The New Man

by Janice Kay Johnson

  She’d found out in time. It hurt, but not as much as it would have a few months from now.

  Or so, mocked her inner voice, you’d like to believe.

  DEVLIN CLAIMED that he didn’t need to hear Dr. Ritter’s take on his dad’s health, but Alec called anyway. The doctor agreed to meet them for a quick lunch in the Harborview Hospital cafeteria.

  The teenager was subdued, skulking at his father’s back as they made their way through the labyrinth. Alec saw him stealing glances into rooms as they passed, his expression one of horrified fascination. After all, Alec remembered, Dev’s only experience of hospitals had been the six weeks of his mother’s dying.

  Dr. Ritter was a big, bluff man with the long-fingered hands of a surgeon and an open face. Squint lines fanned from the corners of his eyes, his nose crooked and bulbous. Highly respected, he was also a hell of a nice guy.

  “Hey, Devlin.” He clapped Alec’s son on the back hard enough to make him stagger. “Good to see you. Let me grab some food, and then we can talk.”

  Alec took a tray and followed. He and the cardiologist both chose the vegetarian chili in a bread bowl. Devlin set a sandwich and a muffin on the tray.

  They found an out-of-the-way table and Ritter began eating hungrily. Alec guessed that he was used to interruptions and knew enough to gobble when he had the chance.

  “I hear you have questions,” the doctor said finally.

  Devlin flushed, a curse of the fair-haired. “Yeah. I mean, I just thought after a heart attack, Dad would probably have another one. And, um, he says he’s fine.”

  Ritter nodded, expression serious, and said, “Cardiac care has come a long way, Devlin. Before we had angioplasty, your dad would have been in deep doo-doo. We’d have done a bypass, but those are more likely to plug up, or have a graft fail. But, see, we think we actually fixed the root problem for him. His cholesterol is good, the walls of his arteries aren’t thickening.”

  Alec watched as Ritter continued to talk and eat, drawing sketches on his napkin to illustrate points.

  Devlin nodded and peered at the napkin and asked questions that didn’t have anything to do with his dad but everything to do with cardiac surgery. They talked about what a beating heart looks like when the chest is cracked open, how plugged places were pinpointed, where cuts are made to remove a dying heart and replace it with a donated one.

  Ritter talked with passion about new frontiers in medical care while making what he did understandable to a fourteen-year-old boy. When his pager went off and he excused himself, Devlin sat with mouth slightly agape watching him go.

  “Wow!” he said finally.

  “Quite a guy, huh?”

  Devlin turned dazed blue eyes on his father. “Do you think I’m smart enough to do that kind of stuff?”

  “Yeah. I think you’re plenty smart. It just takes a lot of years of school. Four for college, four for med school, then years more of internships and residencies.”

  “Yeah, but…!”

  Alec grinned. “Let’s start with high school. Okay?”

  “Yeah!” his son said. He bit enthusiastically into his sandwich. “That was so cool.”

  He chattered on, repeating half the things Ritter had said, as if Alec hadn’t been there listening. Alec, peeling an orange, looked up when Devlin fell silent.

  Sounding troubled, he said, “I wish I’d, like, asked you. I’ve been a jerk, haven’t I?”

  “Yeah. You have.”

  Earnestly he said, “It would be okay if you marry Helen. If she’s not too mad.”

  Alec pushed away his tray. “I don’t think her being mad is the problem. She’s afraid, like you were.”

  “But…but you’re okay!” Dev stared in bewilderment. “Dr. Ritter said so.” God had spoken, he implied.

  “Helen’s not going to believe it. She was barely working up the courage to think she might let herself love someone again.” He smiled wryly. “Finding out that someone has already flirted with death pretty much sent her scurrying for cover.”

  “But you can make her listen to you.” His voice cracked. “Can’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” Alec let out a slow breath. “I’ll try. That’s all I can do.”

  Devlin stared down at his sandwich as if it had sprouted mold, then slowly wrapped it. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  The ache in Alec’s chest was half pain, half joy. “You know, I’m not. I think maybe you and I cleared the air, and I’m not sure how else we could have done it. As far as Helen goes, I was an idiot. I should have told her.”

  “But maybe she wouldn’t have dated you.”

  “Maybe not.” His mouth twisted. “But honesty is always better.”

  His son frowned. “If she really loves you, she’d want to be with you even if you did have another heart attack. Wouldn’t she? And, like, if she doesn’t, maybe she doesn’t love you that much.”

  “The thought,” Alec admitted, “has occurred to me. I guess this was one way to find out.”

  “Maybe,” his son said, brightening, as they bused their trays, “by the time you have another heart attack I’ll be able to, like, run my Roto-Rooter up there and ream out your arteries.” The idea clearly held major appeal. “Or even crack your chest open.”

  Alec laid an arm across his son’s shoulders for the first time in a long while and said, “Uh-huh. Sure. I’ll, uh, try to hold out until you’re qualified.”

  Devlin thought that was the funniest thing he’d heard in years.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ALEC LEFT several more phone messages but didn’t go so far as to show up on the doorstep, for which Helen was grateful. She could be strong as long as he wasn’t standing in front of her.

  It was bad enough that she had to argue with Jo and Kathleen. Not with Logan—he expressed his opinion with just a glance or the lift of an eyebrow, every time he found out she was ignoring yet another message.

  Kathleen and Jo were more verbal.

  Kathleen had her say almost every night. Jo took the day shift.

  “Don’t you love him?” she demanded.

  The Puyallup Fair over, the kids all in school, Jo had taken to dropping in on her days off, or in the morning before she went to work.

  Helen, who was writing prices on tiny tags to put on boxes and baskets of soap, didn’t look up. “You here again? I thought you didn’t live with us anymore.”

  Jo ignored this piece of rudeness, dropping into a chair at the kitchen table. “Kathleen says you still haven’t called Alec.”

  Helen studied her tidy handwriting—$25. It was so darn neat, she wondered about her psychological health. Kathleen, the control freak, had a bold, nearly unreadable scrawl. Go figure.

  “Helen.”

  She still didn’t look up. “No. I haven’t called him. I don’t intend to.”

  “Why?”

  The question sounded genuine, so she finally sighed and met Jo’s dark, worried eyes. “Because he lied to me, and I find that unforgivable.”

  “Would you have dated him if you’d known?”

  “No.”

  She pulled the next basket toward her. This one was larger, holding a selection of bath oil, soaps, shampoo and body scrub—$45.

  “Then he had no chance with you at all.”

  She shook her head.

  “You won’t let yourself love him because he isn’t perfect.” Jo sounded like the voice of Helen’s conscience.

  Helen closed her eyes. “You know it isn’t that. I could accept anything but…”

  “A fatal flaw.”

  She winced. “I can’t go through that again. I can’t, Jo. You saw me. You know what it did to me.”

  Jo laid a hand over hers. “I do know. But I also know from Emma that Alec claims the heart attack was minor and that his cardiologist doesn’t expect a repeat.”

  Helen’s nostrils flared. “Why should I believe him? He lied by not telling me in the first place! Now he’s trying to soft-pedal it. Would you believe him?”<
br />
  “I don’t know.” Jo squeezed her hand then let it go. “I just wish you’d talk to him. Give him a chance to explain. Maybe…”

  “Maybe what?” She sounded so hard! Helen realized. So unlike herself. “Maybe it’ll turn out he had amnesia and didn’t remember that he’d had a heart attack?” Sarcasm wasn’t her usual style, either.

  “Maybe,” Jo suggested quietly, “he was afraid, too.”

  Helen sagged. “Don’t do this to me, Jo.”

  “Afraid he’d let things get too far. Afraid if he told you, you’d do exactly what you have done—reject him. Afraid to face his own mortality.”

  She hated to think of him afraid to die. He’d told her how desperately he had fought his wife’s fate. What had it been like, so soon after, to discover that his own body was betraying him, that his kids might be orphaned? Every time she imagined the moment when somebody said, “Mr. Fraser, you’re having a heart attack,” she drew a curtain across the thought and refused to empathize.

  Protecting himself, he’d hurt her. How could she forgive that, even if she could face loving a man whose heart was already damaged?

  But how could she go on without him? How could she go back to the modest dreams she’d once considered adequate, the ones in which she bought her own house, raised her daughter alone, celebrated milestones with friends instead of a mate? Slept alone, worried alone, cried alone?

  “He can’t love me.” And here, Helen saw with stark surprise, was her greatest fear of all. “Not really. Or he couldn’t have set me up this way.”

  “But he didn’t love you at first,” Jo argued. “He liked you, he was attracted. No man is going to say, ‘By the way, I had a heart attack,’ the first time he meets a woman or takes her out. Is he?”

  Biting her lip, Helen looked down. No. That probably wasn’t the kind of thing anybody talked about on a first date. She and Alec had gotten unusually intimate early on, because of the connection forged by the knowledge that both had lost a spouse.

  “But later? When we talked about hospitals, and how they smelled and the sounds and what it’s like to sit for hours at someone’s side and watch them sleep? Why not then?” Helen was dismayed to hear herself pleading, longing for a reasonable explanation.

  Gently Jo said, “Why don’t you ask him?”

  Tears stinging her eyes, she shook her head. “I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “You don’t miss him?”

  Miss him? Not a minute went by that she didn’t think I have to tell Alec about that, or wonder what he was doing, what he’d said to Devlin, how school was going for Lily. Not an hour went by when she didn’t think of his kisses or the urgency of his lovemaking or the husky note in his voice when he said, “I love you.”

  She had survived this long—ten days—by erecting a kind of wall. She knew how to endure, how to count the days until grief eased enough to let her forget, first for a few minutes, then a few hours, and finally even days. She did not think, I’ll never see him again.

  Or, worse yet, What if he has a heart attack, and there is no one at his bedside to hold his hand and pray and believe, however foolishly, that he will get better?

  The question would begin to form, and she wouldn’t let it.

  “I miss him,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  Relentless, Jo asked, “Do you love him?”

  Throat thick with tears now, Helen gazed not at her friend but into a future without him. She was nodding when the first tears fell.

  Jo held her while she cried, got her paper towels to mop up, murmured reassuring but meaningless things like “It’s okay,” over and over.

  It isn’t okay! Helen thought with a violence foreign to her nature. Despite all her vows, she’d let herself love Alec, and he’d hurt her.

  In some ways, it was almost worse than losing Ben. Ben hadn’t wanted to go, had done anything, everything, to stay with her. But when he died, it was final. Horribly, painfully, wrenchingly final.

  There was no possibility she would see his name in the newspaper someday, or come face-to-face with him at a craft fair or the grocery store.

  Ben had not taken children with him whom she’d always worry about, wonder about, even miss.

  She couldn’t have had Ben back if she could just forgive a small lie. And—oh, yes—accept that she would have to watch him die all over again.

  Jo watched her mop her tears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t say anything you haven’t already thought a million times, did I?”

  Helen looked at her from swollen eyes. “Am I a coward? Were you afraid, Jo?”

  Her petite, dark-haired friend gave a twisted smile. “Are you kidding? I was terrified! Ryan represented my deepest fears. I knew—knew—everything that makes life exciting or meaningful ends the moment you say ‘I do.’ I was sure that’s how my mother had felt, giving up a singing career to marry my father and have children. After she died, Dad made it plain that Boyce and I were nothing but a duty. It was like—” she hunched, remembering, her eyes dark with pain “—he felt not one moment of joy in us. That’s what marriage and parenting were, to me. Sacrifice, duty, joylessness.”

  “And you had to fall in love with a man who already had children.”

  “Yeah.” Jo grimaced. “I’d just about come to terms with falling in love, figuring we’d have the kids only during holidays, and then their mom ditched ’em.”

  “But you’re not sorry?”

  “That I married Ryan? Or that we have his kids?” This smile was everything the last hadn’t been: brimming with joy. “Not for a second. I love him, and I love them.”

  Helen sighed. “I suppose this was meant to encourage me to overcome my fears, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Something like that.” Jo grinned, in her pixie way. “Did it work?”

  Helen looked down, wrote $25 although she had no idea what she was stickering, and said, “Nope.”

  “Dang.”

  But Helen knew darn well this wasn’t the end of it. None of her friends or housemates gave up easily.

  It wasn’t them she had to convince, anyway; it was herself. She was the one who threatened her own determination to stand firm.

  She was the one who thought, If I really love him, can’t I forgive him? And, If I love him, would I want to be anywhere but at his side if he did have another heart attack?

  She was the one who lay awake at night and thought, I am grieving, but he hasn’t died. I’m grieving because I’m afraid I might have to grieve someday.

  Did that make any sense?

  “TELEPHONE.” Logan held it out to Helen.

  She gazed at it as if a snake might slither from the mouthpiece. “Who is it?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Not Alec.”

  “Nah, it’s a kid.”

  Reluctantly she took the phone. Was one of Ginny’s friends calling? How odd.

  “Hello?”

  “Um…is this Helen?”

  Her heart skipped a beat, the voice was so like his father’s. “Devlin?”

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  He sounded so grave, she groped behind her for a kitchen chair and sank into it, conscious of Logan taking a step forward.

  “What is it? Did your dad…” Her throat closed and she couldn’t finish. “Is he all right?”

  “What? Oh, yeah. I mean, he’s really bummed. Every time I see him, he’s staring into space with this expression on his face like…like someone died.” He took an audible breath. “He looks like he did after Mom died.”

  Oh, God. Helen closed her eyes.

  “And I know it’s my fault. Because of what I said.”

  Waving off Logan, she summoned the composure, or perhaps the kindness, to say, “Not altogether. Your motives may not have been the best, but you asked that your father be honest. In one way, I’m glad you did.”

  “Yeah, but the thing is, I was wrong!” Devlin burst out. “Dad took me to talk to his cardiologist, and he explained everything! He was so
cool! He told me about heart transplants and stuff like that.”

  She swallowed. “Because…because your dad needs one?”

  “Huh?” he said, startled. “Oh. No. Just ’cuz I asked. It’s like, they can do these incredible things! I’m thinking that’s what I might do. Be a doctor. Not the kind who, you know, swabs your throat and gives you an antibiotic. A surgeon. Maybe a heart one.”

  If she weren’t so close to crying, she would have laughed. Alec’s son had discovered his vocation—or, at least, a temporary enthusiasm—in the unlikeliest of places.

  “I’m glad it was interesting,” she said with restraint.

  “So, you see?”

  “No, actually, I don’t,” Helen admitted.

  “Dr. Ritter said Dad is right. They did fix what was wrong, and he should be okay. He says they can always, like, ream out the spot again. He said Dad’s health is great. Heart attack, I mean, that sounds like he’s going to die, right? That’s what I thought, but I was wrong. And…and I wanted you to know. So maybe you’d talk to Dad. Because—” his voice cracked “—he really misses you.”

  Now she was crying. Through the mist, she saw Logan’s worried face, and she gave him a tremulous smile even as she said, “I thought you didn’t like me.”

  Sounding flustered, Devlin mumbled, “I, um, it wasn’t that. You’re…I mean, you’re cool and everything. It was, like, me and Dad. But we’re cool now, too.”

  She blinked and sorted out this muddled recitation. “You wouldn’t mind if your father and I got married.”

  “Right!” Obviously pleased that she was as sharp as he’d hoped, he said, “So, you’ll call Dad? Or go see him?”

  Laughing through her tears, she said, “Yes. I will call your father.”

  With deep significance, he said, “I have football practice tomorrow. And Lily is going to the mall with a friend. We’ll both be gone all afternoon.”

  Had she just been given permission to…? No. Surely, at fourteen, he assumed parents didn’t do such things. Even if they had just fallen in love.

  “Devlin, thank you.”

  “It’s okay. I mean, if you’re okay.”