He was almost out of water and running low on food bars. He used the old water containers to collect rainwater. He searched the rocks for any signs of plants or animals but found only sand and stone. So he figured out how to fish.
There were some missteps along the way. He ate a few fish that made him vomit. He drank the water faster than it replenished. But he also found oysters and mussels growing on the shoreline and during a particularly relentless rainstorm managed to store over a week’s worth of water—getting him ahead of the game. During the scorching sun of midday, he hung the deflated raft between two rocks and slept in the shade. Soon, he figured out a fairly reliable routine.
Jesse was eating raw fish, barnacles, and food bars, drinking rainwater, and hiding from the sun. He felt stable. He felt like he could make that work for as long as he needed to until we found him.
But then, after a few weeks, he realized we were never going to find him.
He says he had a breakdown and then, after, an epiphany.
That’s when Jesse started training.
He knew that he couldn’t spend the rest of his life living alone on a small patch of rocks in the Pacific. He knew his only way out was the very thing he had been raised to do.
He trained to swim a race.
He counted his strokes and each day swam out farther than he had the day before.
He started out slow, frailer and more fatigued than he’d ever been.
But after a few months, he was able to make it far out into the ocean. He felt confident that one day he’d be strong enough to swim the open water as long as he had to.
It took him almost two years to work up the stamina and the guts to do it. He had setbacks both minor (a jellyfish sting) and major (he saw a shark circling the rocks on and off for a few weeks). And when he finally set out for good, it wasn’t because he believed that he could make it.
It was because he knew he’d die if he didn’t.
He had run out of food bars long ago and the oysters had dried up. Half of the raft had been torn and lost to the wind. He feared that he was not growing stronger but weaker.
There was a rainstorm that brought him days’ worth of water. He drank as much as he could and managed to strap a few bottles on his back using pieces of the raft.
And then he got in the water.
Ready to find help or die trying.
He does not know exactly how long he was out in the open sea and he lost count of the strokes. He says he knows it was less than two days when he saw a ship.
“And that’s when I knew it was all over,” he says. “That I would be OK. That I was coming home to you.”
He never mentions his finger. In the whole story, in his telling me everything, he never mentioned that he lost half of his finger. And I don’t know what to do because I agreed not to ask anything more. I start to open my mouth, to ask what I know I’m not supposed to. But he cuts me off and I get the message. We’re done talking about that now.
“I thought of you every day,” he says. “I have missed you for all these years.”
I start to say it back and then realize I’m not sure if it’s true. I thought of him always—until one day I thought of him less. And then I thought of him often but . . . that’s not really the same thing.
“You were always in my heart,” I finally say. Because I know that’s true. That’s absolutely true.
No matter how much history Jesse and I have shared, no matter how much we may feel like we understand the other, I’m not sure I can ever understand the pain of living alone in the middle of the ocean. I don’t know if I can ever truly appreciate the courage it takes to swim the open water.
And while I’m in no way comparing the two, I don’t think Jesse can understand what it feels like to believe the love of your life is dead. And then to be sitting across from him in your car off the side of the road.
“Now you go,” he says.
“Now I go?”
“Tell me everything,” he says. The minute he says it, I know that he knows I’m engaged. He knows everything. Between the acute awareness of his voice and the sense of “here it comes” that lives in his focused eyes and tight lips, I can tell he figured it out on his own.
Or he noticed my diamond ring.
“I’m engaged,” I say.
Then, suddenly, Jesse starts laughing. He looks relieved.
“What? Why are you laughing? Why is this funny?”
“Because,” he says, smiling, “I thought you were already married.”
I feel a smile erupt across my face even though I can’t tell you where, exactly, it comes from.
And then I start laughing and playfully hit him. “It’s practically the same thing!” I say to him.
“Oh, no, it’s not,” he says. “No, it absolutely is not.”
“I’m planning to marry someone else.”
“But you haven’t yet.”
“So?” I say.
It’s so easy to talk to him. It was always easy to talk to him. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve always been good at it.
“I’m saying that I have spent the last three and a half years of my life hoping with everything I have in me to see you again. And if you think that you being engaged to someone else is going to stop me from putting our life back together, you’ve lost your goddamn mind.”
I look at him, and at first the smile is still spread wide across my face, but soon, reality starts to set in and the smile fades. I put my head in my hands.
I am going to hurt everyone.
The car becomes so quiet all I can hear is the roll of the cars whizzing past us on the road.
“It’s more complicated than you realize,” I say finally.
“Emma, look, I get it. You had to move on. I know everybody did. I know that you thought I was . . .”
“Dead. I thought you were dead.”
“I know!” he says, moving toward me, grabbing my hands. “I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for you. I don’t want to imagine it. All these years, I knew you were alive, I knew I had you to go back to. And I know you didn’t have that. I’m so sorry, Emma.”
I look up at him and I can see there are tears in his eyes to match the ones forming in mine.
“I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry. I should never have done it. I should never have left you. Nothing on this earth, no experience I could ever have, would be worth losing you or hurting you the way that I did. I used to lay awake at night and worry about you. I would spend hours and hours, days, really, worried about how much you must be hurting. Worried about how you and my mother and my whole family must be aching. And it nearly killed me. To know that the people I loved, that you, you, Emma, were grieving for me. I am so sorry that I put you through that.
“But I’m home now. And what drove me to get home, what kept me going, was you. Was coming home to you. Was coming back to the life that we had planned. I want that life back. And I’m not going to let the decisions that you made when you thought I was gone affect how I feel about you now. I love you, Emma. I’ve always loved you. I never stopped loving you. I’m incapable of it. I’m incapable of loving anyone but you. So I absolve you of anything that happened while I was gone and it’s now our time. Our time to put everything back together the way it was.”
It’s now so hot in the car that I feel like I have a fever. I turn down the heat and I try to wrestle out of my jacket. It’s hard, in the small space of the driver’s seat, to wiggle left and right just enough to get my arms out. Jesse, wordlessly, takes hold of one of the sleeves and pulls for me, helping me finally free myself.
I look at him, and if I push away the shock and the confusion and the bittersweetness, what I’m left with is extreme comfort. Opening my eyes and seeing his face staring back is more like home than anything I can remember. Right here in this car is the best part of my teenage years, the best part of my twenties. The best part of me. The whole beginning of my life is this man.
The years he’s been gone have done nothing to erase the warmth and comfort we have from the years we spent in each other’s lives.
“You were the love of my life,” I say.
“I am the love of your life,” Jesse says. “Nothing’s changed.”