The Year that Everything Changed

by Georgia Bockoven

  I’d been in Mexico almost half a year drumming up investment money for a movie that was going to shut down production if I couldn’t come up with another half-million dollars by the end of the year. I’d tried calling Frank and Elizabeth when I was in Mexico City but either couldn’t get through or wound up talking to Denise, who always promised to have one or the other of the kids call me, but neither ever did. I should have tried harder or wondered more that I never got an answer to any of my letters, but figured we’d make up for lost time when I got home. I’ve lived the rest of my life with dreams where I go back and change things, where I come home to find out the things I needed to know. They bring me a strange peace that’s all wrapped up in a ribbon of sadness for what might have been.

  I made it to Bakersfield in two days. It was hot, and the wind was blowing the sand and dirt so hard even the birds were walking. Denise met me at the door and talked to me through the screen. She asked how I was. I answered with, “How the hell did this happen?” I shouldn’t have shouted. It stiffened her spine and set the tone for what would follow.

  “Don’t you dare yell at me.”

  “Goddamn it, Denise, I don’t have time for this. Where is Frank?”

  “He’s gone. You missed him.” I swear she was about to smile but thought better of it at the last second. “I told you that you didn’t have much time.”

  “What do you mean, gone?” I didn’t want to find out later that he was at a friend’s house.

  “Shipped out.”

  The words were her bullets, my soul the target. Even though I knew the answer, there was no way around asking, “Where?”

  “Vietnam.”

  Men came home from war. I had. But a lot of men didn’t. Some died from stupid mistakes, some died from being in the wrong place at the wrong time, some just died. “He’s seventeen. They wouldn’t have let him in without someone signing for him.”

  “It was what he wanted. I saw no reason to stop him.”

  I hit my fist on the wood surrounding the screen, splintering it. Denise jumped, the smug look gone. “If something happens to him it’s on your shoulders.”

  “My shoulders?” she screamed. “You’re the reason he went. He thought he could get your attention. He wanted you to be proud of him.” She added the last with a sneer.

  “I’ve always been proud of him.”

  “How was he supposed to know that? You haven’t seen him—or Elizabeth—in over five months, and it was three months before that. They had no idea where you were. You didn’t call, you didn’t write. What was he supposed to think?”

  I didn’t try to defend myself against accusations she knew as well as I did weren’t true. I had no defense for what was true. I’d let myself get caught up in trying to save my business, believing Frank and Lizzy would understand and that I could make it up to them that summer. Some people are slow learners, others it takes getting hit up-side the head with a two-by-four. Nothing had ever hit me harder. “Where’s Lizzy?”

  “She’s not here.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “She doesn’t want to see you.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since Frank left. She blames you.”

  “Then I need to talk to her.”

  “You can’t.”

  It was everything I could do to stop myself pulling what was left of the screen door off its hinges. “Why not?”

  “She’s in Texas with my mother and father.”

  She might as well have told me that Lizzy was sitting on the moon. “Why isn’t she in school?”

  “She is in school—in Texas.” She put her hand up to the screen and showed me a diamond ring. “I got married, and Mama offered to let Elizabeth stay with her a couple of months while me and Harry settled in.”

  “When is she coming back?”

  “We’re going there for Christmas. She’ll come home with us then.”

  “I’m not waiting that long to see her.”

  “You know how my father feels about you. The minute you step foot on his land he’ll have you thrown in jail—or he might just shoot you. And don’t even think about calling. They won’t let you talk to her.”

  The threat would have had teeth twenty years before, but I’d made enough men in Yokum County rich that I figured I had some pull. What I needed was to know where I stood in California if I went to Texas and brought Lizzy home with me.

  I never found out. I got a phone call from Denise telling me Frank was dead the same day I had an appointment to see the attorney about bringing Lizzy home. Frank hadn’t been off the plane two full days and he was gone. He didn’t die in the jungle in one of the battles that made the evening news. He was in a mess tent when a Vietnamese girl that Frank’s lieutenant said couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old set off a grenade. It killed her and Frank and sent seven others home for good.

  I got on my knees that night and prayed like I had never prayed. I’d accepted what I’d been taught in Bible School as a kid that it was God’s will and His mysterious ways that had taken Ma and Pa and my brother and sister and grandmother the way they had gone, but I was having trouble with Frank. I was doing some hard bargaining with God, my soul for ten seconds with Frank, just long enough to tell him I was sorry and that I loved him and that no man had ever been prouder of his son.

  The sun was peeking over the Los Angeles mountains when I gave up on God and made the same offer to the devil. He didn’t answer either. I’d offered my soul and had no takers. I’d saved a movie and lost a son. Perhaps I didn’t have a soul.

  The second tape ended.

  Chapter Forty-five

  Elizabeth

  “It’s a lie,” Elizabeth said, shaken. “That’s not the way it happened. Frank didn’t want to join the Army, my mother made him.” The memories fought for the surface like bubbles from a diver’s mask. “They got into a terrible fight about Daddy. I remember Frank said he was sick to death of living with my mother and that he was going to call Daddy to see if he could go to Mexico with him. He was so mad he was yelling. We were in big trouble when we raised our voices to my mother, but he didn’t care. He kept on until he got it all out.

  “It went downhill after that. Frank said he hated her and that the day he turned eighteen he was moving in with Daddy no matter how she felt about it. She went crazy and took a pan off the stove and hit him. He knocked a chair over when he fell. The way it sounded and the way he reacted, I thought she’d broken his arm for sure, but she didn’t stop to check. I’d never seen her so mad. She stood over him and screamed that if he wanted to get away from her so badly, she was going to help him. She made him get up and change his shirt, and then she took him away in the car. When they came back Frank told me he was in the Army and leaving for basic training at Fort Ord the next day.

  “He promised to write, but I never got any letters. I guess he never wrote to Daddy—” She paused and thought about what she’d called Jessie. “I guess he never wrote to Jessie. One of his friends told me later that he came to see me before he left for Vietnam, but I was in Texas. He didn’t say whether Frank spent any time at home.”

  “Did he get along with your stepfather?” Rachel asked.

  “There was no stepfather. At least none that I know of. I don’t know why she told Jessie she was married.”

  “She had to know he would find out,” Christina said, incredulous.

  Rachel took the clip from her hair and tossed it on the table, shaking her hair free and running her hands through the sides. She toed off her loafers and pulled her legs up to sit yoga fashion. “If there was no stepfather, then why did your mother send you to Texas?”

  The question threw Elizabeth. She remembered the time on the ranch vividly, her mornings filled with school, afternoons riding horses with her grandfather or baking bread with her grandmother. Her nights were filled with shadows on her bedroom ceiling, images she manipulated into moving pictures of happier times. She’d asked why she was there and when she wa
s going home, but no one ever answered. “I never understood why I was sent there.”

  Christina got up and left the room without saying anything. She was back less than a minute later, a small, velvet-covered box cradled in her hand. “I think this belongs to you.”

  Elizabeth hesitated, afraid of what she would find. “It’s all right,” Christina said, intuitively understanding.

  Elizabeth took the box and opened it. Inside was a medal—the ribbon worn to the point of fraying, the features on the face stamped on the heart-shaped metal almost indistinguishable. “It’s Frank’s Purple Heart,” she said in a hushed whisper.

  With reverence afforded holy objects, Elizabeth removed the medal. An image she hadn’t been able to summon clearly for years came to her—Frank turning to wave at her as he boarded the Greyhound bus for Fort Ord. “Don’t forget me,” he’d said. They were the last words he’d spoken to her.

  She held the medal in her palm and looked at it through mist-filled eyes. She could feel the love and regret and yearning that had poured from Jessie with every thumb stroke across the metal heart. He must have carried it constantly, a reminder of what he’d lost.

  Frank would forever be her older brother, locked in her memory as someone she’d looked up to, wise and caring. As she stared at all that was left of him, for a blinding moment she saw him as he really had been—a boy, never to become a man. He was seventeen years old when he died, four years younger than Stephanie was now. He was scared when he got on the bus. She wasn’t old enough to understand why. Looking back, she was heartbroken as she remembered the fear and loneliness in his eyes. She mentally wrapped the child he’d been in the arms of the mother she had become. Pain filled her anew as she thought about how he had never known the joy of finding the girl of his dreams, the feel of his child’s hand cradled in his, or the adoration of his nephews and niece.

  “Where did you get this?” she asked Christina.

  “In Jessie’s study on a bookshelf by itself.”

  “Did you find anything else?”

  “I haven’t looked through his personal belongings. I didn’t think I should without the rest of you.”

  “Do you have a photograph of Frank?” Ginger asked.

  “Not with me—” As strange as it was to contemplate, Frank was their brother, too. “I’ll bring it next time.” She smiled. “He looked like Jessie. Maybe that was why my mother didn’t like him.”

  Rachel held out her hand. “May I?”

  Elizabeth handed her the medal.

  “How sad,” she said softly. “You can almost feel Jessie’s pain.”

  “How did your mother treat you?” Ginger asked.

  “After Frank died she almost suffocated me with attention. I couldn’t go anywhere without her.”

  “What about Jessie?”

  “I never saw him again.”

  “Never?” Christina asked.

  “Not one time. My mother wouldn’t let me come home for the funeral, she said it was more important for me to finish my school year in Texas and that she would visit me there. When we came back to California and I asked about seeing my father, she told me he’d become a drunk and didn’t want anything to do with her or me.”

  “Did you try contacting him?” Rachel pushed.

  “The telephone number I had was disconnected. I wrote letters, but he never answered.”

  “And gave them to your mother to mail?” Rachel pushed again.

  An ugly truth, almost forty years gestating, began its birth process. “Are you saying you think she didn’t send them? Why would she do that?”

  “I’m not saying anything. It just strikes me as odd that Jessie would drop out of the life of someone he loved as much as he obviously loved you and never make any attempt to get back in. He may have become a drunk, but it couldn’t have lasted long. We know he met Christina’s mother, and we know he started a strawberry business and then lost it. We also know he started whatever it was that he did here in Sacramento that made him so rich. There has to be more to the story.”

  “Like?” The memory of the attempts Jessie had made to see her made Elizabeth feel as if a lead jacket had been slipped over her shoulders.

  Instead of answering, Rachel asked, “Is your mother still alive?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think she’s the one you need to talk to.”

  There were some things Denise Reed wouldn’t discuss, and Jessie Reed was one of them. If knowing the truth would make a difference, whatever battle she had to fight with her mother to gain that truth would be worth the effort. But maybe not. Nothing could bring Frank back. And nothing could give her the years she’d missed with her father.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Elizabeth

  On her way to her mother’s house, Elizabeth drove by the home she’d lived in as a child. The new owners had removed the porch and extended the living room, torn off the clapboard, and replaced it with stucco and brick. The only thing they hadn’t changed or updated was the sprawling oak on the front lawn. Frank used to perch there in the summer, stretched out on a thick branch high enough to be hidden from the people passing below whose gazes never rose above the horizon. Once in a while he would let her join him, but she never lasted long—sitting still was hard enough, not talking was impossible.

  Her mother had lived in the rambling two-story house until five years ago, when failing eyesight and an inner ear problem made climbing stairs a hazard. Now she lived in a bright, two-bedroom, cookie-cutter house in a senior citizens’ complex on the opposite side of Bakersfield. The complex boasted a golf course, shopping center, and clubhouse with enough scheduled activities and classes to satisfy the most discriminating senior—a guaranteed social life, according to the sales brochure. No more sitting around the house waiting for a call from the children and grandchildren. Now, when the call finally came, odds were they wouldn’t find anyone home.

  Elizabeth pulled into the driveway of the pseudo-Spanish stucco house, painted the prescribed brown on tan, surrounded with community-dictated landscaping and fencing. She rang the doorbell, and within seconds heard her mother shuffling across the terra cotta tile to answer.

  “You’re late.”

  Elizabeth kissed her cheek and handed her the potted orange chrysanthemum she’d picked up at the grocery store. The plant was wrapped in orange cellophane with a big black bow, a ghost and witch peeking out of the ribbon. “Happy Halloween.”

  Denise looked at the plant with suspicion. “We don’t decorate for Halloween in Rancho Villa. No sense to it with no kids around. I’m surprised you didn’t figure that out for yourself.”

  “It’s a plant, Mom, not a pumpkin. You can take the decorations off if they bother you.”

  “Don’t get snippy. I was just letting you know in case one of the kids was thinking about doing something special for me.” She went into the living room and put the mum on an end table. “This way I’ll be able to see it when I’m working in the kitchen.”

  Elizabeth followed, dropping her purse on the rocker opposite the fireplace. As much as Elizabeth missed the old house, she had to admit that moving had been good for her mother. Not only had she traded in her polyester wardrobe and learned how to use a computer, she’d started traveling. The plaid crop pants and matching short-sleeve top she had on today weren’t flattering, but they were more stylish than anything she’d owned for the past twenty years. And finally, after a lifetime of wearing her stick-straight hair in a bun at the back of her head, she’d had it cut and permed. The soft curls that framed her angular face made her look years younger and half as fearsome.

  Elizabeth gave her mother points for trying, something new to their relationship and welcome. “The house looks nice. I like the sofa. When did you buy it?”

  “I didn’t. I saw it sitting in Betty’s driveway last week and went over to ask what it was doing there. Her kids said they were getting ready to haul it to the dump.” She grinned. “I told them they could haul it over here and t
ake mine to the dump instead.”

  “Betty’s redecorating?”

  “She died. Two weeks ago. Went to bed and never got up. Coffee?”

  “Uh, sure.” The quality of her mother’s coffee was dependent on whether it was the first or second time she’d used the grounds. Ten o’clock in the morning usually meant recycled. “Do you have any cream?”

  “I made it fresh. You don’t have to doctor it.” She handed Elizabeth a mug and refilled her own. “You might as well have a seat and get started on why you came. No sense dragging this out.”

  Elizabeth settled into the sofa. “I want to talk to you about my father.”

  “I figured this was coming.” Denise moved Elizabeth’s purse and took the rocker. “I already told you that I don’t want anything to do with the money he left you. Whatever it was, it’s yours. I’m doing fine without it.”

  “It’s not about the money.” Elizabeth stopped to take a deep breath. With her anger modified by curiosity, confronting her mother wasn’t as easy as she’d expected. “I didn’t tell you before, because I didn’t want to upset you, but Jessie left tapes. I’ve been listening to them for the past couple of months with my sisters.”