Johnston - I Promise (15 page)

Her mother refused to let go of her hand. “Delia.” Her eyes were open again, rheumy with age, pleading, begging . . . For what? Forgiveness?
Fat chance of that,
Delia thought.

“Rest, Mother. Don’t excite yourself.”

“We have to talk.” Hattie’s plea was weak, whispery.

Delia kept her voice even and unemotional, though she felt both distressed and perturbed by her mother’s persistence. “Not now, Mother.”

“Yes, now. I might die.”

It was a threat, pure and simple.
Listen to me now or lose your chance forever.

Delia felt the spur rake deep, opening a wound she had thought long healed. But she refused to fight back. “No, Mother.”
Not now. Not yet.

“Yes,” Hattie said, her fingernails digging into Delia’s flesh. “I . . . should have done . . . more.”

Delia waited, but that was all Hattie said. Delia knew her mother was too proud to humble herself, that she was probably seeing the extent of Hattie’s willingness to admit she had been wrong.

It wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt.

“Delia . . . I . . .” Her mother was visibly struggling to speak.

“What is it, Mother?” Delia asked, needing to get away, needing to shed her mother’s clawlike grasp.

“I’m so sorry.”

Delia tore herself free and stood there, legs trembling, eyes pooling with tears, throat aching. She opened her mouth to deny forgiveness, but no sound came out. She searched inside for anger and found pain instead. Years of raw feelings came tumbling out before she could stop them.

“No. Oh, no. It isn’t going to be that easy, Mother. I’m not going to forgive you so you can go into that operating room and die in peace. I came to you a vulnerable sixteen-year-old girl, violated, pregnant with your husband’s—my stepfather’s—child, and begged you for help. Do you remember what you did? What you said?”

The heart monitor was beeping wildly, but Delia couldn’t hear it for the thunderous pounding of blood in her ears. Her blue eyes, several shades darker than her mother’s, burned with anger. Her hands curled into white-knuckled fists. “I haven’t forgotten a moment of what happened, Mother. So you are not forgiven. I will never forgive you.”

A nurse thrust her way through the doorway. “What’s going on! The monitor went crazy and—”

Delia brushed past her. “I’m leaving.”

“Delia!” her mother gasped.

Delia didn’t stop. She couldn’t. She felt sick inside. She couldn’t breathe. She came flying out of her mother’s hospital room, a tortured animal searching for a place to hide and lick its wounds, and ran headlong into Rachel.

“Delia! What’s wrong? Is Mama all right?”

“The old witch is fine! She’s not about to give the devil his due.” Delia took several gasping breaths and raised a trembling hand to her brow. “I don’t believe I said that.”

“I do,” Rachel said with a wry smile.

Delia gave her sister a ferocious hug. “I’m so glad you’re here, Rachel.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t get here sooner,” Rachel said against her ear.

“Let me look at you.” Delia set her sister at arm’s length and took another step back to give her a once-over. “You look fabulous, as usual.”

Rachel laughed as she brushed at her perfectly coifed French twist. The bright red sleeve of her St. John knit slipped down to expose a bruise above her diamond-studded Cartier wristwatch before she hastily dropped her arm. “Hardly fabulous,” she said, self-consciously adjusting both sleeves at the wrist.

Rachel reached out to finger the sleeve of Delia’s suit. “Is this what the well-dressed judge is wearing these days?
Très chic,”
she said with a teasing smile.

Delia laughed. “I was planning to go out after work, and I didn’t have time to change before I left New York.”

“On a date?” Rachel inquired.

“You know better than that.”

The two sisters sobered and exchanged a long look. Rachel had gotten married at the end of her first year of college when Cliff, a senior, had swept her off her feet. Delia had never married. She had come close once, a few years back, but it hadn’t worked out. Delia told herself she was too busy for a relationship, but sometimes the loneliness crept up on her. She envied her sister. A husband and a son sounded . . . nice.

“Where’s Scott?” Delia asked.

“Cliff didn’t think the trip would be good for him.”

Delia said a word she normally didn’t utter. “Why do you let him make all the decisions? Don’t you have any say in these things?”

Delia saw the unhappiness in Rachel’s eyes and reached out to touch her arm. “I’m sorry. How long can you stay?”

“For the day.”

“Oh, Rachel, no.” Delia’s face mirrored her disappointment. Her grasp tightened at the spot of the bruise on Rachel’s arm.

Rachel winced and pulled free. “Don’t give me a hard time about this, Delia,” Rachel said. “You have no idea what it’s like dealing with Cliff. Once he makes up his mind, there’s no changing it.”

“We haven’t had a chance to talk face-to-face for what feels like aeons. And Scott must have grown inches since I saw him last.”

“You could come visit more often,” Rachel said.

“My work—”

“Is your life,” Rachel finished for her. “But it doesn’t have to be so much of your life, does it, Delia? You could give the rest of us a little bit of it, couldn’t you?”

Delia was surprised at her sister’s plea and more aware than ever of how unfairly she had cut Rachel out of her life to avoid having to deal with the shadows of the past.

A nurse came by with a hospital cart, and Delia stepped out of her way. A hospital corridor was no place to be having this discussion. “We can talk about this later,” Delia said.

“Not too much later,” Rachel replied. “My plane leaves from San Antonio at five this afternoon, and I’ll need at least an hour and a half to drive back to the airport.”

Delia clamped her teeth on another epithet. “Why did you bother coming at all if you were going to turn right around and leave again?”

“Because I wanted to see Mom. Because I need to be here. You should understand that,” Rachel retorted.

The two sisters glared at each other.

Delia huffed out a breath of air, and with it, a great deal of her anger. “We might as well take advantage of the time we have. How about something hot with lots of caffeine?”

Rachel seemed equally willing to call a truce. “Sounds good to me.”

They turned and walked down the hospital corridor toward the cafeteria. Before they had gone two steps, Delia slipped her arm around Rachel’s waist and gave her a sideways hug.

Rachel returned the sisterly embrace, matching her stride to her sister’s shorter step.

“I have no business criticizing you, Rachel. Why do you let me get away with it?” Delia said.

“Maybe because I know I deserve it.”

Delia stopped and pulled her sister over to the wall where they could speak without being heard by orderlies and nurses and visitors walking the corridor. “That sort of thinking is what kept us victims. I thought you’d gotten over all that.”

Rachel pulled herself free. “Maybe you have. I . . . I’ve been meaning to talk to you for some time, Delia. Maybe now is the wrong time, but I don’t know when I’ll see you again.” She glanced down at Delia, who was several inches shorter than her, opened her mouth to speak, and closed it again. “I need a cup of coffee first, all right?”

“All right,” Delia agreed.

As they walked down the cafeteria line, Delia sent a worried glance in Rachel’s direction. Her sister, the congressman’s wife, looked stunning, sophisticated, and aloof, the kind of woman every man stared at, but only the most self-assured dared approach. She seemed both more harrowed and more pugnacious than Delia remembered her being the last time they had seen each other.

On impulse, Delia took an icy pint carton of orange juice to go with her hot tea. Her stomach growled at the sight of food in the cafeteria line, and she picked up a plastic-wrapped bagel to fill the emptiness inside.

The sisters found a table near the window that overlooked the hospital patio and sat down across from each other. Rachel emptied a packet of Nutrasweet into her coffee, and Delia dipped her tea bag up and down several more times in her Styrofoam cup before adding sugar and lemon.

“I want to divorce Cliff,” Rachel blurted out.

Delia froze with the straw in her orange juice halfway to her mouth. She set it back down again. She looked at Rachel and saw things she hadn’t noticed—had purposely ignored?—at first glance. Carefully applied makeup covered the shadows under her sister’s eyes. She was more than slender; she was thin. Her shoulders were taut, and her fingers moved nervously, mercilessly ripping the sweetener packet into tiny shreds.

“I thought you two looked happy together the last time I saw you,” Delia said. “That was only a year ago. Can so much have changed since then?”

“He . . . I . . .” Rachel took a shuddery breath. “What you saw—what I let you see—is what Cliff wants everyone to see. We’re the perfect family. He loves me, I love him.” Rachel snorted with disgust. “It’s all a lie, Delia. None of it is true.”

Delia raised an astonished brow. “I never cared much for Cliff, but I thought you loved him.”

“I did. Sometimes I think I still do. But we’ve had problems since the day we got married.”

“For thirteen years? Why on earth are you still married to him?”

Delia watched the slow flush climb her sister’s throat, as Rachel stared down at her square-cut acrylic nails.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, lately. Why I would stay, I mean.” She glanced up at Delia, but couldn’t maintain the eye contact and looked down at her hands again. “I . . . I was so surprised anyone would be attracted to me . . . I mean . . . I was sloppy seconds and—”

“You were
what?”
Delia exclaimed.

“Shh! Keep your voice down.”

“Explain what that means,” Delia demanded furiously.

“What man would want someone like us, Delia? After what Da—after what happened to us. When Cliff first looked at me I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. He was so handsome and so smart and so popular. What could he possibly see in me?

“I wouldn’t go out with him at first.” She paused and chewed on her bowed upper lip. “Maybe that’s what kept him interested. I don’t think many girls turned him down. He kept after me to go out with him, until finally I did.

“Then, I wouldn’t sleep with him. You know why.”

Delia knew exactly why. It was the reason she had kept herself from Marsh. So he wouldn’t find out she was not a virgin.

Rachel surprised her by saying, “Because I knew what it would feel like, that it would hurt. So I didn’t see why I should do it.

“But I loved the kissing, Delia, and the holding and the closeness and all the rest. So I kept going out with him. Until one night Cliff said if I didn’t do it with him, that was it, that we would have to break up.

“I think he thought I would give in. I almost did. But I couldn’t, Delia. I just couldn’t.”

Delia stared at her sister with stricken eyes. She had left home without giving a second thought to what would happen to Rachel. She had been too distraught to do much thinking at all in the beginning, and later she had thought that with Ray John gone, Rachel’s problems would be over. Things hadn’t been going on as long between Rachel and their father, so she had figured there was probably less damage to Rachel’s self-esteem.

She had been naive. No, worse, she had been stupid to think Rachel hadn’t suffered every bit as much as she had. Maybe more, because Delia had despised Ray John for years before his death. Rachel had not.

“A week later, Cliff proposed,” Rachel continued. “It never occurred to me that he was marrying me because he thought he was getting a virgin. I swear it, Delia. I thought he loved me. He acted like he did. He didn’t want me talking to any of the other boys, and he was always there to walk me home from the library or take me to dinner.

“I thought he spent so much time with me because he wanted to be with me. I didn’t realize it was because he wanted to make sure I wasn’t seeing anyone else.”

“He was possessive?” Delia asked.

“Is. Is possessive,” Rachel corrected. For the first time she took a sip of her coffee and made a face as she swallowed. “Ugh. That’s cold already.”

“Do you want to get some more?”

Rachel shook her head. “I’d rather finish this while I have the courage to get it said.

“Anyway,” Rachel said, “you can imagine what happened on our wedding night when Cliff discovered he wasn’t the first. He went crazy, Delia. Absolutely insane. He wanted to know who had . . . had screwed me. He wanted the guy’s name. You know I couldn’t tell him, Delia. I would die first. I . . . I thought he was going to kill me,” she whispered.

“He
hit
you?” Delia asked, aghast. “That bastard
hit
you?”

“Calm down, Delia. I deserved it, I suppose.”

Delia’s eyes widened in alarm. “No woman deserves that sort of treatment, least of all a bride. You should have left him right then and there.”

Rachel shook her head sadly. “Cliff told me that I belonged to him. We were married, and we would stay married. He already had his political career planned, and he didn’t want a messy divorce in his background. But he told me he would make sure I never . . . never . . .” Rachel swallowed and forced out, “spread my legs for another man again.

“I knew I would never do anything like that. I thought everything would be all right. Because I loved him. And he loved me.

“But it wasn’t all right, Delia. He saw flirting where there wasn’t any. He saw betrayal where it didn’t exist. If I so much as smiled at another man, he would fly into a rage.

“The first time I told him I was going to leave him, he promised he would stop hitting me. He promised he would change. He was very sorry, Delia.”

Tears welled in Rachel’s eyes. “I believed him. I needed to believe him. He’s always sorry, Delia. But the hitting hasn’t stopped.

“Maybe I would have let it go on . . . if he hadn’t hit me in front of Scott.”

“Nooo,” Delia moaned.