Chapter 7
Chapter 7
The hotel isn’t posh, but Jack doesn’t want posh. He could’ve gone to Elaine’s, but he doesn’t want to be around family, either. All he wants to do is sit in his bare-bones hotel room and stare at his cell phone, willing it to ring.
He imagines that Sawyer is waiting for something, too. Sawyer is waiting for the authorities to come. That’s what Jack had seen on Sawyer's face when he told Jack to go. It was the same fatalistic look he’d seen on the island, when Jack was holding a lethal wound closed on his arm and Sawyer was telling Jack to let him die. It was a look that said, “I don’t care what happens to me, and neither should you.”
Jack believes Sawyer’s confession. He believes that Sawyer was a con man. He believes that he killed a man. The man that Jack first met on the island was capable of such things. But that man was not the same one who left the island six weeks later. Something happened to Sawyer in those weeks, something that changed him. Jack knows that surviving a plane crash, one that no one should have survived, is enough to change a man. It changed Jack. But he wants to believe that he had had something to do with Sawyer’s change, too. A man who would steal out of greed and kill for revenge is a man who doesn’t value himself or his life very highly. But the man who gave Jack’s father back to him, the man who got on a raft on a life-threatening mission to save them all, that man was both brave and noble. If Sawyer could see himself through Jack’s eyes, he would know those things about himself.
But the man who had sent Jack away three days ago believes he is worthless. Jack saw it in Sawyer’s eyes when Sawyer pushed him away. The little flicker of hope he’d seen at the end wasn’t a spark igniting but a flame dying away. Sawyer hadn’t given up on Jack, he’d given up on himself, and that was far worse. That killed any chance Jack had to convince him that he’s loved.
Jack doesn’t think that Sawyer will run. There’s something final about his attachment to his house; it’s his last stand, and to run would be to lose not just the battle, but his whole war with life. No, he thinks that Sawyer will wait in his home for Jack to make the next move, and Sawyer knows enough about him to believe that Jack will turn him in. Jack turned in his own father for a careless accident; of course Sawyer would believe that he’d turn Sawyer in for pre-meditated murder.
But what he did to his father is the very reason he won’t. Christian never got a second chance in life, because Jack condemned him without allowing him one. Sawyer committed murder more than a year ago, and in that time he had his second chance, and Jack has seen what he did with it. He saved the lives of almost fifty people. He rescued Jack from his soulless life in L.A., and he'd beginning to learn how to trust another human being. Jack is determined to show him that that trust is not misplaced. Jack told Sawyer that he loves him, and he wants Sawyer to believe that that love is unconditional. So he forces himself to get through the days, forces himself to live what’s left of the life he was only beginning to carve out for himself. He spends his days working, and at night he sits in his hotel room and he waits. He waits for the time to pass, for enough days to go by for Sawyer to realize that Jack still believes in him.
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Sawyer doesn’t know what happened to the first forty-eight hours after he sent Jack away. They’re nothing but a black blur of alcohol. He didn’t stop drinking until he’d emptied every bottle in the house, and after that he’d passed out for God-only-knew-how-long. He spent the third day nursing the worst hangover of his life, and a handful of sleeping pills got him through the night. It was on the morning of the fourth day that he grabbed his keys and left the house, bent on single-handedly relieving the town of Gatlinburg of its liquor supply. He crossed the porch and opened the screen door, and cursed.
How many times had he told Jack not to take the garbage cans outside? “They stink up the porch,” Jack had complained, and Sawyer had explained, yet again, that outside they attract bears. He’d told Jack that the bears were hibernating, though, so Jack had stubbornly continued to take them out.
Now there’s garbage strewn all over the yard -- old newspapers blowing in the breeze, beer bottles scattered across the ground, crumpled food wrappers soggily stuck to the damp grass. It’s a mess, but what makes Sawyer see red is the pizza boxes. Jack had picked up two pizzas on his way home from work Thursday night, but Sawyer had been in such a foul mood about meeting Jack’s mother that he’d refused to eat. Jack had had a rough day and he was exhausted and starving, so he’d dispiritedly eaten a couple of slices before giving up and tossing what was left in the garbage. Now the cardboard boxes are shredded and empty. Sawyer bends down and picks up the plastic garbage can lid, and sees that it’s gouged with claw marks. Some son-of-a-bitch bear had gotten hold of Jack’s pizza and had himself a party.
It’s not the first time Sawyer has had bear problems. That trend seemed to have started on the damned island. Since he’s been home he’s come outside several mornings to find his building materials disarranged, especially after he’d been careless and left behind the remains of a meal he’d eaten while he worked on the house. They aren’t really deep enough into the winter for the grizzlies to be asleep; he’d only told Jack that to make him stop fretting about getting mauled. No, the bears forage in December, fattening themselves up for the winter. And one of them evidently thinks that Sawyer’s house is his own personal diner. The sight of the pizza boxes is the last straw. He decides that, for now, he has had enough of trying to drink himself to death. It might be a lot more satisfying to kill something else first. He stalks back into the house and grabs his grandfather’s shotgun.
“Teach you to steal from me,” he mutters as he loads the barrel. Doesn’t even matter if he gets the right bear or not. Doesn’t even matter that bear hunting isn’t legal in the Smokies. He’s going to prison for something a whole lot worse, and while he’s waiting for that to happen, he’s out for blood. He takes a heavy jacket from the closet and heads out into the woods.
“Keep to the trails,” his mamaw had always warned him. “Boys get lost in these mountains, never to be seen or heard from again.” Sawyer remembers just such a case; a Boy Scout had wandered away from his troop’s campsite to take a leak, and had apparently gotten disoriented and gotten himself lost in the woods. There had been a massive search effort, seemed like the entire population of East Tennessee descended on the mountain. They searched for weeks, but the kid was nowhere to be found. Years later a hunter found his skeleton more than twenty miles from where he had disappeared. Sawyer had never been a Boy Scout, doesn’t know a thing about tracking or about “being prepared,” but being careful equates to giving a shit whether he lives or dies, and Sawyer doesn’t. He stalks off into uncharted territory.
********
“This is ridiculous, Jack.” Margo paces the hotel room, frowning. “The man broke up with you. I know that hurts and I know you wish things had gone differently, but you have to accept things for what they are. Staying in a hotel, going to work every day in a hospital you have no ties to, in a job that doesn’t give you either the prestige or the income that you had back in L.A., waiting for that man to change his mind, just doesn’t make sense.”
Jack turns away from the window, where he’s been staring out at gray skies and gray buildings and gray mountains in the distance. “I thought you were going to Tahoe. Shouldn’t you be on your way?”
There’s a brief flash of hurt on her face, then her expression softens into one of sad patience. “Jack, I know you. I know how stubborn you are. But remember the last time something like this happened? When Sara left you? You were obsessed, Jack. You stalked her, accused her of all kinds of crazy things, drove your father back to the bottle -“
“I’m not ‘stalking’ him, Mom,” he interrupts loudly. He hesitates, then adds, “I’m waiting for him.”
“It’s been days, Jack. Have you heard anything from him at all?” When Jack doesn’t answer, she nods as if he has. “He isn't going to call. He isn't going to come looking for you. It’s time to give up.”
“No,” Jack insists. “He waited for me. He waited for me for a year after we got off the island. If I hadn’t come back to him when I did he’d still be waiting, and he’d have waited for as long as he had to. And you want me to give up on him after four days? I can’t do that. I won’t do that.”
“Okay, look.” Margo tries a different approach. “You need a change of pace. Why not just come away with me for a while, just until after Christmas. You can take some time and maybe get more perspective, and then if you still want to ‘wait’ then you can come right back here. I just think you need some time to rest, recover, and get your thoughts back in order. You’ve been through so much in the last two years - your marriage, your father, the plane crash, now this. Anyone would be emotionally devastated. Just allow yourself some time to rest. Please? For me?”
Jack eyes the door, wondering if he’s brave enough to actually drag her out. He just wants some peace. He wants to be alone to wait by the phone, to wait for the ring that he knows will come, because it has to. “Mom,” he says, “I know you’re just doing this because you’re worried about me. But I couldn’t just take off on vacation with you even if I wanted to. I’ve only had my job here for a month. If I took a leave of absence now, I wouldn’t have a job to come back to.”
“This isn’t healthy, Jack.”
Jack gives her a long, pensive stare. “When have you ever been a good judge of what’s healthy for me?”
Margo turns on her heel and leaves, her face a mask of cold fury.
********
It feels good to be disoriented. It feels right. Sawyer is completely lost in the forest, no sign of bears or a trail or his home. And still he keeps forging on, intent on finding an outlet for his rage.
Evidently it rained in the days when he was out of it because everything around him is damp, but today it’s just overcast, cold, and soggy. Wisps of vapor curl between the trees, sad clouds fallen to earth. The bare gray-brown branches of ash and oaks lift their arms to a leaden sky. The ground beneath his feet is hard with scattered pebbles and soft with a carpet of fallen pine needles. Every so often he hears the haunting hoot of an owl or the scrabble of some other small woodland creature. He realizes after a while that he isn’t even trying to spot a bear, he’s just wandering aimlessly.
He remembers another hunt, a boar hunt that time instead of a bear hunt. He’d found his prey then, had stared it down, and realized as he did so that he didn’t want to kill the boar at all. It hadn’t been about stolen tarps and soiled shirts, it had been about hating anyone and anything that took what was his. And he knows, deep down, that this bear hunt isn’t about a bear taking food that Jack had thrown out days ago. Sawyer wants to kill, all right, but the one he wants to kill is Margo Shephard.
The thought hits him hard. He stops and leans against a giant, loamy-smelling oak, brooding. Killing Margo would feel so, so good. Killing Margo would bring him the same sense of satisfaction that he had once thought that killing the real Sawyer would. But just as he knows now that killing the real Sawyer won’t solve his problems, neither would killing Jack’s mother. It would only cause Jack pain, and it wouldn’t do a thing to fix their relationship. Not now, not since he’d told Jack about most of his sins of the past. Even if Jack never finds out what Sawyer did to his family, he knows now that Sawyer is a murderer. The Jack he knows is not the kind of man to forgive and forget something like that.
A cold wind blows through the bare branches of the trees, and moans through the hollows and valleys of the mountain. In Sawyer’s mind it echoes the sound of Jack’s words, words he’s been trying to block out of his head for four days. He tries to shut them out now, but the wind is insistent, and he hears Jack’s sad, broken voice telling him that he loves him. This is what he knows about life, that love always goes hand-in-hand with heartbreak. This is what Jack had made him forget, for a while. But instead of staying forgotten, it’s a lesson that he has taught Jack now, too. Love never means happiness, only pain.
Jack doesn’t really love him, though, so he’ll survive. Jack only loves the man he thought Sawyer was, the man he knew so little about. He’ll mourn what they had, and he’ll long for what they could have had, if Sawyer had been a different man. But the love Jack feels will die; has probably died already. Sawyer realizes that his desire to kill has already been fulfilled, but what he killed, was love.
With no destination in mind, he continues his trek through the woods.
link to Chapter 8