Bondi Beach (10 page)

Chapter 19

FEBRUARY 6

The following morning, we got up and dressed, grabbing some food from the cooler and eating before heading out for the day. Martin had brought a bag of macadamia nuts, and I pulled a few Granny Smith apples from our produce bag and put them into our daypacks. I’d only recently learned that Granny Smiths had been developed in Sydney back in the 1800s. I wished that I could thank their Australian cultivator, who’d been distantly responsible for many of the great apple pies I’d eaten over the course of my life.

I don’t know why I was still thinking of food as we pulled up to the
new visitor center, but I was. I’d enjoyed a lot of the Australian cuisine since I’d arrived and looked forward to walking off breakfast.

Martin
broke into my thoughts. Smiling, he asked, “Still hungry?”

This surprised me, and I turned to look at him. “No.” I hesitated. “How did you know I was thinking of food?”
He shrugged. We got out of the car and looked around. “This place is gorgeous.”

He nodded
. “Yeah. It really is.”

We
held hands as we walked across the parking lot and entered the visitor center. It was a spectacular place, and we could see out over the Jamison Valley below. The center provided a good history of the place, explaining that it was once inhabited by the Daruk, Gundungurra, Wiradjuri, and Dharwal people. The plight of Australia's aborigines was not unlike what happened to the Native Americans in the United States. European diseases, such as smallpox, wiped out large percentages of many native populations. People were forced off their land and, as in the United States, the federal government forbade the native peoples from speaking their own languages and following their own customs for many years.

After we left the nature center
, we took the Prince Henry Cliff Walk, a trail that followed the ridgeline and had most of the area’s major lookouts. The views of the Jamison Valley below were spectacular. We hiked about 3 1/2 hours before stopping for lunch.

I pulled out my
smartphone and took a candid photo of Martin at the Lady Carrington Lookout. He heard the click and insisted on taking my photo, too. I posted both of the pictures on Facebook. I’d been out of touch since my “bar fight” photo, and this was a way to reassure a few worried friends (“we haven’t heard from you,” “are you still alive?”) that I was, indeed, alright. Actually, better than alright.

There were some large boulders nearby, and we sat down
on two of them and pulled out our sandwiches. The light on my phone began to flash, and I picked it up to check for a message. A few Facebook comments had come in already, and I smiled.

“What is it?” Martin asked
.

You look great
. Who’s the guy?

Martin had made it a point
of introducing me to some of his friends, and none of mine even knew about him. I began to type
My boyfriend Martin
, but “boyfriend” seemed like such a trivial term. My significant other? My better half? My lover? Totally inappropriate. I typed
My Love, Martin
. Holy crap. I’d just hit Send. Comments began to come in immediately, and I turned off my phone without reading any of them.

Martin was watching me
. “I just introduced you as “my love” to my entire Facebook friends list,” I told him.

Smiling, he reached over and squeezed my hand
. “That took guts.”

“It’s the easiest way to let everyone know that I’m okay and that, well, I’m
really
okay. My friends know what it was like for years, and a few have been telling me that I should start dating. I just never had an interest.”

“I know what you mean
. When Melanie and I broke up, it was the same thing. Friends wanting to set me up with friends of their wives or girlfriends. One friend tried to set me up with his sister.” He took his eyes away from the view and looked over at me. “
That
would’ve been awkward.”

I grinned.
He eyed my phone for a moment, a wry smile crossing his lips. “Turn it back on.”

“Yeah?” I
laughed. “Why, are you curious about the comments?”

“Mm-hmm,” he said,
having just taken a bite from his sandwich.

I turned on the phone and skipped through the touchscreen
. “Okay, let’s see.
OMG!!!
,
Congratulations
,
I’m happy for you
,
Congrats!
,
Would love to meet him
,
He’s hot!
(Martin chuckled at that one),
When do we get to meet him?
,
Where are you???
, and on it went.

Martin smiled as
I typed,
Thanks for the good wishes. He lives in Australia, which is where I am now
.

One comment came back
right away.
O
h
.

I showed it to Martin
. He nodded, and I turned off my phone feeling a little deflated. How else would my friends respond? They didn’t even know how Martin and I had met or what we had been through together. They didn’t know how happy I was or how easy the relationship was. All they knew was what I already knew – that Martin and I lived on two different continents halfway around the world from one another and had only just met a few weeks before.

We finished our lunch and
began our hike back toward the campsite. The hike back up and out was wearing, and we were happy to return to camp by late afternoon. “We hiked nearly eight miles today,” he told me. Some of it had been strenuous, but we’d done well.

Given that the tent was already set up, there wasn’t much to do except wash up and make dinner
. Martin made the fire, and I pulled food out of the cooler. We kept it simple, only making a vegetable stew with bread that was easy to fix and clean up.

One of my favorite campfire
desserts had always been baked bananas with chocolate, and Martin was intrigued. I showed him how to make the lengthwise slit through the banana skin and into the banana, placing chocolate chips inside the banana slit and cooking the banana over the fire until it was soft.

He wasn’t disappointed.
“This is delicious.”

I
agreed and reached over to wipe a bit of chocolate from his lower lip. He smiled as I licked it off of my finger and shrugged.

After dinner, we washed
the dishes before going to bed discussing the Jenolan Caves tour that we would take the next morning. Once we made our plan for the day, I rolled over and put my head on Martin’s chest.

“Tell me something about yourself that I don’t know,” I
said quietly.

He
was unusually serious and took a moment to answer. “There is something that I need to tell you, but I’ll do it when we’re more awake.”

He
kissed my head, held me in his arms, and fell asleep. I lay awake for a long time wondering what it was.

Chapter 20

FEBRUARY 7

The next morning, I awoke to the sound of Martin’s voice. He was somewhere outside the tent talking on his cell phone.

“I’ll tell you, Bud, he tried to force himself on her…
. Yeah, he was friggin’ lying on top of her when I got there. He’s lucky I didn’t kill him…. You know how crazy he’s been…. Yeah. You can imagine…. Well, when I saw his car at the house, I knew something was wrong…. Yeah…. Oh, shit…. What’d he do that for? He’s completely lost his marbles…. I’m done with him…. If she wants to take him back, it’s their business.”

I stepped out of the tent and went to use the bathroom and wash up
. I returned several minutes later when Martin was rearranging his backpack.

“Good m
orning,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“No
. I don’t think so.” Remembering his end of the conversation, I asked, “Is everything okay?”

“Mike’s gone of
f and gotten himself thrown in jail. He’s begging his wife to take him back and telling her he’ll stop drinking.”

“Do you want to go see him?”

He shook his head. “Not unless he straightens up. I’m done with him. If he doesn’t like how things are, he’s going to have to fix them himself or get help from somebody else.”

*****

We had a beautiful day at the Jenolan Caves. In the morning, we did the self-guided tour of Nettle Cave. The tour was available in several languages, including Klingon, which had the two of us laughing the entire time. Afterward, we joined a tour group that visited other caves and saw beautiful rock formations and underground rivers. We had considered going on a ghost tour through the caves but decided to eat lunch at the Bistro and walk around the grounds, instead, before returning to our campsite and having an evening together by the fire.

That afternoon went by quickly as
we decided to do one more hike on the way back to our campsite. At Martin’s urging, we stopped at the area near Wentworth Falls. We hiked into the lush area below the falls and snapped some photos. Then, he took my hand, and we made our way into a rock shelter behind the falls. We could feel the spray on our skin, and it cooled us off quickly.

“Wow
. It’s gorgeous here,” I said. After a few minutes, we were covered with a fine mist from the waterfall and were beginning to feel cold. We hiked out of the shelter and returned to the campsite.

As evening arrived, we prepared a light supper
. Once we’d eaten dinner, we washed up and returned to sit together by the campfire. Martin told me about some of the history in the region as well as some of the local lore that he had learned when he was growing up.

“
You can’t visit Australia without knowing about Dreamtime,” he told me.

“What’s Dreamtime?”
I asked.

“Dreamtime was the time when
the spirits created the world. The Aborigines believe that the spirit lives forever. That it comes into the mother’s body from the place where she is when she first feels her baby move. When a child is born, it’s taught songs and stories about the specific place where it entered the womb. There are lots of stories about the Dreaming, the period when the world was created. Stories about how birds got their colors and so on.”

“It sounds beautiful.”

“It is.” He thought for a moment and smiled, glancing over at me.

“What?”

“There’s also something else you should know about. Since we’re camping – especially here in the Blue Mountains.”

“What’s that?”

“You need to know about the Yowie,” he smiled.

“What’s a
Yowie?” I was curious.

“You have
something like it in the States. Bigfoot.”

“
Really?” I laughed.

He nodded.
“Yowies have been around for a long time. Sightings go back at least a couple hundred years.”

“Have you ever seen one?”

“No. But some mates were camping near where we are, and they spotted one. Said it ran off in the woods when they shined their flashlight on it.”

“
And you believe them?” I asked, grinning.

“I do,” he nodded with the most serious look he could muster.

I smiled. “Do you have any other stories?”

H
e looked at me for a long moment, and his smile slowly faded until there was barely a trace of it. Gentle but serious, he reached out for my hand and held it, running a finger over it. He looked at our hands for a moment before returning his gaze to me. I furrowed my brows slightly as I watched him and began feeling nervous.

“Last night, I
said that I’d tell you something about me that you don’t know.” He looked back down and continued to stroke my hand. “When I was 15, I went surfing with Mike and Bud. It had been storming, and the waves were pretty high.” He looked up at me. “We got out in the water and thought we could handle it. Well, I was pretty new to surfing and got caught in a wave. It pulled me under, and I lost consciousness. Bud and Mike got me out of the water, and the lifeguard gave me CPR. After a few minutes, they brought me back. I was taken to the hospital and stayed overnight. I don’t know why, but I had a lot of really vivid dreams that night.” He paused, still looking at me.

“Go on,” I urged softly.

He shook his head. “I didn’t remember any of the dreams… except for one.” He was quiet. “You were in it.”

“What?”

He nodded slowly. “That day you were on Bondi, I had that déjà vu feeling. Have you ever had one?”

“Yeah,”
I said in a near whisper.

Martin spoke very quietly, still stroking my hand but watching my reaction closely.
“When I saw you lying on the ground, I realized that I’d seen you there before… in a dream. After I hit you at Bondi and you went to the hospital, I went home and found my old journal. It was all in there. I’d dreamed of looking down and seeing you on the beach – same clothes, you lying in the same position, everything. In my dream, I knew that I’d done something to hurt you. I wanted so badly to make you okay. In my dream, I didn’t know if you were going to live or die, but I knew I had to help you.”

“Why
did you have to help me?”

He hesitated.
“Because, in my dream, I already knew you.”

Struggling to understand, I asked,
“What do you mean you knew me?”

Martin looked down
and was quiet. Finally, he looked back up at me. “In my dream, the woman lying on the ground – you – were my wife.”

I could tell that he wasn’t sure if he should have told me or not
. After all, we’d only known one another for a few weeks. Much of our time together had been unusually intense, which had helped to create a sense of intimacy with one another. But this was unexpected to say the least.

I shook my head slowly.
“I don’t know what to say.”

Martin
ran his hand across the back of his neck and closed his eyes. “It was probably too soon. I shouldn’t have told you now.”

I
laid my hand on his thigh. “No, I’m glad you did. Can you tell me anything else about the dream?”

He hesitated
. “Hold on.” He got up and went into the tent, reemerging a moment later with an old tattered notebook. He sat down beside me and opened it somewhere near the middle, flipping through until he found the correct entry. The campfire intermittently illuminated the pages well enough to read them. The journal entry read:

Dreams and more crazy dreams
. I had lots of dreams last night but can only remember one. I hurt this woman. She had a cut above her eye and was lying on the sand at Bondi with her arms out from her sides. I couldn’t tell if she was dead or just out cold. Then, I knew she was still alive. If I didn’t help her, she might die. She had long brown hair, a purple swimsuit, white shorts, and a funny necklace with silver squares and purple pearls. I knew she was my wife. I don’t know how, but I just knew. It didn’t feel like a dream – it felt real. How weird is that?

It was one thing hearing the story from Martin but another traveling back into the tattered pages of an old journal and seeing it for myself
. Goosebumps covered my body, and I could feel the hair on my arms stand on end. “How did you know I was your wife? I mean, in your dream, had we gotten married before I was lying on the beach?”

“No, I don’t think so
. It was just one of those things that you know. You were my wife, and I had to help you.” Martin closed the book and set it on the ground beside him. He still was wondering if he should have waited to tell me.

I put my arm around him and rested my head on his shoulder
. “That dream made you confident about us, didn’t it?”

“Yeah.
” He nodded. “I mean, I knew that I could still blow it with you, but I felt – feel – like we’re supposed to be together. That’s why I came to see you in the hospital and why I took you home. Even without the dream, I still would have tried to help you. But with the dream, I knew I had to.”

It all started to make sense now – why he’d gone
to such lengths to help me. I’d thought it was simply out of kindness, but it had also been out of a sense of destiny? In a way, I wished that he’d told me sooner, but we’d only been together for a month. If I’d been in his place, I would have been nervous about sharing a dream like that, too. We were, after all, still getting to know one another.

“
Eva,” he started. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you this before. It just seemed like it was way too soon. I needed to know how you felt about us first.”

“No
,” I shook my head, still taking it in. “I understand why you didn’t. Part of me wishes that you had, but you haven’t known me that long, and you didn’t know how I’d respond.” Still thinking it through, I wasn’t sure what or how to think about it.

He turned to me and took my hands
in his, uncertain whether he should have shared his dream with me sooner or later or not at all. “You need to know that I’m not telling you this to pressure you in any way. Or trying to manipulate you. But if I hadn’t told you and you’d found out later, I was afraid you might think that I was hiding it from you. I actually wanted to tell you this weekend. That’s why I brought the journal with me. So, when you asked me that question last night, it seemed like it was time.” Shaking his head, he continued. “Eva, I feel like we’ve known each other before. At least, I’ve known you for a long time. When I met Melanie, I thought maybe the dream had been just that and that I should let it go. It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d married the wrong woman.”

I
sat with my elbows on my knees and hands clasped in front of me, quietly watching the fire. “You do have an uncanny sense of knowing what I’m thinking. And timing,” I said, recalling what I now privately referred to as “my trouble with Mike.” He didn’t say anything. “Do Mike and Bud know about this?” I asked softly.

“Yeah,” h
e chortled. “At the time, the guys just thought I was having weird dreams after being dead for a few minutes. But Bud remembered my dream a few hours after we saw you lying there at Bondi. By the time he called me that night to ask me about it, I’d already found my journal. I hadn’t read it since I wrote about that dream twenty-one years ago.

“What did he say,” I asked.

“Bud?”

I nodded.

“He said, ‘What do you s’pose it means?’

I squeezed his leg, and he looked distantly into the fire.
“I told him, ‘That I need to do whatever I can to help her.’”

The fire crackled, and we watched it for a moment.
When I turned to face Martin, he reached up to move some hair away from my cheek and tuck it behind my ear. “What I didn’t tell him was that I’d been hoping for years that you’d come here.” His eyes were moist, and he looked at me with a quiet intensity. “There were times when I wanted so badly to look for you, but I had no idea where to begin.” He looked down.

I reached over
to him and placed my hand against his cheek, turning his head back toward me. He couldn’t look at me. “Martin….”

I
got up, then, and sat down on his lap so that I faced him. He wrapped his arms around me and placed his head against my chest. “I love you,” I whispered. As I held him, he finally relaxed and let out a long breath, releasing a burden that he’d been carrying alone for twenty-one years.

After a few minutes
, he sat back enough to look into my eyes and gently placed his hands on both sides of my neck. Our lips met, and, as we kissed, I reached down and untucked his shirt from his pants and pulled it off over his head. We kissed for a long time as I ran my hands across his body. When we finally stood, he took my hand in his and led me into the tent and to our bed, zipping the door closed once we were inside.

H
e undressed me before taking off the rest of his clothes. Then, he scooped me up in his arms and laid me gently on the bed, which was covered with rose petals. “When did you…?” I began to ask.

“
Shh,” he smiled, kissing me so deeply and tenderly that I felt a tear roll down my face. He lay down and pulled me on top of him, and we made love. Afterward, I lay down beside him, and he slid his arm under my shoulders. I rolled over and put my head against his chest, and he covered my shoulders with a blanket.