This story was started in 2003 and sat unfinished on my hard drive until this year. Ironically, when I originally wrote it, the framing story was written as taking place in 2009, making this the perfect year to finish this story. The story alternates between flashbacks and the present day framing story and is a Mother's Day story about Harm and his mother.
This story is a sequel to my Can't Fight This Feeling series. As a reminder, here's where things stand. Harm and Mac got married in September 2000 and had twins Matt and Sarah in February 2001. In the story A Time To Mourn, they had a third child, Elizabeth, born in June 2006. Also in that story, it was mentioned that Sergei was going to ask his girlfriend Lisa to marry him and that Trish and Frank were planning to move to DC to be closer to their family.
Through the course of this story, a few events that took place on the show are worked into the story, although the circumstances changed in some cases (for instance, Harm did crash into the Atlantic in May 2001, although he obviously wasn't rushing back for Mac's wedding to Mic). Thankfully, no Paraguay for obvious reasons (and no Mattie, although I originally did try to figure out a way to work her into the story).
25 DECEMBER 1969
LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA
"Mommy, look! Just like Daddy flies!" I hold up the plane for Mommy to see. She smiles and ruffles my hair. I pull away, not wanting that kind of attention. I'm getting too old for that.
"Very nice," she says, stepping back and snapping my picture with the camera in her hands.
I look the model plane over, turning it in my hands, studying it from every angle. I look up at Mommy, my voice serious, "Do you think Daddy got the presents we sent?"
"He should have," she replies. "We sent them in plenty of time to get to the Tico by Christmas. You want to listen to the tape Daddy sent?"
"Yes!" I yell, bringing another smile to Mommy's face. Daddy's tapes are the greatest. It sounds like he's right here with us. If I close my eyes, I can pretend he's here.
Mommy takes the tape that came in the package of presents from the Tico and puts it in the player, starting the tape. She sits on the floor next to me and pulls me into her lap as the tape begins.
…Merry Christmas, Trish and Harm. Or I hope that it is Christmas when you're listening to this. I tried to send it in plenty of time to get to California, but you never know with the mail. Anyway, if Christmas is already over, I hope you had a good one.
I'm in between missions right now. I should be sleeping, but I wanted to get this out on the next COD. Same old going on around here. I take off, fly missions, and then come back safe and sound. I almost forgot. There is a little bit of excitement going on around here. The Captain announced that Bob Hope and his USO troop are coming to the Tico on the 23rd. I think Phyllis Diller is going to be here and that singer, Jenny Lake. You should hear some of the guys. We haven't had liberty in a while, so nobody's seen any...well, you get the idea, Trish. I hope I'm not off on a mission that day. I'd love to see the show.
Harm, what do you think of the Phantom model? I picked it up in Hawaii when the Tico was on the way to 'Nam. It reminds me of that day on the Hornet. I have that picture of you sitting in the cockpit of my plane. I carry it in my flight suit every time I go up, that way you're with me all the time.
Hey, Hammer. You planning on getting to sleep anytime soon?
Hey, guys, ignore Tom. He's just grouchy because....well, just because. If he would just go back to his own quarters...
Don't listen to him. My roommate was keeping me awake, so I came here to try to get some sleep. You'd be grouchy, too. Merry Christmas, Trish, Harm.
Anyway, just five more months and I'll be home. I hope for good this time. I don't know, Trish. Sometimes I...hey, it's Christmas. This is a happy time, right? So, Harm, have you been working on your swing the way I told you? And I hope you're not giving your mother a hard time... well, too hard of a time. Take care of her for me, Harm.
Look, I need to get this in the mail and let my poor wing man get some sleep here. I love you guys and I'll see you real soon. May will be here before you know it and I'll be with you again….
"When's May, Mommy?" I ask as she reaches to turn the player off.
"Well, let's look," she says, setting me on the floor and getting up. I follow her to the desk, where she picks up a calendar. "Here's December 25th then in one week, it will be January." She turns the page to another filled with blocks and numbers. "There's thirty-one days in January, then comes February with twenty-eight days, then March with thirty-one, the April with thirty, then it will be May." She turns the pages as she lists each month, so that I can see the passage of time.
"Then Daddy will be home?" I ask hopefully.
"Yes, Daddy will..." she stops when the doorbell rings.
"I'll get it, Mommy," I say, running off for the door. I open the door and look up to two men, dressed in uniforms like I remember seeing Daddy in before. Dress blues, I think he called them. I recognize one of the men as the priest at church. We just saw him this morning at Mass. He said a special prayer for all the guys like Daddy who have gone away and aren't home for Christmas. "Hello, Father McNally."
"Hello, Harm," Father McNally says, not smiling. That's odd. He's always smiling. "Where's your Mom?"
"Mommy!" I call out. "It's Father McNally."
Soon, Mommy is coming to the door and she's not smiling either when she sees the two men. "Harm, come here," she says, her voice shaking, holding out her arms to me. "Please come to Mommy."
Mommy sounds...scared and I'm scared now, too. Slowly, I walk to her, taking hold of her hand. I look up at her, wondering what is wrong. Then Mommy's arms are around me and I'm going up into her arms. As she kisses my cheek, I feel something wet. Why is Mommy crying?
5 MAY 2009
MCLEAN, VIRGINIA
"Daddy?"
I turn at the sound of the voice behind me, seeing my oldest daughter standing behind the couch, looking over my shoulder. I start to close the photo album, but Sarah leans forward and puts her hand on the page, stopping me. "How old were you?" she asks, pointing to the picture that I was just looking at.
"Six," I reply quietly, staring at the photo again. It was the last idyllic moment of my childhood; just minutes before my world came crashing down around me. "It was Christmas 1969."
"What kind of plane is that you're holding?" Sarah asks, motioning towards the model in my hands. I smile. Of course that would be one of the questions she would ask. Of my children, Sarah is the one who has shown the greatest interest in planes and in being a pilot.
When she was about five months old, we were going to Michele Mattoni's christening and I was in my dress whites. I had picked her up out of her crib and as I held her to my chest, tiny fingers immediately latched onto my gold wings. Sarah swears that I had the biggest smile on my face for the rest of the day as I proudly told everyone what my daughter had done, while she had just rolled her eyes. Someone – I don't remember who now – tried to suggest that she was simply drawn by the bright, shiny pin, but I would not be dissuaded. My little girl was going to follow in my footsteps. I was convinced of it.
When my daughter got older and got into that phase every child goes through when every sentence out of their mouths is a question, she had pointed at my wings and asked, "Wat dat?" When I took the twins to their first air show, Matt fell asleep – despite all the noise – but Sarah spent the entire show staring up at the sky, gazing with fascination at the planes flying overhead. After I took each of them for their first ride in my Stearman, Sarah was the one constantly begging me to take her up again. Not that Matt doesn't like to fly – he does like it in the same way that his mother likes flying in the Stearman - but Sarah loves it. She's the one who always listens enraptured when I tell tales of my flying days. I was right about her. Someday, she'll be the next Rabb to wear gold wings, following in the proud tradition of her great grandfather, grandfather, father and uncle.
"It's an F-4 Phantom," I reply as she comes around the couch and sits down next to me, leaning against my side. I put an arm over her shoulder and pull her closer. "It was the Navy's fighter plane before the Tomcat. That's what your Grandpa Harmon flew in Vietnam. He gave me the model for Christmas that year."
She studies the photo for a moment, and then I can see her glance at me out of the corner of her eye, her manner contemplative. Finally, she asks, "What happened to Grandpa Harmon?"
I'm silent for a moment, pondering how to answer the question. This is the first time that any of the kids have asked what happened to my father. They know that he's dead – or that he's an angel, as we had told them about Gram when she died a few years ago. They've been to the Wall. They've just never asked for any of the details before. Grandpa Harmon being dead was just another fact of their lives up until this point, something that Mommy and Daddy told them and they took on faith.
"Well," I begin hesitantly, still trying to figure out in my mind how much to tell her. Even after nearly forty years, that wound hasn't quite healed yet. It just doesn't hurt as much as it used to. "He was flying Phantoms off the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga in the waters off Vietnam. On Christmas Eve, 1969, he was flying a mission when he was shot down. He became a prisoner and was taken to Russia with some other pilots. He escaped from a prison camp in 1980 and died two years later. A few months later, your Uncle Sergei was born."
"This was taken on Christmas, 1969, you said," she states, looking at the picture again. "The day after Grandpa was shot down."
I nod. "Just after the picture was taken," I tell her, "the base chaplain and another officer came and told us about Dad. I think Mom knew what they were going to say before they even opened their mouths. I knew something was wrong, too, but I was too young to understand what. Father McNally wasn't smiling, not like he had been at church that morning."
"If Grandpa Harmon was your Dad, what about Grandpa Frank?" she continues. "When did he come around?"
"Mom met him when I was eleven," I reply. "She married him two years later when I was thirteen."
She looks pensive for a moment, and then counts on her fingers. "So it was just you and Grandma Trish for five years," she concludes. "Wasn't it hard, being without a Daddy? I can't imagine being without you."
I'm not sure how to answer that. There are different ways I could answer that question. I mean, after Dad was gone, Mom and I were taken care of. Gram helped out a lot and Mom's parents were still alive at the time. We had Dad's military benefits, so money never was that big a concern, even before Frank came along. As far as material things go, things were no different than when Dad was still with us. We had a place to live and food on the table.
Emotionally…now that's a different story. Sometimes I would….well, not forget....but it would seem like Dad was just off on another mission, just like always. But then I would remember that Mom had told me Dad wasn't coming home every time I asked. Not ever again. Not that I was willing to believe her, but that's what she told me, so eventually I learned not to ask. Looking back now, I figure that Dad was probably at home less than half of my life up until he was shot down. So from that standpoint, things weren't that much different. It was only when I was a little older, when I understood the difference between being gone on another cruise and Missing in Action and Killed in Action that I had started to realize just how different my reality was.
"Daddy?"
I shake my head. I've always tried to be honest with my children. It's just that this is still a difficult topic. I may be forty-five years old, nearly forty years removed from that bleak Christmas Day, but somewhere deep inside, that six-year-old boy still resides, not ready to accept that his father will never walk through the front door again. Maybe it would be different if there was a grave that I could visit – and not the empty one up at the farm - but the secret of where Dad is buried went with Sergei's uncle to his grave.
"I'm sorry, Sarah," I say, closing the album and dropping it back on the coffee table. I'm not even sure why I started looking through the thing, except that it was out, lying on the coffee table. I guess I need to have a talk with the twins again about putting things away after they're done with them. "In some ways, everything was the same as before. We had a home, we had food to eat, and we had money in the bank. In others…it was difficult trying to understand that my Dad would never come home again. I'm not sure how…Do you remember when Gram died?"
Sarah shrugs her shoulders and gives me an uncertain look. They say that time heals all wounds. Maybe Matt and Sarah are too young to remember that far back, or they were too young back then to clearly remember it now. Sometimes, I think time didn't heal my wounds where Dad was concerned because I wouldn't let it. I held onto my belief that Dad was alive like a child holds onto a security blanket or a favorite toy. "Well, you and Matt didn't really understand that Gram wasn't going to be around anymore," I explain gently. "When we told you that she was going to Heaven, you even asked when she would be returning."
"But people don't come back from Heaven," she says, sighing sadly. Again, that was a lesson that only time could teach. I think it took about six or eight months before the twins stopped asking when they were going to see Gram again. They finally figured out on their own – just as I had so many years before - that no matter how many times they asked, the answer would always be the same.
"No, they don't," I agree. "But we didn't know that your grandpa was dead, and we now know that he wasn't dead at that time, not for many years yet. All we knew was that he was missing, so I kept believing that he would someday come home. In that way, it was difficult and became more so every day that passed and he didn't come home. But I think that it was harder on Mom."
"I don't understand," she says. "I mean, I know Grandma Trish was sad because Grandpa Harmon was missing, right? So were you. So why would it be harder?"
"I guess because she had to deal with my grief as well as her own," I explain. I don't think that this makes any sense to her. She looks a little confused. "You know, parents are supposed to take care of their children. She had to take care of me, try to help me deal with what I was feeling, while trying to deal with everything that she was going through. She didn't really have anyone to take care of her, not all the time. So it was like a double burden, I guess you could say."
"But then Grandpa Frank came along," she points out matter-of-factly. "He could take care of Grandma. Things got better then, right?"
"I don't know if you could say that," I say vaguely, realizing that we're sailing into rough seas here. As far as my children have always known, Frank is my Dad and their grandfather. He's been a part of my life now for nearly as long as my father was alive. They just don't know how much I used to resent his presence in our lives. They don't know that the first time that I called him Dad was a mere three weeks before the twins were born. The only thing that they've ever seen between the two of us is a warm and loving father-son relationship. I don't think I'm ready to get into that with my kids yet. "Hey, didn't you say that you have a math test tomorrow? Shouldn't you be studying?"
"I was," Sarah protests.
"Well, you should get back to it," I insist. Then I pull out the trump card. Hey, it's dirty, but it's time to nip this conversation in the bud. "You know, if you want to be a pilot, math's very important."
I knew that would get her. "Okay," she pouts, rolling her eyes. "I'm going. Later, Daddy."
After Sarah takes off upstairs, my eyes go back to the photo album in front of me. I haven't really thought about a lot of this stuff in years. It's always been in the back of my mind, but after my first trip to Russia, I'd managed to find a kind of peace with Dad's memory, Mom's need to move on, Frank's presence, everything. But this conversation has opened a can of worms and another memory floats to the surface of my thoughts…
