Summer of Two Wishes (6 page)

Finn nodded. “You know the thing I keep wondering? I wonder when you decided to move on. How long did you mourn me—mourn us—before you were ready for someone else? You’ve been married seven months, so somewhere between three years ago when you thought I died and seven months ago when you remarried, you said, okay, I’m ready,” he said, gesturing between those two invisible dates.

“You’re being unfair.”

“Macy.” He sighed and raked a hand through his hair. A chunk of it fell back over his eye. “I’m only trying to understand how long you gave it before you let me go and let him in. It’s a fair question.”

“Finn,
stop
—”

“I can’t help but ask! You helped me get out of there! I had this fantasy of you, and all the things we’d do when I was free. I’d imagine how many dogs and horses and cows we could fit on the ranch.” He laughed wryly and looked down. “I had this fantasy that we’d travel, and we’d have this great life with lots of kids, and I imagined Christmas mornings with them, or teaching them to ride, or watching them play football or act in one of those little kid plays they do in elementary school.”

He looked up again, his expression sad and angry. “But then I came home and found you married to someone else, and I’m still trying to wrap my mind around that. Sorry if I ask some hard questions, but I think I’m entitled to know.”

Macy’s belly began to roil.

“Did he come around looking for a grieving widow?” Finn asked curiously.

“No,” Macy said. Wyatt wasn’t like that. “Dad introduced us.”

Finn snorted at that. “So the old man just showed up one day and introduced you to your next husband?”

“Finn, please,” Macy said, pressing a hand against her abdomen. “We had
buried
you.”

“Just tell me how long you waited after you thought I’d died before you hooked up with Clark.”

As if she’d just turned him off and Wyatt on one day, could name the exact moment she’d let go the memory of him and allowed herself to love Wyatt. “Roughly two years,” she said tightly. “I spent two years thinking of you every moment of every day. Mourning you. Wishing I had died with you. And then…then one day I didn’t want to worry or die anymore. I don’t know how it happened—it just happened.”

“Wow,” Finn said, his gaze sliding over her. “Two years.”

His indignation suddenly angered her. “You act as if I should have assumed you were alive in spite of all the evidence to the contrary! I am sorry if I can’t describe the loss and the despair I felt to your satisfaction, Finn, but believe me, there were days I never got out of bed. I spent many,
many
long nights surfing the Web, putting your picture up at every fallen soldier Web site I could find along with a personal tribute because that was the only thing I knew to do to soothe my grief, and that didn’t even
touch
it. There were days I didn’t eat. There were very long days that I didn’t do a damn thing but wander around the house, looking for you. Cows were outside calling for food, and I didn’t care. There were entire days when I did nothing but worry that I hadn’t said good-bye to you the right way. I’d said good-bye like you were coming back, not good-bye like I’d never see you again, and I couldn’t do anything but worry about it.”

“Jesus—”

“I got the black boxes with your stuff from the army and I thought I would have something that had your scent, something I could touch and hold on to, but you know what? They
washed
it all! I couldn’t smell anything but detergent! And you know what else? I was very angry, especially with
you
for joining the army to begin with. What the hell, Finn? Why did
you
have to go? Why did you have to risk everything that we had?”

Finn didn’t speak.

“All that sorrow and anger almost buried me,” Macy heatedly continued. “Ask anyone here. So forgive me if one day I decided my life was still worth living, even without you. That’s right, I tried to find a way to live my life without you. What else was I supposed to do?”

He looked stunned.
Let him be stunned,
Macy thought bitterly. “I’m sorry if I didn’t grieve correctly, but no one gave me a manual for that, any more than they gave me a manual for how to put everything back the way it was when my lost husband turned up blessedly alive.”

She moved to pass him, but Finn stopped her by taking her arm. “Before you flounce off, I want to tell you something.”

Macy tried to remove her arm, but his grip tightened.

“I didn’t get a rule book either,” Finn said quietly. “I never even thought of the possibility you might have remarried, can you believe it? Maybe that was dumb, but I didn’t, and now I don’t really know what I’m supposed to do with you. Am I supposed to accept that you moved on? I’ve tried, Macy, but it’s not that easy for me.”

Macy glanced down. Her hands were shaking. “Me either,” she admitted in a whisper.

He caressed her arm with his thumb. “I’m not trying to upset you. But I’m a plainspoken man, and I’m just going to tell you straight up. I can’t stop thinking about you. Hell, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you since the moment we met, but now I can’t stop thinking of you with him. It makes me feel sick. I love you, Macy, and I didn’t come this far to lose you. You need to know that. You need to know that I want you, and I’m not going to give up on us until you tell me to, and even then, I’m not sure I can. Beyond that, I don’t know what else to say.”

There was a time those words would have melted her right into his arms. This evening, they stirred an unbearable yearning for something that was bigger than desire. Those words went right to her heart and warmed it, hurt it, made it beat like it hadn’t beat in years. They were almost too intense after the emotional swirl of the last week; another wave of nausea came over Macy. She pulled her arm free of his grip, gulping for air. “Excuse me,” she said, and hurried past him to the bathroom.

Inside the small bathroom, Macy gripped the edge of the sink, her eyes closed, her belly churning. She was a horrible person. He was home, alive, and he still loved her, and she felt wobbly. It reminded her of the physical pain she’d felt when she’d lost Finn—too great to endure.

When the nausea passed and she emerged, Brodie was standing outside the door, his arms folded over his chest. “Did you tell him about Two Wishes?” he asked quietly.

The ranch—oh God, the ranch. “No,” she said, and when Brodie looked accusingly at her, she added, “I don’t need to tell him anything, Brodie. I am going to fix everything. He doesn’t need to know. What’s the point?”

“You’re making a mistake, Macy,” Brodie said. “He should hear it from you.”

“Just trust me, will you?” Macy asked with exasperation, and ducked around him. “Everything is under control,” she said as she passed, and ignored Brodie’s dubious expression.

Finn’s head and heart were racing, giving him an excruciating headache. He lost sight of Macy after their talk; Brodie said she’d left with her mom.

He wanted out of there, away from all the peering eyes, the smiles, all the hugs and pats on the back, proclaiming him a hero. He was starting to feel claustrophobic. Antsy.

At last, Finn said good-bye to all the military personnel and Friends of Fort Hood, the reporters, his extended family, and God knew who else, and piled into his father’s Chevy Suburban with his entourage, headed for home.

He rode in the front passenger seat, a seat of honor, apparently, as his mother had insisted he take it. But as the Suburban pulled onto Highway 71, they were met with an onslaught of lights rushing by in the opposite direction. The lights were blurring into each other and Finn blinked, trying to focus. He instinctively braced his arm against the frame of the car. He didn’t like riding in the front, sitting up high with nothing but glass around him. He felt dangerously exposed and defenseless. He tried to tell himself this was Austin, not Kabul, but it didn’t help his anxiety.

He was so tense he could scarcely respond to the many questions his brother Luke put to him, could not concentrate when Mom talked about the family reunion she wanted to have as soon as possible. Finn could feel the trickle of perspiration running down his back as cars darted around his father’s lumbering machine. His heart lurched every time a dirty little white car swept past them—they reminded him of the car that drove into Danny and him, and there seemed to be an inordinate number of them in Austin.

By the time they reached the old home place, his nerves were frayed. He spilled out of the Suburban and quickly walked away from it, pretending to get a good look at the house where he’d grown up, but gulping for air before anyone could notice. The house, a fifties-style ranch, was surrounded by scrubland and flanked to the south by a barn bigger than the house. A windmill that didn’t pump water anymore stood on the north side. The place looked exactly as it had the day Finn left, as if time had stood still on this little ranch.

Someone put a hand on his shoulder; Finn flinched and whirled around.

“Hey,” Luke said, quickly lifting his hand. “I didn’t mean to scare you, man. Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Finn said. “I was just wondering—you think Dad has any whiskey?”

Luke grinned. “Are you kidding? It’s still under the oil cans in the garage. I’ll get it and meet you on the back porch.”

Finn grabbed his rucksack from the back of the Suburban and walked inside the house.

“Finn, you’ll be in your old room,” his mother called from the kitchen. I’m going to fix us some sweet tea.”

Inside, the house looked the same as it always had. It was built of limestone with a beamed ceiling in the living room and a linoleum floor in the kitchen his father had been promising to replace for ten years. One long corridor led to all the bedrooms.

Finn walked into the one he’d shared with Brodie until Luke had gone off to college. He dropped his ruck on the bed and looked around. It was the same as the day he’d left it ten years ago. His rodeo trophies were lined up on a shelf above his bed. There was a pair of cleats on the dresser. Brodie’s, he figured, as Brodie had been the one to play baseball. A poster of Pamela Anderson dressed in a string bikini—complete with the obligatory mustache and glasses drawn on by his best friend Mike—was still tacked to the wall.

Mike was the reason Finn had joined the army. Not the only reason, but the one that got him thinking about enlisting. Mike had come from a working-class family who didn’t put much store in college. Mike did, though, and the most realistic way for him to get there was through the G.I. Bill. He’d joined up after high school, did his time, and was just about to get out and go to college when 9/11 happened. Mike re-upped. And he died in Iraq.

Several months after he died, Finn had seen his pickup on a dirt lot next to Highway 281 with a sign that said,
FOR SALE, GOOD CONDITION
. That was all that was left of Mike. He’d been reduced to a pickup on the side of the road, and Finn…Finn couldn’t let that happen. So he’d signed up for Mike. In memory of. Because Mike had the balls to die for his country.

But it was more than that, really. It was for all of the soldiers who were dying over there. Guys like Finn, guys who supported the war, who were doing the best and only thing they could to avenge 9/11. Finn was young and strong and good with a gun. He felt like he had a responsibility to himself and to his country.

He’d been married to Macy almost three years when he told her. She laughed at first, but when she saw he was serious, she was furious. She didn’t believe in this war or any other. “It’s a dead-end war! There will never be peace there!”

“It’s not any more dead-end than social work,” he’d argued. “And you’d still be doing that if we didn’t live so far out.”

Macy had gasped. “But those are
children
you’re talking about!”

“Exactly,” he’d said. “You do what you can to protect innocent kids. Here or there, it doesn’t matter.”

“Okay, what about
our
kids?” she’d demanded. “We’ll never have them if you get yourself killed!”

“But, baby, if I don’t get myself killed, just think of how much better we’ll be for it. Think of what better parents we’d be.”

In the end, she’d given in. But she hadn’t liked it.

Finn had set up everything so that it would be easy for Macy. José was there, and Finn had assumed everything would be okay…

He looked away from Pamela and Mike’s scribbling.

Yes, his room was just as he’d left it with one notable exception: There was a computer atop a small desk, shoved up against the wall beneath the window. On the right of the monitor was a mouse pad and mouse; on the left, a stack of correspondence and a jar to hold pens and pencils.

His mother walked in with a glass of sweet tea and noticed him looking at it. “We made this into the computer room,” she said apologetically. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.”

“Is this going to be okay?” she asked, gesturing to a stack of fresh towels at the foot of the single twin bed.

“It’s great, Mom.” Finn ran a hand through his hair. He was feeling a little closed in.

“Tea?” she asked, holding the glass up.

“No. But thanks.”

She put the glass down. “Finn?”

He was surprised to see tears in her eyes. She’d cried so much since he’d come home; how many tears did she have left? “Mom, stop,” he said softly, and pulled her into a hug. “Come on, now. Everything is good.”

“I’m sorry,” she said tearfully. “But you can’t imagine how grateful I am to have you home. I look at you and I get down on my knees and thank God for giving my child back to me. It’s a miracle. I just wish
everyone
understood what a miracle it is.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing, really,” she said, shaking her head. She patted his chest and stepped away to the dresser, where she anxiously rearranged a half dozen pictures of him. “I just want you to know that your father and your brothers and I understand how blessed we are to have you back.”

By process of elimination, Finn deduced that his mother meant Macy wasn’t as thankful for his survival as they were. “What, Mom…you don’t think Macy is feeling quite as blessed?” he asked with a laugh.

His mom rearranged two more pictures. “I don’t know if she is or she isn’t, she hasn’t said. But if I were in her shoes, I wouldn’t have remarried so quickly.”

This was the last conversation Finn wanted to have with anyone, much less his mother. He wondered if Luke had found the whiskey yet. “I wouldn’t expect Macy to give up her life just because mine was lost,” he said.

His mother attempted to shrug indifferently, but her pinched expression at the mention of Macy’s name said it all.

“I’m tired, Mom. I’m going to have a drink with Brodie and Luke.” He moved toward the door, but his mother had tears in her eyes again.

“Ma,” he said, embracing her once more. “Come on, now. I’m home. It’s all behind us,” he said, even as a trickle of doubt ran down his spine.