Just Once Page 9

  ‘Happy?’

  He gave a short, sharp shake of his head. His frown made Hannah feel like a fool. Of course not happy. Charley Blackwell didn’t do happy. She’d often wondered why.

  ‘Different,’ he said, though the word sounded more like a question than an answer. ‘Not artsy exactly, but …’ His sigh was also short and sharp; he threw up his hands. ‘I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I guess not.’

  Into the silence that descended, Hannah blurted, ‘I put together a layout.’

  Charley had been gazing down the hall toward the elevator, but his head snapped around as she pulled the mock-up from beneath the light table, then he came over to study it.

  He smelled like the whole wide world in a bottle. Hannah watched his face and forced herself to breathe.

  ‘This is perfect.’ His gaze remained on her work.

  ‘What’s perfect?’ Ray Cantrell stepped into the room. ‘I thought you had to get home for your kid’s whatsit, since you missed the last one.’

  ‘Concert,’ Charley said. ‘Maybe a recital.’ Charley tapped the mock-up. ‘Check this out.’

  Cantrell cast Hannah a narrow glance.

  She held up her hands. ‘All on my own time.’

  He grunted. ‘This is good. Really good. There’s something …’ His gaze narrowed, then widened. ‘They’re all the same, but then again, they’re not.’

  Hannah blinked. So did Charley.

  Cantrell peered back and forth between the two of them. ‘I’ll find a place for it in one of the upcoming issues.’

  He walked out, leaving them to stare silently after him.

  ‘What just happened?’ Charley asked.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get this essay published in a magazine – any magazine – for years.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ Hannah said. ‘Now you have.’

  ‘I think you have. Thank you.’

  ‘I was just practicing.’

  ‘If that was your practice, I can’t wait to see your game day.’

  Hannah’s cheeks heated. ‘If I only had a job.’

  Confusion flickered. ‘You work here.’

  ‘Not after today.’

  ‘What? Why?’

  ‘Summer internships come to an end.’

  ‘They should hire you.’

  ‘Yes, they should, but there’s no opening.’

  ‘Oh.’ He glanced out the door again. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Yeah. Me too.’

  Hannah gathered her things. By the time she’d finished, Charley was gone.

  She arrived at the apartment later than usual. Julie and a few of the others had brought a cake for her last day. While she didn’t need any cake – editing slides all summer had done nothing to slim her hips – it would have been rude not to eat some. Besides, it was great cake – chocolate fudge with cherry filling – her new favorite.

  Just inside the door, she paused. The furniture was beige, the carpets white, the tables a pale brown wood and glass. Waterford crystal figurines graced the bookshelves, along with hardcover books Aunt Carol didn’t have the time to read. This was a wealthy single woman’s apartment, and Hannah wanted one. She would miss the place almost as much as she’d miss her job.

  She heard a noise back where the bedrooms – also white and beige – lay. Too early for Carol to be home. Probably Heath.

  She headed in that direction, faltering to a stop when she recognized the sound. Her brother was crying.

  She hovered where she was, uncertain what to do. When Heath cried, it was serious.

  His door was ajar. She pushed it open.

  He was a mess. Red eyes, pink nose, there were used tissues all over his bed.

  She grabbed another box from the hall closet and then wiped his face, an exercise in futility since the tears just kept seeping out of his eyes and down his cheeks. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘One of my friends has AIDS.’

  Hannah’s heart thudded so hard she thought it might come out of her chest. She fought not to let the dread invade her words. Heath was upset enough already.

  ‘What type of friend?’

  ‘What kind of question is that?’ His voice broke.

  ‘You know what kind of question it is, Heath.’

  ‘I didn’t sleep with him, if that’s what you’re asking.’

  She tightened her lips over the ‘Thank God’. It would only send Heath into a rant over her selfishness or a rant over God. Neither would be productive right now.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Terry.’

  She searched her memory for a mention of Terry, found none. Heath had so many friends. Unlike Hannah, who had Heath.

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘He works at the coffee shop in the lobby of the magazine. We went out for drinks a few times. He’s a nice guy, but he had a boyfriend.’

  ‘Had?’

  ‘Bastard ran like a rabbit as soon as he heard the diagnosis.’

  ‘You won’t.’

  ‘No.’ He lifted his beautiful, haunted, red-rimmed eyes to hers. ‘He doesn’t deserve this.’

  ‘No one does.’

  Since the disease had been discovered in the early eighties, they’d come a long way. Back then half the people who contracted AIDS died within a year. The public freaked out – refusing to allow children with HIV to attend schools, forcing doctors who treated those patients out of their clinics. No one had been sure how the disease was transmitted, or how easily, and they’d overreacted. Even now, when science had proved that hugging or kissing or breathing the same air as a ‘homo’ or a ‘hemo’ could not transfer HIV, people didn’t believe it.

  Hannah managed to get Heath calmed down, only to have him freak out again when he remembered she was leaving the next day.

  ‘You can’t!’

  ‘I’ll be a short train ride away.’ Was less than three hours short?

  ‘Get a job here. Any job. Work at the coffee shop with Terry. Please! I need you.’

  ‘I don’t think Mom and Dad are going to go for that.’

  Heath stared at his hands. ‘They were happy that I was staying here.’

  ‘They were happy you got a job you love.’

  Heath snorted.

  She handed him a tissue. Snorting was not advisable after a crying jag.

  ‘I don’t think I could live with them again.’ Heath blew his nose. ‘Mom tries, but she still looks at me as if she’s trying to figure out how she broke me. Dad doesn’t look at me at all.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with you.’

  ‘Tell it to the world, sister.’

  ‘I will.’ Someday she’d have a powerful job and people would listen to her, and she’d tell them all that being gay was OK.

  Distraction and amusement were in order – for both of them.

  ‘Let’s order Mexican and watch Young Frankenstein.’

  Heath’s favorite movie. Hers too. They’d paid big bucks for a pirated edition, because Mel Brooks was a goddamn genius.

  Several hours later – full of rice, beans and tortillas – Heath dozed and Hannah cleaned up the mess. In the kitchen, a light blinked on the message machine. She pressed the button and Ray Cantrell’s voice flowed out.

  ‘Hannah, we want you to stay on permanently. Come in at the same time tomorrow and we’ll talk.’

  What had changed?

  ‘You can thank Charley Blackwell,’ Cantrell continued. ‘He thinks you’re going to be the best editor we’ve ever hired. Don’t make me sorry I listened to him.’

  Click.

  She returned to the living room and covered her brother with the soft beige throw that lay across the back of the slightly lighter beige couch. She considered waking him to share her news, but he needed the rest. He had to get over that cough.

  Though now that she thought about it, Heath hadn’t coughed once since she’d been home. He must be getting better.

  Hannah shut off the lights and wen
t to bed. Things were looking up for them both.

  Charley

  Whitefish Bay, Wisconsin. October, 1983

  Frankie was in the kitchen, smooth right shoulder slipping free of her gray sweatshirt, standing on the second highest rung of the ladder as she slopped white paint over the atrocious lemon yellow.

  They’d bought a fixer-upper in a near northern suburb of Milwaukee. Their Brady Street apartment just wasn’t big enough any more. Where had all the stuff come from? Since Charley was there maybe two or three days a month, he didn’t think it was his, except somehow, a lot of it was.

  The whole place needed work – both cosmetic and structural. Work he wasn’t going to be able to do, not only because he was never here but because he just wasn’t handy. Never had been.

  But Frankie was, thanks to her father who she’d followed around as a child while he not only fixed their duplex but whatever went wrong with the neighbors’ as well. What she didn’t know how to do, she’d ask for her dad’s help with or hit the library and learn how to do it herself.

  ‘It’ll keep me occupied when you’re gone,’ she’d said.

  ‘You need to keep occupied?’

  She shrugged and didn’t meet his eyes, which he took to mean yes. He supposed it was better that she did house renovations than the mailman.

  Where had that thought come from? Frankie would never cheat on him, just as he would never cheat on her. In all the years they’d been married – six now, hard to believe, they had gone so fast – he’d never been tempted. He found that hard to believe too, as did many of his lying, cheating colleagues. Even his old Vietnam buddy the Waz – now a police chief in his hometown of ‘whatever the hell it was’ Minnesota – had cheated. Multiple times.

  ‘After what we lived through, Polaroid, don’t we deserve it?’ he’d asked.

  ‘Frankie doesn’t deserve it,’ Charley had said quietly, and hung up.

  He hadn’t talked to the Waz since, though he probably should. A lot of the guys he’d served with hadn’t come back. Those who did come back had problems. Cheating was the least of them. He’d heard of multiple vets with cancers of all kinds. There were whispers that Agent Orange, a super weed killer sprayed on the jungle to make it less jungly, was the culprit in many of those cases. Charley wouldn’t be surprised. They must have dropped millions of gallons of that crap all over Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and the GIs.

  In the bathroom mirror, speckles of white paint stood out starkly on Charley’s tanned face. He’d recently returned from his third assignment for Time magazine, where he’d moved from AP just this year.

  Benigno Aquino, a rival of Ferdinand Marcos, had been assassinated in Manila in late August. The political unrest that followed, while less violent than expected, had still kept Charley in the country longer than he’d planned and he’d arrived in Milwaukee just in time for their closing.

  After signing all the paperwork, they’d celebrated at DelMonico’s, sharing their favorite Chianti and an order of bruschetta. They’d fed each other off their single plate and Frankie had outlined her plans for the house with an enthusiasm Charley didn’t share but could appreciate in her. He loved listening to her talk about something that excited her, loved the way her voice would deepen, her eyes would spark and her cheeks would flush. He’d taken her hand and been captivated by how much warmer her skin was than his own; her passion seemed to seep out of her body and into his.

  She made him feel alive in a way that little else could but a close brush with death. An embarrassing truth that he did his best to keep to himself. He was sure his fascination with the razor edge of existence wasn’t healthy, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself from seeking it out and balancing right on the precipice, photographing the world all around him as it balanced there too.

  The phone started ringing.

  ‘I’ll get it!’ Charley did not want Frankie hustling down the ladder to answer a call.

  Instead, he hurried down the stairs to snatch up the yellow receiver of the Snoopy phone perched on a TV tray in the hall. He always felt foolish when he used the thing, but Frankie loved it. ‘Charley Blackwell.’

  ‘You gotta get to Beirut.’

  Neither Charley nor his new boss, Phil Tupman, cared much for the word ‘hello’.

  ‘I thought there was a ceasefire.’

  The Lebanese civil war had been raging since 1975. Now that Syria and Israel were involved, along with a supposed peacekeeping force headed by the US, things had only gotten worse.

  ‘A Lebanese ceasefire is like any other country’s war. There’s been fighting in the mountains for the past month. The day the ceasefire went into effect, the USS New Jersey showed up in Beirut, there are a dozen Navy ships floating off the Lebanese coast and two thousand more Marines have landed.’

  ‘Way to host a ceasefire.’

  ‘The American way. Things have settled down, but …’ Phil let out a short, sharp breath. ‘Reagan just sent tanks and long-range artillery to the Lebanese army.’

  ‘Shit,’ Charley said.

  ‘It’s gonna hit the fan.’

  ‘I’m on my way.’ Charley hung up.

  ‘Where to this time?’ Frankie stood in the doorway of the still electric-yellow kitchen.

  ‘I shouldn’t go.’

  He hadn’t wanted a house, thought it was too much maintenance and responsibility, but Frankie had wanted one so badly, and promised to do everything, that he’d caved. Now he wished he hadn’t.

  ‘Go where?’

  ‘Beirut.’

  She winced.

  ‘There’s a ceasefire.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ve seen how much they’ve ceased firing on the evening news.’

  ‘If the place was peaceful, I wouldn’t be going there.’

  ‘I thought you said you shouldn’t.’ She smiled, but not with her eyes.

  That smile always gave him a shiver, as if the Frankie he adored had floated off somewhere else, leaving this shell behind.

  ‘I probably never should.’

  He pulled her into his arms and kissed her forehead. She smelled like paint, or maybe he did. ‘I love you.’

  ‘I know.’

  She wanted to drive him to O’Hare Airport – getting a flight to Beirut from Milwaukee … well, good luck with that – but he refused.

  He packed his bag, kissed her until she stopped thinking, until he did, then managed to pull his lips from hers and get in the car.

  ‘I’ll call as soon as I land and find a phone,’ he promised.

  ‘Safe trip.’ Frankie backed away.

  She never clung; she never asked him to stay. Sure, she might try and convince him that a hot zone was too hot, but that was her limit, and he worshipped her for it.

  Seventeen hours later Charley landed at Beirut International Airport. As he got off the plane in the unusually silent terminal, he glanced at his watch. Six twenty a.m. At home it was not quite two thirty p.m. He headed for the bank of telephones.

  And the world did a weird sort of shimmy.

  Then came the sound – waves of thunder louder than any thunder ever born.

  A bomb.

  Charley hurried for the exit along with everyone else; his hand reached automatically for his camera; he found the right one by touch without even glancing in the bag that hung on his shoulder.

  He shot pictures until someone made him stop.

  There were heavy casualties. Charley helped as much as he could; he’d become adept at performing first aid while taking photographs. He could do just about anything while taking photographs.

  A suicide bomber had driven a nineteen-ton truck bomb into the lobby of the Marine Battalion Landing building and detonated it. In the end, 241 American, fifty-eight French and six civilians were dead, and over 150 injured.

  But none of this was known right away. Right away all they knew was that the ceasefire was crap – no news to anyone in Beirut – and that people were willing to blow themselves up for a cause.

  ‘Peacekeepi
ng forces lose over three hundred lives, terrorists lose two,’ Charley said when he finally called Phil sometime in the early morning hours of the following day. ‘They win.’

  ‘Like hell they win. Who blows themselves up? Who does that?’

  ‘Dinky dau,’ Charley murmured.

  ‘You OK, Charley?’

  ‘Yeah, just something we said in Vietnam. Means crazy. You bam bam.’ Another way the locals had said crazy.

  ‘You called Frankie, right?’

  The world shimmied, and he could have sworn he heard another bomb go off. He put his hand against his chest. Nope, that pounding was just his heart, though he could swear the thing had stopped.

  ‘Oh, God.’

  ‘You better pray harder than that, son. She’s called here three times.’ Phil hung up.

  As soon as Charley heard a dial tone, he placed another call.

  He was a dead man.

  Hannah

  Washington DC, 1991

  Winter in DC was a lot nicer than winter in New York City. Considering the two cities were only two hundred and twenty-odd miles apart, Hannah couldn’t get over the difference. They’d yet to have snow or temperatures below freezing and February was half over.

  ‘Hannah!’

  She would have known her brother had arrived at the apartment from the force of his door slam alone.

  Hannah and Heath had continued to live with Carol. They’d tried to find an apartment of their own, but anything they could afford, even together, was in a neighborhood they shouldn’t walk anywhere near, let alone live in. Besides, Aunt Carol was hardly ever at home and was happy for them to stay. She even refused rent money.

  ‘Hannah!’ Heath bellowed.

  The apartment wasn’t that large; he should have found her by now. Sometimes she worried about him.

  Actually all of the time she worried about him.

  He’d already dumped Joel – better than being dumped by, as Heath had informed her – flitted through Harvey and landed on Kent. She spent a lot of time shoving condoms into his wallet. She assumed he used them since whenever she cracked open his wallet to check, it was empty. She wasn’t sure if she should be happy about that or more concerned.

  Hannah thrust the photographs of the Gulf War, which she’d brought home to caption, into a manila envelope just as Heath barreled into her room still wearing his brand-new black leather jacket and flopped on to her bed, arms outspread as if he were falling into a swimming pool.