Lakeside Cottage (30 page)

Kate looked at her and frowned, but said nothing. Finally, she told JD, “Have a safe trip.”

They were beautiful to him, all three of them. They were his family this summer, as close as he’d had to the real thing. At the lake they’d been safe from harm, but here in the world he couldn’t protect them from the paparazzi and prying questions they’d face if he stuck around.

“When are you coming back?” Aaron asked.

“I don’t know.” He briefly hugged each one of them, encountering stiff resistance. It felt awkward. Hell, it was awkward. And even though he said he didn’t know, he did.

“Y
ou shouldn’t have let him go,” Callie said, coming into Kate’s study in her nightgown.

It was late, and Aaron was asleep, but apparently Callie was as sleepless as Kate. “It wasn’t up to me. He left,” she said.

“You could have stopped him.”

“And then what?”

“Then you’d be together.”

“I can’t see that happening.”

“Why not?”

“I could make you a list of reasons, but only one really matters. He doesn’t want to be with me. Maybe he doesn’t want to be with anyone, I don’t know.”

“That’s bull. He is so in love with you, he can’t even see straight.”

Kate felt a twist of yearning but covered it up. “Very funny, Miss Know-it-all.”

“I know more than you do about his life.”

Kate imagined him telling Callie the truth about himself. They’d undoubtedly had long, searching talks,
leaving Kate out of the loop. At the thought of that, she felt something ugly—envy. He’d shared things with Callie and kept the wool pulled over Kate’s eyes.

“Well?” Callie asked, sitting in a swivel chair by the desk, “Aren’t you curious?”

“I suppose if he wanted me to have that information, he would have told me.”

“Get off it, Kate. These things are not secrets.” She leaned forward conspiratorially, drew her knee up to her chest. “I bet you don’t know why he went into the service.”

“I don’t.” Of course she didn’t. It was one of the million things he hadn’t bothered to tell her.

“See, he had this horrible mother—worse than mine, even—and all his life he worked just to survive. He took every odd job he could get his hands on. That’s why he’s so good at fixing things. He saved up as much as he could, and he was going to use it for college. Then his loser mom had to go into rehab, and that used up every penny he’d saved. So he went into the service instead.”

Callie had known all this while Kate had been in the dark. Here she was, sleeping with the guy, and he couldn’t even level with her. Yet he’d told Callie his life story.

Despite the deep resentment she felt, Kate couldn’t help imagining the sort of life Callie described. Before meeting Callie and writing her story, she couldn’t have done it, could not have conceived of a mother putting her child aside for a selfish purpose, and the effect that had on the child. Now she was starting to get it. Starting to understand. With a background like that, JD didn’t know how a family worked. Like Callie, he didn’t think he knew how to get it right. But he wasn’t stupid, she thought. He could learn these things.

“You’re mad,” Callie observed, studying Kate’s face.

“Not at you. He should’ve told me this himself,” Kate said.

Callie scowled. “Yeah, right. You think it’s fun to admit this stuff? The only reason he told me is that I was going off the deep end. I needed to hear that a person can survive a rotten mother. You didn’t.”

Kate managed a thin smile. Deep down, though, she felt shattered. He’d given up on them so easily, she thought. And then it hit her—so had she.

Callie looked over Kate’s shoulder at the computer screen. “Is that an Internet connection?” Callie said.

Kate touched the keyboard to light up the screen. Several browser windows were open. “I was reading up on Jordan Donovan Harris. Check this out.” She clicked on a photo to enlarge it.

Callie found a chair and scooted closer. “God, he was so…”

Hot, thought Kate. That would be the word for it. Her wonder grew as she gazed at picture after picture on the Internet. They even found and watched a video clip of the event that had skyrocketed him to fame.

“So when did you figure it out?” she asked Callie. They gazed at a shot of him in fatigues, a much younger JD with his arm slung around Sam Schroeder. In the background, a place identified as Konar Province loomed like an inhospitable moonscape.

“The first time I went over to work at his place. I came across some celebrity magazine and made the connection. He didn’t even try to deny it. Told me everything right away.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I promised I wouldn’t. I gave him my word.”

And, of course, it wasn’t up to Callie to inform Kate that the man she loved was hiding his identity from her. That was JD’s job, and he hadn’t done it.

She clenched her teeth and continued browsing through the information. Last Christmas Eve, a shocked nation had been informed that the Terror Alert had shot up to red, the highest possible category. The video loop was all over the nightly news, of course, and still photos were blazoned across the front pages of national newspapers. The incident had been meticulously analyzed, frame by frame, by various experts.

Eventually, when the motive behind the attack was discovered, the national sense of terror changed to a peculiar queasy sadness. The attacker was no foreign threat but one of their own. Terence Lee Muldoon was a football all-American in high school. He came from an impoverished family. Assured of a generous enlistment bonus, he had joined the military and received the U.S. Army’s most rigorous, extensive training to turn him into a member of a super-elite top-secret commando.

He should have had a long and distinguished career, defending the defenseless around the world. Instead, he fell victim to one of the Pentagon’s most cruel loopholes. Just a few months shy of his thirty-six-month obligation, Muldoon had been wounded while on assignment in the Middle East, losing a kidney in a vehicle accident, which rendered him permanently disabled. Even as he lay recovering from surgery, he had been informed that, because he’d failed to fulfill the terms of his enlistment, he would have to repay his bonus. His name had already been submitted to a collection agency.

Anyone could understand his fury. But no one could have predicted what he would do about it.

With spectacularly convoluted logic, Muldoon decided that his predicament was the fault of the President of the United States. A top-level operative, Muldoon planned his attack, intending to annihilate the Commander-in-Chief, a wing of the hospital and himself in a matter of seconds.

According to a special report in the
Washington Post,
he had no trouble getting the deadly plastic explosives by using falsified ordnance procurement papers.

“Narcissistic personality disorder” was what the expert analysts said of his utter confidence in arranging his own transport to Walter Reed on Christmas Eve. His timing was perfect, because, it was later discovered, he had gained access to the schedule and route of the President of the United States. Muldoon had made just one single miscalculation. There was something he had chosen to overlook about Walter Reed Army Medical Center. And that was that people like Jordan Donovan Harris worked there, military personnel as highly trained and dangerous as Muldoon himself.

As she and Callie browsed through the media reports and Web logs, it became clear to Kate why this incident had so captivated the nation. There were no ambiguities here, no mistakes or cover-ups, just a rogue soldier, a medic doing his job and a good outcome. Ultimately, the only blood spilled came from Muldoon and JD, and both men survived their wounds.

People loved it. They loved the pure drama of good triumphing over evil. And when the facts became known, they loved JD even more. His was the rags-to-riches story of American success. Raised in the Baltimore projects by a hardworking single mother—a detail that made Callie grumble with skepticism—he had a distinguished career in the U.S. Army as a medic for the Green Berets.
This meant he had all the skills of a Green Beret with something more, something that meant the difference between success and failure for his unit—the ability to save lives.

Overnight, the breathless media dubbed him the perfect American hero. Skilled, strong, smart, self-sacrificing and modest. And above all, in the right place at the right time. Across the nation, people subdued their Christmas celebrations, some even observing a moment of silence to pray for the recovery of Sergeant Harris. Some to this day believed the power of prayer had saved him, enabling him to wake from a coma and rise from his hospital bed. Others credited the Herculean efforts of a peerless surgical staff.

“If you’re going to throw yourself on top of a suicide bomber,” a hospital spokesman said in an interview, “you could pick no better place to do that than Walter Reed.”

“Where do these people come from?” Kate murmured.

“Keep reading,” Callie said. While Harris lay in a medically induced coma, the nation sat vigil. Churches and temples across the nation posted words of support and encouragement on their marquees: “God Bless Jordan Donovan.” Yellow ribbons took the place of Christmas ornaments and New Year’s spangles. Kate recalled reading a feature in the paper and feeling profoundly thankful that there were men like this in the world.

She was still thankful. Privileged, even, that she knew him. Yet at the same time filled with an ache of sadness. The very fact that he was a hero had become the wedge that drove them apart.

“It’s weird, seeing all this stuff,” Callie said. “It’s about him, but it’s not him.”

“In the press, you get an impression of the person. Not the person himself.” Kate knew then that it didn’t matter what she had written about Callie. Readers of the article would never know this girl, not really. Maybe that was what JD had been trying to tell her.

“I’m tired,” said Callie. “I’m going to bed. You should keep reading, though. Read about what happened to his mother. Then you’ll see why he didn’t want anyone to know who he was.”

Callie went to bed, but Kate was still restless, reading a seemingly endless variety of material about him. Jealousy burned in her gut as she read that he’d had a girlfriend named Tina, a congressional aide who disclosed everything from his affinity for blue crab to his sexual appetites, and whose dating book became a hot seller. I hope he dropped you fast and hard, Kate thought. And sure enough, just like Callie said, she learned that he’d survived a nightmare childhood with a woman who hadn’t been any sort of mother at all. Janet Harris had embraced the spoils of her son’s fame, but then it had been her downfall. She’d slid back into her old habits and, according to more than one recent report, she had checked into a clinic in Southern California.

Kate’s e-mail flag popped up. The message was from an unfamiliar sender, yet as soon as she saw the photo, she remembered. It felt like a lifetime ago that she and JD had ridden the ferry like any young lovers, posing while a stranger had snapped their picture. Now that she understood what he’d been hiding, she recognized the tension in his face, his discomfort in front of the camera.

“It was a privilege to meet you and Jordan,” the woman had written.

True, thought Kate. It was. Before she met JD, she thought she knew what loneliness felt like. Now she realized she hadn’t a clue.

A
t 5:45 a.m., the phone began to shrill in Kate’s ear. Spoiled by the low-tech solitude of the lake, she practically fell out of bed as she reached for the receiver, bidding goodbye to a perfectly good dream.

“Sorry to wake you,” said her sister-in-law, Barbara, calling from the East Coast. “I thought you might want to know that you’re on
Good Morning America.
”

Kate sat straight up in bed, the last vestiges of sleep doused by mortification. “What?”

“
GMA.
I’m sure it’ll air out there, too. Go find a TV and check it out.”

“What on earth—”

“So is he there now?”

“Is who…” Finally Kate’s head cleared. “You mean JD.”

“Is that what you call him? God, Kate, how long have you been together?”

Not long enough. “Tell me what you saw.”

“First, it was all about the guy—Sergeant Harris. There was a clip from Seattle showing him doing CPR.
Then some stuff about how he disappeared from the public eye for a few months. Tabloids said he was taping a reality show. That he’s the next ‘Bachelor’ and you’re the one he picked.”

The thought of a TV bachelor show made Kate shudder. “He was at the lake,” she explained. “He was using the Schroeders’ cabin.”

“Incredible. Kate, I can’t believe you didn’t tell us.”

I can’t believe he didn’t tell me. She couldn’t bring herself to admit that she’d been duped by him. It was no family secret that she was unlucky in love, but this went beyond unlucky. This just made her look…dense.

In the background, sounds of Barbara’s family could be heard—running feet, children’s voices, laughter. Barbara covered the receiver to tell them to pipe down. With four kids, an uninterrupted phone conversation simply didn’t happen.

“So on the news, they showed him getting in the car with you,” Barbara said. “How cool is that?”

“Must be a slow news day.” Kate shoved her feet into a pair of scuffs and put on her terry-cloth robe, which had seen better days but was still comfortable. She gave Barb the briefest, simplest version of events she could summon before having her first cup of coffee. As she spoke, she shuffled downstairs and put on the pot.

“So what’s he like?”

Gone, Kate thought. That’s what he’s like. She knew she wouldn’t be able to get that out without falling apart. “Quiet,” she said, sifting through memories of him. From the first moment she laid eyes on him, he had shown her exactly who he was. She just hadn’t picked up on it. He was a rescuer, whether that meant bailing a stranger out at the grocery store, befriending a troubled little boy, making love to a lonely woman or saving someone’s
life. At least he hadn’t been able to hide his authentic self completely. But he’d hidden enough to fool her.

That, of course, was the operative word—fool. He’d made a fool of her.

And oh, she had loved every minute of it.

“Nitwit,” she muttered.

“What’s that?” Barb asked.

“Nothing,” said Kate. She’d practically forgotten she was still on the phone. “Just thinking aloud.”

“Well, I can’t wait to meet him,” Barb declared. “He just seems too good to be true.”

“Oh, he is that.” It was too early in the morning to explain the whole summer. She felt raw and confused, far from ready to discuss this with anyone. “Listen, do you suppose I could call you back later?”

After they said goodbye, Kate busied herself with mundane things—putting away the dishes, filling the dog’s bowl with fresh water, taking out last night’s trash. She tried to focus on getting things done today—making the final arrangements for Callie, getting her registered for school and driver’s ed. The end of summer was closing in fast. After that, all that remained was to return to the lakeside cottage and close it up for the season.

Later, Aaron and Bandit came downstairs to troll for breakfast. “Morning,” he mumbled. He seemed pale to her, and subdued. He looked like the shy, unhappy boy he’d been at the beginning of summer.

“Hey, kiddo,” she said, holding the bag of trash. “Get that door for me, will you?”

Aaron pushed open the back door. Bandit shot out first. Though not usually a noisy dog, the beagle immediately started barking.

“Hush, Bandit, you’ll wake the neighbors,” Kate
said, stepping out to the driveway, where the trash cans were kept.

A flash went off in her face. Something—a microphone—jabbed at her and a chorus of questions filled the air, the words running together like a chant in a foreign language.
Miss Livingston or is it Mrs. are you married is that Sergeant Harris’s love child how long have you known him did he really leave the service we just have a few questions….

Kate dropped the sack of garbage. Wet coffee grinds and eggshells sprayed across the asphalt. She clutched Aaron’s hand and they froze, pinned by terror like Bambi and his mom in the crosshairs. In a blur of panic, she called desperately for the dog. The flashing cameras recorded her open mouth, her uncombed hair, the frayed bathrobe.

A reporter with big shoulders and a tape recorder broke free of the pack. “Give us a break, hon. This is our living here,” he said.

“You’ve made a big mistake,” she managed to say. “There’s no story here. There’s nothing at all.”

“Bullshit,” the guy said. “Everybody’s got a story.”

She winced at his language, moved closer to Aaron. “Maybe. But mine’s not anything people would want to read. Go away. Go hunt down an actual celebrity and let me get back to my life.” Fortunately, Bandit returned on command. She ducked inside, yanking Aaron along with her. After she slammed the door shut, she leaned against it, breathing hard.

“Are you all right?” she asked Aaron.

“Are you kidding?” He grinned and went to peer out the window. “That was awesome.”

Kate looked at the phone on the table and contemplated calling 911. Ultimately, though, she simply closed
all the drapes and made Aaron stay inside until it was time for their meeting at CPS to submit the final papers for Callie and register her at school. Kate was jumpy, taking a circuitous route on their errands and glancing in the rearview mirror every few seconds to see if they were being followed.

The early-morning ambush in front of her house had been but a taste of what JD had endured for months, she realized. It explained why he had left his life in Washington, D.C., fleeing to escape the public eye. However, it did not explain why he had left her.

“Mom, where’s wedlock?” Aaron asked.

“Why do you ask?” She felt distracted. It had been a long week. JD hadn’t called. Her heart was on the floor and her life was in turmoil.

“Well, it says in
Star Tracks
that you had me out of there.” He turned the paper toward her. “Right here. It says, ‘Katherine Livingston had a baby out of wedlock…’ Does that mean you were locked out of a wedding or something?”

“Give me that.” She snatched the paper from him and put it in the trash. “Don’t pay attention to any of that stuff,” she said.

She was sick to her stomach. This had gotten out of hand and she had no control over it. What a terrible, terrible object lesson, she thought. She had always imagined what it was like to be the reporter chasing the story—exhilarating, sometimes even important. As a fashion writer for a minor paper, she had dreamed of it, aspired to it. Now she knew the vile feeling of seeing herself in a ratty bathrobe in the newspaper’s gossip section, clutching the hand of her bewildered-looking son.

Strangers contacted her by phone, by e-mail, by
showing up at her house. Most were harmless curiosity seekers, but a few genuinely creeped her out, like the guy asking her to give him a pair of panties. Reporters dug up dirt on her—she’d had a baby out of wedlock. Her grandfather was a sixties radical and she’d been fired from her last job.

Perhaps worst of all was the phone call from Callie’s caseworker. An Internet blog speculated that Callie was on drugs, just like Harris’s mother. Kate was outraged, but worse than that, powerless. She realized that if she engaged in the debate, people would assume she took the charges seriously. If she ignored them, some would say it was because the charges were true. There were e-mails from her editor, wanting the inside scoop. Kate was ready to tear out her hair. One day, a call came in from Callie’s caseworker. She had concerns about placing Callie in Kate’s care. She wasn’t sure all this media attention would be good for Callie.

“It’s not good for anyone,” Kate agreed. JD’s words came back to haunt her:
I never wanted any of this, and I promise you, Kate, you don’t want it, either.

And in the end, she did exactly what he had done. Chased by a notoriety she did not want, she fled to the lake.