Forever Mine: Callaghan Brothers, Book 9

by Abbie Zanders

  “Aye. But you understand, lass.” If anyone could, it was Maggie. There had been a few instances where she’d ignored the warning signs and put her own health at risk, whether out of fear or denial or laundry list of other excuses.

  “Aye,” she agreed, finally meeting his gaze. “But I have Michael now. He looks out for me.”

  That he did. Maggie was a proud, stubborn woman, but she was no match for the unwavering, quiet tenacity of her husband. Jack also knew that Maggie had just appointed herself his personal overseer. He would have chuckled if it didn’t hurt so much.

  “He can look out for both of us,” Jack said.

  “Get some rest, Dad.”

  “I will.”

  “Take care.”

  January 1975

  Pine Ridge

  “Take care.”

  Jack jumped down from the truck at the edge of the driveway and waved off his ride. He didn’t know the driver, but the man was a local and had kindly offered him a ride when he’d come across Jack walking along the road, duffel slung over his back. The nearest bus station was five miles from his parents’ house, but five miles was nothing to feet that had covered a hundred, maybe a thousand times more over the last six and half years.

  He’d heard the stories of men coming home from the war in other places, being greeted by protestors and signs vilifying their service. Thankfully, that wasn’t what he’d come home to. Granted, his return had been unannounced and low-key, but Pine Ridge was blissfully behind the times in terms of social “consciousness raising” awareness and moral outrage over American involvement in Vietnam.

  Thank God. It had been hard enough as it was. If he’d stepped off the plane to a crowd of screaming, taunting protesters after what he’d endured, well... he didn’t know what he would have done. What he did know was, all he wanted was peace. Peace and the promise of waking up without facing another day of Hell.

  Cold, white crystals drifted down and landed on his arms, his face. Snow. How long had it been since he’d seen real snow? How many times had he dreamed of it while he was away in the humid, tropical climate of Southeast Asia? It blanketed the lawn, frosted the trees and bushes; made the place look like a picture postcard.

  He looked up to the sky, drawing in a full, bracing breath. Probably the first full breath he’d taken in years. The heavy, gun-metal gray clouds hanging low in the sky told him there would likely be more to come before long.

  For one brief moment, he had the urge to fling himself down on the ground and roll around it in like he did when he was a kid. Him and Fitz and Brian, they used to live for days like this. They’d hover around the radio with fingers crossed, holding their breath until they heard the words: “Pine Ridge School District, closed.” They’d whoop and holler and minutes later, would meet each other outside, playfully arguing over who was going to ride the Flexible Flyer sled first. It would escalate to a snowball fight, and before long, they’d have built snow forts with three-foot walls...

  Jack shook his head at the memory, both fond and bittersweet. Those days, like those carefree, innocent boys, were long gone.

  Instead, Jack reached down and scooped some of the heavy wet stuff into his hand. So white. So cold. So familiar, yet not.

  He stood there for a while, taking it all in. After all of these years, he was finally home.

  Two and a half years, that’s how long it had been since he’d last been here. Since he’d seen his mother. Since he’d held Kathleen. It had been all he could think about, but now that he was here, he couldn’t seem to make his feet move forward.

  He hadn’t planned on it taking this long, but life had tossed a few wrenches into the works. Within a month of returning to active duty, he and his unit had been ambushed and captured. For more than two years, he had been MIA, a POW, a “guest” of the enemy.

  Did Kathleen and his mother even know that he was alive? Or had they believed the worst? Now that the war was officially over, did they continue to hold out any hope? Or had they moved on?

  He knew what he wanted to believe, but the truth was, he wasn’t sure he believed in anything anymore.

  It was why he hadn’t written, why he hadn’t called. Because if they had given up, if they had moved on, he hadn’t been ready to hear it. He still wasn’t ready, but after a couple of months in a hospital, it was time.

  Jack forced one foot in front of the other, pushing himself forward. It was slow going, but he refused to use the cane they’d given him. Reuniting with his croie would be done on his own two feet, solely under his own power. The broken bones had healed, the open sores now closed over, but some pain lingered. It would take a while, but he would recover fully, the doctors had said. The scars, both mental and physical, would always remain.

  He half expected the door to fly open any second, for Kathleen to widen those pretty green eyes in surprise and then launch herself at him, the way she used to. At least, that’s what he’d imagined happening thousands of times. Those mental images of returning to her, of keeping his promise, had sustained him through the worst of the worst.

  But the door didn’t open, the curtains didn’t move. No one came running out of the house in joyous tears.

  He reached the front door, unaccosted, unheralded, and unnoticed. He refused to acknowledge the heavy weight trying to press down upon him. Should he fish the key out of the mailbox and let himself in? Or would it be better to ring the doorbell? This was his home, yet he hadn’t lived here in so long. Walking in unannounced felt wrong, especially when he wasn’t expected.

  He opted to ring the doorbell. He heard the muffled chimes echo inside, but nothing else. No approaching steps, no calling out of a sing-song “Coming!” to greet him.

  He waited quietly for a minute or so, then pressed the glowing white button again.

  Maybe they weren’t home, he reasoned. Maybe they’d gone shopping, or were visiting Kathleen’s family. He stepped back and looked again, noting that despite the dark, gray skies, no lights were on inside the house. Walking around to the back, he peered into the detached garage, spotting his father’s Ford Galaxie 500, half covered by a cloth tarp.

  Should he come back later, he wondered, knocking at the back door before coming around to the front again? No, it was too cold, and despite the ride, his leg was aching. He would go inside to wait, but would leave his duffel just inside the door to announce his presence so they wouldn’t think someone had broken in.

  He reached into the mailbox hung beside the door and felt around for the key his mother always left there, but found nothing. He checked under the mat and the top of the doorframe, but those, too, were keyless. He was wondering exactly what he was going to do next when he heard his name called.

  “Jack?”

  Jack turned around to find Mrs. Fitzsimmons staring at him as if he was a ghost.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered. She looked so much older than he remembered. Her auburn hair was now a silvery grey, her cornflower blue eyes dim, her face etched with the lines of a mother who had lost her only son. “I can’t seem to find the key. Do you know when my mother and Kathleen will be back?”

  Her eyes widened; she pulled the heavy, hand-knit shawl tighter around her shoulders. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “Know what?”

  She stared at him, and that’s when he saw the pity in her eyes. “You’d best come with me, Jack.”

  She turned and started walking carefully across the snow-covered ground to her house next door. Dread pooled in his stomach, and he suddenly knew without a doubt that he didn’t want to hear whatever it was Mrs. Fitzsimmons had to say.

  “I’d really just like to go inside for a while, Mrs. Fitzsimmons, but I can’t find the key.”

  “I have a key,” she confirmed without turning around. “But you’d best hear what I have to tell you first.”

  With no other choice, Jack pulled his coat tighter around him and trekked over the snow-covered ground toward his boyhood friend’s home.

  C
hapter Seven

  September 2015

  Pine Ridge

  “Well?” Shane asked, following Michael into the small office he kept at the hospital. The others had gone back to their families, but would be returning in shifts to ensure that someone was at the hospital around the clock. Michael’s office was more comfortable than the waiting room, and had the benefits of a comfortable couch, its own full bathroom, and privacy.

  “Well what?”

  “Is he really going to be all right?”

  Michael rubbed the back of his neck, willing away the tension. It had been a hell of a long day and it wasn’t over yet.

  He knew what Shane wanted him to say, but he couldn’t give his brother the guarantee that everything was going to be okay. Their father had come through the surgery all right, and was responding well to treatment, but they were far from out of the woods yet. The usual vague platitudes weren’t going to cut it, either. Shane had the uncanny ability to sense bullshit a mile away.

  “The man just had a triple bypass. He’s doing the best he can under the circumstances.”

  Shane digested those words, and as expected, called him out. “And what are you not saying, Mick?”

  Michael closed the door, then dropped down behind the desk into the leather chair. “Sit,” he commanded.

  Shane did. Unlike some of the others, Shane was fairly reasonable. Kane, Jake or Sean would have stubbornly crossed their arms and refused on principle alone, demanding he just lay it on the line.

  Michael pulled open a drawer and extracted two glasses and a bottle of the Bushmills Single Malt he kept there, then poured them each a shot.

  “That bad?” Shane asked, accepting the glass.

  “It could be better.”

  “I thought you just said the surgery went well.”

  “It did. But there’s a lot more damage than we thought.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning... we dodged the bullet this time, but the gun’s still cocked and loaded.”

  Shane swirled the whiskey in his glass, then tossed it back. Once again, Michael silently appreciated his ability to process bad news with thought and reason rather than brute force. “Does Dad know?”

  “I don’t know. Jimmy Yim stepped up today and did us a favor, but he’s not familiar with Dad’s history beyond what I was able to tell him and what he was able to glean for himself.”

  “But you think there’s more to it than that.”

  Michael stared at his glass, his brow furrowed. When he spoke again, it was with carefully considered words. “I think it’s improbable that, given the damage we found, Dad wasn’t aware there was a problem.”

  “So what are you saying? That Dad knew and didn’t do anything about it?”

  “I’m not saying anything at this point,” Michael clarified. “But, if it was me...”

  Whatever Michael was going to say was pre-empted by his vibrating pager. He checked the number, spewing a few choice swear words while shooting to his feet. “It’s Dad,” he said, running out of the room, Shane right on his heels. They ran to the stairwell and took the steps two and three at a time up the three flights to the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit.

  The nurse on duty caught them right outside the unit, shoving a gown and mask into Michael’s hands. “His pressure bottomed out. Rhythm’s erratic. Pulse is practically non-existent.”

  “Jimmy?”

  “On his way.”

  “Mick...” Shane’s eyes mirrored the same dread he felt. And once again, Michael couldn’t tell him what he wanted most to hear.

  “I know.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Michael breathed a sigh of relief. Another bullet dodged. His father’s heart was beating steadily again and his vitals had evened out. Once again, the waiting room was filled.

  Michael held up his hand when they all jumped to their feet. “He’s stable.”

  “What the fuck, Mick?” Jake asked, looking as weary as the rest of them. “I thought we had this.” Thankfully, they were the only ones in the room.

  “We’re adjusting the meds. It takes a while to regulate the anti-clogging agents, get them just right. Too much and he bleeds out at the insertion points, too little and he strokes out.”

  “But he’s out of the woods, right?” Kieran prompted.

  “For now. How did you all get here so fast?” Michael asked, removing his cap and sinking into one of the well-worn chairs.

  Sean handed him a cup of coffee. Not the crap from the automatic drip machine in the far corner, but the good stuff. “We never left. We’ve been down in the cafeteria.”

  Michael sipped the coffee and leaned back, closing his eyes. “I thought we agreed to take shifts.”

  “We did, but no one wanted to leave. You stay, we all stay.”

  Michael nodded. There was no sense arguing about it. “So. I guess we’re all hanging out here tonight?”

  “I guess we are,” Kieran grinned. “Maggie’s got everybody staying out at your place tonight. She’s already dispatched Nicki with the care packages. Looks like we’ll take turns camping out in your office, Mick.”

  January 1975

  Pine Ridge

  Jack sat in Mrs. Fitzsimmons’s kitchen, waiting while she puttered around with the tea kettle. Jack remembered that kettle. They’d been twelve, maybe thirteen at the time. Fitz had dragged him all over town that day, looking for the perfect Mother’s Day present. They’d scoured the five and dimes and downtown shops for hours for something useful and affordable, the money from delivering papers and mowing lawns burning holes in their pockets. When they’d come upon the tea kettles with the hand-painted roses at the farmer’s market, Fitz had declared their efforts a success. Jack thought it was such a good idea, he’d gotten one for his mother as well.

  The older woman reached up into the cupboard for the tin of tea – a special blend created by the healer that lived farther up the mountain—– and pulled out a bottle of uisce beatha, commonly known in English as Irish whiskey.

  Bringing it all to the table, she placed the kettle on a trivet, the tea next to that. But it was the whiskey she poured into two mugs, handing one to him. “You were with him?”

  Jack didn’t have to ask what she was talking about. He had been waiting for that question for years. The last time he’d seen her, at his father’s funeral, she hadn’t asked, and he sure as hell hadn’t wanted to bring it up.

  “Yes.”

  She closed her eyes, bracing herself against the grief. “Did he suffer?”

  “No,” he answered honestly. If she really wanted the details, he would give them to her, but he hoped she didn’t. It was enough that he had seen it, relived it every day. He didn’t want that for her.

  Thankfully, she nodded, drained her mug, then poured them both another. This time she added some tea. He waited patiently for the words he didn’t want to hear. As long as she didn’t say them out loud, he could believe for a little while longer.

  “I don’t know how to tell you this, Jack, but your mother passed.”

  And poof, just like that, his pipe dream scattered. “When?”

  “Going on two years now. Shortly after word came that you were missing. She never stopped believing you would come home. Said she’d know if her only son was...”

  Her eyes grew shiny. She paused for a moment to gather herself, avoiding his eyes and sipping her tea. He wondered if she had known when Fitz died. If mothers had some secret connection that didn’t need someone showing up on their doorstep with an official-looking letter to tell them their son would be coming home in a box.

  What was worse? Knowing your kid was dead, or not knowing and imagining the worst in between flashes of hope?

  Jack fought the urge to suck in a breath, his lungs desperate for air as the sunshine-yellow walls closed in on him. “How?”

  “Her heart. The doc said it just gave out, couldn’t take anymore. She went in her sleep. Did they not tell you?”

  “No.” Someone had probably
tried, but receiving mail wasn’t part of the amenities offered by the Viet Cong. After he and the others had been found, well, he guessed no one wanted to be the one to tell him. He had been in pretty bad shape.

  “And Kathleen?” he asked, forcing the words past the constriction in his throat.

  “She left, right after. Didn’t feel right staying there, I imagine.” Mrs. Fitzsimmons sighed. “She wasn’t there at the time. Her sister Erin was birthing her firstborn, and there were complications. When she got back, she found...” She trailed off. “The lass took it hard. Blames herself. Thinks that if she’d been there things might have ended differently.”

  Jack didn’t comment on that. There was no second-guessing death. All the what-ifs in the world weren’t going to change anything, and speculating what might have been only kept the wound open and raw. He knew that, first-hand.

  “Where is Kathleen now?”

  “She moved back with her family. She comes round every week or so to check on the place, though. Keeps it nice, said she wanted it ready for you when you came back. Never gave up hope, that one,” the woman said. “She’s working at her da’s diner in Birch Falls. Does she know you’re home?”

  Jack shook his head. When he’d been rescued, he’d been in bad shape, bad enough that he hadn’t wanted to get anyone’s hopes up. And after ... well, a phone call just wasn’t enough. Dreams of his homecoming hadn’t included a dead mother and an empty house, though. But maybe it was for the best.

  “Did you say you have a key?”

  The older woman looked at him for a moment, then nodded. “Aye. Kathleen gave it to me, in case of an emergency.”

  Jack thanked her and stood, suddenly anxious to be out of this warm, familiar kitchen where ghostly echoes of a much happier time warred with sadness and grief. Maybe he’d come back another time, when he’d had time to reacclimate himself to this world, but at that moment, the woman’s compassion made his heart ache. He wasn’t the boy she had known anymore, and the man he’d become needed to deal with this in his own private way.

  Mrs. Fitzsimmons shuffled over to her canister set and extracted a flour-dusted key. She placed it into his outstretched palm, covering his hand with hers. “She’ll be wanting to see you, Jack.”