"From what information we have now," he said slowly, "Major Armstrong reported hydraulic failure in his landing gear on approach and tried to abort the landing. We don't have all the information yet. I don't know if emergency measures failed, or what exactly happened, but the plane landed nose-first and exploded on impact. He never had time to eject."
I gripped the chaplain's arms, digging my fingernails into his coat, fighting against the image of yellow fire trucks racing with screaming sirens to the end of the runway, of water cannons dousing the burning remains of Paul's F-16, of the blackened purple ooze that had once been my husband, my hero.
"It couldn't have been pilot error," I whispered. “It couldn’t have been. Something must have happened.”
The doorbell chimed again. It was Mother, hastily dressed in Etienne Aigner boots, a pair of slacks, and a sweatshirt trimmed with Battenberg lace cutouts. Even in a crisis, she never failed to look perfect. Behind her stood Marcus, his face red with emotion and cold.
"Darling, what has happened? Is everything all right?" Mother stepped inside the door. "That reporter came pounding on my door a few minutes ago and said that Paul had been in an accident. I got your message from the machine then, and he brought me right over."
My eyes swept to Marcus, still standing outside on the porch, a wrinkled trench coat over flannel shirt and jeans, his sockless feet inside snow-caked running shoes.
"Thank you so much." I whispered.
"What happened?" he asked.
"Paul's dead. His plane crashed. Please, Marcus, it's cold. Come inside."
"No. This is a time for you and your family. This is not a time for me to be here. If you need me, I'll be out here on the porch." He smiled wanly and shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his worn trench coat.
"If you insist."
"I insist."
I closed the door, softly. Mother had, in the meantime, introduced herself to Chaplain McBroom and stoically received the news of Paul's death. I found myself in her awkward embrace, something that had not occurred since daddy's funeral.
Daddy's funeral. So now we're both widows, I thought.
"Darling, I am so sorry." Mother's hands rubbed across my back. "Whatever can I do for you?"
Before I could answer, she took charge.
"Chaplain, please tell that man on the front porch to go home. He's not needed."
* * *
We buried Paul in Arlington Cemetery. He had grown up in Washington D.C.; his parents were buried in nearby Arlington, and after all Paul deserved a hero's burial. To the children and Mother, he was a hero for dying in service to his country; in my mind, it was atonement for rushing to judgment. I clutched the folded flag tightly to my chest to deaden the roar of the jets, as the three silhouettes crossed the Potomac in a Missing Man flyover shadowing the never-ending rows of identical, white headstones.
Andrew, ever his father's son, sat stoically, his green eyes never flinching, never filling in any show of emotion, staring at the gray casket. Lillian, only two years old, would probably never remember much about her Daddy. She sat swinging her legs on Grandma James's lap, wondering aloud why everyone was crying. Andrew would remember every action, every gesture, and every word.
As the limousine snaked back across Memorial Bridge, into the District toward the funeral home, I laid my head against the cold window glass and pressed my lips against the folded flag still clutched tightly in my arms.
"Mommy," Andrew asked in a clear voice. "What happens now?"
"God only knows, sweetheart. God only knows."
Chapter 6 Marcus
My God. He's dead. The Major is dead.
I paced up and down the porch that early morning, shivering as scuffs of snow slid into my shoes. Irritably, I kicked the porch rail, showering the wet powder out from between the tread of my Nikes into the bushes.
Shit. Why didn't I take the time to put socks on?
Because she called you.
Because she needed you.
And now you're standing here in your friggin' bare feet, waiting like a damn dog. Woof woof. Sit up and beg. Things are gonna change now, you dirty dog. You got what you wanted, didn't you? She's free. She's yours. So what is it? What are you so scared of?
This isn't right. A man is dead, and I'm a vulture, circling around and waiting for his body to get cold, so I can slip in right next to his wife at night.
You scum-sucking bastard.
"What is it, Mr. Henning?" Marian James poked her head out the door.
"Hmm?"
"I said what is it? Why are you making all that noise?"
"What noise? Oh, that. Just cleaning out my shoes."
She raised her patrician eyebrows. "I see."
"How's Kay?"
"How do you think?"
"Look, can't we just bury the hatchet for once and think about her?"
"It seems to me you've been doing enough thinking about her, Mr. Henning." Without a sound she closed the door. Inside, Kay must have told the children the news. I heard the kids’ voices rise in keening wails through the window glass.
She's yours now, man. There’s nothing in your way anymore.
* * *
"Put it bottom-right on page one, then jump it inside," Jess said, scrolling Paul Armstrong's obituary down his computer screen, dictating to the copy desk how the story should be played.
"Jesus Christ, Jess." I came to work the next day looking like I’d been on a three-day drunk.
"It's a story, whether you like it or not, Mark." Jess looked at me. "As director of the literacy center, she's a prominent member of the community, and her husband died. If he had a heart attack on the ninth hole of the golf course, it would be page three, but it would still be news. The fact that he bounced off the end of a runway in Korea makes it better. Ted—" Jess pushed a button, sending the obit electronically across the newsroom and craned his neck over his computer screen to catch the eye of a copy editor. "Put a thirty-six-point head on that."
The copy editor swiveled a pencil to the corner of his mouth. “’Lit-center exec's husband dead in plane crash?’" he asked.
"That's fine."
"Jess, can't we soft-pedal this a little bit?"
"It's news, Mark. Don't you listen?"
"Jesus Christ. Don't you ever think about the families you write about?"
Jess jumped up from his seat and grabbed me by the lapels of my corduroy sports coat.
"I don't know what's going on between you and Kay Armstrong, and I don't think I want to know," he said. "But I sure seem to remember she had you wrapped around her finger, before she dumped you like a hot rock to marry Mr. Flyboy. Now Flyboy's dead, and, as far as I'm concerned, it's news. If you've got a problem with that, I suggest you go to welding school, because you don't belong in this business." He released me abruptly, nearly sending me across the top of an empty desk.
"
Sheee-it,"
whispered a sportswriter, as I stumbled wordlessly out of the newsroom.
When I got home, there was a message from Jess on my machine. "Hey, Mark, I'm sorry about what happened. You've got some comp time coming, and I know this whole thing has you shaken up pretty badly. Why don't you just take the rest of the week off, okay?”
How considerate of him.
Automatically, I reached for the bottle of scotch beneath the kitchen sink and chased this morning’s coffee grounds from my mug with lukewarm water. All I wanted was oblivion.
* * *
The first time Kay and I had met for dinner those many years ago, the scar above her eye she had gotten from the beating Grant Matthews had given her was still pink, but the bruises around her eyes had gone. She looked radiant in a turquoise sequined dress, with her red curls cascading around her face like a halo as she stood beside the maître d'.
"My dear Mrs. Matthews." I took her hand.
"No, it's Kay James again. I took back my maiden name. I'm starting again."
"Good for you." I folded her arm in mine and, together, we followed the waiter to our table.
I don't remember what we ordered. I don't even remember what we did after we ate. I just remember having felt a tremendous connection with this redheaded fireball in front of me. We shared so much: a belief in humanity's ability to rise above itself if only given the right help, the need to give back to those less fortunate, and a passion to change our world for the better.
Somewhere along about midnight, we ended up sitting on a park bench along Shanahan's Creek, watching the moon cast fluid silver ribbons across the water. Kay had pulled off her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her.
"What a wonderful night," she said, tossing back her head. "The moon and the stars, they're so beautiful."
"Like you."
"Speak to me, sweet lips," she laughed, cynically.
"No, I really mean it."
"Sure you do."
"Can I see you again?"
Smiling, she cocked her head and looked at me. "I suppose."
"You suppose? Can't you come up with something a little more, oh, I don't know, feeling?"
She laughed that laugh of hers, lively, full, and deep-throated, and laid her head on my shoulder. "Honestly, I've never met anyone like you, Marcus Henning. I don't know what to think of you."
"Just think of me, that's all I ask."
"And if I do?"
"I'll die a happy man."
She laughed again, and drew her face to mine. "Then, I'll be honored to see you again," she whispered, and kissed me.
That was the beginning. We saw each other every night that week. I spent a king's ransom on fancy restaurants, movies, and gifts like flowers, candy, and stuffed animals. She accepted each gift with polished politeness.
Then I gave her a music box that played Lara's Theme from Dr. Zhivago. We had just returned to her North End apartment from another dinner at another fancy restaurant. We were seated on her flowery, feminine couch; it was late and, I'll admit, I had hopes of not waking up alone.
There was frigid silence, as she tore off the silver paper.
"You'll do anything to get in my pants, won't you?" she said.
"What the hell is that supposed to mean? I found something nice that I thought you like, and I bought it for you." I was flabbergasted.
"Nobody ever buys me anything, without an ulterior motive." She closed the box, as tears began to roll down her cheeks. "I thought you were different."
I reached over and touched her shoulder. "Why is that?"
"Until I met you, I never thought anybody could like me for me," Kay began. "When I first saw you at that dance, I thought you were just like any other man there. The country club crowd my mother runs with are all such fakes, and my mother's the worst of the whole crowd. Then, when I saw you at the grocery store, and I was so, so ugly, all those stitches and those bruises."
"You've never been ugly to me."
"And you still wanted to go out with me. My heart just burst right then. I thought here's somebody who wants me for me, not just for my mother's money or my looks, because, God knows, I certainly didn't have any then. And then, this whole week—"
"I've been doing everything wrong," I finished the sentence. Gently, I leaned over and kissed her cheek. "I'm sorry. I didn't realize."
"Any time Mother wanted something from me, she bought me something first. She's always been so cold and so distant, and it got worse after Daddy died. The only real mother I ever had was Novella. Novella's the only person who ever really loved me. "
"Who's Novella?"
"Our maid."
So even rich families abuse their children, just in different ways.
"You don't know what it was like, wanting nothing but a normal life, wanting nothing but Ward and June Cleaver, or
Father Knows Best
. I wanted parents who were real, who didn't spend Christmas and Thanksgiving in the Bahamas, who didn't have the hired help drop me off at school while all the other kids pointed and stared."
"Lower middle class life ain't perfect either, sweetie."
"But don't you see? What I wanted was a connection. I wanted my parents to notice me for the person I was, not whose genes I happened to be carrying around, or whose name hung at the end of mine. That's Kay James, Doctor Montgomery James's daughter. I wanted to be a part of something that was real, and I knew what went on at my house wasn't real."
"How did you end up married to that goon I saw you with?"
"I thought I was pregnant. We panicked, ran off and got married. A few weeks later, I found out I wasn’t. You know the first time that Grant beat me up, he blacked my eye. The second time, he broke my nose."
"Oh my God, Kay."
"Mother paid for a nose job, on the condition that I not go to the police about it. She didn't want my name showing up in the
Journal-Gazette's
police blotter," Kay smiled crookedly. "The next time it happened, he broke my arm, and I made up a story about falling down the steps. But finally, it got so bad I went to the battered women's shelter, and they helped me find a lawyer, who Mother, of course, didn't approve of. It hadn't been a week after the divorce, when I saw you at the grocery."
"Are you still scared of him? Do you think he'll come back and bother you again?"
"Mother says he won't."
"I won't let him hurt you, Kay. I won't let anyone hurt you ever again."
Kay wrapped her arms around my waist and laid her head on my chest. "You don't know how much I want to believe that, Marcus."
"Anything you want, I’ll do for you."
"Don't say that."
I kissed the top of her head. "I've never known a woman who could be won by saying you wouldn't do anything she asked."
"No, I didn't say that." Her red hair had shone with the light, as she shook her head and, smiling, pushed away from me. "Don't do what I expect."
God knows I tried not to. With enough testosterone backed up in my cranium to blow the back of my head clean off, I kissed her politely at the door and went home.
Back at my apartment, angry and frustrated, I pulled a beer out of the refrigerator.
This better be worth it,
I thought. Savagely, I twisted the top off the bottle and tossed the cap into a corner.
So underneath it all, beneath the fire and the sarcasm, beneath the veneer she put around herself was a little girl who needed to be loved for what she was, not what she had. But, God, aren't we all looking for that? I wanted her to love me because of whom I believed I could be, not what I had proved myself to be.
At least the scars of my failures didn't show as obviously on my face as hers did. Who could strike a face like that?
I fished my TV remote from beneath the stack of old newspapers on my coffee table and surfed through the channels, settling on some spaghetti western. It would have been just a matter of waiting her out, getting her to trust me, winning her over; she certainly had me caught.
There was a knock on my door.
What the hell?
"Who is it?" I called from the couch.
"Marcus, it's me."
I threw open the door, and there stood Kay in her sequined dress, holding a bottle of champagne in one hand and her silver shoes in the other. Without a word, I took her in my arms and kissed her, tasting the sweetness of her lips, lingering over a curl above her eye, scattering kisses across the soft curve beneath her chin.
"Can we take this inside?"
"Of course."
"I'm trusting you with my heart, Marcus. Please remember that."
"Always. Always. Always."
Drunk or sober, the thought of that night still sends chills down my spine. I still remember watching her as she slept on my pillow. Between that night nearly ten years ago when I first held her in my arms and the first time she beckoned me upstairs this summer, there had been too many mistakes and too many missed opportunities. I had pursued her relentlessly, confident in my love and in hers. Now, with the major's death, reality came crowding in.
She was free again.
And I was terrified.
What was it that terrified me? I poured another shot of booze into my coffee mug and slugged it down.
I had lived all these years wanting an image, a dream. What I waited on, what I staked my hopes on wasn't real; even what we had built these past six months wasn't real.
Andrew and Lillian had been kept completely away from me. Except for that first meeting on the front porch and the night someone broke her window, I never saw her kids.
There were the few late nights when I could slip over after Andrew and Lillian were in bed for a few stolen moments, but I wanted more than anything to wake up next to her in the morning, to see those beautiful blue eyes look across the pillows and hear her murmur “Good morning.”
“We can’t let the kids see us together,” she said, after more than one whispered, late night visit. And maybe the clandestine way we met added to the mystique—the lunches at the dark Colonial Café, the late night visits when I park my car a block or more away and then skulk through the gentrified streets and slip down the alley behind her house and up to the back door.
It made our stolen times together more delicious.
Who could blame Kay? And I had agreed, thinking it was best for the kids.
Now, I saw it was really the best for me.
Without those two kids around, I could stay inside this dream I had about Kay, this seven-year-old image of a woman whose daily life I really didn't know. I knew about her work, of course, because of Elizabeth Kingston. I didn't know what happened when she came in the door after work. I wasn't there when she picked up the kids, or fixed their supper, or helped them with their homework, or put them to bed at nine o'clock. I wasn't really a part of her life, until Andy and Lil were tucked in their beds, or away at Grandma James' for the weekend. I never wiped noses, or settled spats. Andy never came to me with a question about his science homework.