Accidental Heroes

by Danielle Steel

  Peter wasn’t sure what to wear either, since it was their first gay wedding, and they agreed that a dark suit would be a safe choice. They arrived at city hall a few minutes before the appointed hour, and Nancy was startled when Joel introduced her to his mother. He had said that his very conservative family had never accepted the fact that he was gay, and Nancy was impressed to find herself face-to-face with a tall, attractive, youthful-looking woman, who looked just like Joel, in a chic navy blue dinner suit, and she smiled warmly at Nancy and Peter. After Joel had gone to greet several men who had just arrived, in suits similar to Peter’s, Joel’s mother spoke to Nancy in a quiet voice.

  “I just found out about the wedding yesterday. Joel has always been very private about his life,” she said carefully. “And his father has never accepted the fact that he’s gay. It’s been very difficult for Joel. I’m glad he’s happy now. It meant a lot to me that he called to tell me, and invited me to the wedding. I wouldn’t miss it. And Kevin is a wonderful man. I flew in from Salt Lake this morning. I asked my husband to come, but he just can’t do it. But here I am,” she said proudly, and Nancy was pleased for Joel. He whispered to Nancy about it a few minutes later, as he pinned a small white rose to her lapel, so people would know she was the matron of honor, and he had a white orchid for his mother to wear that he’d ordered at the last minute after he called her.

  “Do you believe it? My mother came. She loves Kevin.” It was a difficult breakthrough for him. “I decided to call her when we were getting out of the plane. I thought if I lived through it, I’d give it one more try with them. You never know, do you?” He was beaming, and Kevin’s mother kissed him several times, and stood next to Joel’s mother during the ceremony.

  They had two best men, their closest friends who were also partners who had gotten married, and Nancy standing near them as witnesses, about a dozen friends, and their parents. The ceremony was serious and respectful, performed by a judge, which was the only disappointment for Joel’s mother, she admitted later. She would have preferred a minister. Joel and Kevin exchanged narrow gold wedding bands, and had written their vows, which moved Nancy to tears, even more so when she remembered how close she and Joel had come to being killed two days before, and realized their friends and families could have been attending a funeral, not a wedding, which was a grim thought, and she shuddered when it crossed her mind.

  Both mothers cried when Joel and Kevin were officially pronounced married, and everyone embraced the couple after the ceremony. Kevin had arranged for a white-coated waiter to be outside the room in the hallway and pour champagne into plastic cups. And the atmosphere was instantly festive. Everyone was happy for them. An hour later, they drove to the Ritz-Carlton, where Kevin’s parents had rented a beautiful reception room with a garden, and a small band was playing their favorite songs. And there was a buffet for about eighty people. Nancy couldn’t remember a wedding she had enjoyed as much, or which had been as tastefully done.

  She danced with Peter before and after dinner, and he stayed close to her all night. Having nearly lost her, he didn’t want to let her out of his sight, and Nancy could see that Kevin was feeling the same way. It had been a wake-up call for all of them that the worst could happen and life could change in the blink of an eye.

  At ten o’clock Joel threw a bouquet to the single men and women in the group, and Kevin’s niece caught it and was thrilled.

  The wedding cake had been made by one of the best bakeries in San Francisco and was spectacular, with two grooms on it. Everything had been done with style and beauty and impeccable taste. Not a single detail had been overlooked. The flowers throughout the room were exquisite.

  Joel’s mother left shortly after ten to catch her flight back to Salt Lake City, and she had a quiet, healing moment with her son, and looked genuinely sorry to leave. She promised to come back and visit soon. And at midnight, Kevin and Joel got ready to leave their guests. Their flight to Tahiti was leaving at the crack of dawn. The wedding had been absolutely perfect.

  “If you ever decide to give up flying, you have a new career all lined up,” Nancy said to Joel when she kissed him goodbye and wished him a wonderful trip. “You’d be a fabulous wedding planner,” she complimented him.

  “Kevin did everything. All I did was say yes or no, and cut a few pictures out of magazines.” He looked lovingly across the room at his husband, and then looked at Nancy seriously. “I keep thinking how lucky we were this week.”

  She nodded, understanding what he meant. She felt the same way, and to be pregnant on top of it was the icing on the cake. She had seen her doctor the day before and confirmed that everything was fine, which was a huge relief.

  “I’m glad I called my mom,” Joel continued. “I think it meant a lot to her, and it did to me too to have her here. I always feel like an orphan with no family,” although Kevin’s family had embraced him like their own son. “My mom gave me back a piece of myself by being here and putting her stamp of approval on my life,” Joel said with emotion. “It’s too bad my father can’t get there too. It’s hard on my brother, who leads a secret life to keep them happy. I just couldn’t do that anymore. At least my mom came.” He kissed Nancy goodbye again. Most of the guests left at the same time, as the orchestra played “Happy Trails to You” and the party ended.

  “I had a really good time,” Peter said to Nancy. “It was the nicest wedding I’ve ever been to, except ours.” He smiled and kissed her as the valet brought them their car, and they got in. And he looked serious for a moment on the way home.

  “We need to talk about what we’re going to do about Beijing now.” She nodded. It had been on her mind too. “If we’re going to back out, we should do it soon.”

  “Do you think we should?” she asked him sadly.

  “I don’t know. How do you feel about having two kids?”

  “That doesn’t worry me. I like the idea. I just wonder if we’d feel differently about having an adopted child and one of our own. I don’t want to be unfair to her.”

  “I’m sure that we’d come to love her as much as our own. Our biological child could turn out to be a brat,” he said, teasing her, as they drove home.

  “Let’s think about it,” Nancy said, wanting to do the right thing, still coasting on the warm feelings of the evening. It had been a beautiful night.

  * * *

  —

  Ellen had Scott in her arms when she visited Robert in jail, the day after she arrived, two days after Robert had kidnapped him from her parents’ house. Robert had been arraigned the day after he was arrested. He was charged with parental abduction, and the judge had set bail, but Robert hadn’t paid it and had nothing to post as bond. He looked depressed when he came to the phone in the visiting area. The baby stretched his arms out to him. But they were separated by a sheet of bulletproof glass and had to communicate over the phone.

  “What happened to you? Why did you do it? I nearly went crazy when I discovered he was gone,” Ellen said to him. “I thought he’d been kidnapped by someone who snuck into my parents’ house.” There were tears in her eyes as she said it, and he could see how upset she was. He hadn’t thought of that when he took Scott. He had left her a note, but she said she hadn’t found it for several hours. He had left it on the piano in her parents’ living room on his way out, and no one ever looked there.

  “I don’t know. I think I went crazy for a minute. Everything went so wrong with us. We got married and our parents were on our backs all the time. I thought it was going to be exciting and romantic and fun, and instead you bitched at me all the time. All of a sudden, you didn’t like my friends, I drank too much, I couldn’t smoke weed in the house, my job wasn’t good enough, I didn’t make enough money.”

  She winced when he said it, and couldn’t deny it. It was all true. He’d been twenty-three years old and she was twenty-two. She had thought that marriage would mak
e him grow up and he’d be more like her father. Instead she saw how immature he was. He wanted to go out with his friends every night, or have them hang around and mess up their apartment, which he never cleaned up. And all he wanted to do with them was go to concerts or get drunk or stoned.

  “And then you got pregnant, and it all got worse. You were sick all the time, you talked about the baby all the time, and I had to be a father. And when you had him, you never let me near him. Your parents pay for everything, so they think they own us. And mine never help us, which I agree is shitty of them. And he screams a lot.” Robert nodded toward his son. “You nurse him all the time, so I can never feed him or get near you. I thought it was going to be wonderful, but it’s been miserable. Your parents constantly say how irresponsible I am, as though I can’t hear them. And I think we got separated because they told you to.”

  “We got separated because you are irresponsible. Look what you just did,” she said and he hung his head in shame. But he’d been desperate and didn’t know what else to do.

  “I just thought if I could take him away for a while, we’d get to know each other, and I could get used to being a father without everyone breathing down my neck.”

  “Why Japan?”

  “I saw it on the Internet, and it looked nice.” He was as unrealistic as ever, but he wasn’t a bad person. She had been in love with him in the beginning, but she had hated being married to him. And her parents were right. He was a kid. Even at twenty-five now, he was immature. She was ready to be a grown-up and take care of their baby. He had no idea what that meant, and he wanted to let his stoned friends play with him all the time, or put Scott in a backpack carrier and take him to a concert where everyone was smoking dope. It wasn’t what she wanted for herself, and she hadn’t realized how unready he was to become an adult. Having the baby had shown her that in spades. He had come to the delivery stoned, with two friends, and got upset when she told them to leave. She knew he loved the baby, but he didn’t really know what that meant.

  “He threw up all over some woman on the plane,” he said and laughed about it.

  “He had an earache and the stomach flu when you took him, and you didn’t take his antibiotics with you.” She sounded like an adult and he didn’t, because he wasn’t one. He wasn’t a criminal or a kidnapper. He was just a stupid kid. But their son needed a father and not another child. “And you could have both been killed on that flight. When I called your mom she said there were brochures about Japan all over your room, but she wasn’t worried.”

  “You called my mom?” He looked shocked.

  “Of course. You stole our son.”

  “Was she pissed?”

  “I don’t know. She said you’d probably bring him back in a few days and he’d be fine. But what if he wasn’t? If you had an accident with him, or went down on the plane? You’d break my heart.”

  “Yeah, mine too,” he said glumly. She thought of all the things he didn’t. She always assumed the worst. “Do you think we could ever start over again, Ellen? We were so happy in the beginning.”

  “We were kids in college with no responsibilities. It takes more than a wedding to make a marriage,” she said sadly. He had been a big lesson for her, and her parents had warned her, but she didn’t want to listen. “And what do you suggest we do about him?” And she gestured to their child.

  Robert looked blank for a minute as he thought about it. “We could leave him with your parents for a while. He likes them, and they’re good with him.” Listening to him was like being in fantasyland, and he wasn’t even stoned. This was who he was.

  “We can’t go backward. We can’t just hand our son off to someone else, and I don’t want to. We can’t start over for us. I can’t do this again. I’ve hated the last two years too. You have to go away somewhere and grow up. And then you’ll be good for someone else. Not for me. This has been a terrible experience for me,” she said with tears in her eyes. “But you can start again with Scott, when you’re ready to. I won’t trust you alone with him again. I talked to my lawyer, and the court can appoint a monitor to be on visits with you, so he’s safe. Until you can demonstrate that you’re responsible.” He didn’t say anything and just nodded. It sounded horrible to him.

  “I’m going to withdraw the parental abduction charges. And I’ll drop the back child support. I know you can’t pay it. My father said he’d help us. He’s putting money aside for college for him anyway, and he’ll give me some of that. But if you want to be Scott’s father, you have to act like it,” she said, staring at the man she had married who had turned out to be an overgrown boy. He acted like a teenager at twenty-five.

  “Are you really going to withdraw the charges?” He looked happy about that as she nodded.

  “And the child support. When you can afford it, you can start giving me money for him. I know you can’t now anyway. You need a better job than a surf shop or bicycle shop or skateboard shop. You need a real job.”

  “I’m not ready for a real job.” He wasn’t ready for life, and surely not for a wife and child. Ellen stood up then, and Robert looked at her sadly. “You really don’t want us to try again?”

  “No, I don’t,” she said firmly.

  “We were great for a while.” He smiled at her.

  “No, we weren’t. We were stupid kids and we never should have gotten married. But I’m glad we have Scott.” She gazed tenderly at their baby, who gurgled at her. “Take care of yourself. And I’m not paying your way back to New York. You can figure that out. I’ll take care of the rest.”

  “Maybe I’ll stay here for a while. Everyone says San Francisco is cool.” He looked excited about it as he stood up too.

  “Do whatever you want,” she said to him. After talking to him, she had no regrets. She was glad she had come. It had been her father’s idea. He said they needed to talk to each other as two adults and figure out what they wanted. She knew now. She didn’t want him. And she wondered when Scott would see him again. Robert was obviously in no hurry to go back and grow up.

  She turned around and left then, and never looked back. An hour later, the charges had been dropped, and Robert was released from jail. He texted her one word, “Thanks.” She was already at the airport, waiting for her flight back to New York. She had done what she came for. Robert left the jail a free man. He checked into a small hotel in the Haight and went out to buy some weed. The neighborhood looked like fun to him. He got there just as Ellen’s plane took off for New York with their son.

  * * *

  —

  Helen was surprised when Ben called her the day after the press conference to ask her how she was feeling.

  “I’m okay.” She was touched that he had called. “I must be getting old. I used to do triathlons. I still hurt all over after eight hours in the water.”

  “You could probably swim the English Channel in less. Are you kidding? You were in a life-and-death stressful situation, made a water landing with a commercial plane, saved all your passengers, got swept out to sea, and hung in for eight hours. I’m surprised you can stand up.” She laughed at his description of it. “How are your kids doing?”

  “Relieved. I think I scared them all to death. They can handle the plane coming down better than my disappearing and being lost at sea for eight hours.”

  “Yeah. No wonder.” He wasn’t surprised.

  “Do you have children?” She knew very little about him, and was curious. They had dealt with an emergency together but shared nothing about their personal lives. They’d had no reason to.

  “I never had the courage, or the time. I was married twice, and both my wives said that my work isn’t compatible with normal life between humans. I work a lot. So I stopped trying. Kids never fit into the picture. Once in a while, I regret it, but I don’t think I’d have been good at it anyway.”

  “It’s never too late,” she sa
id, smiling. “You might surprise yourself. Lots of men your age marry younger women and have kids.”

  “Now, that’s a terrifying thought,” he said and she laughed. He seemed like a kind man, and she thought it was too bad that he was alone.

  “We’re going to Disneyland next week.” She changed the subject. “The kids don’t know yet. I love it as much as they do.”

  “I’ve never been,” he confessed. “It doesn’t fit my image as a registered curmudgeon. I go to baseball games, and play pool in bars.”

  “Both my sons are in Little League,” she said. “I’m thinking about coaching. I played softball in the Air Force, in a women’s league. I have to be Mom and Dad now.”

  “That must be tough.” He was sympathetic as he said it.

  “Sometimes it is,” she said honestly. “You do what you have to do. Things don’t always turn out as you plan.” He knew what had happened to their plans, when her husband was killed. But she seemed to be a normal, well-balanced person and was doing all right, and it was obvious how much she loved her kids.

  “Well, don’t forget about our dinner in New York. You look like you could use a decent meal. You probably never eat.”

  She was on the thin side, and always had been. “I eat. We eat a lot of pizza and burgers at our house, and barbecue on the weekends. Jack used to do that. I’m actually a lousy cook.”

  “But a great pilot. You can’t do everything.”

  “You can tell my kids that.”

  “Have fun in Disneyland.”

  She suddenly wondered if he was still in California, and asked him.

  “Actually, I am. The chief out here wanted to talk to me about something. I’m going back tomorrow. He’s a nice guy.”

  She wished him a good trip back, and forgot about the call after they hung up. She had to take her oldest son to his baseball game in an hour. Life was back to normal. It was hard to believe that two days before she had been fighting to save the plane and had nearly died. And now she was driving to Little League games. Life was indeed very strange.