The silence that engulfed the room was claustrophobic in its intensity. She couldn’t believe she’d put it all into words.
Brady looked shell-shocked from everything she’d said…how much she’d held back for far too long. Emotion darkened in his eyes, but he wasn’t letting any of it loose. If only he would.
He raked his hand through his hair and just studied her for a few moments. “If holding you and making love to you again would make either of us feel better, I’d do it. But right now, I don’t think you want me anywhere near you, and we all need a breather. I’m going for a walk.”
He didn’t move for a moment…as if he wanted her to tell him not to go, as if he wanted her to say, Yes, hold me, make love to me, make it all better. But she couldn’t. She needed more than that and she couldn’t even tell him what it was.
When he left the bedroom and closed the door, she sank onto the love seat, dropped her head into her hands, and cried.
On the patio at 3:00 a.m. Brady sat in a lawn chair, a flashlight beside his foot, and stared unseeingly into the black night. His shirt was damp from the sweat he’d worked up on his walk through the woods. The trail was groomed, the path unmistakable with the flashlight’s beam. For some reason he’d needed to cut through the tress and brush…he’d needed to feel surrounded by night more primitively than he would have been on the street with gas postlamps lighting his way.
Propping his elbows on his knees, he dropped his head into his hands. He was going to lose Laura and Sean if he didn’t do something.
Apparently for years Laura had bottled up her feelings. They’d eaten at her. Although she’d remained loyal and loving, the resentment had eroded the bond between them that had once been so durable.
He’d always attempted to look forward, not back. He’d always tried to be strong so she could lean on him. Yet somehow in that strength, there had been so much weakness. The breakdown of his family had been caused by the walls he’d erected to keep his pain and guilt contained.
The pain and guilt from his Nam memories had lain moldy, corruptive and decaying in the pit of his soul. They’d tainted everything he did, said and was, though he’d tried to deny it. When Jason died, his grief had added another layer to the quagmire.
That quagmire had kept him from loving Sean as he should. It had kept him from giving Laura what she needed most—a depth of love that could only find roots in revelation and vulnerability.
Through the years, he’d known that if he spoke again of his guilt and remorse after their session with John, he would be too vulnerable. The idea of going to the parents’ group with Laura after Jason died had been anathema—because he’d known sharing his grief would lead him back to Nam. As he’d gotten older, he’d learned loss compounded loss and guilt compounded guilt.
As he lifted his head and looked up at the stars, he longed to find direction again. He longed to be connected—really connected—to Laura, to Sean and Kat, to his sister and brothers and friends…to himself.
One question echoed in his heart. What do I have to do?
Chapter 17
Before dawn the next morning, Brady sat on Laura’s side of the bed, by her hip, and gently touched her shoulder.
She awakened instantly and he could tell she’d been crying. Her eyes were puffy, her cheeks splotchy. But she was beautiful, outside and in. She was his Laura. He hoped she was still his.
She sat up quickly. “What’s wrong?”
“Pretty much everything, the way I see it. And that’s what I want to remedy.”
He must look as wrung out as he felt because she asked, “Did you get any sleep last night?”
“No. I walked, and thought, and sat on the patio and regretted everything I haven’t done that I should have done.”
Last night, through hours of soul-searching, he’d realized what he had to do—not only to keep Laura, not only to help Sean, but to make them a real family. He had to own what had happened in the past and what he’d done. He had to take it by the throat, shake it until he understood it and then tell those he loved what it meant. He had to puke it out like a poison so he could swallow their love and finally let it heal him.
In healing himself, maybe he could heal Sean and show him he did understand. Brady’s memories, his pride, his guilt didn’t matter anymore. His son mattered. His marriage mattered.
“I want to take Sean to D.C. to the Wall and I’d like you to come along. Will you? It’s five-thirty. I’d like to be on the road by six and there by eight. Even this time of year it should be pretty quiet early in the morning.”
Actually, every time he’d been to the Wall it had been quiet, like a church. And rightly so. He’d never been there with Laura or with anyone else. He’d always gone alone.
“I can be ready in fifteen minutes,” she assured him. “I’ll make a pot of coffee and put it in a thermos.”
Right now Brady didn’t know how to act with Laura. He didn’t know how much resentment she might still be harboring. He didn’t know if her love for him had withered away due to neglect…or due to his inability to be free from the past.
“Brady, about what I said last night—”
“Did you say anything you didn’t feel?”
When she shook her head, her eyes became shiny with the turmoil and upheaval they were both going through.
“Then you don’t have anything to apologize for. I do. I have kept everyone I love at a distance. I don’t know if this pilgrimage will do any good for me or Sean, but I’ve got to start somewhere. I’m long past due. With him. And with you. I’m sorry for shutting you out. I’m sorry for not doing something to fix this a long time ago. I do love you, Laura. I always have and I always will. Will you give me a chance to start over? To make our marriage what it should be? Or is it too late?”
His heart pounded as he waited for her answer.
She slid closer to him. “It’s not too late. I love you, too, Brady Malone. For always.”
Her voice was full of emotion and her lower lip quivered. Leaning toward her, he took her chin into his palm. His kiss was long and soul-felt as he tried to express everything he couldn’t put into words.
Finally when he broke the kiss, he saw love in her eyes—a love so much deeper and wider and higher than the love he’d found on the courthouse steps.
After he kissed her again, he stood. “I have to do this before we can be right together. I have to wake Sean.”
She nodded and he knew she understood. He wiped a tear from the corner of her eye, and then he went to his son.
When he entered Sean’s room, Brady realized Sean hadn’t slept, either. He was sitting on the floor, the baseball scrapbook he kept, open on his legs. There was a newspaper clipping with a picture of his team. Brady realized his son’s gaze was focused on Gary’s face.
“Get dressed,” Brady said gruffly. “We’re going to take a drive.”
“Are you going to lock me up in a detox unit? There’s no point. I’m sober.”
Brady could tell that he was. Sean’s eyes were clear, full of defiance.
“No. We’re going to D.C. There’s something I want to show you.”
Sean looked surprised, but then he frowned. “Now?”
“Do you have something better to do?”
Sean shrugged. “I guess not. Where are we going in D.C.?”
“You’ll see when we get there. Be downstairs in fifteen minutes if you want to grab something to eat. We’re leaving at six.” Without giving Sean an opportunity to argue or to ask more questions, Brady left his room.
The drive to D.C. was quiet. Sean sat in the back, curled up, dozing.
Every once in a while Laura glanced at him, then at Brady. He had no way to know what she was thinking until she placed her hand on his thigh. The message was clear—whatever happened, she was there for him and for their son.
As they neared Washington and he took the Connecticut Avenue exit, his palms became a little sweaty. More than a little sweaty.
Checking
in the rearview mirror, he saw that Sean was awake now. Alert. His eyes questioning as they met Brady’s.
This early on a Saturday morning Brady found a parking spot on Twenty-second Street. Sean followed a few paces behind as they crossed Constitution Avenue. When they started down a path to the Mall, Sean finally spoke. “We’re going to visit the Washington Monument?”
“No. We’re going to the Vietnam memorial.”
“Why?”
“Because I have something to show you. Something to tell you.”
The path was tree-lined as they approached the chevron-shaped wall that sloped down both sides from its vertex, fitting into its surroundings with perfect harmony. The names began on the fifth of the smallest panels.
No one else was around. Lots of tourists hadn’t arrived yet. There were wreaths, a bouquet of mums with a purple ribbon, a single red rose. Brady led as Laura, then Sean, followed in single file on the blocks of granite down the middle, not veering off on the tan cobblestones on either side of the path. Brady didn’t have to consult one of the directories that listed all the names of the men and women killed…or missing in action. He didn’t have to search for Mike’s name or the panel or line numbers, because he’d never forgotten where it was.
The black granite wall was a work of art in many ways, not just in its symmetry and design but in the mirrored aspect of the black granite itself. As they stopped at a panel on the West Wall, the three of them were reflected behind the names. It was an odd feeling. A personal feeling. The reflection always pulled him right in…pulled him over those cobblestones toward the wall.
Laura’s reflection became even clearer behind him. She stepped forward, put a hand on his shoulder and said, “I’ll wait up by the Soldiers’ Memorial.”
There were benches up there. He nodded and let her go, knowing this was something he had to do with Sean. Knowing she couldn’t help. Knowing he was at the end of the line if he couldn’t get through to his son. Yet the tender squeeze of Laura’s hand conveyed that she was with him in spirit.
“Why are we here?” Sean demanded, his voice low.
This memorial did that. In the midst of the hustle and bustle of the city it was an oasis, where voices lowered, where men and women grieved, where everyone remembered.
Brady dropped to one knee, ran his thumb over Michael Wolf’s name and said to Sean, “Come here.”
Sean hunkered down.
Brady pulled his wallet from his back pocket and slid out a thirty-eight-year-old Polaroid photograph that had peeled on one corner. He handed it to Sean. It was a picture of him and Mike outside their quarters.
“Mike was from Lancaster. We ended up in the same squad together. We talked about home a lot…how we’d grown up. He was engaged to be married when he got home. He knew I wished I had married your mom before I’d left. We talked about the kinds of lives we wanted to lead, the number of kids we’d like to have, the houses we wanted to buy. To keep us going through the tough days, we made plans for after we got back. After all, we didn’t live that far apart. We swore we’d go to an Orioles game together. Double-date, so our girls could get to know each other. We had so many plans. We even shared letters from home. Each of those letters was like gold. They lifted our spirits, reminded us where we’d come from, where we’d find safety again. At least, that’s what we thought.”
He paused, then asked, “Do you know how many names are here, Sean? Do you know how many died over there?”
His son shook his head.
“Fifty-eight thousand, two hundred forty-five. The names of men and women are inscribed in the order of when they died or when they went missing. Fifty-eight thousand. If there’s a diamond beside the name, death was confirmed. If there’s a cross, they were either missing or prisoners at the end of the war.”
Sean touched the diamond beside Michael Wolf’s name.
Brady stared at his reflection and his son’s shadowing the black granite. “I saw him get killed, Sean. I saw him get blown apart by a mortar round. So believe me when I tell you I understand what you feel about Gary and how he died.”
When Sean lowered his gaze to the photo, tears began falling down his cheeks. The breeze swept his hair back, but he was unmindful of it as the sun glittered on the streaks down his face.
Brady stood again and laid his palm over lines of names. “There’s another name on this wall of a friend I grew up with. Tom is missing in action.” Taking in a deep breath, he turned to his son. “I want to tell you what happened over there, what that article in the paper was all about.”
Sean stood, too, swiped his tears away with his wrist, but still held on to the picture of his dad and Mike. “You don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do. I’m not going to have another heart attack, Sean. I know that’s why you’ve been afraid to bring it up.”
Sean looked down at his sneakers. “I guess I decided it wasn’t any of my business.”
“But I’ve come to realize it is your business. What happened over there has affected everything I’ve done, said and thought since I got back. Your mother’s never talked about it, but we almost didn’t get married.”
Sean’s gaze met his. “Why?”
“Because we’d been separated for two years and I’d seen things I never thought I could tell her about. I had nightmares and flashbacks and I was afraid I’d hurt her if she woke me up suddenly. I hadn’t left the war in Vietnam. I’d brought it home with me. She put up with me for almost two years and then gave me an ultimatum—either get help or live a life separate from her.”
Sean’s mouth opened a little in surprise. “You got help?”
“I thought I did. I went to seven sessions of counseling and I saw my guilt was eating at me, making me bitter, making me push your mother away. On the advice of the counselor, she came to an appointment with me and I told her everything that had happened. I was afraid she’d walk away. But she didn’t. She told me she still loved me and wanted to make a life with me. That was the greatest gift I ever received. But I didn’t always know how to accept it. Sometimes it just seemed too big and your mom seemed too good, too special. And I didn’t feel I deserved her.”
“Why?”
“Because of what I did.” He hurried on. “I haven’t always been the father I should be to you. I think I’ve always been afraid to let you get too close because you’d see I wasn’t the man you thought I was. You wouldn’t respect me. You definitely wouldn’t look up to me.”
“That’s crazy, Dad. You’ve always done everything right.”
“No, I haven’t. I made a good living for us. But not being able to be close to you is my biggest failure. And it’s my fault, not yours. After Jason died, I felt God took him from us as a punishment. When we adopted you, I was afraid to love you. I was afraid God would punish me again and take you.”
Realizing thoughts were clicking through his son’s head, Brady wanted to know what they were. “Ask me whatever questions you have, Sean. I promise I’ll give you the truth.”
“Was that article right? Did you kill women and children?”
“Yes, I did. I was trained to be a soldier…to react first and think later. That never quite meshed with me, but I never understood just how well I’d learned it until that day—”
There was no easy way to say what he had to say. “We’d heard that the Viet Cong didn’t have a uniform, that they used the local peasants and coerced them to fight the battles. During training we were told older men and little kids were just as dangerous as recognizable VC.”
He stopped, dragged in a deep breath, then went on. “That day we learned the Viet Cong were seen moving cases of mortar rounds near a house in a hamlet. We were supposed to check it out. As we moved closer, our point man tripped a booby-trapped grenade. He went down and VC opened fire. I was leading the second squad. We maneuvered into a flanking position and rolled up the ambush.”
As always when the memory flooded back, his adrenaline pumped and he was there all over again. Except t
his time he was aware of Sean and intended to let it all spill out for both their sakes.
Sean was staring at him…listening as he’d never listened.
Brady could feel the sweat trickling down his neck now, the cold clamminess invading his limbs. His words low and strained, he continued. “A VC broke for the nearest hooch. Carl and I fired as he turned the corner. Knowing he was armed, we approached cautiously. There was movement at the edge of the jungle. I opened fire. When we swept the area after the battle, we found—” He stopped. Complete silence seemed to almost smother them until he said, “I’d killed two women and two children—they looked to be ten or twelve. Both women had grenades at their waists.”
His voice went even lower. “There was blood everywhere. And the smell…I just stood there in horror and couldn’t look away. I felt such intense guilt I was sick.”
He braced his hand against the Wall for support but kept his eyes on his son. “This was war. We’d witnessed buddies blown apart. We’d been taught how to respond. But all I could see were the two women and two kids. Women and kids. And I’d killed them. It was as if the world turned upside down that day.”
“If you hadn’t fired, you might have died! You probably would have.”
“That’s logical, Sean. That’s reasonable. But I was only aware of my M16…of the dead bodies. And I was filled with the knowledge that I was capable of killing without much provocation.”
“That’s not true. You were fighting in a war.”
“Yeah. I was. But if they hadn’t had grenades on their belts, they still would have been dead. What if they’d merely been trying to seek cover? What if…what if…what if?”
He grasped Sean’s shoulders. “That’s what you’re doing to yourself. What if you’d taken Gary’s pot from him? What if you’d dumped out all the beer? What if you’d hog-tied him to a chair so he couldn’t get in that canoe? What if he hadn’t stood up? What if you’d gone with him? What if you’d both drowned?”
Brady shook his son a little. “Gary’s actions were Gary’s. You’ve got to see that. He smoked. He drank. He went out in that canoe without a life vest. You dived into water that could have given you hypothermia. You pulled him to shore. You did CPR. You prayed he wasn’t dead. But he was, Sean. He was gone. And there was nothing you could have done about it.”
The Bracelet (Everlasting Love) Page 21