“You need to stop this, no matter what you think you’re doing.”
“I know what you mean, but I can’t stop. Can you at least try to understand?” Merry pleaded. She had not realized that her hands were out of her pockets, but she had put them together in front of her, as though she were praying.
“Ben ... died in Vietnam, the second week in the country. He gave up a fine scholarship he won in an essay contest to go do what his country asked of him. He dropped out of high school. We begged him not to go. He felt ... go away please. Go away now.” The old man huddled in his sweater as though a winter’s chill had struck him through the April sunshine. His lined face seemed to sag further and his eyes faded. Merry winced. There was the tiniest aspect of Ben around those eyes. She wanted to comfort Mr. Highland and had no idea how she could do that.
“Please,” Merry said. “Let me apologize. I didn’t come here to hurt you.”
“I ... don’t know why you came here. You are describing our son. But we have to put this behind us now. You could have seen a picture. Our questions are answered. Leave now, please. I’m not angry. But, child, a person never forgets. A father doesn’t forget. Do you think you forget?”
“No,” Merry said softly. “I’m sorry.” From the corner of her eye, she saw the ByWay bus coming to a stop at the corner of Pumpkin Hollow and Redfern, five blocks away. If she ran, she might be able to catch it. She didn’t feel like walking all those miles back to her house. She turned and leaped down the steps and began to run. Suddenly, she heard someone from behind her.
“Girl!” Mr. Highland shouted. Meredith glanced back. “Come back.”
Merry stopped, then took a few steps in his direction. “Don’t be afraid. I know who you are. You’re Arthur Brynn’s granddaughter, the girl who was in the fire down the block. My wife, Helene, would like to talk to you.”
When Merry reached the front steps, Mr. Highland had opened the battered screen door. He led her into a hall that was so old-fashioned it was almost retro. “Come into the living room. It’s cold in here, as beautiful as it’s getting outdoors these days. I’m going to make some cocoa. Call home so your folks don’t worry, please.” Merry sent a brief text to Mallory, who was with Drew in Pioneer Park kicking some balls with Adam, who started soccer next week.
Mally felt the buzz against her chest and opened the phone. “M tlking to Mr. and Mrs. Highland. WILL TK bus home. M OK.”
“She’s at the Highlands’ house,” Mallory told Drew. “Do you think we should go get her?”
“Do you think those old people are serial killers?” Drew asked.
“No. I’m afraid of what she’ll find out.”
“Mallory, this is what you wanted,” Drew said.
“You should have talked me out of it,” Mallory told him.
“Adam! Play D,” Drew called out in a tone that said everything without saying anything at all. He took off down the slightly muddy field. “Please remind me to interfere next time you tell me not to interfere.”
THE LOVE BEFORE MY LIFE
Back in the warm, actually stiflingly hot living room on Pumpkin Hollow Road, the woman who asked to take Merry’s coat was as white as her soft robe. Her long blond and silver hair was drawn up in an elaborate braid, and she had an unlined face that never saw sunlight, white soft hands, and the same seawater blue eyes and sad smile Merry had come to love in her son. This was Ben’s legacy. This was undoubtedly the person from whom Ben had received his blue eyes—but more than that, his gentleness. Above the mantel in the living room where she led Meredith were oil paintings made from photographs. One pictured a short-haired guy with those same eyes, his mother’s eyes, and his father’s square chin.
The other was Ben.
Merry put her hands on her knees and began to cry. Mr. Highland had come into the room with a tray. Setting it down, he handed her a large pocket square that smelled of bleach and sunshine. It came away covered with mascara, and Merry felt further miserable.
“Tell me,” said Helene Highland, sitting down on a small red sofa across from Merry. “Tell me what you said about Ben. I won’t be angry.”
“You won’t believe me,” Merry said, accepting her cocoa with a nod. This room was too hot for cocoa. She longed for a glass of water, but the sting of the hot liquid on her tongue restored reality to the whole moment.
“I may not. But please, you’ve come all this way with something to say. And it must be important. People don’t faint at a memorial for no reason.”
“What I want is to know about Ben. Tell me about Ben first. And then I’ll tell you what I know. Let me catch my breath,” Merry said.
And so Mrs. Highland did.
First, she told Meredith about David, her first son, a man’s boy, all athletics and rambunctious spirit, who now, surprisingly, did exactly as his mother had done and taught English at UC Santa Barbara. David had five sons and daughters—two in college, the youngest Adam’s age.
Ben, said Mrs. Highland, worshipped David, but he was so different from his older brother. Dreamy and thoughtful, shy, a mother’s boy, he had helped Mrs. Highland plant the orchard of trees from which she made apple pies and peach jam, with the young Ben at her side. Those same trees were still there and still bearing fruit.
Although Ben always had his nose in a book and excelled at English and writing, he wanted to please his father as well. So he took up sports that were individual. David had played basketball and baseball. Ben ran track and played tennis. At cross-country, he was very good indeed. Mrs. Highland said that Ben went all the way to state and, with his team, placed third junior year. Running, he told his mother, helped him arrange his thoughts.
“And that would be how he put it, even when he was ten or eleven,” said Mrs. Highland. “He would say he needed time to arrange his thoughts.” So shy was Ben as a young child that the Highlands worried when he barely talked at all. They’d considered taking him to a speech therapist. But Ben, she went on, was simply waiting to have something to say. In junior year, he wrote a prize-winning essay about how being a teenager was the time for the illusions of childhood to end: Most people didn’t become astronauts or movie stars or wildlife photographers or archaeologists. They didn’t even own the horses or cars they loved when they were children. Being a teenager wasn’t a time for dreams but for making the best of what life really had to offer and trying to find a single strand of the childhood dream within it. People who couldn’t become astronauts could gaze at the stars from the mountaintops they hiked. People could help save wildlife. But dreams lost their glory when life came true.
“That’s sad but I hear everywhere that it’s true,” Merry said. “It’s almost as if Ben knew...”
“I often thought that later,” said Helene Highland. “I often thought that he was speaking out of some foreknowledge of what his future held.” She went on to explain how she had dreamed of being a writer and a poet but grew to love teaching the words that made her so happy. “I loved teaching them to Ben, and I thought he might, just might, be a writer someday.”
They had been, she added, a family of pacificists with deep doubts about the war in Vietnam. When David enlisted, his parents were terribly troubled. For David, it had not been so much a matter of principle as of camaraderie with old friends. David, said Mrs. Highland, could never resist a challenge, no matter how foolhardy. But he ended up a journalist and never saw any action. His letters home to Ben made Ben restless, said his mother, and Mrs. Highland watched as David, without intending to, seemed to issue a challenge to Ben.
When Ben dropped out and enlisted a month before graduation, his parents were horrified. Not only did Ben have no college experience that would keep him from being anything but cannon fodder, he was sent to one of the most ferocious battles of the war.
“It was called Hamburger Hill,” said Mr. Highland. “The reasons they called it that were ... obvious. Even now, I can’t bear to say it. Ben was nothing but a foot soldier. In his first and last letter, he said h
e hoped we would be proud of him, that he was a man like David.”
“It tore me apart,” said Mrs. Highland. “I’m afraid I almost lost my reason. I was angry at the whole world. I kept the poems he wrote when he was younger. We called him and implored him to try to get a medical discharge. No one was less suited to military life than our Ben. But he didn’t want to be different from anyone else. I think he was afraid that he was a coward and that he would never know...”
“No one ever said that,” Mr. Highland broke in. “Ben was never bullied. He was a well-liked boy. He was happy at home and never showed any interest in violence. We still believe it was some sort of test of manhood that went terribly wrong.”
Not long after the two-week battle ended, a dreaded black car pulled up in front of the Highlands’ house. Two young officers got out and knocked at the door. They handed the Highlands a letter. Ben was missing, believed to be captured. The young soldiers said Ben was trying to save the life of a friend who was pinned down by a sniper.
And I thought it was a game. Some kind of rough and dirty game like paintball! A rugby game! Merry leaned forward, her cup and saucer shaking in her hand.
“Ben would never harm anyone,” Mrs. Highland went on. “In fact, just last month we learned that he was buried where he fell, and the company that he was with had to fall back.”
The long years of waiting and wondering had begun after Ben was declared missing. At first, David begged his parents to leave Ridgeline and join him and his family in California. But though they did visit, they could never feel at peace away from the home where Ben grew up—and the slim chance he would return.
Merry listened as Helene Highland described her walks deep in her yard, more than three acres of land, among the apple trees. They went on growing, but Ben would never go on. She talked to him, shouted at him, scolded him, begged him to come home. She said, “I would almost see him up in those branches, reading, throwing the apples down to me, teasing me. It seemed like yesterday. I would hug the trees and cry out at the sky. For years, I hated everyone whose children were healthy and alive. For years, I was just a bitter, bitter woman. I think that’s what finally affected my heart. Ben’s death broke my heart and I could never let him go. Sometimes I see him still. Before he left, David gave him his old brown leather jacket that he’d outgrown. Ben wore it and said he felt like David, the older brother who got all the girls. He took that jacket with him everywhere, though of course, not overseas. There have been times since I’ve been ill, that I believe I see him, standing in the doorway of my room in that jacket.”
“I have to tell you something,” said Merry. “I need to. You need to know and I need to say it.” Merry took one last sip of cocoa. Her mouth had gone dry. “Are you sure you want to hear? ”
“Tell the truth,” said Mrs. Highland.
“I ... I know Ben. I met Ben a month or so ago, but it seems like I’ve known him all my life. I saw Ben as clearly as I’m seeing you. We talked every day. When did they ... I hate to ask this ... when did they bring his body home?”
What little color there was in Mrs. Highland’s thin, sculpted face drained away. Meredith could not have believed it could get paler. She seemed about to rise and then sat back down, her blue eyes unblinking. Mr. Highland got up and laid his head against the fireplace mantel.
“Helene, this is impossible,” he said. “It’s chicanery. You need to go back upstairs. Sasha will be here soon.”
“Wait, Charles,” said Mrs. Highland. Slowly, she said, “It was just before ...”
“Valentine’s Day,” Merry said. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Highland said.
“She could know that any number of ways. It was in the newspaper for heaven’s sake.”
“I’m just a kid, Mr. Highland,” Merry said. “I don’t read the Ridgeline newspaper. And frankly, I just thought of Mrs. Highland as somebody who once yelled at me for riding my bike over her lawn until now. I don’t even care if you believe me. But I’m telling the truth. I respect myself and Ben too much to joke about something like this.”
Now that she had said what she needed to say, Merry straightened her back and gave herself permission to relax, just a little. Intensely, she tried to drink in the details of the room and what little she could see of the hall and kitchen behind her. That was where Ben had eaten his favorite food—peanut-butter toast, or so he’d told her. The yard in front was where he and his father and brother would have a catch when Mr. Highland got home from work as a pharmacist. The dark stairs in the hall, across from the bookshelves, would lead up to Ben’s room. Merry felt again that almost physical pull. It was the first room on the right at the top of the stairs.
“What do you talk about?” Mrs. Highland finally asked.
“Us. I would say we ... care for each other. He’s never without that brown leather jacket. Sasha Avery works at our house too in her work-study program, but she never told me she worked here. Ben told me you were ill. He was there at the service two weeks ago.”
“When you say you saw Ben ...” Mrs. Highland began.
“I mean I believe I see him. And, of course, it’s impossible,” Merry said. “But it’s not out of the question that I could have seen him or someone like him.”
“Do you believe that there is a life after this one?” asked Mrs. Highland.
“Don’t get upset, dear,” her husband cautioned her.
“I do,” Meredith told her. “I can’t say I’m sure. I know it’s what I believe.”
“Lately, since I’ve been unwell, Ben seems so close.”
“He loves you very much. The main thing he was worried about, when it came to the memorial service was you. He called you his little mom.”
“No!” Mrs. Highland said. “Charles, was that in the newspaper? No one ever knew that except Ben and me. Meredith, you’re right. What you’re saying is beyond belief. But if I knew it was true, that I might see Ben one day, maybe I could actually heal.”
“I don’t think I can prove it to you, Mrs. Highland. And I haven’t seen Ben since the memorial service. I think he may be gone. Then again, I’ve been grounded for sitting all night in church talking to Ben. I’d never snuck out of the house before.”
“If you should have any more of these dreams or visions, will you tell me?” Mrs. Highland said. Meredith nodded. “Do you promise?”
“I have to go now. My mother needs me at home. My little brother has been sick.”
Mr. Highland said, “Sasha told us that. She’s very upset about it. Would you like to see Ben’s old room before you go?”
“Very much.”
It was a shrine. A Yankees poster was tacked over the bed and a battered backpack hung over the back of the desk chair. There were books of poetry and biographies, mostly of Arctic expeditions and real-life adventures, stacked between two geodes that served as bookends. Around the ceiling ran a train track with an old Lionel train sitting on it. “He loved his train, and it never embarrassed him to have it there. The switch is right on his desk. It still works,” said Mr. Highland. “Do you want to ... I’m afraid I don’t understand all this. But do you want to sit here alone for a moment?”
“I don’t understand it either. But yes, I do.”
When Mr. Highland closed the door, Merry ran her fingers over the edges of the books. She took out a marbled black-and white notebook that fell open to a poem Ben had apparently been struggling with. The paper was old. This had been written a long time ago, before Ben ever knew that there was a Meredith Brynn.
She is only a woman like any other
A girl
So slight
And bright
My eye’s delight
I would not seek another
The touch of her hand
Black hair
Gray gaze
All these are mine
There is no other
It did not shock her to see that, forty years ago, before her parents had met, Ben had been writing about her
. Were there whorls of time that intersected in ways no one understood? Did time and destiny loop back and forward on themselves, and if what was meant to be was not, did they collide? Merry opened Ben’s closet. There hung his pairs of faded jeans and a single blue Oxford cloth shirt, a few summer short-sleeve plaid things and to one side, there ... his leather jacket. As if to touch him, she reached into the pocket.
She found her missing glove.
The room seemed to rock. Merry lay down on the bed. She closed her eyes and must have slept because there was a sense of waking when she opened them. Ben lay beside her, his eyes and piney-cinnamon scent as real as if he held her close.
“You wanted that glove back so much?” he asked her.
“Ben, why are you here?” Merry asked.
“I could ask you the same thing,” he said lightly.
“I don’t mean in this house.”
“I do, Merry. And I don’t know. All I know is, I’d give anything to kiss you. I want to know how your cheek really feels. But I can’t.”
“Try,” Meredith said. “Try. I’m not afraid.”
Ben reached for her and at that moment, a silver light, expanding outward, like a force throwing them back, hurtled down like lightning contained. Merry couldn’t see Ben’s face, only his outline beside her. After a moment, she couldn’t see him at all.
What was this? Campbell liked to joke about lightning striking sinners, but how could a simple kiss be a sin? Were there rules about people on different planes being in love? What if Meredith wanted to be with Ben, even if it meant that, like him, she never got the chance to grow up? Would Campbell think this was “just biology”?
Meredith was sitting on the side of the bed suddenly, properly zipped into her coat, her glove in her hand, when Sasha opened the door, flooding the room with musty yellow light.
“Mrs. Highland is a wreck. I don’t know what you’re up to Merry, but she’s had to have a sedative. Time to go home.”
“Why are you dressed up like that Sasha?” Merry asked, shakily getting to her feet. “And why are you talking to me like that? You’re talking to me like I’m a stranger or a brat.”
Watch for Me by Moonlight Page 16