Waking Savannah

by Terri-Lynne Defino

  WAR VET AND TWIN DAUGHTERS DEAD IN APPARENT MURDER/SUICIDE

  An unexpected shift at the hospital had saved Savannah’s life. It made Doc impatient. Changed his plan. Getting home to find the babysitter asleep on the couch had surprised Savannah, tipped her off. It had only been just after ten.

  Finding the girls, dialing 911, fighting off Doc who’d been hiding in the closet full of their daughters’ shoes and clothes. His anxiety rising. Flashbacks pelting. His reason obliterated. Already wrecked on the opiates he’d injected that no longer worked to silence his demons. It was all a blur that ended with her fighting for her life and Doc dead from a gunshot wound deemed a suicide because of the note he left behind. The note Savannah didn’t see until after all was said and done, and then never again. It was a lie. Her lie. Because Doc hadn’t killed himself.

  The babysitter recovered from the high dose of benzos Doc had hidden in the smoothie he’d brought for her. She didn’t remember anything, but the guilt followed her to a mental break a year later. That was when Savannah left Georgia. There would be no peace for her there where memories lived in every nook and cranny. No peace. No escape. The pity in every eye, and the knowing she had deceived them all.

  A soft rap at the door, accompanied by Ade’s voice asking if she was asleep, banished terrible images. Savannah lifted a hand to wipe away tears, only to find there were none. “No. I’ll be ready in a minute.”

  “Take your time. I will call D’Angelo’s and move our reservation to 7:30.”

  The clock at her bedside showed 6:57. Savannah stood up, the clipping in her hand. She read the headline once, twice. MURDER/SUICIDE became TRIPLE MURDER. The headache always behind her eyes pulsed. She saw Doc in her mind’s eye, his hands raised, hers trembling. She felt the trigger, a phantom bit of slippery metal. If she tried hard enough, she could smell the metallic scents of blood and steel.

  Her head pounded. Savannah took long, slow breaths. Tucking the clipping back into the Box, Savannah pushed Georgia, the girls, and Doc away. Tonight was about having a real date, about creating a better future, not reliving the tortured past.

  The headache eased back to a dull throb. Dabbing on a little lipstick, she held one hand still with the other. A swoop of mascara on lashes that had never needed it. War paint. Or simply ritual to calm that part of her never at ease. The woman in the mirror studied her as she was studied. Her eyes were as fierce as Savannah suddenly felt. She dared the mirror-woman to look away first, dared her to even try ruining dinner with Ade.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said, and headed downstairs.

  * * * *

  Ade opened the door of D’Angelo’s, stood aside to let Savannah enter first. She didn’t glance nervously around the restaurant like she had the last time. A good sign. Tonight, she affectionately greeted those she knew, introduced him without hedging, and didn’t draw her hand back when he took it in his.

  How life could change in so short a time.

  After ordering, she asked about the upper field and the progress he was making there. Appetizers brought a discussion concerning the academic tome he would spend the winter writing, and of his father and uncle and their soon-to-be-permanent reunion with home. By the time their dinners came, they were on to Halloween and the pumpkin contest during Harvest Fair Days, and how blissfully quiet it would be on the farm once the season was over. Each new topic excited and contented Ade, as well as distanced him further from his purpose. It was too easy to forget unpleasantness when he was with Savannah.

  Instead of making his confessions, Ade regaled her with the deeds and misdeeds of his youth in Ecuador. His struggles through American academia came close to giving him an in, but Savannah always managed to steer the topic elsewhere. Not that he was trying overly hard to guide it back.

  She told him about the clinic and the poor but tight community of women pulling together to raise their children. Some showed up pregnant in her office almost yearly despite the various forms of birth control she made available to them. For some, it was a choice. For others, it wasn’t.

  “There was one woman, I’ll never forget, whose husband used a box cutter to remove the implant I put in after she gave birth to their sixth child. She was forty-two at the time. He demanded to see where he signed a consent form. I couldn’t get him to understand that she didn’t need his permission.”

  “Qué chingados,” Ade muttered. “How does one person do such a thing to another? To someone he supposedly loves?”

  “You’d be surprised to know the things I’ve seen.” Savannah dabbed her lips, averted her eyes. “Not just here, but in…in Georgia.”

  Heat slithered up Ade’s back. He hadn’t thought. He didn’t mean to. He’d drawn confession to the table, but Savannah’s, not his. That pinched look when a headache was coming squinted her eyes. Ade did not have to be particularly astute to know what tumbled through her head. He could let her speak and she would never know he’d dissected her secrets long ago. That was what the old Ade would have done, but he was no longer such a man.

  He reached across the table for her hand. “I have a confession to make.”

  “You do?”

  “I have an ulterior motive for this dinner.”

  Eyes widened. Lips parted. “You’re leaving Bitterly.”

  “What? No, of course not. Although”—he grimaced—“you might want me to, after I tell you what I must.”

  Savannah laughed softly, a little tremulously. “There is nothing you can say that will make me want you to go away.”

  “Even if you discover I am not the man you think I am? Even if you learn I have been a cold, manipulative, glory-seeking scoundrel who has used people, mostly women, including you, to get what I want?”

  Savannah sat straighter. “That isn’t the Ade I know.”

  “It is the man I was until I got played by a woman way out of my league and ran home to la jefa like an angry child. When I came to Bitterly, I was still that man, prepared and planning to use your farm and you to work my way back to the top.”

  “But…you’ve always been so…so…”

  “Charming?” He shook his head. “It’s what I do, Savannah. It is who I wanted you to see, but not who I actually was.”

  “Then this has all been”—she closed her eyes, took a breath—“an act?”

  Truth balled in his throat. He brought her fingers to his lips, lingered there when she didn’t pull away. “At first? Yes. It was an act. I tried to keep it up. I tried to convince myself that you already knew all about me and my past, and that you were biding your time, waiting to use my troubles to your advantage.”

  “Why would you think such a thing?”

  “Because that’s what I would have done.” What I did. The confession stuck in his throat. Primero lo primero. “But you defeated me without even trying, without me even realizing, when we first sat in this restaurant sharing a meal. Your farm gave me back my passion for my work, but you? You gave me back the heart I didn’t think I had any use for. All within days of my arrival.”

  Savannah looked away, but she didn’t pull her hand from his. “I thought it was just me.”

  “It was not.” He tugged at her hand until she looked up. “A year ago…qué carajo. A month ago, had anyone said I would be here, with you, confessing the sins of a changed man, I’d have laughed. Maniacally. But it’s true, Savannah. I have changed here in Bitterly, because of this town and its people. Mostly because of you. And that is why I must tell you about Boston, and how I ended up here in the first place.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I do, Savannah. Please. Will you listen?”

  She nodded.

  In his head, Ade gulped for air. Self-preservation battled in all its past and present aspects. This was it. Either the Ade he’d become in Bitterly would triumph, or he’d crash and burn. He tapped into the poise that allowed him to speak before thousands without breaking a sweat. That Ade still had his uses.
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  “I have always been ambitious. It is no accident I am the one who was schooled in the United States. My passion for my chosen field was never in question. Not by me or my family. I was going to change the world, Savannah. But somewhere along the way, it stopped being about the environment and became about me. My glory. I have been ruthless. Heartless. I never harmed anyone physically, but there are worse ways to leave one’s mark. I didn’t care. I used people, got what I wanted, and did not look back. Boston was supposed to be just another conquest, another step to my higher goals. I targeted a woman, Anita Durst, for—”

  “Wait a second.” Savannah gripped his hand harder. “You mean the Dursts? The America’s Royal Family Dursts with all those Governors and Senators?”

  “Yes, those Dursts.” He grimaced. “I aimed high, Savannah. And I struck my mark. I needed research grants, and positions out of my reach. Anita was my means to an end.”

  “But you rose in your field by your own merits,” Savannah said. “You couldn’t have otherwise.”

  Ade’s heart twinged. Was she trying to assuage him? Or herself? And then it twinged again for thinking she’d be anything but selfless, even for a moment. “That is true. I have many accomplishments to my name, and I am proud of them. But I got what I deserved in Boston. I can say that to you now and be embarrassed that it is true. Boston was supposed to be just another conquest. I was not counting on Anita having an agenda of her own.”

  “And that was?”

  “She wanted to be married to a scientist she could groom for nothing short of the Nobel Peace Prize.”

  Savannah’s eyebrows lifted. “Well, fiddle-dee-dee, if that isn’t a lofty goal. Would she have succeeded?”

  “Given time, I have no doubt. Perhaps it is immodest of me, but I’ve never had room in my life for modesty. I had the ambition, intelligence and skill. She had the power and influence to get me there.”

  “You’re starting to scare me a little, Ade.” Her laughter trembled. “Just what happened in Boston that you’d give up all that?”

  The busgirl cleared away their dishes and the empty bottle of wine, refilled their water glasses. Savannah leaned back so the girl could work. Her hand slipped from his. The smile on her lips but not in her eyes was as strained as her laughter. Still, she thanked the young lady by name.

  Gathering his flagging courage, Ade launched right back in the moment the table was cleared. “I did nothing that could get me arrested. I only played the part of a man head-over-heels in love with the perfect woman. We were first on every society list. I was happy, I thought. No, not happy. I was getting what I wanted, accomplishing a goal.”

  “Then you didn’t love her? Even a little?”

  “There was passion and ambition but not love. Not on either of our parts, as it turns out.” He took a deep, deep breath. “She became pregnant by another man. She had lovers stashed all over the area. At first, she tried to make me believe the child was mine. She demanded I claim it as my own or she would ruin me. I refused to lie to an innocent child to further my career. To prove she could do it, Anita didn’t just strip me of my whole life in Boston, she erased me from it.”

  Savannah silently contemplated the tablecloth for a moment, and then she took both his hands in hers, squeezed them gently. “I get why it was so hard for you to tell me about the sort of man you’ve been,” she said, “but refusing to lie to an innocent child only proves that the man I know, the man sitting with me right now, was there all along, waiting for that crossroads to present itself.”

  Ade’s scalp prickled. “I…I don’t understand.”

  “Ade.” She kissed his fingers. “You could have pretended the baby was yours and continued with your life. That was your line, and you didn’t cross it. Don’t you see? Bitterly didn’t change you. It simply brought you back to who you truly are.”

  The prickling in his scalp coursed through his entire body. Could it be so simple? No. Adelmo Gallegos had fallen too far from the Ade who left for university. And yet, did he not feel like that boy again? Suddenly, and with a clarity beyond his ken, he did see. The sensation was unsettling, and liberating.

  Savannah let go of his hands. “So why not take a paternity test? She can’t claim the child is yours if science proves it otherwise.”

  “That isn’t her point. She wants me, and if she doesn’t get me, I remain as good as erased from every achievement I’ve made through my years in Boston.”

  “That can’t be right.”

  “It’s not, but I no longer care.”

  “Of course you do,” Savannah said. “And the fact is, birth control is not infallible. As an OB/GYN, I can tell you with absolute certainty that nothing short of abstinence is one hundred percent.”

  But there was another absolute. One no one talked about, especially him. Something old and vicious was reaching into his chest, trying to pull his heart out through bone and muscle and skin. This wound he didn’t know had festered until Anita made her claim, opened up. The fact. The one, undeniable fact no one knew but him. Until this moment of confession. “I had the mumps when I was seventeen,” he said. “It is rare that complete infertility results, but I seem to be that rare case. I’m sterile.”

  “Oh.”

  His face burned. His stomach flipped. “Oh?”

  “I’m not sure what else to say. This is a painful subject for you, I imagine.”

  “It is,” he admitted. “Being unable to father a child made certain things I have done easier. I had no one looking to me as an example of what it is to be a good and noble man. It allowed me to be more ruthless. Until Anita claimed I was what I could never be, I didn’t know the extent of my feelings on the matter. I am a man who cannot be a father. That is…emasculating. And heartbreaking, as it turns out.”

  “Being unable to father a child doesn’t make you any less of a man. Children do not make us men and women, only fathers and mothers.”

  “Yet in a family of dozens of siblings, cousins, nieces and nephews,” he said, “being unable to contribute is unimaginable, especially for my mother. She is ever asking for grandchildren I cannot give her.”

  “Hmmm.” Savannah scrunched up her nose. “Interesting.”

  “What is?” He tried to smile. “Why are you grinning?”

  She traced a nonexistent pattern in the tablecloth. “Did you ever think,” she asked, “that maybe the path you chose might be overcompensating for this perceived inadequacy?”

  “Pardon?”

  Her tracing fingers curled into her palm. She laughed softly. “For an intelligent man, you sure are thick in the head. Think, Ade.”

  He’d been ruthless. Unbending. Ambitious. He aspired to every kind of success to make up for being unable to father a child? The epiphanical prickling dizzied him. New eyes saw what old, closed eyes never could. Savannah gave him more thoughts he’d never conjured, more hope he didn’t deserve. “After all I have told you,” he said, “why do you find the best in me and make it true? Make me hope it is?”

  “Because finding the best in people is what I do, sugar.” A tear rolled down her cheek. She wiped it quickly away and smiled all the broader. “It’s what helps to keep me sane.”

  “Are we ready for dessert?” Brian appeared beside their table, hands on aproned hips and oblivious. “We have Johanna’s Vanalmond Decadence this evening. I had a piece earlier and have been dreaming about another one ever since.”

  Savannah held his gaze a moment longer, and let it go. “We’ll have two,” she said. “And two cappuccinos. Make mine decaf.”

  * * * *

  “I think we’ve overstayed our welcome.” Savannah gestured to Brian leaning on the bar, chatting with Chef Tony, and the bartender. Ade blinked out of his own thoughts, thoughts she didn’t have to guess at to know, and smiled.

  He washed down the enormous wad of sugar and flour in his mouth with steaming cappuccino. “I’ll leave him a big tip.”

  Savannah ate the last
bite of her cake. She savored it, eyes closed, entirely content. He paid the check and they left D’Angelo’s for the summer night, the Green, and music outside.

  “Oh, it’s Thursday.” She skipped ahead, hauling him along. “Live music in the gazebo. Let’s go down and listen for a while, shall we?”

  They strolled to the gazebo hand-in-hand. Ade pointed out Charlie and Johanna surrounded, as always, by children. He waved. Charlie motioned them over, rising from their blanket spread out on the grass.

  “Just the man I’ve been waiting to talk to. I think my tomatoes have some kind of disease.” Charlie drew Ade aside, leaving his place on the blanket beside Johanna open. Ade looked over his shoulder, winked, and turned his attention back to Charlie and his blighted tomatoes.

  “Fancy meeting you here.” Savannah dropped into Charlie’s spot.

  “You and Ade are looking cozy,” Johanna whispered. “I heartily approve.”

  “Well, sugar, as long as I have your blessing.” Savannah shouldered her playfully. “We just had dinner at D’Angelo’s.”

  “Sounds serious.”

  “I’m not sure what it is yet, but it certainly isn’t casual anymore.”

  “That’s pretty wonder—Millie! Millie, don’t feed your sister grass. Dammit, excuse me a sec, Savvy.”

  Johanna grabbed her toddler and was sidetracked by one of the other mothers wrestling with her children. Savannah couldn’t imagine trying to get kids to sit on or near a blanket when there were so many other kids around, when the night was warm and fireflies blinked a carpet of stars. When music played and everyone listened even if they chatted and laughed at the same time. She imagined, just for a moment, Ginger and Sally running around, cardigans flapping behind them like tiny wings, and let it go. She was too happy to bring sorrow to the fore. As much as it hurt, she tucked them gently away.

  “Looks like it’s safe to steal Johanna’s blanket.” Ade dropped down behind Savannah, a leg on either side of her, and drew her back to his chest. His arms draped around her shoulders, he sang along with the band, softly into her ear, “…found out a long time ago, what a woman can do to your soul…” He kissed her ear.