One of Tony’s biggest difficulties had been accepting that he and Don were never going to have a traditional father-son relationship. He’d dropped completely out of Donny’s life for a while.
Vince had been glad to hear that Tony was making an effort at having some kind of relationship with his son, and that he was astute enough to attempt to fit it into a format, like email, that Donny could handle without a lot of additional stress.
Although it was entirely possible that this contact from his father had been the straw that broke the camel’s back—or the straw that made the camel flip out and stop taking his meds, as it were.
“And you were going to tell me this about Tony…when?”
Oh, danger, danger, Will Robinson! Sweet Charlotte was looking for a down and dirty fight.
“Right after we got into the car,” he answered. “Which is right now. Which is when I just told you. It’s good to hear, isn’t it? Although, to be honest, Donny didn’t seem particularly excited. Could be the meds. He was moving pretty slow. Remind me to ask him about it again in a coupla weeks, when he’s up to speed.”
“He’s never up to speed,” Charlotte said darkly.
“Up to his speed,” Vince corrected himself.
“How do you do it?” she asked him. “How do you just sit there and accept him exactly as he is, without ever letting it get to you? You don’t get angry, you don’t get upset—you know, I can count the number of times you’ve lost your temper on my fingers. Nearly sixty years and…It’s really starting to piss me off, Vincent.”
He laughed at those words coming out of this woman’s extremely proper mouth. Unfortunately, she hadn’t said it to be funny.
“And you know what else? I’m getting good and tired of shouting all the time,” she informed him tightly. “We have plenty of money. Will you just go and buy some hearing aids, for goodness sake?”
This wasn’t about his hearing or alleged lack thereof. It was about Donny. It was about how hard it was for Charlotte to acknowledge the fact that their grandson was never going to have the kind of life they’d always dreamed he’d have, back when he was a wide-eyed, sweet-faced ten-year-old. He was never going to have a family. He would most likely never find the kind of love and companionship they themselves had shared for all these years.
It was a difficult thing to come to peace with and accept.
“I think Donny’s okay, Charles,” he told her now. “I think he’s okay with his life. He likes being alone. And the Internet allows him to be social on certain levels—levels he can deal with, with limits he can handle. When he’s taking his meds and his biggest anxieties are under control…he’s okay. I would even dare to suggest that he’s happy.”
She was silent for the rest of the ride home. But when he pulled the car into their driveway, she asked, “You really think he’d be better off if I didn’t go tomorrow?”
“I wouldn’t say better off,” Vince told her as they climbed out of the car. “He loves you and he knows you love him. But I do think it might help keep him calmed down right now, while he’s still unstable.”
Charlie nodded. “I’ll go, but I’ll stay in the car.”
Her reason for going along tomorrow might’ve been so that she wouldn’t feel completely helpless and unnecessary when it came to assisting Donny. She’d be there in case Vince turned out to be wrong, and Don did need her.
But he would bet big dollars that her real reason for wanting to go was so that he wouldn’t have to drive over there alone.
Vince unlocked the kitchen door, holding it open for her. “Okay,” he said easily. “That sounds like a good plan.”
“I’m going up to take a bath,” she informed him as she headed for the stairs.
“Charlotte.” He stopped her. “You have seen me angry more than ten times.”
She thought about it. “No, I don’t believe I have.”
“When Upstairs Sally brought home that guy who lost his wallet…?”
“That was the first time,” she said. “But even then I think you were more upset than angry. But all right. It counts.”
“How about when Tony was fifteen and he came home completely drunk and threw up on the brand-new living room rug…?”
“Oh, yes. Two. And three—when Lexie was in that car accident, and that nurse wouldn’t let you into the emergency room,” Charlotte said. “That was very impressive.”
“When Wendy lit the back deck on fire.”
“That’s definitely four.” She couldn’t keep from smiling. “Although I think even though you yelled, you were secretly impressed she’d managed such an accomplishment.”
Vince grinned. “How did she do that without lighter fluid?”
“You also got good and mad at the high school when the band director was laid off,” Charlotte said. “That’s five.”
“I was angry when you wouldn’t marry me,” he told her.
“No, you weren’t. You were hurt.”
“I was angry, too,” he told her. “I just didn’t broadcast that fact.”
“Well, that doesn’t count, because you didn’t come across as angry.”
“Well, I was.”
“Well, you should have shouted, then,” she countered. “Even if I let it count, that’s only six times.”
“There were definitely others.”
She gave him her Oh, yeah? look. “Name ’em.”
“Well…”
“Hah. You can’t.”
“Sure I can.” He was angry a lot during the war. Surely he’d lost his temper more than once during those first few weeks he’d met Charlotte, when he was staying in her home. “I know—I was angry that day you came home and told me that Senator Howard was going to Hawaii, and that you’d been told to clear his calendar.”
Charlie and the other secretaries had been ordered to contact everyone who had an appointment with the senator and reschedule. After waiting all that time, he was going to be shut out.
“No,” she said now. “You weren’t. You got a little grim, but…” She shook her head.
“If I remember correctly, there was an awful lot of yelling going on that day.”
“That was me,” Charlotte told him. “I was the one doing the yelling. I was the one who was furious. Remember?”
He did.
“You want to do what?” He could still see her, standing in the bedroom that she’d so graciously given up for him, absolutely livid.
“Only six times,” Charlie said now, continuing on up the stairs. “That’s once a decade, Vince. Good thing I’m not prone to delusions or I’d think you might be one of those alien life-forms Donny sees all over the place.”
Vince laughed and let her win. Surely he’d lost his temper more than that, but if she chose not to remember those times, well, that was just as good for him.
He went back into the kitchen and got a beer from the refrigerator door. Truth was, he’d had very little to get angry about these past sixty years. Truth was, he’d used up all of his anger during the war. It was hard to get too mad about a child’s mischief after having lived through the three solid days of hell that was Tarawa, and all the other killing he’d seen.
Charlotte didn’t think he’d been angry that day she’d come home from work to tell him that his appointment with Senator Howard—the one that he’d waited weeks for as he convalesced—was not going to happen.
And yeah, maybe she was right. He hadn’t been angry. Angry wasn’t a big enough word for what he’d felt. Anguished was perhaps more appropriate.
“We’ve been told to reschedule, starting in March,” she told him, and he’d wanted to cry.
“I don’t have till March,” he told her tightly. “I’m due back in California a week from tomorrow.”
“What?” She sat down heavily in the chair by the door. “I had no idea you had to go back this soon.”
“All I want is a few minutes of his time,” Vince said. “Is that really too much to ask?”
He was going to ha
ve to start writing letters. He should have started weeks ago. But the truth was, he couldn’t write to save his life. Who would take his misspelled letters seriously?
“You’re barely recovered,” she said. “You need more time.”
“Charlotte, if I sent a letter to the senator, would he read it?”
She blinked at him. “He might not find the time to read it himself, but someone on staff certainly would. Depending how important it was, it might eventually make its way to his desk, so yes. It’s possible.” She leaned forward. “Vincent, don’t they understand you’ve been sick? What good will it do to send you back to the fighting too soon?”
“It’s not too soon,” he told her. He was getting stronger every day. “In fact, if I don’t get out of here, your cooking is going to make me too fat to fit into my uniform.”
She didn’t laugh at his pitiful attempt at a joke. She was just sitting there, looking at him as if he were a stranger—someone she’d never met. He wasn’t quite sure if that was good or bad.
“Will you help me?” he asked her. “I need to write a letter that’s so good the senator will read it before he leaves.”
She was silent.
“Will you help me write it?”
Charlotte finally shook her head. “Vince, he’s leaving the day after tomorrow.”
“Okay, so it’s got to be a really good letter.”
“How can I help you when you won’t even tell me why it’s so important that you talk to him?” she asked.
Yeah, that was the part that wasn’t going to be easy. He was going to have to tell her about Tarawa.
But not all of it. There was no way he would put the terrible details of that battle into a letter that Charlie might see.
“Mistakes were made at Tarawa,” he told her, choosing his words carefully. “Big mistakes. I’m guessing there were lots of holes in the information given to the officers who planned the invasion. It was…well, it was a slaughter, Charles. You know that. But the newspapers wrote about it as a battle that needed to be fought. A necessary victory that had a terrible price. But I honestly think that price could have been a whole lot lower. I think that flat-out slaughter could have been prevented.”
He had her full attention now. “How?”
“By filling in those holes,” he told her. “By providing information about that beach, about the tides, about the underwater fortifications, including that goddamn coral reef—excuse me—that did more damage than any mines the Japs planted.” He could see from her face that she didn’t understand. “Charles, our Higgins boats were filled with Marines heading for that beach—but their hulls didn’t clear the reef. They got caught up. Most of ’em got stuck there. Talk about sitting targets for the Japanese artillery. Whole platoons of Marines had to wade in, through waist- or even chest-deep water, more than five hundred yards to shore. We had no cover. We had no prayer. You could almost hear the Japs laughing as they mowed us down.”
Charlotte’s face was pale, and he realized he’d probably told her too much.
“There are dozens of islands in the Pacific that the Marines are going to take back from the Japanese, one bloody battle at a time. But we can’t go in like that again. We need to get our men all the way to the beach. If there’s a coral reef like Tarawa’s out there on that next island, we need to rig it with explosives and blow a hole into it before the landing craft are on top of it.
“So, see, I’ve been thinking. I’m a strong swimmer. And I’m sure there are other men who grew up near the water. Ten or twelve of us could swim to shore and get a firsthand look at both the beach and the fortifications. We could carry explosives—I know there are some that work underwater. We could rig any obstacles that we find and blow ’em sky high. We could use snorkles so the Japs wouldn’t even see us out there.”
Charlotte’s mouth was hanging open. “But if they did…?”
He met her eyes. “Chances are, with a dozen small targets, at least one of us would make it back to the fleet with the information we gathered.”
She stared at him, incredulous, slowly rising to her feet. “You’re serious, aren’t you? You want to write this letter to Senator Howard to involve him in setting up some kind of swimming Marine death team. Dear God, Vince!”
“No,” he said. “Charlotte. Death team? That’s not what I have in mind.”
“It sounds to me like you’re out of your mind! Swimming to shore? How could you swim all that way with a gun?”
It was a good question. One he’d thought long and hard about. “We wouldn’t carry guns. It wouldn’t be worth the drag or the weight, especially if we’re carrying explosives. See, I’m talking about trying to make it to shore without the enemy seeing us, about swimming quite a distance and—”
She laughed, but it wasn’t because she thought any of this was even remotely funny. In fact, she was furious. “You are…you’re completely insane!”
“No, I’m—”
“Yes! You want to swim with a handful of other men to a Japanese-held island without a single gun. What do you think they’re going to do when they see you, Vince? Wave to you? Offer you some sake?”
“Well, that’s just it. They won’t see us. We’ll go in at dusk, swim back at night.”
“Oh!” She was shouting now. “Now you’re swimming across the ocean at night! Do you know how big the ocean is? Do you know how hard it is to swim at night? And it’s not like the boat that’s waiting for you will have running lights! You know, there are much easier ways of killing yourself. I’m sure you can find one that doesn’t involve wasting the senator’s—or my—time!”
“I’m not trying to kill myself. I’m looking to save lives.”
“By sacrificing your own!”
“You see this?” He pushed himself off the bed and grabbed his uniform out of the closet. “Look at this. It looks like a uniform, but it’s so much more. Every single man who gets dressed in one of these—Army, Navy, you name it—every man, both officer and enlisted, knows that. It’s all about sacrifice. Those Marines who died at Tarawa weren’t running away from the Japanese! They were running toward them. Do you think we didn’t know we were already dead when those boats got caught on that reef? But we were wearing the uniforms of the United States Marines, and we did what we had to do for our country. Most of us died, but some of us made it through. And those of us who made it through, well, we didn’t let the others die in vain. Yes, it’s a sacrifice, Charles. I don’t want to die—no one wants to die—but I will goddamn do what I have to do to keep my country safe.”
There were tears brimming in her eyes and, as he watched, they spilled over and ran down her cheeks.
“I don’t want you to go back,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to die, somewhere, all alone, so far from home. I dream of James almost every night. He’s alone and dying and calling out for me. It haunts me, Vince. I couldn’t bear it if you haunted me, too.”
He couldn’t look at her. He had to turn away, to put his uniform back in the closet, or else he’d do something stupid, like reach for her. But she didn’t want him to reach for her. She wasn’t going to let herself love him.
He didn’t blame her.
“Well, I don’t want to go back, either,” he told her quietly. “But I have to.”
“Maybe you don’t,” she said.
“Yes,” he said. “I do. Will you help me write that letter, Charles?” He finally turned to look at her. “Please?”
“No,” she said, and walked out of the room, shutting the door quietly behind her.
Mary Lou’s heart sank as Kelly held open the door for her with a smile and a glass of beer in her hand. “Come on in.” She turned toward the kitchen. “Hey, everyone, Mary Lou is here.”
The friendly smile sure was nice, but oh, Lord, she hadn’t even considered the fact that there’d be alcohol at this thing.
Mary Lou clung to her handbag as she followed Kelly into a brightly lit kitchen that opened into a living area on one side and a din
ing area on the other. Surprisingly, it wasn’t all that much bigger than her own house.
The windows were bigger, though.
Sliding glass doors in both rooms opened onto a deck and framed a view of a neatly kept backyard filled with flower gardens and surrounded on all sides by other neatly kept backyards.
“Hey, Mary Lou,” Lt. John Nilsson’s wife, Meg, greeted her with a wave of a corn chip from her perch at the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining area. Her baby girl, Robin, was just a few months older than Haley, yet somehow Meg had managed to slim right down to her pre-pregnancy weight without any trouble at all.
Despite her apparent diet of corn chips and beer.
God, Mary Lou hated her. She gave Meg a big smile. “Hey, Meg. How’s Robin and Amy?” Meg was also more than ten years older than Mary Lou, with a twelve-year-old daughter from her failed first marriage.
“Let’s just say that it’s three years, ten months, and fourteen days until Ames learns to drive, and between now and then I’ll clock three hundred thousand miles,” Meg said. “Sailing lessons, dance, theater classes, soccer…” She laughed. “I’m not working at all right now, and to be honest, I love every minute of it.”
She exchanged some kind of pointed look with Kelly—obviously there was an unspoken understanding between the two women. Mary Lou felt a yawning, empty hole in her chest.
Why couldn’t Meg be her best friend? What was so great about Kelly Ashton, who wasn’t even married to Commander Paoletti?
Somewhere outside, a lawn mower started with a roar.
“Everyone, this is Mary Lou,” Kelly announced, crossing to the sliders and pushing them closed against the noise.
There were five women in the kitchen and the only one Mary Lou knew besides Meg was Teri Wolchonok, beauty to the beast who was the SEAL team’s heart-stoppingly scary Senior Chief Stan Wolchonok. Delicately pretty Teri actually flew helicopters—helos, as the SEALs called them—for the Coast Guard.
“You know Meg and Teri,” Kelly said to Mary Lou. She gestured to a slender young woman who looked an awful lot like Gwyneth Paltrow, only with darker hair. “This is Christy, who’s dating Mark Jenkins, and Shonda—”
Into the Night Page 23
