Chapter 69
CHAPTER 69
H E TELLS HER SLOWLY ABOUT HOW HE ’ S ONLY EVER LOVED one girl. Becky with the warm, bottomless eyes, the smile that could light up a room …
“Back in Vietnam, I used to tell my buddy Doc that Becky was like sunshine at midnight.” He swallowed hard. Saying Doc’s name with hers was almost too much for him to handle without breaking down.
“I called her after my last burn treatment. But I wasn’t exactly truthful with her.” He lifted a finger up to his face. “As you can imagine, this isn’t easy to look at.… It’s a lot for someone to take in and not get sick to their stomach.” He took another painful breath. “And spending a life with a monster … well, who’d ever be up for that?”
Anh put her teacup down. Her eyes didn’t waver from Jack’s face.
“So I made up a story. I told her I had a friend who’d had a serious injury to his face and asked if I could bring him home to live with us. But she didn’t like the idea too much. Let’s just say she told me she only wanted her ‘handsome Jack’ home.” He slid back in the chair. “And I ain’t too pretty now, as you can see.”
Anh wrinkled her brow, trying to concentrate and comprehend Jack’s every word. “Maybe I don’t understand. You never let her have a try? You never let this Becky see you when you come home from war?”
“No.”
“This story so sad. You never see her again?”
“I didn’t say that.…”
Anh looked puzzled. “I don’t get meaning of your words.”
He looked out the window, then at Anh. His one good eye shimmered like a wet stone.
He gripped his hands together, rubbing them together to ease his nerves. And then finally Jack summoned up the courage to unburden himself and tell the whole story.
Three months after that call with Becky, Jack found himself haunted by his decision. It was one thing to spare her the horror of seeing his disfigured face, but it was quite another to close the door shut and never see her again. As much as Becky’s words had hurt him, he had invented his friend with the traumatic injury to gauge her reaction. Jack would never know whether Becky’s answer would have been different had she known he was speaking about himself.
One night after spending the entire day inside, his spirits lower than he could have ever imagined possible, Jack decided to get the courage to call Becky again, but the number was disconnected. He then fell into a terrible depression, often missing his appointments at the Brooke Army Medical Center. Had it not been for Nurse Starr calling him and insisting he come in, he would have abandoned his health completely. Without Becky in his life, he no longer had the will to live.
During one of his visits to check how his skin grafts were healing, Nurse Starr finally got him to reveal what was causing the changes in his behavior.
“I know none of this is easy, Jack,” she sympathized as she began his medical intake. “But you’ve always come to your appointments in the past.” She touched his hand gently to take his pulse. “Has there been something in particular that’s upset you?”
He shrugged. He had no desire to tell this nurse, no matter how attractive or kind she was, what he was actually feeling.
“You can tell me anything, Jack,” Nurse Starr pressed. “You know that, right?”
Jack sighed. Nurse Starr had been one of the few people during his rehabilitation that had gone beyond the call of duty. During those earliest, most painful days of his treatment, she had been the one who sat by his bedside and held his hand, because she knew he had no family, and she didn’t want him to be alone. He now considered Nurse Starr a friend.
“When I was in the hospital, I didn’t have a choice but to have you guys inspect every inch of this.” He touched his finger to the left side of his face. “But now I wake up and think … why bother? There’s no point … not even my girl wants to see this …”
Barbara Starr gently placed Jack’s wrist on his lap and removed her stethoscope.
“This is the first time in over a year I’ve heard you mention a girl, Jack. You have a girlfriend?”
“I did.”
She stepped back and looked at him. He was clearly suffering more than usual. He typically took great pains to cover this scar with the top part of his hair which he had grown longer since his release. But today, he looked like he hadn’t even bothered to change his clothes from the day before.
“Whatever’s happened, you need to give it another try,” she offered gently. “One needs to find a way to keep love in our lives, Jack. Always. It’s so important. Without it our hearts become as dry as paper.”
Jack laughed. “That sounds awful.”
“Trust me,” she told him. ‘We all need love to survive.”
That evening Barbara’s words haunted him. Becky had been the only person beside his mother whom he had ever loved. He wasn’t sure he would have survived his tour in Vietnam had he not had her to return to. It had always been Becky who he imagined being the one to welcome him home. Even now, he would often conjure her face from memory, her green eyes and bright smile, just so he had something beautiful to imagine before his recurring nightmares inevitably took over.
He opened the refrigerator, took out a beer and drank it quickly. Then, on impulse, he called the one person who might be able to tell him where Becky was.
He called her mother.
In the past, Mrs. Dougherty had never revealed how she felt about Jack. Though the fact that she had not come to his mother’s funeral made him suspect she had never thought he was good enough for Becky.
But this time, hearing his voice on the other end of the receiver, she made her thoughts clear.
“Why the hell are you calling now, Jack?” she asked, her voice steely and cold. “Do you have any idea how much you’ve hurt my daughter? You call her, tell her you’ve returned with some injured friend you want her to find space for in her little apartment, which is barely large enough for one person, possibly two, but three … and then forget about it and never call her again?”
“I just …” He started to stammer. “I just—” He cut himself short. “I called her number, and it says it’s disconnected.”
“Jesus Christ, Jack.” She made a click with her tongue. “You called her over a year ago. What was she supposed to do with her life? Wait around?” Her sigh revealed her deep exasperation with him. “Becky’s moved away. She got a job teaching as an elementary school teacher in Foxton, New York.”
There was no answer on the other end of the line. She took a deep breath and then her voice softened slightly. “Jack … do you want to give me your number so I can tell her you called …?”
The dial tone soon rang in Mrs. Dougherty’s ear. Jack had already hung up.
Jack had done few things in his life on impulse. But packing up his rented apartment and dumping what belongings he had in the old VW van he bought for a couple hundred bucks a few months before was certainly one of them. He looked on a map and estimated it would take him three days to drive from San Antonio to Foxton, New York. He wasn’t thinking of how crazy he was to drop everything without any advance planning. He just knew he needed to see her one more time.
It wasn’t hard to find the elementary school in the small town. All he had to do was go to a pay phone and call the operator, who told him the street address. What was harder was remaining unseen. He knew that the mere sight of him lurking around a school could attract unwanted attention.
And yet he didn’t want anything from anyone, and he certainly didn’t want to alert the school. All he wanted to do was see her.
So Jack parked his car in the early hours before school started, away from the main parking lot on a side street that still had a view of the entrance, and waited. One thing he knew about Becky was she was always early.
She was the fourth person to walk toward the entrance. He sensed it was her even before seeing her face in profile. Her gait, the way she placed her palm over her brown saddle bag, the carefree way she threw back her hair and laughed with another woman who was clutching a stack of papers. He just knew it was her. And the sight of her laughing, the image of her standing there with her long chestnut hair and slim physique, filled him with something that he hadn’t experienced since he woke up in the burn unit of Brooke. Jack finally felt alive.
Anh reached for her cup of tea but found it empty. “But then what happened?”
She wasn’t sure if she has grasped all the pieces in his story correctly. She wanted to know if he ever told this woman how much he loved her.
Jack opened his palms in his lap and stared at them, then lifted his eyes to Anh’s. “What happened? I’d gotten what I needed. I saw she had stayed the same. That she was still as beautiful as she had been and that she was now teaching children, as she always dreamed she would. But I still had this,” he said, pointing to his face. “That wasn’t going to change.”
Anh’s face fell. “This story … it is too sad.…”
Jack lifted his head and stared directly at Anh, showing his face completely.
“I think it goes back to what that nurse told me … one has to find a way to keep love in your life.…”
Anh nodded, hanging on to his every word. “Yes, but why you leave?”
Jack bowed his head. “I didn’t leave completely, Anh. I got a job at Foxton Elementary as a night janitor.… I worked there just so I could be as close to her as I could. I saw the classroom she had filled with joy. I saw her desk filled with all the pencils she touched and papers she had graded.” He lifted his head, and a pained smile crossed his lips. “I realized that was as close to love as I was going to get.”