For All of Her Life

by Heather Graham

  He watched the sun go all the way down. When he came home at last, she was sitting in the darkness. Stiff, silent. She didn’t speak to him; he didn’t try to speak to her. But he knelt before her and took her into his arms. She suddenly threw her arms around him in turn, sobbing softly. Still no words were exchanged. He carried her into their bedroom. They made love with a furious intensity. Eventually, they slept. Silent, wet tears still streaked her face.

  Keith Duncan received his draft notice the same week. He and Jordan were to report for physicals on the same day. They did so. Jordan had suspected his friend might try the Canada route. But Keith showed up. The two were lined up together in their B.V.D.s as the doctors went by. Keith hacked and wheezed through the physical. He’d never been heavy or even large, but in the few weeks since they had received their notices, he had managed to drop enough weight to appear in sad condition. He was given a deferment.

  “How the hell did you manage that?” Jordan asked him, proclaimed fit as a fiddle himself.

  Keith, his black hair recently down to his shoulders but cut neatly into something close to a buzz for the physical, grinned. “Gotta know the right stuff to take for a history of asthma. I could have helped you out.”

  “Keith, those damned drugs are going to kill you.”

  “Oh, like a bullet or a bomb wouldn’t? We’ve already lost this war.”

  “We haven’t actually lost—”

  “But we can’t win. A few more boys are just going to have to die so that we can pull out with whatever grace is possible. Damn it, Jordan, you shouldn’t be going. You’re almost over the draft age.”

  “Yeah. It looks like it.”

  “It’s stupid, and too damned bad. You’re a married man.”

  “Lots of married men have gone.”

  “You know I’ll look after Kathy for you. I always look out for her anyway. Can’t quite help it. She’s like a sister.”

  “Just like a sister.”

  “We’ll all be waiting for you, Jordan, you know that. We won’t do anything until you come back. Anything at all. We aren’t anything without you, we never have been.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I believe in myself, but no one has the natural talent you do.”

  “You put us together. You are Blue Heron.”

  “Not without you and Kathy.”

  “We’ll wait.”

  Every word Keith said to him was spoken as a good friend. But Jordan was angry. He didn’t know why. Keith didn’t want to go, he’d known a way out. Jordan didn’t want to go either, and he wondered if he wasn’t a fool.

  They had a huge party right before he left for boot camp. Kathy kept up a good front for it. When other friends had gone home, Blue Heron stayed behind. They seemed an incredibly tightly knit group of friends. Kathy, Keith, him. Derrick and Judy Flanaghan. Larry Haley with his present light of love—an exotic dancer at the time, if he remembered right—Shelley Thompson there with Miles Reeves, arm in arm, those two the best of friends, so critical of one another’s love lives that they found fault with each other’s dates.

  They sat around all night with wine and Jack Black. Finally Judy made everyone leave, reminding them that Kathy and Jordan needed some time alone before the dawn broke and it was time for Jordan to go. Something very sad by Jim Croce was playing on the stereo. When the last of them had gone, hugging Jordan one by one, Kathy still kept up a good front. They never slept. They held one another, made love, held one another again. She didn’t cry until he was actually turning away, and then she shed silent tears, the kind that just swept down her cheeks.

  He made friends in boot camp quickly—he soon earned something of a reputation for himself. His drill sergeant was a hard worker, a good man. Jordan had never felt more physically fit; he knew they were run ragged because that was the only way to train a man to stay alive once he hit the front lines.

  And he did hit them. Right after boot camp he was given a nine-month tour of duty. He was from Florida. He should have been accustomed to mosquitoes and heat and humidity, and he’d seen enough of the war on the nightly news. But nothing had prepared him for the realities of jungle warfare in Vietnam—the rain, the humidity, the heat, the sheer brutality and carnage there. Battle itself was so terrible it was difficult to imagine that men created it. Sometimes it was impersonal, bombs falling, bursting into walls of flame, decimating earth and flesh. Sometimes it was far more intimate, one man staring at another, firing a gun, hearing the rat-tat-tat, knowing it tore through flesh, that blood erupted, and yet finding that so much better than feeling steel within his own flesh, crushing blood and bone.

  The waiting, the endless days, could be as bad as battle. The heat by day, the chill by night. The constant dampness. Days of endless rain. Men lived recklessly, fearing death and dismemberment. Men wrote home, listened to music, popped uppers and downers, smoked hashish. They saw their comrades go by, armless, legless, completely limbless... blinded... dead. They smoked more hashish. They wrote letters home, and received letters from home.

  Friends wrote, his folks wrote, Kathy wrote. Almost daily. Keith wrote, too.

  Had dinner with Kathy last night. She’s doing welly hanging in there.

  Kathy’s letters included Keith as well.

  Keith stopped by for coffee, brought some flowers. He’s really a sweetheart, thinking of little things to help me keep my mind off the fact that you’re so far away.

  Four months into his stay, Jordan watched three of his friends explode when a shell hit. They could have run in time. They didn’t. He screamed their names. He didn’t know what they’d been on at the time; he only knew it had slowed them down so badly they couldn’t move when the attack came.

  A month later, he finally received a week’s R & R with his wife. He met Kathy in Hawaii. Nothing had been as brutal as the war, and nothing was as sweet—as good—as this meeting. The first days he couldn’t talk, all he wanted to do was hold her, smell her, make love to her, wake up beside her, and hold her some more. The last days he talked. Talked and talked, told her what he saw, what he felt, how he hurt, how he was afraid. He’d never considered anything so necessary as her love. She listened, she refreshed him, she took all his hunger and pain, she somehow managed to give him a sense that life could be beautiful as well. He had feared it would be harder to go back once he had seen her. It was nearly impossible to draw away from her, yet it was better that he had been with her. There was only a slight strangeness about their meeting, and that was her casual reference to Keith. Keith was always around. Jordan had wanted to take her words at face value, to be glad his friend was watching out for his wife. He’d wanted Keith to fall off the face of the earth.

  He had ninety days to go, then eighty, then sixty. Kathy wrote that she was pregnant. Fifty days, forty. He was convinced that he would not be killed—he would not allow himself to be killed.

  Finally, he went home. And he received his honorable discharge from the service. He’d survived the nightmare. Life was good again. And if he had any doubts about his wife and his best friend, he wisely managed to keep them deeply hidden. He was grateful in the end that they had never surfaced, for when Alex was born, she was in his image. Her eyes were never blue; they were green. Her hair was sandy, and she was born with a full head of it. She never had the wrinkled-old-man appearance of many a newborn, but from the moment she was slipped into his arms from the doctor’s own—since she was only a minute old—she had looked just like him.

  Still, it wasn’t long after his return and the birth of his daughter that he began to notice things had changed in his absence. He found a pipe on the porch. It was Keith’s. The nickel bags of pot were Keith’s. He knew damned well that a few joints hadn’t led his friends in Nam to their deaths, but he was furious. Maybe irrationally so, as Kathy implied, and maybe not. He had a baby; it was his house. They burst into an explosive argument. He was even angrier because she seemed to think he had come home traumatized. It wasn’t that. All his life he had seen th
e pitfalls, and he had been determined that they wouldn’t fall into them. Drugs were prevalent, their use casual, popular. Maybe the dark experience of Vietnam had created the ambivalence in him. He’d just seen too much, and he didn’t want it to happen to them. Especially not with the baby.

  They got into a shouting match. Afraid of his anger at her, Jordan just stopped speaking. When he heard Alex crying, he went to the baby, picked her up and wrapped her in a soft blanket, and started from the house. Frightened, in tears, Kathy came after him. She swore she hadn’t taken anything herself, she’d have never risked it, not with a baby. He knew she was telling the truth, and the argument ended with Alex sweetly sleeping again, their tempest channeled into passion. He was home; Keith needn’t spend so much time at their house. They were rehearsing again, working again. And, suddenly, they were becoming a tremendous success.

  Time began to pass. Good years, tragic years. Bren was born, another perfect, beautiful baby. But the year after, they lost Kathy’s father to a heart attack, and three years later Jordan’s mom passed away from cancer. Blue Heron grew close, drifted apart. They had megabits, achieved their first platinum album. They fought, they quarreled, but they succeeded. He and Kathy bought the house on Star Island. The perfect family home. A monument to the triumph they had fought so hard for, had planned so carefully to achieve.

  And then...

  He started to toss and turn in his sleep. Then had come the sessions when Keith hadn’t shown up—the interviews when he had walked in—obviously stoned. Jordan’s arguments with Keith. Shelley subtly standing up to him. Miles claiming he didn’t give a damn. Judy insisting Keith had to go, and Keith finding Kathy everywhere, pouring his heart out to her, using her friendship. He’d even found Keith with Kathy in his own bedroom once, trying to explain where he’d been when they’d had an important interview.

  That had probably been the worst argument ever. Jordan had nearly thrown Keith out by the hair. Then Jordan and Kathy had fought, and Kathy had called up Shelley and left the house with her and the girls. Keith had come to Jordan, apologetic, desperate, telling him that he needed what the drugs gave him, that he couldn’t quit. That Kathy understood him. Knew him in a way Jordan did not.

  It had been a horrible day.

  He flipped over, still asleep, trying to waken himself. He didn’t want to live the end over again. The night he had stood at the window, staring out at the pool. Alone. Seeing the one who had been there. The woman running, moving with fleet, sure grace in the moonlight across the patio. Heading toward the guest house, where Keith was staying. Silent in the night, long hair flowing behind her...

  Then the fire.

  Again, oh, God, the fire. Burning. Searing. Flaring to heaven. Bearing them all straight down into hell...

  Twelve

  HER DREAM TOOK PLACE in a haze. Aware that she dreamed, she knew the course the dream would take, yet she seemed powerless to stop it. The haze would eventually become smoke, yet now it was like a fog settled over the people, the house, the events, almost as if some strange ground mist had slowly crept in from the water, embracing them all. She stood in the left-wing studio by the windows, as she had then, only now she could see the fog rolling in, and knew what was coming. She could see Derrick striking low, deep chords on his bass. Larry moving his fingers over the keyboards. The sounds were discordant, strange, harsh. No one spoke until Jordan exploded with a curse, throwing his hands up into the air.

  “I can’t keep doing this. We should just call the band quits. Everybody start over.”

  Judy, magazine in hand, seated in a chair across from the elevation supporting the players, the instruments and the sound system, looked up. “Damn it, Jordan, it’s just Keith. Get rid of Keith. You warned him that he’s going to be out, make him be out.”

  “Why don’t you leave this to Jordan and Keith?” Shelley suggested to her. “This is really between them.”

  “Why should it be?” Judy demanded. “The rest of us suffer all the time!”

  “Because it’s really their band. We all came after.”

  “Their band? Their band?” Larry snapped, incredulous. “We’ve all got over a decade in this now, too. This is a decision we all have to make.”

  “Why don’t we give this just a few more minutes?” Kathy heard herself suggest. “We decided to spend the time here together, to really concentrate on the new material, and we knew if we were all under one roof and working in the studio, we couldn’t possibly be too late.”

  “Kathy,” Jordan said, looking at her moodily, “he’s not your child; you can’t keep defending him.”

  “He may need some real help.”

  Judy snorted. “He needs a kick in the ass.”

  “It would be nice if you just weren’t so self-righteous, Judy,” Shelley suggested sweetly.

  “Lay off her, Shell,” Derrick said, defending his wife. But Judy didn’t need defending.

  “The fact that you do drugs—and sleep with Keith—does not make me self-righteous,” she informed Shelley.

  “I’m not married. Where I sleep is my own business,” Shelley returned, her eyes narrowed.

  “Just what is that supposed to mean?” Judy challenged.

  “It means where I sleep is my own business,” Shelley repeated.

  “Guys, please!” Miles said. “Listen, this is the main reason his lateness is a problem—we sit here and argue like two-year-olds while we wait. Come on. We’re friends here, right? We create something beautiful together.”

  “Miles, that’s so good and kindhearted, I think I’m going to puke!” Shelley said, but she was laughing, her eyes warm for Miles. He grinned back, happy at any time to have obliged her.

  “We need Keith,” Larry said. “He and Jordan are the real talents here.”

  “Oh, yeah, and the rest of you are just a bunch of assholes, hmmm?” Judy said sweetly.

  Miles, even tempered no matter what, suddenly barked at Judy. “You just spent half the day with Keith. Maybe if you’d left him alone, he’d be here now.”

  Derrick Flanaghan’s head shot up. He frowned. “What were you doing with Keith?”

  Judy hesitated just a second. “Giving him a good lecture on the virtues of punctuality. Apparently, he wasn’t listening.”

  “’Cause you took too much of his time giving him the lecture,” Larry said dryly.

  Shelley, especially attractive that day in form hugging jeans and a tank top, her hair whisked up in a high ponytail, set down her violin. “Jordan, maybe this is really innocent. Maybe he’s fallen asleep.”

  “You know, that could be. He was up really late last night, working on music for that new sheet of lyrics Kathy gave him,” Miles said. “Kathy, what was he doing when you left him?”

  “When I left him?” Kathy said blankly. Everyone’s eyes were on her. She sensed them—Jordan’s the most. He had the ability to make her feel he was staring right through her. “I wasn’t with him today at all.”

  “But I saw—” Miles began. “Never mind,” he said quickly. “I must have been wrong.”

  “We need to split,” Jordan said.

  He was still staring at Kathy. Was he talking about the band or the two of them?

  Judy swore. “Split! We’re making a fortune. We’re on the top of the charts. Jordan, I know you and Keith are at odds, but other people can play drums!”

  “Not like Keith,” Kathy said evenly, staring at her husband, defying him to find anything wrong in her defense of their mutual friend.

  “So he’s a pain in the butt. But he can play drums, we are making the big bucks, and I do kinda like this job!” Larry said, trying to be light, trying to make them smile.

  But no one did. Derrick was staring at Judy, who was looking as if she’d like to slit Shelley’s throat. Shelley seemed to want to strangle Larry. Kathy could still feel both Miles and her husband watching her, Miles with a worried curiosity, her husband with something more.

  At that moment, the studio door opened. Ke
ith, oblivious to the rancor displayed in his absence, walked in with a broad smile and sheaves of paper for all of them. “Jordan, I think I’ve got it! This song is a hit, number one on the charts, I swear it, it’s all fallen in just right. I tried changing the breaks the way you said when we were working last night, and it’s made all the difference. Anybody have any objections to working on this first? Kathy, these are great lyrics, wonderful!” He walked to her, took her head in his hands, and kissed her on both cheeks. “We’re not ready to record, but we could introduce this piece tonight at the press party. Shall we work on it? Are there any objections?”

  A strained silence greeted his words. “No objections,” Jordan said. Kathy knew he was staring at Keith, relieved that he was clean and sober. Jordan didn’t want his friend to leave the band. He would rather have no band. She wondered if the others realized that. It had been Jordan and Keith from the start. Jordan sometimes seemed to hate Keith, but he loved him, too.

  The two were head to head then, poring over the music. Jordan glanced up at her suddenly, staring at her again. Keith started to give Larry special instructions for the keyboards, and Larry tested out what he was saying. Instruments screeched as they were tuned.

  The fog kept rolling in. Darkness was falling. Because night was coming...

  She knew she was dreaming and she commanded herself to wake up. She didn’t want to live through any more of that night. She forced herself to try to open her eyes. It was nearly ten years later. She was in her old room, Jordan’s, and she didn’t really belong here, no matter how right or comfortable it was, and like the biggest fool in the entire world, she’d slept with her ex-husband.

  Her eyes opened. The room remained in darkness, except for the shaft of light coming from the bathroom, dimmed now, as if it had grown narrower. Shadows filled the room. Shadows of different lengths and sizes. Shadows the size of...

  A man.

  “Who is it?” she gasped out, panic seizing her as she realized that yes, someone was there. Someone silently standing over her as she slept. There was something so unnerving about it that a slow terror crept into her. “Who is it?” she repeated. She wanted to shout, but she had just come forth from a dream, and as in nightmares, when it was time to scream, she was so frightened she couldn’t quite dredge up the voice she wanted.