Based On Novel

~x~

I could never forget the way she made me feel. The way she changed me in those months when I fell in love with Jamie Sullivan. The boy I was had slowly chipped away and the man that replaced him as the last year of high school came to a close was someone who I never imagined I could be.

But I was him now.

She had opened my world, the day I thought I lost it forever when she had taken her last breath. But that's not how I felt at the time.

Sometimes, in life... you meet that person that changes everything you thought you knew about yourself and the world.

And sometimes, a person like that is too good to stay here for that long.

As the old saying goes, only the good die young, and Jamie... well she was like a saint.

Even more to me and to everyone in Beaufort, she was an angel.

And even heaven has to call back its angels.

~x~

All those years ago, yet just like time itself, it felt like it was only yesterday that I married her. And it felt like only yesterday that I had been at her funeral.

I didn't want to remember that year, that day onward after Jamie left... but I couldn't escape the memories as they went through my mind. As the year that came after the best year of my life... well it was the worse year of my life. Because I was still trying to make sense of what my place, my purpose in this world was now.

~x~

I guess you could say that to know love you have to know pain... and I knew a pain so great that day when I came to her father's house a month later... less than four weeks really... when everything for me froze in that second.

As when he opened the door to me, flowers in my hand, and the ring on my finger... all I saw in his eyes...

...

...

...were tears.

And I knew, I just knew. It wasn't a sixth sense, it wasn't the eventuality of it. It was the feeling I shared in that very moment, the atmosphere between the two of us that I knew... she... was... really... gone.

I'd like to tell you that I held back the tears before he could even tell me that she had left this world for the next. But the truth was, I broke down there on his porch and cried, cried till the very last breath in me for those five minutes was near choking me.

And I knew I had to breathe. I had to breathe.

I came in, and the house was very silent. It was like a very important person had just left the world, and the truth was, she had.

The doctor and nurses had tears in their eyes, and I slowly began to approach her room.

"-Wait,"

I shook still, hearing Hegbert say that to me in a choked voice of his own. My hand had just placed on the handle of her room, and I only stared ahead of me to the wood of the door.

He didn't say anything for a moment... for a minute... before the words tumbled out of his old mouth.

"She said... before she left... 'tell Landon, thank you',"

I could feel the tears rolling down my cheeks, my breath coming out in shaky wheezes. I was finding it too hard to breathe.

How could she say that? How could she finish her life with those words...? I was the one who should have thanked her. She changed my life... she changed me.

But I shook my head, facing it to the ground as I just sobbed there against the door for another couple of minutes. My weeps could be heard echoing through the old house and everyone remained quiet, just listening to the cries of a broken boy.

I finally looked my red eyes slowly up to the wood again and turned the handle down.

The moment I stepped into that room... all life was gone for me. The life I had known would never come back... as I saw her laying there... her body grey... drained of life. Her eyes closed.

But on her lips... I saw the thing that made me stop my tears for a second. A smile.

A peaceful smile as she had gone to that place only the good had gone. She was with God.

But as I watched her for that bare few seconds, looking at her body and knowing she would never wake again... I just began to stumble out pleads as I approached her.

Her hands were folded over each other and placed on her lap... like she had been waiting patiently for me, and I just dropped to my knees beside her.

I took hold of her dead hand and held it with both of mine. It was cold... it was freezing. On this hot late spring day, her body was the only thing that was stone cold.

I pleaded with her, almost helplessly.

"Jamie... wake up please..."

She didn't stir.

I closed my eyes and cried.

I could feel Hegbert's eyes on me in the distance, and as I knelt there, tears soaking my shirt, he walked slowly across the room to me and placed his wrinkly old hand on my shoulder.

Whispering.

"Landon... Landon..."

His words for once weren't harsh or cold to me. They were soft... almost gentle. But they weren't that... they were what they had to be in that moment. Strong.

For he had to be strong not just for himself... but for the boy that had fallen so deeply in love with his daughter that that boy was truly broken in that moment, and his pieces had to be rebuilt. But he would never be the same.

"Come on, son..." he said to me. Because in a way, I was his son now... for I had given myself completely to his daughter.

The wedding was a day I would always hold in my heart... the day I not only became her husband but his son-in-law.

"Come on, Landon."

I trembled there, afraid he would make me leave her, but he didn't. He gripped my shoulder tightly, before letting go and walking slowly to the door. I closed my eyes, just feeling her lifeless cold hand in mine and only heard him say quietly.

"When you're ready..."

I don't think I would've ever left her side that day. I think I would've knelt beside her for years.

But when the tiny world of Beaufort slowly began to arrive at the house... I had to stand aside.

And I watched as my Jamie was soon prepared for the funeral. She was taken away in a bag to the morgue.

And this story is about the first time in my life... when I didn't know who I was or what my purpose was now.

This is a story about the year of 1959... a year... that would make me continue on the new path that Jamie had opened for me.

A path, I soon realized... I would walk mostly alone...