Wild Orchids (44 page)

"Max!" She regained her balance and crawled toward him, half frightened of him in this state. But her love was stronger by far than her fear. She caught the arm that was bent at the elbow now as his hands covered his face, shaking it, calling his name, praying her voice would penetrate through the clouds of nightmare…

"Max!"

Her hands were still on his arm and slowly, so slowly at first she thought she might be imagining it, she felt the tension seep out of it. The agonized sound of his breathing slowed, steadied. Finally, his arms dropped to his sides, and his head turned. His eyes were wide and fathomless in the darkness as they focused on her.

"Lora."

"Oh, Max, are you all right?" She crawled close to him, and would have taken him in her arms, but he held her off, his hands on her shoulders.

"Did I hurt you? Scare you?" His voice was rough, but beneath the roughness was indescribable weariness.

"No, Max, no, darling. You didn't hurt me or scare me. You just had a nightmare, and I woke you."

"You mean I just turned into a raving maniac in my sleep." His voice was bitter. "My ex-wife used to run screaming into the bathroom and lock the door when it happened. I didn't blame her. Who knows, I might have hurt her one day. I might have hurt you."

"You didn't hurt me, and your ex-wife sounds like an idiot," Lora said hotly, the pain in his voice making her long for a few seconds alone with the woman who had hurt him so. She had a totally uncharacteristic longing to rake her nails down the lady's selfish face.

"She was a very nice girl. Believe me. Kind of like you that way. I seem to have this fatal attraction to nice girls…"

"There's nothing fatal about it. Here, darling, why don't we lie down? You're cold." She had managed to put her arms around him, and she could feel him shivering. She wasn't sure if it was cold or the aftermath of his nightmare, but she thought that either way he would be better off under the covers. In her arms…

Max let her push hi down onto his pillow and cover him with the disordered blankets. They she lay down as close beside him as she could get, her head on his chest, her arms around him. After the briefest of hesitations, his arms came around her, enfolding her tightly. He was still shivering…

"Max, can you tell me about it? About what happened at Mei Veng? That's what your nightmare is about, isn't it?"

He laughed, the sound a bitter breath on the artificially cool air. "Tunafish told you about it, didn't he? About Mei Veng. I'm surprised you don't think I'm a monster."

"I don't think you're anything of the sort. You're a man, that's all. A man who was caught up in a hellish situation and may have made a mistake. A man who has enough of a conscience to have tortured himself about it ever since. In my book, that doesn't make you a monster. Far from it."

"Oh, Lora, you're the best thing that's ever happened to me, do you know that? I had forgotten that girls as kind and decent as you exist."

"Tell me about the nightmare. Max. Please." She felt him quiver, and then he sighed. The sigh sounded very, very tired, as if he had been carrying his burden for a long time. Then he began to speak, his words halting and barely audible at times, his voice hoarse with emotion.

Chapter XXVI

"My father was a minister, you know. The Reverend John Thomas Maxwell. He was a good man, I suppose, but stem and strict with my older brother and me. When I was a little kid and knelt beside my bed at night to say my prayers, his was the face that would appear in my mind. I thought God must be like that—thin and bony-faced with a wide forehead and cold, blue eyes. And so good. He was always so good—a virtuous man. I always knew that I could never measure up to what God expected of me—and I could never measure up to what my father expected of me. They were pretty much the same to me then, I guess.

"He was a very patriotic man, and when Paul—that was my brother—graduated from high school he raised no objections to him joining the army instead of going to college. My father said there was plenty of time for college after Paul had served his country. I remember my mother cried when Paul left for boot camp. But she never tried to stop him. My mother never gainsaid my father in any way.

"After boot camp, Paul was immediately shipped off to 'Nam. I was a senior in high school myself, but unlike Paul—and my father—I was against the war. Actually, I knew very little about it, and my feelings weren't based on any kind of politics. Looking back now, I can see that proclaiming myself anti-war was a way of rebelling against my father. And it worked very well. I drove him crazy in those few months before I went off to college.

"Texas A & M had a very vocal anti-war group, and I joined them as soon as I walked on campus. I let my hair grow and carried anti-war signs and protested and had a fine old time driving my father around the bend. He got so he would scarcely talk to me, by the end of my sophomore year. All he could talk about was Paul. Paul had been decorated for bravery, Paul had been wounded and been awarded a purple heart, Paul was promoted to sergeant, Paul was coming home. Only Paul never made it home."

Max stopped talking, and Lora felt him take a deep, shuddering breath. She lay quietly, not moving, hoping to comfort him just by being a warm, sympathetic presence. And after a moment he started talking again.

"Paul was killed in October 1968. After that, everything changed. My father seemed to shrink. He became very quiet, no longer ranting endlessly about religion and patriotism and all those things. You know, I almost missed his shouting all the time. It was like he died with Paul. Or I did. My father never seemed to see me after that.

"My mother died a year later, almost to the day. October 17, 1969. I was twenty-one ten days later. The following May, I graduated from A & M with an engineering degree.

The next day, I joined the army. Three months after that, I was shipped off to 'Nam.

"Vietnam was a nightmare from start to finish. They say war is hell—they've never seen combat in 'Nam. From what I've heard of hell—and believe me, I heard a lot about it, growing up—it doesn't even come close. We were recon, I was the lieutenant and I didn't know shit about what I was supposed to be doing. Some of my men died because I didn't know what I was doing. I learned on the job, a hard way to learn when men's lives are at stake. But I learned… We were always scared. Scared to death. So scared we couldn't sleep even when we had the chance. We'd seen too many corpses who'd had their throats slit while they slept. All we wanted to do was stay alive and get the hell out of that damned country.

"Mei Veng was a tiny little village near the border of Laos. We'd had reports that they'd been harboring gooks. We went to check it out. God, I'll never forget that day as long as I live. It was a beautiful day in a beautiful country. If it hadn't been for all the killing that was constantly going on, 'Nam could have been a model for the Garden of Eden. It was gorgeous, the sun was shining, the sky was blue and the air was sweet—and out of one of those little huts came this baby in a diaper."

His voice cracked, and Lora longed to shush him. His pain made her ache. But he needed to talk, needed to share this nightmare that he had held inside him so long. Her arms tightened around him as she listened and wished she was not.

"They had planted a grenade in his diaper. He got right up to us—none of us was going to shoot a baby who could barely toddle—and the damned thing went off. The baby was blown to hell. Two of my men—Hardy and MacLaren, good guys both—were blown to hell with him. I was hit in the knee—funny, there was all this blood and I hardly even felt it, I've cut myself shaving and felt more pain. Another guy— Philip Winslow, he had just turned nineteen the day before— had his leg blown off. He lay there screaming that his leg hurt—and it lay off by itself about six feet away. He was clutching that damned stump and it was gushing blood and he was screaming. We were all screaming. Then a woman came running toward us out of the same hut the baby had come from. I don't know, maybe she was the kid's mother or maybe she was a Vietcong sympathizer—or both. I don't know. Harvey, one of the men, shot her. Tunafish was trying to help Winslow, and the rest of us were moving in on that hut. Another woman was in there, crying and trying to hide. Somebody shot her. Then—you know, I don't remember this very clearly—we were herding all these people out of the huts, old men and teenage boys and women and children and they were screaming and crying and calling out to us in their damn language and then one of the boys—he must have been about twelve—pulled a gun. We shot him. We shot them all. Every last one.

"You know what I hear in my nightmare? The sound of babies crying. I hear babies crying and I see all those people lying dead in the sunlight and I smell blood."

His voice was shaking, and Lora could feel the tremors that racked his body. She didn't know what to say to ease his pain, so she said nothing. She just held him tightly, closing her mind to the horror that he had described so graphically. Whatever had happened to him in Vietnam, whatever he had done or was done to him was a part of him now. It could never be changed or, she thought, forgotten. But he could learn to live with it. She would help him. Her love would help him.

"My dad died two months after I was sent home from 'Nam. I was in a VA hospital all that time, and I had only seen him once. I—never told him I loved him. And he never said he loved me. I did it all for him—and we were strangers. That hurts most of all."

This tortured confession was whispered. Lora reached up to stroke his cheek, not surprised at the dampness she encountered there. He was crying—Max, super-cool, super-confident, super-macho Max. Her heart ached for him.

"I'm so sorry, darling." It wasn't much, but it was all she could think of to say. She longed to comfort him, but there were no words to ease the pain he was suffering. He had to bear it, come to terms with it, live with it. "I'm so sorry."

She didn't even feel the tears running down her own cheeks. She only knew that she hurt, ached as if she had been kicked in the stomach, that her throat throbbed with suppressed tears. She moved, inching upwards so that she could lay her cheek against the warmth of his. Their tears joined and ran together down onto the pillow.

That was the way they fell asleep. When she woke up, she was alone.

"What happened to you?" Janice met her at the airport in Wichita, her blue eyes that were so like Lora's widening as she took in her sister's tanned face, sun-streaked hair and slimmer figure. "From what you said on the telephone, I expected you to be practically on your death bed. You look wonderful!"

"I don't feel wonderful," Lora assured her. Janice's carefully maintained blond hair was perfect as usual, and her slightly plump body was set off to advantage by the pale yellow cotton blouse and skirt she wore. Janice looked a lot like Lora, only better. Or so Lora—and Janice—had always thought. Now, for the first time in her life, the older sister found herself envying the younger's looks.

"Tell me everything," Janice insisted, only to be interrupted by two squealing voices.

"Aunt Lora! Aunt Lora!" Heather and Becky threw themselves on their aunt, their thin little bodies hugging her tightly. Lora hugged both girls in turn. She was really very fond of them—and they served as a very effective barrier between her and her sister.