All those many years he had been coming to sit and be with her. God was cruel to have kept him here on Earth this way, for all this time. He intended to have a word with Him about that, when the time came. If it ever came. He sometimes felt like he was never going to die.
He had thought so many times about taking his life. He had planned it out in so many different ways. But he could never do it. He remembered learning when he was young, listening to some priest preaching hell and damnation from a pulpit, that suicide was a one-way ticket to hell for all of eternity. God would forgive anything but suicide. Tony didn't even know if he truly believed it, or if he even believed in a God, or in anything, for that matter. But he couldn't take the chance of being separated from her in the afterlife, too. The afterlife was his only hope. So he'd waited it out instead of blowing his brains out, just to be on the safe side; just in case that hell-and-eternity thing turned out to be true.
All these decades had crawled by so slowly. In the beginning, he had prayed to catch a bullet on the job, but no such luck. Not even in his line of work. Not even after having expressly gone back to CTU to join Jack in the field, with the secret hope of going down in a hail of gunfire.
Everyone had told him to be patient; that he would get over her death — or "his loss," as people would always more daintily put it — each swearing that someday he would; that time heals all wounds. But he knew that it was never gonna happen. So, throughout the years, and to this day, he would call the cell phone that he had buried at her grave so that he could make it ring a foot beneath the grass, to signal her from wherever he might be; to talk to her; to let her know that she wasn't alone; that his heart had been buried alongside her; that he hadn't abandoned or forgotten her. He couldn't bear the thought of her being alone — out there, or up there, or wherever "there" was. He had called her from their empty bed so many times, just to tell her to hold on; that he'd be joining her soon. Yet here he stood at her gravesite again, all these years later, still trapped on this godforsaken Earth.
He had never told anyone about the phone. Someone would've had him committed, for sure. Except that they would've been wrong to do it. That had always been the ironic part. His phone calls to her weren't an indication that he had lost his mind; they were the only thing that had kept him sane. He doubted anyone would be able to understand that, though. But it hardly mattered, anyway. He couldn't care less what people understood, or thought, or said. He hadn't really cared about much of anything since that day.
It had been wrong of God to give her to him for such a short time, then snatch her back like that, when he wasn't looking. He would bring that up to Him, as well. He had a number of things he wanted to discuss. But those things could wait. He would wait. He had become an expert at it.
He looked back on his life for a moment and realized that he hadn't really had one. He didn't care about that either. He did, however, oddly care about how grey he had become, nervous that she might not think he was handsome anymore, once he had kicked his way through those pearly gates and found her. She, on the other hand, would look the same, he knew: still young and vibrant, with porcelain skin and crazy red curls that smelled like — well, heaven, he supposed. Or maybe still like that coconut-scented shampoo of hers, still in the medicine cabinet. He would find out when he got there.
He had never become that alcoholic, whom everyone had laid their paychecks down on, at first. All these decades, he'd never touched a drop. He knew she wouldn't have approved of that.
On their honeymoon, had told her that he would never love anyone but her, and he never did. He couldn't, even if he had wanted to. His heart had long since withered to dust. He pondered the irony of how so many people had thought of him as "heartless," back then, for not having attended her funeral. Not that he cared what they thought. Nobody could have understood why he'd gone fishing that day, instead. Except for his Dad, of course. He was the one who'd shown up with the rods, asking if he felt like flying down to Belize for a few days. And so they did, just the two of them. His Dad had read his mind, as usual, and ended up taking the same heat from a variety of people who'd been shocked and angered by Tony's failure to show. Tough. Jim Almeida had no more cared than Tony. Amanda Almeida would handle those people. Their shattered son had been Jim Almeida's singular concern.
They had stayed in an old dilapidated shack, owned by a local who'd built it with the intention of renting it out, for a small fortune, to the few fishermen in the world who even knew of the well-kept-secret, sacred spot. He had given Tony his space, though never situating himself more than a short sprint away, be it during the day, when they quietly fished along the bank, or all the nights that Jim had sat on the boulder amid the thick foliage, listening to his son's plaintiff wails emanating from the river's edge, piercing the night's silence with diatribes against God and man. It tore at the walls of his heart. He knew there was nothing he could do but simply be there. And so he was.
Tony hit the familiar button on his cell and stood listening to the muffled ringing beneath the grass, waiting for the automated message feature to beep.
"Hey, it's me, baby," he said, and began to talk about this and that, though feeling she probably already knew everything he had done that week. She was probably right over his shoulder. She probably still had his back, like she always did through the mercilessly short time together that the gods had decided to give them.
"So, look, I guess I'll see ya when I see ya, huh?" he wrapped things up after awhile, forcing a small smile so that she wouldn't worry about him too much.
He clapped the phone shut and pushed it into his back pocket. Then he brushed away some leaves that had fallen atop the grave stone and used his foot to push away a few others that sat on the patch of grass directly to the right, reserved for himself; for the day when the gods would finally see fit to free him from this hell called Earth; to give him the death that he lived for.