They darted into the night, their umbrellas snapping open to the hiss of steady
rainfall as they dashed for the car, Randy's car, a blue two-door parked halfway down the
street. He fumbled out the keys, opening the left side first and then slipping in and
leaning over to unlock the passenger's side. As Captain Adam snapped his seatbelt into
place, Randy started the car, and they were off.
Neither of them spoke, but it was not quite the hostile, belligerent silence that characterized dinner, but rather a somewhat thoughtful, introspective quiet complimented by the heavy raindrops beating their tattoo on the metal roof. Squeaking windshield wipers interrupted the sluicing rain distorting the view of the black, slicked roads.
Before long, they pulled up in front of a rancher rising authoritatively over a vast expanse of neatly cropped lawn. "This is it," Randy said unnecessarily as he pulled up on the long, gravel driveway. Nate got out slowly, staring up at the house, which was all windows and angles. It was exactly the sort of place he would expect Eiling to have. He shut the car door and clomped up a set of wooden stairs to the deck, where Randy was unlocking the front door. He glanced over his shoulder, giving Nate one aloof, dubious look before striding into the hallway.
"Good thing Dad still lets me have a set of keys," he commented, hanging his rain-splattered jacket in the front closet. Nate silently slipped off his own coat as he looked around. The house sprawled magnificently, so that he could see almost all the family areas upon entering. It had everything a home should have--semi-worn carpeting in the halls, little end tables in the living room, knick-knack shelves and various pot-holders hung in the bright, white kitchen. But there was a sterility about it somehow, and the carpets were stale with the pervasive stink of cigars. He turned away from his inspection of a portrait of a rather dour woman staring at him from the wall to find Randy eyeing him as though he expected Nate to try and steal the silverware. He looked away when Nate glanced at him, then looked back again.
"My pictures . . ." Nate put a slight emphasis on the first word, feeling threatened and overwhelmed by the sheer Eiling-ness of the house and abandoned by his son.
Randy moved to the end of the hall, where a skinny, tall cupboard door had been built flush with the wall just where the corridor made a sharp ninety degree turn before heading for the bedrooms. "Probably in here."
Nate stared as his son pulled open the door. Dusty photo albums cluttered the cupboard from top to bottom, piled on boxes and bins of photographs, some still in the store-packed paper packages they'd been developed in, others simply stacked loose. This was never Eiling's work, he thought, and that made him feel better.
"Well?" Randy said with a trace of impatience, obviously eager to finish the task and have Captain Adam out of the house. "Which one is it?"
Nate looked at him and wondered if he was out of his mind. The photo albums were stacked at least two deep in the closet--and "stacked" was a generous term--and although they had certainly started out in different cheerful colors, over the years they had all acquired a similar shade of dust. "I think . . . it's going to take some digging." He eyed the closet up and down. "Maybe a lot of digging."
Randy huffed a sigh through his nose and for a minute Nate was afraid he was going to order him out of the house altogether. Instead, his son glared first at him, then at the haphazardly arranged photographs. At last he said (with severe reluctance), "Go to the living room and I'll start bringing stuff out. He should never had let Peggy put them away," he added under his breath in a grumble.
Nate couldn't help letting a little smile escape. Peggy was a good girl, he reflected as he sat gingerly at the end of a stiff, square couch. He reached over and turned on a nearby lamp as Randy drew near, with a stack of photo albums pinned under one arm and another set, balanced unevenly on each other, held against his chest with the other arm. He silently dropped them on the couch.
"Thank you," Captain Adam said, looking up at him. Randy grunted, crossing his arms as Nate reached for the first soft-covered book. He blew away the thin frost of dust that had settled on the photo album and immediately saw that it wasn't the one he wanted; but, giving in to a twinge of curiosity, he flipped it open anyway.
Nate blinked. Randy and Peggy smiled up from the page, kneeling on a familiar frayed and wrinkled picnic blanket. They were not quite as he remembered; Randy looked to be about eleven, not eight, and Peggy perhaps seven. But their faces, their grins, spoke to Nate of the Randy and Peggy he knew; not the cold, angry young man currently glaring at him or the sophisticated young woman who pitied him, but the Randy and Peggy who had loved him and looked up to him and smothered him with hugs every day when he got home, over his laughing protests. His children.
Only it wasn't him in the picture pulling the cold chicken out of the cooler; it was Eiling. General Eiling. Eiling holding a bowl full of lime jello covered with plastic wrap. Eiling sitting across from Angela. Eiling laughing with his, Nate's, family. He felt a stab of jealousy.
But . . . on the other hand, here was an opportunity to at least observe the years that he'd missed. So he turned page after page, watching his children age by clicks of the shutter, and ignoring Eiling's triumphant (so they seemed to Nate) smiles. But the General was everywhere, and it was hard. It was hard seeing him pushing Peggy on a swing. It was hard seeing him showing Randy how to put on a lifejacket or steer a sailboat. It was terribly hard seeing him with Angela, holding her hand or possessively draping an arm around her shoulders. But it was most difficult seeing them all together. As a family.
But children need someone to look after them, he reminded himself as he flipped through their lives. He was there for them, anyway. But it still bothered him, the fact that Eiling had been there for them and he had not.
"I don't think that's the one you're looking for, Nate," came a sarcastic voice from his left.
Captain Adam started and discovered Randy giving him a look. "Um . . . no," he admitted, reluctantly pulling himself from the past.
"Well . . ." His son seemed slightly mollified by this admission. "I pulled out all the white ones, anyway." He nodded to the stack of pale photo albums scattered on the couch. "I mean, I'm assuming it would be white . . ."
"It was white," Nate confirmed. White with birds and church bells . . .
He set aside the photo album he had been looking at and Randy casually picked it up, flicked it open. And he smiled. "I remember this . . ." he murmured, looking at the picnic. Engrossed, he slowly turned the pages and Nate took the opportunity to surreptitiously help himself to the next book in the pile.
After a few minutes Randy settled on the floor, leaning his back against the foot of the couch, and Nate sat curled at the end of the couch, on the opposite side from his son. They stayed that way for a long time, the one reliving his memories and the other trying to capture memories that were never his, but should have been.
Eventually, Captain Adam came to a photo album that did have birds and bells on it, two white doves, in oddly stiff poses, holding up a rather limp set of ribbons with bells hanging half-heartedly off them. It was not Nate's wedding album, but it was certainly a wedding album. With some trepidation, he cracked it open.
Angela and Eiling. Together. In every picture.
He sighed deeply. He had known, of course. Who else's wedding could it have been, decorated with hawkish doves as it was? He made himself look at every page. At Angela and Eiling, hugging, kissing, close. Randy was in some of the pictures, taller than Nate remembered him and holding the little velvet pillow unique to the ringbearer. He would have fiercely denied that he was adorable in his little tailored dress suit, but he was. Peggy was even cuter, dressed in a snow white dress as she smiled, gap-toothed, clutching a bouquet of flowers. Older than he remembered by two years, or maybe three.
Nate paused on a picture of Angela and Eiling (his first name was Wade, actually, but Nate could never think of him as anything but Eiling) holding the knife together as they leaned over the white tiers of wedding cake. Angela was smiling, like in all the pictures. But her smile was not quite as Nate remembered it, not quite . . .
He asked suddenly, "Was she--?" But he cut himself off.
Randy looked up and guessed who he was talking about. "Was she what?"
"Nevermind . . ."
But Randy insistently repeated, "Was she what?"
So Nate hesitantly asked, "Was she . . . happy? Do you think?"
"Well." His son looked at him disapprovingly. "What kind of question is that?"
One I shouldn't have asked . . . he thought.
But Randy answered anyway, in a voice more pragmatic than angry. "Why wouldn't she have been happy?"
"Why wouldn't she be?" Nate echoed, looking at the scrapbook perched on his knees, at Angela's smile. Not that he would have wanted her to be unhappy; he was glad she could still smile after . . . after . . . Don't think about it.
But still it hurt; it hurt. He leaned his elbow on the arm of the couch and his chin on his elbow, flipping through someone else's memories that should have been his. He could forgive Angela for being happy without him, but he did not think he could ever forgive Eiling for being the one who made her happy.
Selfish, he chided himself. At least she had somebody. She probably needed somebody, after all that time. I would never have wanted her to be alone. He turned back to watch Angela and Eiling cutting the wedding cake together. It's terrible to be alone.
At last Nate set the scrapbook aside, stern doves at all, and began looking through the other photo albums on the couch.
Except . . .
"It's not here." Pause. "Randy?"
"Mmm? What?" Randy was only half-listening, caught up in memories of his own.
"It's not here," Nate repeated.
"Oh." He looked up. "Well . . . it's white, isn't it?"
"Yes," Nate said a bit anxiously. "White with doves. And ribbons."
"What about that one you just--?"
"That's his." He tried to keep the edge off his voice.
"Oh. Well . . ." Randy relucantly set down the book he'd been looking through, spine upward to keep his place. "Hang on, I'll take another look."
He returned a few minutes later, this time carrying a plastic bag containing what appeared to be something square and blue. "Maybe this one. The top looks white."
Nate quickly worked the knotted plastic handles loose with his fingers and gingerly pulled out the contents. A white photo album nestled snugly in a somewhat worn and battered cardboard box.
"Yes. Yes!" His face lit in a delighted smile as he soon as he saw the familiar cover, soft and white and swirling with doves and ribbons and wedding bells. We picked it out together.
The end table lamp seemed insufficient to light such precious memories, so Nate gathered up the book, box and all, trembling a little as he carefully, oh so carefully, set it down on the kitchen table and flipped on the overhead light.
Much better. Much brighter. This was good. Angela. He simply sat, basking in the memories for a few minutes, as he rested his hands on the edges of the fluted cover. Then, with the light glinting off his wedding band, he pulled the white-covered photo album out (the back felt . . . different than it should?) and carefully turned back the cover.
"Oh," he said. There was a faint note of surprise in his voice "Oh."
"Find what you were looking for, Captain Adam?" Randy asked from the couch, not looking up.
Nate sat straight in the hard-backed kitchen chair with his hands folded in his lap and his eyes downcast towards the table, unmoving.
"Captain?" Randy repeated. Then, as he cautiously approached, "Nate?" He put one hand on the back of the chair and leaned forward to see what the Captain was looking at. "I said, did you find what you were--" His speech slowed as he came to sudden understanding. "Oh."
Nate said nothing, gazing numbly at what had once been his wedding album. The inside cover had merely been singed, but the plastic pages had melted and deformed. Some of the photos had burnt underneath the plastic while others, perhaps unleashed by a sudden gust of fire, had fallen away from the page to char independently. Nate reached up and turned the page with some difficulty. Flecks of sooty black chipped off as he separated the melted plastic with an odd, synthetic tearing sound, to reveal another collection of curled photographs scorched and blackened beyond recognition.
"I'm . . . sorry." Beneath the formality, Randy sounded embarrassed, ashamed, maybe a little bit angry. "They were yours and . . . he shouldn't have done this. I'm sorry."
Nate pulled apart a few more pages, hoping to find something salvageable. He didn't.
"Maybe . . ." Randy pulled over the battered cardboard box the photo album had been lying in, but only bits of burnt photos slid along the flakes of ash in the bottom.
Nate looked at the box and then at the photo album, and he gripped the heat-warped pages and slowly pulled the book shut. He traced a finger over the cover, all white with raised doves and bells and ribbons. Just like he remembered.
"Thank you," he said from a distance as he scraped back his chair. "I think I understand now."
"Captain, wait," Randy called as Nate picked his coat out of the closet.
"I should get going before your father gets home," Nate mumbled as Randy appeared through the doorway to the kitchen.
"He's gone for the weekend," Randy said, then paused. "The album . . . it is yours . . . if you still want it. The . . . the cover survived pretty well." He held out the box, with the beautiful, fluted white cover, now smeared with their sooty fingerprints.
Nate looked at it and remembered picking it out at Macy's and shook his head no. He turned and blindly pushed his way out of the house. The electric lights broke through to low, dim darkness. Rain splattered around him in large, soggy drops, pooling in stretching puddles that reached towards one another as they took over the gravel driveway.
"Hey," Randy called from the doorway.
Captain Adam was grateful for the downpour as he turned at the foot of the slick, wooden porch stairs, grateful for the rain running in thin streams along his nose and face and cheekbones. Real men stayed in control; he did not want Randy to think he was, as his father would have said, a cheap hat. "Y-yes?"
"You, ah, forgot your umbrella." Randy hurried down the stairs holding the long, black umbrella, still folded. "It's wet tonight," he added as he handed it to his father, then seemed embarrassed by the observation.
"Yes," Captain Adam agreed vaguely as water dripped off his nose. "It's wet." He started walking, not bothering to open the umbrella.
"Hey." Randy caught at his arm. "Don't you think--? I mean, I can give you a ride home. Nate. It's miles. Let me give you a ride home."
"No." Rain seeped down his face. Salty rain. "I . . . I can't . . . I don't . . . I should be alone. Don't you think?"
"If that's what you really want . . ." Randy bit his lip. "He shouldn't have burned them, but I'm sure he thought . . . you've got to understand . . . you were dead."
"Yes," Captain Adam said dully. "I've been dead for some time now." And pulling away from his son, he began walking, letting the solid, square ranch house dim behind him through an ever-growing curtain of rain.
He awoke late the next morning feeling bleared and useless, and didn't remember the walk home, or digging out his doorkey, or where he got the empty bottle he was cradling. He stumbled to the bathroom and was sick, then crawled back to bed.
When he next pried his eyes open, it was late afternoon and the shadows were lengthening over the young maples rustling their leaves by the window. He lay there for a while in his wrinkled suit, just lying there on his side with one hand wrapped around the neck of an empty bottle, staring at the leaves bobbing and sweeping against one another under a cool summer breeze.
They were only pictures, he thought. They wouldn't have brought her back, not really. She's gone. And then: Like everything else.
This did not make him feel any better. He stayed still a while longer, not really thinking of anything, but just letting half-formed thoughts wash through his head without trying to grasp them.
"Get up," he said at last, and his voice was a croak. "I should get up." He pushed himself unsteadily upright. A headache thrummed through his skull, from the alcohol or oversleeping or perhaps both.
"Stupid," he muttered, pushing aside the bottle. He thought he recognized it now; it was the one he kept in the back of the cupboard. He rarely drank, but did like to keep a little something around for special occasions; in his defense, he thought bitterly, last night had been pretty unique.
"Don't. Don't think about it." He shuffled out to the kitchen, feeling haggard and lonely. Various jars and boxes crowded the counter; victims of last night's desperate search for inebriation, he supposed. He pulled open the cupboards and replaced them as best he could; he had always had trouble putting things back the way they should go. The instant coffee, however, he left out.
He drank the coffee. He ate some toast. He sat at the kitchen table and wondered blankly what to do next. Ah, yes. Prove his innocence. As if that would change anything. He wandered in a disconsolate circle around the apartment and was just considering returning to bed as he picked up the mail by the mail slot.
The mail. Except the mail didn't come on Sundays. And the 8x11 manila envelope in his hand had neither an address nor a return address.
Which meant it was probably from Eiling or one of his flunkies. Some imperious order for "Captain Atom" to do this, that, or the other for the glory of the US Air Force. Nate held the envelope for perhaps five minutes, just looking at it. And then with a supreme act of will, he slit it open.
He expected details on some secret assignment or a black ops mission, perhaps. He didn't expect to reach in, feel something smooth and cool against his fingertips, and pull out a full page, glossy, black and white picture. He stared at it, not quite believing, but wanting to.
It was Angela. Him and Angela. She was every bit as beautiful as he remembered, laughing as they crossed arms to offer each other forkfuls of white, fluted cake. Joyful. That was how she looked. Joyful.
He just stood there for a while, holding the photograph, gazing at it. The edges of the negative must have been burnt away, because from the original photo the only the happy couple were left, delighting in each other in a close-singed circle. But that didn't matter. The background didn't matter. Only that they were still together somewhere.
Finally he tore his eyes away long enough to take another look in the envelope; there was something else in there, something smaller and stiffer. A card. He pulled it out. The outside displayed a painting of the ocean, all blues and greens as the water lapped against the shore and seagulls wheeled. The inside the manufacturers had left blank. But there was a hand-written message.
Dear Nate, it began, but then someone had hastily scribbled out the "Dear" part. I checked after you left, but this was the only one that was any good. I'm sorry.
Underneath, someone had taped a band-aid to the card, with an additional note hastily scrawled below it: For fixing all kinds of hurts.
Randall Eiling, it had initially been signed, but that had been blotted out too; now it simply read Randy.
"Randy," Captain Adam said out loud, softly, and he laughed as he wiped at his light blue eyes with his coat sleeve. He carefully detached the band-aid from the card and, peeling off the plastic backing, stuck it on his hand. Inexplicably, he immediately felt better.
He opened the window and sat tinted in sunset golds and reds and purples, gazing at the proof of that one perfect, shared moment and rereading the card from his son. He sat there until the sky faded to star-dazzled black and the maples rustled softly but unseen.
When he finally he moved away from the window, he was still smiling.
Tomorrow was another day.
Perhaps that wasn't such a bad thing.