Dust to Dust: A Broken Fairy Tale (10 page)

“Jake, please stop. I can’t. I love Holden. I like you, but I can’t hurt Holden.” I forced a smile through my fear.

Jake grunted rather than responded. He took both my hands in one of his large muscular hands, and threw me crashing down onto the stones below. My head was aching from the sheer force of the impact of my body hitting the jagged rocks. There was never a time that I hated the stones that decorated the yards of Mantoloking more than when they stabbed me in my back that night. Jake came down on top of me with a sinister look, and it was then that I knew I was not going to be able to stop him from doing what he wanted with me. My heart was in my throat and I could feel the bile start to rise from my stomach when I saw that Jake was now holding a knife in his other hand.

“If you scream, I will kill you. If you tell anyone, I will kill Holden, your family, and then you.”

His eyes were dark and showed no emotion. They were not the bright blue eyes I was used to seeing on him. My head was pounding and my heart was racing, making it difficult to process the gravity of what was happening. I instantly felt sober while I tried to kick him and pull my hands away.

He pressed the tip of the knife to my throat, breaking the skin, instantly stilling me. The pure evil I saw in Jake that night was unmistakable. There were several times during his painful attack when I let out an agonizing cry, unable to mask the pain of him doing those unimaginable things. To quiet me, he pressed the knife, slicing into my skin at the inside of my thigh, my breast, my neck, leaving small gashes….every time he cut me, I thought he was going to kill me.

“Holden,” I whispered as a plea. For what I didn’t know…to be saved, to be forgiven.

“Holden will never love you after I’m done with you, Camryn,” Jake slithered in my ear while he violently stole my innocence.

He left me lying there, half naked, bleeding, not caring who saw me. I stumbled home, replaying his words in my head, shaking violently from the terror of what had just happened to me.

After that night I did as Jake instructed: I didn’t tell anyone. I believed every word that he said to me. There was no doubt in my mind that Jake would kill me if given the chance. From that day on, I tormented in my pain alone, afraid to think about it, so I took the memories and pushed them into the black hole of my mind. Every day since, I’ve tried to pretend it didn’t happen. I closed off my heart, too afraid to let people in and see the real me. But by doing that, I’ve seemed to only push out every person in my life who I love. I was broken.

N
ovember 2, 2012

Devastated. There is no other word I can think of to describe how I feel when I’m finally able to enter Mantoloking with Dave, Jess, and Holden. My parents went up to my apartment in the city with Ellie and Sophie after the storm passed and they realized that they would not be able to go back home for a while. The restaurant has been completely destroyed by the storm, along with over fifty other homes and businesses in our town. There is literally not one home in our town that didn’t sustain some damage. The ocean has made a new inlet to Barnegat Bay, virtually demolishing everything in its path. The damage from the sea is just staggering to see in person. I never in all my dreams thought that my little town could experience this type of devastation from a storm. Mother Nature has reaped her fury, and the results are overwhelming. All of us have tears in our eyes as we silently survey the unrecognizable town surrounding us. There is no doubt in my mind that we have lost everything as we make our way down the bay. Our homes, the restaurant, our entire town is decimated. It is like a war zone. Holden, Dave, Jess, and I can only stand there, holding onto one another and taking in our surroundings. We know most every person in town, and what we are now witnessing is the total destruction of their livelihood.

I hide my head against Dave’s chest when he steers the boat up the lagoon to our homes, as if looking will change the fact that there may be nothing left to see. Jess is on the other side of him, clutching my hands when she begins crying. I grip his shirt even more tightly, too afraid to look at what Jess is reacting to.

“They’re standing. How is it possible? Look, Cam.” She is pulling at the back of my jacket, forcing me to look up before I can make sense of what she has just said.

Holden is standing in front of me with his hands twisting through his hair. “Well, I’ll be damned. The entire street is still standing.”

We are staring dumbfounded at our lagoon. Dave pulls up to where my family dock had once stood, but is now nowhere in sight. There is some pretty bad damage to the shingles on the roof and side of the house, but shockingly it looks like the bulkhead stood up through the storm.
It’s a miracle.

Holden pulls himself up to his dock, followed closely behind by Dave. “I’m going to run over and check out our house. Holden, you check your place then head over to the Dades’.” Dave turns and faces Jess and me, giving us his best “Officer Dave” expression. “You girls stay put. And I mean it, Jess. I shouldn’t have even taken you out here with me today, so don’t screw it all up and go exploring. It’s still dangerous out here.” Dave gives us another
you better listen to me, I’m a police officer
look and hops over some debris towards his house.

Jess and I stand there for a moment and hug each other, too relieved to honestly do anything but be thankful that everything isn’t lost. Holden and Dave walk around the homes, climbing over debris, taking pictures of the property, and securing back up the houses the best they can right now. Dark clouds begin to blow in swiftly from the east, prompting the guys to head back to the boat and to get us all back to the shelter. The area is still extremely vulnerable and another storm is heading our way.

I snap a few more pictures before we take off, wanting to show the world this little piece of Mantoloking that isn’t destroyed. I have more than enough pictures and information about the storm for my article and only hope it will help bring attention to the long road we all have ahead. Too often the victims of acts of nature like this are forgotten after a week and a new hot story emerges. I smile to myself, thinking about the strong will and determination the people of New Jersey have, knowing if there is ever a place that can get through a tragedy like this, it’s Jersey.

After a long, draining day of surveying the damage, Holden and I decide to take the train back into the city, not wanting to deal with the roads. Jess and Dave are going back to Cherry Hill and we all need to start getting back to our lives.

“Why haven’t we ever done this before?” Holden asks, snuggling in to the seat next to me.

“Done what?” I ask while scanning the train schedule to check what our next stop is.

“Gone to the city together? We only see each other here, never in the city. Isn’t that weird?” He hands me a bottle of water and turns in his seat, facing me.

“Um, not really. We have our separate lives. Ellie and Sophie have a lot going on, and I’ve been busy with my new job. I don’t see when we would’ve even had the time.” I take a drink from my water, not able to imagine what it would be like to have Holden in the city with me. Our life together has always only ever been in Mantoloking.

He tips my chin up so that I am looking at him. He always does that when he thinks I’m not listening to him. “Would you
want
to see me in the city? Who knows how long it will be until we can get back to Mantoloking. I will miss our weekend get-togethers.” He smiles shyly.

I haven’t really thought much about it before now, but Holden and I have spent every weekend together since the summer. If we aren’t going to be heading down to the shore every weekend, it only makes sense to hang out up here every once in a while. I’ve gotten used to having Holden and Jess back in my life consistently again, and don’t want to lose that.

“Yeah, totally. I can invite Jess and Dave up, too. It will be fun. Just give me a ring when you want me to set it up.” I stretch out across the seat, laying my legs on top of Holden’s, quietly praying that he’ll take the hint and start massaging them.
Maybe if I think about it really hard, he’ll read my mind
. I closed my eyes and concentrate.
Massage my feet, massage my feet, massage my…

“Camryn, are you listening to me?” he asks in a frustrated tone as he begins massaging my calf.
It worked!

“Yeah, I told you I’ll get—”

Holden smacks my leg, and then his voice turns serious and sultry. “After that. I asked if
you
would
want
to get together with
me
when we get back to the city.” He squeezes my calf to accentuate his words, and then goes back to massaging my legs, making my body feel things it hasn’t for a long time.

Hell yeah.
Wait. No. What am I thinking? I am still married. I don’t even want a divorce. Once Holden sees what my life is really like, the life of a single mother, he will run for the hills. He has no obligations, nothing tying him down. And he’s said it many times before: we are both just too broken to be together. I want things to stay the same between us. Safe. Platonic. Predictable.

I take his hand in mine. “Of course I want to see you when we’re in the city. We can take the girls somewhere. They will miss you too.” I squeeze his hand tightly. “I don’t want anything to change between us.” I hope he understands that I want to keep him as my friend and nothing more. I don’t think my heart can take losing him again.

“I understand,” he answers simply. He lightly kisses my hand and continues rubbing my legs, and I fall asleep to the rumbling of the tracks below.

I am going to make this Thanksgiving like one of my girls’ dreams. We are used to being in Mantoloking with my family on Thanksgiving, but this year is going to be different for so many reasons. Thanksgiving and Christmas have always been one of the few times of the year that I actually went down to my parents’ place before Marcus left me. With all of the changes we have had to make to our life this past year, I want them to find joy in yet another change to their lives. I don’t want different to mean something bad to them. There has been so much change in such a short period of time for my little girls, that I want to use times like these to show them how good change can be, and I want today to be the perfect example for that.

Since residents are still not allowed to move back into their homes in Mantoloking, Jess and I decided to throw a big Thanksgiving party at my parents’ new property for Cutter Lane in Sea Girt. It’s going to be a long time before the original Cutter Lane will be up and running again, and my dad had always planned on branching out, but the storm forced him to actually make the leap to finally buying this property. Hurricane Sandy left him with not much of a choice since the old restaurant was virtually demolished and needs to be rebuilt. Luckily this new location for Cutter Lane is also the perfect venue to host a large group, so we decided to invite some of our closest friends from Mantoloking who are also celebrating the holiday away from their home to celebrate new beginnings with us.

The one glitch in my pursuit of consistency is that Marcus has decided that it will be best if we spend today apart, instead of together with the girls. I tried to persuade him to use this holiday to show them that we are still a united team, but he thinks it isn’t a good idea and he doesn’t want to give them false hope.
Me either, I guess.
So Marcus has the girls this morning and will drop them off on his way to his parents’ house later today. Just the thought of him “dropping” the girls off and going back to the city kills me inside, knowing that this will be our first holiday as the shattered family we are.

After the storm, it became clearer to me that no matter how much I didn’t want it to happen, my marriage is irrefutably broken. He has made no effort to try to rebuild our relationship or even give me a chance to try to make things better between us. Deep down, I know that he has pulled away so much because there is someone else in his life. Someone who isn’t broken like me. I keep trying to tell myself it’s nothing serious, but I know it is. Marcus does nothing unless he is certain. He wouldn’t have left me if it wasn’t something he was sure about, and he wouldn’t be dating another woman if he wasn’t sure about her either.