If I'd Never Known Your Love

by Georgia Bockoven

  Which meant I wasn't prepared when you told me the truth about yourself and broke my heart. I had no point of reference to understand that kind of pain. I knew without hesitation that my mother would lay down her life for her children. I couldn't conceive her being so self-absorbed that one of us would die as a result of her carelessness. It was impossible to imagine her turning to heroin to ease her pain or that she could pass out and leave something so dangerous within the reach of a four-year-old.

  When your mother killed herself out of guilt, she couldn't have understood what it would do to you, how finding her sitting in a bathtub full of blood would be the way you would remember her forever, and how starkly alone you would be without her and your brother. But then, maybe she thought she was doing you a favor, and that you were better off without her. Maybe it was the only way left for her to tell you that she loved you. All I know for sure is that you wouldn't have moved to Kansas if she hadn't died, and we wouldn't have found each other. When I get angry with her for doing what she did to you and the way she did it, I remind myself of that.

  Did I ever tell you that my father had only known you a couple of months and wanted to adopt you? Somehow he found out your aunt would only let you stay with her as long as the state paid for your keep. I threw a holy fit when I heard him discussing it with my mother. Of course I couldn't just come out and say that I was in love with you, that I put myself to sleep at night planning our wedding, and how awkward it would be to explain to everyone that I was marrying my brother. My mom must have figured it out and clued in my dad, because he never mentioned it again. He did, however, spend a lot of time with us that we could have been spending alone.

  Mrs. Winslow got involved when she discovered you were two years behind where you should have been as a high-school senior. She volunteered to help you catch up, promising to keep your secret as long as you came to her classroom after school every day and made progress. Dad and I pretty much ruined that for you when he made you my chauffeur, leaving you caught between a hunger to learn and a need to belong somewhere.

  I had no idea what I'd done until Mrs. Winslow drew me aside one day and told me she was going to have to go to the principal if you didn't start showing up for her after-school sessions. Of course she assumed

  I knew what she was talking about, and I was smart enough to listen to that little voice in the back of my head telling me to play along.

  That night on the way home I confronted you. I'd convinced myself that we were friends by then and was angry, and more than a little hurt, that you hadn't said anything. You just let me go on messing things up for you even after I'd reached the point I could do a pirouette on my crutches and no more needed help getting on and off the bus than the flies that came on board every day when we dropped Hazel off near the fertilizer plant. As hard as it was to admit, I secretly thought you were a lot more worried about losing your growing friendship with my dad than you were with losing my company.

  You didn't say anything for a couple of miles, then pulled off the road at Branford Creek. We bumped along the rutted dirt road in silence until you found an opening where you could park beside the creek.

  We'd had a dry summer, and the cottonwood leaves had shriveled and dropped prematurely, leaving the trees looking sad and desolate. I saw the same emptiness in your eyes when you turned to me. Until that afternoon I'd lived a white-bread-and-mayonnaise life, never doubting that I was loved, never faced with a decision harder than which dress to buy for the prom.

  Then you told me about your mother and little brother, and I was irrevocably thrust from the innocent, sheltered world my parents had created for me into a world where terrible things happened to good people. I cried and you frowned, breaking my heart all over again. You couldn't understand how I could shed tears over someone I'd never met or how I could grieve for someone I'd known less than a month.

  "There's more," you said reluctantly after I'd finally stopped crying and dried my tears.

  "How could there be?" I said, tears instantly welling in my eyes again.

  "This is different. I really don't care who knows about my mother and brother. If someone thinks I'm nothing but a piece of shit because of them, that's their problem. But this other thing is my problem. You can't tell anyone, Julia."

  "I won't."

  "You have to promise."

  I eagerly nodded. "I do."

  "Are you sure?"

  I crossed my heart and put my finger on the tip of my nose so that my eyes were crossed, too, then grinned. "What more could you ask?"

  "This is serious, Julia. If you tell anyone and they tell the wrong person, I'll be arrested and spend the next ten years of my life in prison."

  C H A P T E R 4

  Five Years Later

  Julia McDonald stared at the black suit she'd packed only moments earlier and wondered if it was too somber. It might be better to go with something lighter, the buttercup-yellow or maybe even the sea-foam green, a color that made her look more confident than she felt. She stared at the closet, contemplating her choices. Before Evan was kidnapped, she hadn't owned a single suit; now she owned ten.

  "Still can't decide, huh?" Shelly said between bites of a banana, uncharacteristically early for school.

  "What do you think of this one?" Julia asked, glancing at her daughter in the mirror, noting she'd changed from the sweater she'd had on earlier to the sweatshirt with UCLA written across the front in six- inch-high letters. Her uncle Fred, the UCLA professor, had sent it for her fifteenth birthday the previous week, innocently insisting he wasn't recruiting, just advertising.

  Shelly studied her mother's reflection."It's okay, I guess."

  "It can't just be okay. It has to be perfect."

  "Then go with the red one."

  "I can't wear red for this."

  "Why not?"

  "It's not serious enough."

  "How can it not be serious when it's in the Colombian flag?"

  "It just seems too happy."

  "Why shouldn't you be happy? Isn't the whole purpose of this thing to convince the Colombian ambassador we think Dad is still alive?"

  "We don't think he's alive," she snapped."And the purpose is to get them to start actively looking for him again."

  "I thought the purpose was to bring Dad home," Shelly snapped back.

  They had been on the verge of an undefined argument all week, Shelly moody, Julia preoccupied, her patience threadbare. "What is your problem? You've been like this for days."

  "Sorry," she said without real regret. "I'll get over it. I always do, don't I?"

  Julia shut the closet door. She had plenty of time to pack after Shelly left for school.

  "I'm sorry, too."

  Sorry for so many things that she'd stopped counting. A third of Shelly's childhood had been consumed in the frustrating, heartbreaking struggle to bring her father home.

  Julia had missed holidays and birthdays, chasing promises that she knew better than to believe but couldn't ignore. "This meeting has me rattled." She offered a smile to go with the apology. "You'd think I'd be used to them by now."

  "Yeah, me, too." She folded the banana skin back onto itself and stuffed it into an empty water glass on the nightstand next to the peach-colored rose Barbara had had freeze-dried and preserved for Julia. After five years it had faded and was showing wear, but had not lost one petal. It was the last thing Julia looked at each night, the memory that put her to sleep.

  Shelly picked up the small, framed photograph beside the lamp, the last one taken of them as a family. They were in the backyard, stiffly posed, waiting for the remote to take their picture. Seconds later they had burst out laughing, Evan grabbing Shelly and Jason around their waists and swinging them in a circle.

  "I look so different." She sat on the corner of the bed. "I'll bet Dad won't even recognize me when he sees me again."

  Feeling a breath-stealing wave of love that Shelly had made the effort to say when and not if, Julia sat next to her and put he
r arm across her daughter's shoulders for a quick hug. In five years Shelly had gone from an awkward ten-year-old with twin ponytails and Chiclets teeth to a young woman who turned the heads of young boys and men old enough to know better.

  "He'll be surprised," Julia said. 'I’m sure it's something he thinks about all the time, but I'm just as sure he has it all wrong."

  "Why?"

  "Your father's never had a very good imagination. He's a born engineer, practical and methodical." She and Evan were the opposites that formed the perfect whole. She was the kite, Evan the tail, both made to function best with the other.

  "I don't remember what Dad's like. . .not really. I have all the pictures in my head that I'm supposed to have, but it's like they're not connected to a real person anymore."

  "Sometimes it feels a little like that for me, too." It was a lie, but one Evan would understand. She remembered everything about him, from the way he felt spooned against her in the morning to the way he walked into a crowded room and searched faces until he found her. And then came his smile—in recognition, in discovery, in love.

  She could easily imagine herself stepping into his arms and know exactly how it would feel, where her head would touch his chin, how he would smell.

  Shelly stared at the photograph. "Jason hasn't changed as much as I have."

  "Not yet. But there are some big changes coming."

  "Did you know he thinks he's getting a beard? 1 caught him looking in the mirror the other day and he tried to convince me there was something growing on his chin. It's so dumb—like having hair on your face makes you special."

  "At twelve it does." She smiled. "At thirty it's a pain in the butt."

  "Do you ever wonder what Dad's like now?"

  Julia started to answer, but Shelly cut her off. "What if he's nothing like he used to be? What if he actually likes Colombia and doesn't want to leave? Would we have to move there?"

  "No one can go through what your father's gone through and not be changed by it. But I can guarantee he's not going to ask us to move."

  "I'm so tired of this. I just want it to be over." Shelly put the photograph back on the nightstand and stood.

  "I know how hard this is on you and Jason."

  "No, you don't," she fired back. "You don't have a clue what it's like for us. You think you do, but you don't."

  "Then tell me."

  "I can't. It would hurt your feelings."

  "I can take it."

  Shelly hesitated. Her lower lip trembled with the effort to hold back tears.

  "Sometimes I think it would be better if they had just shot Daddy instead of kidnapping him. At least then we'd know what happened and we wouldn't have to live like this."

  Julia was torn between outrage and grief. "You don't mean that."

  "I just want us to be like we used to be." A sob caught in her throat.

  Julia took Shelly in her arms. "What we used to be is gone," she said softly. "It's a memory, another life." She leaned back to engage Shelly s eyes. "Now, you want to tell me what brought this on?"

  Shelly dipped her head. "You said you'd be here. You promised. Why do I always have to be second? Why couldn't I be first just this once?"

  When she'd told Shelly she would be there for her first real pick-up-the-phone-and-ask date she'd meant every word. Nothing would get in the way. She tucked an ebony-colored strand of hair behind Shelly's ear. "I thought you were okay with my leaving."

  "You said I could count on you. You promised."

  "I know. I'm sorry.' There was nothing else she could say, nothing Shelly hadn't heard a hundred times before.

  Shelly closed her eyes, squeezing out a lone, last tear. She sat there for several agonizingly long seconds before she took a deep breath and said, "And I'm sorry for what I said about Dad. I didn't mean it."

  "We need to talk about this some more. Maybe when—"

  "Hey, bat breath," Jason shouted from the bottom of the stairs. "Patty just drove that piece of junk of hers into the driveway." The words were laced with envy. It was everything Jason could do not to salivate when he saw Patty's car, a midnight-blue 1965

  Mustang with orange and yellow flames painted across the hood and front fenders courtesy of a grandfather whose all-time favorite movie was American Graffiti.

  Shelly untucked the strand of hair from behind her ear. "Will you still be here when I get home?"

  Julia shook her head. "Remember—I told you my plane leaves at two."

  "I guess I'll see you when you get back, then."

  "I'll call." She always did, at least once a day. "I'm going to want you to tell me all about your date, so don't go to bed until you hear from me."

  Shelly nodded and left, bounding down the stairs. She yelled from the front door,

  "Love you, Mom."

  "I love you, too," Julia called back.

  Julia gathered the banana peel and glass from the nightstand before she went downstairs to look for Jason. She found him standing at the living-room window, peeking through the curtain. "Piece of junk?" she chided."I hope you didn't say that to Patty."

  "You think I'm crazy? She'd make me and Shawn walk to baseball practice."

  "Speaking of walking, shouldn't you be leaving?"

  "Shawn's mom is picking me up. She switched days off, so she's driving us on Mondays and Fridays now."

  "You already told me that, didn't you?"

  "A couple of days ago."

  "Sorry, I forgot."

  He patted her shoulder as he passed. "Yeah, I know. That's what happens when you get old, Mom."

  Julia ignored the taunt. "Take your key in case you get home before Aunt Barbara gets here. She said she had a parent-teacher conference that could run late."

  He stopped and turned to look at her. "Why is Aunt Barbara going to be here?"

  "Washington?" she prompted. "My meeting with the ambassador?"

  "I thought that was next week."

  "That's what happens when you're twelve and don't pay attention."

  He groaned. "I told Tom he could stay over tomorrow night. His mom's having some guy for dinner and he doesn't want to be there."

  Tom was Jason's best friend, their house his refuge for the past year while his parents went through a trial separation that had turned into a messy divorce. "I'll call Aunt Barbara before I leave, but you'll have to check with her when you come home in case she had something else planned."

  "I told him you'd drop us off at the mall Saturday. Could you tell her that, too?"

  "Remind me—when did I start letting you hang out at the mall?"

  He grinned. "Can't blame a guy for trying."

  "Get your stuff. I just heard Shawn's mother pull into the driveway."

  He glanced at the clock on the mantel. "It can't be her. She's never early."

  Julia went to the side window beside the door. "You're right. It's Aunt Barbara."

  Her thick, naturally curly hair drawn back in a ponytail, wearing a corduroy jumper with enormous patch pockets, a knit turtleneck and tennis shoes, Barbara looked closer to sixteen than thirty-five. Short, like their mother, she had to stretch to make five foot two—an asset for a kindergarten teacher but a major frustration for a woman who loved long skirts and tall boots.

  "Shouldn't you be at work?"Julia said, opening the door as Barbara came up the walk.

  "I wanted to give you something. For luck." She came inside. Noticing Jason, she said, "Hey, kiddo, what are you still doing here?"

  "Shawn's mother is picking me up." He glanced at Julia. "Don't forget to ask about Tom."

  "What about Tom?" Barbara asked

  "I told him he could spend the night Saturday," Jason supplied. "But Mom said I had to check with you first."

  "It's okay with me. I like Tom."

  "Thanks." He gave Barbara a quick hug and disappeared down the hallway.

  "Don't forget your key," Julia reminded him.

  "I won't...I'm not the one getting old," he shouted back.

 
Barbara smiled and cocked an eyebrow at her sister. "What's that all about?"

  "He's trying to convince me that I'm becoming senile." She started to close the door and saw Shawn's mother pulling into the driveway. "Jason, they're here."

  "I'm coming." Seconds later Jason bounded down the hallway, made a leap to touch the ceiling, smiled in satisfaction at his success and raced out the door. He called over his shoulder, "Bye, Aunt Barbara. Love you, Mom."

  "Goodbye, Jason," Barbara said.

  "I love you, too," Julia replied, meaning every word. After Evan's kidnapping she'd never said goodbye to her children without telling them that she loved them. Now they were the ones who told her first.

  Barbara put her arm around Julia's waist. "Ah, the pitter-patter of little feet."

  "It's yours to share anytime. You don't have to wait to be asked." Julia waited for the car to leave, waved, then closed the door."Now, what did you bring me?"

  Digging deep into her pocket, Barbara took out a small envelope. "Remember Mom's four-leaf clover?"

  "The one she had at the back door?" Encased in plastic and thumb-tacked to the wall above the light switch, it had hung there as long as Julia could remember.

  "I asked for it when they remodeled the kitchen last summer. I didn't believe she'd actually part with it, but then Dad told her it might help me find a man and she practically insisted I take it. You would crack up at the ways she's found to ask if I've corralled anyone yet. Honest to God, I think she'd be willing to drop her standards to eating and breathing she's so desperate for me to get married again. I called her yesterday and told her I was going to give it to you, and she said—"

  "That it was a sign and that Evan—"

  "Would be home by Valentine's Day. Just know that when he's home, you're to give the thing back to me."

  "Three weeks, huh? I wish you would have thought about this five years ago." For the first two years after Evan was taken, her mother had begun every conversation with the latest positive sign she'd seen that let her know that Evan would be home soon—

  things as wildly varied as discovering a pebble in a bag of split peas to the number of blue cars they passed on the way to church on Sunday. Then she'd simply stopped. Julia had never asked why but had a feeling her father had something to do with it.