The Sooner the Better

“If you reconsider and decide to try medical school again, I’ll do whatever I can to help you.”



His offer surprised her. “Thank you, but I’m not going to. Not when Gary and I are about to start our lives together.”



“Well, I promised I’d bring it up if the occasion arose. It saddens me that it has.”



Within a few minutes, Dennis had finished explaining the terms of the will and handed her the necessary paperwork. When she’d read everything, he passed her another sheet of paper.



“What’s this?” she asked.



“An inventory of the safe-deposit box. I went down to the bank yesterday afternoon and retrieved everything. I have it all for you here.” He stood and picked up the manila envelope on his credenza. “I need you to confirm that every document listed on the sheet is accounted for.”



Because it was expected of her, Lorraine dumped the contents of the envelope onto the desk and checked off the items on the list. She’d previously seen or known about everything here. Or so she assumed until she found the opened letter addressed to her mother. How odd, she mused, studying its colorful foreign stamps.



“Do you know anything about this letter?” she asked the attorney.



“Nothing. Actually, it seemed odd to me that Virginia would put something so obviously personal in with documents that were all business-related.”



“It’s from Mexico,” Lorraine said unnecessarily.



“Yes, I noticed that.”



“Postmarked seven years ago.” She withdrew the single page inside. After scanning it, she turned it over and read the signature. Gasping, she lifted her head to stare at Dennis Goodwin.



“You’re…you’re sure you didn’t know about this?” She was unable to conceal her shock.



“Lorraine, I don’t know anything about that letter. I was your mother’s lawyer, not her confidant. What she chose to place in the safe-deposit box had nothing to do with my role as her attorney.”



Lorraine sagged against the back of the chair and raised her hand to her throat. “Could…could I have a glass of water, please?” Her mouth felt dry and her voice had gone hoarse. This couldn’t be true. Couldn’t be real. This was crazy.



“I’ll be right back.” Dennis stepped out of his office and quickly returned with a large paper cup.



Lorraine drank the contents in several noisy gulps and briefly closed her eyes, trying to take in what she’d learned.



“I’m sorry if something’s upset you,” Dennis said.



“You really haven’t read the letter?” she asked shakily.



“No, of course not. It would’ve been highly unethical to do so.”



Lorraine waited until she’d regained her composure enough to sound unemotional. “It appears, Dennis,” she said calmly, “that my father isn’t dead, after all.”



Two



The nightmare woke Thomas Dancy out of a deep sleep. He opened his eyes and filled his lungs with air. A breeze wafted in through the bedroom window and a full April moon cast fingers of cool light into the room. It’s just a dream, he reminded himself. One that came to him periodically. It was always the same, and despite the passage of almost thirty years, it hadn’t lessened in intensity. He relived every gut-wrenching detail—and always woke up at the same point, trembling with fear and terror. Again, as he did every time, Thomas felt unabashed relief that it had only been a dream. Again, he reminded himself that the worst was over. He’d walked through that hell once, and lived.



Thomas threw back the sheet and sat on the edge of the thin mattress as the darkness and the effects of the nightmare closed in around him. Even now that he was wide-awake, the fear would not release him, had seeped into his very bones.



He’d lost so much, back in the early seventies. By far his greatest and most profound loss had been his wife and daughter, but the dream had nothing to do with them.



In an effort to combat the lingering traces of depression—the dream’s legacy—he formed a mental picture of Ginny and tiny Raine the day he’d left for Vietnam. Ginny had been so young, so beautiful. Her face had been streaked with tears as she held their daughter in her arms. Despite everything that had gone wrong in the years since, that particular image never failed to lighten his heart.



She’d come to the airport to see him off to war. A war he didn’t understand and had no desire to fight. It had nearly killed him to leave his family that day. But in the end he’d been the one to do the killing.



Guilt surged up in him and he shook his head, refusing to allow his thoughts to stumble down that path. He rubbed his face with both hands, as if he could erase the last residue of the dream and all the memories it brought back.



He couldn’t.



The trembling started again, and he stood and walked over to the window and stared into the night. He gazed at the reflection of the moon over the smooth water of the bay, off in the distance. He needed a reminder that the war and its aftermath were far behind him.



As memories of the war faded, they were replaced by thoughts of Ginny. Despite the years, despite her abandonment, he still loved her. He’d made a new life for himself here in El Mirador, and he’d come to think of Mexico as his home. He was a simple man, living a simple life. He’d never be rich, but then, money wasn’t important to him. Ginny had understood that.



Ginny…



Earlier that night, before his dreams had erupted into the sights and sounds of a brutal war, his wife had come to him in his sleep. He’d seen her as she was at twenty, and their love had seemed as real as the windowsill beneath his fingers.



His heart sang at the sound of her name in his mind. He remembered the first time he saw her on the university campus and how he’d dismissed her as virginal and uptight. But the cliché about opposites attracting was certainly true in their case. He’d embraced the beliefs of the late sixties—like student power and “doing your own thing”—ideologies she’d regarded with contempt.



As it happened, they’d attended the same English class and sat across from each other. Thomas took it upon himself to break through that barrier of reserve she held between herself and the world. Ginny was the challenge he couldn’t resist. He didn’t mean it to happen, but before he knew it, he’d fallen in love.



So had she.



A slow smile relaxed the taut muscles of his face as he recalled the night they’d first slept together. She’d been innocent, and while he was far from a virgin, that afternoon with Ginny was the first time he’d truly made love. The honesty of their lovemaking had forever changed him. Instinctively he’d known that, despite his other lovers, she was the only woman he’d really loved.



He wanted to marry her. His feelings had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with his heart. They met every day after class and took crazy chances to be together in either his dorm or hers. Once they’d made love, it was impossible to stop, and their physical need for each other grew until it dominated all common sense.



He’d suspected Ginny was pregnant long before she did….



By that time he was renting a two-room apartment off campus. His sole piece of furniture had been a worn-out mattress tucked in a corner. What cooking he did was on a hot plate. The lack of material wealth was of little concern to either of them. They were too much in love to care.



Ginny’s conservative family was shocked by the changes in her when she arrived home for the holidays with him in tow. Her hair was waist-length and her attire consisted of long cotton dresses and sandals. Her parents hadn’t liked him then and liked him even less when they discovered he’d gotten their honor-student daughter pregnant. It didn’t surprise him that her family strongly disapproved of their marrying. One of the things that distressed Thomas most in the years that followed was the rift he’d caused between Ginny and her family.



They wrote their vows themselves and at Ginny’s insistence found a sympathetic priest who agreed to perform the ceremony. Their lovemaking had been good before they were married, but afterward it was incredible.



With a wife to support and a baby on the way, Thomas had been forced to drop out of college and find employment. At one time he’d seriously considered medicine as a career, but that had been an unlikely dream from the beginning. He and Ginny both knew that. Besides, the only way he could’ve attended medical school would have been on a scholarship, and his marks had fallen since his involvement with Ginny. Still, he wouldn’t have traded his marriage for even a full-ride scholarship to the best medical school in the country.



Although they lived in poverty, Thomas and Ginny were blissfully happy. At Lorraine’s birth, he was with Ginny as much as the doctors would allow. It’d been hell not to go into the delivery room with her. When the nurse came out and told him he had a daughter, Thomas broke into tears of joy. His heart had never known that kind of happiness.



Two days after they brought Lorraine home from the hospital, Thomas walked into a U.S. Army recruiting office and handed over his life to Uncle Sam. It wasn’t what he wanted, but he had no real choice. Little did he realize when he put on that uniform how much he was about to lose.



The nightmare was about Vietnam. Again and again he relived the day he’d held David Williams in a blood-filled rice paddy and watched him die. He’d been helpless to do anything but scream in anguish.



He wrote Ginny about David, but words were inadequate to describe his loss. More than a friend had died that day. Part of Thomas Dancy had died, too. The young man he was, the innocent twenty-one-year-old who believed in the power of love and goodness, also bled to death in that rice field. From then on, he was able to kill without conscience.



He’d gone to war a kid, trying to provide for his family, and returned a killer. It’d taken Ginny’s love to wipe away the ugliness of those long months in Vietnam. Halfway through his tour he’d flown to Hawaii on leave and never returned to the war. He despised what he’d become.



The army referred to him as a deserter, but Thomas knew that walking away had saved his life. He would have lost his mind if he’d gone back. He’d hidden in San Francisco for a while and Ginny had come to him there, loved him, given him back his sanity. The bitterness and hatred inside him had slowly melted away until he was almost whole again, almost able to put all the horrors he’d seen out of his mind. But he felt a moral obligation to save others from what he’d experienced. Instead of fleeing to Canada as so many before and after him did, he made it his mission to work toward ending the war. He joined an extremist group and made friends with its leader, José Delgado, who had family in Mexico. Because Thomas had some fluency in Spanish after four years of study, José insisted they speak the language when talking about their plans. It had started out as a safety measure and then later become a necessity.



“Thomas?”



Reluctantly he turned at the sound of his name.



“The dream again?” Azucena asked in a low whisper.



He nodded, not wanting to explain that his thoughts had been of Ginny and the daughter he no longer knew.