by Susan Ward
“Jack,” Lena chided, scrambling from my arms. She rolled her eyes at me as she pulled her shirt in place and hurried to Chrissie.
“Ignore Daddy. He’s just being frustrating today.”
I put her stuff into her suitcases since I knew it wasn’t happening now that one of the kids had interrupted us. “You mean frustrated. Daddy is being frustrated today.”
Lena took Chrissie’s hand and started to leave the bedroom.
“Whatever happened to all a baby needs to know of life is that their parents love? I liked that philosophy.”
She looked over her shoulder, lifting her brows. “Our son became a teenager. Just like his father.”
Laughing, I sat on her suitcase and snapped it shut.
I found her in the kitchen, alone, adding more things to her Jack Remember list.
“What time is the car coming to take you to the airport?” I asked.
“Four. How long is Vincent staying?”
I could tell she didn’t like him. “He leaves in the morning. I’m sorry I brought him home without asking first.”
She gnawed on her pencil, studying her list. “I’m used to it. And if it takes the Vincents of this world to keep you sober, you don’t have to ask.”
I came up behind her, easing her backside into my groin. Three hours before the car. I could still get her into bed. “It doesn’t take guys like Vincent to keep me sober. It affirms how lucky I am.”
She swatted at my hand on her hip. “Still fast on your feet with a charming line, but I am not going back to bed with you. I’ve got too much to do with the kids before I leave.”
I turned her in my arms, kissed her and then pouted. “Fine, Mama, go organize your universe.”
She shook her head and hurried out of the room.
The kids and I saw her off for New York, and the next morning we took Vincent Delmo to the airport. Then we settled in for thirty days home alone without Lena, which pretty much meant we did everything our way and only pretended to follow her list.
Two weeks later, we’d just returned to the house after a morning of sailing when the phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Jack? It’s Yuri.”
I frowned—he never called me.
“What’s going on? Everything’s all right isn’t it?”
“I’m at the hospital with Lena. She collapsed during rehearsal last week. She asked me not to call you, but I think you should come. They’ve been running tests on her. Lots of tests. She says it’s nothing, but she looks worried—”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said, my insides growing cold even though I didn’t know anything yet.
I called Patty to watch the kids and caught the next flight out of Santa Barbara. When I stepped into Lena’s room, my heart stopped. She looked pale, more fragile than I’d ever seen her, and instinct warned this wasn’t nothing.
I took her hand and kissed it. “Hey, doll. What’s going on? Yuri says you’ve been here a week. Why didn’t you call me?”
Her eyes filled up with tears, and I banked my questions, holding her tightly against me. “It’s going to be all right, sweetheart. Whatever it is, we’ll get through it together.”
Those enormous brown eyes stared up at me. “They removed a tumor from here.” She gestured to the bandages on her armpit. “It’s cancer, Jack. They want me to start treatment now.”
“Oh, baby, then we start treatment now.”
She shook her head. “I don’t want chemotherapy. It makes you ill and ugly and you die anyway. If I’m going to die I don’t want to die ill.”
My throat convulsed. How did we get from cancer to her dying in a single breath? No, no, no. She was just afraid.
“Stop it,” I said, brushing the tears from her cheeks. “I won’t hear you say things like that. You’re going to do whatever the doctors tell you to do, Lena. Nothing is ever taking you from me.”
But reality hit me in the face when I went to speak to her doctor. The odds weren’t good. She had an advanced case of an aggressive form of cancer.
She did the first twenty weeks of treatment there in New York.
We waited in her room for the doctor to come, give us an update on her illness, and then discharge her.
He walked into the room, and I could see it in his eyes. “The results weren’t what we hoped for, Lena. My recommendation is that you stay in New York and follow up with another round of chemo soon.”
She shook her head. “No. I’ve been from my kids too long.”
“Then I’ll put together a list of doctors and treatment clinics in Santa Barbara for you. See that she follows up first thing when you get home. The treatments are slowing it down, giving you time, Lena.”
“I’ll see that she goes first thing, Dr. Feshbach,” I assured him.
He nodded. “In these cases, I tell my patients not to give up hope. It’s as important as everything we do medically.”
We spent the next twelve months in and out of the hospital in Santa Barbara. Every round she got a little weaker and the cancer spread.
We both knew it would be over soon, and only pretended for each other that it wouldn’t.
As I sat with her in the sun-bright hospital, she didn’t look like she’d even make it out of the room this time.
I kissed her head. “Can I ask you something, doll?”
She laughed weakly. “You have the strangest look on your face. I can’t imagine the thoughts in your head.”
I smiled. “It shouldn’t be a strange look. It should be happy. I was thinking about the week we met.”
“Uh-oh,” she murmured.
I stared into her beautiful eyes that still looked mysterious to me. “Why did you tell me you were twenty-eight instead of twenty-three?”
Her face brightened slightly from her amusement and laughter. Then she leaned in to me, resting her head on my chest and covering my hand with hers.
“The first time I saw you, you looked like heaven on earth to me. Everything good and kind and gentle and safe. The kind of man too few are. I loved you the second I saw you, Jack. In a way I’ve never loved anyone. In a way women dream of feeling.”
Fuck, I’d started this to keep things light, and now we were overly serious, and I could feel the sadness we shared nipping at the both of us.
I sniffed back my tears and lowered my gaze. “I was anything but a dream for you, doll. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of the time I was a nightmare.”
She laughed tiredly, her exasperated little purr, and then she lifted her hand, cupping my cheek with her palm. “No, the only dream I ever had that didn’t die. A dream from a dreamer. You’re a dreamer, Jack, but like a dreamer everything is easy for you, yet you only chase the things that aren’t. So I was what I needed to be to keep you chasing me. Mysterious and not easy. If I hadn’t been, you would have moved on quickly and forgotten me like every other girl, and I didn’t want that. I wanted you to always love me because I’ve always loved you.”
The saddest part of what she said was that it was the truth.
About me.
My flaws and weaknesses.
And about her; her unique blend of strength and fragility and wisdom.
“I’ve never told you this, but I was so very proud of the incredible things you accomplished. I loved how pure and right you were as the voice for the peace movement—almost as much as it frightened me. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in what you did, it was just I was afraid it would take you from me. I wanted to keep you safe. My perfect dream, not lost to a bullet like too many other great men had been.”
I realized then there was no mystery to Lena. Not ever. At least not how I’d thought about it. She was a woman who loved completely, with all her heart and everything she had. She was the woman who loved Jack.
Fuck, why is it you can never see anything clearly until it’s too late?
My fingers closed around her hand and I brought it to my lips. “I’ve always loved you, Lena.”
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sp; Her gorgeous brown eyes shimmered for me. “I know, foolish boy. Take me home, Jack. I don’t want us to end here in a hospital.”
Against the doctor’s advice, I took her home and hired a hospice nurse.
The months of illness and treatments made her so fragile I was almost afraid to touch her. And yet the man inside me wanted nothing more than to be buried within her. Every moment we were together held a heightened potency and vividness, and making love was no different.
We savored our time, our love and our bodies, in way I wished we had been capable of from the beginning. I’d often heard illness can destroy love. I rarely heard of it fueling it, but with us, it did.
She had what they call a brief flash of good health before death. We laughed more. We talked more. We made love more. In fact, during this time, it felt as though I’d finally done what I’d set out to do: I’d gotten to know her.
Death changes life. It is forever altering, especially in those moments when you realize it is inevitable. Lena was leaving first, but we would both leave eventually. And I held onto the dream—or maybe she was right, the fantasy—that we would be together again in some unknown after.
She was my life. It had taken over a decade of marriage to reach this place, where we were the couple I’d always imagined in my head. It had taken years of tug and pull, forgiveness, loneliness, foolishness, my recovery and her illness, but we were at last where I’d always hoped we’d be.
What I’d wanted since the first moment I saw her at the Arlington Theater. Something even beyond the closeness we’d known the five years before her illness.
Forever seemed an unquestionable thing after having survived all that and still being together, even if it would only be in this brief time before her passing and then in the after. I loved her. I regretted much. I didn’t want to let her go. Not now when we were finally loving each and every thing we should have been from that first moment.
It was a morning like any other when I realized she’d lost the fight. I’d gotten up near 3:30 a.m. to spend some time in the studio to purge my mind of the words and sound in my head before mixing her daily medication tonic and waiting in bed for her to wake.
I was working in the studio, picking out something on the guitar, when I heard her on the intercom.
“Jack?”
The way she said my name sent chills across my flesh, though I wasn’t sure why. It was just a low purr, a touch husky as Lena’s voice often was.
When I entered the bedroom my heart stopped. The bottle of morphine on the table was empty. Yesterday the hospice nurse had told Lena when they thought I couldn’t hear them that if she took enough it would help her body let go.
I knew every day was agony for her now.
I wanted to barge into the room yesterday and tell her no, never, I wouldn’t allow her to do such a thing.
Instead I went quietly into the yard and cried.
Lena would do what Lena wanted to do no matter what I said, and I didn’t want angry moments in the precious few we had left.
I could see it on her face—Lena had taken control of her leaving me, yet again. She was ready, though I was far from it. It showed in the way her features smoothed and the quietness of her gaze; I knew she was aware it wouldn’t be much longer.
I reached for the phone. “Oh, Lena. What did you do?”
Her eyes were glassy and only slits. “No, Jack. Don’t call. Let me go.”
I swiped at the tears running down my nose. I had to be strong. She didn’t need me falling apart now. “Let me get the kids. Can I do that, Lena?”
“No, Jack. This isn’t the last picture of me I want them to have. Carry me to our spot on the cliffs instead. What we have left belongs to you and me.”
As we sat on the cliffs facing the ocean, waiting for the sunrise, Lena on my lap held tightly by my arms, I could feel the shallowness of her breath, the peacefulness of her body, and I knew the end was near.
“Promise me, Jack, you’ll be tough on Sammy. He’s wild, but a good boy. He just needs direction.”
“I promise.”
“And Chrissie, she’s a fearful girl. Show her she has nothing to be afraid of. Little girls just need to know they’re safe. You don’t have to work so hard to make her happy.”
“I’ll remember, Lena.”
I kissed her head where there were no longer her shiny black curls and when I pulled back, she looked up at me.
“When I’m gone, I don’t want anyone to love me. I don’t want anyone to miss me. I don’t want anyone to care. I don’t want anyone to remember me.”
She struggled for breath and I tightened my hold on her. “Stop it. Don’t ask me for what I can’t give you. Not now.”
“No, Jack, listen. Scatter my ashes into the ocean. I want to always be close to you and our children. And then walk away and forget about me. I don’t want you to love me once I’m gone. I want you to forget me and move on. It’s what you have to do, for you and for our kids.”
I tightly shut my eyes against the tears but, fuck, it was hard because those words ripped at my heart. I was losing the other half of me, and we’d wasted so many years, too much time, and had found each other too late. And now she wanted me to forget her, scatter her ashes in the ocean, and walk away.
My chin jutted out as I nodded the way I did when I was struggling with something. “No. Can’t do it. Not even for you, doll. Those are the wants of a narcissistic man. A man who knows nothing of love. And no matter what you think of me, even you would never think that Jackson Parker didn’t love.”
Shortly after dawn spread across the sky above the Pacific, Lena left me.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The present…
A tap against the bar makes me look up.
Oh crap—a leather check holder.
I thought we’d resolved the check.
“It’s not what you think,” the waitress says, amused. “You’ve been here all afternoon, just staring at the ocean. I didn’t want to disturb you, but my shift is done. And”—she does a cute little grimace—“when I told my mother who I had parked on a stool at my station today, she made me promise to get an autograph before I clocked out. I thought the check holder was a sly way to do it.”
I laugh, even though I could have done without the for her mother part.
Smiling, I grab the check holder and the pen she has in her hand. “Sure thing, doll. Anyone in particular I should make it out to?”
Her face lights up. “Gretchen.”
My eyes drift to her name tag. “Gretchen, huh?”
She blushes. “OK, it’s for me, but I’m not allowed to ask for it so don’t tell. But I said, what the heck, when is the next time I’m going to run into the genius who wrote “Take Back the Dawn’? It really is the best sad breakup song ever.”
I shake my head as I try to scribble out something appropriately charming. “Sweetheart, it’s not a breakup song. It’s a love song. The lyrics are from a letter I wrote to my wife from jail.”
Her eyes widen. “Oh…the bars between us. I get it. Jail cell. How romantic.”
Romantic.
Fuck—it had been anything but that.
I continue to write, and tell myself to stop trying to explain the lyrics. It was a song I never talked about to anyone. It was Lena and me. And, fuck, who could ever understand us except us?
“Not jail bars,” I say, snapping closed the holder. “The bars of who we are. Our flaws. I was begging my wife to forgive me my flaws. I wanted her to come back to me and I couldn’t ask her to.”
The girl’s mouth scrunches as she turns dewy-eyed. “I would have come back to you. Did she?”
I nod. “Yep.”
She smiles. “Are you still together?”
I point down the beach toward my property. “We were, until she died, right there on those cliffs.”
I put down the pen and leave quickly.
Fuck, why did I tell her all that?
I walk toward the beach and hea
d for home. As I climb the stairs up to my lawn, I debate making a pit stop in at Patty’s.
My phone hasn’t rung since the time Chrissie fixed the restaurant check for me. Maybe Patty’s heard something from Rene.
Was I a great-grandfather yet?
At the top of the cliffs on my lawn, I turn and stare. I can see Lena twirling in circles on the edge of the cliffs. If this was my house, Jack, this is where I’d be every dawn and every evening. I’d sit right in this spot, to watch the sun rise and set. It’s like the edge of a magical kingdom.
It’s funny how all the women in my life—Lena, Chrissie, Linda—find this spot on their own. Does Lena draw the others here? She draws me here.
Instead of going to Patty’s, I sink down on the grass, on Lena’s spot on the cliffs. It’s shaded by a eucalyptus tree and above me the leaves rustle with the wind.
I am closest to Lena here, on the edge of her “magical kingdom” where she died. I am also my most honest with myself here.
They say if you remember the ’60s you weren’t really there. That maxim always elicits laughs from my generation. But the phrase is anything but funny when I think of it in the context of me. It is painful and defining.
Even after retracing every bit of my marriage today, I don’t know which parts of my life with Lena were real and which parts were fantasies. Even as I lay bare my story, somehow at the end I’m still Jackie unsure of anything, seeing too many things how I wished they’d been.
I was an alcoholic by the time I married Lena, and make no mistake, it was the cause of every heart-wrenching moment we shared, no matter how the moments play out in my head. I can see now things I couldn’t see then.
Lena was five years older than me when we met. It seemed significant when we were young, but we’d both been fledglings.
She married me only because she loved me. I know that now. No woman would have held on to a man the way she did for any other reason.
Still, to hold any of it in my heart too much how it really was would have killed me long before this. When I look back, of course I remember parts differently, in a way I can live with.
Remember, sometimes seeing things how you want rather than how they are is the only thing that carries you into the next day.