Oceans

Dana suddenly stopped crying and turned to look at me. "You really are the stupidest bitch I've ever met," she said. "He isn't going to have sex with her. He's giving her his studio. There's even an apartment there for her to live in while she works. He's doing everything he can to help her get her career off on a good footing."

"That's great," I said. "So he's going to work from our house again?"

She just looked at me like I'd arrived on the short bus. "He's done, Kerri. He's not going to work anymore. He's gone."

"Her words made no sense to me. I just stood there and everything started to spin. I needed to focus on something to keep from losing my balance and falling over. I looked at the huge lifelike statue that now stood silent and still with one arm outstretched beckoning people to come into the bank. "

"Do you know how much money he's throwing away?" I asked. "She nodded her head and told me that he didn't want or need it."

"But what about his art?" I asked. She just looked at me angrily. Kerri, he never wanted to be famous or rich. He never wanted any of this. He did all of this for you. After the way you betrayed him. For his own sake, he just needs to get away from all of this and from you. He just wants to start his life over again, somewhere else."

"But, what about...us?" I wondered out loud. I wasn't expecting Dana to answer me but she did anyway."

"You literally fucked it up for all of us," she said. "Just by your need to fill your little hole, you left an even bigger hole in your life, my life and the entire art world. Can you imagine the things he might have done? You fucked it up for everyone Kerri. Exactly how does that feel?"

I was too close to tears to answer, so I just turned and left her there, knowing all along though that she was right. Besides depriving myself of the only man I'd ever loved, I'd deprived the entire world of all of the art that Legs would have done over the length of his career. I felt worse than terrible."

"I immediately ran out of the bank. I jumped into my car and called him. He didn't pick up the phone. I drove through the streets like a maniac trying to get to the studio before he left. He had a big head start on me. When I got there the place looked deserted. There was a light on, so I knocked on the heavy door. I pounded on it as hard as I could and I heard footsteps coming to the door. I saw the security peephole open and the door opened a little after that."

"Hi Kerri," she said to me. "I guess I was looking to talk to you, but tonight everything just got away from me. Legolas sold every piece I showed. And I got almost twice the price I was asking for them. And then he just gave me a building to work from. Before I met him at that art fair in the park, I was your typical starving artist, heavy emphasis on starving. Now, I have my own building, a new agent who seems to be able to do things for me and my reputation has taken a giant step forward. And it's all because of your husband." She was smiling from ear to ear."

"Yeah, I'm happy for you," I told her. "Is Legolas here?"

"Nope," she said. "He brought me here, showed me around and left. He has to be one of the most giving people I've ever met. I mean, who just gives someone they barely know a building. At first I thought there'd be strings to all the help he was giving me...You know kind of like everyone says you do. And I figured what the hell. He is kind of cute. But he never even tried that or mentioned it. There are a few good people left I guess. He seemed kind of sad though."

"I couldn't stand there and listen to her talking about what a great guy my husband was. I already knew how great he was. I just had to find him."

"Did you see the way people reacted when that statue moved?" she asked. "That man is brilliant."

"By that time I was walking back towards my car, so her words fell on deaf ears. As I opened the door, I noticed that my phone was ringing. I picked it up. It was Dana. Apparently, she didn't want him to leave any more than I did. Her need for him to stay outweighed even her hatred of me. She told me where he was leaving from. He wasn't flying out as I'd have suspected. He was taking a boat and not some big fancy cruise liner. It was a big passenger and freight ship. It didn't offer all of the amenities of a cruise ship but I suspected that part of his reason for taking it was that he could ship his God damned cars with him."

"I raced through the streets again and got to the pier that Dana had told me he was leaving from just in time to be too late. As I ran up to the end of the pier breathlessly, the back of the ship slipped away, bound for who knows where."

"If I'd been one of those athletic women I probably could have long jumped my way onto that ship. But with my athletic skills I'd have drowned."

"I started crying then. I didn't cry the way that Dana did. In my case it was deep soul wrenching sobs. Then my phone rang. I answered it. Unbelievably it was you, Legs."

"Please come back," I sobbed into the phone. "We need to talk about this. I can't live without you. I'm sorry. I'll never do it again. I promise."

"Kerri, it's too late for all of that," he said quietly. He didn't yell at me or call me a whore or anything like that. He was just so calm."

"Why can't we just start again?" I asked. "Why can't you forgive me? Just give me one more chance."

"How could we start again?" he asked. "We've fallen so far from where we were before. You'll never find what you've been looking for. You need something to fill the void and make up for all of those missing pieces of you. I hoped for a long time that it would be me. I loved you with everything I had Kerri. There was never anyone but you. I could never imagine being with anyone but you. And I really believed that you thought about it the same way. But everything we believed in was a lie." The phone went dead after that. I just dropped the phone and sank to the ground.

"A man walking by after that looked at me strangely. He asked me if I'd missed my boat. I nodded my head. He told me that it wasn't the end of the world. I told him it was for me. That my heart and soul were leaving on that boat."

"He smiled and asked me what it would be worth to me to get to that boat. I told him I'd pay him anything he could ask. He grabbed my hand and we went running across the dock. He took me over to a small building attached to another dock. He introduced me to an even older man with a beard and a pipe. "

"He stuck out his hand and I opened my purse. "How much?" I asked.

"Just give us everything you have," he told me. I gave him all the cash I had in my purse. It was about eight hundred dollars."

"Sam here is the captain of the pilot boat. He'll be going out in about ten minutes to guide the ship you missed out of the bay. He's often taken passengers who missed the ship out to meet it. This is the first time we've gotten this much money for doing it though."

"We got onto a relatively small ship that smelled like old diesel fuel and sardines. Sam guided us out into the water and quickly caught up with and overtook the larger vessel. Sam had radioed ahead and the crew of the ship was ready to help me aboard. I searched the entire ship. Neither Legs nor his cars were aboard it. He'd been there only moments before I arrived. I even saw a picture that he'd taken with some members of the crew. Apparently, he'd boarded the ship and then left it again at some point. I guess it was all a way for him to throw suspicion away from where he was really going."

"I got back on the pilot boat with Sam. He seemed to be really worried about whether or not they'd get to keep the money. Just before we docked again my phone rang. I answered it and he said two words, "Goodbye Kerri."

"Until today I never heard from him or saw him again. As my father has told you, I squandered a lot of my money on PI's trying to find you. I also tried to keep my agency afloat but as Dana said, my agency wouldn't have survived without the infusions of money you put into it. With no commercially successful artists, I couldn't keep it going. And when I realized that no more of your money would be coming in, I was forced to shut it down."

"After a while, I thought about selling some of the paintings that you hadn't sold. I couldn't get into Chloe's studio. She was working on something and didn't want to be disturbed. I finally found out that you'd cleaned out the studio and Dana had the rights to everything you'd left. I tried to go to court to get control of your assets as your spouse, but you'd left signed contracts saying who got what in your absence. "

"One of my lawyers was a very smart man. He told me that the thing I should do was to divorce you. Then I'd get half of the marital assets. Unfortunately your lawyer was smarter. You'd inventoried all of your paintings and everything else. You'd given the paintings to Dana as a gift. So they couldn't be touched. You'd also left me half of our cash at the time you left. Any court would have given me only half of the assets anyway so you were clear."

"Dana and I had never gotten along. When I asked her about possibly giving me a loan, she refused. She seemed to blame me for you leaving. I hadn't seen her in person in over a year. I walked into her office and she had a baby. I'm not the maternal type, but I saw your eyes, Legs. I knew exactly who Aria was. After that, even though Dana didn't give me the loan, we became friends after a fashion. I knew that sooner or later you'd find out about Aria and you'd come to see her."

"The thing that surprises me still is that Dana never told you about Aria. She never dated anyone after you left. She just ran her agency and took care of your daughter. Today I learned that you and she spoke often on the phone and she never told you about Aria."

"I didn't find out why she hadn't until she was dying in the hospital. It was love, Legs. She wanted you to find yourself again and either come back to her of your own free will, or call for her to come and be with you. She never wanted to chain you down or force you to be a part of something against your will. I guess that would have been too much like what I did."

"She only thought about you, Legs. She just wanted you to be happy. Me on the other hand, I went nuts. I couldn't adjust to living without you. At first I fell into a bottle and after that I fell into a depression. I was always on the edge of depression anyway. But now that I've found, you things will be better."

"Now that you've found me, I'll just have to leave again," I said. "It's a shame really. I'd begun to really love this place and my life here. I love the people and my job."

"You love teaching art to kids?" asked Kerri. "Okay, we'll live here."

"No Kerri," I snapped. "WE can't live anywhere. It took me a long time to find this place and even more to find myself. After I quit the art world, I spent six or seven months living at Amanda's house in France. I bummed around Europe for a while. I loved the culture and the people. They are so more into living life than we are here. It just seems that here everything is about the lifelong quest for stacking dollars. So few people actually like what they do for a living. I really did. But I'll find another life and another job. But I am keeping my daughter, Kerri."

"Legs, why can't we try again?" she asked me. "I have never stopped loving you. And I know that you still feel something for me. And even those dreams you had told you that we belonged together. Why can't you stop being stubborn and just go with it? We were meant to be together."

"I looked at her and shook my head. Kerri you missed the meaning of my dreams, just like I did," I said. "You thought the dreams meant that I didn't have to fight because I already had what I was looking for. That wasn't it."

"In the first dream, I tried to save you by attacking as hard as I could and I failed. In the second one, I tried stealth and just going with the flow and I failed. In the third one, I sacrificed myself to try to save you and I failed. The thing the dreams were trying to tell me was that there was no way for me to save you. No matter what I tried I couldn't do it, because in the end, I'd be fighting you. The only way to win was just to walk away and save myself and my sanity. I loved you Kerri, with everything I had. But if you wanted to go around fucking a bunch of freeloaders, you could. There was no way for me to stop you. And finding out that you were doing it hurt me worse than I ever thought I could be hurt. Every time I see you, I'll imagine you fucking some guy who used to be an artist, who works at Wendy's now."

"One of the most important things about us was the fact that it was always just us. It was kind of magical and otherworldly. Once you brought other people into it the magic was gone. We became like every other couple out there. You know how you were always searching for something that was missing in you? That was how our relationship felt after I found out what you were doing. It felt like something was missing that we couldn't get back."

"And what you think you see in me isn't what you think it is. You're not seeing me still in love with you, Kerri. You're just seeing the dying embers of what we used to be. You coming here is a good thing though. It allowed me to see that things still aren't the way I thought they were. I always thought that I'd never fall in love again or even want to. I always swore that there would never be anyone else for me Kerri. Now I can see that I've been holding on to those dying embers for too long. It really is time for me to move forward and live my life."

"I crossed the oceans in my mind to find the strength to say goodbye to you Kerri. But I never actually said it face to face. I did say goodbye over the phone, but that was a cowardly and really cheap way to do it. After all we went through together you deserved to have it like this." I stood up and walked over to her. I picked her up and hugged her gently.

"Goodbye, Kerri," I said smiling. "Enjoy the rest of your life. Find someone new."

"Legolas," she said sadly, with big tears falling down her cheeks.

"Who?" I asked. "My name is Larry. Larry Martin. I'm an art teacher."

Dan picked up Kerri and started to pull her away from my house. Before they got to the door, I stopped them. "When Dana died, control of my art and my assets returned to me. I'll file for a divorce tomorrow just in case I decide to get married again. I'll give you some money Kerri, but don't waste it this time because there won't be any more coming."

As they drove away, I felt better. Anna came up behind me. She wrapped both of her hands around my waist. "Are you really staying here?" she asked.

"Yep, I have to stop running at some point," I said.

"So did you mean what you told her about maybe getting married again?" she asked.

"Yep," I said. "I have a daughter to raise. She'll need a female role model and maybe some brothers and sisters."

"Did you have anyone in mind?" she asked.

"Well..." I said. "I was thinking that Melissa Crane's mom is really unhappy with her marriage."

"Unh uh," she said. "Mrs. Crane doesn't have any tits. Remember what you liked about Dana."

"Oh yeah," I said. "I'll have to find someone. But it would have to be someone who loves me. I couldn't marry someone just because they had tits. Do you know anyone like that?"

"Well, I might be interested," she said, opening her blouse. "But before you could ask me, you'd have to do something for me."

"What's that?" I asked, following her down the hall.

"I want a painting," she said, pulling her pants down and kicking them off.

"I've got a few left," I said. "You can have any one of them that you want."

"Nope," she smiled. "I want a new one. I want a special one. Remember that painting you did of Kerri where you captured the expression on her face right after you'd made love to her? I want one like that."

"But we'd have to..." I began.

"Exactly," she said, reaching for my zipper and pulling me down onto my bed.

Anna and I did get married and we had two other kids, a boy and a girl besides Aria. Anna always treated Aria as her own daughter. The two of them are especially close. Over the years, we saw Kerri several times before she died at only forty. She was never able to get over our marriage ending. Though I'm not happy about her passing, I'm glad that she is at peace finally. Hers was a troubled soul throughout her life. Maybe in the hereafter she's found those missing pieces. One odd thing happened a few years after the rest of our kids were born. Anna and I took our kids to New York to see the museums and see some of my artwork. After we left the last museum we stopped off at a Wendy's. The guy making the fries there looked really familiar to me. As he glared at me, I was sure it was Denny.

I'm sure that he'll discover some way to combine making fries and art though and set the art world on fire. Just give him time.

The end.