must hurt Lee Anne to hear that. Lee Anne had known, as she’d known everything, so well that it was probably like being punched over and over on the same spot, so the bruise, and the hurt, never went away.
Lee Anne gave her a look of sympathy. “Don’t feel bad for me. This isn’t news to me, the way it is to you. Didn’t you ever look at Dewey’s personnel file?”
“No. I wasn’t working in the office when Dewey was hired. I went to the office one day on an errand, and there was Dewey. Phil hired a lot of young men who wanted to work with him to get their licenses. I just didn’t have any reason to look.”
“He’s twentyfour.”
“Twentyfour?”
“Born two years before you were married.”
“I didn’t know that Phil was his father. I didn’t suspect until a few days ago. Dewey was the one who came to see me, and saved me from that … the man who broke into my house. And while I was watching him check the doors and windows, it just hit me. He had some of the same mannerisms. I had the feeling I was looking at Phil. It was like a switch turning on. I couldn’t see before, but all of a sudden I could.” There was a silence that made both women uncomfortable. Emily spoke to fill it. “So you were with Phil at least two years before I met him.”
“About three and a half years.” Lee Anne Burns sat primly in her chair for a few breaths. “I should explain something. I know the things that you want me to tell you. And in a way, I think you have a rightor at least a legitimate wish-to know. But at the same time, you don’t. And I’m sitting here thinking that I’m probably about to tell you some things that I’ve never even told Dewey. He has a better claim to a right to know than you do. But maybe he knows everything already, just from having lived with me, and from whatever Phil told him, and from the other ways of knowing that he had. He was always that kind of boy, even when he was little. He seemed to figure out everything by himself, as though he could look at one tiny detail and grow the rest of it in his mind. There have been lots of times when I found out that what I thought he was too young to know he had known for years, or what I thought had been hidden was plain to him.”
“The others all say he has the gift for being a detective,” Emily agreed. “But he also has a gift for secrets. I can’t tell you what he knows because he never told me anything. And I didn’t come here to claim some right to know things. Maybe I already know everything about Phil that I ought to.”
“I loved him,” Lee Anne said. “That’s the main thing, I guess. It wasn’t some kind of fling or something. I was living at home with my parents up in Oakland while I went to nursing school. My older brother Eldon was in the marines. He always had an orderly plan for his life. Even when he was young, he knew he was going to graduate from high school, go into the marines, then go to college. To me it always seemed like an invitation to fate, a sure way to have a disaster just to teach you that things aren’t that simple. When he went in the marines, I was terrified because that seemed to me to be the time for it, but it didn’t happen. Eldon served his enlistment, had a good tour, and made some good friends. One time he came home from a big navy base in the Philippines, and he brought a close friend home with him on leave.”
“Phil?”
“Phil. It was an odd situation. I think about it a lot, even now. It was as though my brother Eldon brought something into the house that I would never have run into otherwise-some substance, like a drug-and it was something that I had no immunity against.”
“You were attracted to Phil right away?”
“It caught me by surprise. I had a guy I was interested in at the time, and I was busy with nursing school, working long hours and studying. But I came home one evening, and there he was.” Her eyes seemed to lose focus for a moment, as though she were seeing it again, and then they sharpened and returned to Emily. “I don’t need to tell you. He had that sense of humor that made you start laughing when you knew you shouldn’t, and then you would remember afterward and start laughing again, and people would look at you and wonder.”
“I know,” Emily said. “You would want to tell him, and wanting to tell him something was the same as missing him, and then you could hardly wait to see him.”
“I wasn’t on my guard because he started out being just some marine, one of Eldon’s friends, not somebody who was there to see me at all, just a guy sleeping over on his way to spend the rest of his leave at his own home. But I started to like him. When they got their orders, he and Eldon were both transferred to Camp Pendleton next, and I found that as soon as I had a break in nursing school, I had an irresistible urge to fly down to San Diego and visit Eldon. I spent most of my time with Phil. One night after a couple of evenings out, we found ourselves in my hotel room in Oceanside, and the obvious happened.”
“And you got pregnant?”
“Oh, no. Didn’t I tell you that it wasn’t that simple? This part of it was simple-that night. Neither of us planned it. I needed a ride, and he walked me to my hotel room. After that night, everything sped up and changed. I was in love with Phil.”
“Was he in love with you?”
“I think he was, but you have to see that love was what I wanted it to be at the time, and later on, what it had to be to make my life a tragedy and not just a sad little story about a stupid girl who didn’t know how to behave and got what you’d expect. He said he loved me, and he acted as though he did. But Phil was a man who kept a lot to himself.”
Emily said, “What happened?”
“I kept going down to visit Eldon in Oceanside. Only I would come a couple of days early, then pretend to leave for home, and spend a few days in Escondido or Capistrano with Phil before I actually left for Oakland. My mother and Eldon would talk on the phone now and then, and she would say something like, `Did you and Lee Anne have a nice visit?’ It was never `Did Lee Anne come to visit you?’ because that would have meant she was checking up on me. I think that even if Eldon had suspected something, he would not have said anything to her. We were so close, and he knew what it was like to be living at home and trying never to disappoint our parents. Sometimes Phil would get time off and show up at my school in San Francisco. I would come out of class or out of the hospital, and he would be there waiting for me. It went on for a long timeabout a year and a half-and then I missed a period. I didn’t need a test, but I went out and got one.”
“Did you tell Phil right away?”
“Not exactly. I had to have some time to think. Then I waited until the next week, when I was going to see him in person. I drove down to Oceanside.”
“What did he say?”
“It was as though we both had been in a dream-a soft, beautiful one-and we woke up on the same day. I had been in college in San Francisco, maybe the most tolerant city in the country, and I was in medicine, where there are lots of people of every shade from every country-patients, nurses, doctors, technicians. When I went down to Oceanside, everybody we knew or saw was a marine or the family of a marine. One of the things about the military is that racism doesn’t play. It’s one of the reasons why there are so many black people. If you’re a gunnery sergeant you’re treated like every other gunnery sergeant-better than a corporal, but not as good as a lieutenant. Phil and I had both been in places where people were people, and nobody had much time or reason to think about color. But as I said, when I got pregnant, we woke up and everything looked different.”
“How?”
“Race. I told my mother, and it nearly killed her. She begged me to break up with him. The thought of having a white man in the family and a half-white baby just made her sick. She cried so hard, rocking back and forth, with her arms wrapped around herself. From the morning when I told her until nearly five in the afternoon, she didn’t stop. Then, at quarter to five, she stopped, took a bath, and pulled herself together so my father wouldn’t know anything was wrong.”
“Did it work?”
“It did. She was afraid my father would hurt somebody-maybe me, maybe Phil, maybe himself-and that would be the end of our family. That meant everything to her. When he went off to work again, she started in on me again. She wanted me to get an abortion, which I could have done practically that day at the hospital. Nobody would have asked any questions or anything.”
“Did you consider it?”
“Not at first. I was a nurse, so I wasn’t intimidated or anything. I just resented the idea that my own mother would think I wasn’t strong enough to handle my own problems.”
“Which ones?”
