Carla Neggers - Betrayals

“From a long, long time ago.” The old man’s voice was distant, sadder than Jared would have ever thought possible. He had always seemed so impervious to anguish, but perhaps he was merely clever at hiding it from those who would take pleasure in his pain. Staring at the marble mantel where photographs of his lost wife and son were on display, he went on, “I’d assumed he never made it out of Saigon.”

Jared resisted the urge to press and press hard for information. “Who is he?”

Thomas shook his head, as if cutting off his own rampant thoughts, not Jared. “You came here because you trust me, didn’t you?”

Jared nodded.

Turning back to his young friend, Thomas clapped him on the arm, his grip stronger than Jared would have expected from a man near eighty. “Then believe me,” the older man said, “when I tell you the best thing you can do for yourself and for your daughter is to go home and let me see what I can root out on my own. You did what you had to do fourteen years ago. You knew then that you had to go on without answers-for Mai’s sake. Well, nothing’s changed.”

“Mai’s safe,” Jared said stonily. “I’m going to find this guy. I want to know what he’s up to. If it doesn’t involve my daughter, then fine. If it does-”

“Jared, go home.”

“I can’t. I’m not running away this time.”

“You didn’t before,” Thomas said with certainty. “You did what was right.”

Jared started to argue, but stopped at the sound of footsteps in the hall.

“Grandfather, how the hell much curry did you put in that stuff? It’s enough to kill a horse! My mouth’s on fire and-” Rebecca went silent as she came into the parlor.

The sight of her took Jared’s breath away. In her tangerine shirt and slim black skirt, she looked pulled together, gorgeous and very rich. She was older and even more beautiful, her eyes just as blue, her hair shorter, but still that unusual, very memorable shade of chestnut. And Jared realized, with a certainty that hurt, that although his life had gone on, he’d never really gotten over having loved and lost Rebecca Blackburn.

“Hello, R.J.,” he managed to say.

“Jared.”

Her voice was a whisper, and at that moment Jared knew that Thomas was right about one thing: nothing had changed.

On a sweltering Labor Day weekend in 1973, Rebecca returned to Boston for the first time since moving off Beacon Hill ten years earlier. She came alone on an Amtrak train. Her mother didn’t approve of her choice of Boston University. “Why Boston?” she’d demanded. “You’ve been accepted at Vanderbilt, Northwestern, Stanford. Why Boston University?”

Because it was in Boston, and Rebecca had dreamed about going back since she was eight. She’d restore the Blackburn name to its lofty pre-Thomas Blackburn position of respectability. And she’d do it in Boston.

But she didn’t tell her mother that. She claimed she’d decided on B.U. because they had offered her the best financial aid package, which was true. Smart, fatherless and the eldest of six, Rebecca had had no trouble getting scholarships.

“You don’t have to take me,” she’d told her mother, and Jenny Blackburn made no pretense of her relief. She couldn’t go back to Boston. And Rebecca wasn’t going to make her feel she had to.

So, her stuffed duffel bag slung over one shoulder, Rebecca made her way from the train station to her dormitory, the only person on the subway not grumbling about the heat. She could have called her grandfather, she supposed, and prevailed upon him to meet her, but why bother? She hadn’t heard from him since she and her mother and brothers had left Boston; he hadn’t answered any of the flurry of letters she’d written to him in those first lonely months in Florida. The only reason she knew he was still alive was because her mother still got tense and nervous whenever his name was mentioned.

Her roommate was a tiny, cheerful eighteen-year-old from Westchester County named Sophia Loretta Mencini-Sofi. She owned twenty-eight belts and twelve pocketbooks. Rebecca, who had one of each, counted them. Sofi grimaced at Rebecca’s meager wardrobe and the tattered, unabridged dictionary she had lugged all the way from Florida and promptly labeled her new roommate an egghead. They became instant friends.

“But why all the crayons?” Sofi asked.

“They’re oil pastels. I hope to audit a few art courses, too.” She’d had a flair for art since she could remember, but didn’t consider it a practical choice for a career-or for erasing her grandfather’s damage to the Blackburn name.

“Major egghead,” Sofi said.

Rebecca laughed. “Just determined.”

On a drizzly afternoon in October Thomas Blackburn gave up on the notion that Rebecca would come to him and instead went to her. He tracked her down at the B.U. library, roomy and nicely laid out, a better facility than he’d expected. He considered the large windows with tempting views of the Charles River an unnecessary distraction, however, and he loathed having to argue his way past the security desk. Did he look like someone who’d try to sneak books out tucked in his pants?

He found his granddaughter reshelving an enormous cart of books in the stacks and knew her at once, this little girl of his now grown-up. Thomas ached at the sight of her. At eighteen, she displayed the same unfortunate taste in fashion as her fellow students. She’d tied a red bandanna over her hair and knotted it at the nape of her neck; it was the sort of thing his wife used to wear when she cleaned the attic. Her jeans and bright gold sweater had so many holes they weren’t worth mending. At least, mercifully, she was clean, the strands of hair flowing down her back from under the bandanna shining, that fetching chestnut that marked her as a Blackburn. Although she wore no cosmetics, her skin, even smudged with library dust, was radiant, and her eyes sparkled. There was an arrogant straightness to her nose-a Blackburn touch-and an altogether stubborn set to her jaw that was pure O’Keefe. Even dressed in rags, Rebecca, in her grandfather’s opinion, would have looked regal, but he suspected telling her so would only have made her angry.

“A fine way to spend a Saturday afternoon,” he muttered. “Does this job of yours leave enough time for you to study?”

She turned, and in the flash of her eyes, he could tell she’d recognized him immediately, but she quickly hid her surprise and, he thought, her pleasure at seeing him. “We all have twenty-four hours in a day.”

“How true.” Thomas lifted a discarded volume from her cart. Aristotle. He hadn’t read the Greek philosophers in years. “I suppose this job of yours is a federally funded position for impoverished students?”

“Not necessarily impoverished. Work study helps students from middle-class families get by, as well. The less your family can afford, the larger your work-study grant.”

“Are you at the maximum?”

She gave him a tight smile. “Not quite.”

“Make work,” he said.

“It feels like real work to me. I’ve been at it since noon. Of course, if I had a rich and generous grandfather paying my bills…”

He laughed, a faint feeling of pride rising up in him. She was a tough, outspoken young woman. If she were going to stay in Boston, she’d have to be. He found himself resisting the urge to hug her, asking instead, “When do you finish?”

“Another forty minutes.”

“Good. I’ll meet you downstairs at the front desk.”

“For what?”

“We’ll go to dinner.” He winked at her, wishing it could be the same between them as it had before Stephen’s death, when they’d done everything together during his home leaves and had understood each other so well. But those days were over. He’d ended them himself. “I’ll take you to the Ritz.”