Danielle Steel - Remembrance

“Then you're not coming home?” Teddy sounded agonized at his end.

“Not yet.”

“Keep me posted at least and if I don't hear from you, I'll call back in a few days.” After the call Serena went back to Vanessa's room, to hear another diatribe about Vasili. It had been an excruciating few days.

“I hate him. I wish you had married Teddy, or Andreas.” She remembered Vasili's brother in Athens.

“I'm sorry you feel that way, Vanessa.” Serena's eyes filled with tears again. She was always being pulled between them, and Vanessa was looking at her strangely now.

“Are you really having a baby?”

Serena nodded. “Yes, I am.” That was going to be a problem too. Nothing was easy anymore. It was hard even to remember when it had been. “Does that upset you very much?”

Vanessa thought about it for a minute and then looked at her mother. “Couldn't we just leave and take it back with us to the States?” It was what Serena had thought of doing, but then she would have had an abortion.

“It's Vasili's baby too,” she said gently.

“Does it have to be? Couldn't it just be ours?”

Slowly Serena shook her head. “No, it couldn't.”

43

A week later Vasili came out of the hospital, and he appeared to be almost angelic. They led a quiet life, stayed home much of the time, he was kind and thoughtful and loving with Vanessa. It was as though in his last rash act of self-indulgence he had finally seen the light. He explained to Serena that he first tried heroin ten years earlier, as a kind of lark, to see what it was, and within weeks he had got hooked. Andreas had ultimately arrived from Athens, seen the condition he was in, and put him immediately in a clinic to clean up. After that, he had stayed away from it for a year and then someone had offered it to him at a party, and he had fallen off the wagon again. For the next five years he had been on and off it, and then he had stayed totally clean until he met his last wife. Shortly after their marriage he had discovered that she used it—”chipped,” he called it—and she had wanted him to use heroin with her, so she “didn't feel so lonely,” she had told him pouting, and stupidly he had tried it again. Their relationship had apparently been a catastrophe of using dope together, and in the end she had died. That had sobered him again, until now he had tried it again. But this time he was certain that it was the last. Serena, however, found it discouraging to learn that he had been in and out of the hospital to clean up so many times.

“Why didn't you tell me?” She had looked at him sadly, feeling as though she had been cheated.

“How do you tell someone that? ‘I have been a heroin addict.’ Do you know how that sounds?”

“But how do you think I felt when I found out, Vasili?” Her eyes showed him how great was her pain. “How could you think I wouldn't know?” The tears began to flow again then.

“I didn't think I'd get hooked again.”

She closed her eyes and lay back among her pillows.

“Serena, don't … darling, don't worry.”

“How can I not?” She looked at him with anguish. “How do I know you won't start again?” She didn't trust him now. She didn't trust anything about his life.

He held up a hand solemnly. “I swear it.”

For the next five months he was as good as his word. He was absolutely exemplary and he spoiled Serena rotten, doing everything he could to make up to her the pain he had caused her and to assuage her fears about his using again. He was thrilled about the baby, told everyone he knew, talked endlessly to his friends, his clients, his models, everyone knew about the baby, and of course he called his brother Andreas first of all. Andreas had sent them the biggest teddy bear Serena had ever seen, and it already sat in what would later be the baby's bedroom. He sent Vanessa an antique bride doll at the same time.

They were days of tenderness and gentle loving between Vasili and Serena. The boyish charm he had had in the beginning emerged again, and they spent long hours going for walks hand in hand. He took her to Paris twice, they spent Vanessa's Easter holiday in Athens, with Andreas and his wife and children, and then Vasili and Serena stopped in Venice on their way home, and she showed him her grandmother's house and all her favorite places. They had a wonderful time, and she thought that she had never been happier when they came home. The baby wasn't due until the first of August, and in early June Serena settled down to do the baby's room. She had bought beautiful little quilts and some wonderful old children's paintings of storybook characters in watercolors and oils. She herself was going to paint a mural, and Vanessa had been giving up dolls and stuffed animals, anticipating that she'd have a real doll soon. As June drew to an end she was excited about the baby. Serena was eight months pregnant, and it seemed incredible that the time was almost here. Vanessa had been invited to cruise the Greek Islands with Andreas and his family, but she wanted to stay near her mother to see the baby, and she still felt uneasy about going away alone. She didn't want to leave Serena, not even to visit Teddy, who had offered her a vacation in the States with him. “After the baby comes” was her answer to everyone, and Serena laughed when Vasili said the same thing to all invitations.

The pregnancy had been surprisingly easy, and the only thing that worried her now was that the same thing might happen with this baby as had happened with Vanessa, and if she started to give birth at home, she knew that Vasili didn't have Teddy's cool head. He was already a nervous wreck at the prospect, and every time she moved in bed, he leaped up, his black eyes starting, a look of shock on his face. “Is it now? Is it now?”

“No, silly, go back to sleep.” Serena would smile at him, and she lay in bed, thinking of their baby and the years ahead. Everything was peaceful between them and the episode of his heroin use seemed like a distant nightmare now, until one day in the first week of July Vasili didn't come home at night. At first she thought that something awful had happened, like a car accident perhaps, and then as the hours ticked by she began to wonder if it was all happening again. She was racked by terror and anger as she waited up for him until four thirty in the morning, and at five o'clock she heard him come up the front steps. The door slammed soundly behind him, and on bare feet she tiptoed down the front stairs, trembling, with the baby seeming to leap inside her. She was afraid of what she would see, but she had to see it and know if he was using drugs again. All the old terrors had started again, in only one night.

As she stood halfway down the stairs and he stood in the front hallway, his eyes met hers, and he attempted a false bravado, with an enormous movie-star smile.

She could see instantly from the way he looked that he was high on something, and he looked nervous and foolish as he raced toward her, trying to pretend that there was nothing extraordinary about coming in at 5 A.M.

“Hello, darling, how's the baby?” His voice sounded hoarse and she had noticed that during his drug use before Christmas too. He always sounded different when he used heroin, and she couldn't bear to think now that he had done it again. She didn't answer him, she just stared at him, and he ran up the stairs and tried to give her a kiss. But she shrank from him in horror, knowing full well what he had done.

“Where were you?” It was a stupid question and she knew it. The point wasn't where he had been, but what he had done. And without waiting for an answer, she turned on her heel and walked up the stairs as quickly as she could. She felt as though at any minute she might have the baby. She felt so tense and she was having so many contractions from her long night awake that she wasn't sure if she was in labor or just feeling ill.