More Than One Kind
By: dharmamonkey
Rating: T
Disclaimer: I don't own Bones. I am, however, interested in renting Booth. A five-hour minimum would apply.
A/N: Kleenex, people. Those of you inclined to get misty, well—you might want to have them handy. Just sayin'. Oh, and Happy New Year!
Chapter 3
Maybe it's silly, because I know there's no way in the world this would have happened, but as I waited for Mom and Dad in the lobby of the Hotel Boulderado that afternoon so we could all head over to the church for the rehearsal, I imagined how Dad would have looked in his old Army uniform.
I wondered what he'd look like in dress blues, with the dark coat and blue trousers with the gold braid down the sides of the legs, the rack of medals on one side of his chest and the Special Forces insignia with its "De oppresso liber" motto pinned to his right, and his sleeves adorned with sergeant major's insignia and campaign stripes on the cuff. I couldn't help but imagine what he'd look like wearing a green beret with his hair cropped extra-short and his silver sideburns trimmed high and razor-close above his ears.
It's strange, but I've always thought of my dad as a soldier.
Although Dad was out of the Army by the time I was born, I've always considered him a military man. Being a soldier is part of who he is—as a person, and as a man. He keeps some of his Army decorations, including his Bronze Star, in a frame on the wall behind his desk at work, and he still wears a heavy brass belt buckle embossed with a pair of crossed muskets—the longtime symbol of the infantry—with his suits. He has an uncanny ability to recognize other veterans just from a person's carriage and mannerisms, and he naturally gravitates towards such people at any conference or social gathering (a skill I like to call "mil-dar"). He and Mom have both been active in raising money for veterans' causes over the years. Dad volunteers as a mentor with the Wounded Warrior Project's Combat Stress Recovery Program, which helped him after he came back from Afghanistan. Dad's even taken up the cause at work, and has been a strong advocate for actively hiring and promoting veterans at the FBI since he finally left the Army in 2010.
General Douglas MacArthur is famously quoted as saying, "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away." Dad's an old soldier, but he learned the hard way that wars don't end when the shooting stops and that the soldier inside never really fades away. He came home from his last war and, despite the horror he experienced over there, successfully transitioned back to civilian life, yet twenty-some years after Dad received his DD-214 and left military service for good, he's still a soldier at heart.
A warrior, as Mom would say.
I stood there in the lobby and smiled while I watched my parents walk down the staircase. Dad's hand was resting on the small of my mother's back but as they reached the bottom of the stairs. His arm snaked around her waist and I saw his big fingers curl around the curve of her hip. Mom looked stellar as usual, with her gray-streaked hair pulled into a bun, exposing her neck and drawing my eyes to the necklace of red coral beads that coordinated with the tiny floral accents on her black wraparound dress. Dad looked sharp and snappy as he always did in crisply-pressed black slacks and jacket, a French blue shirt with the top two buttons unbuttoned, and high-shine black wingtips.
"You look great, Lucy," Dad told me, giving me one of his one-armed, squeezing hugs and dropping a kiss on the top of my head. "Are you ready?" He'd just pulled the rental car keys out of his pocket when Mom's mobile phone rang.
"Brennan," I heard my mother murmur into the handset. Dad's eyes narrowed and his lips pouted out a little bit as he listened to the quiet chirping of the voice on the other end of the line. "Yes," Mom said to the caller. "I understand, but I am in Colorado for a family wedding and will not be able to assist until I return…" It seemed by the chirpy chattering that the caller was objecting. "I'm sorry, but Dr. Bray is more than capable of handling the situation in my stead until Wednesday..."
As Mom proceeded to give a mini-lecture to the caller about the instructions she left during her absence, I saw my dad's brows slope low over his eyes as he grumbled under his breath. As Mom was wrapping up her phone call, he gazed up and his eyes met mine, and for a moment we just looked at each other. Five years after his mandatory retirement from the FBI's Special Agent force (even with a one-year extension, he had no choice but to step down at fifty-eight), he still missed working in the field as a badge-carrying federal law enforcement officer.
"Boots on the ground," he called it. That's what my father loved best and what he missed the most.
Dad finished his career at the top of his profession, spending the last four years as the Special Agent in Charge of the D.C. Field Office before the age rules forced him out. Even after that, he was able to stay with the FBI as the Assistant Director for the Bureau's Training Division, which put him in charge of the FBI Academy and the FBI National Academy (which provides advanced training to non-federal law enforcement), as well as training programs for intelligence analysts and other FBI personnel. At sixty-three, he'd been Assistant Director for five years and was vested in a second federal pension, yet he still stubbornly resisted the idea of retirement. Mom was convinced that Dad wasn't going to retire until she did. She was exploring a way to revert to some kind of emeritus status at the Jeffersonian where she would only be called in to consult on unusually difficult cases, but she was still working out the details with the director of the institution.
Mom hung up her phone and dropped it into her purse. I saw her eyes narrow slightly as she recognized that Dad was on the verge of one of his moods and, given the context, the likely cause of it.
She gave me a wink, hitched her purse higher on her shoulder, then turned to Dad with a twinkle in her eye and said, "Shall we go?"
Mom sat in the front pew during the wedding rehearsal, and I could see from the brightness in her gray-blue eyes and the way she was pursing her lips, almost as if she were trying to hold back tears, that she was very moved by the whole thing. It was strange, because for the most part, my mom is not an outwardly emotional kind of person, but something about the occasion seemed to peel away that extra layer of reserved rationality, leaving her a bit more exposed and a little more raw than I was used to seeing her—even more shimmery-eyed than she'd been when she held her grandsons for the first time after Parker's twins were born.
Celia's sorority sister, Maggie, was acting as a sort of master of ceremonies, helping make sure everyone was where they were supposed to be. As the Maid of Honor, I was standing up at the front, and while I should have been completely focused on what was happening in the aisle, I had found myself watching my mom. It was only when I heard a sudden lull in the orders Maggie was barking out from the back of the sanctuary that I was shaken from the reverie of my own thoughts.
I saw Mom turn to look over her shoulder, and though I stood several feet away from the pew where she was seated, I swore I could hear her draw a sharp breath as my gaze followed hers and my eyes fell upon my dad, walking arm-in-arm down the aisle with Celia, the fingers of his big right hand gently curled around her forearm as he looked at her, his brown eyes warm and moist as a wide, toothy smile raised his cheeks and made every single one of us in that sanctuary smile as the two of them reached the front. Celia took her place to my left and he gave her slender arm a little squeeze as she turned around to face the mostly-empty pews.
Suddenly I heard my mom make a sound—less of a sob and more of a swallowed gasp—and that's when I noticed the tears brimming in Dad's eyes. He looked up and his gaze met mine, and his hands being occupied in that moment, his blink loosened a single tear that came to rest on the edge of his cheekbone.
Maggie came jogging down the aisle and said something to us all, but for a minute, neither my parents nor Celia nor I heard whatever it was she was chattering on about. For that solitary moment, it was just the four of us, suspended in the gravity of it all, and I wondered if each of them felt as I did, my breath hitching in my throat as I felt a presence in the air. It wasn't just the spiritual presence you'd expect standing in the front of the Sacred Heart of Mary Catholic Church, though as my father's daughter and a good Catholic girl (usually, anyways), I did feel a certain something in that respect.
No, it was something else—something more than just the feeling of the place—and when I saw my parents' eyes meet and heard them share a sigh as Dad pressed his lips together in a firm line, I knew then that they felt it, too.
About an hour later, everyone was finally gathered and seated in the downstairs cellar at Salt, a stylish (or, as Dad called it, "swanky") bistro at 11th and Pearl, four blocks away from the Boulderado where we were all staying and where Celia and Caleb's reception was going to be the next day.
The cellar came with its own private bar and we had our own bartender and waitress assigned to tend to our party. All of us—my parents, Parker, his wife and sons, Celia's college friend Maggie, her mom Darleen, her brother Michael, his wife and their baby, Angela, Hodgins, Michael Vincent and his girlfriend, Caleb's parents, brother, sister-in-law and his two best friends, and of course, Celia and Caleb—were seated around the long rectangular table of rustic-looking Colorado blue pine, chatting and telling stories about seemingly everything under the sun.
Dad, Hodgins, Maggie and Caleb were already polishing off their beers while the rest of us had decided to hold off on the hard stuff for a bit and were waiting instead for our soft drinks. Nobody seemed to pay much attention when my mom stood up abruptly as the bartender came down the stairs with two bottles of wine cradled in one arm and a third bottle in the other.
A few minutes later, the waitress came around with large-bowled Bordeaux-style glasses as the bartender followed close on her heels, pouring a glass of red first for my mother, who breathed in a noseful of the wine's aroma before taking a tiny sip. Mom nodded approvingly and smiled as her glass was filled. The barman moved on to pour a glass for me, then Dad, and so on around the table until every adult's glass was full (except for Michael's wife Jenna, who was breastfeeding their daughter Patricia).
As soon as everyone had their drinks, soft or otherwise, Caleb and Celia stood up from their seats at the head of the table. Caleb wrapped his arm loosely around Celia's waist and held up his beer glass to get everyone's attention. After a moment of murmurs and hushing, the room fell silent and twenty-some pairs of eyes swiveled to the back of the room where my friend stood with an genuine if not somewhat awkward smile in the seconds before she began to speak.
"Hey, uhh," she began, nibbling her lip a little as she surveyed the room. Caleb gave her hip a light, encouraging squeeze and she smiled, shrugged a little and continued.
"We want to thank you all for being here tonight...to celebrate with us, and for all of you who came from out of town…" She turned to the middle part of the table where my parents, Darleen, Michael, Parker and I sat and acknowledged us with a nod and a smile.
"We really appreciate you all coming out here to the Wild West to celebrate with us," Caleb, the Colorado native, said with a bright-eyed grin. "The restaurant assured me that your horses will be fed, watered and reshoed by the time you present your valet checks this evening."
Everyone laughed and I saw my dad lean over and whisper in my mom's ear, then wince when she elbowed him in the ribs. He whispered something else to her but fell silent when she patted his leg underneath the table. I watched the two of them for a minute as Celia and Caleb went around the table and one by one acknowledged people by name, blinking myself out of my daze in time to raise my glass of wine for a toast to the parents of the bride and groom. The whole room was a sea of smiles and clinking glasses as everyone drank in the joy of the occasion as they sipped their wine. My mother and Darleen exchanged a look, each of their faces alight with smiles as they watched Celia and her fiancé stand there together at the head of a table full of the people who loved them the most.
After a minute, the table simmered down and attention was once more focused on Celia and Caleb, who turned to each other and smiled as Celia closed her eyes, took a breath and began to speak again.
"There's someone in particular I'd like to recognize," she said, punctuating her statement with another long, steadying breath and rolling her lips together as she turned to my parents.
I saw her nibble the inside of her lip as Caleb leaned in and kissed her temple, whispering something into her hair to which she nodded in reply.
Celia took yet another deep breath, then reached over and placed her left hand over Caleb's, which rested on her hip, lacing her fingers through his as she brought her gaze up again. Our eyes met for a moment and I smiled, then gave her an encouraging nod of my own.
"I never knew my dad," she began, her voice strong but wavering ever so slightly on the edges as she spoke. "He was killed in action in Afghanistan, twenty-three years ago last month, ten days after I was born." She swallowed thickly and I saw her eyes glisten with emotion as she meet her mother's gaze. "He never..." Caleb squeezed her hand gently and whispered something inaudible to her as she turned to my father.
"But even though I never met my dad," she continued, her voice thick but clear and strong, "I was never without a father. Though my own dad never made it back from Afghanistan, his friend Booth did, and through Booth, I came to know my father, and to know a father's love."
My breath caught in my throat as I turned to Dad and saw his mouth fall open, his strong, pockmarked jaw shifting a little from one side to the other as his dark brown eyes glimmered at hearing her words.
"Booth," Celia said, looking straight at Dad. "I'd say that you were the father I never had, except…" She tilted her head with a muted smile, swallowing again the lump I imagined was in her throat. "Except, thanks to you, I had a father. I had someone to teach me how to drive a stick shift and help me practice so I wouldn't flunk my driver's test." She chuckled at the memory, her laugh a liquid chortle that found its echo in the murmur I heard sound in my father's throat next to me. "Someone I knew I could always go to when I needed to hear a reassuring voice when I felt a little lost in the world. Someone who was always there for me, and for my mother and brother. Someone who had been where my dad was, who knew him and the kind of man he was, and through whom I could get a sense of the man my dad was."
I've seen my father get misty-eyed a couple of times—when he held Parker's twin boys, his grandsons, for the very first time, and when I graduated from high school—but it was that night, in the cellar of a swanky bistro in Boulder, Colorado, that I saw my father cry for the very first time.
I watched my mother's slender arm curl around his shoulder as he lowered his gaze and took a deep, slightly ragged breath, nodding to himself before he looked up again and met Celia's eyes. His lips parted and for a minute, it looked like he was going to say something, but instead, he pressed his lips into a line and smiled at her. He sniffled as he wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and brushed away the tears with the edge of his thumb.
"Thanks, Booth," Celia said, her pale blue eyes shimmering with emotion as she squeezed Caleb's hand. "For everything." She paused for a beat, then turned to my mother, who until that moment had been focused on my father and seemed almost a little startled when Celia's attention shifted to her. "And thank you, Temperance, for so generously opening your heart and your home to us, letting our family share in your celebrations and sharing in ours. I can't even begin to say how much it meant to my mother, my brother and I over the years. I just..."
Celia swallowed and took a breath but didn't finish her sentence. Caleb hugged her to his chest and kissed the side of her head, then turned to my mom, smiled and gave her a slow nod.
My parents aren't shy people, and our house was always full of the sound of conversation and chatter as I was growing up. But I know that my parents—for all their bickering and endless discussions of science and reason, on the own hand, and of love, the limits of rationality and the inescapable ineffability of it all—are each people of gravitas who recognize that sometimes, we find ourselves in a space beyond words.
And that was where we found ourselves in that that moment as we reflected on all that had happened to the bride and her groom, and how wonderful it would have been if her father had been able to be there to see it all and celebrate with her.
I was thinking about Uncle Louie when Dad turned to Mom with his brows raised and deep creases in his forehead as he gave her an odd, almost uncertain look. They held each other's gaze for a minute as they had one of those silent conversations the two of them seem uniquely capable of having, then Mom smiled and patted Dad on the thigh.
She stood up and motioned for the bartender to approach. The goateed young man nodded curtly and came over with one of the unopened bottles of wine. Mom accepted the bottle and turned it in her hand as if inspecting it one last time, then glanced over her shoulder as my father stood up. He rested his right hand on the small of her back and leaned in to whisper something in her ear that made her smile.
Turning to the bride and groom, Mom said, "Celia, as you know, Booth and I went about the process of marriage and family in a somewhat unorthodox manner."
I heard someone behind me laugh, then looked over my shoulder to see Angela covering her mouth as Hodgins gave her a disapproving slap on the hand.
Mom, of course, didn't skip a beat. "Booth already had a child, of course," she said. "His wonderful son, Parker, who I met in the middle of the first year of our partnership." She looked over at my brother, who sat between his six year-old sons, Kellen and Jason, and beamed back at her with a son's love shimmering in his eyes.
"We were married in January of 2011," she explained. "But because Booth had just gone back to work after recovering from nerve surgery, and because the weather conditions in January aren't particularly conducive to tourism in the northern hemisphere, we postponed our honeymoon. I became pregnant with Lucia that spring, which further delayed our honeymoon."
When Mom mentioned my name, Dad reached over, put his hand on my shoulder and gave it a gentle, playful squeeze.
"It wasn't until May two years later, in 2013, that Booth and I finally took our long-deferred honeymoon." I saw Dad's brows furrow and he nudged my mom to keep the story moving, which she did, but only after slapping his arm with a pffft sound. "We ended up going to Veneto, in northern Italy, to the province of Verona. While we were there, we discovered a wonderful wine, Bella Lucha, an Amarone della Valpolicella, which we enjoyed so much, we bought two cases of it. Those two cases were bottled in 2011."
Mom held up the bottle, turning it in her hand as she passed it to Caleb, label facing upwards.
"The wine we have been drinking tonight is from that case of Amarone della Valpolicella," she said. "Made from grapes that were picked in the first two weeks of October, 2010. Booth and I bought this wine—which was, in a sense, 'born' when you were, made from grapes grown in the hills of the province of Verona, where your father Lou's family was from—and we've been holding onto it for twenty years, waiting to share it with you on the occasion of your wedding."
Celia's mouth fell open with a laugh, and her cheeks blushed as her eyes glimmered with gratitude. She touched her lips with her fingers as she smiled and considered what to say, but before she could speak, my father did.
"I remember sitting in a guard tower with your dad," he told her, his voice cracking a little as he looked at her with emotion welling in his eyes. "Over there, you know. Your dad would show me the ultrasound pictures your mom would send, and he'd carry them around in his pocket, right here." Dad patted his thigh demonstratively, then laughed. "We usually kept our letters and stuff like that in our thigh pockets so we could get to 'em without having to take off our body armor. Anyway, your dad was so in love with you, and so excited about you, he couldn't wait to show me the latest ultrasound pictures he got at mail call."
Dad winced a little, then took a deep breath and rolled his lips together in a firm line as he hugged my mom closer to his side—for strength, I guess.
"He loved you very much," Dad said. "It broke his heart when a high-priority operation got pushed out a week, but the brass said we had to delay Lou's R&R, even though he had a newborn baby girl waiting at home to meet him. He was nearly crawling out of his skin to get out of there, and to finally get home to see you. He had a picture of you in your mama's arms, with your brother, that your mom had emailed to him and he'd gotten printed out by a friend of his at the Marine base down the road. He took a copy of it—that picture—and he folded up and put it in his chest pocket, under his armored vest."
Dad patted his chest, right over his heart, then cleared his throat.
"He had that picture of you guys right next to his heart when he went off on that last mission," Dad said, the last few words coming out almost as a croak. "He loved you, Celia, and he thought about you all the time we were over there. Though he never held you in his arms, he loved you more than you will ever know."
As I listened, I thought of Uncle Louie, with his dark, laughing eyes and a bushy black Green Beret beard like I'd seen him in photographs Dad brought home from Afghanistan. I could see him standing there in a pair of dusty fatigue trousers and a sweaty old Giants T-shirt with his burly, hairy arms crossed in front of his chest and a toothy, nicotine-stained grin on his face, looking down at us from Heaven with tears in his eyes as he watched his little girl on the eve of her wedding.
"He'd be proud of you, Cel," Dad said, smiling broadly through his tears. His shimmery brown eyes narrowed a little, then he laughed and said, "And Caleb—he'd tell you to take care of his little girl, and to be good to her, or else he'd have to get commando on your ass."
Everyone around the table laughed, in no small part because they knew that Dad and Lou were men of a certain kind—woven of the same yarn, and cut from the same cloth—and that Lou would have been every bit as protective as Dad.
"Seriously, though," he said with a little sniff. "He'd be proud of you, and happy for you both, that you've found happiness in each other. It's all a father really wants for his little girl—for her to find happiness—and he'd be thrilled to see you today, and to know that you had. We're all happy for you, Cel...your mom, Michael, Bones and me...all of us. And I know in my heart, Cel, that your dad's happy for you, too."
As I watched Dad talk about his friend, I felt certain that Lou would have agreed that, if he couldn't be around to help Darleen raise their son and daughter into adulthood, having Booth there to be their guiding hand was the next best thing.
Mom turned to Dad, leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, briefly nuzzled his shoulder, then turned back to Celia with a smile.
"Tonight," she said, "we share this Bella Lucha Amarone della Valpolicella in celebration of you and Caleb, and the love you found in each other."
"The second case," my father said, his voice suddenly stronger and clearer than it had been just moments before, though I could still hear the emotion on the edge of his words as a rich, throaty thickness. "The second case is in the basement cellar of our house in Virginia. It'll be waiting for you when the two of you get back from your honeymoon. As soon as you two are back from Kauai and settled in, we'll have it shipped out to you."
That was when Celia smiled and pulled away from Caleb, then walked over and hugged my parents: first my mom, who accepted the hug with a hint of awkwardness in the first moments before relaxing into the embrace, and then my dad, whose broad shoulders, strong arms and big hands seemed to all but swallow up my small-framed friend.
"Thanks," I heard Celia say into Dad's coat. Pulling away, she wiped away a tear and smiled. "I love you guys," she said. "Thanks for everything."
I know it's a cliché, but in this case, it's really true: there wasn't a dry eye in the room as we watched Celia steal one more hug from my dad.
The gravity of the moment lightened as the dinner moved on, and the heaviness in the air was replaced by laughter and the happy chatter of a big, extended family reunited and growing as we celebrated Celia and Caleb, and finished off that case of Amarone della Valpolicella.
I was glad for the levity, and as I watched my father, I saw his own mood lift. Years and decades have passed since Dad came back from his last war, but the residue of those experiences never completely washed away, especially the loss of his friend Lou. In my father's laughter, I took comfort, glad that the painful reminder of loss didn't overshadow the joy of the occasion. I felt relief when, halfway through the meal, Dad turned to me and smiled, then leaned in and kissed me on the cheek.
Somewhere amid the anguish my father still feels over the death of his closest friend in that crash twenty-three years ago lies something else—a sense of gratitude that he had been able to do this for his friend, his widow and the children he left behind. Every time says her name, Celia, he hears the echo of his name, Seeley, and Uncle Louie's trust in him rings clear. I believe that my father draws strength from that, knowing that his comrade and friend loved him and trusted him to love and watch over his family in his stead.
I know this because every day I hear my name, I'm reminded that, as great a man as my father is, he carries a great burden inside of him. It weighs on him—the sole survivor of the event that took the lives of twenty-one other men who left behind wives and girlfriends, children, mothers and fathers who loved them every bit as much as we all love my dad. That burden, that sense of duty, not only weighed on my dad these last twenty years, but I think it propelled him forward, too. Knowing that he had a job to do, an unspoken promise to keep to his slain friend, and that Uncle Louie believed in him enough to name his daughter after him, helped my father heal and be strong—strong enough for Mom, Parker and me, and for Darleen, Michael and Celia, too.
I heard my mom say once that Dad is the strongest man she knows.
I'm pretty sure that if Uncle Louie were around, he'd agree.
(Then he'd tell my dad to fuck off.)
A/N: I think this story has one more chapter left to it. (You'd think I'd know, but no.)
I've said it before, but this is a dramatic departure from the kind of thing I've done previously, so I'd really like to know what you all think. Did I just send Kleenex stock up a few points? Are you ready to throw your laptop or tablet into a volcano? Let me know your thoughts. Please? Pretty please?
Oh! And thanks for reading :-)
