The Refugee Sentinel Read Free Page B

college, he dialed a radio station on Valentine’s Day for two hours to request a song for her: “I Just Called To Say I Love You.” In a way, she was always going to be the grace of his life. A morning of waking next to her was worth a million Defiance Days. Then smelling her hair and nuzzling in her morning breath, while she tried shielding it from him but in the end, capitulating to his full-on kisses. Then making love to her in the shower. She had given him countless mornings like that.
    He had shared her with the algae for the first, and only, two years of their marriage. He had hoped Yana’s arrival would bring them closer, but it hadn’t. Sarah wasn’t distant or tired or having an affair. She was crazy busy… all the time. And each time he complained about her absence, she would give him the same save-the-world bullcrap he’d grown to despise. “Don’t you want your child to live in a world with snow caps and potable water? A world with wildlife other than ravens and sparrows. Don’t you, Colton?” He had no antidote to her pitch. Not after the North Cap went, fueling a frenzied debate to replace countries with a central government structure the Australians had proposed calling The United Lands of Earth.
    He had no antidote because he knew she was right but, most of all, because he loved her. He was a junior, a Finance major, about to flunk out of Northeastern University when they met. She was a year ahead and cruising, the future Valedictorian of the College of Applied Biochemistry. She was spoken for with a post-graduation job offer from Amgen and a marriage proposal from Roger Maletta, the senior goalie who had strapped the Huskies on his back to two consecutive NCAA East Hockey titles.
    One of the two offers had to cancel the other and, as luck would have it, Sarah chose Amgen in Seattle over staying put and being married to Maletta in Boston. It must have been a close call, because the combination of Maletta’s orphan beginnings and chiseled abdomen had delivered three years of dating Sarah, despite him cheating on the side. She either put up with it or he satisfied her savior complex, which Colton got to appreciate later. Regardless, Maletta had drawn the short straw; Seattle - the long one, and she dove into her algae work, in the shadow of the Space Needle, with abandon she hadn’t applied to anything else in life. Colton loved how happy she was as the Savior in Chief of an Earth that was dying a little bit more by the day.
    During his senior year, he commuted between Seattle and Boston to see her on weekends, as if his academic work needed more obstacles. His life became a sleep-deprived series of shuffling in and out of classrooms and airports. He was broke and in the bottom ten percent in all his classes. But he spent time with Sarah, giving her the only gift he could – his time and thoughts. Seattle grew on him, all because of her, despite its ridiculous rain slugs, which Sarah called “my algae mustangs,” a fixture in her lab work. In a few months, she let him stay at her one-room apartment, instead of at the Thunderbird on Aurora, the only place his budget could afford.
    On Saturday nights, lying next to her, he’d been afraid to fall asleep, afraid to jinx the moment, as she slept in his arms snoring softly like a kitten. When he did fall asleep and awoke, he was happy to wake up next to her. When he proposed a year later, on one knee, looking up at her, during the seventh-inning stretch in a game where the Red Sox were crushing the Mariners and the cheesy “Marry Me, Sarah. Yours, Colton!” flashed on the main scoreboard, he thought he’d have a heart attack.
    She blinked at him, her mouth frozen in the middle of chewing a hot dog. In his head, he heard a reverberating “No,” but his eyes saw her stand up and nod in tears, her lips mouthing a “Yes,” then smiling and adding, “I love you, Colton” with coleslaw drizzling down her cheek. If the world ended tomorrow, a