of me you would have liked best.”

“Jude.”

“I came to Catalina to find Sam again. But somehow it seems you found him first.”

“Oh, God,” I breathe. “And now he’s gone because of me?”

“No,” Jude says. His fingers brush my cheek. He’s smiling. “No, I don’t think he’s gone.”

“But this cabin, this place, it’s all so…” I look around, and my eyes land on the kitchen counter. Where I’d left Sam that note saying goodbye. Saying we were over. The note is gone, but something else remains.

The adder stone.

“Wait a minute,” I say, drawing Jude over to the counter.

Jude studies the necklace and then picks it up. “I used to have one just like this,” he says, draping it over my head. “But this one’s yours, I think.”

“You believe in this stuff?”

“Today I do.”

He leaves me with the necklace, walking toward the side door of the cabin, stepping out onto the porch that faces the ocean.

It’s stopped raining, but it looks like it could start again at any moment.

The sky is pocked with blue breaking through thick clouds.

In the distance, near the mainland, shimmers an almost invisible rainbow.

Sam’s pull-up bar is still here, welded between two wooden posts. Jude reaches up with his left arm, precisely the way I used to love watching Sam reach up. Just before he grabs the bar, he pauses, tosses his head. Then, with his back to me, he whips off his shirt, letting it drop at his feet.

“For continuity,” he says as my eyes feast on his back, slightly leaner, ten years older, and quite possibly even more beautiful. “Whenever you’re ready,” he tells me, “say action.”

He’s telling me without telling me to frame the shot with magic. I hold up the adder stone to my face and look through the hole at the man who straddled life and death and time and space and ended up whole, right here, with me.

“Action.”

Slowly, straining, Jude pulls himself up to the bar. I watch his muscles flex. I watch them swell in size. Jude’s chin crests the bar as the sun explodes from behind a cloud. Its rays reach like angels to lift him even higher.

He lowers his body until his feet touch the planks. He turns around to face me. I let go of the stone.

“Wow,” I say.

“Did it work?” he asks, touching his arms, his face, his chest.

“I’m not sure,” I say. “I think I need to check under the hood.”

Jude grins and moves toward me. He gazes down into my eyes. He looks different, but exactly the same. His eyes are open yet discerning. He puts his hands around my waist, and his touch is boyish smooth but also lit with the confidence of a man.

“Samuel Jude de Silva,” I whisper, drawing him close.

“Yes, Fenny?”

“Kiss me.”

His lips touch mine, and that’s when I know. He’s everything I want. He’s all he’s supposed to be. He can reinvent himself as many times as he wants or never again, as long as he doesn’t stop kissing me.

A blast of horns startles us both. It’s coming from the ocean, and we force ourselves to break apart. The Midlife Crisis is sailing past Sam’s cabin, and ant-sized Olivia and Masha hold binoculars to their eyes, jumping up and down on the deck and waving. A voice calls over the loudspeaker.

“You found the light!” It’s Tania at the megaphone in the cockpit.

“More chin-ups, please,” Masha calls into the megaphone.

“Was my pina colada better?” Olivia’s voice asks.

“Jude, you salty old dog,” Captain Dan growls.

“Not a day too soon, man,” Jake says.

“I think they’re rooting for us,” I murmur to Jude as we wave at the ship, sailing onward, around the next cove.

“Question,” Jude says, resting his thumb on my lip. “When we kissed just now, did it feel like the earth was splitting open?”

“This is nothing,” I assure him. “Wait until I get you horizontal on the secret beach.”

“You know about the secret beach?” he asks. “Of course you know about the secret beach.”

“I know a zip line that can take us there in thirty seconds.”

“No, it hasn’t been used in ten years.”

“That thing was built to last,” I say with a twinkle in my eye.

“When do you think I’ll stop being jealous of my ghost?”

“I know how to make it sooner,” I tell him with a knowing look.

And then, like so many Hollywood endings, Jude sweeps me off my feet and carries me toward Sam’s secret beach and our whole new adventure together.