“He does?”
“Like his grandfather. He takes out that picture of him sometimes.”
Caleb felt a quench of sadness—or not sadness, longing maybe. Even a touch of fear. Would he be strong enough for his son? He looked at Maria, dressed in her red satin nightgown, beautiful as always, smarter than any person he’d ever known. She knew the capitols and the square root of Pi to twelve digits and every major Supreme Court ruling since the birth of the nation. Her eyes were wide and dark. He owed her everything, her and Jonathan. Loving them had saved him, just as his father had told him it would.
Maria brushed her hand across his face and twisted her fingers through the hair behind his ear. “Yours is getting long, too.”
“On accident. Just haven’t been to the barber in a while.”
“Hmm. You know, if you grew it out, you’d look just like him.”
“Who?”
“Your father. Except for the hair color, of course.”
She kissed him lightly on the lips and grazed her hand across his face. On her way out, she glanced over her shoulder and he knew that expression. It meant she was going to be waiting for him and he would be a fool to make her wait long. He turned back to his son, for one last look, and thought about the hair. He didn’t know how he felt about his son growing it out, but he wasn’t about to tell him no. The boy had to start making his own choices, after all. He couldn’t always be there for him.
That’s when Caleb realized, with a shock that nearly brought him to tears, who had really spoken to him in that alley all those years ago.
He also knew what he had to do.
***
It was something of a secret identity.
When he left his house, he was mild mannered Caleb Mertz, with the thinning red hair, the tan polo shirt, and the loose khakis. When he stepped into one of his gigs, some grungy gay bar in the East Village or a high octane lounge just off Wall Street, he was the piano player—with the long black hair flecked with gray, the dark intense eyes, and the tight black jeans and a black T-shirt. The jeans always felt like they were riding up his crotch, and the wig itched like a son-of-a-gun, but he learned to ignore these irritations. Once he was playing, he didn’t notice little annoyances anyway. He never had.
If some oldtimer happened to stop by a night Caleb was playing, he might have thought the piano player looked oddly familiar. Didn’t he see that guy playing here years ago? But it couldn’t have been. That guy hadn’t been around in years. Decades, even.
It wasn’t long before his first foray into the gap. In the early years, he hadn’t been good enough to open a rift for more than a second. Later, when he’d had the ability to make it happen, he’d been too afraid of losing Maria and Jonathan. But now he saw that only by going into the gap, and doing what he had to do, did he stand a chance of keeping them.
The first time, he merely caught a glimpse of the young boy with the red hair, bowing to the half-filled library performance hall. The second time, the boy was older, playing at a bar. There were other glimpses after that, and sometimes the young man saw him, but other times he was gone before the young man even looked up from the piano. They brushed past each other in the gap like the wing feathers of two birds.
Finally, the energy in the song was right, the notes were just perfect, and he found himself standing in a shadowy alley, leaning on a dumpster frosted with a thin layer of snow. He’d gone through the rift. He was in the gap—between two universes that might be or might have been, looking at the wasted shadow of a young man who was feverishly playing a Baldwin piano. The song. That song.
Caleb watched him. Caleb, the recovering drug addict, the Julliard dropout, the one-time vagrant. Caleb, the devoted professor, the faithful husband, the adoring father. Caleb, who opened the rift into the gap. Caleb, who played the piano. Somewhere, he was still playing the piano, his eyes closed and his fingers dancing over the keys like mad spiders, just as the young man before him played. He watched this poor waif, this wretched thing that his own mother wouldn’t have recognized, with the sunken eye sockets and the red hair gone white, and he knew he had to make this moment count. It really wouldn’t take much, just a little hope, a bit of advice, a touch of kindness that every son craved from his father, no matter how undeserving that father was.
“I’m here,” he said.
Introduction to “The Space Between Hope and Dreams”
When I ask my wife, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, to write a story for one of my Fiction River volumes, I never know what I’m going to get. She writes in so many genres and under so many names that she could give me just about anything. (See her website kristinekathrynrusch.com to understand exactly what I mean.)
This time, she wrote a story about love, loss, and possibilities that takes us all to…
The Space Between Hope and Dreams
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“I’ll be home for Christmas,” Jack said that afternoon, hand cupping her cheek. Myrtle leaned into him, believing him, even though in her heart, she knew—they knew—he couldn’t come home until the war let him.
The war had engulfed the world, and it finally engulfed her. Twenty-two years old, a baby on the way—but not visible—something she hadn’t known when he walked away from their house. She couldn’t see him off. He was deploying somewhere secret.
He was a tall man, perfect in his uniform, hat tucked under his arm—the most military of military men, except when he was with her. Then he’d laugh like a little boy, hold her, and become silly.
He pivoted away from their tiny house on the outskirts of Los Angeles, away from her, and walked to the waiting car filled with men he had just met, men who would become friends, according to his letters—letters she waited for, blacked out, “redacted,” half the words missing sometimes—oh, how she hated that—but she treasured them anyway, bits of paper, clutched against her chest, bits of paper he had once touched, paper covered with his words, no matter how many the War Department took away.
“I’ll be home for Christmas,” he told her, with that cocky smile, the one he had just for her, and she believed him.
But it took nearly two years before she realized he’d never said which Christmas, two more before she realized, thanks to Bing Crosby and his song, that such talk was wistful.
At first the popular Christmas song made her cry. It came out in October of 1943. She’d never forget because the air was cool and the sky clear, with that hint—winter coming. Most people didn’t think Los Angeles had winter, but it did. Los Angeles Winter she called it. Cooler, damper, clearer. She’d lived in Los Angeles her entire life, and she knew the weather deep in her bones—the summer dryness, the cool heat, the Santa Ana winds bringing that feeling of destruction, the winter rains (if the season was good).
The first time she heard the song, it filtered from a neighbor’s radio, Bing with his deep voice, that tinge of melancholy, that line about dreams. She’d been preparing her winter garden, tending the snapdragons and winter jasmine, thinking how Jack would love it all when he came home, how he would know the work she put in. She tended the garden, baby Carol in her basinet, tiny fists waving and the song—the song, with its deep-voiced singer, its wistfulness, its echo of Jack’s words, hit her like a wave.
She bent over, tears attacking her unbidden. She didn’t want the baby to see, to get scared, because Mommy never cried. Mommy was strong, Mommy ran the house like a man and his wife. Mommy held a job, a good pre-War job, secretary to a banker, and she found a great place to watch her baby during the day, but at night, she made a home for herself and Carol, a home, just waiting for Jack.
But that song—that song, it sounded like Jack singing to her, even though the radio said it was Bing Crosby’s latest, even though she knew Jack wasn’t singing it.
Although he was thinking it. She knew he was thinking it.
And that knowledge made her look up, wipe the back of her dirt-covered hand over her cheeks, getting rid of the tears, probably messing up h
er face. He was thinking it, and he was at war, doing something so secret, so important, that the words got blacked out, words he wanted her to know. He had the right to be wistful; she did not have the right to cry.
She kept that thought every time she heard the song, and even though the tears threatened, she never let them through again.
“I’ll Be Home For Christmas” became their song, at least in her mind, although she never told Jack that. At first, she didn’t want him to think that she was blaming him for failing to come home for the second Christmas in a row. Later, it was because she didn’t know how to reach him, how to find him, how to communicate with him.
She lost him.
The military lost him.
And no one knew how to get him back.
***
Oh, they had departments handling everything, sending the telegrams, the letters—
Dear Mrs. Talbot:
It is my regrettable duty to inform you that your husband has been reported as “Missing in Action” on November 15, 1944. On a scheduled combat mission in the Pacific…
It took her years to read all the words, the ones no one blacked out, no one “redacted,” even though it was clear there was no whole story here, that it had been changed and altered for her benefit.
She never got to know exactly what happened to him, where he was, when exactly he went missing.
She got that first letter, and thought back to November 15, and couldn’t for the life of her really remember the day. It had seemed like every other one—up early, taking care of Carol, now a toddler who never met her daddy, getting her ready to go to her babysitter’s as Myrtle got ready for work, then work, then groceries—maybe—or just making dinner, reading a little, thinking—always thinking—of Jack, wondering, wondering, wondering what he was doing, afraid to think of what he was doing, hoping he was all right, praying he was all right, trying to believe he was all right, and at that moment he had been—what? Captured? Dying? Injured? Lost?
She didn’t know.
For sixty years, she didn’t know.
Sixty years of letters, of phone calls, of searching, even as Carol, a grown woman who never knew her daddy, married, had children and those children had children and yet another set of children had children.
We founded a dynasty, she whispered to Jack after Carol insisted on a generational photo—without him, of course—two babies on Myrtle’s lap, babies who would grow up and have babies, and the family would continue.
Without him, as it had done for decades.
Decades.
How had she lived without him for decades?
She never knew.
Until the end, she never knew.
***
It snowed in the Los Angeles basin that Christmas, a deep rich fluffy snow, only-in-dreams snow. If-only snow. The kind of snow that made wishes come true. Perfect flakes, falling in perfectly even intervals, piling on the streets and sidewalks and gardens, making the Christmas decorations covering every house seem like part of a movie set.
Magical, some said. Strange, others said.
Perfect, Myrtle said, cuddling her newborn baby girl, beneath the cone-shaped fir tree, with no gaps, no dead boughs, and no need to turn the ugly patch toward the wall. The whole house smelled of pine, unless it smelled of baking sugar cookies.
The red and green garland she’d wrapped around the lintel out of Carol’s reach glinted in the light, and the radio played Christmas music for hours, sometimes live from glamorous New York clubs she had never gone to, filled with joy despite the war. She loved the joy.
And Jack, his uniform a little worn now, collar open—I can’t stay long, honey, he said—cuddling the baby, sliding presents under the tree, eating cookies, eating ham, and holding her, loving her, laughing with her, because that’s what Christmas was—babies and laughter and love.
He found the mistletoe she’d hung in the most unexpected places and kissed her. She leaned into him, and he said…
***
“I’ll be home for Christmas.” His hand cupped her cheek. She turned her face into his palm so he couldn’t see her distress. She cried so easily these days, and that wasn’t her. Only she learned what it was later when she found out she had been carrying his child that day. She hadn’t known, but she told him, in letters, back and forth. Hers, filled with every small detail, his vague and impossible to understand.
He wasn’t home for that first Christmas, nor the second. By the third, he wrote—ever so jaunty, because Jack was jaunty—”I never said which Christmas, sweetie.”
But it turned out to be the third Christmas. 1945: the world so changed. The war over, Europe devastated, parts of Japan flattened, and men, home.
Carol cried when she saw her daddy, not because she had missed him, but because he was a stranger. A thin, ragged, gaunt stranger, who woke up yelling in the middle of the night, and had intense, burning eyes. His skin yellow (“Malaria, sweetie,” he’d say, as if that answered everything), his stomach continually queasy, his breath smelling of alcohol. Jack wasn’t Myrtle’s any more. Not jaunty, never laughing, always looking far away.
She stayed until he raised a hand at his daughter, a fist so large that Carol cowered. He caught himself, backed away, swore, and looked at Myrtle, asking—begging—for forgiveness.
She could forgive the fist if it came at her, but not at Carol. Carol who had done nothing, Carol who couldn’t quite make herself love her daddy.
When will he go away again, Mommy? she’d ask, and Mommy had no answers, until she did. Myrtle had been Mommy and Daddy once. She could be Mommy and Daddy again. Unlike so many other women forced to go home when the men returned, Myrtle’s job remained.
So she packed up her belongings, took Carol away from the only home she had ever known, abandoning the winter jasmine and the snapdragons, and built a new home.
Jack kept the house for a few years, then he went to Korea, and she lost track of him. Decades later, a thin skeleton of a man, elderly and jaundiced, had found Carol, claiming to be her daddy. She had no daddy, she told him, as she protected her children from him.
He walked away—and no one heard from him again.
***
Cocktail hour always felt strange in the bar. As if she were in a dream—a nightmare, really, at least for Myrtle. She was there on Christmas Eve, not by choice. She had to drop off documents for her boss, and he always stopped at the bar for a quick one before going home.
The smell of whiskey caught her, the tree in the corner looking sad rather than festive, the glow of red and green bulbs illuminating the thin branches. Fire hazard, she thought, and stepped by it, leaning across a booth as she handed the manila envelope to her boss.
He grinned, offered to buy her a drink, but she shook her head, needing to go home to Carol. Thirteen-year-old Carol, not quite responsible, still childish enough to love Christmas, old enough to be embarrassed by it.
A man at the bar said, “Myrtle?” in a voice so familiar she shivered.
She turned. Gaunt, eyes still haunted, skin more tan than yellow.
“Jack?” she asked, heart dropping. He’d want to see Carol, he’d want back into their life, he’d want—
“Merry Christmas,” he said, his voice wistful.
“Merry Christmas,” she said, even though she knew he wouldn’t have one.
He nodded, and looked away. And, heaven forgive her, she did too.
***
“I’ll be home for Christmas,” Jack said just after he kissed her. She put a finger against his lips.
“Don’t promise that,” she said. “Please. You can’t keep it. We don’t know when you’ll be home.”
He said, lips moving against her fingers, “But I’ll have leave. I’ll make sure—”
She pressed harder. “No,” she said. “Don’t make a promise you can’t keep.”
He took her hand in his, kissed her finger, then moved it away from his mouth. His smile was sad.
“Okay,” he said. �
��I can promise you this: I’ll love you to the end of my days.”
Her eyes filled with unexpected tears. She’d promised herself she wouldn’t cry, so she blinked them back.
“I’ll love you too,” she said. “Forever.”
***
Forever. A word most people only used in dreams.
Myrtle stayed in the tiny house, with its photograph of Jack on the mantel. She glanced at the photo, smiled, and took it down to show her grandson.
John sat at the dining room table, in front of the good china, which she only brought out for Christmas. It was so nice to have him home. War in a dusty, hot place had changed something about the boy.
“It’s uncanny,” Carol said, looking at the portrait of her father that she had seen her entire life, “I never realized John had Daddy’s smile.”
Myrtle had known it. Just like she had known he had Jack’s build, and his quick grin. His joy. Subdued now. Maybe Jack’s would have been subdued too, if he had come home.
Myrtle had worried that John would go missing, just like his grandfather had. But John was home now. Home for Christmas, like Jack wanted to promise. She thought of him at Christmas, always, at the tree he would never see, the growing family he had never known. He had missed so much, but he had created so much.
She wanted to tell him that, not that she could. She waited, and wondered, and tried to move forward. But she always wondered…
***
The Christmas song that always made her think of Jack was playing on the radio when the men showed up. They were wearing uniforms, and for a moment, Myrtle’s elderly heart nearly stopped.
John! she thought, so terrified she could hardly breathe. She couldn’t lose her grandson too, could she? She’d sacrificed so much.
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