Lakeside Cottage (14 page)

“I was going to clean out the ashes. I found this and took a break, just like you told me to, and I started reading. I saw the note someone stuck to it. At first, I was
confused, but it didn’t take me long to put two and two together.”

“Listen, I never meant—”

“So were you ever going to tell us the truth, Sergeant Jordan Donovan Harris, or just make fools of us?”

JD swallowed, tasting sawdust. He considered denying that he was the man in the magazine, wondering if he could lie his way out of this. Looking at her face, her dark, accusing eyes, he knew better. This was a girl who, in one way or other, had been lied to all her life. She knew what a lie sounded like.

He didn’t speak for a moment. He wanted a few more seconds to be anonymous, a guy spending summer at the lake, nobody in particular.

“I didn’t want to make a fool of anyone, and I sure as hell didn’t mean to hurt anyone,” he said at last. “Sorry if your nose is out of joint.”

“Why wouldn’t you just own up to who you are?” she asked.

He gestured at the magazine. “That’s why.”

She picked it up, flipped it open to the now-familiar image of him attacking the Walter Reed bomber. “This is not something to hide from your friends. This guy— Jordan Donovan Harris—he’s a hero. He’s, like, the biggest hero in the country.”

JD shook his head. “He’s a guy with some good training who happened to be in the right place at the right time. The last thing I wanted was this.” He took the magazine, closed it, set it aside. “Don’t be ticked off at me. I’m trying to get away from all the attention, be normal.”

“I don’t get it. You’re famous. You can do anything you want. Go anywhere, hang out with Paris Hilton.”

He wiped his hands on his jeans. “I rest my case.
You’re a smart girl. Think about it. When people know who I am, I can’t even buy toothpaste without being followed.”

“Is it true about that woman who cut herself and called 911 just so you’d rescue her?”

Shirlene Ludlow. She just wouldn’t go away. “That woman,” he told Callie, “is a real person who put herself in real danger. Knowing there are people like her out there makes it kind of hard for me to stay on the job.”

“It’s not your fault she’s a loony.”

“Maybe not, but would she have sliced herself up otherwise?” He shook his head. “No telling, but I couldn’t take that chance.”

“So you gave up your job because of a crazy woman? That’s not fair.”

He almost laughed. Fair wasn’t in his vocabulary, not any longer. “That’s part of the reason. Because of what happened, I wasn’t effective in my job anymore, so I had to leave. I’m out here trying to get my life back. So far, it’s been working.” He waited. Other than the Schroeders, he had not encountered anyone who was capable of keeping his secrets. It was too irresistible. It was human nature for people to say, “I met him, shook his hand, spotted him in VIP seating at a ball game, saw him putting gas in his car at the Georgia Avenue Texaco.”

For his unauthorized biography, the author had dug out comments from a waitress who had served him coffee at the neighborhood diner (“As I recall, he took both cream
and
sugar.”), his high school football coach (“He always knew how to make an end run when it counts.”). Even the laundry where he took his uniforms to be cleaned offered some comment, and he hadn’t even known they could speak English.

Now here was Callie, a lonely teenage runaway with
secrets of her own. Would she try to parlay this into something for herself, or would she respect his privacy?

She leaned against the sawhorse and reopened the magazine to the article. “So how much of this is true?” she asked.

“Does it look like I’m filming a dating show here?”

“I’m glad you’re not. Those shows creep me out.”

“All the articles sound the same. In a lot of them, the only thing they get right is the spelling of my name.”

“So what do people really call you? Jordan?”

“Nope. That’s something the press started. JD has always been it. Harris in the army.”

She turned the page, looked from the service portrait showing him as a Green Beret to him now—unshaven, long hair, glasses. “I can’t believe how different you look.”

“People see what they want to see.” He waited some more. He had no idea what this girl was going to do, but if she decided to rat him out, his summer underground would come to an abrupt end. He didn’t want to ask her about her intentions, to put ideas into her head. She stayed quiet, scanning the article.

Finally he decided to say what was on his mind. He did not mean to threaten her or to point the finger. He was simply speaking the truth. “Everyone has secrets. They have things they keep to themselves. They have their reasons. You of all people should know that.”

She took a step back, studied the ground. “Yeah,” she said quietly. “So?”

“I don’t want anyone to figure out who I am.”

“I figured it out, and I’m no genius,” she said.

“Clearly, I’ll need to be more careful.”

“Is this stuff about your mother true?” She indicated a shaded inset in the article.

He hadn’t read it. He didn’t have to. He knew without going over the text that it was filled with Janet’s sudden rise to fame, and then her plummeting fall from grace. After ignoring him for years, she’d burst back into his life, claiming that her wise and attentive parenting had shaped his character, molding him into the type of man who would sacrifice himself for others. At first, the media had gobbled up the story of the courageous, hardworking single mom, making Janet a role model for women across the nation.

Then, inevitably, some nosy reporter had scratched beneath the surface of Janet’s story and discovered the truth.

To Callie, he said, “There might be a little grain of truth, but it’s always distorted to make whatever point the reporter’s aiming for.”

Callie was quiet for a long time. The CD changed to Green Day. He saw her lips move, but couldn’t hear what she was saying.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I said, my mom’s in prison.” There was a world of pain in her eyes. It spoke to his own pain, and she must have known that because she watched him expectantly.

Oh, he knew her. It was like looking into a mirror to the past. He recognized her pain because he’d seen that in his own mirror, long ago. Don’t do it, he cautioned himself. But he couldn’t ignore what he saw in Callie. Whether they liked it or not, they were kindred spirits.

He thought he’d left his adolescence behind, but she was a reminder that he could never do that. She wasn’t the first, of course. On the job, he’d seen that look too many times to count. Kids whose parents walked away from their wrecked lives and left them to fend for them
selves. Kids who had no idea what the next day would bring. Kids like he’d been.

“Why don’t you put that magazine down and have a seat,” he said to Callie. “I’ll tell you the real truth.” He sensed that being straight with her might be a way to get her to open up. He was nervous about it, though. He’d never explained about his mother to anyone. “Before all this happened to me,” he said, “my mother and I hadn’t spoken in twelve years.”

“I don’t get it. Why not?”

He hadn’t planned to sacrifice his relationship with his mother. That had been her idea. He grabbed a work rag and wiped the sweat and sawdust off his face. “She didn’t want to have anything to do with things from her past. From her days as an addict. I was one of those things.”

Callie nodded. Clearly she understood that some women were capable of such a thing.

“Anyway, she moved to L.A. and never contacted me again.”

“Until you became the star of the evening news,” Callie filled in, laying the magazine atop a sawhorse. “It says she’s got a talk-radio show in Orange County.”

“That part’s true.”

“I bet being your mother is the reason for that.”

“You’d win the bet.”

She was catching on fast. After the incident, like the rest of the world, his mother had wanted a piece of the action. After a tearful reunion (her tears, not his), she sold her version of the story to anyone who would pay, along with the few grainy, often crooked photographs she’d kept of him as a skinny, grinning boy with his laughing single mom.

He studied the photographs reprinted in the magazine
and realized he didn’t recognize these people. In the pictures—taken at the Maryland shore, or a city park or school picnic—the two of them looked happy together. The future hero and the mother who raised him to be a man of courage and honor, to hear her tell it. They looked happy together in the pictures, but that was a false memory that didn’t exist outside the photographs.

Cameras did this to people. Nobody wanted to show their true face to a probing, unblinking lens, not if that face was shadowed by misery. No matter who you might be, how high you were or how broke, no matter who you had to screw in order to get your next fix, you always summoned a smile for the camera.

Whenever he saw a photograph of his mother, JD was always struck by how beautiful she was. He didn’t remember that about her. Beauty was not what he thought of when he thought of his mother.

Still, when she’d come bursting back into his life, he hadn’t tried to stop her. Stupidly, he’d failed to assess the risks. Instead, he let her parlay his fame into her own talk-radio show and articles in national magazines. She published a pamphlet:
How to Raise a Real Hero.

Step one, he thought: Sell your body for drugs and stay high all the time.

Step two: Sleep all day and ignore the kid so he goes wandering the streets. Hope that the firefighters and EMTs at the station down the block will take him under their wing.

Step three: Use all the money the kid saved up in order to get sober. Then walk away from him, explaining that you can’t see him anymore because he’s part of the past you need to escape.

“So then she blew it, right?” Callie said. “She got her
own radio show and things should have been fine but she screwed it all up.”

He gestured at the magazine. “She had some help. At first, she was fine with all the attention. Everybody bought her made-up past. You can’t hide things, though, not in this day and age, not for long.” It was true. Within weeks of Janet coming forward, reports of her addiction and criminal record surfaced. Then came the invitations she couldn’t refuse, to wild Hollywood parties and exclusive clubs. “She dived into her relapse headfirst,” he explained. “By the time I figured out what was going on, it was almost too late. She’s in rehab now, down in Southern California. She’ll be there until the fall. It’s supposed to be one of the best programs in the country.” He broke a wooden dowel in his hands and looked down in surprise. He didn’t remember picking it up.

“I bet you’re paying for it,” Callie said.

“You win again.”

“So are you like really rich now?” she asked, indicating the address for donations given in the article. “Because of this foundation?”

“I didn’t ask for anything, but…people are basically kind and decent,” he said. “Donations started coming in for no particular reason.”

“Oh, only that you saved the leader of the free world.”

He waved away the comment. “Nobody throws himself on a bomber for money. It just happened. The upside is, I put the money in a nonprofit foundation. People can apply for aid.” He studied her for a moment. “You could request a college scholarship,” he suggested, hoping she wouldn’t think it was an attempt at bribery.

“Yeah, college. What a laugh.”

“I’m not laughing.”

“You never do,” she pointed out. “Jeez, here you are, America’s hero, and you can’t even enjoy it.”

“I don’t want to enjoy it. I’m trying to get my life back.”

“So when are you going to tell Kate?” Callie asked, the blunt question prodding at him.

“I’m not telling her or anybody else. I hope you’ll respect that, Callie.”

“What’s the big deal? She already likes you. She’ll just like you more.”

Women all across America claimed they loved him because of what he’d done. It felt false to him, and it was a wall between him and other people once they found out. “I just explained this to you. I can’t risk things happening to people like Shirlene Ludlow and my mother because of who I am. I’d just prefer to stay anonymous,” he said. “I can’t explain it any better than that.”

“Well, I totally don’t get it. She might be a little put out with you at first, like I was. But then—”

“I’m asking you not to say anything, Callie.” His voice was sharp. Urgent.

She rolled the magazine into a tube. “That’s asking a lot.”

She wasn’t stupid. He knew that. She understood that there was a certain potential, perhaps even a profit in this for her if she went about exploiting it in the right way.

“I know it’s asking a lot,” he conceded. He thought about bribing her. He could afford to do that, for sure. He couldn’t take that step, though. Couldn’t say to her, “I’ll give you five hundred bucks to keep quiet about this.” Not only was it undignified; it was like a single droplet of contamination, radiating outward, spreading God knew where. “In fact,” he added, “I could really use your help in keeping this under wraps.”

“I think it sucks that you didn’t tell us,” she said. “I don’t know why you’re acting like it’s so hard to be famous.”

“Ordinary people aren’t cut out for all the attention,” he said. “I can’t really explain it. It’s just…true.” He knew it for a fact, because he’d found some case studies. The rescue worker who had pulled baby Jessica McClure out of a well in West Texas committed suicide. The guy who jumped off the Fourteenth Street Bridge to save plane crash victims from the icy Potomac became a recluse. The man who’d stopped Squeaky Fromme’s assassination attempt later killed himself, too. All their troubles could be traced to an unplanned act of heroism.

“You’ll deal,” Callie assured him. As she spoke, she tossed the magazine in the trash can, stirring up a flurry of wood chips and sawdust. “By the way, I finished cleaning for the day.”

“Thanks.”

He pulled out his wallet and paid her in crisp bills.

She folded the cash without looking at it.

“Don’t you want to count it?” he asked.