“It might not be much, but we had to do something,” Murton said.
Sandy sat down in the grass next to the tree, and after a few minutes, Murton and Delroy and I did too. Sandy took my hand and looked at me. “I’m sorry, baby,” she said. If I had been just a little quicker…”
I cut her off. “We agreed we weren’t going to have this discussion anymore.”
The shine in her eyes sparkled a turquoise blue, the un-felled tears caught in her lashes. “I can’t help it, Virgil. I can’t get these thoughts out of my head. My father died saving your life, and I keep thinking that surely there must be some reason things turned out this way. I was supposed to save your dad, Virgil. But I didn’t. Don’t you see that?”
“No, I don’t. Amanda was after me. When Dad yelled out, he took a bullet that was meant for me, and one that probably would have hit you. He not only saved my life, but he saved yours as well.”
“And how am I supposed to live with that, Virgil?”
“The same way I have all these years. The same way I’m still learning how to.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“I’ll show you,” I said. “I’ll teach you. We’ll do it together.”
Sometimes though, at night, as we lay together under the sheets, I wonder if maybe our roles aren’t reversed, if maybe it isn’t me who is being led and taught, not just by Sandy, but by those people who have held a place in my life and still rent pieces of my heart as tenants in perpetuity. And when sleep does not come as it sometimes does not, I’ll get up and walk out onto my deck and watch the moon journey across the sky, its reflection set deep in the sheen of the black-watered pond at the back of my house. I’ll stand quietly and listen to the wind hiss through the leaves on my father’s Willow tree or the dull echo of semi tires as they snap over the expansion joints out on the four-lane. The sounds surround and comfort me, ground me in some way.
And after a while I’ll go back to bed and wrap my arms around the woman I love and remind myself it probably does not matter who is the teacher and who is the student, only that we learn how to live and love along the way. God has put us here, and when our time is over God will take us away on a calendar not of our own making, but one that benefits the continued growth of our souls. Everything in between is part of a timeline we think we control, though I doubt we do. In the end I think we simply ride the rails, safe in the belief of a master plan we only witness after the fact, if ever at all.
