A Mother's Heart (20 page)

But the alley looked like dozens of others she’d wandered through.

“My place is just around the corner. If you take the noodles, I’ll walk the bike. I’ve got a bottle of Glenlivet and even two clean glasses in the cupboard.”

He handed her the steaming pots and she followed him as he guided the bike through the puddles in the alley to a small padlocked shed. He pulled a key from his pocket
unlocked the door and rolled the bike into the dirt-floored space. In the rear corner Mel could see neatly stacked boxes marked with red crosses.

Phil followed her glance.

“Medical supplies I’ve managed to scrounge. As I need them I deliver them to the orphanage but there’s little left—just what you see there.”

He closed up, took the pots and led her up an external flight of wooden stairs to a landing above the shed. He flicked on a light as he opened the door and Mel followed him inside.

The room they entered was starkly neat. A small counter held a hot plate and a line of canned goods. On shelves underneath were a small stack of plates and a couple of pots. A desk flanked the one window and on its surface Mel saw a well-thumbed copy of a
Physician’s Desk Reference
and a few medical textbooks. Through a doorway hung with a bamboo curtain Mel saw a mosquito-netted bed.

“I’ve actually got a bathroom if you want to clean up before we eat.”

He set the pots on a table in the middle of the room and pointed toward the bedroom.

“It’s through here. I’ll get you a towel and can offer you some clean clothes.” His glance moved down from her face to her blood-and grime-spattered shirt. “You probably will want to burn that.”

He led the way to the bath and handed her a towel, shirt and shorts. “There’s a tub if you want to soak. I can reheat the noodles when you’re ready. Do you want a drink now or later?”

She turned down the drink and looked with longing at the claw-footed tub in the middle of the bath. This wasn’t what she’d intended, but her flat had only a tiny box of
a shower. She turned on the tap and peeled off her clothes while she waited for the tub to fill. When she finally eased herself into the warm water she could not imagine wanting to be anywhere else.

After she had scrubbed the vestiges of the day from her weary body she leaned back and let herself drift for a few minutes…

The knock was insistent, rapid.

“Melanie? Melanie, are you okay?” She heard genuine concern in his voice. And he had called her Melanie. Not Ames, which was the only way he had ever addressed her; and not Mel, which was how she referred to herself since she’d become a journalist. Only Dessie and her father called her Melanie.

She roused herself with a splash and rose from the tub.

“I’m fine. Sorry to alarm you. I’ll be out in a minute.”

She toweled herself dry, turbaned her hair and slipped on the crisply starched khaki shirt he had given her. The shorts came to her knees and were loose around the waist, so she slipped her belt off her own mud-caked pants and cinched the shorts tightly to keep them up.

Her fingertips and toes were wrinkled, but every inch of her was clean and smelled of Ivory soap. She was aware of his appraisal as she emerged from the bathroom.

“Now, that’s an improvement. The noodles are on the hot plate. I’m going to wash up myself—be back a little faster than you were,” he said, then ducked into the bath.

In the outer room she found the table set with bowls and spoons. An empty glass etched with Marine Corps insignia stood at one place with the promised bottle of Glenlivet next to it. She had noticed that Phil had taken his own glass into the bath.

She poured herself a splash of scotch and swirled it around the glass, breathing in the aroma. Glenlivet had
been her father’s drink and Dessie had kept a crystal decanter on a silver tray on the sideboard in the dining room at Georgetown, ready and waiting for his sporadic returns from whatever hot spot he’d been assigned to solve its crises. Mel remembered him on those nights when he first came home—the quick, stiff hug in the front hall and then the step back from her to assess how much she’d grown or to note the presence, and later absence, of her braces; the kiss to the cheek Dessie offered him; and then the retreat to the dining room. Mel sat and watched her father, hungry for his presence, as he sank into his chair at the head of the table, loosened his tie and clasped the double rocks glass. He drank slowly, his eyes closed at first, each sip easing the creases of worry and fatigue that to Mel seemed deeper each time he returned.

Mel wondered now if her father’s Glenlivet had helped to obliterate the horrors that had assaulted him on his missions. She’d seen enough hard drinking during her years in Saigon to understand how many men used it as an anesthetic. More than likely, from what she’d heard about Phil, it was his drug of choice.

She took a small sip, the gold liquid searing her throat and then warming her empty belly. She rubbed the bridge of her nose. Too much of this and she wouldn’t be able to hold on to the motorbike, much less find her own way back to her flat.

She stifled a yawn as Phil parted the bamboo curtain and stepped back into the front room. He brought the pots to the table and ladled noodles and broth into her bowl.

“Eat, before you topple over.”

They ate silently, hunger and weariness overtaking any attempt on either part to be sociable. Like the bath, the food met a need so basic that it quelled the earlier
disquiet Mel had felt about being with Phil any longer than absolutely necessary. She swallowed the noodles and shredded cabbage voraciously, registering the warmth, the flecks of hot chili pepper, the intense flavors of garlic and onion and basil from the broth that must have been simmering for days.

“Thank you,” she was finally able to murmur when her bowl was empty. “I hadn’t realized how much I needed to eat.”

She pushed her chair back from the table.

“I’ll help you clean up and then I should get back to my place. If you’ll sketch out for me where we are, I can walk or hail a cycle taxi.”

“It’s late and, if you haven’t noticed, it’s pouring out. It’s not safe for you to head out by yourself. I’d take you on the bike, but after finally being clean and dry I suspect that both of us would regret the ride.

“Look, you can stay here. Take the bed. I’ll camp out here on the couch. I need to be close to the phone anyway. The Seventh Adventist Hospital, where most of the survivors were taken, has my number. I spoke to them while you were in the tub. If they need me, I’ll be on my way. It’s another reason for me not to take you back to your flat—I don’t want to miss their call.”

“I can certainly travel on my own at night. I’ve been doing it for a long time.”

“I imagine that you haven’t been doing it when the city is streaming with desperate refugees from the north and today, especially, in the aftermath of the crash, when rumors are careening from one end of Saigon to the other. Stay put. It’s not a suggestion. You’ll be no good for your precious Tien if you’re abducted or worse. There’s mortar fire hitting the fringe of the city.”

Phil’s reversion to his “I’m in charge, don’t mess with
me” mode of communicating with her caught Mel off guard. Had he really been kind and solicitous earlier, or had she simply been lulled into thinking so by her fatigue and hunger? Under normal circumstances, Mel would never have allowed herself to be in this situation—dependent on a man who thought he knew what was best for her. Under normal circumstances, she would pick herself up and go, rain and mortar fire and panic in the streets be damned.

But she knew herself well enough to acknowledge that she was close to physical collapse. Whatever had driven her through this horrific day was gone. She bit back words that she knew might only fuel Phil’s sense of her weakness and vulnerability. And she reluctantly admitted to herself how right he was with the clinching words of his argument to keep her at his place for the night. She had a responsibility beyond herself to Tien, a duty to fulfill to Anh.

“Fine. I’ll stay. But I’ll be on my way with first light.”

She picked up the dishes and carried them to the bath, where she had seen a dishpan, sponge and incongruous container of dishwashing liquid stowed under the sink. She washed and dried the dishes while Phil placed another call to the hospital.

When she was finished she found him making the bed.

“Clean sheets. You’re all set for the night. Get some rest.”

He left her, and she climbed into the bed. Like the rest of his flat, the bedroom was almost monastic in its simplicity and starkness. The bed was narrow, not something she had expected, given Phil’s carousing reputation. But then, he may have carried on that part of his life in other beds, rather than bringing women home to what appeared to Mel to be a sanctuary.

Next to the bed Mel found a stack of books on the night table. As tired as she was, as depleted of nearly all her resources, the journalist in her couldn’t resist investigating. She ran her fingers along the spines: Thoreau’s
On Walden Pond;
Teilhard de Chardin’s
The Phenomenon of Man
in the original French; and Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury.
She had expected Ian Fleming or Ed McBain, but was beginning to understand that what she had previously expected of Phil Coughlin and what she was discovering about him were worlds apart.

She had read de Chardin at Columbia and began to leaf through the pages. Marginal notes in deep blue ink and a jagged, angular handwriting were scattered throughout the well-thumbed book. She was filled with a profoundly curious urge to read the notes, seeking some insight into why Phil Coughlin was so disturbingly compelling. It might give her some edge in dealing with him, provide her with some understanding of him with which to defend herself. Protect herself. But she hadn’t read more than a few words, straining to decipher the script in the dim light of the single lamp by the bed, when her eyes and her brain simply refused to perform for even a few more minutes. Her head fell heavy into the pillow, the book sprawled open across her chest and she was asleep.

But it wasn’t a restful sleep. Jumbled images of the smoke-filled bog, the broken fuselage, scattered limbs, her father’s distant, sorrow-lined face, and Coughlin’s intense blue eyes crowded her subconscious, accompanied by a cacophony of sirens and explosions and fragments of the lullaby she had sung as she carried the babies. She was lost in the smoke, the mud immobilizing her feet. She was hearing the cries of a child in the distance but couldn’t reach her, despite struggling with every ounce of her strength. Panic rose in her and guilt
as the screams continued and she was helpless to stop them. She was frantic, clawing at her feet to dig out of the mud, but when she lifted her hands they were filled with blood.

Suddenly, cool hands grasped her own heated ones, and a voice she couldn’t see because of the smoke spoke to her calmly.

“Melanie. Melanie, it’s only a dream. You’re safe.”

She struggled for a moment and then the bog and the smoke vanished, replaced by yellow light and an unrecognizable room. Where was she? The voice whispered to her.

“It’s okay, Melanie. You’re with me, Phil.”

She opened her eyes and stared into his startlingly blue ones. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking her still trembling hands.

“You must have had a bad dream—no surprise, given what you witnessed today.”

What she had witnessed flooded back and crushed her emotionally. She began to cry, keening as if she were one of her Irish aunts on her mother’s side, mourning each of the shattered lives flung across the path of this war.

Phil took her face in his hands, wiping her tears with his thumbs, and then pulled her into an embrace, his arms wrapped around her as her body heaved with uncontrolled sobs. She emptied herself into him and he simply held her, absorbing her grief. When her tears subsided, he brushed her damp hair away from her face.

“Try to get some rest now. It’s almost morning and you’ll be needed at the orphanage. I’ll stay here with you if you want me to.”

She nodded, not willing to be separated from the steadying rhythm of his heart, the strength in his arms holding her up and keeping further nightmares at bay.

She settled down again onto the narrow bed and he slipped behind her, her back leaning into his chest. His arm reached around her and clasped her hand.

“Sleep,” he said. “I’m here.”

When she woke a few hours later she could see faint cracks of light through the blinds on the window. She groped for her clock, a small, leather-bound travel clock that her father had given her when she left for Vietnam. It was the last time she had seen him. But the clock wasn’t there, and the room and the bed weren’t hers. She sat up with a start, remembering where she was and vaguely aware of the disturbance during the night. She was alone in the bed. Perhaps Phil coming to her in the midst of her dream had been part of the dream, as well.

She wasn’t sure which version of the night before upset her more—that her subconscious had been so consumed with him that he could be so present in her dreams, or that he had physically comforted her and she had welcomed him into her bed. But she had slept, wrapped in a cocoon of safety that he had somehow provided her.

She heard the water running in the bathroom and scrambled out of the bed. She didn’t want to still be there in the midst of rumpled sheets if, indeed, he had held her and slept with her.

In the front room she found a pot of coffee on the hot plate and poured herself some into one of the thick ceramic Boston Red Sox mugs on the counter. Some caffeine and a cigarette would clear her fuzzy thinking. Whatever had happened the night before was an aberration, thrust upon her by the crash. She couldn’t even remember the last time she had cried or needed comforting. She hadn’t been herself, Mel Ames, seasoned war correspondent, that was all. She nearly dropped the mug when Phil entered the
room behind her and spoke. He didn’t have to touch her to evoke what convinced her now had definitely been a physical, not imagined experience. His voice held the same compassionate tone she remembered.