Читать книгу The Bracelet - Karen Smith Rose - Страница 7

When his mom entered the waiting room, Sean stopped pacing. “What’s going on?” he asked, anxious to know his dad was still alive. No matter what his mom said, his dad’s collapse was his fault.

She mustered up a little smile. “Your father opened his eyes a couple of times and he even talked to me. We have to believe he’s strong enough to pull through. He’s going to need our support and—”

“Aunt Pat!” Kat jumped up from the sofa where she’d been paging through a magazine and ran to her aunt. “Did you hear? Dad had a heart attack!”

In the doorway Pat put her arms around her niece and gave her a long hug. At the same time, she glanced at Laura. “Has anything changed since you called me? I just got your message.”

Aunt Pat, his dad’s sister, was a real estate agent. Divorced, she’d never had kids, but she was nice enough, even if she did have silicone boobs and sprayed hair. She was supernice to Kat, had even invited her on a shopping trip to New York last summer. She’d given him a hundred dollars his last birthday, and that was way cool.

“He’s scheduled for a catheterization at 7:00 a.m.,” his mother responded.

“Can anyone visit him?”

“Ten minutes on the hour.”

“I won’t take that time away from you. He’ll know I’m pulling for him. I always have.”

Sean wondered what that meant. The realization dawned that he really didn’t know a lot about his parents—not really. Apparently they had secrets.

“If you’re going to be here through the night, I can drive the kids back to your place and stay with them until morning if you’d like,” his aunt offered.

Sean didn’t have to be told that a heart cath was serious stuff. “I’m not leaving. I’ll stay here.”

Aunt Pat studied him as if he were a kid. “There’s nothing you can do here.”

“I’m staying.” When he checked with his mother, he saw she understood.

She understood a lot of things his dad didn’t. But even his mom couldn’t imagine everything he kept inside. He was a disappointment to his parents. He’d never lived up to their expectations. Until he’d been diagnosed with dyslexia, his dad had thought he was lazy, that he didn’t care, that he didn’t try. After all, he wasn’t their real son. Their real son had died, and his father would never forget that. When he looked at him, Sean always felt small, as if he’d never measure up. Maybe he wouldn’t.

After all, his biological mother had given him away. He’d had the guts to finally ask questions when he was around ten. He’d learned she couldn’t care for him, and she hadn’t even known who his father was! He had no desire to find her or meet her. He had a mother. He didn’t need another one. And since his father’s identity was a mystery…Brady Malone was his dad and they were stuck with each other.

“Mom, should I go with Aunt Pat?” Kat asked.

“That’s up to you, honey. You’ll only be five to ten minutes away. I can call if anything happens.”

“What do you mean if anything happens?” Kat sounded afraid. “Dad’s not going to die. He’ll be all right, won’t he? You said he will.”

Laura went to Kat now, too, and draped an arm around her shoulders. “We have to believe he will.”

Sean felt as if he were standing in the middle of nowhere, all alone, the way he always was.

Kat’s eyes were wet now and tears dripped down her face. “I don’t want to stay here. I don’t want to smell these awful smells and see all these sick people.”

Usually he tolerated his sister. But sometimes…“You’re such a spoiled brat,” Sean muttered before he could help himself.

Kat’s “I am not” protest and Laura’s warning “Sean” hit the air at the same time.

Aunt Pat held her hand up like a referee. “Whoa, everyone. Take a deep breath. Kat, it’s okay if you don’t like the hospital. I don’t, either. If you come home with me, we’ll gather some things for your dad, your mom and Sean. Was this about the article?” she asked, staring at his mom as if what had appeared in the paper was no secret to her.

“Yes,” his mother said softly. “Don’t answer the phone if it rings. I’ll sort through the messages eventually.”

Aunt Pat gave a knowing nod, clasped Kat by the elbow and led her down the hall.

After a few seconds of silence, his mom suggested, “Try to be a little understanding with your sister right now. She’s only fourteen.”

“And most of the time she acts like ten.”

His mom’s face was drawn as she told him, “We all have our own way of coping. Yours and Kat’s are different.”

His way of coping started with shots from those bottles in the toolshed. “How do you cope, Mom? How have you coped all these years knowing what Dad did? How have you lived with that?”

He hadn’t meant to bring the matter up again now, but the questions were doing a slow burn in his stomach. Gary had shown him the article in the paper at baseball practice. Maybe his dad’s heart attack was really about the article being published. But what did he have to do with that?

“Was that article in the paper true or was it a lie? Did he kill women and kids?”

For once in her life his mother was at an absolute loss for words. Finally she answered him. “I know you need to talk about this. I know you have questions. But there are two sides to every story and you have to hear your father’s.”

Maybe a part of him was glad this had happened. Maybe a part of him wanted to kick the pedestal out from under his dad’s feet. But another part…

Sean suddenly realized Kat wouldn’t be here and he’d have to visit his dad alone. Panicked, he asked, “What am I going to say when I go in to see Dad?”

“You don’t have to say anything. Just be with him. Let him know you’re there. If you do want to talk, just tell him you’re sure he can fight through this.”

When his mom’s voice cracked, Sean felt something breaking inside him. He glanced away and told himself his dad would be all right. His dad had to be all right.

As the monitors beeped, Brady floated, trying not to think or even feel. There had been times over the years when he’d blocked out all feeling. In Nam, for sure. As well as after he returned home. After Laura’s miscarriages. After Jason died—

He didn’t want to go there.

He wished there was a clock in the cubicle. But doctors probably thought patients shouldn’t think about time or count the minutes until their next visitor. Would Laura come back? Or would Sean or Kat visit?

In spite of his struggling to stay in the here and now, his mind wandered. To the day he and Laura had moved into their first house—one with a mortgage instead of a landlord. She’d discovered she was pregnant one week and they’d found the split level the next. They’d been so happy…so ready to prepare a nursery.

But then he’d returned home from work one night and—

“Laura! Laura, are you home?” he’d called as he’d set his briefcase in the kitchen. There was no answer. Yet her purse sat on the counter.

Returning to the living room, he called up the short flight of stairs. “Laura.”

A sixth sense urged him to climb them, even though she didn’t call back. At the top of the stairs he heard her crying coming from the bathroom.

Rushing in, he found her on the floor by the bathtub, with blood on her white summer dress. “Sweetheart, what’s wrong? What happened?”

She was sobbing now. “I lost our baby. Oh, Brady. I lost our baby.”

He had to get her medical attention. But her tear-stained cheeks, the sense of loss in her eyes, had him holding her and rocking her. “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll have another baby.”

“I wanted this one. I wanted this child. What if I can’t get pregnant again?”

“You’re young and healthy. You’ll get pregnant again. We’ll have lots of kids. You’ll see. I love you, Laura.”

Then he scooped her into his arms and carried her to his car to drive her to the hospital.

The doctor had performed a D&C. Visiting Laura and holding her through her grief had been difficult for him. He’d tried to bury his. When she’d returned home, they’d talked about trying again as soon as the doctor said they could. He’d brought her daisies. He’d bought her her favorite perfume. He hadn’t bought a charm. Charms were for the happy times. The times they wanted to remember.

Eventually her smiles had become natural again.

Until the next miscarriage. There had been a third. Then she’d become pregnant with Jason.

His son.

“Mom?”

An hour later, Sean’s strained voice told Laura she’d been staring into space for at least ten minutes. “How’d it go?” she asked.

Her son dropped down onto the sofa beside her and raked his hands through his hair. “He was sleeping. He didn’t know I was there.”

“He might have.”

Now Sean stretched out his legs and slouched against the cushion. “Tell me something about Dad you’ve never told me. Not about now, but—” he pointed to her bracelet “—tell me what he was like when he was in college. He wasn’t that much older than me.”

“He was twenty-one when I met him.”

“Did he always want to make robots?”

She smiled. As an engineer, Brady had been ahead of his time. “Yep. When he took me to meet his parents, he showed me his workroom. Uncle Matt and Uncle Ryan had an HO train set up year-round.”

“They would have still been in high school.”

“Right. Your dad did all the electrical work on the trains, but on his side of the room there were electronics kits.”

“What about Aunt Pat? Did she have a space in the workroom?”

Laura laughed at the thought of Pat playing with trains or experimenting like Brady. “No. She wanted no part of it. She liked it when her brothers were busy down there because they weren’t annoying her.”

“That sounds like Aunt Pat.” Sean was quiet for a couple of seconds, then murmured, “When you talked earlier about the way you and Dad met and all, he seemed so different from the way he is now. Was he?”

How much should she tell Sean?

Maybe that was the problem. She and Brady had always filtered everything they’d told the kids, instead of just laying it all out. At eighteen, Sean could vote, he could enlist, he could fight in a war. When should parents stop protecting children from heavy truths that would color the rest of their lives if they understood them?

“When I met your dad…”

Her voice trembled and tears blurred her eyes, but she blinked them away. “He wasn’t like anyone else I’d ever met. The first time I looked into those blue eyes, I wanted to stay there. When he took my wrist and dragged me from the demonstration, I felt safe being with him. He knew where we were going even if I didn’t. It was so odd, really, because I’d learned not to depend on anyone. I’d learned I had to make my own way.”

“You were only twenty.”

She nodded. “Losing my parents made me feel so alone. Even though my aunt Marcia took me in, I still felt…abandoned. Your dad changed that. He opened this great big window for me. He let in light and love and warmth. He had this amazing sense of humor and he knew how to relax. We’d sit for hours—”

“Making out?” Sean asked with a smile.

Her cheeks warmed. “Just being together. Before he left, we took walks in the park and fed the squirrels. We flew kites. We went to a party with his friends.”

“Before he left?”

“Before he went to basic training at Fort Dix. Before he got sent to Hawaii. Before he went to Vietnam.”

If she told Sean about that night with Brady’s friends, he’d learn an important truth about his dad.

Six weeks into her dates with Brady—he’d come home every weekend—they’d gone to a party at Jack Crawford’s. His apartment was small, on the second floor of a row house on West Princess Street. Jack had gotten a medical deferment because of a heart murmur and sold shoes at Thom McCann.

When Brady had introduced her to Jack, his buddy had said in an aside, “I guess we have to watch our language tonight.”

Laura had worn a lime-green A-line dress, not sure what kind of party they were attending. She’d tied up half her hair with narrow lime-and-fuchsia grosgrain ribbons. Pretending to appear worldly, she’d remarked offhandedly to Jack, “I’ve heard all kinds of language. Don’t worry about me.”

When Brady had draped his arm around her shoulders, she’d felt trembly and weak-kneed, as she always did when they were close. Although they made out every time they saw each other, they hadn’t gone any further than that, not because they weren’t eager to, but because Brady had said more than once that he respected her dreams, understanding that they had to learn to trust each other—that they’d know when they were ready.

Would they? Was she putting them both through weekends of frustration because she was afraid she’d get hurt? Because the wrong decision could mean an unhappy turn in her life? Because the war was standing between her and Brady and they both understood that?

That night she wanted to forget about it all, and she suspected Brady did, too.

Two more friends—Tom and Luis—showed up. They seemed surprised that she was there, but Brady made no excuses for her presence, just introduced her to Luis, who went to Penn State, and to Tom, who was earning a degree at Shippensburg.

Tom, who defied longer men’s hairstyles by wearing a crew cut, held out a box. “It’s a game called Pass-Out. We can talk and play and drink, all at the same time.”

While Luis and Tom moved the coffee table into the middle of the room, Brady lifted the cushions from the sofa and positioned them around it. Luis took out three packs of Lucky Strikes and tossed then onto the coffee table next to the game. “My contribution.”

Brady produced a bottle of Burgundy from a paper sack he’d carried in and set it on the counter in the narrow kitchen. Laura had never been to a party like this, with a lava lamp glowing blue-green on top of the TV console, smoke filling the room and scents of wine and whiskey wafting up from juice glasses. She tucked her legs under her on the cushion and felt really grown up for the first time. While Luis strummed his guitar, Tom and Brady talked about the courses they’d enrolled in, the ones they’d hated and the ones they’d liked. Jack told funny stories about how picky some of the customers at the shoe store were. The guys reminisced about their high-school days.

At a lull in the conversation, Brady leaned close to her. “I might have met you in high school if you’d stayed in Catholic school.”

“My aunt didn’t intend to pay anything extra to send me there.”

When they started the game, Brady rolled the dice and moved his marker. The square said All had to take a drink. They did. The talking and playing went on as the sun set and traffic noises outside the open windows became quieter.

After she’d downed two glasses of wine, Laura switched to soda. Jack, Luis and Tom started mixing more ginger ale into their bourbon. But she noticed Brady wasn’t diluting his. At some point, pink-elephant cards from the game forgotten, Jack flipped on a transistor radio and they listened to the Saturday-night countdown. The Beatles’ “Get Back” pounded through the room.

By midnight, Laura realized Brady and his friends had talked about absolutely everything except the thousand-pound gorilla in the room. None of them had mentioned the war. None of them had mentioned friends who hadn’t come home. None of them had mentioned that Brady, Tom and Luis would be drafted into service for their country after they graduated. It was almost one in the morning when Luis and Tom left. As Brady stood, he wasn’t quite steady on his feet.

“If you two would like some privacy, you can have my bedroom. I can bunk on the couch,” Jack told them.

Since Laura had worked at the Bon Ton until five, she and Brady hadn’t had any time alone. Tomorrow his family was going to have dinner with his uncle, then he’d be leaving to return to school. She wouldn’t see him again until next weekend.

“Why don’t we take him up on his offer for a little while,” Brady suggested. “I shouldn’t drive yet. We can leave when my head clears.”

She wasn’t sure what her aunt would say if she came home in the wee hours of the morning, but right now she didn’t care. Being with Brady was more important than anything else.

“All right. Let’s stay,” she agreed.

Ten minutes later, they were lying on top of Jack’s cotton spread, breathing in sweaty socks, Aqua Velva and smoke that had drifted in from the living room. The room was black except for the glare of the street lamps battling against the rolled-down shades.

Brady lay on his side, his muscled arm resting across her waist. He kissed her longingly, deeply, passionately.

Afterward, he brushed his thumb along her hairline. “So what did you think of everybody?”

Still reeling from the effects of his kiss, she didn’t filter her thoughts. “You have good friends, but I’m not sure you should have brought me along tonight.”

“Why not?”

They’d kicked off their shoes, and Brady’s stockinged foot rested against her nylon-clad one. “Because none of you talked about what was on your minds.”

“Sure we did. We talked for hours.”

Their body heat, Brady’s face so close to hers, his scent and pure maleness tempted her to kiss him instead of talking to him. But she spoke her mind anyway. “You didn’t talk about the draft, or about you and Luis and Tom going to basic training in a few weeks. Or about your friends who are there now and what’s happening.”

Brady shifted away from her, rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Damn it, Laura, not everything’s about the war. What did you think we should do? Analyze the last news report? Talk about how we’re giving up real life for the next two years? Share notes on why our mothers cry because they don’t want us to go? What good would any of that do?”

Brady had never been angry with her, never shut her out, never turned away. She suspected what was at the bottom of it all.

Although his long, hard body was tense and rigid, she turned into his shoulder, laid her head against his arm, hugged him as best she could. “I know sometimes when you get really quiet, you’re thinking about it,” she said softly. “I imagine when you’re lying in bed at night, you can’t get to sleep because pictures are going through your head—pictures from TV and stories you’ve heard. You don’t have to hide what you’re thinking or feeling from me, Brady.”

His body was so still, so stiff, she couldn’t even feel him breathing. She wished there was a little more light in the room and fewer shadows. She wished she could see him.

Finally she felt his breath. It was fast and shallow. She raised her hand to his face, and he suddenly turned away from her. But not before she felt the wetness. Not before she realized there had been tears on his cheeks.

She held on tighter. “Tell me,” she whispered into his neck.

He just shook his head and mumbled, “I had too much to drink.”

She guessed why that was so. “Nothing you say is going to change the way I feel about you.”

His shirt was damp from their combined body heat. Still staring at the wall instead of at her, he kept his voice so low she had to strain to hear.

“In the daytime, I think about our reasons for being in Vietnam and I know I have to do my part. I think about how proud my parents will be when they see me in a uniform. I think about learning skills I don’t have now. I think about toughening up so I can really face the world when I get back. But at night—At night I think about Bill’s leg being blown off. I think about the guys who haven’t come home. I think about the swamps and a strange country, living in God-knows-what conditions.” Without warning, he faced her. “Most of all at night, I think about dying. Since I met you, I think about that a lot and I get so damn scared.”

He wasn’t touching her and she realized he expected her to move away, either to turn away in disgust or to leave him with his misery. She wasn’t about to do either.

Winding her arms around his neck, she felt her own voice break when she admitted, “I’m scared, too.”

As they held each other, she knew that what had just happened between them was more intimate than making love.

“Mom. Mom?” Sean asked. His voice seemed to come from very far away.

She focused once again on her son. “Yes, honey. I was remembering.”

“Remembering what? What Dad was like?”

“I often wonder if children ever really know their parents,” she admitted with a sad smile. “I mean, we’re people, too, and we had lives before you were born. Believe it or not, we had the same struggles you do.”

“Not Dad. He never had to struggle with anything.” Sean’s voice was almost bitter.

If only you knew, she mused, and then realized maybe it was time Sean did know. Not everything. Lots of things Brady needed to tell him. But she could reveal bits and pieces that Brady would never tell him. Brady was a proud man. Brady wanted his son to always see him as strong, maybe even as invincible. Her, too, for that matter. But she knew better. She knew he was human just as she was, with flaws and needs, wants and desires that sometimes got them into trouble and other times made life worth living.

“I was remembering the night your dad cried and I held him tight and we prayed he’d return safely from the war.”

The shock on Sean’s face was reiterated in his words. “You’ve got to be kidding. Dad cried?”

Had she made an awful mistake? Was this something too private to share with her son? Yet if Sean didn’t soon learn that his father had flaws, that he hurt and got disappointed and didn’t always succeed, she was afraid the two of them would always be at odds.

Her voice vibrated with the intensity she felt. “I’m talking to you as one adult to another. You wanted to know something about your dad. I just confided in you about a night when both of us were so scared that there wasn’t any escape from it. Your dad was twenty-one, graduating from college. You’ll be graduating from high school soon. What if someone put a weapon in your hands and shouted orders at you? What if you were sent to a foreign land where nothing is easy, nothing is familiar and there’s no way to go home? Think about it and then tell me what you’d do with that storm building inside you.”

It was a few moments before Sean murmured, “I can’t imagine it.”

“Vietnam wasn’t so different from Iraq. Maybe the cause was more idealistic. I don’t know. By the time I met your dad, no one could ignore the clips on the news…our boys dying. The war was touching so many families’ lives that the nation couldn’t look away.”

She tapped her finger on Sean’s chest over his heart. “When war touches you personally, when a relative or friend dies or loses a leg, the fight is a prison you can’t escape from. A young man walking into hell has every right to cry.”

She was talking to Sean from a woman’s perspective, from her woman’s perspective, as a girlfriend and a mother, or as simply a lover of peace. Maybe he needed to know her, too, in all this. Maybe he’d never realized what was at her core. Perhaps it was time he did.

After a few very long minutes during which neither of them spoke, Sean asked what she thought was an odd question. “How long had you been dating Dad when that happened…when he let you know he was scared?”

“Six weeks. We’d had six weekends together, letters in between.”

“He must have trusted you.”

“That night, we started to trust each other. I can’t explain what happened between me and your dad that spring. As your mom, I’d tell you never trust love at first sight, never trust that initial excitement because it could fade away, never think the moment is going to last forever. Because what your dad and I shared was so rare, Sean, so very rare. But your dad and I were blessed with knowing from the moment I met him.”

“Knowing you were going to get married?” her son asked.

“No. Everything was still too uncertain. But we knew for sure we had a connection, a bond that would never be broken. That weekend was a turning point for me in more ways than one. Up until that weekend, I’d lived with my aunt.” Aunt Marcia had died of lung cancer before Sean and Kat had come into her and Brady’s lives.

“What happened that weekend?” In spite of the late hour, Sean’s eyes sparkled with interest, as if he was intrigued by everything she was telling him.

“Your dad and I had gone to a party. I met his high-school friends, who’d gone their separate ways for a while. Your father didn’t take me home until 4:00 a.m.”

Slipping back in time again, she remembered how they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms on that bed in Jack’s apartment. When they’d awakened, Jack was snoring on the sofa. It had been so late and she’d had no idea what her aunt was going to say.

She’d never expected Aunt Marcia to be waiting up for her.

Brady had driven away after she’d unlocked the door and gone inside. How she wished he’d still been by her side. How she wished she’d felt like a niece to this woman with the angry expression and a slip of paper in her hand.

Marcia Watson had thrust that piece of paper at her. “I can only imagine why you’re traipsing in here at 4:00 a.m., but I’m telling you this—I’ve had enough of looking after you. Here’s a place you can stay. If you don’t like it, you have a week to find somewhere else. You’re old enough to be on your own.”