He was glad the doctors were working on his face. “No, I don’t know anything about his drugs. I saw him on the news. I didn’t know anything about those drugs, and he didn’t tell me. Me and my friend beat him up because he stole my car in Mexico. We beat him up for revenge. We didn’t know he sold drugs…we had no idea. We never went to his room. We only saw him at Walking Street.”
Another long pause. He heard writing.
“I believe you, Mistah Shield. We saw video from Walking Street. We saw you meet and go into bar. Then we saw you go into go-go and attack him.” Video? They have video on Walking Street? “We not charge you, okay. But we not welcome fighting in Thailand, sir. We want peaceful country. You could have kill that man. He not deserve that beating you give him, even if he drug dealer. But he was bad person, so we not charge you. My boss, he tell me that he want you and your frien’ out of Bangkok. So when doctors fix you up you leave. Is that okay with you, Mistah Shield?”
“Yes, it’s okay. I will leave within a week, okay?”
“Okay. We leave you now, Mistah Shield. You tell you’ friend Malcolm Warwick. He leave too.”
“He left already, I think. I don’t know how to reach him.”
“Okay. If you see him, you tell him to leave. We hope you recover fast, sir.”
“Thank you.”
A slight pause, and then, “If you live peaceful life, people are peaceful to you. That is what Buddhism teach us. If you are kind to people, people will be kind to you. If you fight people, people will fight you. Do you believe in karma?”
“No. I believe bad things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. We never know when bad things are going to happen to us. Life shits on everybody from time to time.”
“Which one are you, Mistah Shield? Are you ‘good people’ or ‘bad people’?”
He thought for a bit. “I honestly cannot answer that right now.” He thought for a bit more. “I think I was good once. I don’t think I am anymore.”
“Maybe that answer tell you what you should know. Goodbye, sir.”
He heard the boots walk out the door.
PART V: CODA
XLI
He stepped out of the rental car, and moved up the walkway to the house. Though physically tired from the flight, he felt wired. His heart was racing. He could feel it beating in his throat. He stood in front of the door, and then he thought, Here I am. He thought he was ready, but now that he was here, he wasn’t sure. He ran his tongue across his dental implants…they still felt weird in his mouth, and his lips dragged across them. Moving his jaw made his scars itch.
He summoned all his courage and pressed the doorbell. He immediately heard movement inside. A dog barked in the backyard. Sidney.
The door opened. Blonde straight hair and freckles. Long streaks of red dyed on either side of her face. “Uncle Danny!” Meghan’s daughter, Melanie, stepped out and wrapped her arms around him.
“Hi, Melanie! Oh my goodness! Look at how tall you are! How old are you now?”
“I turn twelve in two months!” She seemed very proud of that.
“Wow! You’ll be grown up before you know it.”
“What happened to your face, Uncle Danny?” she asked with the directness of youth.
“I had an accident. I’m okay, though…”
“Let me get my mom. Dad’s at work.” Before he could say anything, she ran inside, and was shouting, “Mom! Uncle Danny’s outside.” A distant response, then loudly and slowly, “Uncle…Danny’s…here!” More movement, someone coming downstairs.
And there she was. It had been a year. Her hair was now shorter, and the curls were gone.
“Danny…” There was a calm surprise. “Danny…where have you been?” He saw her looking at his scars. “Danny, what happened to you?”
“Hi, Meghan. I’ve been gone a while, I know. How are you?”
“Are you okay? We haven’t heard from you in forever. What happened to your face?”
“Penance, I think.”
She stared at him for a moment, as if she couldn’t believe her eyes. And then she stepped down onto the walk and put her arms around him. “I’ve wanted to see you for a while. We’ve all missed you.”
“Meghan, there’s so much I’ve wanted to tell you,” he croaked out. She felt just like Melissa in his arms.
“Come in, Danny. Come in.”
Once inside, she led him to the family room. The home looked the same, and Danny sat where he had always sat when he visited Omaha. Meghan stepped out for a second, and returned with a small baby in her arms.
“You had another baby?”
“Yes. She’s two months now. I got pregnant just a couple weeks after Mel’s funeral.” She held up the baby, and Danny reached out and touched her soft hand. He looked into her blue-gray eyes. “This is Melissa.”
“Melissa?” The name had so much meaning. His mind moved to connect things.
“I wanted to honor her life. I hope to do well by Melissa and raise this baby in her image. I want her to be like my baby sister.”
He looked into the face of an angel. Gray eyes looked up and regarded him. Wispy light hair poked out in various places. “She’s beautiful. Just like Melissa.” And she was.
“Thank you. I compared her with Mel’s baby pictures, and I see a lot of similarities. I think she has Mike’s face-shape, but the eyes and hair are definitely Mel. Or me, I guess.” She giggled at that.
“I’m so happy for you and Mike. I can’t believe Melanie is almost twelve now too!”
“Oh yeah, twelve going on twenty. If you ask her, she’ll tell you…she knows everything! Ha ha!”
“Meghan, I’m so sorry your mother passed. I’m so sorry I wasn’t here for her. It would’ve been the least I could’ve done.”
The baby began to cry softly. Without hesitation, Meghan pulled a small towel over her shoulder and began to feed her. She never lost her train of thought and continued speaking.
“All things considered, it would’ve been complicated at that time anyway…but I really do appreciate the kind thoughts.”
“Your mother was always so kind to me. It’s hard to imagine her gone.”
“After Mel died, she just seemed to lose her will to go on. She would lie on her bed for days on end. When she’d get up, she would just be so far away. Everybody tried to talk to her…to get her moving. There was just no reaching her.”
“I understand so clearly now.”
“You’ve been through a lot it seems.”
“Yes, I have.” He thought for a few seconds, then, “I think so much of me died with Mel, I had to live this last year just to build a new part of me…enough to replace that part. Up until the last couple months, I don’t think I understood all that I lost. She was everything in my life, I guess.”
“Danny, there’s so much we need to talk about.” Her eyes looked directly into his.
“Hold on…it took me a long time to work up the courage to come see you…I kinda want to get it all out before I fold up. When I saw you at the funeral, I sensed anger from you. I felt a distance. I know now that it was my own guilt that was eating at me. I was consuming myself with self-hatred for not having defended her. My own guilt convicted me of every wrong. I felt like you blamed me for her death…that you held me accountable. I realize now that it was just my guilt telling me that everybody thought I was wrong. Like you were the jury pronouncing sentence on me.”
“Danny, I should have talked to you then…”
“It’s okay, I understand. You had just lost your little sister, and you were no doubt in as bad a shape as I was. I was reading into what you were feeling. It was silly of me, but I was so far out myself…”
“Danny, you have to let me stop you here…”
“Meghan, it’s okay though…”
“Danny, I was mad at you. I did blame you. You need to know why. I have to tell you now. I have to get this off my chest, Danny.”
“You were mad at me?”
“But not for the reasons you may have thought.”
“Meghan, help me understand…”
“Danny, you need to prepare yourself for what I’m about to tell you. This will come as a shock to you, I think. Before I thought you must’ve guessed, or that maybe she told you, but now I see you didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know what?”
She took a deep breath. She looked for the words. “Danny, Mel was going to leave you. That Friday. That night. She got off early so she could bring you home and break it to you. She and I had been working on this change for some time. She wanted to let you down easy…she truly loved you and cared for you, and didn’t want to hurt you any more than she had to. She wasn’t ‘in love’ with you any longer.”
The magnitude of what she said didn’t register immediately. Danny just looked at her blankly. Then as each bit of meaning took hold in his mind, his face changed expression. Confusion. Shock. Dismay.
“Meghan, please tell me what you’re talking about.”
“I’m sorry, Danny.”
“If this is some revenge thing…”
“No, Danny, I’m really sorry. Mel had met someone else. She was in love with another man. Barry. A math teacher at Luther Burbank. She was going to tell you that day, pack some things, and then move in with Barry while she filed for divorce. She had already hired a lawyer.”
Danny could only stare in disbelief.
“That’s why I was so upset with you at her funeral. The timing convinced me that you had a hand in her death. The day…the very day she was going to separate from you she ended up dead while you walked away unharmed. It seemed like a setup. Yes, Danny, I was very angry with you. I was sure you were responsible somehow. I pressed the police to investigate. I was sure it was no coincidence. I kept waiting to hear that the police made a connection between you and those men. I was sure they would find something, especially when you quickly left to go down to Mexico. I thought you were running. It took me months to get over the suspicion. Mom believed you though…she said you weren’t the type to do something like that. I saw that later, and I see it now.”
“Meghan, you can’t be telling me this now. You simply cannot be.” Pain and rage were roaring inside him, just below the surface, hoping to be let free. A firestorm in his mind ravaged the charred remnants. All the old pain…all the old memories…all the old tears waited to be set free.
The baby had fallen asleep. She stood up slowly and returned her to a bassinette, a few steps away. Danny was lost. I finally found a way to deal with her death, and now this?
Meghan was speaking again. “Danny, you can’t take this the wrong way. Mel was simply human. You both worked so hard and had a lot of pressure. House. Careers. It’s natural to drift apart over time. It happens in so many marriages. Mike and I have gone through a separation before. Maybe you and Mel would have worked this out.”
“Barry?”
“Yeah, Barry. Not sure if you remember him. He was at the funeral. He sat with me and Mom…tall, beard…”
He searched his memory, but found no image.
“Mel had been seeing him off and on for a couple years, and finally decided she couldn’t go on living a lie. She was in love with Barry. She wanted to move forward with him and have a family with him.”
“Family? In love with Barry?”
“Yeah, Danny…I’m sorry. She thought she was pregnant with his child in March, because she was late with her period. It was a false alarm, but it was what finally drove her to make the decision to file for divorce.”
And then it came in a rush. A screaming vortex of emotion, memories, and pain hit him in the face. Everything he had believed…thought…suffered through for the last year was a lie. His face was flushed. A lie. One giant lie. I spent a year mourning for her, and I was maybe an hour away from finding out she was going to leave me. She wanted to divorce me to be with another man. They had an affair for a couple years, for fuck’s sake! Imagine all the lies she must’ve told me those last two years. Imagine how many times they slept together. How much love had they shared together, while I stupidly thought we were doing great? Why would she do this to me? What was wrong with me?
“Danny, I know this is tough for you to hear. It took me several months to get over the thought of you setting her up. I blamed you. I wanted you to suffer. When I finally understood you were not responsible, you had been gone a while, and nobody knew how to reach you. I called Scott, but you had a falling out, I guess. I wanted to tell you…I did try to reach out to you. You deserve to know because you’re a good man. Danny…”
“Barry...oh fuck…” Hand to his forehead.
“…I wanted to tell you all this. While the timing is horrible and I know it must re-open some wounds, I really wanted you to know so that you can stop blaming yourself. Whatever happened that day, you are just a man. Just human. Like Mel. Whatever happened between her and you and Barry, you are all just people…people trying to find a path through a very complicated life. It’s not easy. Not easy in the slightest.”
Danny was staring at the carpet. So many emotions were hitting him at once. Me and her and Barry…”
“I know she would’ve wanted you to know that she loved you so much. You had both worked so hard to build a life and she felt so immensely guilty…Danny, she really did…it was destroying her that she was going to have to break your heart like that. You wouldn’t believe how many times we talked about it.”
“So many lies.”
“What?”
“Meghan, she must have told me so many lies. She always told me she was working late, or visiting friends. Or you. To carry on that relationship, those must’ve all been lies. Every ‘dinner with friends’ or ‘brunch with Mom’ or ‘meeting with my principal’ must’ve been, in fact, a rendezvous with Barry. I believed her…never questioned her...”
“Don’t let that eat you up. You can’t. Whatever drove her away isn’t your fault, you see? People just naturally grow apart.”
He could hear her voice, even now. Danny, I have to work on folders for conferences tomorrow, so I’m going to be home very late…I have a meeting at the district tomorrow that I need to prepare a presentation for…I’m going over to help Mom with a few things, but I’ll be back in the evening… So many lies. How many? When was she working late and when was she seeing Barry. If they were in love and planning to marry, then most or all of them were lies.
“Danny, come back…you’re far away.”
“Well, you hit me with a big one there, Meghan.”
“I am sorry. Danny, you don’t know how sorry I am. I know you were a great husband to her. Mel told me that over and over, which was why it was so hard for her to think of leaving you. She said you were always so patient and kind with her. It tore her apart…it really did.”
“Then why? Why would she leave me if I was a good husband?”
“Why? Why do people fall in love? For so many reasons. We can’t change who we’re attracted to, Danny. We can’t change what our heart tells us. Whatever caused her to fall out of love with you, it happened. Whatever caused her to fall in love with Barry, it happened also. But instead of focusing on that, focus on your path moving forward. Perhaps knowing that she was ready to leave you will help you put that part of your life behind you. Maybe now you can move on with your life. Do you know what I mean? That’s why I wanted to tell you so badly.”
“I know your intent, Meghan, but I honestly wish I had never heard this.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I loved her with everything in my heart. There was only her. Now I know that wasn’t returned. I have to bury her again. I spent this last year mourning her loss and learning to put it behind me. Now everything I worked for has been destroyed. I have a new funeral to attend.”
“I’m sorry. I wanted you to have closure.”
“I thought I already had. Not now.”
“I’m sorry, Danny. I really am. I had to tell you this truth, though.”
Behind her, the baby began crying again. She got up, picked her up, giving soft shushes. She brought Melissa back, and held her while they talked.
“The last year has been so tough, Meghan. You have no idea.”
“Please forgive me, Danny, but it looks like you’ve had a tough time of things in many ways.” He blushed, noticing that she was reading the scars on his face.
“Yeah.”
“If you could talk to Melissa right now, what do you think she would want you to do?”
“What do you mean?”
“If Melissa could talk to you right now, what do you think she would tell you to do?”
“I’m…I’m not really sure.”
“I know what she’d want, because I know what she was going to tell you that day last year. She would want you to have a happy life. Not to mourn her loss, or dwell in the pain you’re experiencing. She’d want you to find someone. To get on with your life. She was going to tell you to find somebody else that night. She wanted you to be happy and in love. She loved you so much, even though she wasn’t in love with you any longer. She wanted you to meet someone and marry and have a family…just as she was planning her family with Barry.”
Danny knew he had heard these words before, but now they impacted him in a different way. Hearing these words from Meghan caused a ripple deep within him. “That’s all I ever wanted for her…happiness.”
“Because you loved her. Yes. I know she wanted you to be happy…to start a new life. Remember her always, but move on with your life. Besides, living a life without someone to share it with is meaningless. Meet someone, Danny. Life is meant to be shared. Find love again.”
The baby began to coo softly. Meghan looked down with the same beautiful smile he had seen on Melissa’s face so many times. A smile that would always warm him. Now a young baby girl named Melissa was being raised, and looking up into that same smile. The same family was producing another. He wondered what Melissa’s life would be like.
The One Way (Changes Book 1) Page 21