Elderberry Croft: The Complete Collection

by Becky Doughty

  “Doesn’t matter. It was war. Me and my buddies were sardined into a C130 and dropped into the middle of the U.S. marine base in Khe-Sahn under siege. In the seventy-three days my troop fought, I didn’t set that tree up once, but somehow, everyone knew I had it. They’d find me, ask if they could see the tree, touch it, and I’d open the flap of my ruck and slip it out just far enough for the top branches to open up, for Lucky Dog to give them a reminder of home, and of what they were fighting for.”

  She still didn’t speak and Doc took another swig and capped the flask, sliding it back in his pocket.

  “John Lewis never made it back from Hill 861A for the ornament. Or his dog. Or his wife.”

  “Doc, please.” It was a whisper, one that made him straighten up in his chair a little. “I can’t take it. Not tonight.”

  But he saw in her something he recognized. He saw anger. Rage. Fear. He saw denial shining out of her eyes like a red flag, and he wasn’t going to stop now.

  “I still have that tree, Ms. Goodhope. It sits on my dresser. And that dog watches me, waiting. Waiting for the man he loves to come home to him.”

  “Stop.”

  Doc stood up, needing to step away from her, to assess the situation from a safe distance. Not that he was afraid of her, but maybe a little afraid for her. He’d better tread lightly lest he trigger a landmine and blow them both to smithereens.

  “Why are you burning those letters, Willow Goodhope?” He asked the question quietly, from a good ten feet away, the sound of the creek competing with the rumble of his voice, but he could see that she’d heard him. She looked down at the packet in her hands and smoothed a bent corner on the top envelope, her mouth clamped shut.

  “Willow.”

  “Go home, Doc. I don’t want you here anymore.” There was death in that voice.

  “Willow.”

  “Go home, Doc!” The words came out raw, compressed, a wail flattened between pain on one side and resistance on the other. She lurched to her feet, her blanket slipping down her arms, her unbound hair springing wild around her face and shoulders. She looked like an angry goddess, all lit up, the color of the flames themselves, but Doc stood his ground.

  And the dam broke. Her body began to tremble, then heave, the look on her face one of shock and dismay. She pressed her fists to her mouth as though she could shove it all back inside, but great gasping sobs tore out of her. Her eyes wide, they overflowed with her anguish, then her knees buckled.

  Doc lunged for her, catching her before she crumpled, and he held her against him, wrapping his beefy arms around her.”

  Chapter 4

  It had been a long time since he’d comforted a beautiful woman. He didn’t know if he should pat her shoulder like a baby, smooth her hair like a little girl, or rub her back like a lover, so he did none of the above. He just held her while she emptied herself out.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” she finally muttered against his shoulder. She’d pulled a tissue from the layers of clothing she wore and dabbed at her eyes, her nose.

  Doc cleared his throat. “You asked if I thought we were still the same people underneath all the changes.” He paused. How did he say the things in his heart that he’d never really put to words before?

  “Well, I came home a different man than the one who left, that I can assure you; someone Eleanor didn’t know, someone I didn’t even know. I came home to a country that hated me for fighting in a war they’d turned against. You probably weren’t even born yet, so all you know of it is what they taught you in school or told you on TV, but the first piece of rotten fruit that hit me in the chest hurt worse than any of the hits I’d taken in Nam. And I got angry.” It still made his blood boil, to this day. The rage he’d seen on the faces of those who jeered at him in his uniform, who screamed curses and slurs against him, calling him “Baby Killer” and “War Monger” and worse, still made his own blood boil.

  “And I had—and still have—a right to be angry at the way we were treated coming home. We were heroes, all of us, even the crazy ones. But I took my anger out on the wrong people. And I found comfort in the wrong ways.” He patted his coat, thumping the flask in his pocket. It bumped comfortingly against his ribcage.

  Willow didn’t speak, but he knew she was listening to every word he spoke, the top of her head half tucked up under his beard. She seemed to find comfort in his arms, so he didn’t pull away; it was easier for him, anyway, not to have her staring at him while he tried to find his words.

  “I took it out on Eleanor. On my girls.” He continued, the usual lump in his throat that lodged there whenever he tried to talk about that time. Tonight, though, this woman’s suffering seemed even greater than his, and he pushed past it. “I knew I was doing wrong. And I wanted to stop, but no matter how hard I tried to be a better husband, a better father, I couldn’t get a handle on the bitterness and regret and anger that always caught me by surprise. That war took a part of me, Willow Goodhope. I watched my brothers fall—“

  His voice caught and he brought up one hand to tug on his beard again. “I tried. Believe me, I tried. And the only thing that seemed to take the edge off it all was booze.” He chuckled wryly. “But being a drunk is no way to be a husband or a father, and I chose my buddies Jim and Jack over Eleanor, Tracy, and Janeen. One day, I packed my bags and I left them so they’d be safe from me.”

  Willow raised her head and lifted teary eyes to his. She sniffed loudly from behind her tissue before asking, “Are you dangerous, Doc? Am I safe with you?”

  He snorted and rolled his eyes. “I’ve seen too much in my day to be called safe, I’d venture to say.” He smiled sadly, staring into the fire. He’d played this game with himself a hundred thousand times. Could he go without the drink so he could go home again? Could he maybe just try one more time? But there was no way. His body would boycott. His blood would thicken in hours and he’d die. Or he’d hit the edge and explode on someone. On his wife. His daughters. His grandchildren. No. He was better off here. Watching them all from a distance.

  “I’d like to think there’s still a little of the old me under-neath all the ugly you see.” His hands moved up to her shoulders, and he held her at arm’s length so he could look her in the eye. “I do know this, though.” He waited until she met his eyes.

  “You, Ms. Goodhope, aren’t safe here by yourself. No harm will come to you, not physically, not while I’m here, I can promise you that. But I can’t do anything to stop your heart from shriveling up and dying.”

  She frowned; he could tell she already guessed where he was going with this. “This is no place for someone like you, Willow. The Coach House is the end of the road. It’s a holding ground for old soldiers like me, waiting for the last flight out of here. You need to go home.”

  He’d gone this far: he might as well go for broke. “You need to go home and make things right with that man of yours.”

  Willow stepped back and Doc let her go. She moved closer to the fire and crossed her arms tightly. She was closing off. “I can’t go home, Doc. I just can’t.”

  He didn’t argue, but she shook her head as though he’d contradicted her. “It’s too much to ask of me.”

  “I’m not asking, Willow. I’m telling you that it’s time to clear out of here. It’s time to go home. Take it from a man who’s thought about home every single day since leaving.”

  “Well, why don’t you go home? When was the last time you saw your daughters?”

  “It’s too late for me.” He shifted his weight over his feet, knowing intuitively that she wouldn’t accept that as an answer.

  “Hm.” Now she was mocking him. “Hmmmmmm.” This time, she drew it out longer and louder.

  “I left thirty-one years ago, Ms. Goodhope. Janeen was just a few years old. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen my daughters since walking out. One hand. And of those times, only three of them were actual visits. The other two—the last two—were without their knowledge or Eleanor’s permission
. I kinda messed up the last visit and she wouldn’t let me come again until I could do so with the bottle.”

  “Then you don’t have the right to tell me to go home.” She returned to her seat and glared up at him for a few moments. “It’s easy for you to stand there, half-tanked already, and order me to man up. But you have no idea what that would require of me. You have no idea, Doc.”

  “Well, what in tarnation did the man do to you? I saw the way he looked at you, woman. That wasn’t hatred or anger. What are you so afraid of?”

  Willow scooped up the letters that had fallen to the stones and traced a finger along the lines of the hand-written addresses. Finally, she pointed at the chair he’d abandoned. “Please sit. I have a story for you, too.”

  She waited until he was situated, feet stretched out to the warmth again. After he lit another cigarette, she withdrew a small picture frame from the pocket of the jacket she wore and handed it to him.

  Doc studied the image in the flickering light, then a sizzle of alarm jolted through him as he recognized the smiling man in jeans and a flannel shirt; nothing like the gun-metal gray suits he wore whenever he came to see Al. But it was the child who made his gut clench. There was no doubting the little one’s parentage. He was afraid to look at Willow, to see the resemblance in living color.

  “Christian, you’ve already met.” She finally spoke, her voice going flat again. “Julian, our son, would have been three this month. In two weeks; on November 26th, in fact. He had my hair, and Christian’s hands. My glow-in-the-dark skin and my husband’s teeth. His eyes were his own, though.”

  Something about the way she spoke made him think he didn’t really want to hear this story. He squinted down at the frame in his rough hands, wishing he’d never seen it.

  Chapter 5

  “So you have a son.” He handed the picture back to her.

  Willow nodded, her thumb moving back and forth over the faces in the frame, as though absently trying to rub them out. “Yes. This time last year, Christian had just passed his state boards and had joined the firm where he works now. I had just turned in my two week notice at the beginning of the month to the little café where I worked. I didn’t work many hours there, not since having Julian, and the couple that owned it knew I would move on eventually. I loved it because they were good people, Doc, not because of the money. I didn’t make squat there; just enough to pay for babysitting and the gas in my car to get there and home again, but I was almost afraid to let it go, and I came up with excuse after excuse to keep working.”

  “Hm.”

  “There you go again.”

  “Sorry.” He drew his thumb and forefinger across his lips in a zipping motion.

  “It was finally Mama Dosh, the café owner and a good friend to boot, who told me I needed to quit or she’d fire me.” Willow smiled ruefully. “I can’t tell you how relieved I was to have that decision taken from me. I turned in my notice the next day.

  “The day before my last day at Café Sienna, I knew they’d be having a goodbye party for me, and I wanted to look good for the pictures. I wanted to preserve for posterity the last evidence that I’d once been more than a stay at home mom and wife. Why?”

  She shrugged and tossed a twig she’d been mangling into the fire. “I suppose I’d bought into the stigma that being a stay at home mom made me a little less of a woman. A little less of a success. I didn’t have a career I could do from home that would somehow validate my time there, and even though I loved my baby boy to distraction, I felt guilty for wanting to spend every waking moment just making him smile.

  “So that morning, Christian and I were both in our own worlds. He was off to prove his worth in the courts, having his first real case to call his own, and I was off to prove that I wasn’t selling out; that I wasn’t becoming less.” She pulled the lapels of her coat around her, hunkering down a little, like a turtle that wanted to disappear inside her shell altogether.

  “Christian was frustrated that I wasn’t more available to help him, I was frustrated that he hadn’t ironed his shirt the night before, and Julian had a terrible case of the spills that morning, slowing everything I did to a crawl. He somehow got the lid off his cup and poured milk all over the carpet in the living room. Next, he knocked my half-full glass of water off my bedside table, drenching the pile of books on the floor beside it. Finally, he tried to pull the tea bag from my cup on the bathroom counter—thankfully, it was almost room temperature—and the whole cup came down, splattering my pants and shoes, and shattering the teacup, a special one of my mother’s.”

  Doc stroked his beard. He recalled very little about those early days when his girls were little.

  “In my frustration, I did something totally uncharacteristic of me. I found an over-stimulating cartoon on television, plopped him down on the floor in front of it, and handed him a bowl of his favorite crackers. He was amazed at his good fortune and smiled at me like I was the most amazing mother in the whole world, even though I knew otherwise. I couldn’t stay angry at him. I bent down, kissed him on top of his mop of curls, and headed back to the bathroom.

  “Christian dashed in and kissed me goodbye—all was forgiven. I heard him say goodbye to Julian, then the front door opened and closed.”

  Willow stopped talking and Doc watched her swallow, hard, twice. He recognized that lump.

  “I remember sighing dramatically, my straight-iron undoing all the curls in my hair, thankful that I was finally getting a moment of peace and quiet.” She rolled her eyes. “And in that moment, like a flashback, it suddenly occurred to me that the front door had opened a second time. Sheer panic, like nothing I’ve ever known before, washed over me, and I dropped the iron and ran.

  “Julian was gone. The door stood open. And Christian was backing down the driveway, sitting too high up in his pickup to see Julian darting around the back of it to get to him.”

  Doc held up his hand like she’d done earlier. He’d heard enough. But she wasn’t finished.

  She turned hollow eyes on him, a piercing black gaze that made his toes curl. In a voice as cold and sharp as a layer of ice, she said, “I look at my husband and I see our selfishness. I see my failure. I see his lofty ambition. His guilt. My shame. My guilt. His shame. And I don’t think there’s enough love in the whole world to cover the multitude of sins we committed that day.”

  What could he say? What mere words could he offer that would ease the pain this girl was enduring, even as she sat like a black hole in front of him? Oh, she deflected it by helping others, by giving and giving and giving some more; by offering hope, even when there was none left over for herself, but he knew it was only bandages.

  And Doc knew all about bandages. And running. And destructive behavior.

  “Don’t burn the letters.”

  “Once again, that’s not your call to make.”

  “You’ll regret it. You don’t need any more regret on your plate, Willow Goodhope.”

  Without a word, she tossed him the packet. He caught it and slipped it in his coat next to his flask. After a pause, he said, “Willow?”

  “What?”

  “At the risk of sounding trite, I want to tell you something a buddy of mine said to me a couple years ago. I don’t know if it will help. Honestly, it hasn’t fixed much in my life except to help me be more understanding of myself, but maybe it will be what you need to hear.”

  “I don’t know if I want to hear it right now, Doc.”

  He chuckled at her honesty. “I’m sure you don’t. I don’t really want to speak it, either, because then I’m stuck hearing it again, too.”

  Willow shrugged noncommittally. He took that as permission to speak.

  “He said, ‘Doc, you’ll never forget it, so stop trying. You’ll never be able to let it go, to be done with it. You have to own it because it’s part of you now.’

  Willow didn’t look at him, but she didn’t stop him either.

  “Here’s the clincher, Willow. He went on to say
, ‘You have every right to have these feelings, this anger, this pain. But you do not have the right to make others suffer for it.’”

  Willow only nodded, whether she agreed, or just did so to be polite, didn’t matter. At least she’d heard him out.

  They sat together in silence while the fire burned low, then Willow began to hum softly. Her voice was gentle, soothing, in the same way that she spoke, and Doc sunk down in his chair a little lower. Her humming turned to words, and as he listened, he began to feel like an intruder, like someone who no longer belonged in the middle of her pain.

  In the lingering silence I still hear your whispered sigh.

  But your hand in mine tells me you’re leaving

  You must not know how much I need you

  That every moment you stay keeps me breathing.

  Doc stood up slowly and stretched. Maybe now he could sleep. He waited until she looked at him, then patted the pocket where he’d tucked the letters. “I’ll keep these safe for you, Ms. Goodhope. You get some sleep now, you hear?”

  She nodded. “Thanks for keeping me company, Doc. Sorry I’m such a mess.” She didn’t get up.

  Doc brushed a hand over the top of her head, the thought just now occurring to him that she was probably younger than his daughters. “We’re all a mess, little girl. That’s why we like you here at The Coach House.”

  Chapter 6

  Early the next morning, Doc shoved open his front door with a shoulder; it usually didn’t start sticking until the rains came.

  It wasn’t stuck, though. Propped against the outside of the door on the landing was a basket, one made of twigs, the contents covered with a small quilt. He picked up the basket and lifted the corner of the blanket, already knowing who’d brought it. He didn’t know how she’d made it to the top of his stairs without him knowing—that was a first in all the time he could remember.