Sentimental Journey (67 page)

In the C Ward, he found the room number and quietly opened the door.

Cassidy’s wife was sitting by the bed talking softly.

He waited for her to finish, then asked, “How is he?”

She turned when he spoke. Her face was red and wet from crying.

“I hurt like hell,” Cassidy rasped, and opened his eyes. “How come that kid hit me so damn many times and missed you?”

“Clean living. Have you seen Charley?”

“She was just here a minute ago,” Kitty said to him. “She walked outside with the doctor.”

“Excuse me . . . I have to find her.”

Cassidy looked at him.

He met that look for a fraction of a second, then wordlessly left the room.

A doctor came out of the next room and turned, looking down at a chart. He started to make notes.

“I’m looking for a woman.”

The doctor looked up.

“Tall, blonde.”

“Miss Morrison?”

“Yes. Have you seen her?”

“She left. Through those doors and toward the exit. If you hurry you should be able to catch her.”

“Thanks.” He ran past the doctor and through the swinging doors.

She was at the other end of the hall, her hand on the exit door.

“Charley!”

She turned and looked at him. “Oh! I’m so glad you’re here. I thought you might have been with J.R.”

He didn’t stop running until he was in front of her. “I’m glad I caught you.” He paused, looking at her face and trying to find the words. “Let’s go sit down and talk.”

“What? Why?” For a mere second she looked confused, then her expression changed suddenly. “Oh, God. No . . . ” She put her hand out, palm toward him. “Red? Where’s Skip?” She was looking into his eyes with a pleading look. “He wasn’t with Cassidy.”

“He didn’t make it, Charley. They shot the plane down before he could get out.”

“Oh, my God . . . Oh, my God . . . ” There was such a harrowing look of human pain on her face that keeping his own void of emotion almost killed him.

She reached out toward him, then suddenly pulled back, shaking her head, her hand still out almost warding him off. “No . . . ” She looked unsteady, teetering like someone old and disoriented.

He wasn’t certain if he should reach out and steady her or hold her. He wanted to do something. Instead he did nothing but stand there.

She put her hand on the wall, straight-armed, as if it were all that was holding her up. She was staring down at the ground, her breathing labored, then she just melted onto the floor, huddled there, pulling her legs to herself. The sound she made was the worst thing he’d ever heard.

He sat down with her, beside her, wrapped his arms around her and pulled her against him, rocking her. “I’m sorry . . . ”

Her fists hit his shoulders, not hard, but with each whispered “No . . . No . . . No . . . ”

He rested his chin on her head and held her even tighter. “I’m sorry . . . Charley, I’m so sorry.”

“ALONE”

TWO MONTHS LATER

She was down by the lake at Keighley near the broad and ancient elm trees that had survived generations of wars and politics. The wild ducks were noisy, but the swans wonderfully quiet. Charley was sitting on the grass, cross-legged, as she watched those swans glide over the lake. She liked the way they moved, smooth and effortlessly, like a plane in the sky on a clear, aquamarine day.

They were black swans. Somehow black swans, like black roses, were right for this place. Not because they were the color of mourning. They were the color of his hair.

She picked up a basket of freshly cut flowers, bright yellow and red, and filled the grave next to his. Graves without flowers looked sorrowful, lost, or even worse . . . they looked forgotten.

Isn’t that the reason for a marker? It’s not so you know where someone’s buried in the ground. After all, the soul, the thing that matters, well, it isn’t there anymore. It’s out there somewhere in “the Grand Scheme of Things.” Perhaps that place is called Heaven.

Perhaps that place is called Hell. Or perhaps, the soul is like a hundred fireflies on a summer night, scattering light, just small bits of it, here and there in the memory and the hearts of the ones left behind.

The reason you mark the earth with a gravestone is to say: this person was here.

Charley adjusted the black roses. She needed them to look perfect. Fussy. She was being fussy. She glanced up. Audrey stood at the garden doors. For a moment Charley thought she might walk down the path.

Kitty had been Skip’s answer for his mother. Everyone who mattered understood that for Audrey, losing her eyesight was like a raindrop in a hurricane compared to losing her son. Her suffering was deeply horrific.

So many mothers’ sons were dead on the front lines, or worse yet, buried beneath blank white crosses, their parents never knowing where they were, the sons now only a name typed in black ink on a list in some government office.

Why was it that people didn’t know what to say to those left behind? Their voices, their choice of words, always felt grating, like a record played on the wrong speed. All the words in all the human languages in all the world were too trivial to comfort a loss that was so deeply personal.

But she and Audrey walked together sometimes, feeling an unspoken closeness in their shared grief and love of the same man. The sounds here by the lake and in the gardens, the life outside, free and open, helped Audrey exist in a world where mothers outlived their sons.

The doors opened wider and her father came outside to stand beside Audrey. He smiled and waved to her. She waved back and watched him lean down to speak to Audrey, before they went inside.

Charley stood and dusted the grass and dirt from her skirt, then moved over to sit down on a bench setting in the sunshine, surrounded by flower beds, a sundial, and stone birdbath; it was the kind of place where grandmothers let children sit on their laps.

She heard the crunch of steps on the gravel path behind her and turned around.

Red stopped with a suddenness that said he was afraid to come closer.

“Hi.” She smiled. “Come here. The sunshine is wonderful.”

Red walked toward her in that loose-limbed, Southern walk of his, hands and feet moving different ways all at once. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

She scooted over and patted the stone seat. “Sit.”

He sat down and stretched out his legs, his hands resting between them.

She turned her face upward. “The sun feels good.”

He looked up, then she could feel him looking at her.

“Kitty told Audrey about this wonderful quote from Helen Keller. She said, ‘Turn your face toward the sunshine and you’ll never see the shadow.’ “

“Does it work?”

“Sometimes.”

Red seemed to understand. He sat there quietly, companionably. A mallard took off, and three others followed. A breeze ruffled past, and she wiped the hair away from her face.

“Charley?”

“Hmm?”

“I need to ask you something.”

“Go ahead. Ask away.”

“I want you to marry me.” He blurted it out awkwardly.

She turned away from the sunshine and looked at him. “That wasn’t a question.”

“I didn’t do that the right way.” He sounded disgusted with himself.

“Someone told you I’m pregnant.”

“I would marry you in a heartbeat, baby or no baby.”

“Let me guess who it was. J.R., right?”

“Listen to me. Please. I would love your child. I’d be a good father.”

“Oh, Red, you are a good man, and I know you would be a great father to any child.” She placed her hand on his arm. “I love you for what you just asked, and even more for what you are willing to give up for me and my baby.”

“I’m not giving up anything.”

“I loved Skip. I still love him.” She kissed his cheek. “Thank you, but I can’t do that.”

He didn’t say anything for a long time. “I thought you might say that.” He took a deep breath and exhaled. “I still had to ask.”

They sat there shoulder to shoulder in the bright sunshine. Friends, perhaps more than friends.

“I might be nuts to do this,” she said in a half-laugh. “I sure don’t know anything about raising a child alone.”

“You’re not alone.” He put his arm around her shoulders. “No matter what happens, you’ll never be alone.”

“COME
FLY
WITH ME”

OCTOBER 11, 1968

I am my father’s son, not merely in name but in nature, or so they tell me. I never knew my father. He exists for me only as a character in a thousand stories—tales that are quite possibly taller than the man— and in a few faded black-and-white photographs.

But I see him in the mirror when I shave in the morning. Every so often I catch a glimpse of him that has nothing to do with muscle and blood and bone, only a fleeting bittersweet look in my mother’s eyes. It was years before I understood that look for what it was: just one small second in a lifetime of hours, days, weeks, months, and years, where I have done something that instantly reminds her of him.

With my grandmother it’s different. For her, my mother says I have replaced him, that losing him was more than even a strong woman like Audrey could accept. I, too, am called Skip, and lately, sometimes she forgets which one she’s talking to.

When I was a child, she was my favorite person in the world. She always recognized my footsteps. No matter what else was going on around her, she knew when I was in the room. She was a young woman, not even fifty when I was born. She is blind. The blast from a bomb during the Blitz took her eyesight, but I have always been amazed at what she, a woman who has lost her sight, can see.

We had a deal, she and I, for the times when I would visit her. She loves the outdoors, breathing in the fragrance of her complex English gardens or the arid, stark simplicity of the New Mexican desert. I was probably only four or five when we decided that I would be her eyes for those long walks in the English country or the Southwest, those moments when it was only the two of us. She, in turn, passed on to me the stories of my father’s life he was not there to tell, stories as stark as white chalk against the blank paternal slate of my child’s mind. It was my grandmother who gave me the strongest sense of both the boy and the man my father was.

Audrey is my only grandmother, both paternal and maternal. Yes, that’s right. My father’s mother married my mother’s father. My grandfather claims that she did so just to create confusion for a future generation, for some poor bored relative with an interest in genealogy, whose purpose in life will be to document where we all have come from in the hope of finding out who they are.

My grandfather is Robert Morrison, a legend in aviation design, a man who knows exactly what he wants and has never been afraid to go after it. He showed me this impossible world is full of possibilities. “Who,” he always says, “would have thought a man could fly?”