When We Meet Again (26 page)

“I’m fine, Emily. Don’t worry.” He smiled slightly. “Travel takes a toll on you when you’re almost seventy.”

“Okay,” I said uncertainly. “Is there anything I can do? In terms of your cancer?”

“You can stop worrying.”

“I don’t think I can do that. Get some rest, okay?” We agreed to talk on Monday and gave each other an awkward hug good-bye as we headed in separate directions to claim our cars.

At home, I went through my stack of mail, dashed off a quick note to Ingrid Gaertner’s P.O. box address, watered the herb garden out back, and called Myra. She had left two messages on my cell, the first inviting me to dinner, the second asking where I’d disappeared to.

“Wait, I’m sorry, you went to Germany without telling me?” she asked after I’d briefly explained the story. “With
your father
? Otherwise known as Satan’s spawn?”

The words rubbed me the wrong way, even though she’d obviously gotten the sentiment from me. “He’s actually not so bad.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You
like
your long-lost dad now?”

I hesitated. “It doesn’t change anything that happened, of course. But he keeps apologizing. I think he genuinely realizes that he made some serious mistakes, and he’s sorry for them.”

Myra snorted. “Too little, too late. Am I right?”

“I don’t know. It would be easier that way, that’s for sure. But maybe he deserves another chance.” I paused and added, “He’s sick. Cancer.”

“Oh.” Myra sighed. “Geez, I’m sorry. That’s sad. It isn’t terminal, is it?”

“He said no. But it’s liver cancer.”

She whistled, low and slow. “That’s not good.”

“I know.”

We were silent for a minute. “So is that it, then? You forgive him?”

“No. But I’m trying.”

“Well. I guess that’s a good thing,” Myra said.

“Is it?” I paused, trying to find the words for what I was feeling. “You don’t think I’m betraying my mom?”

“Your mom?”

“He left her, Myra. Regardless of why or how it happened, he hurt her badly. And even if he can somehow make it up to me now, he can never make it up to her. Am I letting her down by even considering forgiving him?”

She was silent for a moment. “Do you think she’d be happy to know you’re walking around with all this anger toward him?”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled.

“Well, I’ll tell you this. If Jay ever left me, I’d be worried about him hurting Samantha one day too,” she said slowly. “But I wouldn’t ever, ever feel like Samantha owed it to me to be as pissed at her dad as I was.”

“Why?”

“Because it would be a burden she wouldn’t deserve,” Myra replied. “It’s fine if she wants to be mad at him for her own reasons. But a child should never have to fight a parent’s battle. I don’t think your mom would have wanted that for you either. Besides, you were just a kid when they split, right? How do you know your mom didn’t already find a way to forgive him and move on?”

“I don’t know.” I wasn’t convinced.

“My advice? Worry about how you feel, not about how your mom may or may not have felt. My guess is that if reconciling with your dad feels right to you, then maybe it’s what she would have wanted.” She hesitated, and then she changed the subject. “So tell me what you found out about your grandfather.”

I gratefully shifted along with her and recapped our visits to Munich, Atlanta, and Savannah. I didn’t tell her about Nick, because she’d never heard a thing about him before, and I didn’t have the energy to explain it now.

“So what next?” she asked.

“Next, I sleep,” I told her with a yawn. “Then, tomorrow, if you have time, I meet you for a drink, and you help me make sense of this.”

“Oh, sweetie, I can’t,” she said. “I have a barbecue I have to go to with Jay, and we have a thing with his parents on Sunday. Maybe sometime this week?”

“Sure.” We promised to see each other soon, but after we hung up, I felt lonelier than usual. I’d gotten accustomed to living in my own little world, which was fine most of the time. Not just fine, but safe. Yet after spending the past few days with my father—and after finally facing Nick after all these years—my bubble of solitude had been punctured.

Four hours later, it was just past one in the morning, and I’d been tossing and turning for an hour. It might have been the time difference from Germany, or it might have been the emotional storm that had been kicked up inside me, but either way, I couldn’t sleep. Silencing the voice of logic in the back of my mind, I picked up the phone and called Scott.

“Hey, beautiful!” He answered on the first ring. I could hear music in the background and a subtle slur to his voice. He was out drinking.

“Hey.”

“You back from your trip?”

“Yeah. I just got in tonight.”

I could hear someone shouting behind him, then laughter. “You feel like some company? I’m just down the street at Casey’s.”

I took a deep breath. It was why I had called, wasn’t it? I wanted to spend the night with someone who wanted me. I wanted to feel that sense of belonging. So why was it suddenly so hard to get the words out? “Sure, if you want to come over, that’d be great,” I said finally.

“Cool. I’ll be there in fifteen.”

Nearly an hour later, my doorbell rang. I hadn’t even bothered to fix my hair or put makeup on, which I usually did before Scott arrived, even in the middle of the night. I was glad to realize, as he strolled in with too-loose limbs, that he was too inebriated to notice my appearance anyhow.

“I missed you, baby,” he said, pulling me into his arms and nuzzling my neck.

When he let me go, I closed the door behind him. “Someone had a good night.”

“Just a few drinks with the guys, babe,” he said. “Dan was playing all these great hits from the nineties. I couldn’t leave when ‘Crazy for This Girl’ was on.”

“Evan and Jaron. Indeed, a classic.” I felt stilted and awkward, like I usually did when he came over drunk and I was sober.

“You know,” Scott said, dramatically waggling an eyebrow, “I think you’d be much more comfortable in fewer clothes.”

“Is that right?” I managed a smile.

He tugged at the hem of the oversized T-shirt I was wearing. “So what do you say we get this off you?”

I smiled, took his hand, and let him lead me toward the bedroom.

But five minutes later, as his hands were snaking under my shirt, and I could feel him breathing hard as he pressed against me, I abruptly stopped.

“I can’t,” I said, pulling away and sitting up.

“What?” He raked a hand through his hair and stared at me with a foggy expression.

“I can’t do this.”

“Baby, you’re going to have to give me a little more than that.”

I didn’t say anything.

“You drag me out of a bar when I’m having a good time, and now you stop me once you get me all excited?”

“I’m sorry.”

“I didn’t think you were such a tease.” He gave me a dark look as he grabbed his T-shirt from the foot of my bed.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “I’m not trying to be a tease. I just . . . I can’t do this. You don’t care about me, Scott. I’m just a convenient booty call.”

“
You’re
the one who called
me,
” he muttered to himself as he pulled his shirt back on. It was inside out, but I didn’t bother telling him, since he didn’t bother telling me that I wasn’t a booty call.

“This is a bad idea, you and me,” I said finally. “It’s not going to work.”

He shook his head and stood up. “You took the words right out of my mouth.” He walked out of my room without looking back, and a moment later, I heard the front door slam. I waited until he was long gone, and then I got up and locked it behind him.

As I crawled back into bed alone, I couldn’t quite believe I’d just done that. Scott was safe, convenient, someone who would never want too much from me but could be counted on from time to time to make me feel attractive.

But that wasn’t enough anymore.

I wanted what I’d once had with Nick. When you’re young, you think you’ll have a hundred opportunities to find the kind of love that fills you up, the kind of love that sustains you. But the reality is, you’re lucky to find it even once in a lifetime. It’s easy to turn a blind eye to reality, to make up a fairy tale in your head. But once you’ve felt real love, you know deep down when you’re faking it. You know when you’re lying to yourself.

The walls around me were crumbling, and it was time for the lies to end. I deserved better.

A
fter spending the next morning working on my assignment for
Seventeen
and crafting a pitch for an essay about the search for my long-lost grandfather, I left for a visit to Camp Blanding, which was now a National Guard base located between Gainesville and Jacksonville. Seventy years ago, it had housed one of Florida’s two main POW encampments, and it would have been the administrative center for Camp Belle Creek. My grandfather would have made a stop there—possibly for a few months—before being sent farther south to work in the sugarcane fields.

I’d made a midafternoon appointment with Geoff Brock, the man who ran the base’s small museum. They had a small exhibit on the POW experience and he’d said he might be able to fill in a few blanks for me, but that he didn’t have access to prisoner records. “It may not be worth the drive,” he’d added.

“No, it’ll be worth it,” I’d said firmly. “I want to understand everything I can about what it was like to be a German POW during World War II.”

I had two hours in the car to think about things, and as I drove, I kept mentally replaying my conversation with my father. I knew he was making an effort. I knew I was supposed to forgive him. And if I couldn’t find it in my heart to forgive, if not forget, the things he had done to me, how could I ever expect it of Nick?

Before I could second-guess myself, I picked up my phone to call my father’s cell.

“Emily?” He answered on the third ring. “Hang on, I’m in a meeting. Let me just step out for a second.”

“Oh, you went in to work today?” I had expected, especially with his illness, that he’d take at least a day off to recuperate after our whirlwind trip. I had to admit, I’d been worrying that I’d overtaxed him.

I could hear a door opening and closing, and then my father cleared his throat. “I’m out in the hall now. Yes, I had an important meeting today. I couldn’t miss it.”

“You should have said something. I could have handled Atlanta and Savannah on my own.”

“Honey, I’m sure you could have managed just fine, but I’m glad I was there with you. I wanted to be.”

I felt a rush of warm emotions. “I’m glad you were there too. But how are you feeling? I don’t think you should be pushing yourself like this.”

My father chuckled. “Thanks, Dr. Emerson. But I’m feeling okay. Don’t worry.” I could hear someone talking in the background, and my father asked me to hold on. When he returned, he sounded less warm than he had a moment before. “I’m sorry, Emily, but I’m going to have to let you go. Something came up that I need to handle immediately. Was there something you needed?”

“Oh. No. I’m just headed up to Jacksonville to talk to someone about German POWs, and I figured I’d tell you.” I felt strangely let down.

“Well, that sounds good.” He already sounded distracted. “Good luck. I’ll talk to you later, then.” And with that, he was gone, leaving me with the reminder that work would always come before me. It was pathetic that it still stung after all these years.

At just past three thirty, I pulled through the guard gate and into the parking lot of the Camp Blanding Museum. The long brick building was surrounded by a handful of mid-twentieth-century tanks and small airplanes, all of which were set up for display. Inside, I found Geoff, a middle-aged man with a buzz cut and deep-set green eyes, waiting for me in the entryway. “Ah, you must be Emily,” he said. “Right on time. Come in!”

He ushered me into the museum, where there was a large collection of old weapons as well as a model of what the barracks at the camp would have looked like in the 1940s. Most of the museum, I realized, was dedicated to telling the story of what life was like at Camp Blanding during World War II. And most of the camp had been geared toward the training of young military recruits; the POW camp was just a small portion of what had gone on here.

“Feel free to look around as much as you’d like,” Geoff said as we walked toward the back of the building. I glimpsed black-and-white photos of soldiers training in fields flanked by palm trees. “But I know you’re here specifically to inquire about our German guests in the 1940s. Would you prefer I just jump into a bit of that history, in the interest of time?”

“Sure,” I said, secretly grateful that I wouldn’t have to feign interest in a bunch of seventy-year-old guns.

“Well, I suppose I should begin by telling you that before the bulk of the German soldiers got here, Camp Blanding served as a holding camp for a small number of German nationals who had been living in Latin America.”

I gave him a confused look. “They were part of the military?”

“No. Just normal German civilians who had immigrated to Latin America. It’s a sort of strange part of our history here, but the truth is, the first prisoners at Camp Blanding really shouldn’t have been in prison at all. They were brought here without being convicted of anything, simply for being German. The government was afraid that there could be Nazi spies among them.”

I stared in disbelief. “Our government interned German civilians?”

“Of course everyone was treated very humanely—eventually, in fact, they were moved to special facilities in other states that were exclusively for civilians—but yes, it was a crazy time, and there were some crazy things happening.

“In any case, the first military prisoners arrived in the fall of 1942,” he continued. “They were naval boys from German U-boats at first, but by mid-1943, Camp Blanding was taking in German soldiers too. Actually, we were one of the only camps in the country to house men from the German navy, and when the army boys started coming, they were housed in completely separate barracks. You can see what the camp looked like here.”