The Bracelet (Everlasting Love)

by Karen Rose Smith

  Laura had worn a lime-green A-line dress, not sure what kind of party they were attending. She’d tied up half her hair with narrow lime-and-fuchsia grosgrain ribbons. Pretending to appear worldly, she’d remarked offhandedly to Jack, “I’ve heard all kinds of language. Don’t worry about me.”

  When Brady had draped his arm around her shoulders, she’d felt trembly and weak-kneed, as she always did when they were close. Although they made out every time they saw each other, they hadn’t gone any further than that, not because they weren’t eager to, but because Brady had said more than once that he respected her dreams, understanding that they had to learn to trust each other—that they’d know when they were ready.

  Would they? Was she putting them both through weekends of frustration because she was afraid she’d get hurt? Because the wrong decision could mean an unhappy turn in her life? Because the war was standing between her and Brady and they both understood that?

  That night she wanted to forget about it all, and she suspected Brady did, too.

  Two more friends—Tom and Luis—showed up. They seemed surprised that she was there, but Brady made no excuses for her presence, just introduced her to Luis, who went to Penn State, and to Tom, who was earning a degree at Shippensburg.

  Tom, who defied longer men’s hairstyles by wearing a crew cut, held out a box. “It’s a game called Pass-Out. We can talk and play and drink, all at the same time.”

  While Luis and Tom moved the coffee table into the middle of the room, Brady lifted the cushions from the sofa and positioned them around it. Luis took out three packs of Lucky Strikes and tossed then onto the coffee table next to the game. “My contribution.”

  Brady produced a bottle of Burgundy from a paper sack he’d carried in and set it on the counter in the narrow kitchen. Laura had never been to a party like this, with a lava lamp glowing blue-green on top of the TV console, smoke filling the room and scents of wine and whiskey wafting up from juice glasses. She tucked her legs under her on the cushion and felt really grown up for the first time. While Luis strummed his guitar, Tom and Brady talked about the courses they’d enrolled in, the ones they’d hated and the ones they’d liked. Jack told funny stories about how picky some of the customers at the shoe store were. The guys reminisced about their high-school days.

  At a lull in the conversation, Brady leaned close to her. “I might have met you in high school if you’d stayed in Catholic school.”

  “My aunt didn’t intend to pay anything extra to send me there.”

  When they started the game, Brady rolled the dice and moved his marker. The square said All had to take a drink. They did. The talking and playing went on as the sun set and traffic noises outside the open windows became quieter.

  After she’d downed two glasses of wine, Laura switched to soda. Jack, Luis and Tom started mixing more ginger ale into their bourbon. But she noticed Brady wasn’t diluting his. At some point, pink-elephant cards from the game forgotten, Jack flipped on a transistor radio and they listened to the Saturday-night countdown. The Beatles’ “Get Back” pounded through the room.

  By midnight, Laura realized Brady and his friends had talked about absolutely everything except the thousand-pound gorilla in the room. None of them had mentioned the war. None of them had mentioned friends who hadn’t come home. None of them had mentioned that Brady, Tom and Luis would be drafted into service for their country after they graduated. It was almost one in the morning when Luis and Tom left. As Brady stood, he wasn’t quite steady on his feet.

  “If you two would like some privacy, you can have my bedroom. I can bunk on the couch,” Jack told them.

  Since Laura had worked at the Bon Ton until five, she and Brady hadn’t had any time alone. Tomorrow his family was going to have dinner with his uncle, then he’d be leaving to return to school. She wouldn’t see him again until next weekend.

  “Why don’t we take him up on his offer for a little while,” Brady suggested. “I shouldn’t drive yet. We can leave when my head clears.”

  She wasn’t sure what her aunt would say if she came home in the wee hours of the morning, but right now she didn’t care. Being with Brady was more important than anything else.

  “All right. Let’s stay,” she agreed.

  Ten minutes later, they were lying on top of Jack’s cotton spread, breathing in sweaty socks, Aqua Velva and smoke that had drifted in from the living room. The room was black except for the glare of the street lamps battling against the rolled-down shades.

  Brady lay on his side, his muscled arm resting across her waist. He kissed her longingly, deeply, passionately.

  Afterward, he brushed his thumb along her hairline. “So what did you think of everybody?”

  Still reeling from the effects of his kiss, she didn’t filter her thoughts. “You have good friends, but I’m not sure you should have brought me along tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  They’d kicked off their shoes, and Brady’s stockinged foot rested against her nylon-clad one. “Because none of you talked about what was on your minds.”

  “Sure we did. We talked for hours.”

  Their body heat, Brady’s face so close to hers, his scent and pure maleness tempted her to kiss him instead of talking to him. But she spoke her mind anyway. “You didn’t talk about the draft, or about you and Luis and Tom going to basic training in a few weeks. Or about your friends who are there now and what’s happening.”

  Brady shifted away from her, rolled onto his back and stared up at the ceiling. “Damn it, Laura, not everything’s about the war. What did you think we should do? Analyze the last news report? Talk about how we’re giving up real life for the next two years? Share notes on why our mothers cry because they don’t want us to go? What good would any of that do?”

  Brady had never been angry with her, never shut her out, never turned away. She suspected what was at the bottom of it all.

  Although his long, hard body was tense and rigid, she turned into his shoulder, laid her head against his arm, hugged him as best she could. “I know sometimes when you get really quiet, you’re thinking about it,” she said softly. “I imagine when you’re lying in bed at night, you can’t get to sleep because pictures are going through your head—pictures from TV and stories you’ve heard. You don’t have to hide what you’re thinking or feeling from me, Brady.”

  His body was so still, so stiff, she couldn’t even feel him breathing. She wished there was a little more light in the room and fewer shadows. She wished she could see him.

  Finally she felt his breath. It was fast and shallow. She raised her hand to his face, and he suddenly turned away from her. But not before she felt the wetness. Not before she realized there had been tears on his cheeks.

  She held on tighter. “Tell me,” she whispered into his neck.

  He just shook his head and mumbled, “I had too much to drink.”

  She guessed why that was so. “Nothing you say is going to change the way I feel about you.”

  His shirt was damp from their combined body heat. Still staring at the wall instead of at her, he kept his voice so low she had to strain to hear.

  “In the daytime, I think about our reasons for being in Vietnam and I know I have to do my part. I think about how proud my parents will be when they see me in a uniform. I think about learning skills I don’t have now. I think about toughening up so I can really face the world when I get back. But at night—At night I think about Bill’s leg being blown off. I think about the guys who haven’t come home. I think about the swamps and a strange country, living in God-knows-what conditions.” Without warning, he faced her. “Most of all at night, I think about dying. Since I met you, I think about that a lot and I get so damn scared.”

  He wasn’t touching her and she realized he expected her to move away, either to turn away in disgust or to leave him with his misery. She wasn’t about to do either.

  Winding her arms around his neck, she felt her own voice break when she admitte
d, “I’m scared, too.”

  As they held each other, she knew that what had just happened between them was more intimate than making love.

  “Mom. Mom?” Sean asked. His voice seemed to come from very far away.

  She focused once again on her son. “Yes, honey. I was remembering.”

  “Remembering what? What Dad was like?”

  “I often wonder if children ever really know their parents,” she admitted with a sad smile. “I mean, we’re people, too, and we had lives before you were born. Believe it or not, we had the same struggles you do.”

  “Not Dad. He never had to struggle with anything.” Sean’s voice was almost bitter.

  If only you knew, she mused, and then realized maybe it was time Sean did know. Not everything. Lots of things Brady needed to tell him. But she could reveal bits and pieces that Brady would never tell him. Brady was a proud man. Brady wanted his son to always see him as strong, maybe even as invincible. Her, too, for that matter. But she knew better. She knew he was human just as she was, with flaws and needs, wants and desires that sometimes got them into trouble and other times made life worth living.

  “I was remembering the night your dad cried and I held him tight and we prayed he’d return safely from the war.”

  The shock on Sean’s face was reiterated in his words. “You’ve got to be kidding. Dad cried?”

  Had she made an awful mistake? Was this something too private to share with her son? Yet if Sean didn’t soon learn that his father had flaws, that he hurt and got disappointed and didn’t always succeed, she was afraid the two of them would always be at odds.

  Her voice vibrated with the intensity she felt. “I’m talking to you as one adult to another. You wanted to know something about your dad. I just confided in you about a night when both of us were so scared that there wasn’t any escape from it. Your dad was twenty-one, graduating from college. You’ll be graduating from high school soon. What if someone put a weapon in your hands and shouted orders at you? What if you were sent to a foreign land where nothing is easy, nothing is familiar and there’s no way to go home? Think about it and then tell me what you’d do with that storm building inside you.”

  It was a few moments before Sean murmured, “I can’t imagine it.”

  “Vietnam wasn’t so different from Iraq. Maybe the cause was more idealistic. I don’t know. By the time I met your dad, no one could ignore the clips on the news…our boys dying. The war was touching so many families’ lives that the nation couldn’t look away.”

  She tapped her finger on Sean’s chest over his heart. “When war touches you personally, when a relative or friend dies or loses a leg, the fight is a prison you can’t escape from. A young man walking into hell has every right to cry.”

  She was talking to Sean from a woman’s perspective, from her woman’s perspective, as a girlfriend and a mother, or as simply a lover of peace. Maybe he needed to know her, too, in all this. Maybe he’d never realized what was at her core. Perhaps it was time he did.

  After a few very long minutes during which neither of them spoke, Sean asked what she thought was an odd question. “How long had you been dating Dad when that happened…when he let you know he was scared?”

  “Six weeks. We’d had six weekends together, letters in between.”

  “He must have trusted you.”

  “That night, we started to trust each other. I can’t explain what happened between me and your dad that spring. As your mom, I’d tell you never trust love at first sight, never trust that initial excitement because it could fade away, never think the moment is going to last forever. Because what your dad and I shared was so rare, Sean, so very rare. But your dad and I were blessed with knowing from the moment I met him.”

  “Knowing you were going to get married?” her son asked.

  “No. Everything was still too uncertain. But we knew for sure we had a connection, a bond that would never be broken. That weekend was a turning point for me in more ways than one. Up until that weekend, I’d lived with my aunt.” Aunt Marcia had died of lung cancer before Sean and Kat had come into her and Brady’s lives.

  “What happened that weekend?” In spite of the late hour, Sean’s eyes sparkled with interest, as if he was intrigued by everything she was telling him.

  “Your dad and I had gone to a party. I met his high-school friends, who’d gone their separate ways for a while. Your father didn’t take me home until 4:00 a.m.”

  Slipping back in time again, she remembered how they’d fallen asleep in each other’s arms on that bed in Jack’s apartment. When they’d awakened, Jack was snoring on the sofa. It had been so late and she’d had no idea what her aunt was going to say.

  She’d never expected Aunt Marcia to be waiting up for her.

  Brady had driven away after she’d unlocked the door and gone inside. How she wished he’d still been by her side. How she wished she’d felt like a niece to this woman with the angry expression and a slip of paper in her hand.

  Marcia Watson had thrust that piece of paper at her. “I can only imagine why you’re traipsing in here at 4:00 a.m., but I’m telling you this—I’ve had enough of looking after you. Here’s a place you can stay. If you don’t like it, you have a week to find somewhere else. You’re old enough to be on your own.”

  Chapter 4

  Hours had passed since Brady’s surgery.

  Laura’s palms were sweaty as she approached the Open Heart Intensive Care Unit, thinking about Dr. Gregano’s words after Brady’s heart catheterization the previous day. “Your husband has ninety-nine percent blockage in the main artery, eighty-five percent in the…”

  His diagnosis had hit Laura like a belly blow. For some reason, she hadn’t been able to absorb everything. When she’d managed to concentrate on his voice again, she’d heard, “…surgery as soon as we can schedule him in the morning.”

  Now, as she stood there after so many cups of coffee she’d lost count, trying to prepare herself for this first visit, all she could think about was the fact that she’d triggered this. She’d caused Brady’s heart attack. And she had to face the aftermath of it.

  Both the surgeon and Dr. Gregano had warned her that some people didn’t want to visit their loved ones the first night after surgery.

  Stepping inside the cubicle, she felt her breath catch as she saw Brady, and she almost backed away. The doctors had explained what she’d find, yet she hadn’t been prepared.

  He looked like death. He was so white she wasn’t sure blood pumped through him. His hands, arms and face were swollen, his fingers blue. He seemed to be shivering. He was hooked up to tubes, IVs and monitors, and a machine breathed for him, making his chest heave. There were markings and dye on his body.

  She felt as if she’d stepped into a science-fiction movie.

  Still, even if a machine was breathing for him, this was her Brady and he was alive.

  A nurse touched her arm. “He’s doing fine.”

  Fine. What an inadequate word.

  Dr. Gregano had told her Brady would be sedated. That was best the first twelve hours. But she wanted to see those blue eyes of her husband’s. She needed to see those eyes. She needed to know he was still her Brady.

  After approaching Brady slowly, Laura sat on the edge of a chair next to the bed. This was so different from when she’d visited him after his heart attack. She wasn’t sure exactly why. Maybe because she knew that during the operation, the surgeon had cut through Brady’s chest and cracked open his sternum. Brady had been connected to a heart-lung machine and his heart had stopped. The surgery had been traumatic, and she really didn’t fathom the results of that yet. Maybe because she was afraid that the Brady who would wake up wouldn’t be the Brady she’d married and loved for more than half her life.

  The lump in her throat made it hard for her to swallow. Her stomach roiled with fear and she felt nauseated. Yet she had to be here for him, just as she’d been there for him after other kinds of nightmares, just as he’d
been there for her after her miscarriages and after the death of their son. That was what she and Brady did. They held on to each other through the difficult times, even when they didn’t feel like it, even when it was hard, even when they didn’t want to. When had they stopped going out for dinner on the odd evening the kids were both involved in activities and Brady was home? When had kisses become short and perfunctory rather than long and passionate? She couldn’t remember when making love had joined their souls. More tears came to her eyes and once more she blinked them away. Making love with Brady had always brought them back together when distance found its way between them.

  She laid her hand on Brady’s arm and whispered, “I’m here.”

  He didn’t respond and she recognized the fact that he couldn’t.

  Because the sight of Brady like this was so overwhelming, because she had to stay and touch him, yet felt he wasn’t really here, she sank into memories again, desperately wanting to escape the complications of everything happening now, to be anywhere else with Brady.

  All over again it was May 1969. Each day that month had brought her and Brady closer. Each day had shown her how much he cared.

  After Aunt Marcia had ordered her to rent a place of her own, Laura had gone to the address on the slip of paper her aunt had thrust at her. She’d found a boardinghouse that smelled like sour cabbage. As the landlady had taken her to the second floor, a disheveled man had opened his door and leered at her. When Mrs. Treedy had told her she’d be sleeping on the third floor with another “gentleman” across the hall from her, Laura had made her escape.

  On her return to her aunt’s, she’d found a note:

  I’ll be back around five. I put some boxes in your room for you to start packing. See you later.

  Aunt M.

  Laura had replaced the note on the red Formica table but had brought the Sunday paper with her to the sofa. Sinking onto it, she’d told herself she was not going to cry. She was twenty. She was old enough to be on her own. She’d get extra hours of work somehow or add another job. And she’d find a place better than Mrs. Treedy’s.