Where Love Has Gone (4 page)

“You could love her. And you did.”

“Yeah, I loved her,” I said bitterly. “That was a big help. A fat lot of good I am to her even now. Still broke, still scratching.” I could taste the bile rising in my throat. “I should never have let Nora have her!”

“What could you have done?”

“Taken her and run,” I said. “I don’t know. Anything.” “You tried that once.”

“I know,” I said. “I was broke and I was a coward. I thought it took money when all that Dani really needed was love.”

I turned to look at her. “Nora never loved her. Really, I mean, Nora had her work and Dani was just something to have around when she wasn’t in the way. But if there was any inconvenience, off she went to her grandmother’s or I’d take her down on the boat. And you know the topper to the whole story?”

She shook her head.

“Dani was always so glad to see her mother,” I said. “She was always trying to make up to her. And Nora would just give her an absent-minded pat on the head and go on with whatever she was doing. I would watch the child coming back to me with a kind of sad expression on her face underneath the baby laughter and it was all I could do to keep from crying.”

Tears were welling up in Elizabeth’s eyes. I felt her move closer to me. “You were her father,” she whispered gently. “You couldn’t be her mother too. No matter how hard you tried.”

The loudspeaker over our heads blared again. “American Airlines, Astrojet Flight 42 to Denver and San Francisco now loading at Gate 4.”

I rubbed by neck. Suddenly I was tired. “That’s us,” I said. “I guess it is, Daddy.”

I looked at her in surprise. It was the first time she had ever called me that. She smiled. “You’ll have to get used to it again.”

“That won’t be hard.”

We started to go back inside. “You’ll let me know when you arrive?”

“I’ll phone myself person-to-person from San Francisco. If you don’t have anything to tell me,

say I’m not there. That way we’ll save the cost of a call.” “What could I possibly have to tell you?”

I put my hand on her stomach.

She laughed. “Don’t worry, I won’t have the baby until you come back.” “That’s a promise?”

“That’s a promise.”

There weren’t many people around Gate 4 by the time we got there. Most of the other passengers had already gone aboard. I kissed Elizabeth goodbye and gave the passenger agent my ticket.

He looked at it, stamped it, tore the top section off and gave it back. “Go right on through, Mr.

Carey.”

I didn’t get off the plane at Denver to stretch my legs as the stewardess suggested. Instead I sat in the lounge and had a cup of coffee aboard. It was hot and black and I could feel its steaming warmth creep down inside me and loosen up the muscles in my gut.

Six years. A long time. Many things could happen in six years. A child could grow up. She could be a young lady now. High heels and bouffant skirts. Pale, almost colorless, lipstick, and green or blue eye shadow, and that funny pile-up of twisted hair on top of her head, like an artichoke, that would make her look taller. She would appear very mature until you saw her face, and only then would you realize how young she really was.

Six years is a long time to be away from home. The child you left behind could grow and be many things that you never wanted for her. Like her mother. Six years and your child could grow up to

—

murder?

I heard the cabin door lock and the lights flashed on. I ground out my cigarette in the tray and fastened my seatbelt. The stewardess came back and gave me an approving nod, then went about her task of checking the rest of the passengers.

I looked at my watch. It was four thirty Chicago Time. I set it back two hours. Now it was two thirty Pacific Coast Time.

I smiled to myself. It was so easy. Just turn back the clock and you’ve got the two hours to live all over again. I wondered why, if it was so easy, no one had invented a machine that would do it for the years.

I could turn the clock back six years and Danielle would not be where she was tonight. No, I’d turn it back almost fifteen years, back to the night she was born. I remembered those hours in the hospital. It was just about this time of the night and Nora had just come down from the delivery room.

“Don’t stay too long,” the doctor said as I started into her room. “She’s very tired.” “When can I see the baby?”

“In ten minutes. Just tap on the nursery window. The nurse will show you your baby.”

I stepped back into the corridor and closed the door behind me. “I’ll see the baby first. Nora will want to know what she looks like. She’ll be angry if I can’t tell her.”

The doctor looked at me quizzically, then shrugged. It wasn’t until a long time later that I learned that Nora wouldn’t even look at the baby up in the delivery room.

When the nurse rolled up the shade and held up my daughter, I flipped. With her tiny red screwed-up face and glistening black hair and little fingers tightened into angry little fists … I flipped.

Something inside me began to ache and I could feel all the pain of being born, all the shock that that tiny body had known in the last few hours. I looked down at her, and I knew even before she opened her eyes and then her mouth what she was going to do. We were in tune, we were on the same wavelength, we were like locked-in to each other, and she was mine and I was hers. We went together and belonged together. And the tears came to my eyes for the tears she could not shed.

Then the nurse rolled down the shade and suddenly I was alone. Alone as if I were standing at the edge of the sea and a wave of dark night flooded over me. I blinked my eyes for a moment and I was back in the corridor of the hospital.

I knocked at Nora’s door softly. A nurse opened it. “May I see her now?” I whispered. “I’m her husband.”

With that peculiar look of tolerance that nurses seem to reserve for fathers, she nodded and stepped aside. “Don’t be too long.”

I walked over to the bed. Nora seemed to be sleeping, her black hair spread across the white pillow. She seemed pale and tired and somehow more frail and helpless than I had ever imagined she could be. I leaned over and kissed her gently on the forehead.

She didn’t open her eyes but her lips moved. “Up the oars. The Free French Navy will never say

die.”

I looked at the nurse across the bed and smiled. I put my hand on Nora’s lying on the sheet, and

pressed it lightly.

“The Free French Navy will never say die.”

The nurse was smiling now. “The pentothal, Mr. Carey,” she said. “Sometimes it makes them say funny things.”

I nodded and pressed Nora’s hand again.

A strange look of fear crossed Nora’s face. “Don’t hurt me, John!” she whispered hoarsely. “I’ll do anything you want! I promise. Only don’t hurt me!”

“Nora!” I said quickly. “Nora! It’s me. Luke.”

Suddenly her eyes opened. “Luke!” The faint shadow of the fear disappeared. “I was having a terrible dream.”

I put my arm around her. Nora was always having terrible dreams. “It’s all right, Nora,” I

whispered. “Everything’s all right now.”

“I dreamed someone was breaking my hands! I couldn’t stand that. You know I couldn’t! Not my hands. Without them I would be nothing!”

“It was just a dream,” I said. “Just a dream.”

She raised her hands and looked at them. Long and slim and graceful. She looked up at me and smiled. “Aren’t I silly? Of course they’re all right.” She closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

“Nora,” I whispered. “Don’t you want to hear about the baby? She’s a little girl, a wonderful, beautiful little girl. She looks like you.”

But Nora didn’t move. She was asleep.

I looked at the nurse. This wasn’t the way it should have been. It was never like this in books.

I guess the nurse noticed the puzzled look on my face, because she smiled sympathetically. “It’s the drug.”

“Sure,” I said. And I walked out into the corridor.

I glanced out the plane window. I thought I could see the haze of light from the city far into the front of the plane. San Francisco.

It would not be enough to turn the clock back fifteen years. That wouldn’t have stopped anything.

Twenty years would be more like it.

1942. Summer. And the battered P-38 that I was flying screaming down into the wind as I dived at the funnels of the gray-black Jap battleship. I had a sudden and strange urge. Like dropping the bombs but not pulling back on the stick afterward, following them into the funnels of the warship and dying in the cool sea with it.

Then there would be no Air Medal, no Silver Star, no Purple Heart. Maybe there would be a

C.M.H. like they gave Colin Kelly, who had done the same thing a short while before. There would be no hospitals afterward, no hero’s tour, no bond drives, no publicity.

Because then there would be no me and I wouldn’t be coming to San Francisco now as I came to San Francisco then. For I would be dead and I never would have met Nora and Danielle would never have been born.

Almost twenty years. And maybe even that would not have been enough. I was so young then. I was tired. I closed my eyes for a moment.

Please, God, give me back the time.

PARTTWO

The Part of the Book

About NORA

1

__________________________________________

It is trite, but it is true. Time lends perspective. When you are trapped in the emotions of the present, you cannot really see because you are like a leaf driven before the autumn winds by the demons that possess you. Time dulls and sometimes kills the demons of love and hatred leaving only the tiniest thread of its memory so that you can peek through the keyhole to the past and see much that you could not see before. I looked down from the window as the plane swung wide across the city to enter its landing pattern. I saw the lights of the city and the string of pearls that was its bridges and suddenly I realized that the pain and fear that had been mine at the thought of returning no longer existed. They lay dead in the past with the other demons that had possessed me.

At that moment I knew why Elizabeth had insisted that I come and I was grateful to her. She had chosen this way to exorcise my devils, so that I could once again be my own man, free of my guilts and tortures.

The reporters were there with their cameras but they were as tired as I at that early hour of the morning. After a few minutes they let me go. I promised them a full statement later in the day.

I went over to Hertz and rented the cheapest car they had, then drove into the city to a new motel they’d built on Van Ness, just across the street from
Tommy’s Joynt
. The room was small but comfortable in that antiseptic style that motels go in for.

I picked up the telephone and called Elizabeth. When I heard her voice, warm from our bed, as she told the operator I was not at home. I wanted to thank her. But the connection was broken before I could utter a word.

The morning was at the windows and I went over and looked out. North toward the hills in the gray mists I could see the tower of the Mark Hopkins rising to the sky. I tried to see beyond, a few blocks to the west, to a familiar white façade and an Italian blue stone roof. The house where I used to live. The house where, even now, Nora was probably sleeping. Sleeping in that strange dream-like peculiar world all her own.

From somewhere far off in the fog of dulled sleep, the telephone was ringing. Nora heard it and didn’t hear it. She didn’t want to. She pushed her face deeper into the pillow and her hands pressed it tighter against her ears. But the telephone still kept ringing.

“Rick! Answer it!” And the thought woke her. Because Rick was dead.

She rolled over and stared balefully at the instrument. Now its ringing came from far away and all she heard was the soft peal of the chimes that had been installed on her bedroom extension. Still

she made no move to answer it.

After a moment the chimes stopped and again the house was quiet. She sat up and reached out for a cigarette. The sedative the doctor had given her the night before still pounded dully in her head. She lit the cigarette and drew in deeply.

There was a click as the house interphone came on, bringing the voice of her butler. “Are you awake, Miss Hayden?”

“Yes,” she answered, without moving from the bed. “Your mother is on the phone.”

“Tell her I’ll call her back in a few minutes, Charles. And bring me some aspirin and coffee.” “Yes, mum.” The interphone clicked off, then a moment later clicked on again. “Miss Hayden?” “Yes?”

“Your mother says it’s very important that she speak with you immediately.”

“Oh, all right,” she said truculently. She reached for the telephone. “And, Charles, hurry with the aspirin and coffee. I have the most frightful headache.” Then, into the telephone: “Yes, Mother.”

“Nora, are you awake?” Her mother’s voice was bright and penetrating.

“I am now,” she answered resentfully. She didn’t know how her mother did it. She was well over seventy and her voice sounded as if she’d been awake for hours.

“It’s half-past six, Nora. And we expect you at seven. Mr. Gordon is already here.” “Is Luke there yet?”