Harlan Coben - Gone for Good

My XXL Amherst College sweatshirt lay over a chair in the bedroom. I picked it up, feeling a pang in my chest. We spent homecoming weekend at my alma mater last fall. There's a hill on Amherst 's campus, a steep slope that starts a-high on a classic New England quad and slides toward a vast expanse of athletic fields. Most students, in a fit of originality, call this hill "the Hill."

Late one night Sheila and I walked the campus, hand in hand. We lay on the Hill's soft grass, stared at the pure fall sky, and talked for hours. I remember thinking that I had never known such a sense of peace, of calm and comfort and, yes, joy. Still on our backs, Sheila put her palm on my stomach and then, eyes on the stars, she slipped her hand under the waistband of my pants. I turned just a little and watched her face. When her fingers hit, uh, pay dirt, I saw her wicked grin.

"That's giving it the old college try," she'd said.

And, okay, maybe I was turned on as all get-out, but it was at that very moment, on that hill, her hand in my pants, when I first realized, really realized with an almost supernatural certainty, that she was the one, that we would always be together, that the shadow of my first love, my only love before Sheila, the one that haunted me and drove away the others, had finally been banished.

I looked at the sweatshirt and for a moment, I could smell the honeysuckle and foliage all over again. I pressed it against me and wondered for the umpteenth time since I'd spoken to Pistillo: Was it all a lie?

No.

You don't fake that. Squares might be right about people's capacity to do violence. But you can't fake a connection like ours.

The note was still on the counter.

Love you always. S.

I had to believe that. I owed Sheila that much. Her past was her past. I had no claim to it. Whatever had happened, Sheila must have had her reasons. She loved me. I knew that. My task now was to find her, to help her, to figure a way back to… I don't know… us.

I would not doubt her.

I checked the drawers. Sheila had one bank account and one credit card at least, that I knew of. But there were no papers anywhere no old statements, no receipts, no bankbooks, nothing. They'd all been thrown away I guess.

The computer screen saver, the ever-popular bouncing lines, disappeared when I moved the mouse. I signed on, switched over to Sheila's screen name, clicked Old Mail. Nothing. Not one. Odd. Sheila didn't use the Net often very rarely in fact but to not have one old email?

I clicked Filing Cabinet. Empty too. I checked under Bookmarked Web sites. More nothing. I checked the history. Nada. I sat back and stared at the screen. A thought floated to the surface. I considered it for a moment, wondering if such an act would be a betrayal. No matter. Squares had been right about looking back in order to figure out where to go next. And he was right that I might not like what I find.

I logged on to switchboard. com a massive online telephone directory. Under Name I typed Rogers. The state was Idaho. The city was Mason. I knew that from the form she'd filled out when she volunteered at Covenant House.

There was only one listing. On a slip of scrap paper, I jotted down the phone number. Yes, I was going to call Sheila's parents. If we were going to go back, we might as well go all the way.

Before I could reach for the receiver, the phone rang. I picked it up, and my sister, Melissa, said, "What are you doing?"

I thought about how to put it and settled for: "I have something of a situation here."

"Will," she said, and I could hear the older-sister tone, "we're mourning our mother here."

I closed my eyes.

"Dad's been asking about you. You have to come."

I looked around the stale, foreign apartment. No reason to hang here. And I thought about the picture still in my pocket the image of my brother on the mountain.

"I'm on my way," I said.

Melissa greeted me at the door and asked, "Where's Sheila?"

I mumbled something about a previous commitment and ducked inside.

We actually had a real-life non family visitor today an old friend of my father's named Lou Parley. I don't think they'd seen each other in ten years. Lou Parley and my father traded stories with too much gusto and from too long ago. Something about an old softball team, and I had a vague recollection of my father suiting up in a maroon uniform of heavy polyester knit, a Friendly's Ice Cream logo emblazoned across the chest. I could still hear the scrape of his cleats on the driveway, feel the weight of his hand on my shoulder. So long ago. He and Lou Parley laughed. I hadn't heard my father laugh like that in years. His eyes were wet and far away. My mother would sometimes go to the games too. I can see her sitting in the bleachers with her sleeveless shirt and tanned, toned arms.

I glanced out the window, still hoping Sheila might show up, that this could still all somehow be one big misunderstanding. Part of me a big part of me blocked. While my mother's death had long been expected Sunny's cancer, as was often the case, had been a slow, steady death march with a sudden downhill plunge at the end I was still too raw to accept all that was happening.

Sheila.

I had loved and lost once before. When it comes to affairs of the heart, I confess to a streak of dated thinking. I believe in a soul mate. We all have that first love. When mine left me, she blew a hole straight through my heart. For a long time, I thought I'd never recover. There were reasons for that. Our ending felt incomplete, for one. But no matter. After she dumped me at the end of the day, that's what she did I was convinced that I was doomed to either settle for someone… lesser… or be forever alone.

And then I met Sheila.

I thought about the way Sheila's green eyes bore into me. I thought about the silky feel of her red hair. I thought about how the initial physical attraction and it was immense, overwhelming had segued and spread to all corners of my being. I thought about her all the time. I had flutters in my stomach. I could feel my heart do a little two-step whenever I first laid eyes on that face. I'd be in the van with Squares and all of a sudden he'd punch my shoulder because my mind had floated away, floated to a place Squares jokingly called Sheila Land, leaving a dorky smile behind. I felt heady. We cuddled and watched old movies on video, stroking each other, teasing, seeing how long we could hold out, warm comfort and hot arousal doing battle until, well, that was why VCRs have a pause button.

We held hands. We took long walks. We sat in the park and whispered snide comments about strangers to each other. At parties, I'd love to stand on the other side of the room and look at her from afar, watch her walk and move and talk to others and then, when our eyes would meet, there'd be a jolt, a knowing glance, a lascivious smile.

Sheila once asked me to fill out some stupid survey she found in a magazine. One of the questions was: What is your lover's biggest weakness? I thought about it and wrote, "Often forgets her umbrella in restaurants." She loved that, though she pressed for more. I reminded her that she listened to boy bands and old ABBA records. She nodded solemnly and promised that she would try to change.

We talked about everything but the past. I see that a lot in my line of work. It didn't trouble me much. Now, in hindsight, I wondered, but back then it had added, I don't know, an air of mystery maybe. And more than that bear with me again it was as though there were no life before us. No love, no partners, no past, born the day we met.

Yeah, I know.

Melissa sat next to my father. I saw them both in profile. The resemblance was strong. I favored my mother. Melissa's husband, Ralph, circled the buffet table. He was middle-manager America, a man of shortsleeve dress shirts over wife-beater T's, a good oP boy with a firm handshake, shined shoes, slicked hair, limited intelligence. He never loosened his tie, not exactly uptight but comfortable only when things are in their proper place.