by Jane Gentry
Elizabeth shuddered. What an incomprehensible horror.
Cara laid a picture on the table. “Here’s the baby,” she said. “It’s a picture he asked her to send.”
Melody examined the baby’s face. “But he’s got on a dress,” she said.
“Boy babies wore dresses then,” said Elizabeth. “Don’t you think he looks sweet?”
Melody nodded. She looked up at Elizabeth. “Did his father get home?”
Steve had already scanned all the letters and was replacing them carefully. Melody removed them from the box as fast as he put them in and was busy arranging them in chronological order.
“The letters stop in January of 1865,” she said. She looked up at her father with troubled eyes. “Nothing says what happened to him.”
“I wish I knew,” said Cara wistfully. “The baby’s so sweet. And see? Here’s a picture of his mother.”
The young woman in the picture looked so much like his own love that the sight of her put a lump in Steve’s throat. He leaned his head against Elizabeth’s.
“War’s such a tragedy,” he said. “I wonder what did happen to all of them.”
“Why don’t you find out, Cara?” asked Joe. “That can be the surprise ending to your report. Did you know that the Department of Defense will have his records?”
“Really?” said Cara. “I can find out what happened to him?”
“Really,” said Joe. He twinkled at her. “It’s worth some extra credit.”
Cara grinned. She’d forgotten her feud and her embarrassment for the moment, Elizabeth noted gratefully.
“I suppose I need it,” Cara said.
“I suppose you do,” said Joe. He picked up his suit jacket off the back of the chair where he’d left it. “Well, folks, it’s been real, but tomorrow’s a working day.”
* * *
The yellow foyer light made Elizabeth look pale, and slight dark shadows gathered under her eyes. Steve leaned against the door and opened his arms to Elizabeth. She looked toward the kitchen with a shrug and a smile and put her head on his shoulder.
“What a night,” she said.
“Pretty stressful,” he agreed, stroking her hair as she rested against him. “You’re tired, honey.”
“Battle fatigue,” she told him. “Like you said. I’m sorry Cara was so rude.”
A little amused sound, almost a laugh, clucked in the back of his throat. “I don’t know what you said to her, but it seems to have had some effect.”
“I demanded good manners,” she said, yawning. “In Miss Westcott’s voice.”
He did laugh, then. “God knows that would scare anyone into obedience.”
“I know it can’t possibly work all the time as well as it did tonight,” she said. “She’s just too adolescent. But,” she looked up at him, with her first easy smile in some time, “I think I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I no longer feel as if I’m going to be run over by the train.”
“You don’t know how glad I am to hear you say that,” he told her. “I’ve been worried about you. You’ve been feeling awfully hopeless lately.”
She laid her hand on his thick blond hair and kissed him.
“You’ve been awfully patient lately,” she said. “I appreciate that.”
“Let’s have another kiss,” he said, wrapping her in his arms. “A really good one, sufficient to last me through the night. I’ll call you soon as I get home, just to say good-night, and then I want you to snuggle under the covers and get a good night’s sleep.”
“You know,” she said, with wonderment, “I just might be able to manage that, for a change.”
She gave him the kiss he wanted.
“I love you, Elizabeth,” he said quietly.
“I love you, too,” she said, and felt, deep in her peaceful heart, how wonderful that was and how rare.
He kissed her again and she clung to him happily, feeling more hopeful than she had since October. Steve loved her and was willing to face down even their bumptious offspring for her. Cara was showing a little manageability, and the girls hadn’t exchanged a cross word all evening. And look how instantly, if not cheerfully, they had obeyed when Steve had told them to leave the room—that was certainly progress. And they’d eaten their dinner, and Melody had brought in the plates, and Cara had quietly fetched the pictures and the letters and had participated in an actual discussion, with Steve and Melody at the table.
A miracle, nothing less.
Then she turned around. Both girls stood woodenly, with their hands at their sides and their faces set.
Chapter Eleven
Steve hadn’t called. Elizabeth, waiting, took a bath and curled up in bed with Steve’s fifth Fireman book, Fields of Gomorrah. It began:
A hot red dawn broke across a new world. Jord Varic fell to his back on the warm earth, exhausted. The children curled asleep beside him, safe for the moment from pursuit.
Jord Varic, relaxed and able to sleep? Elizabeth looked at the back cover: Steve’s face, so haunted and worn in the Kalik picture, was still grim, but determined and alert.
Varic and the children were still in trouble, but the outlook was less threatening. Kalik’s forces had been misled, and Jord had a little time to plan. There was none of the horrible, hopeless discomfort of the previous book.
Elizabeth read, but couldn’t concentrate. Why hadn’t Steve called? Had something happened to them on the way home? Worried, she picked up the phone to call him. There was no dial tone. She clicked the disconnect button several times.
Nothing. She looked at her watch. Only nine-thirty.
Frowning, she got out of bed to check the other phones in the house. She didn’t see how any of them could be out of order—Cara’s had been removed from her room, and all the other phones had worked fine when she’d gone upstairs. She knew, because she’d had to call the Time and Temperature number to set her alarm clock.
Must be a neighborhood outage, though she couldn’t imagine why. The weather wasn’t too awful, just cold, and the drizzle they’d had off and on for the past week would hardly disrupt the phone lines. First thing to do was check the rest of the connector boxes—a fool’s errand, but always the first step before she called the phone company. She shrugged into her bathrobe and walked down the hall, flipping on lights as she went. Cara, petulant, reading in her room. Office phone, okay. Okay in the kitchen, okay in the den. She opened the basement door and stood there. Was there any point in going down? There couldn’t be anything wrong with that phone. She hadn’t been anywhere near it when she went to get the wine, and anyway, it hung on the wall and made a terrible noise if it fell.
Not willing to leave the job half-done, she turned on the basement lights and went to examine it, anyway.
The receiver was not only off the hook, it had been disconnected entirely from the body of the phone. She held it in her hand and stared at it, as if it could tell her what it had been doing and why it wasn’t on the job. Finally she plugged it in, dialed Steve’s number and leaned against the wall.
“Guess where I am,” she said, when he answered.
“I can’t imagine,” he said. “What’s going on at your house? I’ve been sitting here in my office with my phone on automatic redial for over an hour. I was about to come over and see what’s wrong.”
“I’m in the basement,” she told him. “And this phone was off the hook.”
He wasn’t sure what she was telling him. “But why?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” she said. “It was not only off the hook, the receiver was unplugged.”
“But you were the only one down there,” said Steve.
“This isn’t the first time it’s happened,” she said. “It’s become a pattern. Cara, I’m sure.”
“Why would Cara unplug the basement phone?” asked Steve. “Oh. Of course. So we can’t talk.”
“Exactly,” said Elizabeth grimly. “I’m going to have a little conference with her.”
�
��Calm down first,” said Steve.
Good advice, which she didn’t want.
“And how should I do that?” asked Elizabeth, with some asperity. “Jog in place until the adrenaline dissipates?”
“She’s in a lot of distress,” said Steve. “Be compassionate.”
She hated being forced to be reasonable.
“I’m in a lot of distress,” said Elizabeth.
“I know,” he said. “Sleep on it.”
“I can’t sleep,” she said grimly. “I’m wide awake and probably will be for hours.”
“Read a good book,” he said. “One of mine.”
“I started Fields of Gomorrah,“ she told him, deciding she was glad to change the subject. Here was the opportunity to calm down. “While I was waiting in vain for you to call. It’s much more comfortable than Kalik.“
“Did you finish Kalik?“ he asked.
She hesitated. “Yes. It made me cry.” The memory of the sadness and despair was like spiders on her skin. “This one—it’s more comfortable.” She searched for words. “Kalik seemed to mirror my own sadness so much,” she said, “I thought I couldn’t go on at first. But I wanted to, because it was so good, and it won that Nebula award, so I know it’s famous. So I finished it, but I wish I hadn’t.”
“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “I understand. I couldn’t read it myself, for several years after I wrote it.”
“Was that when you were getting a divorce?” She remembered and bled for the hurt, hollow-eyed man pictured on the back cover of Kalik the Destroyer.
“Yeah. I was bitter and feeling helpless and couldn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “What I’m thinking often shows up in my books, and Kalik got it in spades. It wasn’t like your divorce from Robert. You knew why you were splitting up.”
“I certainly did,” she said. Robert had not one, but two women on the side. And maybe more—she hadn’t wanted to know. She had just wanted to get as far away from him as possible.
“Marian and I married too young,” Steve continued. “And we grew up in different directions.”
“Sometimes that happens,” said Elizabeth.
“It’s almost guaranteed, if you’re just nineteen,” he said.
There was a somber cast to his voice, which she couldn’t quite identify.
“You still sound sad about it,” she said.
“Not sad,” said Steve. “Not anymore. A little melancholy, looking back at those two happy children. They never could have dreamed that what they were so sure about would cause them such grief.”
She heard his office chair squeak as he leaned back in it.
“And when we did grow up, we wanted different lives, different things out of life, and we could never come to a compromise.” The chair squeaked again, as if he were restless. “It was the worst possible ending, for both of us. A bloodless killing, sort of like a neutron bomb. All the wounds were internal. You left your marriage with a feeling of relief. We left ours with a feeling of failure. If one of us had been a real rat, it would have been easier, but we’re both nice, well-meaning people.”
“I’m glad Robert was a rat,” Elizabeth said, with heartfelt sincerity. Then she realized what she said wasn’t actually what she meant and tried to explain.
Steve laughed. “It’s all right. I understand. I’m sort of glad he was a rat, too, except for Cara. It’s opened up all kinds of new possibilities for me.”
“Like me,” she said.
“Exactly like you,” he said. His voice was tender. “Darling, you ought to go back to bed. You’re going to catch cold in that dank basement.”
“I’d rather talk to you,” she said. “I’ve waited all evening to do it.”
“Tell you what, Sammy and I will come over for breakfast. We’ll talk about going to Lin’s.”
“Will this be anything like the last time you came over in the morning?” she asked. “I can’t say I’d mind, because I thought the entire event was spectacularly successful, but I promised McNulty that I’d see him at nine o’clock without fail.”
“McNulty,” said Steve, “is becoming an intolerable burden.”
“McNulty,” said Elizabeth, “is becoming the source of most of next year’s income.”
“McNulty,” said Steve, “is perhaps a tolerable burden, after all. All right. I’ll let you out of the house, fully dressed by seven forty-five.”
“Actually, I don’t have to leave until eight-fifteen, if you’ll drop me at the station so I won’t have to park.”
“I can manage that,” said Steve. “I’ll be over as soon as I put Melody on the train.”
“Okay.” Elizabeth wished she could look forward to the time when they could have breakfast—and whatever else they wanted—every morning. With a sigh she wondered if that would ever become possible.
“Good night, then, sweetheart.” His voice was a caress. “Sleep well.”
“I love you, Steve,” she said. And after she disconnected, she said it again. “I love you, damn it. How are we ever going to work this out, when absolutely everything is going wrong?”
Disabling those phones was sabotage—well planned, carefully conducted and, she had to admit, fairly successful. Denied that, what other schemes would the child invent?
She found this subterfuge difficult to believe. Cara was fiery and short-tempered, but she’d never in her life ever been sneaky. Elizabeth contemplated this gloomily. It wasn’t merely spite, on Cara’s part. It was desperation. She was fighting hard, and not just to get rid of Melody. Her distaste for Melody simply could not have provoked such sustained guerrilla action, particularly in view of Cara’s pronounced disdain for anything underhanded. And she really didn’t seem to dislike Steve.
So why did she do it?
Elizabeth lay back on the bed, with her hands tucked behind her head and thought.
After considerable worry over her approach, she got up and ambled wearily to Cara’s room. Cara was still sitting cross-legged on her bed, reading a novel.
“That’s awfully bad light, honey,” Elizabeth said. “Doesn’t it hurt your eyes?”
“No,” Cara said. She didn’t look up.
Elizabeth sat on the edge of the bed. “Cara, I have to talk to you.”
“So talk,” Cara said. She kept her head bent over her book.
“Trying for three weeks?” asked Elizabeth. There was a touch of unsheathed steel in her tone.
Cara paid attention to that. She closed her book and gave Elizabeth her sullen attention.
“Why have you been disconnecting the phones?” Elizabeth asked.
Cara shrugged her shoulders convulsively and looked away.
“Cara,” said Elizabeth. “You have to talk to me about this.”
“He’s trying to be my father,” said Cara. “I already have a father.”
“Did you think keeping the phone off the hook would keep me from seeing Steve?”
Cara shrugged again. “Why’d you divorce my dad?” she asked.
Elizabeth took a deep breath and told her. “He was going out with other women, behind my back. Every time he did it, he’d promised to stop. But he was lying about that—he told me what I wanted to hear. So he had to leave, because he wouldn’t stop.”
Cara glared at her. “He would have, if you’d been nicer to him,” she told Elizabeth. “He loves you. He told me.”
“Cara,” said Elizabeth, not knowing how to explain, yet knowing that she must. “Your father loves you, not me. He doesn’t want you to be unhappy, so he says what you want to hear. He’s very charming and convincing. I know that, because I loved him once myself. But he doesn’t love me, and hasn’t in a long time.” She didn’t add if ever.
“Well, he said he loves you on his card!” Cara whipped it out of the pages of the book, where it had been placed both as keepsake and bookmark. “He says so, right on this card. ‘Give my love to mommy.’ There.”
“Darling,” said Elizabeth helplessly. “That’s just being poli
te. He doesn’t love me. His only link to me is through you. That’s not even his handwriting. It’s typed.”
“Well, Daddy typed it,” said Cara stubbornly. “And he wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it. And I bet his feelings are hurt because you’re going out with other people.”
“Cara, we’re not married anymore. Both of us go out with other people.”
“You never did before,” said Cara. Her eyes were full of misery. “And then Mr. Riker came along, and all of a sudden you’ve forgotten all about Daddy. And he does love you. I asked him and he said he did.”
God help me! Elizabeth thought.
“He can’t stand to have anyone mad at him, Cara,” she said, repeating her earlier message in different words. “He’s insecure that way. He knows you want us to get married again, and he doesn’t want you to be unhappy. So he’s let you believe something that just isn’t true, sweetheart. We are never going to get together again. I want you to believe that.”
Cara’s eyes were as opaque as jade.
Elizabeth looked at her helplessly and took her by the shoulders. “I don’t want you to be unhappy or disappointed either, darling, but disappointment and unhappiness are part of life. You just have to learn to overcome them.”
Cara tried to twist away from her. Elizabeth took a firmer grip and massaged at the tight muscles around her thin neck.
“I have always told you the truth, and I will keep right on doing it, even if it makes you sad,” Elizabeth said. “It makes me sad, too, because I want you to be happy, and I know this makes you sad. But your father and I don’t love each other. We are not going to get back together. We can’t, because I have to know the truth and he is not capable of telling it. You can’t stop loving him because of that—he’s your father. He doesn’t tell lies because he’s mean or dishonest. He tells lies because his lies make people happy for a little while.”
Cara’s eyes were shut and her mouth was set. Elizabeth’s stomach felt hollow with anxiety. “I love you and I want to make you happy, but I won’t lie to you to do it.”
She let Cara go, and the child moved away from her. Her eyes licked fire and her teeth were actually bared.