Jen's Legacy.

They climbed from the river up onto the large flat slab of rock above their little beach.

He tied one end of his rope snuggly around her waist, using her lifejacket as a cushion against the rope and to stop it chafing at her middle, then tied himself into it no more than twenty feet from her, coiling the remainder of the rope and putting it diagonally over his shoulder before he put his backpack on again, then took up the slack between them to keep them fairly close together.

She looked around, seeing the blaze of flowers opening up to the new day in the sunlight spreading slowly down the slope, reaching an open slope of boulders.

“I feel as though I know this place. I’ve seen it before somewhere." It suddenly came to her.

"In a painting! This rock too, at the edge of it.” She fumbled at her shirt to take out her phone, and snapped another photograph, changing her position to get it just right.

“We have it at home. The painter’s name was, ‘Josh’. He must have captured this very scene from about here.”

Royce stood there saying nothing, just watching her, looking at her, waiting for her to bring her mind back to where he needed them to be before they could leave. He’d had enough shocks for one day, but they just kept coming at him.

There was a question she ached to ask and decided that she should ask that too, before they set out.

“Royce?”

He was surprised to hear her use his name, and gratified that she didn’t seem prickly or defensive with him after his lapses of that morning and of the night before, and might want to ask him anything.

“Yes, Claire?” The more he used her name, the better he might see her as who she was, rather than mistaking her for another.

“Who is, Jen?”

She was fairly sure now, that Jen, whoever she was, wasn’t waiting for him up there on the rim.

He hadn’t expected that question.

She saw him close his eyes and stand there for a few moments without saying anything, swaying, as though she had just pushed him off balance. That seemed to happen to him a lot.

He spoke in a low voice. “She is my wife.” He corrected himself.

“She was…. She was, my wife.”

The way he'd responded suggested she was dead, rather than anything less final.

It was a painful memory for him, and she regretted asking.

“Jen.” He repeated the name and sighed heavily, but his mind was clear about everything now; no more confusion.

He waved his hand around.

“Jen, is everything around us here. Her memory is everywhere. She is why I am here, at this moment."

He sighed and closed his eyes. “We walked this canyon five years ago on our honeymoon.”

He opened his eyes to look at her, revealing the pain that question had caused him, and pointed to the rock slab they were standing on.

“Jen is also here.”

Claire saw initials carved onto the top of that sandstone slab. She hadn't noticed them before when she had walked over this same slab to go down the river the previous evening, looking for a way out.

They were the same initials in that rock in the painting. J H and R.H.

He explained the initials. “Jen Healey, and Royce Healey. Jen, and me.” She was truly sorry she’d asked now.

“I carved our initials here, five years ago. Jen brought me back to this place.”

He did not tell her that they had been married only a month. “We'd planned on walking this same course, this year, reliving those earlier memories, but she couldn’t.”

No. Jen was not here. This other Claire was, instead, but Jen was the one who had effectively brought him here to this very spot in time to rescue her from the river. She knew nothing about Jen, but she felt grateful to her while being pained by his obvious grief. He must have really loved her.

Claire felt beholden to this woman who had been the instrument of saving her life. Fate moved in mysterious ways to bring things together in such unexpected ways that could never be anticipated.

She felt that she owed Jen so much,

Claire took out her phone and quickly snapped a photograph of the rock they were standing on with those initials, and took other photographs around her, even of the message in the sand on the beach below them, and of him, standing there with his eyes closed again, wrestling with sudden emotions she had clumsily caused to surface for him.

She also had memories of her own of this place that she needed to preserve.

She put her phone away and touched him on the arm, feeling him flinch.

“I am sorry. I did not know.”

No wonder his mind had been thrown off track, feeling her beside him in that sleeping bag, and accepting her presence as a needed, but unsuspecting substitute as he closed his eyes and felt her body, her warmth, her presence, just as Jen had been for him.

When he had walked out of the river as naked as he had been, his mind had been thinking only of Jen. Claire had been unsure about him at that moment, not understanding, scared, not sure what to expect, not knowing. She shouldn’t have been scared. He would not have harmed her.

She began to understand now, knowing that she had nothing to fear from him. He was still living in two worlds. She had to make the transition for him, and with him, to bring him back into this one, the one where she resided, and the one where she wanted him to be.

She began to make her mind up about many things as he continued speaking.

“I hope I did not scare you too much, but I thought you were Jen, last night, which was why I asked… if I had…. And why I forgot where I was when I came out of the water as I did. It won’t happen again.”

She regretted raising such tender memories.

“Thank you for telling me, and you did not harm me in any way.”

He hoped he hadn’t, but it was difficult to separate dream from reality at times with this woman suddenly coming into his life and turning it upside down, but he couldn’t tell her that, or she may be even more concerned.

He was able to tell her more, opening up at last where he had been unable to before.

“She died in a plane crash three months ago, on the seventh of June… but I survived.” He would say nothing about the baby she had been carrying, or that they'd decided to call it, Claire.

It was all just coincidence. That’s all it was.

She’d seen the scars from that crash on his head and on his body.

“Why I lived, and she died, sitting next to me and holding my hand, I will never understand.”

He looked suddenly very sad and close to tears.

He’d called her, ‘Jen’, in his sleep last night, reliving that earlier memory, and in that same sleeping bag with Jen, as he’d held her close and had absent mindedly kissed her and touched her familiarly, aching to make love to her, but he hadn’t.

No wonder he'd been the way he had been as he’d come back to the fire and her, assuming that she was Jen, and letting her decide when they would make love. No doubt they had made love many times, but there must have been something in his subconscious, or something about her, that caused him not to go so far with her as he so clearly wanted to.

It explained so much.

She moved closer to him to hold his arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I shouldn’t have asked.”

He patted her hand, thanking her for understanding and for her comforting words. “You weren’t to know. So, if I don’t always hear you when you speak to me, or my attention is difficult to get… that will be why.”

He looked at her, with tears in his eyes.“You do not need to be afraid of me. I’m not entirely mad; only sometimes”—as when he’d leapt down the cliffs above them, heedless of his own safety; being driven to get down as quickly as he could.

No wonder he hadn’t wanted to stay here, but had to keep moving. If he was in one place for too long, he would burn up, and would go mad with impatience to be moving on, and to continue tracing out their course of five years earlier.

His head fell, and she saw a tear escape as he sighed, but she could do nothing for him except to watch what she said, and try not to be too obvious. Grief was a very personal thing.

“Royce?” She pulled him closer to her, electrifying him for a moment. Was she about to ask another painful question and revive other memories?

“Yes, Claire.”

“I’m truly sorry for asking.” Her heart went out to him. “We will go on together.”

She took a deep breath.

“My full name is Claire Jeannine Prescott.” She hoped, if she were more open with him, as he had been with her, it might help in some way.

He smiled weakly at her.

“Thank you, Claire, for trusting me with your name. For trusting me at a difficult time.”

She was trusting him with a hell of a lot more than her name or her virtue, but with her life and even her entire future. But she had no choice.

When she was reported missing, there would be no expense spared to find her, and whatever was needed of her father’s money would be thrown into the search. Yet here she was, alive for almost the first time in her life and with a goal of her own, newly formulated.

Whoever came across that message scrawled in the sand, they would recognize what it meant; that she had made it to the bank and had been rescued.

The search would then change again, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to be found too soon. Not now. She should return to that strip of sand and erase it.

She was alive, and safe, with a protector of her own who needed her even as much as she needed him, though he did not know that yet.

As he would protect her, so would she, do what she could for him, though she suspected that her being with him would be all that he would need to sidetrack him from those darker emotions that would sweep over him. She would make sure of that.

She, would rescue him, no matter what it took. Even if her virtue had to be the first casualty of this one-sided war.