Cherry Girl

“J ust like my brother to be out of the country when there’s work to be done.”

Elaina was checking her text messages as I drove us to her mum’s.

“This is what he sent me: ‘Sorry sis, off to Paris. Big clients with deep wallets have me shouting Vive la France! Scotty can do without my help just fine. He’s bigger and stronger than me. –Ian.’” She scoffed at her mobile in disgust. “What an arse.”

“True. But think about if he did help move you into my flat how we wouldn’t be able to get rid of him after. He’d stay for hours and hours, drinking all my Guinness and expecting us to feed him.”

“That’s a very good point, Captain.” She turned in the seat to face me as I drove, a frown marring the smoothness of her brow.

“What are you thinking about, Cherry Girl? I see those cogs in your pretty head churning something fierce.”

“Well you should be keeping your eyes on the road and not the cogs in my head,” she retorted, in that sassy way that made me want to do really filthy things, involving her pouty lips and my cock.

“You can tell me whatever it is, you know.” I reached a hand over and found one of hers. “It’s in my new job description. All part of being your man.”

She pulled my hand up to her soft sweet lips and kissed my palm. “It’s Mum. She’s been drinking more in the last few days and I’m worried about why.”

“Yeah, I noticed. And you think it’s because you’re moving out of her house?”

She shook her head. “Don’t think so. I was away for years and she lived alone. I’ve only been back for a short while so she couldn’t have gotten that dependent upon me in just a few weeks. Besides, her whole point of leading me back to London was to get us back together. She wants this for us. Why would it send her down now that her wish has happened?”

“I don’t know. And you’re right, it doesn’t really make sense.” Caroline Morrison’s strength and devotion to me had sustained me for many years. Her love and support had never been questioned. In my head, she took over the role of mother that my gran had previously held. There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for her if she needed me. “Let’s try to get her to come to the flat with us today. She can see where we’re living with her own eyes and know she’s wanted, and welcome to visit any time she likes. I’ll take you both to dinner after we get your things sorted, and maybe we can do some detective tag teaming, and pull it out of her.”

She sighed into the seat and gave me a half smile. “You are aware that when we chose to adopt you, we made out the better in the deal, aren’t you?”

I shook my head. “No, darlin’. I am the luckiest man in the world. I believe that, and I never forget when I gained Ian as a friend, I gained not only a brother, but a whole family.”

Elaina

The minute we entered the house I knew something was off. It was far too quiet. Neil noticed, too. I could see it in how his body tensed, and in the way he moved quickly but methodically, going through the house for clues.

“Mum?” I called loudly.

Silence.

“She was expecting us. She knew we were coming at noon to pack up everything,” I reasoned, now starting to really worry.

“Her car is here. Maybe she popped in to see a neighbour or something—” He paused, tilting his head up to the ceiling as if he’d heard a noise. He pointed up. “Your attic has the pull-down staircase doesn’t it?”

“Yes, but why would she go up to the attic—”

A loud thump sounded right above us.

Neil was already up on the second floor and opening the latch that released the attic staircase to come down before I even made it half-way. The steps hadn’t had time to unfold completely and he was already climbing them.

“Is she up there?” I asked impatiently.

I heard him say, “Oh, Mum, that’s no good.”

“I am fine, dear,” Her voice sounded like my mother, but when I made it up the stairs and saw her for myself, she didn’t look at all like my mother. She was very disordered, still wearing her robe, hair not brushed, definitely intoxicated and it was barely noon.

“Mum…what’s happened?” I sat down beside her on the old chaise lounge and put my arm around her. “Did you sleep the whole night up here? It’s freezing.” I rubbed up and down her arm to get some circulation and warmth into her.

She held out a hand toward the room and then let it fall. “Oh, Elaina…” She turned her head away from me in shame and sobbed quietly. Boxes of my father’s clothes, and mementos, were opened and strewn all about us, along with an empty bottle of Bombay Sapphire and Schweppes. The most significant item though, appeared to be what looked like a letter pressed to her breast.

I tried to make eye contact but she wouldn’t look at me. She just continued to cry with her head turned away, with that paper clutched to her heart.

Neil crouched down to meet her at eye-level. “What’s this, Mum?” He took hold of the corner of the paper. “May I read? Did something in this letter upset you?”

She allowed him to pull it from her hand.

“What does it say?” I demanded, knowing full well he hadn’t had enough time to figure out what it was about.

Sometimes you just know when things are bad. The sense of dread cloaking me affirmed without a shadow of a doubt, that whatever the letter contained—it was something very ominous.

Neil’s face went pale, and my heart skipped a beat as I continued to rub up and down Mum’s arm.

“It’s from the US Department of Defense in Washington D.C..” He looked at me with compassion in his beautiful dark eyes that loved me so well, and tried to soften the blow.

My hand flew up to my mouth in a gesture to brace myself. “Dad?”

“Yes. It says they’ve identified the remains of George Morrison through advanced DNA analysis. It is a request for the wishes of the family to be made known to them so…the final resting place for his bodily remains can be, um…resolved.” Neil hated to say those words to us. I could tell it hurt him to speak them.

“Oh…Mum…” Nothing else would form on my lips. I was so stunned, trying to process what the letter was asking of us, and worried about the present state of my mother, I couldn’t really come up with anything better. What was there to say? Dad was gone, as he’d been since the day his plane had crashed on September 11. This certainly brought up so much of the feelings I’d put away deep, deep inside of me. They shot straight to the top of the emotional queue, all in a split second. I couldn’t even imagine how Mum had been dealing with it…and that she’d kept it to herself and not told her children. Well, I could see how she dealt with it. By way of a bottle of Bombay.

And that scared the absolute shit out of me.

“Mum…when did you get the letter?” Neil asked gently.

She choked out another anguished sob and said, “It came a week ago Friday.”

I was afraid to ask the next question, but knew I had to. I looked at Neil and gathered my courage, because I had a feeling about what she would say. “What do you want us to do, Mum?”

She snapped her head around to look at me, took my cheek in her hand and held it there. Tears streaming down her lined, but still beautiful face, she told me what she wanted.

“My darling, please—please go there and bring him back—bring Daddy back to his home—to the family that loves him. I cannot b-bear the thought of him being…th-there all alone…and so far away from us.”

“Okay, Mum. I will go.”

I answered my mother quickly because I already knew what she was going to ask me. Also, because there was no other answer I could’ve given to her. I would go to Washington D.C. to get my father and bring him home. No matter how hard this was going to hurt, I’d do what had to be done.

“And I’ll be right there with her,” Neil said, embracing both of us into his strong arms, that thankfully could bear the weight of two broken hearts.

Neil

The mortuary at Dover Air Force Base housed the remains for victims of the Pentagon crash on 9/11. I wondered how they’d handled the hundreds of families that had come through there, grieving for lost loved ones over the past decade. I mostly worried about how they were going to handle things with Elaina. I pulled her hand, clasped in mine, up to my lips as we walked down the hallway together.

“Okay?” I asked.

Her midnight-blue eyes blinked at me solemnly, and then she nodded. “I’m really glad you’re here with me.”

“Nothing could have kept me away. Wherever you go, so must I.”

Elaina mouthed the words “love you” to me as we followed behind the servicewoman who was leading us.

She stopped us at a room that appeared to be set up, just as a viewing area in a funeral parlor would be. Darkened lighting, rich décor with stained-glass windows, and even a platform of sorts. This whole experience was eerie. The very idea that this facility had returned partial remains, so many times, to so many families—the Yanks had been forced to make a room especially for the purpose—was depressing. I worried about what Elaina would be presented with. It didn’t take profound logic to understand that there wasn’t going to be a body for George Morrison. If there had been a body for him, it would’ve been identified almost immediately, not a decade later. There would be very little for the family to claim, and I ached for my girl, and her mother, and brother over it.

“Right through here is where you’ll take possession.” Staff Sergeant Knowles gestured with her arm. “The documentation is on the altar beside your father’s remains, and you’ll take that with you as well.” She gave instructions for Elaina and spoke to her directly. “This room is yours for however long you need it. When you’d like to leave, please use the exit out the hall and to the right. As you come out of the building, you’ll see the car waiting to take you back to your hotel.” She smiled placidly, as if she’d done her small speech thousands of times and could recite it in her sleep. “Whenever you’re ready, though. Again, please take all the time you need.”

Yes, Dover AFB had done this far too many times for my liking. The Yanks had a protocol, which had been honed to perfection because of it. I hated the whole thing. I hated that George Morrison had been killed in a terrorist attack. I hated that a good man had been snuffed out needlessly, as so many others had been, in a pointless war, over semantics…and ideals that would never change any minds. Stupid.

My own service, in the very same war, had made me somewhat of a cynic. Seeing troops die right in front of me was something my mind probably would never let go of. Lost friends and brothers, people you talked to, ate meals with. People you trusted with your life. Lost. Taken. Dead. Was hard for me to evade feelings of guilt, when I still had a life, and they no longer did. Why them and not me?

I also hated that the daughter had to be here claiming the few small bits of her father, a decade after his death, so the family had something to bury. I hated what the circumstances of his death had done to Mum, to Ian, and to Elaina. It brought home the knowledge of how quickly somebody you loved could be taken away from you forever. Like Gran—like my own mother.

Sergeant Knowles gave a salute and left us, the sound of her boots in regulated step, tapping out a beat as she departed, leaving us in quiet once again.

Elaina started forward to the altar, still holding tightly to my hand. She hadn’t broken down or been visibly upset by going there, but I knew it had to be very hard on her to be the one to actually make the trip. There was never a doubt in my mind about coming with her. She needed me and that was all. Family came first, no matter what. The Morrisons were my family.

We stopped at the altar and looked down at the two things placed there. An envelope and a small square box made of cardboard, with a self-closing lid and label marked with his name and address.

Elaina put her hand out and touched it. “It’s so tiny…”

I didn’t know what to say. I just put my arm around her and looked down at the small, tidy box containing some small portion of her dad.

A whole person reduced to what could fit inside a minute cardboard box.

“Let’s go now,” she said.

Elaina picked up the box and the envelope in her hands and looked up at me. Not much expression on her beautiful face, just a kind of blankness that showed me she was suffering from no small amount of shock. She had to be in disbelief at what she’d been given of her father to bring home.

“I want to leave this place.”

So I walked her outside of the building and into the sunshine. A few puffy white clouds in a clear blue autumn sky displayed above our heads. We both looked up at it and I imagined we were both thinking the same thought that didn’t need to be expressed out loud.

This day was very much like the final day of George Morrison’s life.

Elaina

I sat at the table in our hotel room and stared at the box. A box that held some small parts of my father inside it. So many emotions were boiling around inside my head. Things I’d put aside over the years because the passage of time does dull the ache when you have to live daily life. Also, I’d been a child when he’d died, so the more years that passed without him, made the time I’d had with my father become shorter by comparison. In a way, death is easier than letting go. When the person is gone, you have no choice but to accept that fact. Death is final. When they are still alive but lost to you, the grief stays alive, too.

But Mum had had many wonderful years with my dad. I thought about Neil, and how it would be for me if something like this happened to us. If he was just…gone. And there was never another chance to be together again. I shuddered. Yeah, G&T’s every day didn’t seem like something that far off the mark, when I put it in my terms. My mother had lost her husband, the father of her children, the love of her life. Who was I to judge how she handled her grief? I didn’t even know how I would present this—what should I even call it?—portion of my dad to my mother, when we arrived back home.

“Neil, I can’t bring him back to Mum in this…box. There has to be something better we can find.”

His response was to bring his hand up to the back of my neck and rub with his thumb gently back and forth. He’d been so good about everything, showing me, with his quiet strength and support, how much he loved me, and my family. I’d done a number on Neil when I’d left him six years ago. I realized now, how much my abandonment had hurt him to the point he was unreasonably worried about me going anywhere without him. I suppose he was still afraid I might not come back.

This was something I agonized over each time I saw the signs of his obsessive worry about me. It made me feel guilty and I didn’t like feeling that way. I knew he had me on surveillance in his office at work, that he could watch me at my station and hear me talking to clients and such. I was being patient with him for now, but I didn’t think it was healthy for us, either.

“I saw some shops on the street like antiques and even a pawn shop, I think. Maybe you can find something suitable in one of them. You want to go right now?” he asked.

“You don’t have to come with me, you know.” I sighed without meaning to. “I’ll be fine by myself. It’s just a block of shops on the same street as this hotel.”

He shook his head at me and frowned. “I’m coming with—”

“You don’t have to worry anymore, babe. I know I hurt you badly, and I own up to what I did to you by leaving like that.” I put my hand on his face. “But I’ll always come back to you. I love you and I can’t live without you. There is nothing that will ever keep me from my man again. I’ll always come back to you. Promise.”

The look he gave me nearly split my heart in two. His eyes turned glassy and he brought his head to my lap and just rested it there, saying nothing. He reached for my hand and clasped it against his lips. I ran my fingers through his hair with my other hand and we just stayed like that for a while. No words needed. We communicated just fine without them.

Decisions were permanent, and although we could regret some of them, we couldn’t call them back. I had made some poor ones. Neil had too. I guess the best we could hope for, was to love each other as honestly as possible on each day we had left together. And hope for many, many long years of those days in our future.

He still had his head in my lap when he asked, “I want to take you somewhere before we go back to London. Please?”

“Of course, my darling,” I answered immediately. “Wherever you go, so must I.”