Chapter Twenty

 

Lillianna shivered, pulled back the covers and crawled into bed, fully clothed. She’d accidentally left the air conditioner running all day. After closing her eyes, she drifted into an account she’d read of an American soldier’s recurring nightmare where he killed a young Vietnamese boy. In his dream, the enemy soldier marched toward him, his gun pointed, but each time the American soldier moved closer, the boy’s face disappeared. A therapist forced the soldier through that dream again and again until he discovered the disappearing face in the enemy’s body was his own. Despite the differences in our skin, eyes and hair coloring, we are all much more alike than we are different. And the soldier’s nightmares ended.

While at that moment, between sleep and waking, when everything around her grew silent, Lillianna found she could listen. And she heard something deep inside that soldier’s story and understood.

 

New Castle, Delaware

Summer 1967

 

She’d longed for an educated and sober father, not one unpredictable and doused in whiskey. A doctor or a teacher, a man in a starched white shirt, a grey pin-striped suit with pants sharply creased who passed the offering plate in church on Sunday instead of gambling away the grocery money in poker games or at race tracks. And she realized she’d found one in Jack.

Like her father, Jack was a World War II veteran. After the war, he’d earned a Ph.D. and worked as the director of a medical research laboratory in Newark, Delaware. He hired Emma, right out of her two-year secretarial program at the University of Delaware. She was to be a clerk typist in the pathology section.

Desperate to do a good job, to win approval, compulsive Emma routinely arrived at the lab an hour before the work day officially began. She often lingered, late into the evening, unable to relinquish her typewriter until the daily stack of pathology reports dwindled and found their proper place in the file cabinet.

When Jack Morrison remarked on her dedication, a thrilled flush rose on Emma’s cheeks. It all began innocently enough, Jack stopping by her small office in the morning with a steaming cup of coffee. Late in the summer, while his secretary vacationed, Jack asked Emma to fill in.

While taking dictation one evening, she commented on a small, framed picture of a young woman.

“That’s my daughter, Rebecca.” Jack fingered the photo, his tanned face lighted in pleasure. “She’s completing her junior year at Vassar.”

“That’s great, Doctor Morrison,” Emma said, not realizing until that second he was married. “You must be proud. I really envy her. I used to dream about going to college and medical school.”

“You can call me Jack.” He smiled, his teeth large and even. “At least when no one else is around.”

“So, you’re married?”

He shifted his weight in his chair. “Not very. We haven’t had anything except our daughter in common for years. We’ll be divorced by the time Rebecca graduates.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. But I don’t want to talk about me. Why didn’t you go to medical school?”

“Money, I guess. You see, my father’s a disabled veteran, but I did get an associate degree through the GI Bill.” She lowered her gaze, ashamed she hadn’t done something more, then shifted her weight on the chair. “The truth is I never believed myself smart enough to be a doctor.”

“You’re wrong,” he said, tapping his manicured fingertips on his desk top. “I’m astounded by your understanding of medical terminology. Doctor Strossberg’s a stickler for accuracy, and he fired five secretaries to prove it. You, my dear...” he paused and smiled again, “are the first to satisfy the illustrious Doctor S. He threw quite a tantrum when I borrowed his dark-eyed beauty.”

Heat rose on her face, and she flipped through the pages in the shorthand notebook, pretending to read her scribblings.

The following day Jack summoned her into his office and announced the company would reimburse for pre-med classes at the University of Delaware, provided she earned an A or B.

Emma wasted no time and enrolled in biology, attended lectures two nights a week and did her lab work on Saturdays. At the end of the semester, she rushed into Jack’s office early one morning with her grade—an A.

“That’s great,” he said, beaming. “I knew you could do it. How about I take you out to dinner tomorrow night to celebrate?”

Time would demonstrate she should have refused, should have known better. But Emma was only nineteen then, a critical and stupid year when her male friends raced motorcycles without a thought of death. Already one of her fellow high school cheerleaders drank herself mindless on the beach near Rehoboth then overdosed.

The following night, Jack drove his metallic grey Thunderbird across the Delaware Memorial Bridge into New Jersey, to the fanciest restaurant Emma had ever seen. It didn’t occur to her then he chose that unlikely setting to avoid anyone who knew him in his life with Marguerite.

Her hands trembled as she reached for her water glass. When the waiter unfolded the linen napkin and placed it on her lap, she laughed nervously, then stared at the row of forks lined up beside the ornamental plate.

“I never know which one to use.” Jack leaned across the table. “I asked once,” he whispered. “The rule is, start on the outside and work your way toward the plate.” He winked, and Emma smiled, instantly in love with him for the generous lie.

When Jack ordered a bottle of wine, she held her breath while he poured, fully expecting him to mutate into a monster with the first sip, but it didn’t happen that way. In the candlelight, the translucent crimson sparkled in her crystal goblet and the world around them blurred into rose-colored insignificance.

“A toast to Emma’s 4.0. Congratulations.” His pale blue eyes shimmered as he clinked their glasses and she tasted her first sip of wine. Gradually, with the help of the alcohol, their conversation smoothed out, and she babbled on about her life, her dreams. Jack appeared amused and interested, a shock of his silver and black hair falling over his forehead each time he laughed.

After pouring the last drops of wine into her glass, Jack set the bottle down and reached across the linen tablecloth, touched her hand. Emma’s pulse quickened, and energy seemed to flow through his tapered fingertips and straight up to her heart.

He paid the bill with cash, left a generous tip, and they strolled, his arm encircling her waist, into the parking lot. When she stumbled, he pulled her against him, kissed her hard on the lips.

And that’s how the love affair of Emma’s life began. With Jack, she experienced time in every conceivable color, laughed like she’d never laughed before. Every little thing he said or did held magic, his voice on the phone lifted her higher than she’d ever been.

As they walked together in the woods behind her apartment building, everything grew more beautiful. Shafts of sunlight stood like columns between the tall maples and pine trees. Emma wrote poems giving life to the lavish waves lapping the shores at Battery Park and along the sandy banks of White Clay Creek. Sunsets leaped out at her, called her into the early night to observe their paintbrushes whisking across the sky. Clouds tumbled off the shoulders of hillsides while the rain tapped melodies on the pavement in front of her. Loving Jack had transformed the world into an enchanted place.

When his long-term affair with the laboratory receptionist surfaced, Emma ignored it. After all, that started before she entered his life and only proved his unhappy marriage. Convinced Jack loved her, she believed he’d change. Believed him incapable of hurting her. Not Jack. Not ever.

She cried with him through a bitter divorce, angry episodes with his children—the two others he’d failed to mention. After two years, in spite of her parents’ protests, they married. And Emma deemed herself forever bound to Jack Morrison as if his name had been tattooed on her heart.

Perhaps because she’d, on some level, understood her parents were right, she paid no attention to their fears. The youthful necessity to make serious mistakes played itself out in Emma. After Zack and Cassy’s births, she forgot about her dreams of medical school and flung herself head on into motherhood, determined their children would be happy and not traumatized by the ghosts and horrors in her own childhood. But it didn’t happen that way, and eventually, the entire fantasy unraveled, piece by piece, like a nightmare that kept getting worse in spite of her desire to wake up.

Her thoughts brushed carelessly across their years together as if she was fingering the graying hairs on his chest. Suddenly she remembered a wooden box he kept in the top drawer of his dresser. She’d rummaged through it, just after discovering his affair. And to her surprise, it held photos of his first wife and their children. Standard snapshots—they could easily have been mistaken for photos of Zack and Cassy taken more than two decades later. In one, Marguerite sat between two children on the beach in front of a sandcastle, identical to one Jack built for Cassy. Another, snapped under the Christmas tree, revealed a kneeling Marguerite in a terrycloth robe, her face lit from inside as she opened a tiny jewelry box. At a child’s birthday party, she sported a pointed paper hat and balanced a cake with lighted candles.

Perhaps it was the familiarity, their undeniable connection to her own storybook life with Jack that haunted her long after the lid slammed, and she slid the box back into his drawer.

As her life with Jack collapsed, whenever one of the photographs redeveloped in Emma’s mind, she chanted You got what you deserved. You got what you deserved and then steadied herself with a stiff drink as the world lurched savagely forward.

Eventually, she entered therapy. “You’re unaltered,” her psychiatrist had told her. “You haven’t changed. Your husband’s not who you thought he was. Yes. But that doesn’t change who you are.”

How could he have been so wrong?

 

Baltimore, Maryland

Sunday, October 1, 1995

 

What seemed hours later, Lillianna woke, trapped in her clothes and the twisted, sweaty sheets. Unable to believe morning hadn’t come, she squinted at the lighted hands of the clock, astonished by how few hours had fallen out of it.

After jerking back the covers and climbing out of bed, she headed for the bathroom, but stopped, suddenly seized into admitting her own stupidity, her youth and lack of wisdom with Jack. It was all playing itself back for what it really was. As she stood in front of the bathroom mirror, her younger self appeared. You son of a bitch, how could you?

Jack, at fifty-nine, had been sleeping with his new secretary, in addition to one of her best friends, and Lillianna wanted to end her life. Hopelessly, she explored various methods of dying—Valium, Scotch, a razor to the wrist. Driving off a cliff. While she didn’t propel her car off Mt. Lemmon, she didn’t choose to live either. Not for months.

She hid in her closet, just as she had in childhood. But this time, instead of scribbling I hate you, I hate you into a diary, she swallowed glass after glass of wine. Ashamed and hating herself, she eventually stored a half gallon bottle between the long evening dresses she’d worn in better times with Jack.

Not drinking would mean letting herself feel, trudging back into the pain, the very thing she’d bolted away from. It took months of therapy for her to confront her past, to shout I hate you at Jack and hear echoes from the silent screams of that child in the closet.

Left with the remainder of her life to analyze the mistakes, Lillianna came to realize Jack was merely human, with his own set of faults and fears, neither the perfect father nor the God she’d appointed him to be. And she believed she now knew not to take things for granted—to understand the distinction between obsession and choice. Finally, in a healthy relationship with Steve, Lillianna could see, with far more lucidity than she’d ever imagined, her own connection to the world around her.

Now, she turned on the hotel shower. Standing under the cascade of warm water pouring down her back, the past again began to reshape Lillianna’s present or at least the lie she could no longer make herself believe. How could her father remain the enemy when they’d once worn the same face?

Maybe she’d aged, or maybe she’d finally grown up. This journey she’d taken into his life had at times helped her to hate him, to pity him, and to grieve for everything the two of them had lost. But ultimately, it aided her in understanding herself. To know her father’s story, his strengths, his weaknesses, and vulnerabilities was to learn more about her own.