Chapter Seventy-four

At his insistence, Rick has been gotten out of bed and is sitting in the small hospital solarium. This wheelchair is hospital-issue and he feels as though he is higher up than usual. The orderly tucked an extra pillow behind him, so he’s also more upright, as if one half of his body is at attention. He doesn’t want Francesca to find him slumped and defeated. He wants her to believe that his attempt wasn’t the act of a weak man, but of a decisive one. This is one failure for which he will take full responsibility, and for which he is sorry. Whether or not he is sorry for having tried or sorry for having failed will depend on the look on her face when she comes into this relentlessly sunny room.

The orderly has faced Rick toward the window, with its view of nothing more than the sky. There is no one else in the solarium with him, no obligation to make forced conversation, no contention for the better magazines. There is a clock on the wall, a pie-size Timex with an audible tick as the second hand moves in a persistent sweep around the face, counting off the minutes as Rick waits for Francesca. Official visiting hours don’t start for an hour, but he expects her at any moment, although he can’t say why he thinks Francesca will defy the rules.

Keller will bring her. He won’t let her come alone. Keller, who has become so important to them—to him, to her. From a shy and nearly mute helper, Keller has been transformed into a friend. Nonetheless, Rick is hoping that for once Keller won’t come along with Francesca. He really needs time alone with her, not like the hours they spend closeted in his room, but quality time. Time enough to say what he needs to say, tell her the truth about what happened in the Italian mountains; to beg her forgiveness. He can’t do that with an audience. Keller may have a stake in this, but Rick has to rebuild his life with Francesca from the ground up.

Gradually, he’d been lifted out of his dreamless narcotic sleep into a dream-filled slumber in which he saw her fading away like a ghost, an ethereal revenant of the happy-go-lucky girl she was before his transformation from luckiest man on earth to this wreck of a man. As long as she’s believed that he is a casualty of war, not of ego, she’s been tied to him by a love that has been refined into admiration and devotion from the fire of passion. But if she knows the truth, how long will she want to be tied down to a vainglorious idiot? How strong is love when there is nothing more than marital duty framing it?

All too often lately he hears her laughing with Keller, hears that girlish trill that he no longer teases out of her. Keller makes Francesca happy. She deserves happiness.

Rick begins to cry. He doesn’t want to lose Francesca; she is everything to him. His life. More important than any loss—limb, mobility, career, even Pax—losing her would kill him. But she has to know the truth. And that may drive her away.

*   *   *

My husband heard me come into the solarium, the click of my heels on the linoleum loud in that otherwise-silent room. His back was to me, but he sat up straighter and I watched him raise his hand to wipe his face, so I knew that he had been weeping. Those tears broke my heart. Then I was at his side, kneeling, touching his hand, and fumbling in my purse for my handkerchief. “It’s all right, my darling, it’s all right.”

“I have to tell you something.”

“No. You don’t. I know and it’s all right.”

“Keller told you?”

“Yes.”

“It’s my story to tell.”

“He needed to help me understand why you … why you did what you did.”

“Where is he?”

And that was when I began to cry.

*   *   *

I awoke that morning to meet the pure light of a spring day and the certainty that Keller had to go. We had not succumbed. I kissed him and tasted his desire like thirst rising up to be quenched. Like mine had been in those early days of Rick’s courtship, when we resolved it was best to get married rather than burn, when burn to me meant with unsatisfied desire, not the fires of hell. With his kiss, Keller instigated the memory of that old unrequited passion; his mouth and fingers ignited the fire of my physical desire, which had been tamped down for so long by circumstance of war and wounds. I wanted him. As I had wanted my husband from the first.

And it was the thought of Rick that stopped me.

“No. We can’t.”

“Francesca.” His voice was deep with the words pressing to get out. “I love you.”

“Keller. No. You can’t.”

“I do.” Keller Nicholson was an honorable man. A good man. He gently released me and kissed my cheek. “But you love Rick.”

“Yes. No matter what’s happened, or what he did, he’s my husband.”

Keller picked up his forgotten shirt from the floor. “I love him, too, Francesca. I do.”

*   *   *

Rick would be gone for weeks, or even months. Keller no longer had a purpose in our house. We would be dancing around each other, alone except for the dog. It wasn’t concern for what the neighbors might say. Not at all. After all, he could rent a room somewhere else for the duration. It was that I wasn’t sure I had the moral fortitude to have Keller so close. He’d poured his heart out in those three little words and I didn’t know if I was strong enough to resist temptation—and afraid that someday I might take what comfort he offered. I could never forsake Rick, so all that Keller would ever have of me would be far less than what he wanted. Keller could never have my love.

So I said the words that effectively broke everyone’s heart. “Keller, it’s time for you to go.”

*   *   *

“Where’s Keller? And Pax? What happened?” Rick hands Francesca back the handkerchief.

“I’ve asked him to leave. You’re going to be away for a while and there’s no reason for him to stick around.”

Away. Rick appreciates Francesca’s euphemism for being committed to the psychiatric ward of the VA hospital. He appreciates her sense of fair play for Keller. But there is something more at stake than Keller. “Fran, what about Pax?”

She bursts into tears again, this time gasping and inconsolable. “I don’t know.”

She is on her knees, her head in his lap, and he strokes her curls, not like he strokes Pax, for the comfort he gets from touching the dog, but in order to comfort his wife, who has effectively given the dog away.

Rick pulls Francesca into his lap, wraps his arms around her, and kisses her with all the passion of a capable man. There is something that she isn’t telling him, and that’s all right. In the end, he will never speak to her of his grievous mistake in the mountains in Italy and she will never speak of the real reason she has sent Keller away.

Rick holds his wife and is amazed at how good it feels.