Sweet Hush

by Deborah Smith

  “I can tell you what he’d say. He said it to me, once, when I was lost.” I eased up to him. “Let’s go home.”

  “Home.” His shoulders sagged. A sigh of relief came out of him. The hand holding the knife dropped loosely to his side. “Okay, man.” It was that simple.

  I put one hand on his shoulder to keep him still as I reached for the knife. His head jerked up as one of the guards made a sudden move. His eyes shifted wildly toward the motion. His knife hand moved with a convulsive swing.

  “Down,” I ordered. I tackled him low around the bulk of the explosives. He stumbled and fell, with me on top of him. The knife came up with uncanny precision. I wasn’t sure I’d been stabbed in the chest until I began to gasp for air and realized the blood soaking his army jacket was mine. He lifted his head, saw what he’d done, and moaned. “I’m sorry.”

  My vision began to cloud. I put a hand on his head, protecting him.

  “Hush,” I whispered.

  “Okay,” he whispered back, misunderstanding but getting the point. He stopped struggling. So did I.

  Hush.

  Chapter 19

  I SAT WITH PUPPY in a big rocking chair on the back porch, holding her against the cold afternoon air. I’d wrapped a warm afghan around us; apples marched along the weave. She burrowed her head into the crook of my neck and I rocked her, kissing her dark, Thackery hair. “Tell me again who I am,” she said in a small voice.

  “You are the sixth Hush McGillen, and the second Hush McGillen Thackery,” I whispered. “That makes you very special, and that’s all that matters.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, Honey, I’m absolutely certain. People are born to be whoever they want to be. It’s all in how you tell your own story.”

  We heard footsteps. I set her down and she ran through the house to the front foyer, with me following anxiously. When she saw Logan and Lucille she halted. Logan looked down at her with red-rimmed eyes. “How’s my baby after talking to Aunt Hush?”

  “I’m still the sixth Hush McGillen, Daddy.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “But I’m a Thackery, too. But I don’t have to change my name. Names are just the stem on the apple. They hold it on the family tree, that’s all.”

  “That’s right, baby. That’s the whole point, baby. Yes. You’re Hush McGillen. You’re my Hush Puppy.”

  “And it’s okay for Davis to be my big brother.”

  “That’s right. It’s fine.”

  “He sent me this heart by special delivery.” She lifted a tiny, gold, heart-shaped pendant. “And he called me on the phone and said he’s glad I’m his sister.”

  “He’s a good big brother.”

  “You sure you still want to be my daddy?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Always. Now and forever.”

  “Good!” Puppy launched herself at Logan, and he swung her into his arms and held her like mad. Crying, she hugged Logan’s neck and reached out urgently to touch Lucille’s damp face. “Lucy Bee! You’re in the Secret Service. You never cry!”

  “I’m not in the Secret Service, anymore. I’m out in the open, now.”

  Her expression fell. “Are you crying because I’m going to see Abbie? Because you know, she’s my mama.”

  “I’m not crying because you have a mama. I think it’s wonderful that you’re going to meet your mama and get to know her.”

  “But then I’m going to come right back home with Daddy.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Aunt Hush says I can pick any mama I want to. I can have more than one.”

  “You bet.”

  “So I need a mama here, too.” Puppy gulped back tears. “Do you want to be it?”

  “Yes! Oh, yes, Puppy. I’d be so honored.”

  “Okay.” Puppy placed the palm of her hand on Lucille’s hair as if christening her. “I name you—” she whispered—“Lucille The Number One Mama.”

  Lucille dissolved into stalwart, unblinking tears. Logan put his arm around her solidly, and she stood at attention beside him, then submerged herself in his bear hug, engulfed by his arms, with him and Puppy inside hers.

  I wiped my own eyes and left them alone with their moment. I walked out on the back porch and gazed out at the old orchard, a winter scene of dormant life. I could just make out the silhouette of the Great Lady tree. She whispered to me. See what strong roots you’ve set, and how these trees of yours stand strong, together.

  I nodded. Puppy would have more questions as she grew up, some of them painful, but she’d be all right. She’d be all right because I’d planted her where she belonged. If only Davis could feel that way, too.

  And Jakobek.

  My cell phone sang, lost somewhere in one of the porch’s flower pots beneath a mixture of mulch and pinecones sprayed gold for Christmas. I shuffled the golden cones aside with slow hands, raised the phone to my ear, and leaned on a porch rail, a tired old woman at only thirty-nine.

  “Hello?”

  “Mother.”

  My son’s somber voice drew me up straight and young again. “Davis! I’m so glad you called—”

  “It’s about Jakobek,” he said.

  JAKOBEK WAS STILL in the recovery room when I arrived at the hospital in Washington that night. He had suffered a punctured lung and tremendous blood loss from two arteries the knife had sliced. He was lucky to be alive, the doctors said after surgery.

  “Alive,” I whispered, and leaned against a wall. “Alive.”

  The Secret Service controlled all access to that wing of the hospital. I’d gotten to the surgical floor but they wouldn’t let me see him. “We have orders from Mrs. Jacobs to keep everyone out of the recovery room,” they said politely.

  Edwina.

  Al was in China for more trade talks, so Edwina had commandeered Jakobek’s situation and was with him in the recovery room along with some of the Jacobs’ relatives and a priest—that last news nearly folded my legs until I learned the priest was a family friend just leading a prayer for Jakobek’s swift recovery.

  I made my way down a corridor, searching for a water fountain. I turned a corner, and Davis met me. We stared at each other sadly, mother to son, son to mother. “I’m glad he’s going to be all right,” Davis said. “I mean it.”

  “Good. How are you?”

  “I have a question. When you hurt your arm and Dad took you to the emergency room, was it really an accident?”

  “Oh, Davis.”

  He shut his eyes, exhaled, then opened them with a hard, new gleam in the irises. A shiver went up my spine. I watched my son age into true manhood, with all its tempered joys and accepted disappointments. “Everyone’s saying the Lt. Colonel is a hero.”

  “I agree.”

  “But nobody understands why he did what he did. He didn’t have to risk his life to talk a stranger into surrendering.”

  “Yes, he did. Jakobek has instincts about good and evil. Oh, don’t look at me that way, I know it’s not sophisticated to say there’s evil in the world, but there is, and Jakobek recognizes it. He saw that that poor fool was no threat to anybody else, and that there was nothing evil in him. If there’s one thing Jakobek believes in, it’s justice. There wouldn’t have been any justice in letting armed guards shoot a crazy man.”

  “Then I guess Jakobek really is a hero.”

  “I doubt he’d use that word about himself.”

  “Mother . . . from the moment I met Jakobek, I felt he was real in a way that Dad hadn’t been. I couldn’t put that feeling into words at the time. Maybe it was watching your reaction to him, the way you looked at him, the way you trusted his opinion. Now I realize why your relationship with him bothered me so much.” Davis cleared his throat. “Because I could never recall you being that trusting with Dad.” />
  “I don’t want you to hate your father. He came from a hard beginning, and he was wired for trouble long before you were born. It’s a testament to something grand in the scheme of things that he made so much effort to be a good father to you.”

  “A good father doesn’t abandon his other child.”

  “He didn’t abandon Puppy, he just didn’t live long enough to do right by her.” A small lie, but still. All right, I’d never entirely give up a certain inclination to tell the best story rather than the truth, if need be.

  “You really believe that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to do my best to be a good husband and a good father and a good man,” he told me. “Eddie and I are going back to Harvard in the spring. Her mother has offered to rent a house off campus for us. With a staff. Bodyguards. We’ve decided to accept the offer. Do you mind?”

  “I’m all for anything that gets you and Eddie back to college.”

  “Someday, I’ll come home. But I have to find out who I am, and I have to make peace with who Dad was. I’ll come home when I’m my own man.”

  “The Hollow and I will be waiting with open arms.”

  He only nodded. There was a distance between us, a sad coolness, and it would take years to build a new bridge over it. At least, we’d started. Part of me wanted to thank Edwina for greasing the path for him and Eddie to go back to college in prosperous security after their baby was born, but part of me wanted to hate her for giving my son more help than I could. And part of me said, Shut up and accept what’s best for him.

  He returned to the White House that night with my blessing. Eddie was under an obstetrician’s orders to rest after the upset of hearing that her beloved Nicky had been stabbed. She sent me a sweet note. Take care of him, please, the way he has always tried to take care of us. I was supposed to tell one of Edwina’s minions to take me to the White House whenever I was ready to sleep. Sleeping in the White House, as a guest of Edwina Jacobs, First Lady of these United States, including Chocinaw County. Hush McGillen Thackery. Edwina’s guest.

  I would rather eat dirt and shit roots, first.

  “I want to see the Lt. Colonel,” I kept saying to everyone in sight. “We’re friends. And he’s family.”

  “We have orders,” I continued to hear.

  “The President doesn’t know what’s going on here,” I countered. “Or he’d be mad as hell.”

  No one spoke up to deny that. They went quiet and looked the other way. Finally I was assigned to a nice young woman on Edwina’s staff, who led me to an elevator that would take me up to Jakobek’s private room. But Secret Service agents stopped us at the elevator doors. “Mrs. Thackery still isn’t on the First Lady’s list to be admitted.”

  The young aide blushed. “There must be some mistake.” She went around a corner to place a phone call in private. When she returned she wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Mrs. Jacobs says the Lt. Colonel is under sedation and sleeping soundly now that he’s out of the recovery room. She believes it’s best that he not be disturbed tonight. Mrs. Thackery, I’m sorry. Mrs. Jacobs says you’re welcome to visit him tomorrow.”

  I paced. The aide twisted her hands and apologized repeatedly. After I got myself under control, I said, “You go upstairs, honey, and you tell Edwina that I’m going to sit in the waiting room down the hall here all night, and I want her to think about that. I want her to consider the fact that every hour I don’t get to see Nick Jakobek moves her one notch higher on my shit list, and so by morning she’ll be right up at the top.

  The aide blanched. “I’ll relay the message, ma’am.”

  “You do that, please.”

  I spent the night in the waiting room. Too much pride kept me from calling my own son, at the White House, and asking for help.

  THE NEXT MORNING I still didn’t get to see Jakobek. Al was flying in from overseas; the media was all over the story of Jakobek’s heroism, and the hospital floor where I sat was swarming with even more Secret Service. They sent two agents to get me. “Mrs. Jacobs wants to see you ma’am, at the White House.”

  “I’m not leaving here until I see the Lt. Colonel.”

  “Mrs. Jacobs says she’d like to speak with you, first. If you’ll agree to that, she says she’ll permit you to visit the Lt. Colonel.”

  Stalemate. I was grinding my teeth, swallowing my own bile. “Take me to the White House, then. Fast.”

  On my wristwatch, the stem of a flat gold apple clicked over to a new hour. Edwina had officially reached the top of my list.

  THE FIRST THING I noticed, after I was escorted like a criminal under guard through the White House and into Edwina’s mauve-and-eggshell, country-French office, was that she kept two rotten apples inside a crystal cookie jar on her office bookshelf. Two Sweet Hush apples. She’d plucked them from the loads I’d brought to the White House back in the fall.

  She set the cookie jar on her desk like a sacred urn filled with poison and magic. “I kept these apples of yours to remind me that one day they’d be nothing but a dehydrated pile of organic debris,” she said. “Apple molecules. That’s all. I reduce you, in my mind, to nothing but that, too. Because the thing that has antagonized me the most about you is your absolute courage in the face of adversity. I’m afraid I lost that courage, twenty years ago.”

  “You? You’re the bravest woman I’ve met.”

  “It takes very little bravery to turn into a sarcastic, controlling bitch. I’m well aware of what I’ve become. And none too fond of it.” She lifted the jar’s lid, set it aside, then reached inside and gingerly picked up the pair of soft, brown, wrinkling, rotten apples. She examined them for a moment, then laid them carefully on her desk. “Unfortunately, it appears neither you nor your son nor your apples are going to dry up and blow away, so I’ve welcomed your son and will do all I can to make him adore me, Al, and our entire family. He’s quite a fine young man, actually. I’m going to enjoy winning his respect and support. Who knows? He may feel far more at home in my family than in his own. He has a great deal in common with us, I suspect. Intelligence, education. A sophisticated world view.”

  “You can’t scare me with these voodoo-mama threats. I’ve been through the fires of hell with my son. We’re welded like steel.”

  She stiffened. “Why shouldn’t I threaten you the way you’ve threatened me? You stole my daughter. You never seriously encouraged her to mend the break with her father and me.”

  “That’s a lie, and you know it. You betrayed her trust and she surprised you by being just as stubborn as you are. You don’t want to admit you screwed up. Being a mother means half the time we apologize for doing the wrong thing and the other half we spend doing the wrong thing again. You need to get the equation right.”

  “You practically turned her into a hillbilly. She came home with overalls packed in her luggage. She’s developed a fondness for country music and apple fritters. She adores you. You’re brilliant, kind, strong, generous. ‘Hush does this and Hush says that’ is all I’ve heard since she returned. You owe me. I want my daughter’s affection back.”

  “I want my son’s back. It’ll take time, but I’ll get it. Along the way I want you and yours to let go of Nick Jakobek’s soul, too. You’re the ones who nearly got him killed, yesterday.”

  “What are you talking about? You marooned his soul in your little apple heaven. After a few months in your company he’s obviously developed a death wish. Why else would he walk up to a human bomb? If there’d been innocent bystanders to protect, I’d understand. But there weren’t.”

  “Yes, there were. That pathetic crazy man, for one. And Jakobek, for another. Both of them—innocent by-standers in the dark, cold pit of the ugliest urges of humanity. If Jakobek let the guards kill that man he’d have been guilty as charged—a cold-blooded killer, just like people whisper. You’ve always thou
ght of him that way, yourself, so don’t tell me—”

  “Thought of Nicholas as a cold-blooded killer? Have you lost your mind? What the hell are you talking about now?”

  “In Chicago. When he killed the man in front of you. The look he saw on your face—you were never the same with him after that—you were afraid of him.”

  “My god. That’s what he thought?” She sank down on the corner of the desk, a hand rising to her throat. “I was afraid of the entire world at that moment, not of him.”

  “He didn’t know that. He felt like he was everything evil in the world, then. Especially after Al made a big deal out of calling it self-defense. He thought Al was ashamed of him.”

  “My god. Nicholas.”

  “I haven’t taken anything away from him or made him want to give up his life or his common sense. I’ve just . . . listened to him. Maybe no one really gave him the opportunity to talk, before, or maybe he trusts me in some way he’s never trusted anybody else. Because I don’t judge him. I love him.”

  She stared at me. “You what?”

  “Don’t worry. I have no idea if he loves me, or even if the idea of staying with me and two hundred acres of apple trees and a pack of cranky relatives and my beat-up reputation makes any sense to him.”

  She stood. “I assure you, Nicholas is not cut out to be an apple farmer.” Edwina clamped her lips together and gazed into thin air, distracted, frowning. I felt dismissed. I felt insulted. I felt she was probably right about him not wanting to live with me and my apples. But I also felt the time had come to let my fruit make the ultimate statement. There is a time to fight, the Great Lady whispered.

  I picked up a rotten apple off Edwina’s desk. “Edwina,” I said evenly, “you need to be ceremoniously christened with the essence of the McGillen family tree.” I slung the apple. Gooey, brown, stinking Sweet Hush apple rot spread across her perfect, pale, cashmere-scarved business suit.

  She didn’t even blink. A tough mother. How I admired her. She snatched up the other apple, drew back an arm, and let me have it across the front of my blazer.