Always Box Set

by Ward, Susan

  “Father of my children.”

  I pressed hers to my chest.

  “Keeper of my heart.”

  She surrounded me with her arms.

  “Keeper of me.”

  Thirty-Five

  In November our daughter was born and we named her Chrissie. Well, I called her that. Lena put on the birth certificate Christian Maris Parker, a name appropriate for a concert musician, and then she chided me not to foul up this baby’s name the way I had Sammy’s.

  I wasn’t hot on the name Maris, and I told Lena that. And yeah, I gave in—not just because what Lena wanted Lena got from me, but because my wife explain it was Latin and it meant “from the sea.” She wanted our daughter always to know where she was from and never to leave us.

  That worked for me, but the other part, not giving her a nickname, heck, couldn’t be helped because the kid looked like a Chrissie to me with her golden curls and bright blue eyes, the exact image of me.

  When Lena—annoyed—said every time I called her Chrissie it made her think of the girls in a Sandra Dee movie, I knew it was perfect.

  After eight years of turbulent marriage and five years of sober marriage, those were the kinds of things we bickered about. The pet names I gave the children, not letting Sammy play guitar in a band yet, and not taking off to the beach with Chrissie so she could ditch her cello lessons with Lena.

  That last one was the fiercest of our regular arguments, because Lena was still annoyed that Sammy ditched the cello and picked up a guitar. I tried to explain it, but that didn’t work. It only made her more annoyed when I told her to give it a rest, that she wasn’t changing it because, hell, he was fifteen and doing it to get girls.

  Sammy dating—that was one Lena and I agreed on. It wasn’t good how the girls chased him or the guys that gravitated to him from that. He was growing up too fast, a touch too devil-may-care, and that one worried me more than Lena because the kid reminded me of me.

  But overall our life was good.

  Damn near perfect.

  As I lounged around the pool on a sunny October day I wouldn’t have changed anything.

  “Come on, love, give me a single word and you’ll have my heart forever,” Vincent Delmo cajoled, and both Liam and I busted up when Chrissie ran and climbed onto my lap, tucking her face into my chest.

  I kissed her golden curls. “Good girl. You stay silent as long as you want. In this case perfect, because you are never marrying a musician.”

  She peeked up at me with her overly sensitive blue eyes, and I smiled.

  “Especially not him,” Liam said. “If you’d have spoken, Chrissie, Uncle Liam would have had to show him the door.”

  I laughed since Liam had done nothing but give Vincent shit since I’d brought him home with me, and the kid wasn’t used to it since he was the hottest new thing in the music industry.

  Vincent relaxed back in his chair. “You have a wonderful family, Jack. I almost don’t want to leave tomorrow.”

  I patted his thigh and held up my hand, palm to earth, in a steady gesture. “Five years for me. Ten years for Liam. You’ve been sober now four months, Vinny. Leaving here isn’t going to change that. You can do anything you want. Be anything you want. Have anything you want now. Sobriety expands your universe, it doesn’t shrink it.”

  Vincent’s eyes clouded up and then he grinned. “I think I just want to figure out how to make your daughter like me and stay here.”

  I grinned. “Not happening. Chrissie knows her own mind, and like I said, no musicians for her, not ever.”

  “Jack!”

  I set Chrissie on her feet and tapped her bottom. “Go play.”

  As I went toward the house, Liam jeered, “She calls, you still jump.”

  “Yep. Only question is how high she wants me to.”

  Lena was in our bedroom by the time I caught up to her. She pointed at a small stack of clothes next to her suitcase. “I can’t get those in and close it. Can you do it for me, Jack?”

  I slipped my arms around her waist, kissed her on the back of the neck, and smiled at what was on the bed. “Those are new. Hiking boots. Overalls. You’ve decided to take off upstate for alone time with me when I hit New York.”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t decided, but you made alone time and fall color sound so good, I’m considering going camping like you want to.”

  I turned her in my arms and took her with me down on the bed. “Mama wants to get nasty in nature with Jack.”

  A husky laugh escaped her lips as I kissed my way down her neck. “Don’t call me Mama.”

  “Never again,” I promised as I unbuttoned her shirt. “Tell me we’re going. Give me something to look forward to the month before the kids and I join you.”

  I was running my tongue across the rise of her breast and nearly had her shirt off when I heard a squeak. Turning my face, I spotted Chrissie spying on us from behind the door.

  “Chrissie, one step back and close the door. Daddy wants to make out with Mommy.”

  “Jack,” Lena chided, scrambling from my arms. She rolled her eyes at me as she pulled her shirt in place and hurried to Chrissie.

  “Ignore Daddy. He’s just being frustrating today.”

  I put her stuff into her suitcases since I knew it wasn’t happening now that one of the kids had interrupted us. “You mean frustrated. Daddy is being frustrated today.”

  Lena took Chrissie’s hand and started to leave the bedroom.

  “Whatever happened to all a baby needs to know of life is that their parents love? I liked that philosophy.”

  She looked over her shoulder, lifting her brows. “Our son became a teenager. Just like his father.”

  Laughing, I sat on her suitcase and snapped it shut.

  I found her in the kitchen, alone, adding more things to her Jack Remember list.

  “What time is the car coming to take you to the airport?” I asked.

  “Four. How long is Vincent staying?”

  I could tell she didn’t like him. “He leaves in the morning. I’m sorry I brought him home without asking first.”

  She gnawed on her pencil, studying her list. “I’m used to it. And if it takes the Vincents of this world to keep you sober, you don’t have to ask.”

  I came up behind her, easing her backside into my groin. Three hours before the car. I could still get her into bed. “It doesn’t take guys like Vincent to keep me sober. It affirms how lucky I am.”

  She swatted at my hand on her hip. “Still fast on your feet with a charming line, but I am not going back to bed with you. I’ve got too much to do with the kids before I leave.”

  I turned her in my arms, kissed her and then pouted. “Fine, Mama, go organize your universe.”

  She shook her head and hurried out of the room.

  The kids and I saw her off for New York, and the next morning we took Vincent Delmo to the airport. Then we settled in for thirty days home alone without Lena, which pretty much meant we did everything our way and only pretended to follow her list.

  Two weeks later, we’d just returned to the house after a morning of sailing when the phone rang.

  “Hello?”

  “Jack? It’s Yuri.”

  I frowned—he never called me.

  “What’s going on? Everything’s all right isn’t it?”

  “I’m at the hospital with Lena. She collapsed during rehearsal last week. She asked me not to call you, but I think you should come. They’ve been running tests on her. Lots of tests. She says it’s nothing, but she looks worried—”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I said, my insides growing cold even though I didn’t know anything yet.

  I called Patty to watch the kids and caught the next flight out of Santa Barbara. When I stepped into Lena’s room, my heart stopped. She looked pale, more fragile than I’d ever seen her, and instinct warned this wasn’t nothing.

  I took her hand and k
issed it. “Hey, doll. What’s going on? Yuri says you’ve been here a week. Why didn’t you call me?”

  Her eyes filled up with tears, and I banked my questions, holding her tightly against me. “It’s going to be all right, sweetheart. Whatever it is, we’ll get through it together.”

  Those enormous brown eyes stared up at me. “They removed a tumor from here.” She gestured to the bandages on her armpit. “It’s cancer, Jack. They want me to start treatment now.”

  “Oh, baby, then we start treatment now.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want chemotherapy. It makes you ill and ugly and you die anyway. If I’m going to die I don’t want to die ill.”

  My throat convulsed. How did we get from cancer to her dying in a single breath? No, no, no. She was just afraid.

  “Stop it,” I said, brushing the tears from her cheeks. “I won’t hear you say things like that. You’re going to do whatever the doctors tell you to do, Lena. Nothing is ever taking you from me.”

  But reality hit me in the face when I went to speak to her doctor. The odds weren’t good. She had an advanced case of an aggressive form of cancer.

  She did the first twenty weeks of treatment there in New York.

  We waited in her room for the doctor to come, give us an update on her illness, and then discharge her.

  He walked into the room, and I could see it in his eyes. “The results weren’t what we hoped for, Lena. My recommendation is that you stay in New York and follow up with another round of chemo soon.”

  She shook her head. “No. I’ve been from my kids too long.”

  “Then I’ll put together a list of doctors and treatment clinics in Santa Barbara for you. See that she follows up first thing when you get home. The treatments are slowing it down, giving you time, Lena.”

  “I’ll see that she goes first thing, Dr. Feshbach,” I assured him.

  He nodded. “In these cases, I tell my patients not to give up hope. It’s as important as everything we do medically.”

  We spent the next twelve months in and out of the hospital in Santa Barbara. Every round she got a little weaker and the cancer spread.

  We both knew it would be over soon, and only pretended for each other that it wouldn’t.

  As I sat with her in the sun-bright hospital, she didn’t look like she’d even make it out of the room this time.

  I kissed her head. “Can I ask you something, doll?”

  She laughed weakly. “You have the strangest look on your face. I can’t imagine the thoughts in your head.”

  I smiled. “It shouldn’t be a strange look. It should be happy. I was thinking about the week we met.”

  “Uh-oh,” she murmured.

  I stared into her beautiful eyes that still looked mysterious to me. “Why did you tell me you were twenty-eight instead of twenty-three?”

  Her face brightened slightly from her amusement and laughter. Then she leaned in to me, resting her head on my chest and covering my hand with hers.

  “The first time I saw you, you looked like heaven on earth to me. Everything good and kind and gentle and safe. The kind of man too few are. I loved you the second I saw you, Jack. In a way I’ve never loved anyone. In a way women dream of feeling.”

  Fuck, I’d started this to keep things light, and now we were overly serious, and I could feel the sadness we shared nipping at the both of us.

  I sniffed back my tears and lowered my gaze. “I was anything but a dream for you, doll. In fact, I’m pretty sure most of the time I was a nightmare.”

  She laughed tiredly, her exasperated little purr, and then she lifted her hand, cupping my cheek with her palm. “No, the only dream I ever had that didn’t die. A dream from a dreamer. You’re a dreamer, Jack, but like a dreamer everything is easy for you, yet you only chase the things that aren’t. So I was what I needed to be to keep you chasing me. Mysterious and not easy. If I hadn’t been, you would have moved on quickly and forgotten me like every other girl, and I didn’t want that. I wanted you to always love me because I’ve always loved you.”

  The saddest part of what she said was that it was the truth.

  About me.

  My flaws and weaknesses.

  And about her; her unique blend of strength and fragility and wisdom.

  “I’ve never told you this, but I was so very proud of the incredible things you accomplished. I loved how pure and right you were as the voice for the peace movement—almost as much as it frightened me. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in what you did, it was just I was afraid it would take you from me. I wanted to keep you safe. My perfect dream, not lost to a bullet like too many other great men had been.”

  I realized then there was no mystery to Lena. Not ever. At least not how I’d thought about it. She was a woman who loved completely, with all her heart and everything she had. She was the woman who loved Jack.

  Fuck, why is it you can never see anything clearly until it’s too late?

  My fingers closed around her hand and I brought it to my lips. “I’ve always loved you, Lena.”

  Her gorgeous brown eyes shimmered for me. “I know, foolish boy. Take me home, Jack. I don’t want us to end here in a hospital.”

  Against the doctor’s advice, I took her home and hired a hospice nurse.

  The months of illness and treatments made her so fragile I was almost afraid to touch her. And yet the man inside me wanted nothing more than to be buried within her. Every moment we were together held a heightened potency and vividness, and making love was no different.

  We savored our time, our love and our bodies, in way I wished we had been capable of from the beginning. I’d often heard illness can destroy love. I rarely heard of it fueling it, but with us, it did.

  She had what they call a brief flash of good health before death. We laughed more. We talked more. We made love more. In fact, during this time, it felt as though I’d finally done what I’d set out to do: I’d gotten to know her.

  Death changes life. It is forever altering, especially in those moments when you realize it is inevitable. Lena was leaving first, but we would both leave eventually. And I held onto the dream—or maybe she was right, the fantasy—that we would be together again in some unknown after.

  She was my life. It had taken over a decade of marriage to reach this place, where we were the couple I’d always imagined in my head. It had taken years of tug and pull, forgiveness, loneliness, foolishness, my recovery and her illness, but we were at last where I’d always hoped we’d be.

  What I’d wanted since the first moment I saw her at the Arlington Theater. Something even beyond the closeness we’d known the five years before her illness.

  Forever seemed an unquestionable thing after having survived all that and still being together, even if it would only be in this brief time before her passing and then in the after. I loved her. I regretted much. I didn’t want to let her go. Not now when we were finally loving each and every thing we should have been from that first moment.

  It was a morning like any other when I realized she’d lost the fight. I’d gotten up near 3:30 a.m. to spend some time in the studio to purge my mind of the words and sound in my head before mixing her daily medication tonic and waiting in bed for her to wake.

  I was working in the studio, picking out something on the guitar, when I heard her on the intercom.

  “Jack?”

  The way she said my name sent chills across my flesh, though I wasn’t sure why. It was just a low purr, a touch husky as Lena’s voice often was.

  When I entered the bedroom my heart stopped. The bottle of morphine on the table was empty. Yesterday the hospice nurse had told Lena when they thought I couldn’t hear them that if she took enough it would help her body let go.

  I knew every day was agony for her now.

  I wanted to barge into the room yesterday and tell her no, never, I wouldn’t allow her to do such a thing.

  Instead I went qui
etly into the yard and cried.

  Lena would do what Lena wanted to do no matter what I said, and I didn’t want angry moments in the precious few we had left.

  I could see it on her face—Lena had taken control of her leaving me, yet again. She was ready, though I was far from it. It showed in the way her features smoothed and the quietness of her gaze; I knew she was aware it wouldn’t be much longer.

  I reached for the phone. “Oh, Lena. What did you do?”

  Her eyes were glassy and only slits. “No, Jack. Don’t call. Let me go.”

  I swiped at the tears running down my nose. I had to be strong. She didn’t need me falling apart now. “Let me get the kids. Can I do that, Lena?”

  “No, Jack. This isn’t the last picture of me I want them to have. Carry me to our spot on the cliffs instead. What we have left belongs to you and me.”

  As we sat on the cliffs facing the ocean, waiting for the sunrise, Lena on my lap held tightly by my arms, I could feel the shallowness of her breath, the peacefulness of her body, and I knew the end was near.

  “Promise me, Jack, you’ll be tough on Sammy. He’s wild, but a good boy. He just needs direction.”

  “I promise.”

  “And Chrissie, she’s a fearful girl. Show her she has nothing to be afraid of. Little girls just need to know they’re safe. You don’t have to work so hard to make her happy.”

  “I’ll remember, Lena.”

  I kissed her head where there were no longer her shiny black curls and when I pulled back, she looked up at me.

  “When I’m gone, I don’t want anyone to love me. I don’t want anyone to miss me. I don’t want anyone to care. I don’t want anyone to remember me.”

  She struggled for breath and I tightened my hold on her. “Stop it. Don’t ask me for what I can’t give you. Not now.”

  “No, Jack, listen. Scatter my ashes into the ocean. I want to always be close to you and our children. And then walk away and forget about me. I don’t want you to love me once I’m gone. I want you to forget me and move on. It’s what you have to do, for you and for our kids.”

  I tightly shut my eyes against the tears but, fuck, it was hard because those words ripped at my heart. I was losing the other half of me, and we’d wasted so many years, too much time, and had found each other too late. And now she wanted me to forget her, scatter her ashes in the ocean, and walk away.