She had nodded and clung to him and he had said huskily, ‘But whatever decision you make, remember that I love you, Abbra. Only you, forever.’
If it hadn’t been for her casualty assistance officer saying to her, ‘Lewis has seniority and so will be the first to disembark,’ Abbra would not have known who he was.
He was in full uniform, but he looked old, and stooped, and gaunt. She suppressed a cry of anguish, and then Lewis was being officially greeted. Flags were flying. Her legs began to shake as she became aware of the large number of photographers and newsmen covering the event.
‘Don’t worry,’ her casualty officer said, sensing her distress. ‘There are going to be no questions allowed.’
There were none, but Lewis was given the opportunity to say a few words.
‘The three of us who have been released, stand here today, proud to be American. We are American fighting men and in all the years of our captivity we have never, for one moment, forgotten it. We have kept our trust in God, our trust in our fellow countrymen, and our trust in America. Now we want to join with the rest of America in striving to obtain the release of the hundreds of men we left behind us.’
There were cheers and a storm of applause and then Lewis and his two companions were swiftly led away into waiting limousines.
His speech was exactly the kind of speech that she would, once, have expected Lewis to make. But she had forgotten so much about him. She had forgotten how utterly he was a professional soldier. She wondered what he would say when he learned of her participation in the antiwar marches, and her nails dug deep into her palms. What he would say when he learned of her antiwar activities was the very least of her problems.
From the air base Lewis and his companions were brought immediately to the hospital. In a very short time they would be reunited. She would see him in the flesh. She tried to remember Hawaii and their passionate last night together before he had flown back to Vietnam. She couldn’t do it. She could see only Scott’s anguished face as he had said good-bye to her. The hands she remembered, hot and ardent on her body, were Scott’s hands.
She began to tremble, praying for the strength to survive the next few hours. The military chaplain who had counselled her had told her that God never gave a person a burden heavier than they could bear. She clung to that thought, knowing that she had to be strong. She had to be strong for all their sakes. For Scott, for Sanh, and for Lewis – Lewis who had suffered so much, and who she had once loved so very, very, desperately.
The casualty officer had left the room to talk to the many officials milling around in the corridor. Now she returned, saying quietly, ‘The men have arrived and are in the building.’
‘Will Lewis be coming here? To this room?’ Abbra’s voice was stilted, the words forced through dry lips.
‘No, he’s waiting for you in a room across the corridor’, the officer said. ‘Are you ready?’
Abbra shook her head. She was going to greet Lewis exactly as she would have if she had never married Scott. After his five years of captivity, and of believing that she was faithfully waiting for him, it was the very least she could do. When his medical examinations and debriefing were completed, she was going to take him away to a small hotel in Yosemite National Park. Then, and only then, would she tell him about her and Scott.
The only thing she had asked the military to do was tell Lewis that everyone believed he was dead. Once he knew she thought he was lost to her forever, he would be a little prepared for the news that had to be broken to him.
‘Then if you are ready…’ the casualty assistance officer said, opening the door wide.
‘Yes,’ she said, the blood drumming in her ears, ‘Yes, I’m ready.’
It was only a short walk out of the room and across a corridor and into another, yet she knew that it was the longest walk she would ever take. The tension was so great that Abbra was convinced she wouldn’t survive it. She felt as if she were going to faint, or have a heart attack, or die.
There were military officials in the room, and doctors. She was scarcely aware of them. She had eyes only for Lewis. His skin had taken on an unhealthy greyish-yellow cast. His hair was no longer a thick and curly brown, but grizzled, clipped short to his skull. He looked older in the flesh than he had on the television screen. Only his eyes were the same. Dark, and brown, and full of both overwhelming relief and with love – love for her.
‘Lewis,’ she said softly, taking a step towards him. ‘Oh, Lewis. What did they do to you? How did you bear it?’
He covered the distance between them in two limping strides, and her arms opened wide.
‘Abbra!’ He crushed her to him, burying his face in her neck, his tears of thankfulness and joy hot upon her flesh.
‘Oh, dear Christ! Abbra!’
At that moment, all that mattered was that he was alive, and that he was home. She clung to him, returning his kisses. He had endured, and he had survived, and she thanked God for it, from the bottom of her heart.
Lewis’s commanding officer cleared his throat. ‘I know this must seem very heartless, Mrs Ellis, but your husband still has to be medically examined. Your real reunion will have to take place a little later in the day. Perhaps even tomorrow.’
Abbra tried hard not to let her relief show in her eyes. ‘That’s all right,’ she said, holding Lewis’s hand tightly in hers. ‘We’ve waited so long to be together again, a few more hours won’t make any difference.’ She raised the back of Lewis’s hand to her mouth and kissed it. ‘Good-bye for a little while, Lewis. I’ve been given a room in the hospital. I won’t be far away.’
Her voice was as smokily-soft as he had remembered it, her hair still as silk-dark, still as glossy; but there was something different about her, something he couldn’t at first fathom. Then it came to him. There was an air of sophistication about her that the Abbra he remembered had not possessed. He reminded himself that she was six years older than when he had last seen her, that she was no longer a teenager, but a young woman. And however much she had changed, it wasn’t an iota compared to the changes that had taken place in him.
For the next few days, though they met together for a little time each day, they were never alone. First of all came intensive medical checks. He was suffering from exhaustion, malnutrition, a glucose problem, an enlarged prostate gland. And epilepsy. He was told not to worry about the epilepsy. It could be fully controlled with drugs. He was certainly not made to feel any shame about it, rather, the reverse. As far as the medics were concerned, it indicated the very great suffering that he had undergone under torture.
After the medicals came the debriefing sessions. What other Americans, had been imprisoned in the U Minh with him? Had he overheard his captors mention any American names? Any other southern camps where men who were MIA might be being held? Exactly how had: he been captured? And interrogated? And treated? What information, if any, had he given to the enemy? What were the names of the men who had been his captors? Where exactly in the U Minh had his prison been located?
The questions went on and on until he was dizzy with them. He was seen by army psychiatrists, who reluctantly pronounced him stable enough to take a five-day vacation with his wife. The medical staff knew what the purpose of the vacation was and were deeply unhappy that this was the way Abbra wanted to break her news to Lewis.
‘It would be far better for such emotionally traumatic news to be broken to your husband while he is under medical supervision,’ Lewis’s psychiatrist had said to her sombrely.
She had thanked him for his advice and had ignored it. She didn’t want to break the news to Lewis in such clinical surroundings. She needed to be alone with him. Really alone with him. Their short periods of time together at the hospital, with medical and military staff always close by, were a nightmare that didn’t grow any easier.
He was a total stranger to her, and that moment when they had first met and she had looked into his eyes and thought she had seen the old Lewis had not come aga
in. He was a middle aged man, deeply fatigued and physically changed almost beyond recognition. Although the physical changes had shocked her, she had been prepared for them. After such long captivity, in such horrendous conditions, it would have been ridiculous to have imagined that he would return looking no different from when they had last said good-bye.
Other changes she found harder to adjust to. His brooding sombreness, his almost manic patriotism, and his stubborn belief that the war he had fought had been a just war.
‘We should be fighting in the North, where everyone is the enemy, where you don’t have to worry whether or not you are shooting friendly civilians,’ he had said to her passionately one day. ‘Our biggest, most basic mistake is in the way we focus on chasing Viet Cong guerrillas. Those guerrillas have been deployed to grind down our forces until big North Vietnamese units are ready to launch major operations as at Khe Sanh and at Tet in ’68.’
She had wanted to cover her ears with her hands and scream. She didn’t want to hear him talking about the war and about strategy and about how great a president Nixon was. She couldn’t understand how he could even bear to dwell on such subjects. Surely his debriefing was bad enough. The hideous reliving of years of days and nights of sheer hell.
Apart from the physical changes, Lewis hadn’t changed, she suddenly realized. She had changed. Even if she hadn’t fallen in love with Scott, even if she had known that Lewis was alive, now that they were reunited she would still be having problems relating to him. She didn’t know whether the realization was a shred of comfort or an added agony. She knew only that the necessity of staying within the confines of the hospital was giving her claustrophobia, that she needed Scott, needed him with all her heart and mind and body.
The small sports car she had bought when her third novel had been published had been brought to the hospital for her and left in the underground staff parking garage. Lewis knew of her plans that they take a short vacation together in Yosemite and had said enthusiastically that he thought it was the best idea anyone had come up with since he had set foot again on American soil.
He was waiting for her now, dressed in civilian, clothes, his bag packed. They were going to have to leave the building by a rear service exit to avoid the newsmen who still thronged the main entrance, and she hoped that he wouldn’t question their method of leaving, or begin to think there was anything odd about the way he was being kept from contact with the press.
He looked slightly more familiar to Abbra in civilian clothes. He was wearing a maroon-checked open-neck cotton shirt with a matching maroon V-neck sweater on top of the shirt, cream-coloured chinos, and a pair of white leather loafers. She had bought the clothes herself and was relieved to see that though the chinos and sweater hung loosely on him, they were not grossly the wrong size.
‘You look nice,’ she said sincerely.
He glanced at himself in the mirror. At his grizzled hair and still greyish-yellow pallor. ‘I look a wreck,’ he said truthfully, but there was also a refreshing hint of humour in his voice. ‘Come on. Let’s leave before someone decides they want yet another goddamned urine test or blood sample.’
He picked up his bag and she led the way out of the room and along the corridor and down the rear service stairs to the parking area.
He stared at the sports car in bemusement. ‘Whose is this? Have you borrowed it?’
She shook her head, smiling. ‘No. It’s mine. A present to myself.’
A slight frown creased his brow. ‘On an army pension? Wasn’t that a little wasteful?’
‘No,’ she said equably, stowing his bag in the trunk. ‘Because that isn’t how I paid for it.’
She was already behind the steering wheel, and he opened the passenger door, seating himself next to her.
‘Explain,’ he said, his face as stern as the psychiatrist’s had been when he had said he wanted them both back at the hospital in five days.
She turned the key in the ignition and slipped the car into drive. ‘You remember my writing? Well, I’ve been doing a lot of it over the last few years.’
‘You mean that you were able to buy this car by writing stories for women’s magazines?’
For the first time since they had been reunited, she giggled. ‘No. I write books. I bought the car with the payment I received when my third novel was published.’
His frown didn’t disappear. In the rearview mirror she saw it deepen. She didn’t say anything more. He had never been enthusiastic about her writing, and it would probably take him a little time to adjust to the fact that she was now a full-fledged novelist.
She drove up the ramp, speeding away quickly before any reporters or photographers should spot them. Then he said wryly, ‘Your driving hasn’t improved with time.’
‘No.’ She managed a grin, grateful that there was humour. In his voice again. They were both trying so hard to be normal with each other and it was so hellishly difficult. For him, as well as for her.
In a silence that was almost companionable they drove east towards the wild grandeur of Yosemite. At dusk, dramatically sculptured rocks and 200-foot-high giant sequoia trees came into view and she said unnecessarily, ‘We’re nearly there.’
He merely nodded, his eyes turned away from her, feasting on the wonderful views as if he could never get enough of them.
She knew why he was being so silent. He was almost as nervous as she was. She turned into the parking lot at the side of the hotel, needing Scott so badly that she didn’t know how she prevented herself from crying out his name.
What was she going to do? In the name of God, how could she possibly make a choice between them? Lewis needed her in a way that Scott never would. He needed her in order to reaffirm his manhood and to help him adjust to freedom after years of unbelievably brutal captivity. Yet it was Scott who was her friend and lover, Scott whom she truly felt married to.
‘You look tired,’ Lewis said to her as he lifted his bag from the trunk. ‘This whole thing must have been as big a strain for you as it has been for me.’
A light evening breeze lifted her hair, blowing it softly against her face. ‘They told me you were dead,’ she said simply, and at the memory of that terrible moment her eyes became overbright and tears glittered on her eyelashes. ‘For three years I believed it to be the truth.’
He put his bag down and drew her into his arms. ‘I know, my love. I know,’ he said comfortingly. ‘But it’s all over now.’ He tilted her chin upwards with his forefinger, smiling down at her with the crooked smile that she remembered so well. ‘We’re together again, Abbra, and we have our whole future before us.’
‘Lewis…’
‘Come on.’ He picked up his bag and put his free arm around her shoulder. ‘Let’s check in and shower and eat. We can do all the talking we have to do afterwards. I want to know everything that you’ve been doing. What the books you have been writing are about, where you’ve been living, if you’ve seen much of my family over the years.’ He lowered his voice as they entered the hotel lobby. ‘And I want to do more than talk.’ In his dark brown eyes she saw again the old Lewis, the Lewis she had fallen so much in love with. ‘I want to make love to you,’ he said softly as they walked across to the reception desk. ‘Oh God, Abbra! How I want to make love to you!’
They ate dinner at a candlelit table in the hotel’s small dining room. Abbra was never able to remember what it was that they ate, or if there were many other diners.
Lewis tried to keep the conversation light and innocuous, but nearly every subject that he touched upon was traumatic for her.
‘I understand Scott is still with the Rams?’ he said as her almost-untouched sirloin steak was removed.
‘Yes.’ She was reduced to monosyllables, terrified of saying anything further for fear of where a conversation might lead.
Dessert came, and then coffee. He stretched a hand across the table towards her. ‘Let’s leave the coffee,’ he said, and though his voice was carefully casual, there was a pl
ea in his eyes that tore at her heart.
She nodded, rising to her feet, accompanying him from the room.
Where were Scott and Sanh now? How was Scott enduring their separation? How was he surviving not knowing what was taking place between her and Lewis, whether they had begun to sleep together or not? Whether she was going to return to him or not.
Their room was decorated in tones of pale yellow. The bedstead was of polished brass, and there were a half dozen goose-down pillows on it and crisp sheets and thick blankets and a yellow-hued patchwork bedspread.
She had made her decision not to tell him about Scott until the morning, but with every passing minute it was a decision that was becoming harder and harder to abide by.
As he began to undress he said awkwardly, ‘I want to be patient with me, Abbra. It’s been so long … and I feel so damn shy!’
His touchingly honest admission gave her the inner strength she needed. He was her husband, and even though they were now, in so many ways, complete strangers to each other, she still did love him. Not as she loved Scott, but then, Scott was different. Scott was lighthearted and fun-loving and made her laugh. She refused to think about Scott. She couldn’t think about him. If she did, she would collapse.
She stepped out of her dress, saying truthfully, ‘I feel shy as well, Lewis. We’re going to have to be patient with each other.’
She had seen him semi-naked at the hospital, when he had been undergoing some of his medical tests, but the sight of the scars that he bore still shocked her inexpressibly.
There was a puckered scar high on his left arm where a bullet had been removed. That scar was the least terrible of all that he bore. His back was criss-crossed with the healed lacerations of repeated and prolonged whippings, and there were burn marks on his chest.
‘I’m not a very pretty sight,’ he said, his eyes dark with anxiety as he saw her look at him and look quickly away. ‘I’m sorry, Abbra. If it offends you I’ll…’
She didn’t wait to hear what it was that he was going to suggest. Her head spun towards him, her eyes anguished.
White Christmas in Saigon Page 65
