by JoAnn Ross
One was from his fifth birthday, two years before his sister, Angel, had been born and before they’d both ended up in foster care. This time his mother had sneaked him out of a window in the middle of the night to escape whatever bad guys were chasing her. Then, pausing only for fitful naps at rest stops along the way, and buying junk food from the vending machines, she’d driven nearly nonstop from West Virginia to a desolate spot in the Nevada desert where the only things breaking up the barren landscape were rocks, wind-beaten Joshua trees, and a lonely scattering of single-wide trailers.
One of the trailers, rusting on its flattened wheels, belonged to his grandmother, who’d stayed on after her husband, a man too fond of the bottle and slot machines, had died from a rattlesnake bite. Being that the grandfather Johnny had never met had been passed out on the dirt in front of his battered pickup at the time of the reptile attack, he hadn’t, the coroner had assured the stoic widow, even known what hit him. Or, more accurately, bit him.
Johnny’s carrot red hair and freckles earned him the usual taunts from the other kids, who’d also laughed at his southern Appalachian accent and called him a cracker hillbilly. But that didn’t stop them from showing up for his birthday party after his grandmother promised there’d be cake.
It was the first time he’d ever had a birthday party, which should have been cool, but experience had taught him that something was going to happen to ruin it. Especially since his mother hadn’t come back from a sudden trip to Las Vegas. Johnny suspected she was looking for medicine to help turn off the voices that whispered threats in her ear.
Or maybe the voices had stayed quiet long enough for her to remember it was his birthday and she’d gone to get him a present. What she couldn’t understand was that all Johnny wanted—all he’d ever wanted—was a normal life like other kids had.
His grandmother had picked up the cake at the grocery store this morning. It was a chocolate sheet cake covered in bright pink frosting, which only gave the kids something else to laugh about. She’d bought it at a discount from the mistake rack because the name of the person the cake had been made for had been misspelled. Being a practical woman and, as she was always telling him, needing to pinch her pennies, she’d replaced the pink plastic princess with two of his Hot Wheels cars.
Then, assuring him no one would notice, she’d rubbed out the pink script Debbie with a kitchen knife, which had left a big smear in the middle of the cake. In the middle of the smear, she’d stuck six striped candles.
“Five for how many years you’ve been alive,” she’d told him. “And one more to grow on.”
Despite the laughter over the Barbie pink cake, the party wasn’t too bad, although he wished the desert sand would open up and swallow him when his grandmother brought out a surprise—a pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game she’d gotten at the Goodwill. Johnny knew she meant well, but he was still dying inside when all the kids started asking why they couldn’t just play a video game.
“You do have one, don’t you?” Kyle Conners had challenged. The smirk on his fat face told Johnny that he already knew the answer to that question.
Johnny was about to lie and claim it had broken just before everyone showed up, when the metal door burst open and his mother arrived home, bringing with her a charged energy that caused his gut to clench. He could practically see the energy sparking around her, like the heat lightning that had flashed over the ocean that summer they lived in Jacksonville, Florida.
“Let’s get this celebration for my baby boy started!” She flashed her most brilliant smile at the kids sitting around the card table they used as a kitchen table.
“About time,” his grandmother muttered as she pulled a pack of the matches she used to light the stove from the kitchen drawer. She struck a match against the rough strip, causing a flame to spark to life.
A hush came over the room as she lit one candle, then another until all six were blazing merrily.
“Make a wish!” his mother demanded.
“Make a wish!” all the kids shouted.
Johnny closed his eyes and wished the same thing he did every morning when he first woke up and every night, right before he fell asleep.
Please let my mom just be normal. Like other kids’ moms.
He took a deep breath.
Then blew.
And blew.
The flames continued to flicker.
Trying again, he drew in a deeper breath, then blew it out on a huge puff of air.
But the flames still burned.
“Weenie,” Kyle said, laughing at him. The others, following their leader, echoed the taunt.
Unable to figure out what was happening (though he later realized they were trick candles), Johnny sucked in another breath, all the way to his lungs. Then let it out.
Although this time the flames bent sideways, they continued to burn as steadily as the sun.
How hard could it be to blow out six tiny candles? Johnny was trying to figure out what he was doing wrong when his mother screeched like some monster from a horror movie was chasing her.
“You can’t have him!”
As all the kids turned toward her, eyes bugging out of their heads, mouths wide open, she snatched up the plastic pitcher of cherry Kool-Aid from the table and dumped it over Johnny’s head.
The bloodred liquid flowed over his shoulders, onto the cake, finally dousing the six small flames.
“Don’t worry, darling.” She dropped to her knees into a puddle of Kool-Aid surrounding his chair and gathered him into her arms, pressing his face against the soft cushion of her breasts. “I won’t let that bad old devil burn you alive.”
While the other kids were caught between laughter and shock, Johnny had known that his wish would not be coming true.
Pushing down the long-ago painful memory, he’d just shoved his underwear into the duffel bag that probably had more mileage on it than the space shuttle when there was a knock at his door.
“May I come in?” the voice on the other side asked.
“Sure.” Like he had a choice? None of the temporary homes he’d lived in over the years had ever had a lock on his bedroom door. Which Johnny figured said a lot about how much people trusted him.
“So, are you ready for tomorrow?”
This foster mother, who was married to a cop, was actually kind of cool. She’d told him right off the bat that if he was looking to get adopted, he’d be disappointed, because her mission in life was to provide temporary homes for as many children as she possibly could. But if he followed the rules, didn’t skip school, stayed out of fights, and didn’t do drugs or steal, he’d find her a fair person.
Which she’d turned out to be.
“Yeah. I guess.” He’d already been told he wouldn’t be coming back here. Such was life in the revolving door of the system.
“You’re going to have a great time,” she said encouragingly.
He muttered something she apparently decided to take as agreement. Which it so wasn’t.
Johnny hated everything about camp. The matching T-shirts everyone had to wear, the stupid games, all the forced fun where everyone had to fake having a great time.
But Camp Rainbow, held at a lake near Shelter Bay, one of those boring shit-ass coast towns, was the one time during the year he got to see his baby sister.
Which was why, only for Angel, he was willing to suck it up and pretend to be a normal kid.
11
Despite her volunteer work writing letters and sending monthly care packages to deployed troops, Charity had never really given a great deal of thought to the details of war. Obviously, she knew it was dangerous. And that the desert was hot and hostile, and that just driving down the street could be an invitation to a violent death.
Like everyone else in America, she’d seen clips of battles on the nightly news. Seen names of those lost in battle printed in the paper. But, living in Shelter Bay, where even the name of the town signified peace, she’d never put a face to those names. Or e
xperienced the emotional jolt she got as she turned the oversized pages of Semper Fi.
Some, at first glance, depicted humorous situations, such as Iraqis dressed as Disney characters celebrating the end of Ramadan at an outside restaurant. Her smile immediately faded as the next page showed a young boy, no older than five, atop a Ferris wheel. Wearing a pair of Mickey Mouse ears atop his head, he was pointing a toy gun down at a U.S. Marine who was searching the trunk of a car for weapons.
In another photo, a preteen girl in a blue shawl and a woman—whom Charity took to be her mother—hidden from head to toe in a voluminous canary yellow burka stood side by side as the girl tossed bright orange poppies into a mass grave.
Even more unsettling was the total lack of photographer involvement in the photos. If Gabriel St. James had an opinion of the discordant scenes he was documenting—and surely, she thought as her attention was riveted by the sight of a Marine, his face bloodied, carrying a burned child from a firebombed mosque, he must have—he didn’t reveal it. Instead he allowed—no, she corrected, required—the viewer to form his or her own opinion.
Which, in an odd way, made the photos all the more personal as she found herself imagining being there, in those faraway places, and in those frozen moments in time.
The ice in the lemonade she’d made with fresh lemons melted as the drink went ignored. Even as she grew more and more discomforted by the photos—one heartbreaking one of Marines with tears leaving trails in the dust on their faces as they gathered for a memorial to lost teammates in front of a trio of rifles stuck in the sand, helmets on top, boots that would never again be worn—she could not look away.
Which was why she was grateful when Peanut, who’d been lying in a sunbeam at her feet, suddenly stirred. He didn’t growl—that wasn’t in his nature—but he was definitely in full guard-dog mode as the car stopped in front of the house.
She’d been expecting St. James. After all, even if he didn’t want the little black dog who’d spent the night curled at the foot of her bed, he’d already shown he cared about its welfare. Surely he wouldn’t leave town without checking to see how it was. Also, she doubted he was the kind of man who’d run out on a bill.
But it was not the former Marine who climbed out of the car and waved.
“Brace yourself,” she murmured to the dog as she put the book down on the table and stood up to greet her mother. “Typhoon Amanda has arrived.”
“Darling!” Amanda Tiernan Jacobs Chaffee Gillette Rodzianko Templeton came running up the steps in a swirl of scarlet silk. Her skyscraper stilettos, fashioned in a flowered-print fabric, were even higher than the ones that Amie and Janet had forced onto Charity for yesterday’s wedding. “Thank God you’re home!”
She swooped down on her daughter, gathering her into her arms as if it had been forever, not merely six months, since they’d last seen each other. Which had been at her mother’s first-anniversary bash at the waterfront home on the shores of Seattle’s Lake Washington that Amanda shared with her sixth—and, she swore, final—husband.
“Good to see you, too, Mom.” Charity was enveloped in a cloud of lavender, rosewood, and bergamot. Husbands may come and go, but her mother’s signature scent had remained her one constant.
“How are you?” As she stepped a bit away to put distance between herself and the suffocating cloud, Peanut sneezed loudly.
“Oh, darling.” Amanda collapsed onto one of the porch chairs with a languid grace Charity had given up trying to emulate by her tenth birthday. “I’m devastated. Though I’m not even sure that begins to cover this situation.”
She opened an iconic quilted ivory Chanel clutch and pulled out a lace-trimmed handkerchief. Not only was she the only woman Charity knew who didn’t lug around a huge tote—“Why ruin the look of an outfit when there’s always a man to carry the extras?” Amanda had often pointed out—she might be the last person on the planet to actually own a lifetime supply of monogrammed hankies. Being a practical woman, despite her excesses, she’d stuck with a single embroidered initial.
“I’m sorry.” Charity braced herself for the storm she sensed coming.
“So am I.” The wail, rising high enough to risk shattering every window in the house, made even poor Peanut flinch.
“I’m guessing this is something about . . .”
Charity paused, trying to think of her new stepfather’s first name. There’d been so many of them. It wasn’t that her mother was a bad woman. Actually, she was old-fashioned enough to believe that if you wanted to sleep with a man, then you should love him. And if you loved him, well, it only made sense to marry him.
“Bentley?”
“Benton,” her mother corrected on a sniff as she dabbed her wet and shiny eyes. “And yes, I’m afraid our marriage is over.”
“I’m sorry,” Charity repeated.
“But not surprised.”
Her mother might be a diva, but she wasn’t unintelligent. Only, it seemed, in matters of the heart. She’d always lived with a wild, reckless, the-world-might-end-at-any-moment abandon when it came to love.
“Actually, I am. I thought, when I met him, that he seemed a good match.”
Meaning he was wealthy enough to be able to supply her mother with all the creature comforts she’d grown up accustomed to, while being as sober and steady as a judge. Which, ironically, he was. He’d also, from what Charity had witnessed during the weekend of the anniversary party, managed to unearth a more natural woman inside the drama queen.
Charity had been stunned by the sight of her mother wearing white jeans and a T-shirt that read, Women love men who love boats because they’re already used to high maintenance. Not only that, she’d laughed as her hair had blown free in the wind during a sunset cruise on Puget Sound aboard the judge’s 1930s wooden Chris-Craft runabout.
“I thought we were a perfect match, too. I foolishly believed that after having wed so many frogs, I’d finally found my prince.” She wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her manicured hands, looking for all the world like a heartbroken six-year-old. “Not that your father was a frog, darling,” she tacked on quickly.
“I know what you meant.” Dylan Tiernan, a renowned plastic surgeon to the stars, who’d even for a time had his own television program, had many fine attributes. Unfortunately, monogamy wasn’t one of them.
“We haven’t been apart one night since we got married.”
“I hadn’t realized that.” She tried to imagine the down-to-earth outdoorsman judge sitting in the front row at New York fashion week. Tried to imagine her mother not being there. Both ideas proved a stretch.
“It’s true. Life’s been so perfect, there really isn’t anyone I’d rather be with.” Her mother sniffled into the handkerchief. “Believe it or not, although Helga—you remember her, darling, our Swiss cook—does the weekly shopping, we’ve even gone to the farmers’ market together on occasion.”
“That’s sweet.” And coincidentally, exactly the type of marriage she’d always wanted herself.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you? He even goes clothes shopping with me.” She frowned as she plucked at the red silk. “The saleswomen at Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom adore him because whenever I can’t decide between two outfits, he insists I buy both.”
“No woman’s going to complain about that.”
“I certainly wasn’t about to. One of the problems with marrying such highly successful men is that none of them, until Benton, ever put me at the center of their lives. Which is why, when he said he had to attend some judicial conference on Maui, and that it was going to be all work, so wives weren’t invited, I decided to put a little love note into his suitcase to surprise him when he unpacked.”
“That’s a nice gesture.” Charity still couldn’t see what the problem was.
“A gesture the horrid man damn well doesn’t deserve.” The tears began to flow again. Not the ones for show Charity had grown accustomed to, but real ones that streamed down her mother’s face, leaving t
rails of mascara on her porcelain-smooth cheeks. “You’ll never guess what I found.”
Given that husband number five—who’d claimed to be a Russian count descended from the czars—had turned out to have a penchant for wearing women’s underwear, Charity was afraid to ask.
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?” As if a herd of wild horses could stop her.
“V-V-Viagra.”
Oops. “Oh.”
“It’s not as if our sex hasn’t been off the charts.” Amanda recovered enough to toss her shoulder-length auburn hair. A redhead by both temperament and nature, she’d kept it the same rich color it had been all Charity’s life. “And he’s always been amazingly inventive. That is, until suffering that little episode a few months ago.”
“Episode?”
“An MI.”
“Your husband had a myocardial infarction? And you didn’t think to call me?”
“He wanted to keep it private. And he assured me it wasn’t all that serious.”
“Mom, any heart attack is serious.” Surely the judge’s doctor had given the couple a list of post-MI instructions?
Her mother’s spine stiffened. “I’m well aware of the seriousness, dear. But he’s been walking along the lake-shore every day. And not only was he back on the bench in only a few weeks, but apparently he’s healthy enough to go traipsing off to Maui with some bimbo.”
“You don’t know that he’s with any bimbo.” Though, granted, taking a sexual enhancement drug along on a business trip while his wife remained at home was suspicious.
“We haven’t had sex since he got home from the hospital,” Amanda said, revealing yet more information about her sex life that Charity could’ve lived without. “Even though the doctor assured us both that it’s safe. I also went online to get a second opinion. Actually, I found several physician Web sites all saying exactly the same thing.”
“An MI, even a small one, is undoubtedly a sobering event, Mom. Benton could be depressed, or afraid of having a full-blown heart attack, or—”
“And of course, having one at some hotel thousands of miles from home—not to mention away from your wife—makes perfect sense,” Amanda said dryly.