Savage (Daughters of the Jaguar) (25 page)

I was never going to love gross anatomy, which I found to be the most challenging medical school class known to humankind, whether it was the typical one-hour lecture or the four hours in lab. Cadavers and the smell of formaldehyde just wasn't my thing. As I spoke to others, I found several like-minded students who didn't enjoy it so much either, so I figured that maybe it wasn't me. Maybe I wasn't in a wrong place, after all. Maybe I did have it in me to become a physician. It was pretty normal to have ups and downs, I was told by a couple of second-year students that I ran into during lunch one day.

"Medical school is a place in which you will grow as a person and as a professional," they said. "You will be challenged to study more than you thought possible and pick yourself up when you fall down.  The massive amounts of knowledge you need to learn in a short period of time makes medical school one of the most challenging professional schools out there. It is really like a roller coaster, so feeling down or losing interest isn't uncommon at all."
 

The first days went smoothly and to my surprise so did the entire first week. After only one day I realized that I had a huge advantage. The first three years I had spent at the university in Odense at the unit for Medical Education proved to be very valuable. I was ahead in most of the classes and I had no problem catching up even if I had been away for the first month. Most of what they taught us the first couple of months I had already been through, and with my photographic memory I knew the answers to it all. It was a big relief for me that the first couple of months were that easy, and in that way I felt encouraged, I no longer felt I had made a wrong decision to come here, and it gave me time to try and forget about Aiyana. Plus I had to get used to studying and being lectured in a foreign language, so it was a big help for me that I didn't have to struggle with the academics.

Every day I would leave early in the morning to be in Jacksonville at nine. I wouldn't return until dinnertime, which was always ready on the kitchen counter wrapped for the microwave ready for each person in the house to eat whenever they had the time for it. I would park the car in the underground parking tunnel at the Kirk's house. In that way I didn't have to as much as look in the direction of Aiyana's house. I would simply ignore the fact that it existed in my attempt to try and ignore the fact that she had existed as well. I buried myself in my medical books and never left the house unless it was to go wind surfing or swimming in the pool. If I heard laughter from Aiyana's yard, I would close the window, if I saw tea cups floating over the fence I would go inside and close the door. I refused myself the right to even think about her or utter her name. She simply ceased to exist to me. I even gave up everything that had to do with her or in any way reminded me of her or the first month of me being in Florida. The music, the newspaper, even the jaguar. I decided to ignore the visions and images that were constantly flickering in my head and stopped thinking of them as anything of importance. I decided it was all baloney.

My new strategy worked like a charm. The images in my head became fewer and less urgent. I started dating a few girls and left them broken hearted without even blinking my eyes. It was brutal, I know, but it was my way of getting back at Aiyana. My way of restoring myself. I was back in control of myself and my emotions and I was determined to never let go of it again.

Heather and I picked up our friendship and became even closer as soon as she realized I was finally done with the girl next door. We would hang out together at the pool or at the dock and watch the sun go down every evening talking about our day, what we had done, who we had been with, who had made an idiot of himself in class and so on. I picked up my wind surfing again and we started doing tricks together with her jumping on my shoulders and doing cheerleading tricks while I was surfing. It became quite a spectacle that her mother and Maria enjoyed to watch. 

I came to enjoy Heather's company a lot and regretted my resentment towards her. I still saw her as a spoiled rich girl, but she never pretended to be anything else. She was determined to have her way in everything and maybe her way wasn't so bad after all. Slowly I realized that she had only been hard on me to help me make the right choices. She told me she was afraid I was going to throw my whole life away because of some crush.

"I was determined to never let that happen to you," she said one day. "I care too much about you to just watch you ruin yourself while I do nothing. I knew those people were trouble and that they would somehow hurt you. I am glad you didn't let them drag you further into their messy lives. I am glad you put an end to it before it was too late."

Somehow she had convinced herself that I was the one who had stopped it after she had told me to and threatened to tell her parents. That I had somehow chosen to listen to her advice instead of my own heart.

I let her believe that. 

 Heather even convinced Jim to forgive me, and since he had a huge soft spot for Heather, he did as she told him. He started hanging out with us on the weekends, took us fishing and beer-drinking or we played tennis at his father's club. Some weekends we drove up north and went hiking on trails and caught big snakes that he skinned and put up on his wall in his parents’ house. In many ways Jim was the perfect guy to help me forget. He was the perfect company for me in those days trying to move on. He kept me busy and could always come up with something exciting for the three of us to do. Every now and then I caught him glancing in Heather's direction. I recognized that look and I understood why he had an urge to keep busy as well. Somehow in the middle of all this we became friends. Not the kind of friends that bonded and told each other everything, but more friends with a bond and a sort of subtle understanding of each other's needs. We could just hang out and not have to explain ourselves to each other. We could walk in the water for hours with our fishing poles and not utter a word and it would be our happiest moment. We would go out boating for hours on his father's yacht and just drink beer and listen to Michael Jackson angrily telling someone to "Beat it" or singing about "The lady in my life". Even on days when Heather couldn't go with us because she had to study or wanted to be with Danielle and Regina, Jim and I would still hang out together. Sometimes we’d take Jim's jeep cross country through the forest and wetland on a wild ride while screaming our lungs out. Screaming our repressed anger out.

It is quite mesmerizing come to think of it, that we, even with our many differences, somehow found a cohesion, an alliance if you will. We found we had something in common, something very simple yet unique; we enjoyed each other's company. It all came down to avoiding having to think or talk about what was eating us. Keeping ourselves so busy that we never had time for it. Avoiding asking questions, avoiding being alone with our thoughts. I grew to like and care for Jim. Unlike any friendship I have ever been in even since then, I never had to be accountable for anything, I never had to explain why I was sad and sometimes stared empty into thin air for hours almost without blinking. Jim knew something was going on with me, but he never asked about it. I appreciated that about him. He was waiting for me to be ready. And I never asked about his love for Heather, either. I knew he appreciated that as well. We didn't have to tell one another. We didn't have to speak at all.

We never mentioned the jaguar again until three months later.

Chapter 30

It happened on a Saturday afternoon. We had taken Dr. Kirk's boat out to go spearfishing in the Atlantic Ocean. It was our latest new hobby that I enjoyed immensely. It
 
is really an ancient method of fishing
 
that has been used throughout the world for millennia. Early civilizations were familiar with the custom of spearing fish from rivers and streams using sharpened sticks. Modern spearfishing makes use of elastic-powered spear guns
 
and slings, or compressed gas pneumatic-powered spear guns, to strike the hunted fish. Basically, we would just put on our SCUBA diving equipment and go hunting under the surface of the ocean. It was a lot of fun. And as it turned out I was actually very good at it. Don't ask me why. I guess at that time and point in my life I just liked to spear things and kill the fish. I don't think you need a psychologist to explain why I liked it so much. I was angry and this was a way for me to get some of that anger out. Plus, it was a lot more challenging than sitting on top of the boat and waiting for the fish to come to you. In this way I felt like I had the power over life and death. I would choose the fish and I would decide when it was going to die.

Heather wasn't into spearfishing in the deep sea, so on that particular Saturday she had decided to go shopping with her girlfriends instead. It was just Jim and I and that suited us just fine. For hours we searched the ocean for the big catch communicating only by gestures. I had set my heart on finally catching a Blue Marlin. It is a very recognizable fish with its elongated body, spear-like snout, and a long rigid dorsal fin, which extends forward to form a crest. But at the same time, the Blue Marlin is an incredibly fast swimmer, reaching speeds of about sixty-eight miles per hour. And they are big. The Atlantic Blue Marlin can reach almost twenty feet in length and eighteen hundred pounds in weight. Needless to say it was difficult to catch, but if you did it made a great trophy. They say that spear fishers all have that one fish that they dream of, that one fish that is going to define them as fishermen. I don't know if that is true, but if it is, the Blue Marlin had to be mine.

We had searched the waters for a couple of hours and almost given up when Jim finally spotted one not far from us. It was beautiful, the biggest of the kind I had ever seen and even the biggest Jim had ever seen, he later told me. But it was far away. We had to go farther away from where the boat was anchored than planned, but I was willing to take the chance to get my long-awaited catch. We both were. Without a sound we swam closer holding our spear guns in front of us ready to shoot if either of us got the chance. Jim stayed a few feet behind me since he knew this was my catch. It was an unspoken agreement between us, since I had wanted this for so long and since Jim already had several of Blue Marlins hanging on the walls of his father's library. But even if it was my kill, Jim was ready to take it for me if I should miss or fail my chance somehow. It wasn't likely going to happen since I had improved my aim and ability to pull the trigger at the right time and place tremendously since we had hunted together in the swamps. Jim had taught me everything; he had trained me using skeet-shooting and later by taking me deer-hunting and eventually he had made a real hunter out of me, as he put it himself. I never froze again, and I certainly never missed a shot. To me, killing animals had somehow become my way of getting some of the steam out, letting some of my anger out, and even if it was against everything I used to be and believe, it helped me. I no longer felt like I was slowly dying inside.

The Blue Marlin didn't see us until we were within shooting range. I lifted the spear-gun slowly to not scare it away and aimed. But as I did, it spotted me and started swimming away from us, really fast. I looked back at Jim who signaled that we should try to follow it. So we did, even  though we knew it was way too fast for us.

The problem with spear-fishing is that you have only one shot, only one chance to kill. You need to know exactly where the heart is. You have to shoot it directly in the heart to kill it instantly. Normally the technique is to wait for the fish to come to you and then attack, but Jim and I had our hearts set on this beautiful enormous specimen that we both knew would make any of our fishing colleagues jealous to the bone so we did what you're not supposed to do. We followed it and were led far away from our boat. Deep into the dark ocean. And just as we thought it didn't know we were following it, it suddenly started swimming in circles around us extremely fast so we couldn't aim on it. Then it swam into a huge crowd of smaller fish where it disappeared for a while before I spotted it again still trying to escape my aim by moving really fast. This was one clever bastard, I remember thinking. I didn't understand at first why it didn't just out swim us. Then I realized that it was merely being territorial. Suddenly it began swimming towards us and then passed us very close and extremely fast. It did so five times and that was when I realized we had stepped right into its food source and it was merely protecting it. It was attacking us with its snout. We had to be careful and I had to be extremely precise when I fired my one shot. If I missed it could end up killing us instead.

On the sixth pass I lifted my gun and aimed right at it. It was like everything went quiet around me. Like there was no other fish, no Jim, no boats. Nothing but this enormous fish in the water coming towards me with huge speed. It was like an ancient survival instinct had arisen inside of me. It was either him or me. Man against nature. My heart was pounding in my chest as the marlin came closer with its snout pointed directly at me like a knight's lance. I was breathing heavily as it came closer and closer. When I thought it was close enough I fired my gun. I was pulled backwards in the water when it went off. I stared at the spear as it darted through the water. I could only hope that my aim was right and that I had been close enough for it to reach. The spear came closer to the marlin and went right into the fish, straight through its body and killed it instantly. It kept swimming a few feet more before it finally stopped moving -not very far from where I was. I was hyperventilating and it took me several seconds to realize that it was actually dead, it was no longer moving towards me. I think it was when the red blood started to mix with the water. The relief was massive.