Nora Roberts - Sacred Sins

It wasn’t said with the resentment many siblings might have felt, but with a trace of humor, and more than a little admiration.

“You must have loved him very much.”

“Sometimes I hated him.” It was said with a shrug, from a man who understood that hate was often the heat that tempered real love. “But mostly yes, I thought he was terrific. He never bullied me, not that he couldn’t have. He was a hell of a lot bigger, but he just didn’t have that kind of temperament. Not that he was holy or anything. He was good, just basically, deep down good.

“We shared a room when we were growing up. Once Mom found my stash of Playboys . She was prepared to whale the lust as well as the tar out of me. Josh told her they were his, that he was doing a report on pornography and its sociological effects on teenagers.”

Unable to resist, Tess laughed. “And she bought it?”

“Yeah, she bought it.” Even now, remembering made him grin. “Josh never lied to cover his own ass, only when he thought it was the best thing to do. In high school he was quarterback on the football team. The girls all but threw themselves on the ground in front of him. He was healthy enough to get some pleasure out of that, but he fell hard for one girl. It was like him to focus in on one instead of, well, picking the tree dry. Still, she was the one big mistake I ever thought he made. She was gorgeous, smart, and from one of the better families. She was also shallow. But he was crazy in love, and in his senior year he took his savings and bought her a diamond. Not just a little chip, but a real rock. She used to go around flashing it to make the other girls drool.

“They fought about something. He never would say what it was, but it was a real fallout. Josh had an academic scholarship to Notre Dame, but the day after graduation he enlisted in the Army. Kids were protesting ‘Nam, smoking pot, and wearing peace signs, but Josh decided to give his country a few years of his time.”

For the first time since he’d begun, Ben reached for and lit a cigarette. The tip glowed red in the shadowed light that fell over him. “My mother cried buckets, but my father was bust-button proud. His son wasn’t a draft dodger or a pot-headed college student, but a real American. My fathers a simple man, that’s the way he thought. For myself, I leaned more toward the left. I’d be starting high school myself in the fall, so I figured I already knew about everything I needed to know. I spent an all-night session with Josh trying to talk him out of it. Of course, the papers were signed and it was too late, but I figured there must be a way out. I told him he was stupid to toss three years of his life away because of a girl. The trouble was, it had gone beyond that. As soon as Josh had enlisted, he’d decided he was going to be the best soldier in the United States Army. They’d already talked to him about Officer’s Training. The way Johnson was escalating things over there, we needed smart, capable officers leading the troops. That’s how Josh saw himself.”

She heard it then, the splinter of pain that worked its way into his voice. Leaving the light for the shadows, Tess went to him. He hadn’t realized he’d needed it, but when her hand touched his, Ben held on.

“So he went.” He drew deep on his cigarette and let smoke out with a sigh. “He got on the bus, young, I guess you could say beautiful, idealistic, confident. From his letters it seemed he was thriving in Basic. It was the discipline, the challenge, the camaraderie. He made friends easily, and it wasn’t any different there. He got his orders for ‘Nam less than a year later. I was in high school bluffing my way through Algebra and finding out how many cheerleaders I could rack up. Josh shipped out a Second Lieutenant.”

He lapsed into silence. Tess sat beside him, his hand in hers, waiting for him to go on.

“My mother went to church every day he was over there. She used to go in and light a candle then pray to the Blessed Virgin to intercede to her Son for Josh’s safety. Every time she got a letter, she’d read it until she knew every word. But it didn’t take long for the letters to change. They got shorter, the tone was different. He stopped mentioning his friends. We didn’t know until later that two of his best buddies had been splattered all over the jungle. We didn’t know that until he’d come back and started having nightmares. He didn’t get killed over there. My mother must have lit enough candles for that, but he died. The part of him that made him what he was died. I need a drink.”

Before he could rise, Tess put a hand to his arm. “I’ll get it.” She left him, and wanting to give him the time he needed, poured two warming brandies. When she went back in, he’d lit another cigarette, but hadn’t moved.

“Thanks.” He drank, and found that while the brandy didn’t fill the hole grief had left, it no longer had to bypass that ball of bitterness. “Nobody was giving hero’s welcomes back then. The war had turned sour. Josh came back with medals, commendations, and a time bomb in his head. It seemed okay for a while. He was quiet, withdrawn, but we figured nobody could come through that without some change. He moved back into the house, got a job. He didn’t want to talk about going back to school. We all figured, well, he just needs some time.

“It took almost a year before the nightmares started. He’d wake up screaming and sweating. He lost his job. He told us he’d quit, but Dad found out he’d picked a fight and gotten himself fired. It took about another year before things really deteriorated. He couldn’t keep a job for more than a few weeks. He started coming home drunk, or not coming home at all. The nightmares got violent. One night I tried to bring him out of one and he knocked me across the room. He started shouting about ambush and snipers. When I stood up and tried to calm him down, he came at me. When my father came in, Josh was strangling me.”

“Oh, God, Ben.”

“Dad managed to bring him out, and when he realized what he’d done, what he’d almost done, Josh just sat down on the floor and cried. I’ve never seen anyone cry like that. He couldn’t stop. We took him to the V.A. They assigned him a psychiatrist.”

The ash on his cigarette had grown long. Crushing it out, Ben went back to the brandy. “I was in college by then, so I’d drive him sometimes when I had a light afternoon schedule. I hated that office; it always made me think of a tomb. Josh would go in. Sometimes you could hear him crying. Other times you couldn’t hear anything at all. Fifty minutes later he’d come out. I kept waiting for him to walk out that door one day and be the way I remembered.”

“Sometimes it’s as hard, even harder on the family, than it is on the one who’s ill,” Tess said, keeping her hand near his, letting him take or reject the contact. “You feel helpless when you want so badly to help… confused when you need so badly to think clearly.”

“My mother broke down one day. It was a Sunday. She’d been fixing a pot roast. All of a sudden she just dumped it all in the sink.

If it was cancer, she said, they’d find a way to cut it out of him. Can’t they see what’s inside him is eating him up? Why don’t they find a way to cut it out of him?“

He stared down into his brandy, the image of his mother standing over the sink, sobbing, as clear as if it had happened yesterday.

“For a while he really seemed to get better. Because he was under psychiatric care and his job record was shaky, it was hard for him to find work. Our pastor applied a little pressure, some good old-fashioned Catholic guilt, and got him a job at a local gas station as a mechanic. He’d had a scholarship to Notre Dame five years before, and now he was changing spark plugs. Still, it was something. The nightmares slowed down. None of us knew he was eating barbituates to keep them that way. Then it was heroin. That got by us too. Maybe if I’d been home more, but I was in college, and for the first time in my life serious about making it work. My parents were totally naive about drugs. It got by the doctor too. He was a major, regular Army, had done a tour of Korea and ‘Nam, but he didn’t see that Josh was pumping himself full of smack to get through the night.”