Landon Carter. At seventeen years old he had everything. Now that he was fifty-seven however, everyone saw him as an old decrepit man void of all emotion. He was the neighbor the little children whispered about in church when he wasn't there, or, even worse, whispered about while he was sitting right there. The real life Boo Radley of Beaufort North Carolina.
The one thing people never stopped to ask while they were making fun of him was how he got to be the way he was. No one bothered to talk to him to see what had happened in his life that had been so terrible he couldn't see it in his heart to ever walk and talk amongst other human beings again.
Landon Carter had a secret that seldom people remembered while they were spreading the rumors about him. He had been loved once in his life and for him, knowing he was loved at one point in time was worth putting up with all the rumors. If he wanted to, he could get up and leave Beaufort, but not without cutting some very painful strings that were attached to it. For one thing, he would find it impossible to leave. Thinking about it made his heart ache, and it made him feel guilty. The thought of going anywhere without Jamie was overwhelming to him. He wanted to believe that after forty years the pain was not nearly as bad as it had been at the ripe age of seventeen, but if he told you it was, he'd be lying.
At seventeen years old the young man had vowed to marry a young woman who had stolen his heart. He knew that he hadn't been nice to her for all that long, but when he had bothered to get to know her he soon began falling in love, and by the time he realized it might be better to pull away from her, it was too late. He was hooked in and nothing was going to happen. He promised her he wouldn't fall in love with her, and when he had told her that in fact, he had, she had had to tell him about her cancer.
Where at first he was angry, he found it impossible to stay that way. He loved her and if she was sick he was going to be by her side. He had been too. Up until the very moment she had passed away, and she was in his mind forever after. Forty years later the memory of her smell and the way her body touched his made him feel a glimpse of the happiness he once felt every day. Even though Jamie was no longer in Beaufort in body, she was forever in his mind. At one point Jamie was all he needed to survive. She had been the oxygen he needed to breathe. So now, though everyone in town was a critic of him He knew that he could carry on. After all, he had in fact lived through worse.