Wounded Heroes Boxed Set

by Judith Arnold

  From the moment he and Bonnie had confronted each other in her driveway one balmy late afternoon a few weeks ago, the chemistry had been there, the attraction mutual and strong. It seemed clear to Paul that she hadn’t yet figured out how to ignore it.

  Neither, he admitted, had he.

  In the lull between two songs on the record, he caught the sound of someone banging on his front door. Setting his beer beside his book on the coffee table, he headed down the hall to the door and opened it.

  "Hey, Paul," said Shane.

  Paul stared in surprise at the lanky young man occupying the front step. Shane was dressed in his usual garb: tee shirt, torn jeans, oversize hightops, leather necklace. His sandy-blond hair was typically messy. His face, however, was etched in panic, his eyes wild and his smile pleading. "Can I come in?"

  "Sure," Paul said, waving him inside and closing the door behind him.

  Shane dawdled in the hallway, gazing curiously through the arched entry into the living room. Not that Paul’s house warranted curiosity—it was about as exciting as any bachelor’s home, with mismatched furniture, trite still-life paintings decorating the walls, curtains that had been donated by an aunt and faded carpet covering the floors. The place was comfortable but not the least bit distinctive. It would never have occurred to Paul to adorn his window with a star-shaped crystal that would spray the walls with rainbows whenever the sunlight struck it.

  "Come on in," he urged Shane, who was apparently waiting for permission to enter the living room. "What’s up?"

  "Nothing," Shane said, which was plainly a lie. His gaze skittered around the room and he shifted nervously from foot to foot.

  "Can I get you something to drink?" Paul asked, reaching for his beer. He saw Shane’s sparkling hazel eyes grow round and hastily clarified, "Some soda, or a glass of milk?"

  "What kind of soda have you got?"

  "Coke and ginger ale."

  "I’ll have a Coke," Shane told him, still rocking back and forth and looking remarkably ill-at-ease.

  Paul considered questioning him about his emotional condition, but he checked the impulse. When Shane was ready to state his business, he would. Paul headed for the kitchen.

  Returning to the living room with a glass of soda, he found Shane bent over the coffee table, flipping through the book. "Is this good?" the boy asked.

  "I don’t know. I haven’t read it, yet." Paul nodded toward the couch. Shane took a seat there, and Paul settled into the overstuffed armchair across the coffee table from him. He lifted his beer in a silent toast, then took a drink.

  Shane sipped his soda, lowered the glass and jiggled his knee. He looked around the room in quick, fretful glances. "My mom thinks I don’t read enough."

  "Then maybe you ought to read more," Paul suggested evenly. If he let his mind wander, even for an instant, it would settle on an image of Bonnie trying hard to look stern and earnest as she scolded her son, while her luminous, lovely eyes radiated the message that, no matter how much or how little he read, Shane was the best thing ever to have happened to her.

  Paul willfully blocked the image before it could insinuate itself too deeply inside him.

  Shane took another sip of soda and jiggled his other knee. "I bet you’re wondering how I found your house," he said, his eyes fixed on the bubbles rising in his glass.

  "You looked me up in the telephone directory," Paul guessed.

  "Yeah." Shane shot him a quick, half-formed grin. "And then I asked around, and this guy gave me..." He drifted off.

  Paul scowled. When he’d discovered Shane on his doorstep, he hadn’t noticed a bicycle on the front walk or leaning against the side of the house. "Did you hitch a ride?" he asked.

  Shane cringed, then nodded. "Hey, look, Paul...it’s like, I’m kind of in trouble."

  Paul refrained from chewing him out about hitch-hiking. He’d leave that lecture to Bonnie. "Does your mother know where you are?" he asked.

  "Uh-uh. Oh, man... She’s gonna kill me if she finds me."

  Paul wondered whether he should interpret Shane’s claim as mere adolescent theatricality or something more serious. "Your mother doesn’t believe in killing," he said, trying to keep his tone devoid of sarcasm. "We ought to give her a call and let her know where you are. She’s probably worried."

  "No way!" Shane shook his head frantically. "You can’t call her, Paul! I’m not kidding—I’m in major trouble."

  Paul’s instinct was to telephone Bonnie anyway. It was past dinner time and getting dark; she might be frantic about her son’s absence. But he decided to give Shane a little more time to explain what had happened before Bonnie was dragged into the picture. "What kind of trouble?" he asked.

  Shane looked toward the window and jiggled both knees.

  "Are you in legal hot water?" Paul pressed him. "You haven’t been messing around with drugs or anything, have you?"

  "No."

  "Vandalism? Shop-lifting?"

  "No."

  Of course not. Shane was a good kid. What could he possibly have done that was so terrible he was afraid to face his mother about it?

  "You didn’t get a girl pregnant, did you?" Paul asked, mostly to jolt a response out of Shane.

  The response he got spooked him. Shane flinched, turned ashen and gasped. "Uh-uh! It wasn’t like that at all, Paul—I swear. We didn’t even take all our clothes off—I swear to God we didn’t."

  Okay. Whatever had happened, it had something to do with a girl. Paul experienced no small amount of relief to know that Shane hadn’t messed around with drugs—and to know that, in the context Shane apparently had messed around, he hadn’t been totally naked.

  On the other hand, Paul was hardly qualified to advise anyone—let alone Bonnie’s son—when it came to sexual activity.

  "Did you keep your pants on?" he asked, figuring the best strategy was to find out precisely what Shane had done.

  "Yeah, well...I mean, I didn’t take ‘em off, you know?"

  "I don’t know. I wish you’d tell me, so I could figure out what the hell’s going on."

  Shane took a deep breath, fortified himself with several noisy gulps of soda, and then sank into the couch’s cushions. "It was, like... See, there’s this girl at school, Melinda Garrison, and she’s really foxy, you know? And she told Jennifer Lash that she thought I was cute, and Jennifer told my best friend Matt, and he told me..."

  This rang a bell. "I think you mentioned her to me," Paul said.

  Shane nodded. "Well, anyway, she invited me over her house after school today, so I went. And, like, her mom wasn’t home." Petering to a halt, Shane lifted his glass to his lips and drained it.

  "And then?" Paul prompted Shane when his silence extended beyond a minute.

  "Well, it was kind of her idea."

  "What was her idea?"

  "That we should, sort of like, touch each other. But that’s all we did, I swear. If she’s pregnant, it’s not my fault. I didn’t do anything!"

  "If you didn’t do anything," Paul reasoned, "then there’s no reason to be afraid of calling your mother. Just to let her know you’re safe," he added when his simple suggestion caused Shane to blanch.

  "She’ll kill me," Shane insisted. "I’m not supposed to go to a girl’s house when there aren’t any grown-ups around. And besides...I mean, like...we touched each other."

  "All right, so you touched each other. It’s not the end of the world," Paul assured him. If Shane had forced himself on this girl, if he’d acted like a maniac, the way Paul had with Bonnie—that would have been different. But this sounded like a rather innocuous episode, all told. "Boys and girls do that kind of stuff sometimes. It’s a part of growing up, Shane."

  "Yeah, but...I mean..." Shane’s cheeks darkened from a sickly pallor to an equally sickly flush. "We were on her bed," he explained in a near whisper. "And, man, it felt..." He closed his eyes and swallowed. "I mean, I didn’t know it was going to feel like that."

  Paul glanced away in deferenc
e to Shane’s obvious embarrassment. His own, too. He could identify with Shane; he knew that, in some ways, men never progressed beyond that glorious fourteen-year-old astonishment that a woman could make you feel so utterly wonderful.

  "And then her mom came home and found us," Shane continued.

  "Ah." No wonder the kid was so upset. Paul doubted that a little fooling around between classmates on a bed would warrant threats of a shotgun marriage. Nevertheless, it must have been a pretty awkward situation.

  "The old lady threw a major fit," Shane mumbled. "I thought she was gonna kill me."

  "Mothers of daughters can be that way."

  "I just ran. I didn’t know what else to do."

  Right, Paul muttered beneath his breath. Just as mothers were apt to throw fits, men were apt to run away. When things got too intense, when a man went too far and couldn’t face up to what he’d done, he ran.

  "Did—did you ever get caught, Paul?" Shane asked. "I mean, doing something like that."

  Paul reminisced. Once, during his senior year in high school, some of his buddies had shadowed him and Amy Farrell down to the road near Breaker Gorge where they’d gone parking, and bombarded them with catcalls and flashlight beams through the windshield just when they’d started getting it on in the back seat. As humiliating as that had been, however, it wasn’t the same thing as getting caught by a girl’s mother.

  But with maturity came different humiliations. Paul no longer feared getting caught by someone else. What concerned him now was getting caught by himself. Whatever shame he felt these days was self-inflicted.

  "Maybe you should give the girl a call," Paul recommended. "Melinda, right? You could check and see if everything’s cool at her end."

  "No way," Shane groaned. "I’d rather die."

  "That’s not too mature, Shane," Paul chided gently. "If you were willing to fool around with her, you ought to be willing to talk to her on the phone."

  "Yeah, well... It’s not her I’m worried about. It’s her mom. What if she answers the phone? What if her father answers it?" Simply thinking of such a dire possibility prompted another groan from Shane.

  "She’s at her house facing up to her folks," Paul pointed out. "The least you could do is face up to your own mother. Come on, Shane, I’ll show you where the phone is. Give your mom a call and let her know you’re all right."

  "Uh-uh." Shane looked desolate. "Would you call her, please, Paul? I don’t think I can handle talking to her."

  I don’t think I can handle it, either, Paul responded silently. But if he were in Bonnie’s position, he’d be desperate for news that his son was safe, and he wouldn’t give a damn about who the messenger was. "All right," he said reluctantly, heaving himself out of the chair and bringing his beer with him. He had a feeling he might need it to get through the conversation. "Don’t go anywhere. She’s probably going to want to talk to you."

  "Tell her I can’t talk," Shane implored him. "Tell her I got laryngitis or something."

  Paul gave him a reproving look and then trudged out to the kitchen. "What’s the number?" he called to Shane. Shane shouted the digits and Paul pushed the buttons.

  Bonnie answered on the second ring. "Hello?"

  For a woman whose son was unaccounted for, she sounded surprisingly placid. "Bonnie, this is Paul Tremaine," he said, keeping his voice impassive.

  She said nothing for a minute, and then: "Oh. Hello, Paul."

  "I’m calling to let you know that Shane is here."

  Another pause. When she finally spoke, she sounded confused. "He’s where?"

  "Here with me, at my house."

  "I thought—no, that can’t be. I spoke to his friend Matt Molson a while ago, and he told me Shane was with him. I thought he was supposed to be staying for dinner."

  Evidently Shane’s best friend had covered for him. "Well, Bonnie," Paul said, hating to have to reveal Shane’s deception to his mother, "the fact of the matter is, he’s sitting in my living room right now, listening to Mick Jagger on the stereo. I asked him to call you himself, but he...he got himself into a little scrape this afternoon, and he’s afraid you’re going to come down hard on him."

  Again, Bonnie took her time before answering. "I probably will. I don’t understand any of this. What kind of scrape did Shane get himself into? Was he hitch-hiking again?"

  "That’s only part of it," Paul revealed. "It seems he got caught making out with a girl from his school."

  "Oh, lord." Bonnie sounded both annoyed and relieved. "What happened, did he get detention?"

  "He wasn’t caught making out with her at school. He was caught at her house, by her mother."

  He heard a noise that could have been a curse or a bark of laughter. "I hope the woman gave him a good swift kick in the pants," Bonnie muttered.

  "I don’t think she had the opportunity. According to Shane, he bolted at the earliest opportunity."

  "Then I guess I’ll have to do the kicking. Where is he? Could you please put him on?"

  "He’s not really anxious to talk to you right now," Paul warned her. "He thinks you’re going to kill him."

  Bonnie sighed. "And I thought the Terrible Twos were rough. Well, I’ll come over and pick him up. You’ll have to tell me where you live."

  Paul thought for a minute. Although she kept her anger under wraps, he could sense the exasperation in Bonnie’s voice. She’d been lied to and disobeyed. And then, to add insult to injury, her son had sought refuge with Paul. She shouldn’t have to drive through town to fetch the kid.

  If he drove Shane home, he could drop him off and split before Bonnie had a chance to engage him in a conversation, before she had a chance to curve her graceful fingers around his arm and gaze into his eyes. He would be in control of things.

  "I’ll bring him to you," Paul said. "It may take a while, though. He needs to build up the courage to face you."

  Bonnie didn’t respond directly to Paul’s offer. "He didn’t by any chance fill you in on any of the details about this tryst, did he?"

  "He claims they kept their clothes on," Paul informed her.

  "Thank God for small blessings," Bonnie grumbled. "Please bring him home as soon as you can. It’s a school night, and he and I have some talking to do."

  "I’ll do my best."

  "Thanks. I’ll see you later." She hung up.

  Paul stared at the dead receiver in his hand, then slowly placed it in its cradle. He wasn’t exactly thrilled at the prospect of seeing Bonnie. If her brusque farewell was anything to go by, she felt the same about seeing him. But it would be over with quickly enough. Maybe he wouldn’t even get out of the truck. He’d keep the engine running, shove Shane out the passenger door and speed away.

  He’d do what he had to do, and then he’d run. That, after all, was what men did.

  ***

  THE TREMAINE NURSERY TRUCK turned onto the driveway, its heavily treaded tires spraying loose pebbles in all directions. Bonnie had spent the entire half-hour since Paul’s telephone call seated on the porch, watching for Shane and Paul and trying to sort her thoughts.

  When had Shane started noticing girls? He and Matt had taken a rather lusty interest in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue last winter, but that was a far cry from being caught necking with a female classmate. Who was the girl, anyway? When had Shane learned how to kiss?

  The particulars of his escapade were unsettling enough. But what bothered Bonnie went beyond the fact that Shane had spent an unchaperoned afternoon at a girl’s house and arranged to have his best friend lie about it. Her little boy was growing up fast, and she wasn’t sure she was ready for it.

  Oddly enough, she was consoled by the fact that after leaving the girl’s house Shane had gone to see Paul. Hitching there had been stupid, but his destination had been a sound choice. When it came to advice about sex, Paul could...

  What? What on earth could Paul tell him? That if your relationship with a woman reaches a dangerous degree of intimacy, you ought to beat a
hasty retreat?

  She remained on the porch until Paul turned off the engine. Then she stood, swept back the stray hairs that had unraveled from her ponytail and sauntered across the lawn to the driveway, her hands on her hips and her mouth twisted into an appropriately severe frown. Through the open passenger window she saw Shane shrink at her approach. Reaching over the gear stick, Paul gave him a nudge and a concise pep talk: "Go ahead, Shane. She’s not going to bite."

  Sighing dolefully, Shane edged the door open and stepped down onto the gravel. He shut the door behind him and mumbled, "Sorry, Mom."

  "I’ll bet you are," she muttered.

  Paul had made no move to join Shane outside the truck. His gaze met hers and he offered a crooked smile. "He’s all yours," he said with mock generosity.

  "Don’t remind me." Above the rustic symphony of chirping crickets and chattering birds Bonnie heard Shane’s footsteps whispering through the unmowed grass as he trudged across the lawn to the porch and inside the house. She glanced over her shoulder in time to see him slam the screen door shut behind himself, and then she turned back to Paul. His eyes were radiant despite their smoky brown color; there was nothing evasive in his gaze.

  He didn’t strike her as someone preparing to beat a hasty retreat. Pressing her luck, she asked, "Are you going to fill me in on what happened?"

  "There’s really not much to fill in," he answered.

  She glanced behind her again and deduced from the illuminated second-floor window that Shane had headed directly into his bedroom—where, no doubt, he hoped to remain safely out of reach until Bonnie’s fury burned itself out. Scowling, she spun back to Paul. "You called me over a half hour ago," she pointed out. "You and Shane must have been talking about something in all that time."

  "We analyzed the lyrics to ‘Wild Horses,’" said Paul.

  "I need your help, Paul," she demanded, annoyed at having to ask for it. "Shane will never tell me what he’s told you."

  "Then I guess he doesn’t want it told."

  "Damn it—you don’t have to titillate me with all the dirty details. Frankly, I’d rather not know about them. But I do need to know just how far this little fling went."