Single with Children

by Arlene James

  Laura was sitting on the sofa, her legs folded beneath her, poring over the family photo albums. Adam felt a quickening that he could only have called interest. “Hello,” he said, stopping in the middle of the floor to sip his brandy. She was amazingly attractive, her long blond hair swept onto a shoulder bared by the droop of the wide collar of her pale yellow nubbly-knit sweater. The slender length of her legs was not diminished either by her position or by the thick black leggings she wore. Likewise, heavy wool socks in no way disguised the delicate turn of her ankles or the petite perfection of her feet. Her graceful hands abandoned the book to her lap. She sat upright and folded long arms beneath breasts almost too ample for her slender frame. When she turned her face up to him, his first thought was that not even anger could make her seem less than pretty. Anger. The realization was secondary, but correct nonetheless.

  She dropped her gaze once more to the pair of photo albums overlapping on her thighs. “You aren’t in any of the pictures,” she said. Her oddly husky voice took on a hint of challenge. “Have you noticed that you aren’t in any of the pictures?”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about, or why it affected him as it did. He only knew that something clutched at his heart, sending rills of panic surging through him. Instinctively he stepped into the firm, indifferent role that had served him so well in the military. “I don’t recall giving you permission to go through my family keepsakes.”

  The gaze she jerked up at him was first wide with shock, then lax with contrition, and finally narrow with hurt. She closed the books gently, the glossy gold-embossed navy blue one first, then the ragged hemp-colored one. “My apologies,” she muttered softly, sliding the books onto the coffee table. “I didn’t think you’d mind.” She got swiftly to her feet and weaved her way past the table, a displaced footstool and him. He couldn’t help noticing that, though her grace rivaled that of a ballet dancer, she managed to stub her toe twice.

  His indifference fled, and he didn’t have time to question why. He only knew that he didn’t want her to go, and his body reacted to that desire. Stepping back and to the side and throwing out an arm, he managed to block her path and catch her against him at the same time.

  “I, um, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bark. It…it’s been a long day.”

  She bowed her head, standing very still in the curve of his arm. “Yes, I know.” The gaze she lifted to him this time glittered with accusation. “They waited until after nine o’clock.”

  They? His children, of course, though why they would bother to wait up for him, of all people, was pure mystery. Most of the time, they ignored everything about him, including his commands. He dropped his arm, put his head back and swallowed his brandy in one hard gulp that burned all the way down and hit his belly with the force of a fist. He inhaled cooling air through his mouth, bit down on the fiery aftertaste and sighed with satisfaction. He immediately felt better. “Suppose you tell me what they wanted,” he said smoothly, loosening his tie with one hand. Suddenly her anger was back. It leaped like bolts of clear blue lightning in bright green eyes.

  “They wanted their father!” she told him sharply. “We built a snow castle in the front yard today, and they wanted to be told what an amazing structure they’d made, what brilliant children they are.”

  “A snow castle,” he repeated dully. He hadn’t noticed. He stepped over to his chair and sank down upon it, all at once weary beyond bearing. “I’ll tell them in the morning,” he said, pressing the brandy snifter to the ache beginning between his eyes.

  Laura shook her head slowly from side to side, but he was too tried to ask what it was all about. This time, when she muttered, “Good night,” and stalked away, he let her go.

  After a while, the pounding in his head seemed to lessen, and he sat forward, trying to work up the energy to get up and go to bed. His gaze fell on the photo albums on the table. Leaning far forward, he could just reach them. He pulled them into his lap, stacking one on top of the other. He ran a hand over the ragged cover of the first and wondered again why his grandmother had left him this shabby piece of memorabilia in her will. You could never tell about Kate. Her mind had seemed to work in several arenas at once, weighing seemingly unrelated matters and reaching often amazing conclusions. He missed her. He was surprised at how much he could miss her after all those years away in the military.

  What were you doing, Kate, flying off to the Amazon alone, leaving your family to fend for themselves? He had the lowering feeling that he wasn’t doing too well on that score himself. After eighteen months, his children seemed hardly to know him, and he was still drifting, still looking for an anchor.

  Slowly he opened the cover of the photo album and looked once more upon his parents’ wedding picture. They had been the perfect couple, the heir apparent and the unspoiled beauty. It was difficult to think of them apart now, despite the reality of their separation, and yet, when he thought of home and his youth, he thought of his mother and her apologetic explanations for his father’s continual absence.

  “He has the whole weight of the family business on his shoulders,” she would tell him. “So many are dependent on him. He’s doing the best he can.”

  He thumbed through the photos, watching himself grow from infant to toddler to mischief-maker to rebel to man. Here were the hallmarks of his life—first steps, birthday parties, eighth-grade graduation, the football championship, hockey play-offs, proms. In these pictures the family grew, too, from first and only son, to Caroline, then Natalie, and finally the twins, in precise two-year intervals.

  Laura was wrong. He was in nearly every one of these pictures. The only person missing here was, as always, his father. Who did that woman think she was, scolding him for not coming home in time to compliment his kids on a silly snow castle? He came home, didn’t he? When they needed him, he was here, wasn’t he? He was doing his level best, and that ought to count for something. Shouldn’t it? He pushed the photo albums back onto the table and set the brandy snifter on top of them. Then he got to his feet and dragged himself to his bed. He never even opened the second album, the pictorial journal—navy blue, leather-bound, embossed in gold—so painstakingly put together by his late wife, the one that chronicled the years of his own young family’s lives—the one from which he was missing.

  Four

  She expected him to shout at her, or at least to tell her to mind her own business. Instead, he came in to breakfast all smiles. His only reference to the evening before was a pointed glance in her direction before he heaped lavish praise on the snow castle on his front lawn. To Laura’s dismay, his children merely traded looks among themselves before the twins followed Wendy’s lead and hunched over their cereal bowls in damning silence. An obviously crestfallen Adam sat at the table and erected the dreaded newspaper barrier before him. Laura got up and poured him a cup of coffee, then pulled a toasted English muffin and a bowl of creamed wheat from the oven to set before him. He smiled distractedly, murmured his thanks, and went back to his paper. The children finished their breakfast and were herded from the room by Laura. She cast a last wistful look at Adam, shook her head in frustration and followed her charges through the door. He left before she could get the children’s clothing laid out and return to him.

  That became the pattern for mornings in the Fortune household. Adam was always last to the table. He and the children paid only nominal attention to one another, and despite Laura’s best efforts, he always left without saying goodbye. His saving grace was that he regularly came home early to share dinner with his children, and with Laura’s calm direction, the family had begun to evolve their own good-night ritual.

  It wasn’t much to brag about initially. She merely marched the children past him, one by one, for a solemn good-night. Before long, however, he was leaning forward to give clumsy pats on the shoulder, and the children, Wendy first, were tentatively reaching out to him for more, and now they were actually hugging. Laura eagerly awaited the evening when one or the othe
r of them would pucker up and the kissing would begin. It would only be a small step on a long road to wellness and normalcy for this family, but Laura felt that it would be a very important step.

  Sometimes she told herself that if she could only stay until she saw that first good-night kiss between father and child, she would be content, but the truth was that she was more content at the moment than she had been in a very, very long time—except for those instances of sheer terror when she thought about what would happen if Doyal found her here. She never intended to actually contemplate such hideous thoughts, but on occasion they took her unawares.

  Late at night, while she lay in her bed and pondered the day to come, plotting games and treats and subtle teachings, Doyal would flash into her head, his ruggedly handsome face smiling, then sneering, and finally bearing down on her with rage distorting every feature. She would feel his hands around her throat and know that she was going to die, and then, in her mind’s eye, she would see Wendy or one of the boys charge at him, tiny fists flailing. She would sit up straight and shake herself out of it before she could form that last grotesque picture, but it was always there in the back of her mind, the specter of a small body collapsed in trauma. She couldn’t let that happen. She wouldn’t let that happen. She couldn’t just walk out and leave Adam and the children in the lurch, but she had to leave before Doyal found her. She would leave before Doyal found her. She comforted herself with that thought. It became her litany, her mantra. She would go before it was too late—just not yet.

  The terror was never far below the surface, however. She would wake in the black hours of morning, drenched in sweat and trembling with fear and disgust, having witnessed again the daming scene that had confirmed Doyal’s guilt. She could almost laugh, had she not feared that hysteria would overwhelm bitterness as she thought of how she’d followed Doyal that day over seven months ago in a jealous pique, believing that he was seeing another woman, only to find that his destination was a run-down house on the rough side of town. She had watched in horror, concealed by a Dumpster and a tree, as a wide spectrum of humanity breezed in and stumbled out of that old house. Some of them hadn’t come out for hours. Some of them had come out right away, the house barely behind them before they were gobbling their pills, snorting their powders or jabbing needles into their veins. Most of them had been so desperate that they ignored the gun brandished by Doyal’s “friend” Calvin, whom Laura now realized was nothing more than an armed goon. She had stumbled away from that scene to vomit, knowing now that the money showered so generously on her by her first serious boyfriend was not the result of his enigmatic investments in the stock market, but of the drug trade that crippled whole neighborhoods and shattered so many lives.

  Her mistake had been in confronting him. When she demanded to know how he could live with himself, he had laughed at her naiveté. Still, she had not understood her situation until she proceeded with the grand exit she had planned. He had grabbed her and vowed that she was going nowhere. He was not through with her, he had said, and when he was, he would make sure that she could never tell what she knew about him and his “business.” Angry and outraged, she had demanded her release, and he had beaten her senseless. Afterward, he had sworn that she would never be free of him. No one, not even the police, could protect her, for if she dared implicate him, he vowed that both he and Calvin would swear that she, too, was involved.

  Going to the police seemed impossible; yet she had known that the worse thing she could do was to stay. Fleeing might result in instant death at any unguarded moment, but staying would have meant dying by inches. She had chosen the former. It had taken three weeks of hell, and another, even worse beating, before she was able to slip away. He had assumed that she was too badly injured to run and briefly left her unattended. She had literally crawled out the window and down the ivy lattice of their second-story apartment with nothing more than the clothes on her back and a wallet with less than a hundred dollars in it.

  She had been running ever since, from city to city, town to town, state to state, for more than six months. Twice he’d nearly caught her—the last time over five months ago—but in all her dreaming, asleep and awake, she had never dared to entertain the fantasy that he might have given up, that he wouldn’t come for her. The guarantee that he would come, the certainty that she must go before that could happen, was all that gave her hope of seeing tomorrow. But beyond the next day she dared not look with more than longing.

  That was exactly what she was doing, looking at the future and longing for a place in it, when Adam’s voice took her completely unawares.

  “Penny for your thoughts.”

  She nearly leaped up onto the kitchen counter. Her heart was beating wildly, even as she placed the voice and turned to face him. It was late. The children were in bed. The evening news was over, and she had delayed turning in herself only long enough to make a hot cup of cocoa to sip on her way. Adam had disappeared into other parts of the house as soon as the children went to their beds, saying that he had some material to read before an appointment the next day. That was the first thing that came to mind.

  “You finished your reading,” she said lightly, ashamed of her reaction, her fear, of even having known a man like Doyal Moody.

  Adam rubbed his hand over his head. “Not really. I just got incredibly bored with it. I don’t think insurance is for me.”

  “No? Well, you’ll find something,” she told him offhandedly.

  He shook his head, his golden eyes dull with worry. “I don’t know. I…”

  She could tell he wanted to talk, and the idea that he had sought her out to do so was flattering in a way she hadn’t expected. She took another cup from the cabinet and reached for the cocoa mix. “Sit down. I’ll make you a cup.”

  He nodded with poorly disguised relief and pulled out a chair at the kitchen table. She joined him a minute later, and they sat in companionable silence for a bit, sipping and stirring cocoa. Finally she thought to ask, “What is it you want to do, Adam? Have you given it any thought?”

  It was as if she’d struck at the root of his frustration. He pushed his cup away and ran his hands over his hair, sighing deeply. “I don’t know. I feel like I’m stumbling around in the dark, trying one door after another, but none will open for me! I’ve never known anything but the military. Without that, I don’t quite know who I am.”

  Laura understood how he felt. She said, “It must have been difficult to give up your career.”

  He folded his arms and perched his chin on them. “It’s so blessedly simple in the army. Here is the day’s objective. Here are the rules. You’ve had your training. You know your role. Now go and do it.” He turned his face down, sucked in a deep breath and straightened, leaning back in his chair. “These days, I know my objective, but that’s where it ends. There are no rules, and no training can prepare you for a role without definition. I’m lost! I’m trapped in the dark, where the only door I know will open for me is the one that I came through, but I can’t go back.”

  Laura trailed a finger around the rim of her cup, choosing her words carefully. “It’s not the children’s fault that they need you, Adam.”

  He closed his eyes, but not quickly enough to hide the flash of anger in them. “I know that. Don’t you think I know that? It’s just— If only Diana hadn’t been in that awful accident!”

  Laura clamped a hand over his wrist, ignoring the intense awareness that she seemed always to feel in his presence. “Adam, don’t you see that your children have always needed you? That didn’t change when Diana died. You just couldn’t ignore it any longer.”

  “It wasn’t all me, you know!” he lashed out. “That was the way Diana wanted it.” He pulled free and laid his hands palms up on the tabletop, beseeching her for understanding. “At first, she went wherever I was sent, but she never liked that life-style. She hated military housing. Then, when Wendy was about a year old, I was called into action, so I brought Diana and the baby here to my fam
ily, and she liked being a Fortune.” He laughed mirthlessly. “I know the name means nothing to you, but you’re a minority of one in that regard.”

  “I’m not dense,” Laura told him defensively. “I know now who the Fortunes are. I just don’t see what that had to do with it.”

  His smile was cold and self-deprecating. “To Diana,” he said softly, “being a Fortune became more important than being my wife. When my tour was over, she informed me that she was staying here. I’d drawn another overseas assignment, and I knew how she hated that, so I agreed, thinking that if I got the overseas duty out of the way, she and Wendy would join me when I came stateside. But she wasn’t interested in any place but here. She said that this was where Fortunes belonged, and this was where she meant to be. Then the boys came along, and she built this house, and every time I mentioned taking them with me, she would say that their home was here, with the family. I finally realized that she had no intention of ever living anywhere else.” He shrugged. “I considered divorce, actually, but by that time our lives were so separate that there didn’t seem any point in it. So I came when I could, and if Diana was ever unhappy with the arrangement, she never let on. In fact, I think the distance was all that kept the marriage intact. If you want to know the truth, by the end of every leave we were always carping and snapping at one another over every little thing.” He rubbed his hands over his face. “I don’t know…maybe if I’d given it up sooner…but she never asked that of me. Not once.”

  Laura wasn’t aware of having reached out to him again, but somehow her hand wound up in his, and they were both looking at it, staring as if neither of them had ever seen two hands clasped together on a tabletop before. She had to search for her voice, and when she found it, it was nothing more than a husky shadow of itself. “Adam, I didn’t know. B-but however it happened, your children have missed you terribly.”

  He chuckled. It was not a happy sound. “They miss their mother, Laura. Quite frankly, I think you fill that need a lot better than I do. Undoubtedly they’re more fond of you than they are of me.”