Chapter 11
Audrey closed her eyes tightly as she held the phone against her ear, the only sign she gave of her nervousness. It rang once, twice, then picked up.
"DePalma, ZNN."
Audrey took a deep breath. She knew she would have to catch the correspondent's attention fast if she wanted to talk with him.
"Hello, Mr. DePalma. My name is Audrey Le. I'm Vietnamese-American. You took a picture of my father in Saigon in 1980, and I wanted to ask you about it."
The voice on the other end sounded impatient, and underscored by cynicism. "Who, exactly, is your father, Ms. Le?"
Standing in the middle of her small room in Bancroft Hall, Audrey straightened her shoulders, forcing herself to raise her head. "His name is Harmon Rabb, Jr. He's a commander in the U.S. Navy."
"Rabb? Really?" Chuck DePalma barked a laugh. "I'll bet he hit the roof—assuming he knows, of course." He continued to chuckle, a merry, smug sound.
Audrey pushed down her irritation. "He knows, Mr. DePalma. We met a few weeks ago."
"And how did our intrepid commander take the news, if I may be so bold?"
Audrey frowned, uncertain how to answer, or if she wanted to. Chuck DePalma sounded like he was gloating, just a little, over her father's… There her thoughts paused. What was it? Affair? Indiscretion? Innocent fling?
"Ms. Le?"
"He's been… very good to me," she finally ventured in answer to his original question.
DePalma didn't seem to notice her sudden discomfort. "Well, that's the commander for you. Always the gentleman." He went on with barely a pause. "He hardly blinked with that brother of his, so I suppose it shouldn't be much of a surprise."
Audrey took a seat on the edge of her bed, alarmed by DePalma's intimation. "He mentioned he had a brother… is he Vietnamese, too?"
DePalma laughed his irritating laugh. "No, Russian."
Audrey stared at her feet, thoroughly puzzled. "What?"
"Oh, you haven't heard the story yet." He sounded almost droll. "Do you know why your father—" He broke off with a snort. "It's going to take me a while to get used to that one. Anyway—Do you know why he was in Vietnam back in 1980?"
Audrey rested her elbows on her knees, running her fingers through her short hair and tugging lightly at the locks. "He was searching for his father, who was shot down during the war."
"And who was captured by the North Vietnamese and later shipped to the Soviet Union."
Audrey sat up abruptly as the pieces fell into place.
DePalma continued. "Harm comes by his troublemaking ways honestly. His father was as much a thorn to the Soviets as he was a source of information. They got sick of questioning him eventually and banished him to a Siberian gulag in 1980. But, true to the Rabb legacy, he escaped. He took shelter with a couple of Russian peasants, and lived just long enough to father another son."
Audrey willed her reaction under control. What her grandfather had or had not done wasn't of primary concern to her right now.
"That's all well and good, Mr. DePalma, but I called to ask you about Saigon."
He cleared his throat, sounding chastised. "All right. What would you like to know?"
Everything!
she wanted to shout at him. She pressed her lips together, considering her options. "What was he doing in Saigon? How did you happen to meet him?" Without consciously willing them to, her fingers reached toward her desk. She caught the edge of the picture she'd printed out earlier in the week, sliding it off the edge of the desk and into her hand. She stared at it as the correspondent talked.DePalma's voice grew distant with memories. "Let's see… It was mid-July. I was there because the Party Central Committee was getting close on its new constitution and my boss wanted some public interest stuff—how the people of Vietnam felt about being communists and such. So there I was, hanging out in some little dive, waiting for the heat to wear off a bit before going out again, and I saw Colonel Stryker with this American kid, sitting at a table in the back. I'd seen them around, heard rumors there was some crazy teenager running the trails with the MIA hunters, but I really hadn't paid much attention. But then I saw them, so I invited myself over.
"Stryker was trying to get the kid to eat, which was a little odd. Kids that age, you usually spend all your time trying to keep them from eating everything in sight so the rest of the folks can have something, too. Stryker was about half in the bag already, which is probably the only reason he didn't kick me halfway to China when I sat down."
He sighed. "I got the story pretty quickly. Stryker had a woman. I'd seen her from time to time. She went with him on the trail as a guide. Had a sixteen-year-old daughter who'd taken to trailing Rabb around like a puppy dog. I got the impression he was pretty smitten with her, too.
"Anyway, to make a long story short, Stryker's woman was killed when some Laotian border patrol opened fire on them while they were trying to get back into Vietnam. The daughter went back for her and got hit as well. It sounded like Rabb would have gone after her if Stryker hadn't dragged him away. Probably saved his life."
DePalma's voice changed suddenly, as if he were breaking out of the past and returning to the present. "I heard a few years back that the girl'd survived—kind of a sad story, that. I didn't know anything about a baby."
Audrey continued to listen with half an ear. Her head was filled with a strange buzzing that made it hard to concentrate. She had no idea what DePalma was talking about. Some woman—girl—her father had been involved with, someone the correspondent had obviously mistaken for her mother.
Throat dry, Audrey forced herself to speak. "My mother didn't meet him until August, Mr. DePalma. In the village of Son My."
She could almost hear the silent Oh, really? on the other end of the line.
"That was fast," DePalma said after a moment. His amused laugh twisted in her stomach, making her nauseous. "Ah well, Harm's always been good with the ladies. Had quite the reputation once upon a time. You know what they say about dress whites and gold wings—"
Audrey hung up on him, snatching her hand back from the phone. Then she wrapped her arms around her waist, doubling over as if the pressure on her stomach could alleviate the cold, sick feeling there.
All of a sudden she wished she'd never heard the name Harmon Rabb, Jr.
#
Harm arrived at the Naval Academy a little before lunchtime on Saturday. He was grateful his Navy uniform, not to mention his status as an Academy graduate, allowed him to visit whenever he chose. Most middies didn't get to see family except once or twice a year.
It was one of those utterly gorgeous spring days. The sun shone brightly. Fluffy white clouds scudded across the sky, chased by a breeze that smelled of new mown grass.
He found Audrey waiting for him outside Bancroft Hall. She stood to the side of the stairs, half-turned as she studied something across the quad. Her uniform was perfectly arranged, her bearing tall, proud. Harm watched her with a sense of wonder as he walked up. She was, quite frankly, gorgeous—something that never failed to touch off a tiny voice of conceit in the back of his mind whenever he noticed. But it wasn't so much the physical that awed him. It was the way she held herself, the way she cocked her head when she was thinking, the way she smiled. It was like looking into a mirror and finding a fresher, better reflection of himself… only with a mind, a heart, and a will of her own.
When Harm had first met Sergei, he'd found himself focusing on the differences between them, and had only slowly embraced the many similarities that pointed to the blood they shared. With Audrey it was the opposite. Every similarity, real or imagined, was cause for at least minor celebration—even the traits he knew to be his less-than-desirable ones.
Audrey turned when he drew near, coming to attention and snapping off a proper salute. Harm returned it, instantly wary. Her stance was icy and distant, pushing him away without a word.
"At ease." Suddenly Harm wished they didn't have the protocol of superior and subordinate to add pressure to what was already a fragile relationship. He waited, giving Audrey the opportunity to speak first, but when she remained silent he made himself forge ahead.
"Audrey?" Her dark eyes flicked to his, unreadable. "Is everything… all right?"
She seemed to shake herself. The expressionless gaze turned razor sharp, filled with bitter anger. "Just what was my mother to you?" she demanded in a low, controlled voice.
Harm hid his wince. He'd been dreading the question because he didn't have a very good answer. "Let's walk," he suggested, turning toward the wide walkway that ran in front of the building.
Audrey stayed where she was, staring stubbornly at him.
Harm paused. "Let's walk, cadet," he said again, this time making it a command.
Audrey didn't move for a moment that stretched interminably, but then she squared her shoulders and fell in beside him. She stared straight ahead, her mouth set in a thin line. It hurt Harm to know that she'd done as he asked because there were three stripes on his shoulders, not because he was her father.
They wandered away from the more populated areas of the campus, passing a tour group on its way to see the chapel. Harm walked with his hands clasped behind his back and his gaze fixed in the distance.
"I didn't know your mother very well, or for very long," he finally said.
"That doesn't excuse getting her pregnant and then leaving her."
Harm felt a cold hand take hold of his stomach and squeeze. It was one of those things he'd always sworn to himself he wouldn't do—make a child grow up without a father. He knew all too well how much damage it did.
"No, it doesn't," he agreed softly. He was beginning to wonder if Audrey wasn't God's way of punishing him for being such a stupid, arrogant boy. It was simply the worst in a long list of offenses. To have, in a single moment, both created and mangled a life was beyond pale.
Audrey was watching him now, dark eyes alternately demanding and pleading. Harm found he couldn't bear to meet them. "I wish I could tell you I would have done something differently if I'd known." He shrugged. "Maybe I would—brought your mother back to the States with me… if it would even have been possible. The government was a little twitchy about that kind of thing back then. I—I'd like to think I would. But I can't tell you for sure."
He risked a glance at Audrey. Her expression had grown a little less hostile, but the ache he saw there was somehow much worse.
"Did you love her?"
Harm bit his lip. He owed Audrey the truth, harsh though it might be. "No, not really."
She snorted. "I guess she was just a handy substitute for the girl you thought was killed by the Laotians."
Harm turned to stare at her, stung by her mocking tone. "How do you know about that?" he asked before he could stop himself.
She tossed her head. "I found a picture of you in Saigon on the Web and I called the journalist that took it."
Harm groaned. "DePalma." He didn't like the ZNN correspondent, though he was pretty fair in his own greasy way.
Silence fell between them as Harm struggled for something to say. A dozen excuses came to mind, but that was exactly what they were, and just as useless. The truth was, there wasn't anything he could say.
He crossed his arms over his chest, hunching his shoulders against a sudden breeze. The day was turning cold. "What happened to your mother… after I left?"
"What do you think?"
Harm could only guess. An unwed mother with a half-American child, Le Lin wouldn't have had an easy time of it. No doubt the old women would have whispered behind their hands as she passed, and given her little help with her new baby. He'd seen it when he was there, though the children that most recent generation of GIs had left behind were ten or eleven years old by then. Still, the passage of time had only made the prejudice more noticeable.
For a moment, Harm closed his eyes against the images his imagination conjured. "I can't make any of that right."
"No, you can't." Now it was Audrey's turn to stare out across the quad. Suddenly she spun to face him, her face alive with emotions. She made a frustrated gesture. "But that's what I want." Her hands balled into fists as her face closed over once again. "I don't know if I wan to see you again."
The simple statement tore Harm's breath away. He swallowed convulsively, trying to recover his voice, before turning to Audrey. "That's… your choice. I told you when we met that I'd respect your decision, and I meant it." It might very well kill him, but he'd given his word.
Their gazes met, locked. Eventually, Audrey broke away to give him a jerky nod of acknowledgement. She took a deep breath.
"May I be dismissed, sir?"
Harm nodded, hating it. "Dismissed, cadet."
She turned and walked away. Harm watched her go, feeling like a piece of himself had just been ripped away.
Audrey paused where the walkway turned to cut between buildings. She glanced back, just for an instant, watching him with said, wistful eyes. But then the moment ended, and she started walking again, quickly disappearing from view.
Inside Harm, something snapped.
"Audrey!" Cursing himself for a fool, Harm took off after her. He ran, cutting across the grass near the building in a totally unprofessional manner, and drawing startled looks from some passing middies. He spotted Audrey after a moment, standing about fifteen yards away, waiting.
Harm slowed to a slightly more appropriate pace as he closed the distance to his daughter. She watched his approach, her expression somehow both hopeful and wary.
Harm searched her face, hoping for some sign she might recant. "I'm sorry, Audrey. I know I promised but I just couldn't stand to watch you walk away." He desperately wanted to grab her and drag her into his arms and tell her he would do absolutely anything if it would somehow make up for the past. "You don't owe me anything," he went on, "but I owe you. I owe you twenty-one years' worth of love, and laughter, carnival rides, and goodnight kisses—" He stopped before he could get totally carried away. "Everything you should have had. I, of all people, know what it means to grow up without a father, and I'm so sorry I put you through that."
Audrey stared at him with tears rimming her eyes. She swayed toward him, at the same time reaching up to impatiently wipe at the tears.
"Officers aren't supposed to cry."
Harm reached up to capture her face in his hands, brushing the tears away with his thumbs. "That's just a myth. It happens all the time."
His response brought a smile to her face, one of the heartbreakingly beautiful ones Harm knew she'd inherited from him. He gathered her into his arms, holding her tight, and felt her doing the same.
"This doesn't just magically make everything o.k.," Audrey told him after a moment, her voice muffled against his shoulder. But her grip on him didn't loosen.
"I know, baby." Harm doubted there was anything that could possibly make it all right between them, but for the moment this was enough. "I know."
