Cradle and All (22 page)

“Yes. But I can’t go to the D.A.’s office with what I have now. There are too many unanswered questions. We could prove Tommy is yours with a DNA test. But if I go for one, Pat is going to ask who his mother is. When I don’t have an answer to give her, she is going to be between that proverbial rock and a hard place. She’s my friend, Tom. But she’s also an officer of the court. A child’s missing mother is not something she can overlook. Even my order giving you temporary custody could be rescinded.”

“Why?” Tom asked.

“Since I’ve become your wife, I can no longer be considered a disinterested party.”

“I see.”

She was quiet a moment more before she said, “There’s something else.”

“What’s that, Anne?”

“You subdued Benny and his friends so easily this afternoon. And there were three of them.”

“And that’s begun to bother you,” Tom guessed.

“No. What’s bothering me is that I now realize you didn’t need me to burst in and tell Shrubber and Butz that Tommy was ours in order to prevent them from taking him. You could have stopped them yourself, couldn’t you?”

He smiled. “That doesn’t mean I don’t love and admire what you did for me that day, Anne.”

“What I did that day led to us both being trapped into this fake marriage,” she said with an unhappy sigh.

Tom felt the sting of her words. She still thought their marriage a fake? He had hoped with everything they had shared over the past few days that she had begun to realize how very real it was.

“You have some special kind of training in fighting, don’t you?” Anne asked.

“A little.”

“A little,” she repeated. “Is that like a
little
pregnant?”

Tom chuckled.

“Just what I thought.” A rueful smile drew back Anne’s lips. “I doubt it was part of the curriculum covered at the seminary.”

“Not exactly,” Tom agreed.

“I asked you once before what led you to become a priest. You didn’t want to tell me then. Will you tell me now?”

Maybe it was time he did. At least this was something he could share with her, even if he preferred not to.

Tom picked up the bottle of burgundy she had opened earlier to go with their dinner, and offered Anne some. When she shook her head, he filled his glass.

“I told you how my parents, grandfather, aunt and uncle died when I was five,” he began.

“And your grandmother took care of you,” Anne said, remembering Tom’s words.

“My grandmother wasn’t physically strong. The death of her husband and three children hit her hard. I was her only grandchild. I believe she did her best for me in the time we were together. But the grief that never lifted from her heart finally took her two years later.”

“When you were seven,” Anne said, feeling incredibly sad for his losses.

“My grandmother made sure that the family’s estate was placed in trust for me. But by law I couldn’t get access to it until I was eighteen. Since I had no living relatives, I became a ward of the state and ended up in a foster home.”

“In New York City?”

Tom nodded. “On the surface the foster home looked fine. The father had a good-paying job. The mother was a homemaker with two boys of her own.”

But as Anne soon learned, there was a lot wrong beneath the surface of this ideal foster family. The father gambled away most of his paycheck every week. The mother had taken Tom in only to get enough money to pay for food for herself and her sons. They were three and four years older, and took turns beating him up. Their mother never stopped them. Tom’s bedroom was a closet, his bed the floor.

“And I once wondered why you had something against the foster care system,” Anne said with a sad shake of her head.

“The neighborhood wasn’t the best. There were bullies who preyed on kids with lunch money on their way to school. I learned not to carry any.”

“You didn’t get any lunch?” she asked.

“Anne, I’m only bringing up this part to explain about Li Yu-Tang.”

“Who is Li Yu-Tang?”

He was a new boy to the neighborhood, Tom related. Of Chinese ancestry. A lot smaller than the other eleven-year-olds in their class. Which made him immediate prey for the bullies. Tom was walking to school the morning after the new boy arrived when he saw three bullies getting ready to jump him. Tom couldn’t let them beat up the little kid. He charged them, threw his lunch at the biggest of the bullies and yelled for Yu-Tang to run. He didn’t.

“What happened?” Anne asked, wondering if she really wanted to know.

“While I was barely holding my own with the big guy,” Tom said, “Yu-Tang flattened the other two. Then he came over and finished the guy I was fighting.”

“He knew martial arts,” Anne said with a relieved smile.

“His two uncles were Kung-Fu masters,” Tom confirmed. “And Yu-Tang was well on his way to being one. We were best friends from that day on. After he finished teaching me what he knew, I no longer worried about carrying lunch money to school.”

“What of the older boys in that foster home?”

“Let’s just say they began to respect my closet space.”

“I’m glad you learned to defend yourself so well,” Anne said.

Tom was happy to hear it. Especially with what he had to tell her next.

Yu-Tang’s reputation for being an unbeatable fighter spread over the next year. His fighting skills kept trouble away a lot of the time, but they also drew trouble. A sixteen-year-old named Gordo, who had been trained in karate and kick boxing and was twice Yu-Tang’s size, challenged him to a fight. But Yu-Tang never fought unless attacked. Gordo was so bent on proving he was a better fighter that he jumped Yu-Tang. Yu-Tang knocked Gordo out in less than a minute.

“Gordo came to boiling mad,” Tom said. “He swore he’d get revenge. The next day he got hold of his father’s gun, lay in wait for Yu-Tang and shot him dead.”

“Dear God,” Anne gave a long, sad sigh.

Tom drank the wine in his glass, then waited until the warmth reached his stomach. He needed that warmth at the moment as painful memories returned. And the remembered hatred that had encased his twelve-year-old heart.

“Yu-Tang was my best friend, Anne. In truth, the only friend I’d known up to that point. I went after Gordo. When I found him, I used everything that Yu-Tang had taught me. I intended to kill him. But I was stopped.”

“What stopped you?” Anne asked.

“We were in an alley behind an Episcopal church. Father Edward Thurman was the rector there. He heard the commotion and came out to see what was going on. Father Ed was pushing sixty but he still had the guts to pull me off Gordo. When the police came, I told them Gordo had killed Yu-Tang and why. When Gordo got out of the hospital a month later—”

“Wait a minute,” Anne said. “You beat him up so badly he was in the hospital for a month?”

“If Father Ed had pulled me off him five seconds later, he would have been in the morgue,” Tom said quietly.

Anne let out a long, shaky breath.

“Gordo was tried as an adult for the murder of Yu-Tang,” Tom continued. “He’s still serving his sentence. I was charged, as well.”

“With assault?” Anne asked.

Tom nodded. “I served six months in a juvenile detention center.”

It would have been a lot longer, Tom admitted to Anne, if Father Thurman hadn’t interceded. He’d told the judge that Tom could have easily beaten him, too, but he hadn’t. After he’d served his time, the foster family refused to take Tom back. He was glad. Still, no other family was willing to take him. Not a kid who had just served six months for assault.

“Where did you go?” Anne asked.

“Out on the streets just as soon as I could escape the state-run boardinghouse.”

“You were on the streets at twelve years old?”

“Trust me, Anne. I met better people there than I did in that state-run facility.”

“But how did you live?”

“I got by. Then one day while I was digging French fries out of a dumpster, I met up with Father Edward Thurman again.”

“The priest who pulled you off Gordo.”

Tom nodded. Father Ed had bought him a hamburger and some milk and sat with him while he ate. Tom had found him easy to talk to. He’d told Father Ed about his parents, his grandmother, his foster home. The priest took Tom home with him. His wife, Beatrice, was blind, but her nose was working well. The moment she got a whiff of Tom, she sent him off to the bathroom to shower.

“How long had you been on the streets?” Anne asked.

“Several months.”

Beatrice gave Tom an old bathrobe of Ed’s to wear while she washed his clothes. Over dinner that night, he learned she and Ed had married late. Too late to have children. Too late to adopt. Too late to be considered for foster care. But they took care of him from then on.

They educated him at their home. Ed also taught Tom carpentry, Ed’s hobby. He was a devout man, Tom said, who firmly believed in church teachings. Yet he never once pushed his faith on Tom.

“All he ever told me was to remember that my right to choose was the most powerful right I possessed,” Tom said. “And with every choice I made, I created who I was.”

“He sounds like a very special man.”

“He was the best,” Tom said with feeling.

When he was eighteen Tom gained access to his family’s estate and tried to pay Ed and Beatrice back for all they had done for him. They had so very little. Yet they wouldn’t accept a dime from him. They told him the way to repay them was to use the money to get a good education. Thanks to their tutoring, he easily passed a high school equivalency test and enrolled in college. He majored in engineering, and when he graduated, took a job in commercial construction.

“Because of the interest Ed had given you in carpentry,” Anne said.

Tom nodded. “Everything that was important to me, I learned from Ed and Beatrice. They taught me how to love by the way they loved me and each other. They were my real family. Then five years ago they were shot to death by a drug-crazed mugger outside a restaurant where I had taken them for their anniversary dinner.”

“Oh, Tom, no.” Anne’s voice was filled with sadness.

Tom stared at his empty glass. He wanted more wine to ease the awful dryness in his throat that these memories were bringing. But he didn’t refill his glass. He hadn’t drunk more than two glasses of wine at one sitting in five years, and he wasn’t going to start tonight.

When a man told the woman he loved the worst about himself, he had to do it sober.

“It was raining, so I left them standing under the awning in front while I went to get the car. Suddenly, I heard an angry man’s voice demanding their money. I whirled around to see a guy with a gun pointed at them. I ran toward them, but I wasn’t in time. He shot Ed first, then Beatrice.”

Tom paused for a moment as the soul-searing images returned. Still, there was more to tell. Long ago he had learned that the only way to say something terrible, something unspeakable, was calmly and quietly.

That was how he said it now. “I knocked the gun from the mugger’s hand. It only took a couple of well-placed blows to kill him.”

He stared at his empty wineglass, aware of Anne’s eyes on him. But she said nothing. Just waited for him to continue.

“When I bent down to Beatrice, she was gone. When I turned to Ed, I found he was still alive. He looked into my eyes and knew at once that I had killed their attacker. ‘I had already forgiven him, Tom,’ he told me. ‘We’re here on this earth to learn to love, not hate.’ Then he died in my arms.”

Tom closed his eyes for a moment as the memories became too vivid. When he opened them again, Anne’s grave face was before him.

“Until that moment, I hadn’t understood what Ed had been trying to tell me all those years. You see, I could have easily just knocked out their attacker. I had chosen to kill him. And because the mugger had a long record, I was hailed as a hero. I was no hero. Ed was the hero. He had chosen love. His had been the right choice. Love gave meaning to his life...and even to his death.”

Anne’s eyes held that lovely look of wonder that had first spoken to Tom’s heart.

“So you became a priest like Ed,” Anne said. “Choosing love. Willing to go out on a limb for homeless kids and those most in need of comfort. It all makes perfect sense.”

Tom smiled at Anne’s gentle expression and the soft silver light in her eyes. She knew the worst about him now and had responded with compassion and understanding.

He reached across the table and took her hand in his. “Anne, do you have any idea how much I love you?”

Just for an instant, the light in her eyes was so bright it blinded him. But then it went out as though a switch had been thrown.

“Tom, it’s not necessary to say that.”

“I didn’t say it because I thought it was necessary. I said it because it’s true. I love you, Anne.”

He felt her start to withdraw.

“I know your previous relationships have hurt you,” he said quickly, holding on tightly, not letting go of her hand, trying to get through the barriers she was fast erecting. “Please, don’t let them be the yardstick you use to judge what we have together.”

“I don’t do that, Tom. What we have together is sweeter and truer than anything I ever had with Bill or any other man. I’ve known an intimacy and honesty with you that I didn’t believe possible between a man and a woman.”

Warm relief flowed through Tom’s heart. Until he heard her next words.

“But I’m not a dewy-eyed fool,” she said as she pulled her hand away. “I know that this is temporary. And I know it can’t be anything else.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because men aren’t monogamous by nature. Sooner or later you’ll be looking elsewhere. I’m not finding fault. I’m just letting you know that I know.”

“You’re measuring me by the two men who have disappointed you.”

“No, I’m measuring you by every man I’ve ever met. Including my father.”

“Your father, Anne?”

“Last year I came home for a surprise visit and walked in on him and a woman neighbor. After he scurried her out the back door, we had a long talk. Seems he’s been having affairs for years. When I asked him how he could do this to my mother, you know what he said?”