Mary Margret Daughtridge SEALed Bundle

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

  There were other horrible things—not accidents—that happened because the innocents simply weren’t as important as the objectives. You didn’t justify it. You accepted it. He accepted it. This was part of being the man he was.

  Chapter 33

  CALEB BROUGHT IN A LOAD OF WOOD TO REPLENISH the family room fireplace at Aunt Lilly Hale’s. Pickett and Jax and Tyler had been able to come for Christmas, filling Pickett’s mother’s house to capacity. So Emmie and Caleb were spending the night with Aunt Lilly Hale. The family would come over tonight to have supper and open presents. In the morning, Emmie and Caleb would go to Pickett’s family’s house for more present opening and to have Christmas dinner.

  The next day, the day after Christmas, Caleb’s leave would be up. He had been so right that they didn’t have time to waste. Emmie was clinging to him a little, and she knew it. Every sight of him was precious. They had already talked about how they would adjust their schedules to have time together, but it wouldn’t be easy. It was too soon to talk about forever, yet Emmie knew she had found exactly what she had always dreamed of in Caleb.

  A future together shone with bright promise.

  Caleb hunkered down in front of the fire, arranging the split logs with the same attention to excellence that he paid every job. His open-weave sweater revealed the play of muscles in his back, and the light of the fire burnished his golden skin.

  He’d been a little quiet for the last hour, but so had she. There was still much to say. And the knowledge that their time was almost up made the smallest observation about the weather or what they wanted to snack on, unbearably poignant. It was easier to remain silent.

  When the log had caught, Caleb added another. One-handed, he checked the number on his cell phone without removing it from his belt. He frowned and went back to his fire tending.

  “Do you have to return that?” Emmie asked.

  “No.”

  It was the second or third time in the last couple of hours that there had been a call he hadn’t taken. Suddenly, it all clicked into place. The phone. His solemn silence.

  “Caleb? That’s the donor registry calling, isn’t it? Oh, my Lord, and I mean that in the fullest and most reverent sense. That means Teague Calhoun is your father. And you are a donor match for Vicky!”

  She knew she was right—she never been more sure of anything—but a cold hand touched her heart. He was so… still.

  “Caleb. What’s going on?”

  He dusted his hands and replaced the fire screen. “You remember when I told you about the portrait of my grandfather?”

  “Oh, yes, the portrait in the library.”

  “I didn’t need this,” he said as he tapped the phone at his waist, “to confirm that Calhoun really is my father.”

  “What? I thought you said—”

  “I know he’s my father. I palmed a glass he had used at the wedding reception. I sent it to a DNA lab for a paternity test. He passed. Or failed, depending on how you look at it.”

  “What do you mean, failed?”

  “There’s something I didn’t tell you.” His hazel eyes sought hers. “When I saw the portrait of Calhoun’s father and I realized my mother’s stories might be true, I didn’t research him out of curiosity.”

  Her stomach dropped. “You went looking for him.”

  Caleb unhooked the brass-handled hearth broom and dust pan from the fire tool set. He stood there holding them in his hands. “My mother caught the flu. A couple of weeks passed. Then a month, and she didn’t bounce back. One day her lips were blue. They said she had myocarditis, caused by a virus. Many people recover, and for a long time we thought she would.”

  Slowly, starting on the left, he swept bits of bark and ash from the green glazed tiles of the hearth. “We went back and forth to the hospital. At a hospital, they don’t refuse to treat you if it’s an emergency. But their only objective is to get you well enough to walk back out the door. They’d run more tests and give her a different medication. She’d be better for a while. An emergency room doc finally sat me down and told me she wasn’t going to get well. She needed a heart transplant. And if I wanted her to live long enough to see a transplant, her case needed to be managed. She needed regular appointments with a cardiologist, not crisis-to-crisis care in an emergency room. We didn’t have insurance. Do you have any idea how expensive heart medications are? It was taking everything to keep her prescriptions filled.” He carefully swept a gray piece of bark into the dustpan. “It was the first time I ever thought I needed him.”

  “Needed your father,” Emmie clarified.

  “When I walked into that library, I had an hour to kill before I could complete my deliveries. When I finished them, I’d have enough money to keep the company that supplied the oxygen off our backs for a few weeks.”

  “How old were you?”

  He took his eyes from his sweeping long enough to throw her a surprised glance. “Sixteen.”

  Emmie’s face burned to think she had once told him he didn’t know what it felt like to be helpless. “Okay. What’s the rest of the story?”

  “I saw the portrait of Calhoun’s father, and I realized my mother’s stories might have basis in fact. It might have really happened like she said. My father might have been a good man who had loved her. A man who would help her if he knew.

  “It is true that I did some research. I found the address of his law firm in North Carolina. I bought some good paper, the kind that comes from an office supply store, not a tablet from the grocery store—‘white wove’ it said on the box.” His lips twisted at his naiveté. “I wanted to make the right impression, you see.

  “I wrote a letter. I got no answer, so I found another address and wrote another letter. And another. Almost a year passed, while my mother got sicker. I called his law office. I could do a better job locating someone now, but back then it was the only phone number I knew how to find.

  “‘Mr. Calhoun cannot be reached. Can someone else help you?’” Caleb singsonged. “I became a little obsessed with finding a way to reach him. By then, I didn’t hope he would do anything. I had figured out that he probably wasn’t going to come through. I just wanted to find him. You know?”

  Emmie nodded her understanding. “You must have felt so powerless to do anything that made a difference, but that was one goal where success was measurable.”

  “I saw an article announcing that he was running for the senate and had opened a campaign office. I called that number. I told the man who answered I thought Calhoun knew my mother. He asked questions—my mother’s name, where I was calling from—like he was interested. He said he’d be sure to give Calhoun the message, and I’d hear something soon.”

  “Oh, God. Did you start to have hope again?”

  Caleb opened the fire screen and threw the tiny pile of debris he’d collected into the fire. He shook his head. “I had never heard of denial, but I think I had been in denial and was coming out of it. I was facing reality. There wasn’t any hope. She wasn’t going to get better, no matter what I did—no matter what anyone did.”

  Emmie hated the grimness in his tone, the harsh judgment of himself for not accepting reality sooner. “You know,” she put in, “it might not have been denial. It might have been ignorance. You were smart and extremely competent for your age, but you hadn’t had much life experience. Even if you knew the words, I’m sure you needed time to understand emotionally what it meant for your mother to be dying.”

  Caleb gave her one of those sympathetic looks people give those who have just revealed themselves deficient in the most basic understanding.

  Emmie refused to be intimidated. “Don’t give me that look. You couldn’t possibly have known how bitter being helpless in that situation would feel. If you had known, you would have crumpled under the load.”

  The stubborn man shook his head again, refusing her comfort, refusing to acknowledge that maybe a little comfort would have been good for him. She threw up her hands. “Okay, you didn’
t get your hopes up, you weren’t angry about what you had gone through, and there was no reason that a seventeen-year-old trying to shoulder a load like that, by himself, would become bitter!”

  She stopped to take a deep breath. She was angry for him, but it wouldn’t help for sympathy to turn into being angry at him. “Sorry I went off on you. I guess you never heard from him.”

  “Well, actually, I did. Four or five weeks later, there was a letter in the mail from a law firm—not his. Heavy cream-colored envelope.” He huffed a sound that could have been a grunt of pain or a mirthless chuckle. “That envelope taught me the difference between white wove and vellum. And there must have been fifteen names on it.” He quirked a sardonic eyebrow. “Do you want to know what the letter said? I can still quote every word.”

  Now the anger was there in his voice, cold and grinding forward with relentless, measured tread, like a doomsday machine freezing and killing all in its path. No, she didn’t want to hear what the letter said! It was a bullet she would have happily taken for him, but she could not stand to know the pain he had felt when it hit him.

  His question was rhetorical. He continued, still cold and relentless.

  “Dear Mr. Dulaude,

  “Be advised this firm represents Teague Calhoun. Mr. Calhoun has forwarded your letters to us.

  “Mr. Calhoun categorically denies any improper relationship with your mother or even any knowledge of her existence.

  “While Mr. Calhoun is sympathetic to your predicament, his sympathy does not extend to allowing himself to be blackmailed and defamed. This is your one notice to cease and desist such false and defamatory statements. Failure to comply will result in immediate action against you on both civil and criminal levels.”

  A threat added to an insult. Emmie could feel the lash of the injustice Caleb had endured as if it had landed on her own flesh. She slapped her hand over her mouth to stifle an outcry. Tears spilled down her cheeks.

  For someone like Caleb who so generously shouldered others’ burdens, to have admitted his need and then been attacked—it would inflict a wound that would bleed from his very soul. It was a betrayal of every principle on which civilization and all social cohesions stand. It was the law of the jungle shined up in stainless steel.

  “I’m so sorry, Caleb,” Emmie spoke through her tears. She wasn’t the perpetrator, but someone needed to say they were sorry. Someone needed to acknowledge that it shouldn’t have happened. “The only person you knew with the money or power to help you, and he used his power against you.”

  They were silent a long time. There wasn’t anything else to say. The fire hissed in the fireplace. Ashes sifted into the grate.

  After a while Emmie wiped her cheeks with the flat of her hand. Gently, in the low hushed tone people use outside hospital rooms, she urged him to return to his story. “Did your mother live long?”

  His lips slanted in an oddly young, sad smile. “At that time, the doctor had changed her medicine, and she seemed better for a while…”

  His voice trailed away, while he looked out the window as if he could see through it into the past. While they had talked, dusk had fallen. A pale blue veil of ground fog floated over the dark stubble in the peanut field. The pine forest at the field’s edge looked almost black against the sky.

  At last he turned back to Emmie, a gentle smile tipping the corners of his mouth.

  “She was so pretty.” He shook his head in fond amazement. “She told me my father was a handsome prince, and I believed her longer than I should have, because she looked just like a fairy-tale princess from my books. She was tiny and had long golden-red hair.

  “When she died, it was like some sort of malignant enchantment fell away, and she looked about fifteen, so beautiful and so completely pure. She was propped on pillows in the back bedroom, and the last red rays of the sun glowed in her hair and made her skin translucent as a rose petal. You could see what she was supposed to be, had been meant to be. She had a believing heart and a gift for dreaming. Instead of treasuring her, he had taken one sip of her sweetness and thrown her down in the dirt.

  “I swore she would have justice, Emmie.

  “I promised if I ever saw him face to face, I would kill him.”

  Chapter 34

  SLOWLY, CAREFULLY, HE TOLD HER THE REST. AS THE day grew darker, Emmie learned the story of a man in the midst of a public war, who sees a hated face left over from his private war.

  She listened to it all.

  All he had done.

  The reasons for all he had done.

  Right up to the phone calls from the donor registry.

  Which he hadn’t answered.

  And did not intend to answer.

  Her face burned hot. And then froze into a perfect wooden likeness of herself. Thoughts, like cool, slow drops of dispassion, spread ripples across her mind.

  That’s what this has been about. Revenge.

  Everything from the day of Pickett’s wedding on. It was only a way to get past the layers around Calhoun.

  From the beginning. Oh, wait. That wasn’t the beginning in Aunt Lilly Hale’s office. That was the third act.

  The plan was clever. Very clever. I was a walk on. Anyone could have played the character who shows up in the third act and announces, “Come, sir. I will lead you into the citadel.”

  And then the thought that squeezed the last trace of illusion from her heart: Oh, Caleb, were you really willing to marry me?

  She knew the answer. Caleb was a man who would do whatever it took to reach his objectives. He wasn’t mean or callous. He had never treated her unkindly. He would fulfill any promise he made. And he would let nothing stop him.

  It felt like the very bones of her spine were crumbling. None of it had been real. She wanted to crawl into some deep, dark place like a wounded animal seeking its den, someplace she could bleed to death in peace or lie still enough, for long enough, to heal.

  This was the experience she had always feared: to find out she didn’t matter. Her life hadn’t been about her, because she hadn’t chosen to be significant to herself. She had kept herself small, unimportant, had crept around the edges and lived a life that she herself was missing from, so that she wouldn’t feel this.

  Well, now she felt the pain, and it hurt as badly as she had feared, but it wasn’t dull. It was real. She had been living in a fantasy that someone would come along and she would make a meaningful difference to him, simply because she existed.

  One lesson her newfound self-esteem had taught her over the past several weeks: she knew when it was about her and when it wasn’t. This wasn’t. She couldn’t accuse him of betrayal. She winced at the irony. He hadn’t betrayed her. What he was doing didn’t have anything to do with her.

  The forces at work here had started before she was born. She’d stumbled in a tragedy already in progress, but it was not her story. This story began long before Caleb met her.

  Now that she looked at the truth—what the last few weeks had really been about—the story of her great love affair turned to nothing. It was like ashes on a fireplace grate still holding the shape of a log. If she touched them, they would fall in soft gray whispers, leaving only the memory of warmth.

  She touched them.

  And having let all the pieces of her fantasy collapse, she learned something.

  Even if she could no longer pretend they had a relationship, all the reasons she loved Caleb were still there. His integrity. His imagination. His courage. His largeness of spirit. No matter how narrow his choices, he had never allowed life to make him small. He was a hero.

  Oh, yes, she loved him still, though he was keeping himself in the past, and his keeping himself in the past had doomed their love from the beginning. She grieved for the tragic story he was living.

  She could see so clearly that he would not have the flaws of a tragic hero were it not for his great strengths. Great loyalty. A capacity for generosity that made him able to make greater sacrifices than other people coul
d contemplate. A self-discipline that held him to his course undeterred, no matter what the temptations.

  What always made a tragedy so sad was the sense that it was inevitable, and yet it was unnecessary. She could not have the love she wanted from him, but she couldn’t, wouldn’t, let him go through this alone. She could offer her friendship.

  Why didn’t she say something? Purple wool clogs kicked off, she sat on the maroon leather sofa with her feet tucked under her. All day he had known this moment would come. As he waited for her judgment, the back of his neck was so tight he thought it might snap.

  Finally he could take the silent waiting no more. “Aren’t you disgusted that I wanted to kill him?”

  She pondered the question. She looked at the ceiling. She clasped her hands loosely in her lap. Emmie-like, when she had organized her thoughts, she said, “Soldiers kill. They take on terrible psychic wounds in order to keep the rest of us unwounded.”

  With the lecturer’s skill, she looked at her hands for a moment to insert a thoughtful pause. “Teach a person to kill and you’ve taken away some measure of the person’s peace. They’ve crossed a line, and they know it. Call war peacekeeping all you want. It might even be peacekeeping, for all I know.” She shrugged. “Certainly, soldiers lose their peace so that people like me can keep mine. Some people are born to soldiering.” She gave him another Emmie-look that signaled a dry joke. “I can’t call it SEALing—for now, we’re stuck with ‘soldier.’”

  She went back into lecture-mode. “They come into the world knowing that they’re the ones. They know they are the protectors, the defenders, and the fighters. They know when the shit hits the fan, the wolf attacks the fold, and the terrorists have taken over the plane—it’s their job to deal with it. They are in charge, and since they are serious about their duty, they train for the day it will come. Soldiers have skill at killing. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s what their gun is for. The most natural thing in the world is to see a problem in terms of the skills you have to bring to it.”