PART 3 — THE PORCH
I drove to Altoona that week and sat in Paul Beckers church office, and he told me everything, finally.
The night of the accident, Paul really had seen Marks car go into the river. He pulled a drowning man out onto the bank with his own hands. But Mark came out of that water with a terrible head injury. He did not know his name. He did not know he had a wife and a little girl. The police never found the car, and in the chaos they never found Paul again either, because Paul had taken the half-drowned stranger straight to a hospital two counties away.
Mark lived for years not knowing who he was. He pawned the only thing he had on him, a gold Hamilton watch, just to eat. Paul, a young pastor then, took him in and helped him build a quiet life while his mind slowly healed.
I had buried an empty casket for a husband who was alive the whole time, a few hours away, a stranger even to himself.
The memories had only come back to Mark in pieces this past year. When they did, he was so ashamed of the nine lost years, so afraid of what we would think, that he could not bring himself to knock on our door. So when he saw Ashley at that dinner and knew his own daughter, he lost his nerve and only asked her not to tell me.
But Ashley told me. Of course she did. And I went and found the man I had mourned.
It was not the reunion from a movie. He was changed, and so was I, and nine years is a canyon. But he knew my face, and he wept, and he asked if it was too late. I told him it was not. We are getting to know each other again, slowly, like the strangers the river made us. But Ashley has her father back, and the watch I gave him on our wedding night is on his wrist again, where it belongs.