by Leger, Lori
Her gaze narrowed on him just before she gave a hysterical snort. “You’re joking, right?”
“No. I’m not. Ever since you came back to town you’ve had a pissy attitude towards me, and for the life of me, I can’t figure out why.”
Her eyes glazed over for a moment before she lifted her chin. “I’m actually a little sad for you, Greg. But not enough to make the same mistake twice. No. I will not go to lunch, or dinner, or even coffee with you.” She turned, walked out of the library without a backward glance.
He stared after her, basking in the lingering scent of her perfume. He started to walk away, then stopped, turned back toward the computer. Maybe there was a chance. “Let’s see what had you so damn captivated, Ms. Dawson.”
The Marines had taught him lots of skills, some not so useful in civilian life, but the computer skills he’d accumulated there had proven to be helpful on more than a few occasions. Within seconds, he’d brought up the recent history. After another minute, he was staring at a website for adopted people—specifically women, according to the filter—who were looking for their birth parents.
Why would she be on a page like this? Did she discover she was adopted all those years ago? Had she left town to find live with her birth mother, or something?
He leaned forward to read the heading on the page. No, the entries were all for women who were adopted in 1975. They’d all been born in the state of Texas, and all were searching for one or both of their parents.
What the hell?
Snippets of her snide comments came back to him. “You’re the reason I stayed away”, followed by the GI Joe comment… “You ran off when I needed you most,” and most recently, “My days of needing any help from you are long gone.”
Greg stared at the screen until the names began to blur. He started to shake his head, not wanting to see what was right in front of him. July 16th…all of these people… correction, all of these women were born on July 16th, thirty-one years ago. No. She wouldn’t, couldn’t have done that. She couldn’t have had a child and given her away. Did she meet someone in California? Is that why she never came back? Something about the date jarred him…July 16th of 1975. She’d left for California over the Christmas Holidays, December 1974. A quick count on his fingers had him standing so fast the chair hit the floor with a clatter.
Several heads looked his direction as heat infused his face, his entire body.
No way. No freaking way. He bent to pick up the chair, reeling just from the thought. He shut down the computer and hurried out of the room with a quick nod to the librarian.
He’d been pounding on the door for a full minute before someone bothered to answer. It wasn’t her, but her dad who finally pulled open the door.
“Hey Hart, did you come to check on the new television set? It’s fine. Picture’s clear as a bell but the buttons on that damn remote are too small for my clumsy fingers.”
“You’ll get used to it,” he replied sharply. “Where the hell’s Melin? I’ve got some questions for her.” He suddenly remembered Mr. D’s confession earlier about adults making wrong decisions. “Or is it you I need to talk to?” An uneasy feeling settled in his gut as Melin’s father took his glasses off and wiped his eyes, looking suddenly tired and much older than his seventy something years.
“My daughter’s not here, and from the look on your face, I’m thinking that’s a good thing.” He stepped aside and waved Greg inside. “It’s time we got this out in the open. Ate at her mother and me for years. We thought we were doing her a favor, but we drove a permanent wedge between us and our only child.” He pointed to one of the two matching rocker recliners. “Have a seat, Hart, and I’ll tell you everything.”
“I prefer to stand, but you go right ahead and sit. Just tell me why the hell Melinda was on a website for women born on July 16th, 1975, who are looking for their birth parents.”
“She’s looking for her daughter. She never stopped looking for her.”
“Her daughter?”
“Your daughter, too, Hart.”
During his entire twenty-five year stint as a Marine, he’d never had anything knock the wind out of him as those four words had. He reached for the arm of the sofa as his knees buckled. Seating himself, he rested his arms on his knees and lowered his head to keep the room from spinning.
“I’ve got a child? A daughter?”
“You do.”
“She left town because she was pregnant with our baby. Why didn’t she tell me? I would have married her. I loved her.”
He stood up. “So instead of telling me so I could man up, she left town and then what? Gave her up for adoption? I can’t believe this.”
“It—it wasn’t quite that simple.”
Greg stopped his pacing and turned to glare down at Melinda’s father. “You’d better start talking, old man. And you’d better do it now.” Mr. D. sat back in his chair and stared straight ahead, as if afraid to look him in the eye.
He damned well should be.
“When my wife came to me that night, I knew by the look in her eyes something was wrong. She’d been crying, but it was more than that. She looked defeated, devastated. She’d just had a talk with Melinda and said she suspected our daughter was at least two months pregnant. We had plans for her. She was going to college, something neither of us had been able to afford. We’d scrimped and saved to put money aside for that. It was understood. We wanted her to have a real future.” He sighed. “I made two phone calls that night. To a home for unwed mothers in Dallas, Texas … and to your parents.”
Another kick to the gut.
“Are you telling me my parents knew about this?”
Mr. D. nodded. “They knew. And they knew, as we suspected, that you’d want to marry our daughter. Do the right thing—the noble thing. You’d quit your classes at the Junior college, get a job and struggle to make ends meet for the rest of your lives. We wanted better for our children than that. We wanted you both to have futures … careers. So, they agreed with our plan.”
“They knew and they kept it from me.” Greg stood again, started the pacing. “I can’t wrap my head around this. It’s like telling me you’re from another planet. How the hell did the four of you pull this off?”
“We sent her away, Greg. We sent our only daughter away—to a place where she couldn’t make a phone call that wasn’t monitored, and couldn’t mail a letter that wasn’t read. We told them we didn’t want her contacting you.”
“Who came up with the California story?”
“The four of us did. We knew that neither of you would let it go unless we found a way to make you both believe you’d pushed each other aside.”
“So you told me she’d lost interest and didn’t want to tell me to my face, which I didn’t buy for a second. But when she never called, or wrote, or came home …”
“You eventually accepted it.”
Greg’s jaw tightened. “And what did you tell Melinda, while she was over in Dallas with no one around to help her through this?”
Lawrence Dawson looked at the floor.
“You told her I knew? That I didn’t care?”
“We never brought you up. If she asked, we changed the subject. One time she kept asking. We—we told her you’d moved on.”
“Son of a bitch. No wonder she can’t stand the sight of me. You all told her I abandoned her, both her and our baby.” He grabbed his head with both hands at the thought of what she’d gone through. “My God … she thinks I didn’t want them.” Greg paced the floor. If he didn’t move, exert some kind of energy, his heart would have exploded. He shook his head again.
“We have a child together. We have a daughter.” He stopped suddenly in the middle of his pacing. “And we wanted her, even if her grandparents didn’t.”
“It’s not that we didn’t want—”
Greg turned on him, his finger pointed in his face. “Shut up, old man! You left your own daughter to suffer through all of this alone. And you sent our daughter
out into a world where God knows what happened to her. Do not try to justify this to me.”
He swore low under his breath, furious at his own parents who’d died within four months of each other two years earlier. He threw up his hands in utter frustration. “And my parents took this crap with them to their graves, so I can’t even yell at them. You’d think at least one of them would have wanted to clear their consciences after twenty-nine years.” He turned on Lawrence Dawson again. “Looks like you get to shoulder the blame alone.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
Greg nodded. “Well, finally we can agree on something. It is the very least you could do.” He paced the length of the floor again, wondering if there was someone else he could blame. “Who else knew about this?”
“No one else knew.”
“No one? Except for you, your wife, my parents, the other girls at the home, the nurses who practically held her prisoner, the doctor who delivered our daughter, and let’s not forget Melinda, who’s been searching for her for years. Searching for our child, alone, because you and three other adults thought it would be better to keep us apart with lies.” His voice caught on tears, fueled by a deeply embedded fury that threatened, at any moment, to burst forth in an agonized roar. He pressed both of his palms to his head and groaned.
“My God, what have you done to us, old man? What if she’s lost to us? What if she was put in a foster home with people who abused her? What if she’s dead and we never have a chance to meet her?” He turned angrily on the man. “What if she’s out there somewhere, thinking her parents didn’t want her and we never have the chance to tell her differently?”
“I’m sorry, Greg.”
Greg erupted with a burst of hysterical laughter. “We had a saying in my unit, old man. ‘Sorry don’t make you any less dead’. All four of you had three decades to make it right and you didn’t. You’ll go to your grave, just like all the other people who claimed to have loved us, knowing you ruined three lives.”
“Hart!”
Greg turned away from him. “Man, I can’t talk to you anymore right now. Just tell Melin to call me when she gets home. I want to be the one to tell her I know. You owe me that much.”
He heard a gurgling sound and turned back to see Melin’s father clutching at his chest.
“Heart …” He emitted the strangled cry, just before collapsing to the floor.
Melinda pushed through the doors of the tiny hospital and headed for the nurse’s station.
“Melin!”
She turned toward the voice she’d heard far more often than she’d cared to the last month or so. “Greg, what are you doing here, and where’s my dad?”
“I was with him when it happened, so I drove him here.”
“What did the doctor say?” She looked around, frantic to speak to someone in charge.
“Nothing yet. We’ve only been here fifteen minutes.”
She nodded and walked over to let the nurse know she was there. She began wearing her own path over the grey and white tiles of the waiting room floor.
She turned on Gregory. “You said you were with him, so what the hell happened to bring this on? Was he trying to do too much?” The guilt-laden look he gave her made her stop her pacing to face him. “What happened?”
“We were discussing something I figured out today,” he said, sounding uneasy. “Come to think of it, I was doing all the talking. He wasn’t saying much of anything when it came on him.”
“Were you arguing?” She was more than ready to detest him for one more reason.
Greg shoved his hands deep into his pockets. “Not exactly arguing. I—I was venting my frustration, and I said some pretty awful things to him.” He put up his hand when she tried to say something. “I know about the baby, Melin. I know about our daughter.”
She nodded, narrowing her eyes in ugly accusation. “So you admit that you left town in case I came back with her?”
“No, dammit! I only found out about her today. The computer in the library—I went to the browser history and accessed the last website you visited. I started putting things together, and went to confront you. Then I remembered something your dad told me the other day. Our parents kept us apart, Melin. They lied to us.”
“What are you saying?”
“Your parents told me you went to California because you couldn’t tell me to my face that you wanted to break up.”
“What? No! That’s not what happened,” she stammered.
“I know now, but for over thirty-one years I didn’t.”
Her eyes pooled with tears. “All this time, you didn’t know?” He took a step closer, shook his head. “I couldn’t call, or write anything they didn’t see first. A couple of times I thought I got letters out to you. There was always someone finding a way around things over there.”
“I never got any letters, but then I never checked the mail, either. My parents would have got to it first and kept them from me.” He fisted his hands and brought them to his forehead. “I can’t believe they did that to us. Making you go through all of that by yourself. God, I’m so pissed, and I can’t even yell at them for it.”
“So you yelled at my father, instead,” she accused, turning away from him.
“I did,” he whispered. “I’m not proud of it, but I was bombarded by all these thoughts of what if. What if she was abused, or what if we never find her? What if she’s—gone—and had to leave this earth thinking we never loved or wanted her? All our parents had a share in the blame, but he’s the only one left to yell at. So, I did.”
She closed her eyes, let herself relive those horrific moments. “I almost died, Greg. They wouldn’t let me hold her at first. I screamed until they did. And when they pulled our baby out of my arms, I started screaming again. I screamed and fought them with everything I had. I started hemorrhaging. When things started to fade out I knew I was dying, and I was glad for it, because I had no reason to live without my baby or you.”
She felt his hands light softly on her shoulders and it gave her the strength to continue. “I woke up two days later. God, I felt awful. I was so sick, Greg. Physically sick and sick at heart, too—Inside and out. Every second was one more second away from our daughter.” A soft clearing of his throat reminded her she wasn’t alone anymore.
“You saw her, Melin?” His whisper was low, almost reverent.
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment and turned slowly to face him. “I held her, Greg. Our daughter was beautiful, so tiny and pink and healthy. I may not know anything else about her, but I know this—her hair looked like it would be curly, she has my lips and nose.” She gazed up at him through tear-filled eyes and raised one finger to the cleft in his chin. “And she has this.”
Greg shuddered at the effort it took not to burst into tears at her words. When she reached up to brush away a single tear from his face, he grabbed her hand in his own and brought it to his mouth.
“I waited for you, Melin. I died a little each day I didn’t hear from you. Finally, I couldn’t stand the sight of the place. I couldn’t hear one more person ask if I’d heard from you. I had to get out. I quit school and joined the Marines without even discussing it with anyone. I told my parents to forward any letters from you, just in case you ever wrote, or to let me know if you called, but you never did.”
“It took two weeks to heal enough for them to release me. I called your house that day, as soon as I got out of that place. I’m betting your mom never told you.”
He shook his head. “I was already in the Marines by then, but it wouldn’t have stopped me. I was stationed state side for the first year. I would have been there for you. I only made the military my career because I didn’t have you, Melin. I would have married you. We would have been together, and we would have been happy,” his voice finally broke on a strangled sob as he pulled her to him. “I never stopped loving you.”
The two of them stood alone in the waiting room, clinging to each other and sobbing quietly for s
everal minutes.
“Ms. Dawson?”
They pulled apart and turned toward the voice.
“I’m Melinda Dawson. How’s my father?” she asked, wiping tears from her eyes with the back of one hand.
“He’s weak, but adamant about speaking to you. If you could keep it short. One visitor at a time,” he said, when they both stepped up.
Melinda clung to Greg’s hand. “He has to come with me.”
He squeezed her hand, pleased more than words could say that she wanted him with her.
They stepped inside the tiny hospital’s only ICU area, the steady beep of the heart monitor the only sound in the otherwise silent room. The ambulance was on its way to transfer her dad to a larger hospital with a heart unit two hours away. Judging from the ashen look on his face, Greg knew they couldn’t get him there soon enough.
Melinda leaned over the bed and touched her father’s face. “I’m here Dad.”
He wrinkled his brow before he blinked and opened his eyes. “I don’t have much time, Melinda.”
“Don’t you say that,” she demanded, tears running down her face.
“It’s okay, honey. I’ve lived long enough without your mother. And now that the truth is out, I can go.”
“Dad …”
“I miss your mother, honey. We had a lot of good years together and I’m thankful for that. You staying away like you did—it forced your mom and me to be closer. But life without her—It’s just not good for me. I’m ready.”
“You can’t leave me alone, Daddy.”
He gave her a fragile smile combined with a grimace of pain. “You won’t be alone, sweetheart. You and Greg. You belong together.”
“Greg can’t replace you,” Melinda said, using the back of her hand to wipe her eyes.
“We were wrong. Your mother and I—and Greg’s parents. Never should have kept you apart. I see it now. Friggin’ old age!” he gasped. “It’s good for one thing. Reflecting on mistakes you’ve made in life.” He reached out to clench her hand. “Hart still loves you. If I’m right, you feel the same way.” He stiffened as pain registered on his face.