“I’m sorry,” Danny whispered.
I wiped my nose with the back of my hand.
“You’re sorry?”
His smile disappeared.
“I know.”
“No, Danny. You don’t know. You can’t possibly know.”
“I know I hurt you.”
“You died.”
He closed his eyes.
“Yes.”
“You let me think you died for fifty-eight years.”
His fingers tightened on the blanket.
“I know.”
“Stop saying that!”
My voice cracked so hard that Selena flinched.
I was seventy-seven years old, sitting in a stranger’s living room, shouting at the boy I’d loved when I was eighteen.
I wanted to hit him. I wanted to hold him. I wanted to demand every missing day of my life back from him, as if he might have kept them somewhere safe, like I had kept his letters.
Instead, I whispered, “Why?”
Danny looked toward the window.
Outside, a wind was pushing the branches of a pine tree against the glass.
“Sit with me,” he said. “Please. There’s a lot you need to know.”
I pulled my chair closer.
“Then you’d better start talking.”
He took a breath that rattled in his chest.
“I didn’t die in Vietnam.”
“I figured that part out.”
A faint, surprised laugh escaped him. It sounded so much like the Danny I remembered that I nearly broke all over again.
“I was on a medical transport in March of sixty-nine. Our convoy had been hit. I was burned, pretty badly. My left side, my back, my neck. I couldn’t see out of one eye for a while. They moved me from one hospital to another, and eventually I wound up in San Antonio.”
His gaze settled on his right hand.
“I was in bad shape, Sukey. For months, I couldn’t even remember my own name.”
I stared at him.
“Your mother said you died in San Antonio.”
“She visited me there.”
“She visited you?”
He nodded.
“She was there when I came around enough to understand what was happening. I remember asking for you. I remember saying your name. I couldn’t remember my own birthday, but I remembered Dandylion.”
His lips trembled.
“She told me you’d be better off believing I was dead.”
I felt something cold move through my chest.
“Why would she do that?”
“She said you were young. She said I’d never be the same. She said you deserved a husband who could give you children and a home and a normal life.”
I laughed once, bitterly.
“Well, wasn’t that thoughtful of her.”
Danny looked down.
“She was frightened. I think she was frightened of what I’d become. I had trouble walking. My face was damaged. I was angry all the time. I woke up screaming. The doctors couldn’t tell her if I’d ever be able to work again.”
“And she decided to bury you.”
“She decided to let you mourn me.”
“No. She decided to lie to me.”
“Yes.”
“Did you agree with her?”
That question seemed to hurt him more than the others.
“I did.”
The room went quiet.
I watched his face, searching for the boy who had once stood on a riverbank and promised he’d write every week.
“I was twenty years old,” he said. “I was ashamed of what had happened to me. I couldn’t bear the thought of you seeing me like that. I kept thinking about that yellow dress. About how you laughed when I called you Dandylion. I didn’t want the last thing you remembered about me to be a hospital bed.”
“You don’t get to decide what I can bear.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t get to call it kindness when you take away somebody’s choice.”
“I know that now.”
I looked at him for a long time.
“Did you stop loving me?”
He shook his head so quickly that it looked almost like the old Danny, the one who had been incapable of keeping a straight face when he was caught in a lie.
“No. Never.”
“Then why didn’t you write?”
“I wrote you one letter.”
My heart seemed to stop.
“What?”
“After I got out of the hospital. It took me almost a year to get well enough to leave. I stayed with my mother in Ohio for a while. I had operations. Physical therapy. I learned to walk with a cane. I learned how to look in a mirror without hating the man looking back.”
He swallowed.
“I wrote to you from her kitchen. I told you I was alive. I told you I was coming home as soon as I could find work. I told you I understood if you didn’t want me anymore, but I needed you to know the truth.”
“Where is that letter?”
“She found it before I mailed it.”
I stared at him.
“What did she do with it?”
“She burned it.”
For a moment, I could hear nothing but the clock ticking on the wall.
“Did she tell you she’d burned it?”
“No. She said she’d mailed it. She said she’d sent it to the address you gave me, and that it must have gotten lost.”
“Then what?”
“I waited. A month. Two months. I thought maybe you were angry. Maybe you’d met somebody else. Maybe you’d decided that a dead man was easier to love than a broken one.”
His eyes shone.
“Eventually, I believed what she wanted me to believe.”
I sat back in my chair.
I had spent fifty-eight years wondering whether I had been too young, too foolish, too easy to leave behind.
I had blamed the war. I’d blamed the Army. I’d blamed myself for marrying Ted. Sometimes, in the quietest hours, I’d even blamed Danny for dying before he could keep his promise.
Now I had a new person to blame.
A woman who had been dead for decades.
“Did you ever try to find me?”
Danny nodded.
“When I was able, I looked for you. I wrote to your old address in Reno. It came back. I called directory assistance a few times, but I didn’t know your married name. I knew your first name was Susan, but everybody called you Sukey. I didn’t know your parents’ names. I was ashamed to contact the people who’d known me before the war.”
“You could have tried harder.”
“Yes.”
“You could have come to Reno.”
“Yes.”
“You could have done a thousand things.”
“I know.”
His voice broke on the last word.
“I was a coward, Susan. Not about the war. About you.”
I looked at the scar along his neck.
I’d imagined Danny dead beneath foreign soil. I’d imagined him buried in a cemetery in Ohio. I’d imagined him forgetting me in his final moments.
I had never imagined him growing old.
I had never imagined that somewhere in the world, the boy who gave me a cheap diamond ring had learned to shave with one hand, to sleep through the night, to live with the man in the mirror.
And I had never imagined that he had done it without me.
“Tell me about your life,” I said finally.
He looked startled.
“What?”
“Your life. All those years I missed. Tell me.”
He studied me, as though he were afraid I’d change my mind.
Then he began.
He told me about the months in the hospital and the long recovery. About taking a job repairing machinery in a small factory in Ohio, where the foreman didn’t ask questions about his scars. About meeting a woman named Elaine at a church supper.
“She was a good woman,” he said. “She knew about the burns. Knew about the nightmares. I told her I wasn’t easy to live with.”
“Did you tell her about me?”
“Before we married.”
I felt the sting of that answer, though I had no right to it.
“What did she say?”
Danny’s expression softened.
“She said there was room in a man’s heart for a memory without making it a home.”
I looked at the window.
“She sounds wiser than both of us.”
“She was.”
They had been married forty-one years. Elaine had died six years earlier of cancer. They had one daughter, Selena, who lived in California and worked as a nurse. Danny had moved west after Elaine’s death, hoping the milder climate would ease his arthritis. The burns had left him with chronic pain, and in recent years his mobility had deteriorated.
“Selena’s been taking care of me,” he said. “More than I deserve.”
“Dad,” Selena said quietly from the doorway, “don’t start that.”
He gave her a tired smile.
Then he turned back to me.
“I thought I had more time.”
The words came out so softly I nearly missed them.
“What do you mean?”
He looked down at his hand.
“Two weeks ago, I was in the hospital. Pneumonia. The doctor told Selena my heart was getting weaker. I heard him say I might not have another winter.”
My throat tightened.
“So you sent the flowers.”
“I wanted you to know I was alive before I died for real.”
He paused.
“I thought I’d write the card, send the flowers, and leave you with the choice of whether to remember me. I didn’t think you’d come.”
I almost smiled.
“You always did underestimate me.”
“That I did.”
For the first time since I’d entered the house, I saw a spark of the old mischief in his eyes.
Then it faded.
“I didn’t want you to see me like this.”
I leaned forward.
“Danny, I have seen you in a yellow dress of my own imagination for fifty-eight years. I have carried a ring that turned my finger green. I have read thirty-one letters so many times I could tell you what was written on the other side of the paper.”
My voice trembled.
“I wasn’t coming to see a handsome young soldier. I was coming to see you.”
He pressed his knuckles against his mouth.
I reached for his hand.
It was warm. The skin was thin, the fingers crooked, the nails ridged with age.
But it was his.
For a little while, we sat that way, neither of us trying to repair the years.
Then Selena brought us tea.
She sat beside me, and the three of us talked until the afternoon light turned gold against the curtains.
Before I left, Danny asked if I’d come again.
I looked at him.
“Do you think you can put up with me?”
He smiled.
“I’ve been waiting fifty-eight years to find out.”
I drove home that evening with my hands shaking on the steering wheel.
My daughter called twice. I didn’t answer until I reached my driveway.
“Mom? Where are you? I’ve been worried sick.”
“I’m home.”
“Did you go?”
“Yes.”
A long silence.
“Was it really him?”
I looked at the mason jar of wildflowers I’d brought back with me. Selena had insisted I take it.
“Yes,” I said. “It was really him.”
My daughter started crying.
I didn’t tell her not to.
That night, I took the Whitman’s box from my cedar chest and set it on the kitchen table.
For the first time in fifty-eight years, I didn’t open it to mourn a dead man.
I opened it to prepare for a visit.
Because on Sunday, I was going back.
And this time, I wasn’t going to let anybody tell me not to.
Final Part: The Things We Carry Home
I went back the following Sunday with a lemon cake.
It seemed the proper thing to bring to a man who had spent his whole life without knowing whether I was still alive.
Besides, my lemon tree had finally produced two lemons after thirty years of stubborn refusal, and I wasn’t about to waste the occasion.
Danny was waiting by the window when I arrived.
He wore a clean blue shirt and the expression of a schoolboy who’d been promised a trip to the fair.
“You came,” he said.
“I told you I would.”
“I know. I just wasn’t sure I’d believe it until I saw you.”
I set the cake on the kitchen counter.
“Well, you’d better get used to believing me.”
Selena laughed from the stove.
“He hasn’t stopped talking about you since you left.”
Danny’s face turned pink.
“Selena.”
“What? You haven’t.”
I found myself laughing, too.
It was a strange thing, how quickly the years could collapse around a familiar voice. There were moments when I looked at Danny and saw the boy from the riverbank. Then he’d shift in his chair or wince with pain, and I’d remember that we were both old now, that the life we might have shared had been lived separately, and that no amount of wishing could make it otherwise.
But I kept coming.
Every Sunday, I drove the two hours to Susanville.
