Stay a Little Longer (19 page)

“At first, she didn’t know whether she should tell you about the baby or not,” she continued. “She was afraid that you would
have been distracted or would have worried about her. But in the end, she decided to write you a letter telling you that you
were to be a father. Alice waited and waited, but weeks went by without a reply.”

“The mail… was erratic… we were never sure when it might arrive,” Mason haltingly explained. “I… I only ever received a couple
of Alice’s letters, ones she had… written in the first days… after I left.” Wistfully, he looked over Rachel’s shoulder at
the worn coat draped over a chair in the corner. “I… never… received that letter… I never knew…”

“I know, Mason,” Rachel answered, certain beyond any doubt that he was telling the truth; the pain in his voice was so real
that she found herself agonizing right along with him. “And Alice knew it as well. Because she’d heard no reply, she concluded
that the letter had been lost, but before she could even begin to write another, your father and a military man came to the
house and told her that you were dead.”

“No one knew who I was at the hospital. My identification had been lost…”

“From that day forward, it was as if you were really dead to all of us.”

Waves of pity washed over Rachel as she told Mason what had happened in his absence. Even though she had endured the experiences
firsthand, having to watch hopelessly as Alice spiraled ever downward, telling her sister’s husband felt somehow worse. At
least she had been able to try to reach Alice, to battle against the decline, even if it did no good in the end; all Mason
could do was sit and listen.

“What… what happened to Alice?” he asked. “How did… she die… ?”

Carefully, Rachel told of how after Alice received the news of Mason’s death, she began slowly to waste away, how without
her husband in her life she seemed no longer to have a reason to continue. Rachel explained how she and her mother moved Alice
out of the home she had shared with Mason and back into her old bedroom in the boardinghouse.

“After a couple of months, she began to talk less and less,” Rachel said. “Her looks began to change. She always used to take
such pride in her curly hair, but eventually she quit caring, leaving it unkempt. Even her eyes seemed to grow distant. No
matter how much our mother fussed, she never lifted a finger to change.

“Even though she was pregnant, it was all I could do to get her to eat, to keep her and the baby’s strength up. She lost weight,
and we worried she wasn’t gaining enough for the child. Through the spring and summer, nothing ever changed. In the beginning,
she had visitors, friends and acquaintances who wanted to offer their condolences for her loss, but when word spread that
she never responded, people stopped coming.

“Then came the day when she was to give birth… and…”

“Tell me, Rachel,” Mason insisted, his eyes imploring her to continue. “I need to know…”

“There were some… complications… something was wrong,” she began as her eyes once again filled with tears. “My mother had
delivered countless babies, so we thought that even though it would be a difficult birth, she would manage. But we soon found
that Alice no longer wanted to help, that she simply didn’t want to live no matter how much we tried to persuade her. Your
death had broken my sister’s spirit so completely that even for the sake of her child, she couldn’t find the strength to go
on. So as she slowly bled to death, she never once cried out, never once asked to see the baby even as my mother coaxed out
its first cry. No matter what I said to her, no matter what my mother tried, we were unable to save her.”

Mason’s broad shoulders began to shake as the first tears fell from his downturned eyes. While Rachel recounted what had happened
to Alice, to his beloved wife, he had kept his gaze fixed on their entwined hands, but now that she had finished he looked
up at her, his face a mass of emotion.

Rachel watched as a spark of recognition raced across Mason’s face. For an instant, he appeared to be having trouble believing
what he had surmised, looking first to her, then to his hands, then briefly out the window before once again returning to
her.

“Charlotte…” he said, his voice faint. “Charlotte is Alice’s daughter. My daughter…”

*   *   *   

Since the fateful day when he had been tossed skyward by an exploding German artillery shell, Mason had experienced several
moments when he felt utterly helpless to control his own life. Lying in the room in the boardinghouse, reeling as he tried
to absorb what Rachel had told him, he again felt buffeted by fate, unanchored to the life he knew. His heart raced and his
breath seemed to catch in his throat. Even if his life had depended upon it, he knew that in that moment, he was utterly incapable
of speech or movement, struck mute by the knowledge that his and Alice’s daughter was still alive.

“Charlotte… Charlotte is my daughter,” he repeated.

“She is.” Rachel nodded solemnly. “Even if her mother no longer had the will to live, Charlotte fought on… I think she gets
that stubbornness from you. Even though it’s hard for her to share her birthday with the anniversary of her mother’s death,
she just turned eight. She is your and Alice’s child.”

“I should… I should have understood…”

“Oh, Mason, I’m sorry,” she said as she squeezed his still shaking hands. “I thought that because of the way you had been
calling her by her mother’s name while you were sick, somehow you might have understood that she was Alice’s daughter.”

Even as Mason tried to make some sense of what Rachel was telling him, the faintest memory of seeing Alice enter the dilapidated
cabin welled up in his disordered thoughts. With Charlotte’s blonde hair and striking eyes, both traits of her mother, it
was easy for him to believe that he had made such a connection given the power of the illness that ravaged him, that he could
have mistaken her for Alice.

When he first awakened to find Charlotte sitting at the foot of his bed, Mason had been surprised to learn that he had called
her Alice. In his embarrassment, he had apologized, but even then he recognized that she closely resembled his wife. While
he didn’t remember Alice at such a young age, he could believe they would be the image of each other.

“Does… does she know that I… I am her father?” Mason asked, suddenly worried.

“No,” Rachel answered with a shake of her dark hair. “Just like the rest of us, she believes that her father is dead. All
she knows of Mason Tucker is what she’s been told over the years.”

“What about now? Now that you know, will you tell her?”

Fixing him with a serious stare, Rachel said, “The only person to decide that is you.”

Even as he nodded his head in agreement, Mason knew the decision would be difficult. That he had a daughter, a child who had
no idea he existed, was daunting enough. To bring Charlotte into his life, at least the life he’d been living for the last
seven years, seemed an impossible task. Questions raced around in his head.

Would my being in Charlotte’s life make it better?

What will she think of me once she’s learned the truth of what I’ve done?

Can I just walk away… leave without telling her?

Mason had no more than thought the last question when he came to the sudden realization that, with his and Alice’s absence
from Charlotte’s life, someone had done his job for him.

“The burden of caring for her has fallen on you, hasn’t it?” he asked Rachel.

“Caring for Charlotte has been trying at times, but it has never been a burden,” she explained. “I’ve done what I can for
her because I’m certain that that is what Alice would have wanted. There are days that are harder than others, but I’ve never
regretted it. Besides, I don’t have to do it all alone. I have my mother and Uncle Otis to help.”

“Your mother… how is she?”

“Alice’s death nearly killed her. After all of the children she’d safely delivered over the many years, it was hard for her
to accept that she failed to save her own daughter. Ever since that day, she hasn’t delivered a single child. Now her days
are spent in her room at the end of the hall, staring out the window, so frightened that she never goes outside.”

“After everything that’s happened…”

“It’s much more than that.” Rachel sighed. “My mother worries for the sake of worrying, wringing her hands until they’re chafed
and raw. It’s hard on everyone, but especially Charlotte. She’s always being told to be careful, not to run about so wildly,
even though she’s no different from Alice or me at her age. Whenever Charlotte so much as skins her knee, my mother will work
herself into hysterics and tries to protect her by locking the child in her room. Every year it gets worse. She’s never been
able to accept that what happened to Alice was beyond her ability to control.”

Mason knew that Eliza Watkins was just another victim of his disappearance, but her painful struggles tugged especially hard
at his heart. He remembered the days he had courted Alice, when Eliza had struck him as a particularly independent woman.
Outspoken as she was hardworking, brimming with confidence at her abilities as a midwife, as quick to laugh as she was to
fight for those that she loved, it seemed impossible that she had been struck so low.

“With my mother in her room,” Rachel continued, “Otis and I run things here at the boardinghouse.”

“Good old Otis,” Mason said with a weak smile. “Is he still a drinker?”

“Worse than before. Thank goodness he was sober enough to help get you back here the other night.”

Another flare of worry raced across Mason’s mind upon learning that Otis Simmons knew of his return. Fearful that every tongue
in Carlson would be wagging with news of his unexpected appearance, all fueled by a certain man’s love of liquor and the way
a snoot full of whiskey could make a man blabber things he shouldn’t, Mason asked, “Will he manage to keep it quiet? The fewer
people who know of my arrival, the better.”

“Otis might be many things,” Rachel explained, “drunk, lazy, and quick of tongue among them, but he knows how to keep a secret.
You don’t have to be anxious.”

Momentarily relieved, Mason once again began to reflect upon all the many things that had happened during his absence. Never
in his wildest imagination would he have thought that so much could have occurred. As his own life had forever been changed,
so had others, many of them belonging to those he truly loved.

Shock and surprise still tore at his heart at the fact that his beloved Alice was beyond his reach. For longer than he could
remember, he’d comforted himself with the belief that he would, at the very least, be able to look upon her face one day,
even if it were from a distance. That their love and union had left behind a child, a daughter so like her mother, filled
him with both joy and trepidation.

While I was gone, for better or worse, life went on without me
.

“I’m sorry for all the misery that I’ve caused, Rachel,” he muttered.

“I won’t sit here and tell you that I haven’t felt my share of anger at you and all of the grief you’ve caused, Mason,” she
said curtly. “That Alice’s love for you was greater than her desire to live still torments me. I know it’s not right to place
all the blame on your shoulders, but because she couldn’t continue living, none of our lives will ever be the same. But now
that you’ve returned, there are decisions that will have to be made.”

Mason knew that what Rachel was telling him was right; now that his supposed death had been exposed, he would have many hard
choices to make. He expected that she would want him to begin making them as soon as possible, particularly those that related
to Charlotte and whether he would take a role as the girl’s father, so he was somewhat surprised when she squeezed his hands,
rose from where she sat on the bed, and made her way back toward the closed door.

“You still need to get your rest,” she said simply. “You were as sick as I have ever seen a man, and that sort of illness
isn’t just going to disappear. I’ll be back later with your dinner.” Just as Rachel was about to step out into the hall, she
turned back to him with a tender look in her eyes. “Welcome home, Mason…”

I
F THERE WAS ONE THING
that bothered Jonathan Moseley, it was a secret being kept from him. Even as a child, a birthday gift or the most innocent
of schoolyard mysteries would gnaw at his thoughts, make him dizzy, taunting him until he had figured it out. In adulthood,
he had changed little, which was why he was pacing around his cramped room like a caged animal.

Two days earlier, he had been coming back to the boardinghouse from another mostly fruitless attempt to peddle his wares when
he’d come across Rachel and her uncle practically carrying a destitute man back toward their home. Carefully, he’d kept his
distance so as not to be seen, and watched as they hauled the stranger up the back stairs. Later, when he finally returned
to his room, he came to understand that they had placed their new guest in the room next to his own.

Who in the hell is he?

From that moment, Jonathan had been tortured by the fact that he had little idea what was going on, even if it were right
under his nose. People had been coming and going from the stranger’s room, but he was no closer to learning the man’s identity
than he had been out on the street. Worst of all was that Rachel was so concerned. Once, he’d tried to speak to her at the
head of the stairs, but she’d just barged by him as if he weren’t even there and had gone into the room.

“Don’t make the mistake of ignoring me,” he mumbled to himself.

With every passing hour, every tick of his pocket watch, Jonathan grew more restless. Every once in a while, he’d managed
to hear the faint sound of voices, although he’d been unable to understand a word of what was being said, even after he’d
pressed his ear against the wall. So great was his curiosity that he’d had trouble sleeping and hadn’t eaten much. After a
while, he realized that his mistake was in waiting for the information to come to him; he would have to find out the truth
himself.