Dead Calm

by Lindsay Longford

  He jerked, but she didn’t release him.

  “Judah, maybe I was hasty with what I did the night I treated him, but I don’t think so. If his death hadn’t split us apart, I would never have thought twice about my actions of that night. But let’s say I did act out of my dislike for him or out of annoyance with his constant crudeness. I’ve finally realized that if I had, that would be on my conscience. But my conscience feels clean. What about your conscience, Judah? Is it clean?”

  “Low blow, Doctor Sugar.” His fingers closed around her wrists, but he didn’t try to pull her hands away from his face. “No. My conscience isn’t clean. How’d you guess?”

  “After you talked about your father, I figured it out.”

  “I loved that crude, rude, obnoxious son of a bitch, you know. I don’t have a clue why I did, but I did.”

  “I know,” she said softly and knew, too, that he wasn’t talking about Calvin Finnegan, the man who’d almost destroyed him.

  “He was impossible. He ate and drank too much, he pissed off everyone at the station. He didn’t take care of himself, but he took care of me. He trusted me to keep his back, no matter what. And in his own way, he loved me.”

  “Of course he loved you.” Sophie rested one hand against the steady beat of Judah’s heart.

  “But I let him down.”

  “How? Tell me.”

  “I should have stopped him that night. I should never have let him take off in the squad car.”

  “The car didn’t kill him, Judah.”

  Off in the distance, lights from a ship on its way to the harbor in Tampa spangled the night, a holiday decoration against the movement of the Gulf on a starless night.

  Judah sighed, and a shudder ran through him. “I know. But I still can’t forgive myself.”

  “For what? For not taking away his gun? For letting George slide by with his misogynistic comments and self-indulgences? For not treating a grown-up man, one quite a few years older than you, by the way, like a naughty child and sending him to his room?”

  “You can be tough, Sophie, can’t you?” He rested his chin on the top of her head.

  “Judah, George killed himself. Because he was empty at the core, because he was unhappy, because his ego had been stomped on. Who knows why, Judah? I doubt that he knew himself. George Roberts was a desperately unhappy man. And his emptiness was his own decision. But you can’t forgive yourself for not being God. You’re only a man, Judah. A wonderful man, but not God. Any God I’d believe in would be a forgiving one. That’s not how it is with you. You don’t forgive, Judah. Not yourself, not me. You can’t forgive me. You keep nicking away at me with the knife of your anger. Because it’s easier to blame me for George’s failings, easier to blame yourself for your inability to save the world, than it is too blame George.”

  “Cruel, Sophie.”

  “Maybe. But it’s the truth. Your father abandoned you. So did George. But you loved George, and so you can’t forgive him for leaving you.” Sophie stepped back, dropped her hands. “Unless you can find a way to forgive yourself, to forgive George and, yes, even your father, you’re going to slide right off that mountain, Judah, right into the chasm. Think about it. Because you’re at the edge. And as far as I can see, every time someone reaches a hand out to you, you chop it off. That’s why you wanted me there at the interrogation. Your not-so-subtle way of trying to push me away one more time. It didn’t work. Why? Because you were breaking my heart in there.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Sophie.”

  “I know we have no future, Judah. Unless you figure this out.”

  “A future? I like what we have right now.” He touched her throat, stroked down. “I thought you did, too.”

  “I do. But I don’t like what’s happening. What we have? It’s nothing. A dead end, Judah. I’ve never liked dead ends. I want more. You should, too.”

  “I reckon that’s how we leave it then.”

  She could see the shuttered look of his face, his rejection of what she was trying to make him see.

  “I don’t want this to end, Sophie. Not now. Not like this.”

  “Neither do I, Judah, but you’re the one with the power to change the situation, not me. I learned in surgery that sometimes you have to cut away in order to cure. There’s a kind of sickness with us right now. You’re the only one who can change things. I hope you can.”

  She stood on tiptoe and kissed him, kissed him with hope, kissed him with regret.

  Judah was so furious with Sophie that he stormed around until Sunday afternoon. Tyree literally threw up his hands and quit talking to him. The other cops saw him stomping down the hall and gave him a wide berth if he looked at them. It took that long for the heat to die down and Sophie’s words to percolate through the layers of his anger and hurt.

  It was the hurt that kept stunning him. It was the hurt he hadn’t expected. Not like this, anyway. Not this searing knife-like pain that sliced through him every waking minute. He’d thought that when the time came, he’d be able to walk away from her without a second thought. That had always worked before.

  It wasn’t working now.

  Anger eventually simmered down, died away. The hurt stayed.

  At some level he knew he wasn’t being honest with himself.

  He’d known from the minute he’d seen her again in the ER that she was already under his skin, burrowing deeper into him, making herself at home in spite of all the reasons he hadn’t wanted her there.

  He had never expected to need her the way he seemed to. He’d had a taste of that need during the days she’d been in Chicago, but now? Chicago, as wrenching as it had been, was nothing compared to this desolation.

  Sunday afternoon he drove to the cemetery. He had not been to his father’s grave since the funeral. He’d thought he’d have trouble finding the site, but his feet took him there as if he made the trip every day, through the weeds and sandspurs to the edge of the sandy plot where the remains of Calvin Finnegan lay.

  There was no headstone. Only a flat marker in the grass.

  Only the occasional birdsong broke the silence. The grave was indeed a quiet and private place.

  “All right, Calvin. I’m here. You’ve got my attention. You preached salvation and damnation. Got anything to say about those topics now? Because if you do, I’m listening. Strike me dead, speak to me. Here’s your chance.”

  Only the sighing of the wind in the pines answered him.

  Judah didn’t know what he’d expected in coming to the cemetery. In books and movies, folks always had a moment of clarity, an epiphany. He would welcome an epiphany now, that was for sure.

  But the silence continued.

  Judah squatted down on the grass around the plot, pulled up a clump. “You were a mean, vicious, unloving old man, you know. Did you ever realize that? You had to, I’d think. I hated you with everything in me. Did you hate yourself, too, old man? The way you hated everyone else? Because that’s what all that ranting and raving was about, best as I could tell. Hate. Oh, you cloaked it in fancy words, like it came on a tablet from God, but you preached hate, lived hate with every breath. And you passed on that legacy to me, Calvin. How’d I let that happen, huh?”

  He watched as the wind bent the grasses down, swirled a brown leaf.

  No deep, booming voice came from on high.

  He hadn’t really thought there would be one.

  For a long time Judah sat there under the blue, empty sky and listened to the silence, to the sound of nothing.

  And what he longed for was the sound of Sophie’s voice.

  Chapter 16

  In the days before Christmas, Sophie decorated her house. She and Angel baked cookies. Irina called several times a week and insisted on talking to Angel while Sophie held the receiver up to Angel’s ear. Sometimes Angel gooed back. Mostly, though, she listened as Sophie’s Bushka welcomed this new female to the family and made plans to visit in the new year.

  Figurin
g Angel’s quietness was a language issue, Sophie took Angel to visit Hoang Lan Thoa, the woman who’d identified Angel and her mother. There, Angel chattered in her own way while Sophie nodded and smiled. The Vietnamese woman cried sometimes, but she always opened her door to them with an offer of tea. Once she gave Sophie a mobile to hang high over Angel’s crib. Tiny origami cranes dangled and moved with every draft of air. The cranes symbolized longevity, Sophie learned.

  She planned, too, for the new year, wanting to give Angel what she could of her heritage. Sometimes when she visited Hoang Lan Thoa, Mr. Dai, the translator, was there, and Sophie took notes on everything the two of them told her about Angel’s mother, about Angel, about Vietnam. She made an ever-expanding book for Angel, to give her when she was older. In the meantime, though, she showed Angel the pages and told her the stories. She began to hang pictures of unicorns, signifying wealth, and dragons, for power and nobility, in her beach house. Angel would need power. She bought fanciful pewter and silver figures of these creatures and put them on a high shelf in Angel’s room to watch over her.

  Sophie framed the blanket Angel had been wrapped in when she was found in the manger and hung it on the wall above the crib so that Angel would see it every day.

  Sophie had no intention of allowing everything to be stolen from her daughter.

  Jeanette prepared the preliminary papers to begin the investigation process for the adoption. She’d already gone to court on behalf of DCF to have Angel declared a dependent child of the State of Florida, thus leaving DCF with no notification of kin requirements. Sophie smiled, followed her friend’s instructions, went to court, and floated along with the process that seemed to move with surprising smoothness, another gift, another miracle.

  Most nights, Judah knocked at her door.

  The first night, the Sunday after they’d cleared the air, she’d blinked at the sight of him.

  “May I come in?” he asked with careful politeness.

  “Why?”

  “I’m trying to learn, Sophie. About forgiveness. About not being a straw man like George, a man who can’t handle the first strong wind. I don’t wasn’t to be a hollow shell, Sophie.”

  How could she not open her door wide, welcome him with her arms and her heart?

  Their loving was slow, exquisitely gentle.

  Poignant.

  They talked, their voices rising and falling during the nights they lay in each other’s arms. They talked sometimes until Sophie’s throat was sore. She told him her grandmother’s pet phrase for her, told him about the way Irina had turned sadness into golden joy, had made life rich for them both. Her soul hurt sometimes when Judah talked. She wanted to clap her hands over his mouth to stop the words, to erase his awful memories, the pain. She let him talk.

  Because there was a sense of fragility to each encounter, Sophie tried not to think, tried not to want so much. But each night Judah was there, and Angel was in her bedroom, Sophie’s heart expanded to the bursting point. The shadowy figure of Judah in the night as he went to stand at Angel’s door, the way he carried her down to the beach on his shoulders—it was everything Sophie’s heart craved.

  But…there was everywhere that niggling sense of walking on eggs. In Poinciana, where the community committee didn’t seem to be making much headway, and in her beach house.

  The days drifted closer to Christmas. Judah went with her and Angel to pick out a tree and carry it back to the house. While he didn’t decorate, he watched Sophie dance with Angel around the tree while Sophie sang about Mommy kissing Santa. She pranced beneath the arch of the kitchen where a red-bowed sprig of mistletoe dangled.

  She noticed that Judah almost laughed at the silliness.

  She made plans for Christmas day: a late-afternoon open house and a bonfire down on the beach afterward. She sent out red invitations with extravagant calligraphy to everyone she knew. Billy Ray didn’t think he should come since Tommy Joe was now living with him. She told Judah her plans and didn’t say anything when he merely nodded.

  She could see he was struggling.

  At night she tried to let her touch, her body, speak to him, to tell him of the infinite possibilities of love and hope.

  But…

  On Christmas Eve everything came to a head.

  Glogg was in a big pot on the stove, ready for the party the next day. She had spring roll ingredients chopped in a bowl in the refrigerator, and Angel was in bed, her wispy black hair spiking out around her face. In her crib, she clutched a purple plush dinosaur with both chubby hands.

  She and Judah had made love again and again. There was something desperate in his touch, as though he couldn’t get close enough, often enough. His desperation seeped through to her and made her jittery, anxious. Even though she was filled with him, she sensed that he wasn’t there. When he lifted himself away from her, his finger trailing down her midline slowly, reluctantly, she sat up, the sheet beside her. If they were going to have this discussion, they would face each other with no walls of any kind.

  “Sophie, I can’t do this. I have to go.”

  “Go? I don’t understand.”

  But she did. She’d hoped, but sometimes hope wasn’t enough. She wanted to be cool and calm, but her heart still fought for what she’d dreamed was possible.

  “I thought we were going to celebrate Christmas together. You, me. Angel. We bought the tree. Together.” She waved frantically at the stubby tree in the corner. Silly thing, a tree, to carry the weight of so much hope. But it did. She, who’d never begged, would. For this, oh, yes, she would beg. On hands and knees if it came to that. “Stay, Judah. Please.”

  “I can’t.”

  In the dim light, such pain and misery filled the long, narrow lines of his beautiful face that she couldn’t stop weeping. For him. For the pain slicing through her with his agony-filled words. For what was never going to be. “Oh, Judah. How can you do this?”

  “Because I have to. Because I can’t be with you and Angel. Oh, God, Sophie, I want to. I’ve been trying so hard.”

  “Then do, Judah. Just…do. Be with us.”

  “It’s this goddamned darkness inside of me. I wanted to kill Tommy Joe. Did you know that?”

  “Yes.” She batted her hands against his chest, and her tears dripped down onto his arms holding her at a distance. “I knew!”

  “Even though he was the one who saved Angel. If I could have gotten my hands on him… I have no forgiveness in me, Sophie. I’m a cold, hard, unforgiving son of a bitch. Just like my old man. All this light I see in you, all that you can give Angel—I want it for me, too. And I’d turn all that love and joy inside out. I’d ruin everything. You’d hate me. I’d hate myself. I’d fill that beautiful child in there with this darkness I can’t escape. I’m leaving while I still can. Because you’re so much a part of me already that if I stay longer, I won’t ever be able to leave you.”

  “You’ll push us away, push me away? To protect me?”

  “You saw how I let George’s loss fester inside of me. You saw how I let it eat at me, how I let it distort everything. How I couldn’t forgive you for doing your job. In my head I knew you’d done what you had to do. I knew up there,” he smacked his forehead, “that it wasn’t personal. But I couldn’t forgive you, Sophie. I lost a whole damned year with you because I couldn’t let go of my anger. That’s who I am, Sophie—I see evil in the world, in people. I don’t see anything else. Except in you. And I’d destroy you, one way or another. You said that earlier, and I tried so damned hard—” His voice caught. “But that’s how it is. I’m my dear old daddy’s boy.”

  Her heart, splintering into bits, bled a little more for the torment of this lost man she loved with everything in her.

  Then he wove his hands through her hair, lifting the strands, studying them as if he were memorizing every curl, every shade. “I once accused you of being a fool. You aren’t. You never were. I’m the fool. I can’t change who I am.”

  “You can. If you love me.”<
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  “I thought I could change. But you saw me with that kid….”

  “Judah, you didn’t hurt him.”

  “Not this time, no.”

  “You were tough, yes, with him and with Billy Ray, but you had to be. You are not this, this Prince of Darkness!” Laughter struggled with the scalding tears and lost. “You’re not!”

  “God, Sophie,” and it sounded like a prayer, “you’re the air I breathe, you’re in every pore of my skin, every cell of my body—you’re my everything.”

  “But?”

  “But.” He held his hands out helplessly.

  “Angel. You can’t see yourself being a father?”

  He nodded. “I can’t do this. I love her. I don’t know when it happened, but it did. I would kill anyone who touched her. I love you, with everything in me, but I can’t do this, Sophie. I want to. You don’t know how much I want to. I can’t.”

  She wanted to tell him to have a little faith. In her, in himself. In the two of them together. She wanted to tell him that they could make it work if he believed in what they had together. Instead, feeling as if a part of her were dying, she said, “I love you, Judah. You know that. I love you more than I ever thought I could love someone. You’re in every breath I take, too.”

  He nodded in the direction of Angel’s room. “She needs you. I want her to have your caring, your joy. I want all that, too. But…”

  Sophie could feel her throat closing, the tears dropping onto her breast. She didn’t know how to make him see what he was walking away from, what he was losing. “I love you,” she repeated, her words tear-clogged.

  “I know.”

  “Isn’t that enough? Can’t we build on that?” How could he be so blind? So stubborn. She wanted to shake him until his teeth rattled, until he understood. “I love you,” she repeated. “You love me. I know this.”