Raising Rain (43 page)

They burst into the house and collapsed. Bobby clutched her until her mother came and pried her out of his arms, demanding to know
what was wrong. Bebe saw him turn away and wipe his eyes. She'd never seen him cry before. And although she didn't completely understand the danger at the time, she knew how the man had made her feel, and the fear it had struck in her family. And she felt beyond a doubt the depth of Bobby's love for her. She realized now that the anger her father displayed when he found out wasn't directed at her as she'd thought at the time, but was simply his reaction to fear. Somehow, her guilt over taking the spoon had blended into accepting a childish responsibility for the turmoil and the unspoken implications of the man's intentions.

Bebe gazed back toward the house at the boys tossing the football. Bobby had joined them, and the sun was beginning to dull and fade in the mauve horizon. The temperature dipped and the air grew chilly, just as it had always been out on the periphery of her family where she had lived most of her life.

She felt acutely her need for reconciliation—to prune the regret from her life, and to disk the undergrowth of guilt into the nourishing soil of forgiveness. Did she truly believe that God could heal her broken heart and that He wanted to dress her wounds? She'd held this healing at arm's length for too long, knowing she was forgiven, but refusing to allow Him access to her pain. It would feel so nice to let it go.

She slipped into the house to grab a jacket and came back out to where they were playing. Bobby noticed her standing on the sidelines, and surprisingly, gave her a small nod. After a few more passes, he excused himself from the game and came over to her. They stood looking directly at each other for the first time in years.

“C
an we talk, Bobby?” she asked.

He considered her for a moment, and then nodded toward the vineyard without malice or insolence. They walked down one of the rows with the silence surrounding them as they moved farther from the house. Bebe toyed with the ring on her necklace as they walked, and she saw the recognition in Bobby's eyes.

“I was remembering that time when I was playing out here and you saved me from the transient.”

He walked with his head down, watching his steps.

“Thank you.” She looked over at him and he looked back, nodding without answering. “I remember you went back and found my ring in the dirt when we were sure he was gone.”

He looked down to the end of the row. “Mom wasn't too happy about her spoon.”

“When she figured out I was okay, she paddled me good.”

“You couldn't have taken just any old spoon out of the kitchen drawer.”

Bebe chuckled grimly. “No, I had to use Oma's silver.”

Bebe felt encouraged that they were actually carrying on a normal conversation for the first time since she was in college. She plunged ahead.

“I owe you several apologies,” she said. “And I just realized the connection between them.”

She cleared her throat. “I think that, over the years, I've blamed you for some unfortunate choices that I made. Some situations I found myself in. They weren't your fault,” she hurried to say, “and I wasn't even aware at the time that I was doing it, but I guess I have been.”

He continued to walk, and she caught the small edge in his voice. “Like what?”

She took a deep breath. “Like leaving me at college. Realizing that I wasn't equipped to face the situation I was in, and not stopping me.”

His countenance grew dark, and he stopped. “I tried to make you go home with me, do you remember? What was I supposed to do, pick you up and throw you into the car?”

She raised her hands. “I know, I know. It wasn't your fault. That's what I'm saying. It was totally my choice. All of it. You did the right thing by leaving it up to me.” She folded her arms across her chest and continued to walk. He walked beside her.

“The things that happened, the choices that I made . . . they weren't all bad. Some of them really helped me to grow, although I wouldn't recommend them to anyone else. I think that for a long time, I saw you as my savior, and when you weren't there anymore, I lashed out.”

“Just how did you lash out?”

She stopped and plunged her hands into her pockets, screwing up her courage. She spoke to the ground at their feet.

“I was really angry at you for leaving and going to Vietnam.” She looked him in the face. “It doesn't make sense. You didn't have a choice. You just weren't there anymore. I was nineteen. I was in over my head with some things and I had no one I could trust to talk to about it. I was angry at the government. I was angry at Mom and Dad for not stopping you—I was angry at everybody. I didn't care about Vietnam. I only
wanted you to be safe again. We heard so many horrible stories, and I was afraid that you wouldn't come back, and that somehow God would punish you for the things that I did.”

He slowly began to walk again, and she kept pace with him.

“So I decided to protest the war, force them to bring the troops home. Make a difference. Except it was never about politics, it was about frustration. All it did was get my picture in the paper. That picture ruined everything.” She briefly closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she saw it all again. “It was like a switch was thrown. Like gasoline to a flame. It made me feel like I was really accomplishing something, and people rallied around like I was some kind of celebrity.”

“And then you stopped writing to me. At first, I thought you'd been wounded or . . . worse. But Rudy told me that you knew about the picture, and I figured I'd never hear from you again. I didn't blame you. It looked so bad and it was manipulated in a lot of ways that weren't true. And the protests in the news got worse and more violent. They turned into bombings, and Mom and Dad just assumed I was a part of all that, and they acted like I was dead to them for a long time. I didn't even know you were home from Nam until Rudy finally called me.”

Bobby was quiet for so long that Bebe wondered if he had moved beyond her reach. Finally, he spoke.

“We heard things were bad here. Crazy bad. When we got back to Oakland we were told to remove our uniforms and put on civilian clothes, and then told exactly what we could expect to find out there. But I just wasn't prepared. It couldn't be fixed.
I
couldn't be fixed. None of us deserved it.” He looked up at the sky and cleared his throat. “Neither did Cynthia.”

His brow furrowed and he cleared his throat again like he was struggling for control. They walked in silence.

He kicked a small stone. “And then, Scotty joins up.”

“Yes. Scotty, who knows nothing about any of this until he gets a copy of the clipping. I wrote him a letter, trying to explain it all. How the times were different then. But I still don't know how he feels about it.”

Bobby stopped and looked at her. She didn't know what he was going to say, or how he felt, or whether any of it had made sense or just sounded like an excuse. She just knew that she'd had to say it. She needed the closure, one way or another. She needed for the healing to begin.

He reached into his back pocket and pulled out his wallet. Opening it to the billfold, he pulled out the envelope she sent to Scotty with the letter explaining about the clipping.

“Scotty sent this to me and asked me to read it. Took me about a month before I could. Angie convinced me to read it.” His features softened into a gentle smile. “She's quite a woman. She said that she understood where you were coming from, because her ex was a Marine. You might have even bumped into her at a protest.”

He offered it to her, but she couldn't speak and just shook her head. He folded it back up and stuck it in his wallet. He stood looking at the purpling horizon and Bebe could see a bit of the younger Bobby that she used to know.

“She sounds like a good friend to have around.”

“She's helping me deal with some things.” He sniffed. “I sometimes blamed myself for what happened,” he said. “You know, I thought about going back for you that day. I almost turned around at Fairfield. I never told Mom and Dad. Things might have turned out different if I had. I was pretty mad at the both of us.”

“I couldn't have gone back home, Bobby. I needed to make my own decisions. Times were changing. Like I said, you weren't my savior. If I had, I wouldn't have married Neil, or had Scotty and Dylan and a job that I love. And I wouldn't have Rain.”

They turned around and headed back toward the house. The sun was almost gone and the air carried the scent of wood smoke.

“I always wondered about Rain. I figured she was yours, and you were just keeping it a secret from the family.”

She chuckled. “No. Jude is her real mother, although I loved her like my own.”

He scratched his head. “I gotta tell you, I could never see her as a mother.”

“She wasn't a very good one, but she didn't have a very good example, either.”

They got to the end of the row and paused, turning to face each other and considering all that had gone on between them. She hoped he wouldn't reconsider later. Over thirty-five years of anger doesn't dissolve in one conversation.

“So, what do you think?” she asked him, feeling vulnerable and thin as tissue. “Can we call it a truce?”

He looked down on her, and a small smile softened his face. “Truce, little sis.”

Rain had gone to Lisa's house for Christmas Eve, simply because she couldn't come up with a plausible excuse at the time when Lisa had invited her. It turned out that it was a setup with her cousin who was divorced and had custody of his two kids. When the evening finally ended, after the twin boys knocked over a pedestal by running through the house in a frenzy and almost set fire to her carpet, Lisa apologized to her and said it would never happen again.

Rain spent Christmas Day with her mother and William, but drove home on Christmas night over the protests of William who offered to let her stay in his room. She couldn't stay in the house any longer, and she needed to go to work the next day. It had been awkward between herself and Jude, and disappointing since they didn't celebrate the holiday, even though William made a fabulous pork tenderloin and tried to make the dinner special. Her mother had slept most of the day, and suffered from nausea, so Rain and William ate alone. Her medications weren't quite enough anymore to take the edge off of her pain.

She wished now that her mother had never had the idea about the Celebration and had been content to just enjoy the rest of her time. Now their tenuous relationship was strained again, and they were back to square one.

Rain pulled into her garage and let Noah inside. She breathed a sigh
of relief that the holiday was finally over, but what a horrible way to think about Christmas. Would it be like this every year, she wondered? She hadn't spent the holiday alone for eight years, and she didn't like it very much.

She noticed that her answering machine light was blinking, and she pushed Play. She recognized Hayden's voice immediately.

“Hello. Rain. I tried your cell phone, but didn't have any luck reaching you. You must be out. Just wanted to wish you a merry Christmas and . . . well . . . Merry Christmas.'Bye.”

She grabbed her cell phone and saw that she had missed a call, but he hadn't left a message. She played the answering machine again, dissecting the message for any nuance of hidden meaning.

Should she call him back, she wondered? It was eleven o'clock. Would she seem desperate if she called him back so late? She decided to send him an e-mail instead. She thanked him for calling and said she had been at her mom's.

Could it be that he missed her, too?