A Virgin River Christmas (Virgin River #4)(55)

She stared at him for a long moment. “Holy Jesus,” she finally said. “Is that how you think it was? That it was up to you? And that your actions made my life a nightmare?” She shook her head. “That’s not how it was. You should’ve just read the damn letters!”

He stared down at the pile in front of him. Then he lifted his eyes to hers. So, she’d been into his stuff, found them, knew they’d never been opened.

“Here’s how it was—”

“Marcie,” he said, his eyes darkening in regret. Pain. “Don’t, okay?”

“God, I thought I was the one who needed to understand,” she said, taking a delicate sip of the liquor. She made a face and pursed her lips, then said, “You’re gonna listen now. We lost our mom when Drew was only two, I was four, and Erin was eleven. Our dad raised us, but when I was fifteen he died suddenly—it was a coronary during a routine knee surgery. Very unusual, very rare. Erin was a recent college graduate, headed for law school, so she stepped in, became the parent, and we all stayed in the house that Dad raised us in and, of course, when Bobby went to Iraq, I lived there with Erin and Drew while he was gone. When we brought him home, that’s where we brought him. That’s where we were when you visited us—and we weren’t very good at that whole thing. We—all of us—were so new to caregiving, it must have looked to you like we weren’t going to survive it. It must have looked terrible…”

He remembered; there were days he’d had trouble putting it out of his mind. The house was a disaster, Marcie was skinny and pale and alone, she looked about thirteen. The hospital bed dominated the dining room so it was the first thing you saw when you walked in the house, leaving the family nowhere to have a meal. There was other medical equipment standing around the place—a fancy wheelchair with a head brace, hydraulic lifts, weights for counterbalance when moving that dead weight, a suction machine, oxygen tanks, basins, linens.

“We had to bring him home or leave him in a long-term care facility in another state. After a couple of months we got him into a civilian nursing home—an excellent place, with the military picking up the tab through CHAMPUS. I can thank Erin for that—she wouldn’t give up. Bobby had a large family—he was the youngest of seven—and we were all in it together, God bless them. They’ve been such a wonderful help—family to me in every way.”

“CHAMPUS?” Ian heard himself ask.

“It doesn’t always work out so good. A lot of wounded soldiers who need long-term care are assigned to military hospitals wherever there’s space, and it has nothing to do with where the family lives. I faced leaving Bobby in D.C. or the East Coast or Texas, but…We were very lucky. He had the best. And Ian—he might’ve looked pathetic, but there was no indication he was in any pain or stress. We pampered him, kept him totally comfortable at all times, and there were so many of us to do that. Bobby’s whole family—his mom and dad, six brothers and sisters and their spouses, nieces and nephews, me, Drew, and yes, even Erin got right in there. He was massaged, read to, kissed and hugged. He was almost never alone. We had a visiting schedule—he was always checked on and covered. Ian—it wasn’t torture for me. Losing him hurt, of course, but really, I lost him so long ago that by the time he passed…”

“Relief?” Ian asked reflexively.

“For him,” she said. “For me, the end of a long journey. You should’ve read the damn letters!”

He just shook his head. “I didn’t want to know he was dead. Didn’t want to know he was still alive.”

“He was alive, comfortable, cared for and loved.” She nodded toward the letters. “I wrote you about him, but also about me—it was really hard at first, grieving Bobby as though he’d already gone—but then my life became almost normal. I got out with friends quite a bit. I took a couple of vacations—Bobby’s parents insisted on it. I wrote you all about them, don’t ask me why. Hell, I wrote you everything. Every stupid thing. Like you were my best friend, not Bobby’s.”

“But you were still tied to a—”

“No, I wasn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “I loved Bobby. We knew he wasn’t going to recover. Bobby’s family tried to get me out, introduce me to people—sometimes male people. If I’d wanted freedom from him, from those obligations, no one in my family or his would have tried to talk me out of it. In fact, there were lots of discussions about things like that—like breaking me loose through divorce so I could pursue another relationship, about pulling the feeding tube so he would just die, but—”

“Why didn’t you just do that, Marcie? Why?”

“Because, Ian. Feeding him was part of keeping him comfortable.”

“But what if he was thinking in there?” Ian said, a note of pained desperation in his voice. “What if it was torture for him, thinking how much he hated living like that, not being able to move or communicate?”

She smiled gently. “If he was able to think of things like that, then he was also thinking about the legions of loved ones dedicating themselves to keeping him safe and cared for until he could make the last part of his journey.”

A long piece of silence separated them. “And none of them was me,” he said softly.