Chapter 3 Skeletons in the Closet
Skeletons in the Closet
It was a chilly and gray Tuesday afternoon in mid-September when Otis and Rebecca finally pulled back into San Francisco.
They’d returned with five less people, some lost to the madness of Woodstock, some deciding to stay on the East Coast. Like the bus that had lost half its paint, those who had returned seemed worn down—a long way from the jolly bunch who’d first set sail.
It was time to detox and take long hot showers and sleep for a few days.
“He must be a miracle worker in bed,” one joked in front of the entire hive of roommates.
“You mean in a sleeping bag?” Rebecca responded before laying a wet kiss on him. “He is indeed.” Otis turned as red as Carlos Santana’s guitar but stood tall for a week afterward. No one could give him backbone the way she did.
He finally found the courage to call his parents—not that he was ready for an unveiling of truths.
“Otis, where in the world have you been?” his father asked. Five years in Montana had done little to chip away at Addison Till’s distinguished British accent. “We’ve left messages with the Texans.”
“I’m so sorry, Dad. What a month.”
“With the car wash?”
“Car wash and ...” He paused, unaccustomed to lying to his parents. “And I took a second job running Thai food for a spot down the street.”
“Ah, good for you, son.”
Otis wanted to tell his dad about Rebecca.
He would proudly shout from the highest mountain that he’d gotten engaged to an angel, but telling Addison Till right now would shatter the world’s peace and send Otis tumbling into what might turn into a battle for his future.
Sprouting from a family tree of successful men, his father had set a high bar and held even higher expectations of his only son.
Two in the afternoon in October, and Otis and Rebecca sat in a crowded Chinese restaurant on Grant Avenue in Chinatown, sharing egg rolls and fried rice. The San Francisco fog hung heavy outside and moved into the restaurant like smoke every time someone opened the door.
A group of war protesters had just marched by.
Thousands of miles away, American soldiers fought an escalating war in a country most Americans couldn’t point out on a map.
Between the seemingly countless soldiers returning in body bags, the talk of possible conscription, and a new president many doubted would make any changes, the dissent back home grew stronger by the day.
All the men dying, fighting a war many didn’t even understand, only exacerbated Otis’s swelling need to carve his own path. He was more than a month into his education at Berkeley, wondering why in the queen’s name he was chasing someone else’s dream.
Not that Otis had an alternate idea for a vocation.
It had all seemed perfectly brilliant to talk of dreams and to propose to this young lady sitting across from him, dipping her egg roll into an inordinate amount of duck sauce, but the follow-through was more daunting.
Especially now that they were back in reality.
It wasn’t like he had to become a journalist. Even if he graduated with a journalism degree, he didn’t have to commit to write for a living.
So he didn’t need to tell his father yet.
But he did need to share that he’d found the love of his life and that they planned to marry the following spring. For that matter, Bec had kept it quiet too. The inevitability of sharing the news with both sets of parents hung in the air like a trapeze artist who’d lost his pants.
Otis still hadn’t even told his father that he’d paid the small fine to bail out of his dormitory commitment, opting to continue his inexpensive lodging with the Texans, only a short walk away from Bec’s place.
He pointed to her puddle of duck sauce. “Americans eat more condiments than they do actual food. What would happen if there was a ketchup shortage? The country would go to war. Well, another war.”
“At least the cause would be clear.” She wore a sunflower-yellow dress cut low enough to show the jewel necklace she’d made and a peek of her voluptuous and braless bosoms.
Apparently noticing his wandering eyes, she leaned forward to tease him with an even more tantalizing peek. “I come for the egg roll, but I stay for this sweet, delicious sauce.” Her lips split into a smile.
“Well,” Otis said, “I come for the fried rice and stay for the fortune cookie.”
Holding her egg roll like a microphone, she spoke into it. “What would you want your fortune to be?” She moved the mike toward his own lips and waited for an answer.
Otis grinned and pretended to tap on it, as if testing whether it were on.
He cleared his throat and gave a terrible Nixon impression.
“I would like my fortune to read ...” He paused.
“Shite, I don’t know ... may gold rain down from the heavens and splash onto the marble floors of our palace overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and may we have ten babies who each grow up to dominate their fields and subsequently change the world. ”
Bec returned the egg roll back to her own lips. “That would be unlike any fortune I’ve ever read, but I can dig it. This is Rebecca Bradshaw, live in San Francisco, reporting for CBS News.” With that, she took a big bite of her egg roll and sat back with a smile.
Otis wished he could laugh at her exquisite absurdity.
He tried his best to hide the wheelbarrow full of strife that came rushing through him as he pondered the fact that he had no idea what fortune or future he desired.
Sure, he wanted to be with Bec, but there had to be more.
Journalist or not, he needed to do something great, to be someone great.
The hell if he was going to live anything less than an extraordinary life.
“Okay,” she said, “out with it. Why the sudden dark cloud over your head?”
“No, no, no, I’m not dragging you down with me.”
“Please, drag away. That’s what I’m here for.”
“That’s not true. Please let me deal with whatever this is on my own, and you be here waiting on the other side if I make it back.”
“Fine, then, I’ll move on to the fried rice and wait for you to poke your head back out, Turtle Boy. Don’t mind me.” She picked up her chopsticks and went about eating while looking out the window at a few straggling protesters.
“It really must be nice,” Otis said, “to not have a worry in the world. Let’s float through life and make jewelry and ceramic weed pipes for a living. We can raise our kids on a commune and teach them how to grow organic zucchini and bathe themselves in a lake.”
She dropped her chopsticks back into the bowl. “Does this mean I’m no longer waiting on you? Are you back already?”
Yes, dammit, he wanted to chat. She was the only one who could make him feel better when he felt like this, but he was also self-aware enough to know that he’d drive her mad if he couldn’t take a break from his worries from time to time.
Turned out she already knew what was on his mind—maybe because he’d nearly drowned her in his worries earlier that morning. “Otis, you’re seventeen. You have all the time in the world. We’re supposed to be having fun right now.”
He crossed his arms, wondering how she could be so easygoing about it. “I just ... I want to do something that matters. I know you’re tired of hearing about it—I’m certainly tired of talking about it—but I can’t let it go.”
“I adore your hopeful vision, handsome. You’re a windup doll with all this incredible energy, waiting to be pointed in the right direction, waiting to pick up the scent.
Maybe it’s like love, Otis. Soon as you stop looking so hard, it might find you.
In the meantime, let’s be teenagers. I don’t want to be an adult yet. ”
He sighed out the whole world of his plagued confusion. “We’re not exactly kids. We’ll be married soon and have kids of our own.”
Her cheeks swelled. “All ten of them, right? In our palace on a cliff overlooking the ocean.”
“I was exaggerating. I’m okay with the two like we talked about. Still, we must figure out how to feed them, to clothe them. To send them to university. There’s no time for fun right now,” he insisted. “We must start making plans.”
Rebecca reached across the table to take his hand.
“One day you’ll look back to this moment—you’ll taste the soy sauce and egg and green onion on your tongue—and you’ll see me over here wearing this dress that I made—and you’ll wish that you had fully immersed yourself into this moment and all the other moments that led to you finding what you’re—”
Otis hit the table, causing the glasses and bowls to rattle. He wasn’t exactly angry, simply bewildered. “I find it extraordinary that you can have such faith.”
Her lips straightened. “What gave you that impression? I barely have any faith at all. I don’t have big dreams; I don’t expect anything. I’m happy where we are, just the two of us, that’s all.”
“Would you be happy with me scrubbing sweet-and-sour chicken off the plates back there for the rest of my life?”
“Would that mean we get free duck sauce?”
Otis didn’t flinch. “You’re not nice. That’s all there is to it. I will dump duck sauce on your—”
“Otis, any faith that I have ... is in you. You make me a believer.”
He couldn’t have loved her any more in that moment. “I don’t know what I did to—”
“No way,” said a voice from behind Otis.
Rebecca let out a big grin. “Hunter!”
“The one and only.” A surfer type approached them and pulled Rebecca into a bear hug. He had a head full of curly hair and caterpillar eyebrows.
“What are you doing here?” Hunter asked, his chest nearly bursting out of his tight white shirt. He looked like he regularly paddled to Hawaii on his longboard.
“Finding my way, you know. Meet Otis, my fiancé.”
Otis rose. “How do you do?”
“You’re getting married, Bec?” Hunter pumped Otis’s hand with unrivaled enthusiasm. “What a lucky guy.”
Rebecca slipped her arm through Otis’s. “Hunter and I went to high school together in Santa Rosa.”
A note of curiosity entered his voice. “Yeah, everyone wondered what happened to you. You didn’t even make it to the graduation party.”
Rebecca shook her head, instantly drawing a dark cloud over her. “I couldn’t take it anymore. Skipped town that day.”
“Yeah, I get that. By the way, I’m sorry about your brother. It’s heartbreaking.”
Rebecca dropped the smile and let go of Otis. “What ... what happened to my brother?”
“You know, coming home like that.”
“Like what?”
Hunter froze. “Wait, when’s the last time you were home?”
The temperature of the restaurant plummeted as she struggled to speak. “I haven’t talked to my family since I left in May. What happened?”
Otis had detected that she didn’t have the best relationship with her family, but she hadn’t shared many details.
Hunter swallowed and scratched his temple. “You know he went to Nam, right?”
“Vietnam?”
The guy clearly wished he hadn’t opened his mouth. “Yeah. He was hurt, Bec. Bad. He lost his legs.”
Rebecca’s eyes fell closed.
Hunter’s stout posture sank. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you.”
The three of them stood there quietly, both the men looking at Rebecca, waiting for her to return to them. Otis attempted to take her hand, but she pulled away.
“Look, I know that’s big news. I’m going to go. You know I’m here for you.” Hunter offered her a hug.
Rebecca allowed a quick one and then whispered inaudible words as he departed.
Otis wrapped an arm around her and guided her out of the restaurant and into the fog. For the first time since he’d met her, Bec broke into an awful cry that Otis could feel at his core. She wept for a long time, and when she was done, she said, “I have to go home.”
Otis had already put that together. “We do, you mean. I’m coming with you.”
She pulled him closer, tighter. “Yes. We have to go see him. It’s my fault, Otis. I ran off. I can’t imagine what he felt like, abandoned by his sister.” Her words broke apart.
“You ran away?”
She nodded into his shoulder.
Ah, this was that part of her that she kept hidden, protecting it like a diary.
How deep did the mysteries of this woman go?
What else didn’t he know? Taking her home would certainly peel back some of the layers.
As strong as she was, he wondered what was to come.
A brother injured in the war. Parents who hadn’t seen their daughter since the spring.
And here comes Otis, the man she would soon marry.
He could hear the rumble of emotional thunder, and he hoped with all his heart that he would be strong enough to endure.
That he could be the man she would surely need when the time came.