Courage Tree (11 page)

“Paula would never do that to another woman. Her husband cheated on her, which is why she left him.”

“So Paula and I have something in common.” She instantly regretted her words. They were having a good conversation, and she’d just taken it below the belt. But Joe didn’t seem disturbed.

“Yes, you do,” he said. “I wish you’d told me you thought it was Paula. I could have saved you from…I don’t know, you must have felt awkward around her.”

“At first, I did,” she said. “But it’s been a long time. So, if not Paula, then…is there someone else?”

“Now, you mean? A girlfriend?” He smiled again, this time ruefully. “Lord knows, I’ve tried,” he said. “I’ve gone out with a few women. They all say…” He shook his head.

“They all say what?” she prodded.

“It’s hard to talk about.”

“What?”

“They all say I’m still in love with you.”

They were the last words she’d expected. “Are you?” she asked.

“Let’s just say I would do anything to erase the past and make us a family again.” He took her hand in his. “Is there any chance of that?” he asked.

Again, she felt a surge of sympathy toward him. His words, his obvious honesty and sincerity, were seductive to her, and she allowed herself one brief moment’s fantasy of being his wife again. But then she thought of how he would react if she mentioned that, at this very moment, Sophie should be at Dr. Schaefer’s office receiving her infusion of Herbalina. And she thought of how, despite his momentary kindness, he held her responsible for Sophie’s disappearance, and she knew she could never be that close to him again.

“Now is not the time for this conversation,” she said, squeezing his hand. She took the map from his lap and looked out the window at the two roads stretching out in front of them. Neither looked promising.

“Let’s go back,” Joe said with a sigh. “Let’s just go to the police station and get ready for the press conference.”

She hesitated, looking down at the map, trying to determine exactly where they were.

“It doesn’t mean we’re giving up,” Joe said. “Just changing our strategy.”

She handed the map back to him. “All right,” she said.

Joe looked at his watch. “It’s after twelve,” he said. “We told your parents we’d call before noon. Might as well do it before we start driving again.”

She nodded and took her phone from her purse, pressing the memory button for the mansion.

“Hello?” Her mother’s voice had that brittle, anxious quality that Janine knew all too well.

“Hi, Mom. We—”

“Let me talk to Joe.”

Janine sucked in her breath as though her mother had punched her. “I just wanted to let you know that we haven’t found anything,” she said quickly.

“Put Joe on,” her mother insisted.

Janine shut her eyes. “She won’t talk to me,” she said, handing him the phone. Her throat was so tight she could barely breathe, and she reached into her shorts pocket for a tissue.

“Hi, Mom,” Joe said. “No, no word at all. Any news there?”

She listened as Joe told her mother about the press conference scheduled for that afternoon. When he hung up, he looked at her, and she knew her nose was red from her quiet crying.

“How about I drive back,” he suggested.

She shook her head and started the car. She needed something to engage her mind. Yet as she drove, all she could think about were the countless other times she’d done something to elicit the sting of her mother’s silent anger.

After she lost the baby on the banks of the Shenandoah, she suddenly noticed babies everywhere. Janine had never paid much attention to them before, not even during the seven and a half months of her pregnancy. But suddenly babies slept in strollers in the shopping malls, reached from carts for forbidden items on the shelves at the grocery store and were carried in sacks against their mother’s chests in the bank, where Janine had taken a job to help Joe pay their expenses. Mothers cooed at their little ones, smiled at them, comforted them when they cried, and played peekaboo with them on the counter at the bank. Each time Janine was witness to one of these interactions, she felt the pain of losing her own infant. She had not felt that pain at the time; she had felt nothing, actually, since she had somehow managed to deny to herself that she was about to become a mother. But now she saw, in vivid detail before her, how she had taken that precious life for granted. How could she have gone canoeing that day? How could she have had so little regard for the miracle happening inside her? Her feelings both
sobered and depressed her. For a while, she functioned like an automaton, a little Stepford wife, doing everything Joe asked of her, as if complete obedience were her penance for her transgression. Her parents had stopped helping them financially now that there was no baby to consider. She and Joe needed to learn to make it on their own, they said, and, of course, Joe agreed. That was only the beginning of Joe’s agreements with her parents.

She was coming to realize that, had it not been for her pregnancy, she and Joe’s relationship probably would have died a natural death after high school. They were so dissimilar. He was straight-arrow, goal-oriented, money hungry. He weighed every move before he made it, thinking through every possible consequence. Yet, she did love him, despite his stodginess. He was handsome and kind, and she could talk easily to him—as long as she didn’t talk about things that upset him, like her longing for adventure or her boredom with her bank job. She liked that she was helping to put him through school. Once he was out, though, and had made a little money, it would be her turn. She planned to study aviation—although that was one of those things she couldn’t talk to him about.

She knew the very day her depression began to lift. She was getting ready for work, watching the early-morning news in their studio apartment, when an ad came on the TV.

“Learn a trade,” the announcer said, “and earn money for school at the same time!”

The images on the screen were of young men and women, Army Reservists, dressed in camouflage, crawling on the ground with rifles, pushing buttons on huge computers and…flying planes! Her heart pounded against her ribs as she watched the ad, as if it were beating life back into her body after a long illness, and she longed to rip off her stuffy bank teller clothes and dial the phone number displayed on the screen right that minute. She managed to wait until her afternoon break at the bank before making the call, but within a
week, she had signed up for the Army Reserves—without the knowledge of Joe or her parents.

It was another week before she dared to tell Joe what she had done. They were in their apartment, sitting at opposite ends of the sofa, eating their dinner of canned chicken soup and grilled-cheese sandwiches. He had a textbook on his knee, as usual; he was always studying.

“Joe?” she said, when she was halfway through her sandwich.

It was a moment before he looked up, and he kept his finger on his place in the book.

“I did something this week that I’m really excited about,” she told him.

“What’s that?” He glanced down at the book again, obviously distracted.

“I enlisted in the Army Reserves.”

He actually laughed. “You’re kidding, right?”

She shook her head. “I saw an ad on TV, and I—”

He withdrew his finger from the book and shut it. “Why would you do anything so stupid?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s stupid. I’ll be getting training and money for college, so it won’t cost us as much for me to—”

“We aren’t—” Joe hunted for the words “—we’re not army kind of people. Your father even refused to fight in Vietnam, remember? Do you know what he had to go through to get that conscientious objector status? And here you join up? We don’t even know anyone in the military.”

She looked at him curiously. “When did you get so bigoted?” she asked.

“I’m not bigoted. I’m just being…realistic. I mean, can you really see yourself in a uniform, taking orders? You, of all people?”

“Yes, actually, I can.” She felt herself toughening up as she spoke. “And it’s only the reserves. I’ll just have to be away
from home for one weekend each month, although I’ll have to be on active duty for a while first, while I’m in Warrant Officer Candidate Development.” She spoke very quickly, hoping that by talking rapidly, she could make the long separation seem much shorter. “That’s kind of like basic training,” she said. “And then I’ll go to flight school.”

“
Flight
school?”

“Yes.” She couldn’t stop her grin.

“Oh, Janine, your head’s in the clouds.”

“I can’t
wait
to have my head in the clouds,” she said.

“You’re going to be surrounded by other guys,” he said, and she suddenly saw one of the central reasons for his disapproval. He’d always had a jealous streak.

“That’s not why I’m doing it.”

“So…when is this supposed to start?” he asked.

She felt a little afraid of what she had to tell him. “I’ll leave in September,” she replied. “I’ll have to go to basic training, like I said, in Fort Rucker. That’s in Alabama. That’ll take about a year, and—”

“A year!”

“And then I’ll stay there for flight school, and then I’ll be a Warrant Officer.” That sounded so much better than “bank teller”!

“And then what?”

She knew that tight look on his face; he was struggling to hold his anger in.

“Then I’ll come home and I’ll be able to fly with my reserve unit at Fort Belvoir. Once I’m with the reserve unit, I can have another job. I’ll just need to be able to take off one weekend a—”

He threw his book on the coffee table, knocking over his soup. “This is insane!” he said. “I want a
woman
for a wife. Not a soldier.” He stomped across the room to the phone.

“Who are you calling?” she asked.

“Your parents. Maybe they can talk some sense into you.”

She could feel her strength and resolve slipping away from her, and she was once again the little girl, always under her parents’ disapproving thumbs.

Within minutes, her parents had arrived at the apartment, where they attempted to talk Janine out of her “wild plan.” They thought she had grown up in the last year, they told her. They thought she was more stable and responsible. She was being unbelievably selfish. She wasn’t thinking of Joe or their marriage at all, only of herself and her crazy ideas. Sitting perfectly still, not saying a word, she let them have their say. She was going to do this, even if it cost her the love of her parents. Even if it cost her the love of her husband.

Her mother stopped talking to her that night, and her silence lasted for years. Janine went to Fort Rucker, tucking her family’s disdain for her decision in the back of her mind as she learned to fly a helicopter. Her flight instructor called her a “natural pilot,” and she knew she had found her passion. Yes, some of the guys badgered her, and others hit on her, but that was not what she was there for. She was in faithful contact with Joe, reassuring him that she would be home soon and how truly happy she was. She told him she couldn’t wait to take him up in a helicopter someday. When she finally came home from flight school, she was a happier young woman. And she was, remarkably, a soldier.

As much as she adored flying, Joe loved his chosen career: working with money. He graduated from college soon after her return and took an accounting job with a large, well-respected firm. He was a hard worker, and he became even more serious and sober as he threw himself into his career.

It wasn’t until Janine took a job as a helicopter pilot for Omega-Flight, an aircraft leasing company, that she discovered Joe’s fear of flying.

She’d received permission from Omega-Flight to take her husband up in the helicopter one weekend, and only then did
Joe admit to his fear. She thought back to the few times they had been scheduled to fly somewhere, and how he always decided to drive or take the train instead, making up some excuse about wanting to see the countryside. She had known about his father’s accident and chastised herself for her insensitivity. He admitted then how much it upset him that her major passion in life was the one thing he could take no part in. She’d felt sorry for him and held him close to her as he talked about his fear. He rarely let her see vulnerability in him, and it touched her. Yet he was right. Flying was indeed her passion.

Although her mother began talking to her again, she rarely had anything positive to say. What could she and her father tell their friends about her? she asked Janine. How could they admit she was in the reserves, putting on a uniform and playing soldier one weekend a month? Why couldn’t she be a normal daughter and wife? They constantly told her about their friends’ daughters who had respectable jobs as teachers or nurses.

Now that they were both out of school, Joe had wanted to start a family again, but Janine was not ready to move in that direction. She used her job and her reserve duties as an excuse, but the truth was, she still had nightmares about that chilly October day, when she’d lain on a bed of gold and red leaves, giving birth to a baby who would not live. She would take any sort of physical risk, but she didn’t think she could take that emotional risk again.