Small-Town Dreams (15 page)

According to Jim, David Chernak’s marriage had been the stuff of fairy tales. Jim told him that David had worshiped his wife and success, in that order, and that, like Jim, he hadn’t been a Christian in that old life he’d lost on a lonely mountain road.

Another thing he’d learned was that David had resented the way his parents doted on his younger brother. In fact, he’d gone into the Navy so he could gain experience under the tutelage of someone other than his own father.

All of this made Josh wonder again what kind of people his parents were. Well, he told himself, he was about to find out. Then he chuckled. All he’d had for five years was his present. And with all the information he’d been given, it was still all he had.

J
osh forced himself to put one foot in front of the other as he made his way up the long path to the front door. The walk to the door seemed to take forever, but before he knew it, he was watching as if from afar as his finger pressed on the doorbell.

The woman who answered the door was his mother. Josh knew who she was but not because he remembered her. Jim had found a picture of his parents, in a back issue of a newspaper, taken as they’d entered the courthouse for his brother’s trial.

Nancy Chernak didn’t say a thing. She just stared. She stood around five-foot-five, had hair that was nearly as dark as his but slightly streaked with white strands. Her face was unlined and her figure that of a woman thirty years younger. She was as opposite Irma as was humanly possible, but there was something in her dark eyes when she looked at him that was the same, as well.

She loved him.

And he didn’t even know her.

“David! Oh, David!” she cried at last as tears turned her dark gaze liquid. She threw her arms around him and hugged him.

His hands came up and hovered at her back, and he forced himself to hug her—this stranger who was his mother.

She stepped back. “Oh. Let me look at you! Why, you look positively rustic. Where have you been? Hiding in the woods?”

“You could say that, I suppose,” he replied, uncertain and embarrassed.

“Oh, I should be so angry at you for staying away for so long and not even calling. But I’m just so glad to see you.”

“We…ah, we’d better talk. There’s a lot I need to tell you. To explain. And questions I need answered. Could we go inside?”

She giggled like a schoolgirl and stepped back and into the house. “Oh, of course. How silly of me to keep you standing on the front steps. You go on into the family room, and I’ll go get us something to drink.”

For a second he was tempted to go along with her suggestion and prolong her happiness, but he realized it was impossible. He’d never be able to guess where the family room was in so large a house.

A house he didn’t remember at all.

“I’d rather you didn’t. We need to talk. Right away.”

Nancy Chernak stiffened, and he realized that he’d sounded cross. “I had hoped you’d been able to put the past behind you,” she said, her bubble clearly broken. Frowning now, she gestured to a wide doorway at the end of a long wide hall. “Very well, we’ll talk now.”

He followed her into a huge room with an oversize fireplace and a French door that led to a deck. A pair of short couches sat perpendicular to the fireplace toward one end of the large space. The room, though it appeared comfortable, looked unlived in. He remembered Cassie and her decorator story, and nearly flinched at the sudden flash of pain and loneliness that shot through him over the loss of her in his life.

Nancy Chernak—he just couldn’t think of her as his mother—led him to the fireplace area, but he didn’t feel comfortable enough to sit. Instead he leaned an elbow on the mantel and waited for her to choose a seat.

“You asked why I never called,” he began after she settled on one of the small couches. “And why I never came…home.”

“That can wait. We should talk over what happened before your father gets home.”

He shook his head. “No, ma’am, it can’t wait. You see, I didn’t call, or write, or come here because I didn’t know where to go.”

Obviously misunderstanding, she said, “I know things were terrible when you left and I’m sure you felt adrift.”

“But I don’t know the way it was!” Josh blurted out. “I don’t know a thing about when I left. I only knew to come here because a Pennsylvania state policeman gave me this address.”

“I don’t understand,” she said, staring at him as if he’d lost his mind. Little did she know that he literally had.

“Ma’am, I don’t know you. I don’t know the David Chernak of five years ago. I was in an accident that wiped out my memory. My name has been Joshua Daniels ever since. Three months ago I was accidentally shot by a hunter and that’s when I found out about the life of a man named David Chernak. Someone he’d—
I’d
been in the Navy with saw the news report on the shooting and found me.”

Now she looked positively stricken. Her voice shook. “You have amnesia?”

He nodded and resisted the urge to go to her. The pastor in him demanded he offer comfort, but the unlooked-for son in him held him in place.

“That’s what it’s called—but it’s not a temporary problem. Since I learned who I am, since I saw pictures of my family, I’ve come to accept what the doctors have been telling me for a while. I’ll never regain my memory. I have to believe that this was God’s plan for me. The pastor who took me in believes that there’s something in my past the Lord wants me to be free of.”

Now tears filled her dark eyes and flowed down her cheek. “You’ve become a Christian.” She pursed her lips as if gathering her strength, and nodded sharply. “He answered one of my petitions for you, at least. I’ve been praying that my children would accept Jesus since I found Him in the midst of the unholy mess that sent you out of our lives. Tell me how. What brought you to Him?”

Josh understood the bond he’d been feeling for this stranger who was his mother. It was more than that she loved him. It was that she was his sister in the Lord. For the first time, he felt comforted. Felt that he’d done the right thing in seeking his past. But one of his biggest questions remained. Why had no one tried to find him? Not sure he was even ready for her reasons, he answered her question about his salvation experience instead of asking his.

“When I woke up with an almost total void in my brain, Henry, the pastor I spoke of, and his wife Irma were all I had. They were the ones who found me when I was hurt. They stayed by me and gave me more than a family. They gave me one more person to hold on to. Jesus. And He’s been the most important person in my life ever since.”

Josh left out the second most important person and the fact that he wouldn’t be sitting here were it not for his belief in God. He’d be back in Pennsylvania, with Cassie.

“You said these people found you hurt. What happened to you?”

He told her the whole story of his last nearly six years, what he knew about what had happened to take his memory—which was very little—and about the shooting that had sent him in search of his past.

“You mentioned that you knew why I was in Pennsylvania. Jim Dillon said I had some sort of falling out with your husband over business problems. Could you tell me about it? Could you tell me why my family never tried to find me?”

She sighed and closed her eyes. When she opened them seconds later there was a quiet resolve in her gaze that had not been there before. “Lies and keeping secrets from you sent you out of our lives, and if the truth does the same, then so be it. Do you know about Regina?”

“I know I’m married to someone named Regina and that I was very much in love with her, but that’s all. We couldn’t find an address for her, or I would have gone to see her first.”

“No, that wouldn’t have been a good idea, David.”

She stopped, and he knew she’d seen him flinch at the use of a name that had no meaning to him.

“Would you rather I try to remember to call you Joshua?” she asked. “This must be even more difficult for you than it is for me. At least I
know
you.”

Josh nodded and silently acknowledged the truth of what she’d said. This was harder than he’d thought it would be. “About Regina?” he prodded.

“You
were
very much in love with her. So much in love that you had as great a blind spot about her as we did about your brother. Which made what happened all the worse for you.”

She sighed and put a shaking hand to her forehead. “There is no easy way to say this.”

Josh remembered saying those exact words to Cassie. Something bad was coming. He knew it. She stared at him, her eyes seeming to drink in his image, obviously afraid to continue.

Josh finally gave in to the urge to go to her, but he sat across from her on the couch. “Whatever it is, it can’t hurt me. I don’t know any of you. Remember?”

Nancy Chernak nodded and pursed her lips. “Regina and your brother had an affair.”

Josh was stunned and glad he’d decided to sit. Not because of any emotion he felt. What rocked him to his core was the betrayal. How could a man perpetrate such a betrayal on his brother? And how could a woman betray her husband with her husband’s brother? “How could they do that?”

“Oh, it gets worse, I assure you. Will has always disregarded rules. We’d tried to protect him from the consequences of his actions since the first time he got into trouble at age five. I’ve come to understand that the more we did, the worse his problems got. This was one of those occasions.

“Your father and I knew about the affair for quite some time. We told them it had to stop, but when it didn’t—no, that isn’t right—when they
chose
not to end the affair, we covered for them. I told myself I was doing it to keep you from being hurt. And I was, but I was also protecting Will.

“But this time there was no protecting Will. What we didn’t know was the lengths he’d gone to over Regina. He bought substandard material and pocketed the difference. He finally admitted to you and your father that he’d done it so he and Regina could start over together somewhere else.”

“But the hurricane Jim Dillon told me about exposed him first,” Josh said.

Nancy nodded. “And it put him in prison. Which I am happy to say was the best thing that ever happened to him. He accepted Jesus while he was there, and it’s changed his life.”

“But why did none of you look for me when I disappeared?”

“Because you learned of their betrayal, and, quite frankly, ours, in the worst possible way. From Will. You had reached a conclusion about who was at fault for the collapsed houses before the state investigators did. When you confronted Will, he told you about him and Regina—and that we had known. You left the office, and no one heard from you for nearly a week. When you showed up here, you told us you were leaving Florida to settle elsewhere. You said that when you came to a place where you could forgive us, you’d contact us. But, of course, you never did.

“Your father grew bitter in the months that followed over what he feels was your desertion of us and the business. As for me, I didn’t think you’d ever forgive us.”

Feeling a little better about why his parents had abandoned him, he knew it was time to ask his next question. More than ever he didn’t want to know the answer, but it was the reason he was here—the reason he’d given up a life of happiness with Cassie. “What happened to Regina?”

“You signed the house over to her and left your lawyer with power of attorney to handle the divorce. Of course, she couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments so she sold it, divorced you and…” She sighed. “I’m sorry. She and Will were married before he went to prison. She had their first child while he was still in there. After the baby was born, he accepted the Lord and eventually led Regina to Him. They wanted to look for you to tell you how sorry they were, but your father controls the purse strings and refused to let them. As I said, he’s rather angry that you left him to save the business on his own.”

That struck Josh as terribly amusing. “About that time I was learning to walk and talk again. I couldn’t even read.” He chuckled. “I wouldn’t have been any help except through prayer.”

Suddenly Nancy Chernak’s face crumpled. “Oh, my poor boy. You’ve been through such an ordeal because of us, and all the time we were angry at you for staying away so long. I’m so sorry.”

He leaned forward to take her hand, but a huge voice pierced the moment. “How dare you return here after all these years and reduce your mother to tears?”

Josh looked up as a tall, gray-haired man stalked toward him. Ronald Chernak looked very much like his photo and was a formidable-looking man. It was easy for Joshua to see where he got his own height and build. He stood, uncomfortable with the fury radiating from the older man. “I’m sorry, sir, but—”

“Ronald, calm down.” Nancy sniffled. “You need to listen to what David has to say.”

But Chernak wasn’t willing to listen to anyone. “Get out!” he shouted at Joshua. “I don’t want you near my family. We’ve hung on in spite of your callous disregard for our feelings and needs. I don’t want the traitor who sent his own brother to prison in my house.”

“Ronald, we don’t know that,” Nancy cried. “The police denied it. The district attorney denied it. David wasn’t even on the witness list, and you know he would have been if he’d told them what he’d discovered. They merely reached the same conclusion he did.”

Shock rooted Josh to the floor as the man charged toward him, his limited experience leaving him unprepared to deal with such hostility. Chernak grabbed Josh by his shirt. “You told them,” he screamed into Josh’s face, “didn’t you? You went to the investigators and told them what Will had done. You broke your mother’s heart because you were jealous of your brother. You saw a chance to hurt him and you took it. We had to visit our child in prison!” He pushed Josh back a step and let go of him. “I won’t have you in my house, do you hear me?”

“Ronald! Stop this right this moment!” Nancy shouted. “You don’t understand what happened.”