Stranger in Paradise (Home Front - Book #2) (8 page)

Mac wasn’t a fashion critic, but even his untrained eye recognized that her pale gray dress was out of date. Women were wearing those long skirts these days, not the kind that just brushed the knee. “Your things,” Mac had said the night they planned their wedding, “can someone ship them to New York?”

Jane had exhibited little concern. “Leo’s wife will, I’m sure.” Her blue eyes had clouded. “There isn’t much worth shipping.”

A true statement, he knew now. He doubted if she had possessions enough to fill a steamer trunk. Serviceable underwear. A cotton nightgown. Some carefully mended dresses and suits that had once been stylish but were now a few years behind the times. Not that it mattered. When a woman was as beautiful as Jane, it didn’t matter if she went out in a burlap sack.

But there’d been a hint of apology about his wife as the steward had hung her belongings in the closet. An air of almost embarrassment that got under Mac’s skin and made him vow she’d never have to feel that way again. The arcade shops were filled with frilly feminine things and he wanted to buy everything in sight for his wife. And he’d do it, too. He wasn’t rich but he’d managed to hang on to some money along the way, and he could think of nothing he’d rather do than shower his woman with everything she’d ever wanted.

He took a drag on his cigarette. His class ring looked enormous on her delicate hand. One of the first things he wanted to do when they reached New York was buy her a proper wedding ring. Hell—an engagement ring, too, while he was at it. She’d never have to apologize for anything. Not while he was breathing.

By the time Jane had finished the last of her tea, the ship was bobbing like a cork on the ocean. Most of the tables were bolted to the floor of the dining room, as were the side pieces, but chairs slid crazily about while waiters tried to corral them into one place and strap them to anchor hooks cunningly attached at various spots on the wall.

“Take care, folks,” said one of their waiters, a friendly gent from Brighton. “Decks are slippery as ice. I’d be sticking to the Promenade if I were you.”

“The Promenade’s enclosed, isn’t it?” asked Jane as they headed toward the sweeping staircase with the glittering chandeliers swaying overhead.

“Warm, dry, safe.”

Jane’s nose wrinkled. “Deadly dull.”

Mac put his arm about her shoulders and spun her around to face him. “It’s wild out there, Janie. Cold, windy, probably dangerous as hell.”

“I know,” said Jane with a glint of matching wildness in her Wedgwood-blue eyes. “Shall we?”

If Mac had had any doubts about their impulsive marriage, those doubts disappeared that afternoon. They were two of a kind, two crazy individualists who’d rather face a storm head-on than watch it from behind a barrier of glass and steel. She turned her face up to the rain, catching the droplets on her lashes and cheeks and lips. With her dark hair whipping about her face, she was easily the most beautiful sight his jaded eyes had ever seen. She didn’t worry about her hairdo or makeup. Instead she gloried in the elements, in the untamed wonder of nature, the same as he did.

This is right
, he thought as the wind roared in their ears. This was the one woman in the world who could make him happy. One day or one week or one hundred years. It didn’t matter. When something was right, time didn’t mean a damn thing. Nothing mattered except the fact they had found each other.

He’d been around long enough to know there weren’t many women in the world who knew how to laugh in the face of a storm. And Jane didn’t just laugh; she gloried in it. She seemed to gather strength from the violence all around them, as if she drew the storm into herself and made its power her own.

Funny thing. He understood Jane and the world that shaped her better than he understood his own. He’d been gone so long that the world he’d left behind no longer existed. The United States of America had been a sleeping giant when the war began, reluctant to take a stand in the world until the world came banging on her door. Pearl Harbor had been the catalyst that had propelled the country into the spotlight, and from then on, there had been no looking back.

Mac had been in Europe on December 7, 1941. He’d been covering the endless nights of bombing for so long that the sound of destruction was almost a lullaby. He’d enlisted after the Japanese attack. You couldn’t be a red-blooded American male and not feel a sense of outrage that your peaceful world had been forever shattered.

Four years later the war was over and he was again covering the foreign beat. Sure, he’d made a few trips back home but somehow the connection had been severed.

Sailing back to Europe had come as a relief. He felt more comfortable amid the destruction in England than he had amid the splendor of his own country. He couldn’t face those well-fed, well-meaning Americans when elsewhere in the world little kids cried for their mothers as they slowly starved to death. The jump from poverty to plenty had been too big for him at the time.

But the years passed. He covered stories in England and continental Europe, witnessing the slow rebirth being aided by dollars from the Marshall Plan. He traveled to Japan to watch as American dollars rebuilt their shattered economy. You couldn’t stand there on the outskirts of Hiroshima or Nagasaki and not feel a sense of dread at what terrors the dawning of the Atomic Age might hold.

He liked what he did and how he lived, but there was one inescapable fact that soon overwhelmed all others: he was an American through and through. He missed the sights and sounds he had grown up with, the cocky what-the-hell attitude that had endeared the American soldier to many and helped to win the war. Life was short. His time digging through Korean foxholes in search of a story had proved that to him, if nothing else.

He wanted to go home and discover his own country again.

When he purchased passage on the
Queen Mary
, he’d experienced a moment of something close to panic.
You’re really doing it
, his logical mind had observed.
Are you sure there’s a place for you anymore?

Now it no longer mattered. He had Jane by his side, someone who understood the place he was leaving behind. She looked to him to take her hand and guide her through the brand-new world she was going to. What Jane didn’t realize was that he’d be as much of a stranger in paradise as she.

My wife, he thought, feeling the same burst of pride he’d known the night before, when he’d held her in his arms for the first time. Mac Weaver, with his big broad shoulders and big broad smile, had been brought to his knees by the power of love.

When the ship docked at Pier 90 on Monday morning, he’d walk down the gangway with his wife by his side. He couldn’t wait to see the expression on his parents’ faces when he introduced them to the newest member of the Weaver clan.

* * *

Jane wished she could stop time. As she stood beside Mac on the windswept deck of the
Queen Mary
she knew the first moment of complete happiness she’d experienced in her entire life. She’d never been much good at living for the moment. The moments as they passed had not seemed anything to savor, just endless dull bits of time stretching out into the endless gray skies over England. She’d lived her life with little fanfare or cause for celebration. No one to care if she returned to her flat each night happy or sad or lonely. No one to care if she returned to her flat at all, for that matter.

Oh, Leo Donnelly and his wife had befriended her early on when she moved to Liverpool, but Jane had been painfully aware that Leo was her boss, and so her guard had always been up, even in social situations. Besides, Leo’s wife reminded her painfully of her own late mother, and often as not Jane thought up excuses to avoid their weekly get-togethers.

She’d wished she could go some place—any place!—where she wouldn’t be reminded of the war. Some wonderful place unmarked by bombs and deprivation and sad-eyed children calling for their mothers. She’d dreamed of America, of the bright lights and excitement of New York. “Save your pennies, girl,” Leo had said with a laugh whenever the talk turned to travel and daydreams. America was fast and furious and young, a magical place so new it had yet to get bogged down by the past.

How dull and stodgy England seemed compared to the sparkle and glamor to be found just across the pond.

And now she was on her way. Like something in a Hollywood movie, Mac had exploded into her life and given her the one thing she’d never believed would belong to her: a future.

She belonged to someone. What an amazing notion, that. Those simple words said before the priest in Southampton had changed her life forever. Mac would be there to take care of her, to protect her and to love her. He would be her husband and her friend and, God willing, the father of her children. Her hands hovered over her flat belly as she gazed out at the endless expanse of storm-tossed ocean. Maybe right now, right that very second, that miraculous union of sperm and egg was happening, binding her life to Mac’s in the most wondrous way possible.

Maybe that was it, the grand scheme God had in mind when He brought Mac into her life. A child of their own, the very best they both had to offer combined in a baby with eyes as green as his father’s. A baby who would link the people they’d loved and lost with the future that stretched out before them. Mac’s brother, Doug. Her mother and father and brother. A baby would cast light onto the darkness of memory and intertwine their lives so tightly nothing could ever tear them apart. Not even death.

I’ll be the best wife in the world, Mac
, she vowed as he cradled her against him while the storm raged all around.
I promise you you’ll never regret this—not for a minute.

She’d be wife and mother, friend and lover, and more American than Eleanor Roosevelt and Mamie Eisenhower rolled into one.

“It will always be like this,” she said, her voice lost in the shriek of the North Atlantic winds. This magic, this sense of wonder would only deepen with time and experience.

“No, it won’t.”

She looked up at him. “No?”

“No.” He kissed her soundly. “It’s going to be better, Janie.”

“It couldn’t possibly.”

“Trust me,” said Mac, who was old enough to know better. “The best is yet to be.”

Christmas 1990

“Liz!” Linda’s voice reached her from a great distance. “Aren’t you listening to a thing we’ve been saying?”

Liz Weaver blinked and stared at the red-haired woman before her, almost surprised to see the spare lines of her emerald green dress. “What was that?”

“I give up.” Linda turned toward her cousin Christine. “She’s from another planet entirely. Can you imagine getting so engrossed in this dusty pile of letters that you can forget it’s Christmas Day?”

Christine, who was much like Catherine, her mother, winked at Liz. “I can’t imagine the kids ever letting that happen. I doubt if Grandma Dot will be able to keep them away from their stockings much longer.”

“Just once I’d love to have an elegant Christmas like you see on television,” said Linda with a sigh. She brushed at specks of lint and dust on her short skirt. “If I’d known I was going on a treasure hunt, I would have dressed for the occasion.”

Liz just smiled and continued sifting through a towering stack of
Photoplay
and
Modern Screen
magazines that Linda’s mother, Nancy, had collected through the years. Linda hated being reminded that she’d been born with a stainless-steel spoon in her mouth and not a silver one. The photo albums and scrapbooks of her childhood in Levittown must have struck a chord in the almost painfully stylish mother of two. Nancy had never turned away from her roots or her love of movie stars and fashion magazines, much to her daughter’s chagrin.

Christine glanced at her watch. “I should be going downstairs,” she said, meeting Liz’s eyes across the attic room. “I invited someone to join us for dinner.” She said it casually, as if it wasn’t a live hand grenade thrown into their midst.

“You did what!” Linda glared at her cousin.

“I invited a guest for dinner.” Christine was as cool and reasonable as her elegant mother.

“Our last dinner together at the house and you ask a stranger to join us?” Linda’s voice was heavy with scorn and disbelief. “How could you?”

Christine didn’t so much as bat an eye as she turned to Liz. “You don’t have any objections, do you?”

“As a matter of fact I do.” She objected to anything that might draw her away from the task at hand: sorting and packing these priceless mementos of their common past. “Bring me up a turkey sandwich, why don’t you? I think I’ll keep working.” Time was running out.

“Oh, just toss everything into a box and be done with it,” said Linda, her tone cross. “You can hole up in your apartment and read to your heart’s content.”

“I don’t have an apartment,” Liz said calmly. “I have a hotel suite.” She’d never stayed put long enough to put down roots. There had never been a reason. The world had beckoned to her with open arms and she had run to embrace it, the same way her parents had nearly forty years ago. And she had no regrets.

“The diaries,” her mother had said that morning as they’d dressed for Christmas at the Wilson house. “Your father and I stored them at Dot’s after your grandmother sold the house.”

The diaries kept by her parents during the early years of their marriage were the one thing Liz had never seen. Liz knew the stories about their serendipitous meeting, about their impulsive wedding and glamorous transatlantic crossing to their new life in America. Theirs was a passionate and vital marriage; you had only to look at the two of them together to know that sometimes the most improbable odds yielded the most wondrous results.

“Read them,” her mother had said.

“They’re so... personal,” Liz had protested. She’d never hesitated reading any of the other materials. Why had these diaries given her pause?

“We lived it,” said her mother as she French-braided her silky dark hair, only lightly sprinkled with silver. “They’re yours now, lovey, same as everything else up there.”

Everyone else had their own lives, their own memories. Only Liz lived vicariously, flying from city to city, writing about other people’s sorrows and joys, their hopes and dreams. She was the only one without a family of her own, without her own scrapbook of wedding invitations and baby teeth and first-grade report cards. Was it any wonder she was the one in charge of nostalgia for the combined Weaver and Wilson families?

One week from today, the door to 70-15 Hansen Street would swing shut for the very last time and Liz knew nothing would ever be the same after that.