Once a Warrior

by Fran Baker

  “Owe them what?” the reporter followed up.

  Cat paused to take a drink of water and to gather her thoughts. As one of the regional spokespersons for Americans for International Aid, which, among other things, worked to facilitate reunions between the American soldiers who had fought in Vietnam and their Amerasian offspring, she walked a fine line. For one thing, she was a volunteer, not a paid staff person. And for another, she worked both sides of the political aisle on legislation that was being considered, so she had to be careful to keep her personal views from spilling over into her answers.

  She set her glass back on the table and idly scanned the crowd that had turned out in honor of the reunion between a local veteran and the Vietnamese wife and daughter he’d had to leave behind when he’d finished his stint. He’d promised faithfully that he would return for them just as soon as he could. But the fates had conspired against him. After the Paris Peace Accords ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam were signed in late January and the American ground troops pulled out in March, followed by the return of the “last known prisoners of war,” there was no going back.

  AIA had worked diligently to bring the small family together again. Their reward had come a little over an hour ago, in an empty office behind the conference room, when the soldier had enfolded his wife and daughter in his arms after their year-long separation. Even his parents, who’d been rather dubious about their son’s choice of a spouse, had literally melted when their new little granddaughter had taken her first toddling steps toward them. Once everyone’s eyes were dried, the doors to the conference room had been thrown open, the audience invited in, and the serviceman had given a short but moving speech thanking everyone who had helped him get his family back.

  Now, Cat felt her heart skid to a jarring halt when her gaze lit on a tall man in Air Force blues who was standing in the shadows in the back of the room. She couldn’t see his face because of the cameras that were still popping like fireworks, the microphones that were being held up to catch the panel members’ answers and the reporters’ hands that were waving in the air. But there was something hauntingly familiar about him . . . something that caused her senses to come tingling to life . . . something that reminded her of Cain.

  Which was ridiculous, since he was wearing a uniform.

  Thinking her eyes were simply playing tricks on her, she turned her attention back to the reporter who had asked her what the government owed the children under discussion. She couldn’t divorce herself entirely from the issue, of course. John Lee was such a happy, loving little boy that she couldn’t imagine her life without him. He was also a daily reminder of the orphans at Sacré Coeur—many fathered by American soldiers, some scarred, others sick, all without hope of a loving family—and the nuns who had put their own lives in jeopardy to care for them. All she could do was continue to call the public’s attention to their plight and pray they would eventually demand that their children be brought home.

  “Let me answer your question this way,” she began. “Because many of these children are American citizens by virtue of the fact that their fathers married their mothers in legal ceremonies”—she looked pointedly at the couple to her left then—“I believe that Congress should pass the special bill that’s being introduced which exempts them from the current two-year residency requirement.”

  “And if the bill doesn’t pass?”

  Now she focused on her congressman, a rather pompous fellow with white hair and a florid face who was sitting in the second row of the audience. “Then they should provide the funds to bring the children here—to live in foster homes, perhaps—so that they can fulfill the residency requirement.”

  “That’s a lot of money, Mrs. Brown,” one of the newspaper reporters challenged her. “Especially for a country that’s already spent something like a hundred-and-ten billion dollars and lost over fifty thousand men . . . not to mention the war.”

  Cat glanced down at her folded hands again before she answered. She didn’t wear her wedding ring anymore, but she could still see it on her finger, as shiny and new as the happily-ever-after dreams that that God-awful conflict had destroyed. Then she met the reporter’s gaze head-on.

  “Yes, it is a lot of money,” she agreed. “And I know the American public is tired of hearing about the war. Frankly, I get tired of hearing about it sometimes. I get tired of talking about it, too.” She lifted her chin defiantly higher. “But I believe we have a moral responsibility to those who carry half our features, half our blood and who bear all the terrible consequences of being Half.”

  A smattering of applause broke out in the audience when she finished. She pushed the damp bangs of her shag-cut hair out of her eyes and sat back in her chair, more grateful than words could say that the next question was directed to one of the military officers instead of to her. Listening with only half an ear to the question he’d been asked and was now answering, she let her gaze stray to the back of the room again.

  But the man she was looking for was gone.

  * * * *

  Cat emerged from her reverie to find that she’d shredded a whole head of lettuce when she only needed half. Disgusted with herself, she opened the drawer beside the sink and reached for a plastic bag. She’d been in this painful, bittersweet state since the press conference that afternoon, and she blamed it—unfairly—on the man who’d made her think of Cain.

  These head-trips, while growing fewer and farther between, weren’t all that uncommon. In fact, she’d taken quite a number of them over the past five years. She would see a stranger, usually from behind, whose dark hair or devil’s laugh reminded her of him, and her heart would do the old hanky-panky. Then the stranger would turn around, as if he sensed her staring at him, and she would turn away, embarrassed to realize that she was.

  Five years was a long time to carry a torch. Too long, perhaps, for what might have been—on Cain’s part, at least—nothing more than a pleasurable but ultimately inconsequential escape from the war. On Cat’s part, though, the flame had never been extinguished. That one night of love had illuminated her soul. And it was that golden light, still burning bright, that had sustained her all this time.

  Shaking off her malaise, she scooped the lettuce she planned to use into a serving bowl and put the rest in the plastic bag for another meal. She had better things to do than to stand there daydreaming about what might have happened if they had met in another time and place. That was fantasy, pure and simple, and fantasy didn’t put food on the table. Or sit up with a sick child all night or drive a preschool carpool in the mornings. She was a single mother now, just as she’d once been a “single” wife. And while there was no denying that John Lee pined for a father, that he deserved a father, she had yet to meet a man who deserved to have his picture share space with the portrait of Johnny on his chest of drawers.

  “Dinner’s ready!” she called into the living room of the small shirtwaist-style bungalow she’d bought four years ago, after Johnny’s status was officially changed from a presumed finding of death to killed in action. His body had never been recovered, so there’d been no flag-draped casket to give her closure. But at her parents’ urging, she’d held a private memorial service for him.

  That service had marked a watershed in her life. She’d moved out of her parents’ house, where she’d been living with John Lee while she finished earning her teaching degree, and had used half of Johnny’s insurance money to make a down payment on a home of their own. The other half she had placed in trust for John Lee. He wouldn’t need it to pay for his college education. Those expenses would be met by the death benefits of a father he would never know. Still, with interest, it would amount to a tidy gift when he graduated.

  Sighing in exasperation when her son failed to answer her earlier summons, she called again, “John Lee!”

  “Just a minute,” he replied with the typical reluctance of a five-year-old who was thoroughly engrossed in a “Deputy Dawg” cartoon.

  Ordinarily, Cat would
have waited until the program was over before giving him an ultimatum. After all, it was summertime and the living was supposed to be easy. But she was anxious to see how her mother was doing after her radiation treatment today, so she didn’t hesitate to hurry him along. “I mean it, young man. Turn off that TV right this minute and wash your hands.”

  “All right.” He sounded so put upon that she had to smile.

  Cat set the lettuce on the kitchen table, between bowls of chopped tomatoes and shredded cheese, then went to the old gas stove to dish up the simmering hamburger meat. The elderly couple she’d bought the house from had kept it immaculate on the outside but hadn’t done much to the inside since the Truman administration. She’d been remodeling and redecorating as her teacher’s salary permitted ever since John Lee and she had moved in. Their bedrooms and the living and dining rooms were done, so her big project for the summer was to strip the white-painted kitchen cabinets and refinish them to their original oak. Come winter, she planned to repaper the walls and replace the ugly linoleum floor with one of those new no-wax floors. Eventually she hoped to be able to afford switching from steam heat to a central air-conditioning system.

  “Oh, good, tacos!” John Lee raced in, resembling a manic elf in his red T-shirt, denim shorts and high-top tennis shoes. His skin was golden, his cheeks were rosy, and his grin revealed a space recently vacated by a front tooth. He was such an adorable boy, with thick black bangs hanging straight across his forehead and dark, sparkling eyes that were slightly tilted at the corners, that she tended to forget that he was not a child of her own body. She simply thought of him as a gift from God.

  “Not so fast, buster.” Cat caught him around the waist before he could slide into his chair. She nuzzled his neck, which caused him to squirm and giggle, before she set him down and demanded, “Let me see your hands.”

  “Mo-om . . .” He stretched the protest into two syllables as he hid the chubby little hands in question behind his back. “I was just watching TV.”

  “And petting Tiger.” She’d allowed him to adopt the skinny, scruffy yellow-striped kitten after his preschool class had visited the animal shelter. He’d come home in tears, having overheard one of the workers there say that it was slated to be “put to sleep” soon. Now, after a few months of tender loving care, the pitiful little fuzzball was well on its way to becoming a fat, sleek house cat.

  “You brushed him yesterday,” he rebutted, setting that square jaw he’d inherited from his father in a stubborn line.

  Cat pointed a don’t-argue-with-me finger at the half-bath off the kitchen.

  John Lee, recognizing that he’d lost the battle, headed in that direction to wash his hands.

  The doorbell rang just as they were finally sitting down to dinner.

  “I’ll get it!” John Lee jumped up from the table and hit for the front door.

  “Remember, we’re going to Grandma and Grandpa’s this evening.” Cat assumed it was his best friend David, who lived next door, wanting to know if he could come out and play when he was finished eating.

  The deep male voice that answered John Lee’s piping “Hi” proved her assumption wrong. Irritated to think it was probably one of those door-to-door salesmen, who seemed to have a real knack for catching their potential customers in the middle of a meal or a bath or a nap, she got up and followed her son to the foyer. The summer sun was behind the man, so as she approached she could only see his silhouette on the other side of the screen door.

  John Lee, who never met a stranger, was talking the poor guy’s leg off. “My dad was a soldier too, but he died in the war. I wasn’t borned when he died, but my mom said he was a hero. She said all soldiers are heroes because they help keep us free. I’m going to be a pilot someday, just like my dad, but my mom said I gotta go to college first. In September I’m going to kindergarten.” He shrugged, pulling both shoulders up beneath his ears and holding his hands, palms up, out to his sides. “I can tell time and I already know how to read Goodnight Moon, so I don’t know what they’re gonna teach me. But at least I won’t have to go to the baby-sitter—”

  “John Lee—” Cat began as she stepped up behind him and peered out the wire mesh at the man who was patiently listening to her son’s prattle.

  Time stopped for her as her precocious son continued chattering. “My Grandma’s sick—she’s got cancer—and my Grandpa’s really sad. But he told her doctor she’s gonna fight it just like she fought the Germans in World War Two. He said ‘Once a warrior, always a warrior.’ And then he started crying.”

  Looking at the man on the other side of the screen, Cat wiped sweaty palms on her ragged cut-offs and moistened suddenly dry lips. His black hair was short now, almost white-walled on the sides, and his face was even more finely chiseled than she recalled. The lines that etched the corner of his eye and the grooves that bracketed his sensuous mouth had deepened, giving his looks a provocatively seasoned edge.

  More astonishing yet was his attire. Today there were no jeans or T-shirts or mud-caked boots. He wore Air Force blues with a bright slash of ribbons across his broad chest and shoes that had obviously been spit-shined.

  Still, she would have recognized him anywhere.

  “What happened to your eye?” John Lee asked with a child’s blunt curiosity. “Did you lose it in the war? Is that why you have to wear that patch? My Uncle Drew didn’t go to the war. He went to Canada, and he can’t come home ’cause he’s afraid they’ll arrest him. My Aunt Mary—she’s gonna be a lawyer like my Grandpa—said he was a coward. But my Grandma said he did what he thought was—”

  “That’s enough,” Cat admonished her son.

  “Well, it’s the truth,” he insisted obstinately.

  “Cain.” As she breathed his name, memories of a river of fire, rice paddies and a rain-freshened night in Saigon rushed back at her. She bit her lip, every emotion inside her coalescing and focusing on his rank. “Or should I say Major Cain?”

  “You cut your hair,” he said in that dark velvet voice she still heard in her dreams.

  Of all that she had thought he might say if they ever met again, this was the last thing she had expected. But then, he’d always done the unexpected. Her eyes met his through the thin mesh. “So did you.”

  “I’ll explain later,” he promised.

  “I’ll hold you to that,” she assured him.

  “Do you like tacos?” John Lee asked. “My mom makes the best tacos in the world. She piles on cheese and lettuce and tomatoes, but she doesn’t put onions on ’em ’cause I hate onions.”

  Cain chuckled at the expression of supreme distaste the boy made, then bent down and whispered conspiratorially, “I hate onions, too.”

  John Lee looked up appealingly at Cat. “Can he stay and eat with us, Mom? Please? We’ve got plenty of shells.”

  In turn, she glanced uncertainly at Cain.

  He grinned. “I love tacos.”

  * * * *

  “I like your parents.”

  “They like you, too.”

  Cat and Cain were sitting on her patio. It was a perfect summer night. A full silver moon shone down upon them and countless stars swirled across the heavens. Fireflies danced in the darkened yard as the brass wind chimes hanging on a hook near the back door tinkled musically in the sultry breeze.

  John Lee was spending the night, as he did almost every Friday, with his grandparents. He’d done a lot of his growing up in and around their house, and he always slept in Drew and Johnny’s old bedroom, which had been redecorated just for him. Cat had been worried that it would be too much for her mother, but both Mike and Anne-Marie had insisted that they wanted to stay in as normal a routine as possible for as long as possible during her bout with breast-to-bone cancer.

  So tomorrow, her father and her son would have their regular boys’ day out. Instead of going to the Lake of the Ozarks and taking the boat out to their “secret” fishing cove, as they often did on Saturdays, they were planning to have breakfast at a panca
ke house and then head for a batting cage where John Lee could work on his swing. Cain had been invited to accompany them, and he’d accepted with alacrity.

  “When your mother put her hand on my arm and thanked me for her grandson . . .” His indrawn breath was sharp and serrated with emotion. “I almost lost it.”

  “They love him so much, both of them.” Remembering the tender moment, she blinked to keep her tears at bay. “With Drew gone and Johnny dead, John Lee is like a second chance for them.”

  Cain reached for his cigarillo, glowing red in the ashtray that was sitting on the small wrought iron table between them. He dragged on it deeply before he exhaled, blowing a stream of smoke from his nostrils. As a concession to the heat, he’d taken off his uniform jacket, unbuttoned his collar and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  “We all need a second chance now and then,” he said quietly.

  Cat picked up her glass of iced tea and took a sip. While she’d gotten over the initial shock of seeing him standing at her door, they still had a lot of ground to cover. Five years’ worth, to be exact. She decided to work backward, starting with today.

  “That was you at the press conference this afternoon, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you leave before it was over?” Despite the heavy hammering of her heart, she strove to keep her tone light as she looked over at him.

  For an interminable moment, she thought he wasn’t going to answer her. He stared up at the sky, as though he were lost in the past or hadn’t heard her question. Then, lifting the beer he’d been nursing, he took a long swallow. Finally, as though he’d just fought some violent inner battle with himself—and lost—he glanced at her nakedly.

  “Because I wasn’t sure you’d want to see me again.”

  “You thought I might regret”—she caught herself before she could say “making love with you” and amended it to—“what happened between us?”