Long-Awaited Wedding

Dear Allen,

I love getting your letters, but I wonder if I have them all. Sometimes Mother beats me to the mailbox. But would she keep your letters from me?

I have learned to listen for the mailman’s truck on the street behind ours and to hurry outside and wait for him to reach our block. When I do that, he waves and gives me the mail. Allen, I tuck your letters inside my pocket so Mother will not see them. And at midnight, when everyone is sleeping, I read them.

Mother tells me we are too young to be in love. It makes me sad. I want my mother to like you. To be nice to you. We were such good friends and now she seems like a stranger to me. My loving you has hurt her. She kept asking me about that weekend we went away together. Five months ago now. She knows.

Two weeks ago she took me to the doctor. Mother is furious with us. And so I must tell you that I am carrying your child. I am five months pregnant. Yes, I am going to have a baby. Your baby, Allen.

At first I was terrified. I didn’t know where to turn. I couldn’t tell anyone, not even my friends at school. I tried to hide it from Mother as long as I could. When we left the doctor’s office, she wouldn’t speak to me. Even now I can hear Mother upstairs, packing what we will take with us. She insists that we must move. She will not allow me to disgrace the family name.

I have refused to go back to Indiana with her. And so we are moving to Running Springs. But I will not be far away. I have promised you that I will wait for you. No matter what Mother says, I will be here.

Your father came to our house again last week. But Mother would not let me see him, not the way I look now. But I was leaning over the banister and heard her tell him to go away—the way she told you to go away. Your father insists that I must never see you again. Our parents are determined to keep us apart. But, dear Allen, summer is coming.

Of all the seasons, Allen, summer is best. For you will come again in summer. Back to me as you promised. For now, I feel like we have been torn apart like the dull brown leaves outside my window, drifting from the trees into the yard. Falling before their time.

Last month I found Cyprus on the map. I wish that I could be with you, but I am not as pretty as when you went away. I put my hand on my belly and it is full and round, blossoming with our baby. I am frightened, but I am glad, too, because it is part of you. I cannot touch your face or lips or hold your hands. If I could, I would put your hand on my belly and let you feel our baby kick.

Mother won’t talk about her grandchild. She keeps me isolated at home, but when we move to Running Springs, I can walk in the woods over the red-soiled trails covered with twigs that do not snap and leaves that do not crunch. I will look for footprints not my own. I will be looking for your footprints, Allen, and pretending that you are there with me.

* * *

Maureen sat at her desk at Fabian Industries, crying. She had never mailed the letter. Twenty years ago, while she was still penning the words to Allen, the phone had rung.

“It’s for you,” her mother had called up the stairs. “Mr. Kladis is on the line.”

“Allen? Is it Allen?”

“It’s about him.” Her mother’s voice had sounded shocked, stricken. And as she handed Maureen the phone, she had said gently, “Darling, you must be brave. It’s Allen’s father.”

Across the bottom of the letter, she had written the postscript that Allen would never read:

They tell me that you are gone now, Allen. Dead. Killed in Cyprus. Drowned in the waters near the island you loved. Your mother’s island. Your mother’s people.

I clamp my ears, not willing to hear those words. Surely they are lying to me—my mother and your father. How can you be gone and never know about the baby? You promised to come back to me. And I sit alone, feeling our baby kicking inside of me. Our baby is alive, and you are dead. I am so afraid. And I weep because you will never know about our child. No. They are lying to me, dear Allen. I must keep listening for your footsteps, longing for summer to come.

Maureen heard Eddie McCormick’s thudding, dragging steps coming down the corridor, then his voice speaking heatedly to someone else. The footsteps stopped, doors from hers, the argument between the two men raging. Maureen placed her treasures back into the jewelry strongbox, the beaded baby bracelet on top of Allen’s picture, her unmailed letter folded beneath them. She shut out the sound of the men in the corridor. Allen is alive, she thought. And Allen was married to someone else. Like I was married to someone else so briefly. The seasons had closed in on both of them. Still, she felt sadness for him. Allen with his unforgettable smile was too young to be a widower already.

Chapter Three

Maureen pulled herself forward, her arms resting on the desk, her hands clasped. Her eyes remained closed. Even when she opened them seconds later, it was as though she faced a thick fog bank, the white vapors slowly lifting, a figure coming to meet her. It was an image at first, swirling her back in time…and then a remembered face. A remembered time. A remembered place.

Allen—the memory of all her yesterdays, the unhealed wound of her quiet tomorrows. Allen—tousled and barefoot in a blue wet suit, a surfboard under one arm. Allen—defiantly facing her mother, declaring his undying love for Maureen. Allen in uniform, turning back to wave as he boarded the plane that would carry him back to his ship. The ship that would take him to Cyprus.

Allen! Allen, out of her life so long ago, yet crashing back into her thoughts again and again. Refusing to leave on this harried evening as she sat alone at Fabian Industries.

It had not been like that with Carl Davenport, the vigorous, fun-loving man she had married. There had been good moments with Carl, but when he died, her grief had been measured. She had grieved for Carl, a dignified sorrow for someone who had been special. She remembered him periodically with sadness for his fast-paced commitment to racing, to living, even to her. With sadness for the dynamic, energetic way he lived, the foolish way he died.

Whenever she thought of Carl, she recalled a laughing, spirited man who lacked nothing financially, and yet who sacrificed everything careening around a race course. Sometimes on holidays or special occasions, Maureen still visited Carl’s mother in her isolated fifteen-room estate, enduring the long hours of a mother’s reflections while the elderly woman talked as though her son would walk into the room any minute.

With Allen, it was different. She had no ties with Allen’s family. The twenty-year-old memories were her own. She had grieved deeply for Allen, and when she remembered him now, she did so with searing intensity and always with thoughts of his child—a grown young woman now whose image she couldn’t conjure up to comfort her. That part of Allen that she could only think of as “Meggy.”

Allen. The well-remembered face of her first love with its Athenian features, a lock of wet black hair cresting over his broad forehead, the mesmerizing dark-brown eyes, the amused tilt of his head as he waved goodbye. A remembered time: high noon on the hard-packed beach. The sliver of a midnight moon peeking through the trees. The five o’clock flight that left on time. And the remembered places: Huntington Beach Pier, the iso lated campsite at Big Bear, the crowded terminal at John Wayne.

Now with missiles and mergers and mayhem crowding in on her, it could well be Allen Kladis who would unknowingly take her down, topple her corporate climb— A sharp knock on her door announced Eddie McCormick’s arrival. Without waiting for Maureen’s reply, McCormick shoved open the door and came in, a dark-haired stranger behind him.

She caught her breath. It was like seeing Allen walk into her room, the stranger’s likeness to Allen was so striking. Her palms dampened; her locked fingers tightened. She looked away, her eyes focusing on Eddie McCormick.

“Davenport, what in blazes went wrong this evening?” McCormick roared.

She steeled herself for a dressing-down and prepared to fight back, but at the sight of Eddie’s ashen face, she bit her tongue. The once robust man came across the room in a halting gait, strands of his sparse gray hair falling limply across his forehead. A year ago he’d been a giant of a man, but his illness was taking its toll.

“Well, Davenport, do you have an explanation for what happened tonight with that missile?”

“Eddie, I didn’t give that order.”

“Who then? Some idiot in your de-department”

She heard the quiver in his voice, knew that his anxiety was peaking. She considered offering him a chair, but thought better of it. These days he took common courtesy as unwanted sympathy. She did pity him, but not in the usual sense of the word. She ached for him. She hated his struggle for control, his need to blame.

Lately he had taken to standing with his hands folded, his stronger one gripping his left wrist in a futile attempt to control the tremors. Tonight he stood with his left hand in his pocket, but she could still see the jerking of his upper arm.

Parkinson’s disease is a cruel adversary, she thought.

She was accustomed to discussing industry problems with Eddie, but the thought of Allen Kladis’s brother standing in the shadows, listening to her, was disconcerting. She tried to keep a clear head, saying, “The order to launch was phoned in to the air base, but no one in my department gave that order, Eddie.”

“A gremlin?” he scoffed.

She ignored his sarcasm. “I talked with Roland Spencer at the Pentagon. He insists that someone at Larhaven made that call.”

McCormick dropped in the chair across from her. “I didn’t want the Pentagon involved.”

“Our contract is with the Pentagon. You are familiar with the last communication from them. No more tests on the Fabian missiles until the problems are corrected. I had nothing to gain by giving an order to the contrary.”

“My position,” McCormick said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Taking over before Larhaven does?”

She didn’t argue. That had been the original plan. He would take an early retirement, and Maureen, groomed and qualified to fill the job, would have been Fabian’s first female CEO. Her disappointment at missing that opportunity was as keen and sharp as his mood swings.

Moving to the top had slipped through her fingers. Once Allen Kladis learned that she was on the corporate rung at Fabian, what chance did she have? Allen had always liked competition—but from his first love? If he had wanted to see her again, he would have come back long ago, wouldn’t he?

Sighing, she said, “Eddie, what matters now is who gave that order at Larhaven. And whether it will affect our government contracts.” She aimed her barb at the stranger. “As far as I’m concerned, Eddie, we’re still in business until Fabian and Larhaven sign on the dotted line.”

“Seems to me it is a bit more involved than signatures,” the stranger said.

Maureen allowed herself to look at him again, forced herself to do so. She drew in another quick breath. He was a shorter, heavier version of Allen, and equally attractive if it weren’t for the cunning twist of his mouth. In that flash she likened him to his father. She had seen the head of the clan twice—a stocky, powerful man, a tad over five-eleven, with an authoritative voice and steely black eyes. His wide mouth had curled at the corner—exactly the way this man’s was doing now.

She wanted to cry out, to ask about Allen.

The stranger eyed her curiously. He was casually dressed in dark slacks, an open-neck shirt, a forest-green sports jacket. He held up his hands and shrugged. “I’m a Kladis, but I don’t give the orders.” His voice was deep, half-amused, and his eyes mocking as they met hers. “That’s my brother’s department.”

Even without the name, she would have guessed it. The family resemblance was definite, the voice quality so much alike. “Allen Kladis?” she asked, thrusting the name between them, challenging him, hoping that he would speak of his brother.

“I’m Nick. Allen’s my elder brother, the company CEO.”

“The owner of the company, then? The one who would have given the order to the air base. Call him. Find out what’s going on.”

He winced, his gaze shifting quickly to McCormick and then to a space beyond Maureen’s desk. “Mr. McCormick, you told me you’d get to the bottom of this.”

He nodded. “But, Mr. Kladis, this is Maureen’s department”

Nick turned his gaze on her again. “Then I think you’re making a mistake, Miss Davenport. Larhaven had nothing to do with that launch.”

“Mrs. Davenport,” she corrected. “And Roland Spencer rarely gets it wrong.” She had to hear Allen’s voice—to know that he was really alive. “Why don’t you call Mr. Kladis and find out what’s going on?”

His eyes and tongue snapped at the same moment “You’re out of line, Davenport. We wouldn’t do anything to stop the merger.”

Wouldn’t you? she thought.

She knew that she wanted to place the blame for the misfired missile on Allen Kladis. But even more, she wanted to hear his voice.

“The number?” she said, lifting the receiver.

“Look, don’t bother my brother now. Allen won’t thank us for calling him this late at night.”

“Then when? When can I discuss this problem with him? The reputation of Fabian Industries is at stake,” she said evenly. “I have to have answers when Roland Spencer calls in the morning.”

“That’s why I’m here. I’m capable of making company decisions.” He glanced at McCormick.

But Eddie seemed at a loss for words. She wanted to cover for him. “We should stop production on the Fabian missiles,” she suggested. “Can I tell Spencer you’ve given the order for that?”

He nodded. “If that’s what you think best.”

“You’ll lose the government contract that way,” Nick argued.

“It will just affect part of the assembly line. The tests for the flaws will go on. It’s a good program. I dare say your brother will be pleased for the millions it will bring in.”

“Finances? That’s my department,” Nick told her proudly.

She frowned. “I thought your brother Allen was CEO.”

“Our father left the company to the three Kladis boys.”

But he left Allen in charge, she thought. She was certain of that. He had been grooming his eldest son for the job. It had been the reason that the elder Kladis didn’t want Maureen standing in the way.

“Oh, Allen got his hog’s share of the company all right Fifty percent. But Christophorous and I are still in the running.”

She heard the bitterness in his voice.

“Christophorous?” she asked.

“Chris, the kid brother. The one who likes flying better than building planes. Couldn’t care less who runs the company.”

For some reason she remembered Allen calling him the “waif” of the family—the non-Greek, the question mark, the independent thinker. “Dad will never mold him. He came along ten years after the rest of us. Blond and fair-skinned and Mother’s favorite.”

But it was Allen who mattered to Maureen.

She stood silently, the receiver dangling between her fingers. Staring straight into Nick Kladis’s dark gaze she asked, “Did you give that order to launch the missile, Mr. Kladis? To help the merger go through quickly?”

He didn’t answer, but Maureen was certain that she had struck a bull’s-eye. If Nick gave the order, was Allen even aware of it?

“Were you trying to humiliate Fabian Industries? Trying to force the bidding figure down?”

Or were you trying to undermine Allen’s leadership? she wondered. She had to talk to Allen. Or had Allen changed? Had he become shrewd and cunning like his brother Nick? As cagey and cruel as his father had been?

“I need answers, Mr. Kladis.”

“Wait until I tell my brother that a woman is handling the missile project.” He laughed sardonically, his dark eyes smiling nonetheless.

He was outwitting her for now. “Will you be around in the morning?” she asked.

He made a point of pushing back his cuff, glancing at his expensive watch. “It’s already morning. I’ll be flying out in a few hours. But we can talk by phone when you know what happened.”

You’re behind it, she thought. But why? You had no reason to destroy me, to tamper with my authority. But you’re in a power play with your brother.

“Then we’ll talk later,” she said.

“I’ll let Allen know.” Again his eyes were mocking, amused.

Long after the men had gone, Maureen lingered at her desk, thinking about Allen. She had long ago come to terms with him dying on Cyprus, but to learn now that he was alive—that she had been deceived by both father and son—was unthinkable. Now the only picture she could conjure up in her mind was the youthful Allen, the young man she had fallen in love with, untainted by the Kladis’s greed and conniving. But the businessman? The head of an aircraft company? Had he changed?

Meeting him again would be painful. Not meeting him would be unbearable.

Slowly she brought her attention back to the crisis at hand and jotted down notes for the morning schedule. At 2:00 a.m. she left a message on Dwayne Crocker’s answering machine, asking him to meet her at eight in the morning. She had a vague recollection of him talking about new statistics that would iron out the flaws on the Fabian missile project. She wished she had listened more closely. It was the most important thing he had said all evening.

When she came face-to-face with Allen Kladis, she wanted answers that would guarantee her own job, and secure her reputation. Dwayne Crocker, with his mathematical genius, could give her those answers.

She tidied up her desk, closed up her office and locked it, then went through the security checks with a forced smile and a pleasant good-night to the security guards as she walked out to the parking lot. The night was mostly gone, but automatically, as she reached the car, she glanced up and saw the evening star still glowing brightly in the pre-dawn sky.

Chapter Four

In the Pacific Northwest, on what proved a surprisingly warm and dry spring morning, Allen Kladis moved barefoot across the thick carpet of his condominium. He paused at the mantelpiece, staring down at Adrian in the framed picture of their wedding day. Setting his water tumbler down, he braced his hands against the shelf, his gaze fixed on the bride and groom in the photo. His chest constricted, the emotional pain tormenting him with its harshness, its swift onset. It was a pain that never completely went away.

Had they really been that young, that jubilant? He saw it now, their absolute trust as they looked at each other, so confident that they had a lifetime ahead of them, not just twelve years. He felt cheated, robbed too soon of his dearest friend.

Adrian at twenty-three had been beautiful in satin and lace, his grandmother’s clutch pearls around her slender neck. In the photo, she had just tilted her chin up, her blue eyes meeting his. Brilliant peacock-blue eyes. She looked so trusting, sheltered there in the crook of his arm. He looked rather striking himself in his black tuxedo.

“A handsome pair,” the photographer had said.

Allen slid his tumbler across the fireplace shelf and moved three steps to the other picture of Adrian by herself. He had taken it two days after meeting her out by Snoqualmie Falls, where the 268-foot waterfalls had drenched them. In the photo she was laughing, pushing her wet, windblown hair back from her lovely face.

Without these two photos and without the shoe boxes of snapshots that she had hidden under the bed—photos she was always going to put in albums when she found the time—Allen would not remember how beautiful she had once been.

Adrian at thirty-five had been barely recognizable. Holding up his tumbler of iced water, he saluted her. “I still miss you,” he said.

A year and a half ago she had been the healthiest woman he knew. Then, within weeks, she was suddenly tired, not feeling well, nauseated. Oh, Adrian, he thought, forgive me. I was so elated, so certain you were finally embarking on a rolling sea of morning sickness. A baby. The baby we always wanted. But you knew, didn’t you?

He tilted his head back and ran one hand through his thick hair, still wet and unruly from the shower. He tried to block out the memory of picking her up in his arms that day and saying, “If you’re pregnant, you’ll make me the happiest man on earth.”

Her smile had matched the glow in the photograph. But ten seconds after twirling her around and setting her down, she ran to the washbasin, deathly pale, deathly sick. When they saw the family doctor the next morning, Allen grinned and said, “Just tell us, Doc. When is the baby due?”

Allen had never considered any other diagnosis until the doctor came back into the examining room. “Adrian is not pregnant,” he said kindly. “But let’s run some blood tests and see what’s making her so tired. I’ll call you when the reports come back.”

Four days later he referred them to a hematologist “What’s wrong?” Allen asked.

“Mr. Kladis, let’s not get alarmed. Let’s just see what the specialist says.”

What he had said was “acute myeloblastic leukemia.”

“What are you telling us?” Allen demanded, sitting with Adrian across from the large mahogany desk.

Calmly, the physician repeated the words and added his medical mumbo jumbo. “We’ll do a bone-marrow aspiration and chemotherapy to induce remission. Chemo may give her an extra few months.”

Allen had doubled his fist and lunged forward. If it had not been for the grace of God and Adrian’s swift grip on his wrist, he would have knuckled the hematologist’s jaw and silenced his bluntness.

“My wife is not dying!” Allen had shouted, his angry words bombarding the four walls. “She’s as healthy as I am. We swim every day at the club. Sail on Lake Washington. Ski all winter. Don’t come in here with your crazy diagnosis, doctor. My wife is pregnant. Take another look at those tests.”

“Don’t, Allen,” Adrian had said, reaching across the chair and clutching his arm. “I’ll be all right You’ll see. We’ll fight this together.”

But it was a crushing, one-sided battle. Five months later, he sat by her hospital bedside, barely touching her bruised hand, not holding her the way he wanted to do because her pain was too severe. She was shockingly thin. Dark half-moons clung beneath her sunken eyes. She had fought a good fight—but she was losing. For days she slipped in and out of consciousness. On that last day, she came out of the murky depths of a coma and cried, “Allen, take me home.”

His grip tightened on the mantel as he remembered the lie fitly spoken. “I will, honey, as soon as you’re better.”

You knew I was lying, he recalled. But I wanted to take you home again.

A tiny smile had touched her cracked lips. “What’s happening to me? Where do I go after this?”

“Honey, I don’t understand. What are you asking me?”

“I’m dying. You know that, don’t you, Allen?”

He nodded, not wanting to lie to her anymore.

Her chest heaved. “But what happens to me when I die?”

He’d spent hours thinking about that—a mahogany casket with a white-satin lining. A cemetery plot, six feet deep. A miserable memorial with useless platitudes. He didn’t need anyone to remind him how lovely she was, how much he loved her. But Adrian hadn’t wanted to hear about a casket or cemetery plot any more than he did. She’s talking about herself, he thought. About what happens to her when she dies.

He had struggled to his feet, leaned down and kissed her lips gently, the weight and pressure of his chest forcing the oxygen tube to hiss. “Honey, I’ll get the chaplain for you.”

“No, don’t leave me…I’m afraid. You tell me.”

How could he? He didn’t know. She winced as he took her hands. “You’ll go to heaven.”