“Are you all right?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “You got some coffee? I could use some coffee.”
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll make a pot.”
He followed her silently into the kitchen. He didn’t say a word about her apartment. No “nice place” or other comments. It was almost as if he didn’t see it. What was going on?
“Are you sick?” she asked. Maybe that was the family emergency. Or maybe his father had died. She remembered he’d mentioned once that he and his father had never gotten along.
“No.”
He just stood there in the middle of her kitchen, taller and broader than she’d remembered, making what had always seemed to be a good-sized room feel small. She glanced at him as she got the coffee beans from the freezer. “Why don’t you sit?”
He sat.
And Alyssa measured out the water, turned on the coffeemaker. This was a strange experience even without his odd behavior—Sam Starrett sitting in her kitchen, because she’d invited him to her apartment. Who would’ve thought that would ever happen?
She got two mugs down from the cabinet and set them on the counter. And turned around to find him looking at her as if he wanted to eat her alive.
It took her breath away, that look in his eyes.
“You look amazing,” he said.
“I thought you might want to go out to dinner,” she said. “I guess I jumped the gun.”
“I’m getting married,” he said. “Probably on Sunday.”
She heard the words. They just didn’t make any sense. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re getting married?”
He nodded, pure misery in his eyes. “Her name’s Mary Lou Morrison. I went out with her for a couple of weeks, back about four months ago. She’s pregnant, Lys. And the baby’s mine.”
Oh, God, he was serious. Alyssa sat down across from him at the table. “Are you sure?”
“The test results just came back positive—for the second time.” His voice broke. “Jesus, I’ve got to do the right thing. She’s already more than three months’pregnant—I mean, she’s got to be. It’s been at least that long since I’ve seen her.” He leaned toward her, his eyes actually filled with tears. “I swear to you, Alyssa, I broke it off with her months ago. I had no idea she was pregnant. If I knew, I wouldn’t have let you into my room back in Kazbekistan.”
She nodded. “I believe you.”
“You have no idea how sorry I am,” he whispered.
“Actually,” she said, “I think I might, because I’m pretty sorry, too.”
“I have to do right by her,” he said, as if, like Alyssa, he wished they weren’t separated by the wide expanse of the table. As if he wanted her in his arms as much as she wanted to be there. “I have to do this.”
“Do you?” she asked, and then hated herself for asking it. God, she was shocked by her reaction to this news, by how badly she wanted to fall to her knees and ask him—no, beg him—not to marry this other woman.
Sam wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands, and she knew if he hadn’t, his tears would’ve escaped. He was crying. “I’m sorry,” he said again. “I was working on my truck when the lab called. And they said it was positive. And then, Jesus, I was at the airport, because I knew I had to tell you and I didn’t want to do it over the phone and I’m sorry I didn’t even shower or change my clothes. I just got on the next flight. And all the way out here I was thinking maybe I shouldn’t say anything. Maybe I should just get you drunk and take you to Las Vegas and marry you.”
Great. Now she was crying. But she could pretend she wasn’t as well as any man. She wiped her eyes. “God knows I could use a drink.”
“I used protection,” he told her. “I know you probably think I’m always careless because I was that one time with you, but I did it right. I didn’t lose my head over her, not ever. Nothing broke. Nothing leaked. She shouldn’t be pregnant—but she is. And now I have to do what’s right.”
The coffee was ready, and Alyssa stood up and poured them each a mug, wishing she had something stronger to add to hers.
“Well,” she said, because she knew she had to say something, “we’re just going to have to pretend that night in Kazbekistan never happened. We’ve done it before—pretended it never happened. We can do it again. We’ll just have to . . . forget that you . . . said what you said to me, forget that I got all dressed up like this because you were coming over, and . . .”
She turned to put the mug on the table and found that he’d gotten to his feet. She set it down in front of him, but he didn’t touch it.
He was looking at her, his eyes hungry again. “I love that you got all dressed up for me,” he whispered. “I’m not going to forget that. I’m not going to forget you.”
Alyssa couldn’t stop herself. She took a step toward him and then another, and then, God, she was in his arms and he was kissing her.
He tasted like Sam, like everything she wanted but shouldn’t want.
She knocked his baseball cap to the floor as she kissed him, as she tugged his shirt free from his jeans and ran her hands up the smooth, broad expanse of his back. His skin was hot and he groaned at her touch as he pulled her closer to him, her skirt riding up all the way to the tops of her thighs as she opened herself to him, as she wrapped one leg around him and . . .
And he broke away. He stopped kissing her, pulled back, stepped free from her embrace. He was breathing as hard as she was as he held her at arm’s length, but he held her there.
“I can’t do this,” he gasped. “Jesus, I want to. I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone. But I’m getting married on Sunday, and I’m not just going to play at it, Lys. I’m marrying her. I’m going to have a family with her.”
Alyssa stepped back from him as she pushed her skirt down, aware that he could see the red silk panties she’d put on just an hour ago with such anticipation and hope in her heart. “Then you better go.”
He went.
But he stopped in the kitchen doorway and turned to look back at her. “Thanks for getting dressed up for me, Lys,” he said quietly.
And then he was gone.
Alyssa heard her apartment door shut.
She’d wanted to get to know him. Well, she’d just gotten to know him a whole hell of a lot better in the past fifteen minutes.
She’d found out he was the kind of man who could resist temptation, the kind of man so intent upon doing what he considered to be the right thing that his own happiness came last. He was a good man. An honorable man.
An amazing man.
Sam hadn’t touched his coffee, and his baseball cap was on the floor. She picked it up, knowing that he wouldn’t come back for it.
Knowing that he wouldn’t ever come back.
She put on his hat and drank his coffee. And then she sat there at her kitchen table, wearing the dress she’d put on for him, for a good long time.
Helga knocked on the hospital room door. “May I come in?”
“What do you know,” said the deep male voice from the room, “someone who actually knocks. Please, by all means, come on in.”
She pushed the door open to find a very large, still young-looking man sitting up in a hospital bed. His hair was blond and his face was that of a man who’d lived hard but well, with a nose that had been broken at least once. His eyes were blue and Annebet’s, and his smile of greeting was pure Marte.
As soon as she saw him, she remembered meeting him, talking to him about Marte and Annebet. And Hershel.
“How are you, Stanley?” she asked. “I’m Helga Rosen Shuler, remember me?”
“Of course,” he said with another of those charming smiles. “Mrs. Shuler. Please come in.”
“I’m glad I caught you,” she said. “I understand you’re getting ready to leave.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “I’m flying home to San Diego. Not a minute too soon. Please, won’t you sit down?”
Helga sat in a chair by his bedside. He wa
s alone in the room.
“Your young lady’s not with you?” she asked, disappointed. She remembered a pretty, dark-haired young woman, a helicopter pilot who had looked at Stanley with love in her eyes. Funny how she should remember that and have trouble with other things. Ah, well, better to remember love.
“No,” Stan said. “Teri, uh, she went to San Diego—something she said she had to take care of. She’s actually flying back in this afternoon so she can go home with me tomorrow. It seems crazy to come all that way just to go all the way back, but . . .”
“It’s not crazy if she loves you,” Helga said.
“That in itself is pretty crazy,” he said, and changed the subject, as men often did when the topic of love came up in a conversation. “I understand I have you to thank for coming through with that information about the bomb.”
“You’re welcome, I’m sure,” she said, “although I have no idea what you’re referring to. And no, don’t explain. I’m sure I have a note about it somewhere here. I came all the way to . . . Merde, this is annoying.”
“London,” he supplied.
“Thank you.” For crying out loud. She had to look at her notepad. Thank God for her notepad. Hershel, it said. “Ah. I wanted to finish telling you about my brother.”
“Aunt Anna’s husband.”
“Annebet,” she said. “Yes, that’s right. Hershel used to call her Anna. Oh, he loved her so. And she loved him. How far did I get in the story?”
“Hershel was shot,” Stanley said, “and taken to Copenhagen Hospital. Annebet came and told you. That’s where we were.”
“After Hershel was shot, the Germans got a tip that we were hiding in the Gunvalds’house,” Helga told him. “My parents were moved to the neighbors, and then to Copenhagen Hospital, where Hershel was being cared for. But he was dying. Annebet knew that and so did my parents when they saw him.
“Marte and I were with Annebet at the time. We walked to the market, quite literally right out from under the Germans’noses. It was quite terrifying. I hadn’t been out of your grandparents’house for weeks, and then there I was in the town square where people might recognize me.
“I remember there were German soldiers marching, and I later found this picture in a book.” Helga pulled it from her purse. She’d had a reprint made of the old black-and-white photo.
A small crowd of civilians had gathered, sullenly watching the Germans goose-step past. Two little girls stood together, their arms around each other. “That’s me—” Helga pointed herself out to Stanley. “—and that’s your mother.” Then she pointed to the older girl, standing several feet away, a solitary figure, all alone. “There’s Annebet.”
“This is a wonderful picture,” Stan told her.
“Yes,” she said. “I was quite pleased to find it. A short while after this must have been taken, Annebet found us a ride into Copenhagen. And we went to the hospital, too.
“The entire place—and it was a rather large facility for the times—was used to hide hundreds of Jews. It was quite miraculous. All those people who believed so completely in saving lives that they felt it was their duty to risk their own. I remember being led down a corridor to Hershel’s ward. They had him hidden in plain sight. ‘Olaf Svensen’ it said on his bed.
“And, oh, I knew when I saw him that he was dying. I may not have wanted to believe it before that, but when I saw him . . .” She cleared her throat. It still made her cry to think of him lying there. “Annebet went to him right away. It was so clear to see that she brought him respite from his pain. But he wanted nothing more than for me and my parents to be taken to safety in Sweden.
“I don’t know what Hershel said to my father, but he apparently convinced him to take my mother and me and to leave. Annebet would take us to a contact on the coast and put us aboard a boat that very night.
“It had become quite a dismal day, rainy and dark, and we left the hospital in a funeral procession. Hundreds of Jews were smuggled out of the Copenhagen Hospital in broad daylight either disguised as mourners for real funerals or in completely false processions. It was quite a setup they had going there.
“We left, my parents, Annebet, and me. Marte stayed behind, sitting with Hershel, who lay close to death’s door. I remember riding in the black car, the four of us, tears streaming down our faces. We didn’t have to pretend to be mourners.
“We traveled some distance and had to wait for quite a while in a fisherman’s shack. It was cold. I remember the way the wind blew and the rain came down. And Annebet sat with us, holding my mother’s hand even though her heart was so clearly back in that hospital ward.
“And it was then,” Helga told Stanley, Marte’s precious son, “before we were smuggled into the hold of a fishing boat, on that rainy night in a town called Rungsted, my mother took off her diamond ring. It had been in our family for many years, I heard her tell Annebet. Poppi’s mother had worn it, and had given it to her on the occasion of her marriage to Poppi. It was only fitting, Mother said, that this ring should go to Hershel’s bride.
“And Annebet, she cried,” Helga remembered, “because although she and Hershel weren’t married in the eyes of the church or the state, they were married in their own eyes and in the eyes of God. And this blessing from my mother, this acceptance, made it all the more real to Annebet, who was soon to be left with nothing but a memory of Hershel’s love.
“Mother asked her to come to Sweden with us—on the chance that she was carrying Hershel’s child. And Annebet wept again as she told us she was not so lucky as to have conceived in the short time they’d shared.
“She put on that ring,” Helga told him, “and put us on the fishing boat. I remember watching as she hurried away, as she slipped into the woods to rush back to Copenhagen. I knew she hoped to see Hershel one last time, to kiss him once more, to hold him as he left this world.”
Helga shook her head. “I never knew. Did she tell you? Did she make it in time?”
Stanley had to clear his throat. “Yes,” he said. “She did.” He reached for her hand and held it. He had nice hands, strong and warm. “She told me that she was with him at the end. She said the doctors gave him morphine, that he wasn’t in pain. That he slipped into sleep as she held him. That he went quietly.”
Helga closed her eyes and said a prayer of thanks.
“I have her ring,” Stanley said.
Helga looked at him. “I’m sorry?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I never understood why Aunt Anna gave it to me instead of my sister. But if it went from mother to son . . . She wrote me a note—it was part of her will. I can’t remember exactly what she said, but it was something like, ‘If I’d had a son, I would have been proud if he’d been like you,’ or something. It makes sense now. I have it here—the ring. It’s kind of funny, actually. My father came a week or so ago, and he brought it with him. He kind of got it into his head that, I don’t know, that I might want it.”
“You were going to give it to your young lady,” Helga realized.
“Well.” Stanley cleared his throat. He moved carefully, up and out of bed. He held on to the bed railing and moved painfully to the cabinet. “Yeah, I, um, hadn’t really got that far. I think it still might be too soon. And besides, it seems only fair that the ring goes back to you. To your family.”
There was a drawer that was secured with a combination lock. He opened it with a few quick turns, took a deep blue jeweler’s box from inside, and shuffled back to her.
And then Helga was holding it in her hands. Her mother’s diamond ring. Annebet’s ring. Annebet had worn it all her life.
It was as beautiful as she remembered. Beautiful in its elegant simplicity.
“Annebet was my family,” Helga told him. “She was my brother’s wife.” She closed the box, handed it to Stanley, who’d settled himself carefully back in bed. “She gave it in turn to her sister’s son—someone I should like to think of as being part of my family, too.”
She wrote in her
notepad. Stanley has Annebet’s diamond ring. “I had a note here,” she said. “I wanted to ask you a question. I don’t remember this, and it’s possible it never happened, but didn’t you say something to me once about Annebet selling an heirloom, a ring, for passage to America?”
“Yeah,” he said. “That was her mother’s ring. It was quite old. My mother was angry with her for selling it because it had been in the family since the time of the Vikings, I think.” He grinned. “Or at least that’s what my mother liked to believe.”
“Tell me about Marte,” Helga said. “And forgive me if I’ve asked this before. Was she happy?”
“She said she was,” Stanley told her. “She first met my father when she was very young, when she and Anna first arrived in Chicago. She met him again when she was eighteen. He was on leave from the Navy. He had three weeks before he had to go back, and it took him only five days to convince her to marry him. She said she never regretted it.”
Helga had to smile. “I, too, married my husband a very short time after we met. I think maybe we both learned a thing or two from watching Hershel and Annebet. We learned never to waste a single moment when it comes to love.”
She sighed as she looked around the room. “Where’s your young lady?”
“She had some business to attend to,” Stanley told her with a patience that told her she’d asked that question before. “I expect her back sometime this afternoon.”
“Is that when you plan to give her Annebet’s ring?”
“Um,” he said.
“Stanley,” she scolded. “What would your mother say?”
He laughed. “She would say, What are you waiting for? A sign from God?”
“What are you waiting for?” Helga said. “A sign from God?”
“I just . . .” He shook his head and laughed again. “You remind me so much of her.”
“So what would you say to her?” Helga asked. “You’d say, Mother . . . what?”
“I’d say, Ma,” Stanley said, “I’m afraid Teri doesn’t know what it’s really like to be married to a man like me, like Dad. I’m afraid that being with me will make her unhappy in the long run.”
Over the Edge Page 41
