Suzanne Brockmann - Tall, Dark and Devastating - Harvard's Education

“Maybe not,” he admitted, his eyes still closed. “But if that’s the case, I guess I’m moving out today, huh?”

P.J. hugged her legs to her chest as she sat on the beach next to the Alpha Squad’s Senior Chief.

“Maybe that’s why I feel so bad,” he mused. “It’s a symbolic end to my childhood.” He glanced at her, amusement lighting his eyes. “Which I suppose had to happen sooner or later, considering that in four years I’ll be forty.”

Harvard Becker was an incredibly beautiful-looking man. His body couldn’t have been more perfect if some artisan had taken a chisel to stone and sculpted it. But it was his eyes that continued to keep P.J. up at night. So much was hidden in their liquid brown depths.

It had been a bold move on her part to suggest they go off alone to walk. With anyone else, she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. But with everyone else, the boundaries of friendship weren’t so hard to define.

When it came to this man, P.J. was tempted to break her own rules. And that was a brand-new feeling for her. A dangerous feeling. She hugged her knees a little tighter.

“There was a lot wrong with that house in Hingham,” Harvard told her. “The roof leaked in the kitchen. No matter how many times we tried to fix it, as soon as it stormed, we’d need to get out that old bucket and put it under that drip. The pipes rattled, and the windows were drafty, and my sisters were always tying up the telephone. My mother’s solution to any problem was to serve up a hearty meal, and my old man was so immersed in Shakespeare most of the time he didn’t know which century it was.”

He was trying to make jokes, trying to bring himself out of the funk he’d been in, trying to pretend it didn’t matter.

“I couldn’t wait to move out, you know, to go away to school,” he said.

He was trying to make it hurt less by belittling his memories. And there was no way she was going to sit by and listen quietly while he did that.

“You know that dream you’ve been having?” she asked. “The one where you get home from school and your parents are gone?”

He nodded.

“Well, it didn’t happen to me exactly like that,” she told him. “But one day I came home from school and I found all our furniture out on the sidewalk. We’d been evicted, and my mother was gone. She’d vanished. She’d dealt with the bad news not by trying to hustle down a new apartment, but by going out on a binge.”

He pushed himself into a sitting position. “My God…”

“I was twelve years old,” P.J. said. “My grandmother had died about three months before that, and it was just me and Cheri—my mom. I don’t know what Cheri did with the rent money, but I can certainly guess. I remember that day like it was yesterday. I had to beg our neighbors to hold on to some of that furniture for us—the stuff that wasn’t already broken or stolen. I had to pick and choose which of the clothing we could take and which we’d have to leave behind. I couldn’t carry any of my books or toys or stuffed animals, and no one had any room to store a box of my old junk, so I put ’em in an alley, hoping they’d still be there by the time I found us another place to live.” She shot him a look. “It rained that night, and I never even bothered to go back. I knew the things in that box were ruined. I guess I figured I didn’t have much use for toys anymore, anyway.”

She took a deep breath. “But that afternoon, I loaded up all that I could carry of our clothes in shopping bags and I went looking for my mother. You see, I needed to find her in order to get a bed in the shelter that night. If I tried to go on my own, I’d be taken in and made a ward of the state. And as bad as things were with Cheri, I was afraid that would be even worse.”

Harvard swore softly.

“I’m not giving you the 411 to make you feel worse.” She held his gaze, hoping he would understand. “I’m just trying to show you how really lucky you were, Daryl. How lucky you are. Your past is solid. You should celebrate it and let it make you stronger.”

“Your mother…”

“Was an addict since before I can remember,” P.J. told him flatly. “And don’t even ask about my father. I’m not sure my mother knew who he was. Cheri was fourteen when she had me. And her mother was sixteen when she had her. I did the math and figured out if I followed in my family’s hallowed tradition, I’d be nursing a baby of my own by the time I was twelve. That’s the childhood I climbed out of. I escaped, but just barely.” She raised her chin. “But if there’s one thing I got from Cheri, it’s a solid grounding in reality. I am where I am today because I looked around and I said no way. So in a sense, I celebrate my past, too. But the party in my head’s not quite as joyful as the one you should be having.”

“Damn,” Harvard said. “Compared to you, I grew up in paradise.” He swore. “Now I really feel like some kind of pouting child.”

P.J. looked at the ocean stretching all the way to the horizon. She loved knowing that it kept going and going and going, way past the point where the earth curved and she couldn’t see it anymore.

“I’ve begun to think of you as a friend,” she told Harvard. She turned to look at him, gazing directly into his eyes. “So I have to warn you—I only have guilt-free friendships. You can’t take anything I’ve told you and use it to invalidate your own bad stuff. I mean, everyone’s got their own luggage, right? And friends shouldn’t set their personal suitcase down next to someone else’s, size them both up and say, hey, mine’s not as big as yours, or hey, mine’s bigger and fancier so yours doesn’t count.” She smiled. “I’ll tell you right now, Senior Chief, I travel with an old refrigerator box, and it’s packed solid. Just don’t knock it over, and I’ll be all right. Yours, on the other hand, is very classy Masonite. But your parents’ move made the lock break, and now you’ve got to tidy everything up before you can get it fixed and sealed up tight again.”

Harvard nodded, smiling at her. “That’s a very poetic way of telling me don’t bother to stage a pissing contest, ’cause you’d win, hands down.”

“That’s right. But I’m also telling you don’t jam yourself up because you feel sad about your parents leaving your hometown,” P.J. said. “It makes perfect sense that you’ll miss that house you grew up in—that house you’ve gone home to for the past thirty years. There’s nothing wrong with feeling sad about that. But I’m also saying that even though you feel sad, you should also feel happy. Just think—you’ve had that place to call home and those people to make it a good, happy home for all these years. You’ve got memories, good memories you’ll always be able to look back on and take comfort from. You know what having a home means, while most of the rest of the people in the world are just floating around, upside down, not even knowing what they’re missing but missing it just the same.”

He was silent, so she kept going. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d talked so much. But this man, this new friend with the whiskey-colored eyes, who made her feel like cheating the rules—he was worth the effort.

“You can choose to have a house and a family someday, kids, the whole nine yards, like your parents did,” she told him. “Or you can hang on to those memories you carry in your heart. That way, you can go back to that home you had, wherever you are, whenever you want.”

There. She’d said everything she wanted to say to him. But he was so quiet, she began to wonder if she’d gone too far. She was the queen of dysfunctional families. What did she know about normal? What right did she have to tell him her view of the world with such authority in her voice?