A Child Of His Own, page 19
“Oh, Ben, surely you don’t think that.”
“Why not? Do you have a better explanation?”
“Yes, I do. It’s called life.”
“Are you telling me you don’t believe in Karma?”
“I believe that there is an ultimate power by which the order of things is prescribed.” She shrugged her shoulders as if to say, “go figure,” and with a note of resignation in her voice, she concluded simply, “It’s fate.”
It was fate that led him to her doorstep one crisp April morning. Fate which decreed that their lives entwine the way they had. Fate had decided the outcome of their problem, and only fate would determine what was to become of them now.
“I can’t blame it on anything but myself,” he said dully.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little hard on yourself?”
“Think about it. I knew what I was getting into when I married Allison, but I married her anyway.”
“You could never have known what she would do.”
“Maybe not. But I was smart enough to know that she was marrying me for the kind of future I could give her. She came from a wealthy family and wasn’t about to settle for anything less.”
“It was a mistake, Ben. That’s all. Just a mistake. We all make them. I’ve certainly made my share. Look at the person I married. I’ve been carrying the burden of that particular mistake around with me every day for the past three years. But you taught me something. You taught me that there comes a time when you have to let go and get on with your life.”
He turned sharply to look at her. In the moonlight her expression was all calm and reason. It made him angry to see it, when his own calm had fled long ago and his reason was spinning out of control.
“How did I teach you that?” he scoffed. “All I did was sit there.”
“But don’t you see? It was enough for me to know that somebody cared enough to sit there and listen.”
“Somebody?” he questioned.
“You. All right? You.”
“Look, Dory, I don’t blame you for any of this. You didn’t ask for me to come barging into your life and turn it upside down the way I did. Not only didn’t you ask for it, but you don’t deserve it. You have enough baggage of your own to handle. You don’t deserve what I put you through because of the baggage I carry around with me. All I’m saying is that I take full responsibility for my actions.”
“How noble of you.”
His dark eyes flared at the undisguised sarcasm in her tone.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she told him. “If you expect me to feel sorry for you because you think it’s all your fault, you can forget it. Besides, it sounds to me like you’re feeling sorry enough for yourself.”
Her insensitivity to his feelings shocked him. It was so unlike her. And then he realized what she was doing. She was a clever one, all right, accusing him of self-pity and forcing him to take a good, hard look at himself. And he didn’t like what he saw.
Never once during those torturous years in prison had he ever felt sorry for himself. If anything, the experience had hardened his resolve to remain strong. Yet here he was, indulging in self-pity and hating himself for it. Until Dory had the courage to speak out and make him see it for what it was.
He turned away, disgusted with himself. “You’re right. It wasn’t self-pity that got me through those bad times, and it won’t be self-pity that will get me through this one.”
“What will you do?” she asked.
He shrugged his broad shoulders helplessly and answered, “Move on, I guess. See what’s around the next turn in the road.”
It wasn’t what Dory had expected him to say. Unprepared for his response, she felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under her. She quickly regained her equilibrium and said, “I meant about your son. Will you continue to search for him?”
“I’m no longer sure I’m meant to find him,” he replied fatalistically.
“So, you’ll be leaving, then?” She was thunderstruck, trying hard to comprehend what his leaving would do to her. Her voice emerged as a scratchy whisper. “When?”
“In the morning.”
The words stung like a slap across the cheek. “So soon?”
He gestured toward the carousel and said, “You seem to have everything under control now. The rest of the floor needs sanding and buffing, but I’ve patched that hole in the roof as best I can. There’s no reason why you can’t open on Memorial Day as planned.”
“Planned?” She spoke the word dully as she turned away to hide her tears. “Yes, that’s what I had planned, wasn’t it?”
How could she have known weeks ago, when her goal had been simply to make it to Memorial Day, how it would change to include all the Memorial Days yet to come, with this man beside her? Yes, with a few finishing touches, she would be ready to open on Memorial Day, but without Ben there, it wouldn’t be the same.
She had come out there to tell him that, to tell him how very much she loved him and to ask him to stay. But what was the point, when he seemed to have made up his mind to leave, choosing the open road over her, choosing a child he would never know to the son that she wanted more than anything to share with him.
Dory was stunned by the apparent ease with which he could just walk away. But it was more than her own crushed feelings she was thinking about. What effect would Ben’s leaving have on Jason? He had been too young to feel the effect of Eddie’s absence, but this was different. Ben had become as much a part of their lives as any real father ever could be. Jason looked up to him. His time spent with Ben building the model airplane was all he talked about. She recalled with tears in her eyes that just that very morning he had said to her, “Mommy, I wanna be just like Ben when I grow up.”
Children were resilient, she told herself. In time, his broken little heart would mend, and although he would always feel the absence of a father in his life, in time, the memory of the man who had spent this spring with them would fade.
For herself, however, it was different. It was funny, but she had known Ben only a few weeks, yet it felt as if she’d known him and loved him all her life. With cold certainty, she knew she would carry the pain of his leaving with her for a very long time.
All the energy flowed out of her, and suddenly she felt overwhelmingly tired. The weeks of waiting for the court’s decision had taken their toll. What she had once looked upon with dread had come to take on a different meaning these last few days when she had begun to feel the stirrings of hope from deep within. She stood there, not knowing what to do or say, her unhappiness mirrored in the teardrops that slipped silently down her cheeks, glistening in the starlight from above. The feel of her heart breaking into a million pieces was unbearable. That she found her voice in the midst of her gloom was a miracle. That the words that emerged were a brave attempt to hide her sorrow was the saddest thing of all.
“There’s no need to tell Martin about it. I’ll simply tell him in the morning that you had to leave. I’ll say that you had previous commitments...other priorities. He’ll understand.”
“And Jason?” he asked, his tone echoing his deep concern.
Leaving Dory was torture enough, but leaving Jason only made the heartache worse. Jason had become a bright spot in his life. He had come to look forward to their hour together each night after Jason’s bath. The little guy was a fast learner. He only had to be shown something once to know how to do it when asked. He could just picture the model airplanes that would hang in Jason’s room when he was old enough to build them by himself. Maybe one of them would even be the P-51 Mustang bomber they’d worked on together.
. “Jason has his whole life to get over it,” said Dory. She spoke at the ground, her eyes averted, so he would not see her tears.
His face was shadowed by guilt. “You don’t think he’ll have nightmares or anything, do you? Remember that night he woke up crying that there were monsters under his bed?”
She remembered. She had heard Jason cry out in the middle of the night and had jumped out of bed and hurried to his room. Ben was already there. Checking in the closet and under the bed and finding no monsters, he had soothed Jason back to sleep while Dory had watched speechless and grateful.
“Monsters are real to Jason,” she said. “He sees them on television, in books. But something like this, it doesn’t have a scary face or a terrible roar. Don’t get me wrong. He feels it. Children are amazingly adept at sensing things. But if he can’t attach an ugly face to it, in a way, it’s not real.”
“So what you’re saying is that Jason will be just fine.”
Dory knew there were no guarantees in life. Nevertheless, she echoed, “Just fine.”
And neither of them believed it.
“If you want, I can make you some breakfast before you go.”
Her kindness was too much for him to bear. “Yeah, that would be great,” he mumbled, knowing in his heart that he would be gone before then.
She turned to go.
“Dory?”
The appeal in his voice was low and slightly unsteady, but audible. The sound of her name softly uttered halted her in her tracks and turned her slowly back around.
A moment of taut silence followed.
He flashed her a smile that was so genuine and so beautiful that it took her breath away.
“Thanks,” he said. “For everything.”
Later, as he stood at the bedroom window for what was to be the last time, he reflected on how much he had meant what he said. He couldn’t hate, not when he had so much to thank her for. She had given him a job when he needed one badly. She had invited him into her home without question or suspicion. She had provided him with an opportunity to relate to a child for the first time in his life. She had been honest and fair with him about Jason in spite of what she stood to lose. She had filled his physical need in ways he had not thought possible. But most of all, she had come to love him in spite of his past mistakes.
He thought of all the people who, in their entire lifetimes, would never experience the kind of passion he had found with Dory. He himself would never have known that it existed had it not been for one brave and incredibly sexy woman. He should have been happy to have known that kind of passion at all, to have been even the smallest part of her life. Yet there remained inside of him an empty, aching place that only she could fill.
There was no telling where his path would lead him. Only one thing was certain. No matter which road he followed, it would take him farther away from everything he couldn’t have—the wife, the kid, the happiness and security of family life.
He turned from the window and went to the dresser. From the top drawer he removed the few pieces of clothes that were neatly folded there and laid them on the bed. At the closet he pulled his worn denim shirt from the hanger and put it on in place of the newer one he had put on earlier for dinner.
He had to laugh at how nervous he had been wondering whether or not she would notice that he was wearing his good pair of jeans and the new shirt he had purchased on a recent trip into town. One look at her, though, and his nervousness flew right out the window.
She had looked so beautiful dressed in a white silk blouse with a flounce of ruffles at the dipping neckline and a skirt that brushed the tops of her knees. He had never seen her wearing either before. His heart had done a little somersault knowing that she had dressed especially for dinner and that, from the soft blush on her face, she was just as nervous as he was about it.
He pulled his backpack down from the top shelf in the closet and tossed it onto the bed. Absently, he shoved his clothes into it, not caring if they got wrinkled. He’d worry about that some other time.
He slipped into his brown leather flight jacket and hoisted the pack onto his back. On his way to the door he grabbed his watch from the dresser.
Funny how time had lost all meaning to him in this place. Here, the hours were marked by events rather than the hands of a clock. Breakfast was at seven. At eight Jason left for preschool. By two he was home. Dinner was at six. Jason’s bath time was at seven. From seven-thirty until eight-thirty he and Jason built the plane together. At eight-thirty it was story time and then lights out for Jason. At nine he would invariably find Martin outside on the porch, sitting in his rocking chair and smoking his pipe. By nine-thirty, with her chores for the day finished, Dory would join them for an hour or so of quiet conversation. By eleven he’d be up in his room, standing at the window, waiting for the light to come on in the carousel. When it did, he would watch for a while and then go to bed, only to get up in the morning and repeat the whole thing over again. No, there was no need to tell time when he had the simple, pleasurable events of the day to go by.
With a ragged sigh, he strapped the watch to his wrist. He took a step toward the door, but stopped.
His footsteps took him back to the window where the Catskill mountains in the distance looked like great rolling shadows against the darkness. His heart sank when he didn’t see the reassuring light in the carousel.
It was well past midnight when Ben left the room and made his way noiselessly down the hall. He stopped in front of Jason’s door, wondering whether or not to wake him up to say goodbye, and deciding that there was no sense trying to explain it to a four-year-old, nor in compounding his own pain. But he couldn’t resist peeking in at the boy as he slept. Then, with a full heart, he left the room, and all that he’d once dreamed of.
Downstairs he could smell the remains of their uneaten French dinner as he passed the kitchen. Hardening himself against the onrush of emotion it brought, he hurried on toward the front door.
The screen door creaked on its hinges when he opened it and stepped outside.
A crescent moon hung low in the sky, like a jagged tear in the black cloth of night. With no surrounding lights to obscure them, a million stars winked back at him. There was comfort in knowing that they would always be up there. At this point, they were the only constant in his life.
He scanned the midnight sky, searching out the ones he recognized like old friends. There was Orion, the Hunter. He had pointed him out to Jason one night from the front porch, and for days after Jason had proudly told everyone how he had seen O’Brien in the sky.
Was there nothing he could think about that would not remind him of Jason? Was there nowhere he could turn that he did not see Dory’s haunting and beautiful face before him?
For years he had felt something missing from his life. He had been foolish enough to think that marrying Allison would satisfy his longing not only to love but to be loved back. Not for his money or his position, but for himself. But, of course, it hadn’t. The ache remained, reaching into the deepest corners of his heart.
It wasn’t until he met a beautiful woman with sad green eyes that the ache began to subside. With Dory he had come as close as he would ever get to fulfilling the need that raged inside of him. But the joke was on him. To come that close, only to be left with the same aching need.
The pain of losing her was almost physical, and yet he embraced it, for at least it meant that he was alive and not the half-dead man he had been before knowing her. Like her namesake, she had unleashed sorrow and misery, if not upon all mankind, then surely upon him. But she had also given him the one thing that was left inside the box. She had given him hope.
It was astonishing to him that he could feel anything at all except the pain and misery of losing her, yet there it was, beating faintly within him, the tiniest bit of hope that he would one day get over her.
He looked around. This was where it all began. This was where he had first seen her. She’d had grease on her face and a wrench in her hand, and he had thought her crazy for thinking that she could get the Dutch Mill in shape by Memorial Day.
She had looked so scared that cool April morning when he had appeared on her doorstep. And so sad. She was that most lethal of things, a beautiful and vulnerable woman. He knew now that he had lost his heart to her that day without even knowing it.
He wasn’t shocked to discover that he loved her. Hadn’t he somehow known that very first day? What he felt instead was an overwhelming sense of relief that he was finally able to acknowledge it, if not to Dory, then at least to himself.
Yet with the knowledge came an indescribable sadness to be leaving behind him all that he had come to hold dear. Well, at least, they had accomplished the seemingly impossible task of getting the Dutch Mill ready to open on Memorial Day.
The big horse they brought back from Devil’s Corner needed work, but the roof was patched, and it wasn’t likely that anyone would notice that there were some finishing touches to be made to some of the horses.
Together, they had gotten the job done. And as he stood with his feet braced atop the weathered planks, the midnight breeze rustling the hair at his forehead, one word kept repeating over and over in Ben’s mind.
Together.
Wasn’t that the way they were supposed to be? The three of them? Together?
Chapter 17
She couldn’t bring herself to work on the carousel. Not even her old friends could assuage the terrible pain of Ben’s leaving.
Instead, she lay awake in bed with the covers thrown back, feeling feverish despite the cool night breeze that billowed the curtains at the open window, trying hard to comprehend why he was leaving when so much had happened between them.
Perhaps he didn’t feel the same way about love as she did. To her, love was more than the fulfillment of sexual desire. It was all encompassing. It was forever. You didn’t walk away from it at the first sign of trouble.
She thought she had loved Eddie. That’s why she had stayed. But she realized now that she never really loved him. He had represented something familiar to her, and it was that which she loved. Sadly, he had turned into a stranger at the end. It seemed that Ben wasn’t the only one guilty of marrying for the wrong reasons.
