Father to Be (40 page)

“No one will believe you’re guilty.”

His laugh was cold and bitter. “Well, hell, honey,
somebody
believes it, or they wouldn’t be hauling me into court to try to prove it.” Just as quickly as the black humor appeared, it disappeared. “All my life I’ve tried to be the best man I could be, a man my father and mother would be proud of. Sometimes I’ve failed. In Chicago I failed miserably, but here … I had begun to believe that this was the person I was meant to be. But is this what those failures were leading up to?
This?
A man accused of hitting a little boy?”

He continued to toy with the bottle—twisting the cap, breaking its seal, taking it off, then immediately screwing it back on tight. She watched him caress the glass, watched him swallow hard, as if the longing were almost too much to resist. He put the bottle down, returned it to its place in the arc, and his hand trembled as he drew back.

Why don’t you drink? she had asked him at the carnival, and he had given her several reasons—he was on call all the time, he couldn’t attend to patients with his senses impaired, he cared too much for his health.

But he hadn’t told her the biggest reason of all.

He looked up at her, and the bitter smile returned. “You look appalled. I guess my secret’s out—one of ’em, at least. Did you guess? Or did you snoop around under the guise of doing your job and find out that way?”

She could hardly breathe. Her lungs were tight, and her heart felt as if it just might shatter. “You’re an—”

“You can say the word. It won’t taint you.” His movements jerky and angry, he stood up as if at a podium in front of a crowd and intoned in a strong voice, “My name is J.D., and I’m an alcoholic.” Then he slumped onto the bench again. “God, I thought I’d said that for the last time.”

She was stunned. She didn’t know what to do, what to say. She couldn’t even think, couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that J. D. Grayson, the steadiest, calmest, most stable person she knew, was an alcoholic. J.D., who was strong for everyone else, who healed everyone else, had a weakness of the most vicious kind.

“And that’s not even the worst of it,” he went on.

“I know about Carol Ann.”

Abruptly he turned cold. “You know nothing about Carol Ann.”

“I know that she was your wife. I know that she died in a car crash over two years ago.”

“Do you know that she had dark hair and dark eyes and looked as innocent as Gracie? That she studied ballet for nineteen years and gave up her chance at a career to marry me? That she loved children and old movies and romance novels and dogs? Do you know that she was ticklish and spoke fluent French and was self-conscious about the way she laughed, because she was so delicate and graceful and her laugh was so big and full-bodied? That she talked in her sleep and never met a stranger and was fascinated by archaeology and astronomy and movie special effects?” He broke off for a breath, a deep, ragged sob that made Kelsey
ache. “Do you know that she was the worst cook in the entire world and that she always believed the absolute best of everyone, including me?”

He closed his eyes, covered his face with his hands, muffling his next words. “Do you know that it’s my fault she’s dead?”

“That’s not true,” she protested, her voice unsteady, her throat tight. “The other driver was speeding. He ran a red light.”

So slowly, as if the action hurt, he removed his hands from his face, then shook his head from side to side. “It’s my fault. She loved me more than anyone has ever loved me. She had faith in me. She
trusted
me. And she paid for that trust with her life. And I get to live with that knowledge. That’s my punishment.”

Once more he gave her a heartrending look. “And that’s not all. Carol Ann and I had a son. He lives in Chicago with her parents and wants nothing to do with me. I’ve been judged an unfit parent. I can’t have custody of my own child. And that—” He looked longingly at the beer. “That’s also my punishment.”

T
he wind that blew across the deck was gentle, not even enough to stir the curls that hung loose down Kelsey’s back, certainly not enough to blow that stunned look off her face. Though he’d thought he was fresh out of courage, J.D. watched her. This would make or break them. Either she would stand by him, or she would damn him the way he’d damned himself for so long. It wasn’t fair to hope for a better reaction from her than he was capable of himself—after all, they were his own sins—but he was hoping.

Right now hope was about all he had left.

“Trey,” she whispered softly. “Trey wasn’t your patient. He’s your son.”

He nodded.

“You were named after your father. And your—your son—” She frowned, shook her head, then repeated the words to herself. “Your son is named after you. Senior, junior, the third. Trey.” She raised a hand to rub her forehead, then let it drop limply to her lap. “My God, J.D.”

He wondered what that meant.
My God, I’m sorry. My God, what you’ve been through. My God, what you’ve done.
Was she pitying him or damning him? He wasn’t sure he could bear either one.

“Tell me …”

His throat was dry, and he wished for something to make the words easier. The beer would do the job, but he knew too well that if he started drinking now, he would never stop. His two years, four months, and three days of sobriety would be lost.
He
would be lost, and not even Kelsey would be able to save him.

He wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted to know, and so he told her everything. He began at the beginning, and he would end at the end. The end for him and Carol Ann, the end for him and Trey. Would it also be the end for him and Kelsey?

“Carol Ann and I got married in college, and Trey was born while I was in med school. It was her idea to name him after me. She thought it would please my dad, even though neither of us had ever used our given name, and she was right. It did please him.”

Bud had been thrilled with his only grandchild. He’d doted on Trey, and it had almost broken his heart when J.D. had moved the family to Chicago after medical school. They’d remained close, though, until two years
ago. When Trey had cut J.D. out of his life, he’d also turned his back on his grandfather.

“I was ambitious. I liked psychiatry. I was good at it, and I intended to be the best. But you don’t get to be the best at anything without long hours and hard work. I devoted myself to that while Carol Ann took care of everything else. She ran the house, managed our social lives, played both mother and father to our son. As far as Trey was concerned, I was this person who passed through the house from time to time, who never made it to his soccer games, who didn’t show up at his school programs. Sometimes I don’t think he even saw me as part of the family. I was just someone who paid the bills and took his mother’s attention away from him.”

He risked a look at Kelsey. She was sitting very still, barely breathing. Her gaze was directed down, as if the boards that made up the tabletop greatly interested her. He wished she would look at him so he could try to judge the emotion in her eyes. At the same time, he was glad she was avoiding him. If he was going to lose her, he’d rather not see the proof just yet.

“I saw patients, read, studied, researched, wrote papers. I built a reputation, made a name for myself. I took the toughest cases—the kids who had been abandoned, abused, neglected—and I achieved remarkable success. And it depressed the hell out of me.”

Picking up the nearest bottle of beer, he unscrewed the cap and thought about how easy it would be to drink it. In the months after Carol Ann’s death, he would have sold his soul for just one drink. Hell, he would have sold
her
soul. There were times when he would have rather been dead than alive and not drinking, times when
nothing
—not so-briety, not self-respect, not even his son—had been worth the hell he was going through. He’d had no pride, no
dignity, nothing but the raw, jagged, bone-deep
need
for alcohol and the peace it could give him.

His mouth watered at the thought of taking a drink. His stomach roiled. He started to tip the bottle over, to let the beer run over the planks and spill through the cracks to drip on the floor below. Instead, he screwed the cap back on, then clasped both hands around the bottle neck and returned to his story.

“I began having problems separating myself from my job. I spent my life listening to firsthand accounts of the most terrible atrocities one human being could do to another—to innocent, helpless children—and I was expected to just leave it in the office when I walked out the door. I couldn’t do it. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get away from it. There was so much sickness out there, so much depravity and pure evil, and I felt contaminated by it. Finally I discovered that a drink helped me relax. If one drink helped, then two would help more, and four would make life bearable, and after eight or ten or twelve, I could actually find a little peace.”

Of their own will, his fingers began twisting the bottle cap again. He forced them to stop.

“My family and friends never suspected a thing. They knew I drank a lot, but they never saw me drunk. I never staggered, slurred my speech, or appeared hung over, so they assumed I had it under control. The truth was, I drank so heavily that what would normally make a man of my size appear profoundly intoxicated barely touched me.”

Feeling anxious and edgy, as if he couldn’t possibly sit still any longer, he set the bottle aside and stood up. He paced to one end of the deck, then the other. Finally he settled at the railing, staring out into the woods, his hands tightly gripping the curved rail cap. “One evening Carol Ann and I had dinner plans with friends. I had a few
drinks before we left the house, and I had quite a few more through the meal. She wanted to drive home from the restaurant. She said I’d had too much to drink, and I blew up at her. It was the first time she’d ever commented on my drinking, and it scared me. I was this hotshot psychiatrist, the best damn head doctor in the city, one of the top shrinks in the country. My ego—my arrogance—couldn’t let anyone know that I couldn’t handle it, that I needed a crutch to survive the day, that without the booze I would be as dysfunctional as my patients.”

Before long the sun would set. He wished he could hurry it up, could bring on the shadows and hide in them forever. He wished this hellish day would end so he would never have to relive it again.

Behind him a floorboard creaked, and he sensed Kelsey’s approach. She hesitated near him, then moved to stand a few feet away. He saw her from the corner of his eye, but he didn’t look at her, didn’t reach for her though his fingers ached to.

“I got in the car and told Carol Ann that she could come with me or find her own way home. I didn’t care. She chose to come with me. Four blocks later I stopped at a red light, and when it turned green, I pulled into the intersection in front of a speeding truck. The impact knocked our car halfway down the block. I remember the sirens of the police cars, a fire engine, the ambulances, someone screaming.… It was me. The other driver was dying, and Carol Ann was dead, and I … I walked away. I lived to go home and tell our twelve-year-old son that his mother was dead, and he didn’t even need to smell the liquor to know.… ”

He made a sound that might have been a dry laugh or the start of a strangled sob. “I worked every day with doctors, nurses, social workers, substance-abuse counselors, and none of them suspected a thing. But my twelve-year-old
son had known for months that his father was a drunk. Not surprisingly he blamed me for Carol Ann’s death. He said that if I had been sober, I would have been more careful. I would have looked to make sure the cars on the other street were stopping. I would have waited a few lousy seconds … and she would still be alive. And he was right.”

The silence that settled when he stopped talking was deafening. He could hear his own heart thudding painfully in his chest, could hear the uneven tenor of his breathing, but there was nothing else. No sympathy from Kelsey. No comfort. No assurances that he wasn’t responsible, that he didn’t contribute to the death of the woman who’d loved him more than anyone deserved to be loved. Just that terrible, damning silence.

His breath caught in his chest as he forced himself to finish. “Trey went to her funeral with me. He stood beside me, said the prayers with me, but when it was over, he refused to go home with me. He very calmly told me that he wished I had died instead of his mother, that he would never forgive me for what I’d done, and that he was moving in with her parents. I let him go. I thought he was upset. He was grieving, in shock. I was going away for treatment, and he needed someplace to stay anyway. I thought that when I came back would be the time to resolve things with him.

“So I went to a rehab facility. I started therapy, got sober, learned how to handle my problems, went home to pick up the pieces, and my in-laws slapped me with notice that they were suing for custody of Trey. He hated me. They hated me. Hell, I hated myself. So I saved them the trouble of going to court. I relinquished my parental rights, and I came here to start over again.” His scorn was painful. “
Relinquished my parental rights.
It sounds so much better that way, so much less contemptible. The plain and
simple truth is, I gave away my son. Like a piece of property I no longer needed, no longer wanted, I gave away my own child, and I haven’t had any contact with him since. I’ve written him, sent him gifts, tried calling him, but he wants nothing to do with me. I no longer exist for him.”

Again the silence settled. This time he had nothing further to say. If she didn’t, then they truly were finished.

Kelsey held on to the rail for support. It wasn’t often that she found herself at a loss for words, but she had no idea what to say or how to say it. She wasn’t sure she wanted to say anything at all.

And so she didn’t. She moved away from the rail, walked right up to J.D., said a quick prayer that he wouldn’t reject her, and wrapped her arms tightly around him. For one moment he held himself stiff, then in a flash the tension fled his body and he sagged against her. He held on to her, buried his face in her hair, shuddered against her.