Sealed with a promise (37 page)

  “I’m so sorry, Caleb,” Emmie spoke through her tears. She wasn’t the perpetrator, but
someone
needed to say they were sorry. Someone needed to acknowledge that it shouldn’t have happened. “The only person you knew with the money or power to help you, and he used his power against you.”

  They were silent a long time. There wasn’t anything else to say. The fire hissed in the fireplace. Ashes sifted into the grate.

  After a while Emmie wiped her cheeks with the flat of her hand. Gently, in the low hushed tone people use outside hospital rooms, she urged him to return to his story. “Did your mother live long?”

  His lips slanted in an oddly young, sad smile. “At that time, the doctor had changed her medicine, and she seemed better for a while…”

  His voice trailed away, while he looked out the window as if he could see through it into the past. While they had talked, dusk had fallen. A pale blue veil of ground fog floated over the dark stubble in the peanut field. The pine forest at the field’s edge looked almost black against the sky.

  At last he turned back to Emmie, a gentle smile tipping the corners of his mouth.

  “She was so pretty.” He shook his head in fond amazement. “She told me my father was a handsome prince, and I believed her longer than I should have, because she looked just like a fairy-tale princess from my books. She was tiny and had long golden-red hair.

  “When she died, it was like some sort of malignant enchantment fell away, and she looked about fifteen, so beautiful and so completely pure. She was propped on pillows in the back bedroom, and the last red rays of the sun glowed in her hair and made her skin translucent as a rose petal. You could see what she was supposed to be, had been meant to be. She had a believing heart and a gift for dreaming. Instead of treasuring her, he had taken one sip of her sweetness and thrown her down in the dirt.

  “I swore she would have justice, Emmie.

  “I promised if I ever saw him face to face, I would kill him.”

  Slowly, carefully, he told her the rest. As the day grew darker, Emmie learned the story of a man in the midst of a public war, who sees a hated face left over from his private war.

  She listened to it all.

  All he had done.

  The reasons for all he had done.

  Right up to the phone calls from the donor registry.

  Which he hadn’t answered.

  And did not intend to answer.

  Her face burned hot. And then froze into a perfect wooden likeness of herself. Thoughts, like cool, slow drops of dispassion, spread ripples across her mind.

  
That’s what this has been about. Revenge.

  
Everything from the day of Pickett’s wedding on. It was only a way to get past the layers around Calhoun.

  
From the beginning. Oh, wait. That wasn’t the
beginning
in Aunt Lilly Hale’s office. That was the third act.

  
The plan was clever. Very clever. I was a walk on. Anyone could have played the character who shows up in the third act and announces, “Come, sir. I will lead you into the citadel.”

  And then the thought that squeezed the last trace of illusion from her heart:
Oh, Caleb, were you really willing to marry me?

  She knew the answer. Caleb was a man who would do whatever it took to reach his objectives. He wasn’t mean or callous. He had never treated her unkindly. He would fulfill any promise he made. And he would let nothing stop him.

  It felt like the very bones of her spine were crumbling. None of it had been real. She wanted to crawl into some deep, dark place like a wounded animal seeking its den, someplace she could bleed to death in peace or lie still enough, for long enough, to heal.

  This was the experience she had always feared: to find out she didn’t matter. Her life hadn’t been about her, because she hadn’t chosen to be significant to herself. She had kept herself small, unimportant, had crept around the edges and lived a life that
she herself
was missing from, so that she wouldn’t feel this.

  Well, now she felt the pain, and it hurt as badly as she had feared, but it wasn’t dull. It
was
real. She had been living in a fantasy that someone would come along and she would make a meaningful difference to
him,
simply because she existed.

  One lesson her newfound self-esteem had taught her over the past several weeks: she knew when it was about her and when it wasn’t. This wasn’t. She couldn’t accuse him of betrayal. She winced at the irony. He hadn’t betrayed her. What he was doing didn’t have anything to do with her.

  The forces at work here had started before she was born. She’d stumbled in a tragedy already in progress, but it was
not her story.
This story began long before Caleb met her.

  Now that she looked at the truth-what the last few weeks had really been about-the story of her great love affair turned to nothing. It was like ashes on a fireplace grate still holding the shape of a log. If she touched them, they would fall in soft gray whispers, leaving only the memory of warmth.

  She touched them.

  And having let all the pieces of her fantasy collapse, she learned something.

  Even if she could no longer pretend they had a relationship, all the reasons she loved Caleb were still there. His integrity. His imagination. His courage. His largeness of spirit. No matter how narrow his choices, he had never allowed life to make
him
small. He was a hero.

  Oh, yes, she loved him still, though he was keeping himself in the past, and his keeping himself in the past had doomed their love from the beginning. She grieved for the tragic story he was living.

  She could see so clearly that he would not have the flaws of a tragic hero were it not for his great strengths. Great loyalty. A capacity for generosity that made him able to make greater sacrifices than other people could contemplate. A self-discipline that held him to his course undeterred, no matter what the temptations.

  What always made a tragedy so sad was the sense that it was inevitable, and yet it was unnecessary. She could not have the love she wanted from him, but she couldn’t
, wouldn’t,
let him go through this alone. She could offer her friendship.

  Why didn’t she say something? Purple wool clogs kicked off, she sat on the maroon leather sofa with her feet tucked under her. All day he had known this moment would come. As he waited for her judgment, the back of his neck was so tight he thought it might snap.

  Finally he could take the silent waiting no more. “Aren’t you disgusted that I wanted to kill him?”

  She pondered the question. She looked at the ceiling. She clasped her hands loosely in her lap. Emmie-like, when she had organized her thoughts, she said, “Soldiers kill. They take on terrible psychic wounds in order to keep the rest of us unwounded.”

  With the lecturer’s skill, she looked at her hands for a moment to insert a thoughtful pause. “Teach a person to kill and you’ve taken away some measure of the person’s peace. They’ve crossed a line, and they know it. Call war peacekeeping all you want. It might even
be
peacekeeping, for all I know.” She shrugged. “Certainly, soldiers lose their peace so that people like me can
keep
mine. Some people are born to soldiering.” She gave him another Emmie-look that signaled a dry joke. “I can’t call it SEALing-for now, we’re stuck with ‘soldier.’”

  She went back into lecture-mode. “They come into the world knowing that they’re the ones. They know they are the protectors, the defenders, and the fighters. They know when the shit hits the fan, the wolf attacks the fold, and the terrorists have taken over the plane- it’s their job to deal with it. They are in charge, and since they are serious about their duty, they train for the day it will come. Soldiers have skill at killing. At the risk of stating the obvious, that’s what their gun is for. The most natural thing in the world is to see a problem in terms of the skills you have to bring to it.”

  Having delivered her meditation on the subject of killing, like any good teacher, she left him to draw his own conclusions. She rose from the sofa, and crossed the heirloom carpet to study a small painting. After looking at it for a minute, she turned her wide blue eyes straight on him. She said pensively, “Anyway, I don’t think you wanted to kill him.”

  His laughter cracked through the room like a rifle shot. “Oh, you’re wrong.” His hands clenched. With the black joy of hatred throbbing through him, he could feel a smile that had its origins in bared teeth.

  He
knew
what he looked like.

  And
she
plopped her hands on her hips and tilted her head at him. “If you wanted to kill him, you’d have done it by now. You’ve turned down chance after chance. It’s not that you don’t know how,” she added reasonably. “I’ll bet you know ways I couldn’t dream of-ways that would insure you were never caught.”

  She sauntered up to him (yes, sauntered!) and tapped his chest with one shapely forefinger. “I’ll bet you could do it, and do it in a way that would make your fellow SEALs look like frigging heroes.”

  A corner of his mouth kicked up.

  “What?”

  “You said
frigging.
”

  It was her turn to smile. “So, I did. I’ve acquired all sorts of verbal abilities I never thought I had.”

  She walked over to the table and switched on a lamp. She turned to him, her arms crossed loosely under her breasts. “You told me one time that you supported yourself and your mother with crime.”

  Caleb nodded. “They say crime doesn’t pay, but it paid better than anything else in my neighborhood.”

  “I suspect there are areas of crime that pay very well indeed.”

  “Some.”

  “I expect you knew what they were, and you knew the people you’d have to hook up with. You could have made the money you needed yourself, couldn’t you?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you’d have had to get into the criminal world a lot deeper. You’d have been in at a level you never would have escaped. Drugs, human-trafficking-prob-ably other crimes I don’t know about, but illegal businesses where a lot of money and a lot of human suffering is involved. We both know how smart you are. If you had chosen that path, you could have succeeded. But let me repeat.
The course of your life would have been set.
You would never have gotten free. That world would have owned you.”

  “And your point is?”

  “I don’t think you needed Senator Calhoun to save your mother,” she spoke gently, as if to a slow student who must be carefully led. “You needed him to save you.”

  “No, I never needed-”

  She brushed his objection aside. “You’re in the right, Caleb. He
was
the grown-up, and he should have been responsible. But that’s hindsight talking. To find the truth we must look at the situation from the perspective you were dealing with then. If he had stepped in, you wouldn’t have to feel guilty because you drew a line.”

  His heart beat stumbled, then found a new rhythm. At last she was pleading with him as he had expected her to do, but it sounded like she was pleading
for
him.

  “There were things you wouldn’t do. If you had chosen the route of getting a lot of money in ways you knew how, whether she lived or died, you would never have been free. You felt guilty because you drew a line.” Tears filled her beautiful wide eyes, eyes the color of honesty. “And
she
died. And her death set you free, finally, at last.”

  “How can you be so sure of this?”

  Emmie made no attempt to stop her tears. She laughed through them, sadly. “After she died, you went to Six Flags Over Georgia and rode roller coasters for a week. And then you went to Charlotte Motor Speedway. And then you went to the beach.”

  He could tell something about that trip really touched her. She thought it was significant. He wanted to understand it-if for no other reason, so she would stop crying-but he didn’t.

  “
So?
”

  “Oh, Caleb,” she explained softly, “that’s what a kid who has been let out of school for summer does.”

  She’d talked enough, she thought, but she still wasn’t getting through. Teacher that she was, she asked a question. “You told me you
liked
the Navy. I kept wondering, what’s wrong with this picture? You? A natural-born rule breaker. Antiauthoritarian. Independent thinker extraordinaire. Tell me, what did you like about it?”

  He shrugged. “Three meals a day. Somebody else bought the groceries and cooked them. All I had to do was show up. After my duty was over for the day, I had time to read all I wanted. They sent me to schools. They sent me to college.”

  “And you had your friends, Tim and Weed, to teach you how to go on, how not get into too much trouble, and how to massage the system so it yielded what you wanted.

  “You came to the Navy with an extraordinary, mature degree of discipline and the ability to accept responsibility. You’d already had the freedom teenagers say they long for and often must rebel to get. What the Navy gave you was the freedom most teenagers have and don’t appreciate. And when you’d had enough-you’d rested your soul and your extraordinary capacity demanded expression again-you moved to the SEALs.

  “The Navy gave you the space and shelter in which to grow up. And you did.

  “Caleb, I don’t blame your mother for confining you with her overwhelming need. I know you loved her. And yet, your life improved when she was gone. You need to face that. Whatever guilt you feel about being freed- accept it.

  “Make reparation where you can, and ask God, or whatever deity or Power you understand, to forgive you for failing her. And I think you’ve felt guilty about that. You’re so generous, you probably wished over and over that you could buy her presents or take her places once those things were options for you. But if she’d been around, they wouldn’t have been options.