“Maybe we should find her. See how she’s doing and if she had the baby.” A discouraged silence settled between them. “We’re taking a trip to Georgia, anyway.” She laughed lightly. “Not sure if I mentioned it.”
He loved her spunk. “Tell me.”
“One of my foundation kids, a seven-year-old boy.” Her voice fell a notch. “Everyone’s praying for a miracle. He’s very sick.”
“He wants a trip to Georgia?” Ryan’s heart filled at the thought of the sick child.
“Sort of.” She breathed in deep, struggling the way she always did when she talked about the kids who came through her foundation. “He wants to go to a Hawks game. Wants to meet Nolan Cook.”
“Mmm. I’m connecting the dots.”
“Exactly.” Her voice grew more enthusiastic. “We try to find this Caroline Tucker . . . see how she is, whether she kept the baby, and help our sick little guy meet Nolan Cook. All in one weekend.”
“Perfect.” They talked awhile longer, counting the days until they could be together. “No more tours after this.”
“I agree.” She laughed. “I love you, Ryan Kelly.”
“I love you, too. We need a date night.”
“Maybe read Jane Eyre out loud at The Bridge bookstore.”
“Mmmm. Downtown Franklin. Like old times.”
When the call ended, Ryan Googled the Hawks’ play-off schedule. The team would likely have a home game two days into Peyton’s tour break. The perfect time to go with the sick little boy and his family to Atlanta. Then they could take a trip to Savannah and try to find Caroline Tucker. So that maybe Peyton could apologize and change his ways. The singer might even find what he was really looking for.
A changed life.
Chapter Ten
Caroline Tucker put her arm around her young dark-haired son as they walked from church to the car. The afternoon sun felt warm on her shoulders. “How was Sunday school?”
“Fun.” He put his arm around her waist and leaned in. “Teacher told us about Moses. How he needed all those years in the desert so he could learn to hear God’s voice.” He peered up at her, his brown eyes so like his father’s she could barely focus. “God had to teach him that first.”
“True.” She kept her head high. Around them, other families crossed the parking lot, leaving church. Most of the families included a dad. She pictured Moses, years of living in the desert, learning about God and listening to His voice.
Caroline could relate.
“Can we stop at the store on the way home?” John’s face lit up. “We need ice cream.”
“Need?” She grinned. They reached the car, and she hit the unlock button. “We need eggs and milk.”
“Okay.” He laughed as they drove toward the exit. “Today’s the basketball game with the guys, remember? After that, I really might need ice cream.” He raised his brow. “Yes?”
Money was tight, but she was careful. She smiled, losing the fight. “Okay. We’ll get ice cream.”
“Yes!” He pumped his fist and stared out the windshield.
She caught his profile, and the reminder was as clear as the lines on the road. He looked just like Peyton. She loved her son more than her own life, but his looks were a constant reminder of her mistakes, her poor decisions. Proof that she alone had destroyed her family.
Caroline had named him John, which meant “gracious gift of God.” Because at a time when she should be burning in hell for what she did, she was raising this beautiful boy instead. A boy whom she gave the last name Tucker, as if she could will her family back together by doing so. A boy who loved basketball as much as Ellie’s friend Nolan Cook always had.
One who—by God’s grace—had no interest in music.
As soon as John left the apartment with his basketball, Caroline found a piece of paper and sat down at the kitchen table, the way she did nearly every Sunday afternoon. It was time to write to Ellie. Caroline had no idea how many letters she had written to Ellie over the years. One a week, every week since her father moved them to San Diego. Alan had never given her a new address, so Caroline sent the letters to his mother’s house. The one address she did have. Hundreds of letters. Her only way of reaching out to her daughter and letting her know how sorry she was. Over and over and over again. The letters never came back “return to sender,” so Caroline hoped they were reaching her daughter. But not once over the years had Ellie ever written back.
She hesitated, her pen poised over the paper. From the beginning she had tried to find Ellie. The first few days after Ellie and Alan moved, Caroline had tried her mother-in-law’s phone number, hoping to get Alan’s new address. But the number had been disconnected. She and her mother-in-law hadn’t been close. The woman might have changed her number years earlier; Caroline wouldn’t have known. The truth that she had no real way to contact Ellie had sent a panic through her that remained to this day. She had immediately called the base, practically hysterical.
“My husband . . . he moved there with our daughter . . . I’m afraid they don’t want to talk to me and . . . I need to reach them. Please.” She could barely breathe. “It’s an emergency.”
The woman on the other end was kind, but she couldn’t do anything. She informed Caroline that Alan hadn’t reported for duty, but she promised to leave a message for him when he did.
But the hours had become days, and the days had become years, and still she hadn’t had a single conversation with Alan. The man had turned Ellie against her for good reason, and now she was without options. She was a terrible mother, yes, but she deserved one last conversation with her daughter. She tried to get a loan so she could hire an attorney. The banks did everything but laugh at her. She was a single mother with a newborn baby. She had no money, no credit, no way of reaching her daughter except one.
Caroline stared at the paper. How many letters had she written? And how had more than a decade gone by? The weight of it pressed against her heart. There was no way to calculate all she’d missed. High school and homework, prom and graduation. Thousands of good nights and good mornings and everything in between. Her precious Ellie would be twenty-six now. All grown up. Years removed from the girl she’d been when she left Savannah. Through the open window, Caroline could hear the distant sound of the basketball on the pavement, the laughter of the boys as they played across the street at Forsyth Park.
Ellie must hate her. That was the only reason Caroline could think that her daughter hadn’t written back. Not even to tell her to stop sending the letters. She planted her elbow on the table and rested her head in her hand, weary at the thought of pouring her heart onto the page one more time. Usually, she tried to spare Ellie the details of her life, the one she and John lived in Savannah. The tough times they’d faced. Instead, she’d usually pull out a memory from long ago, back when she and Ellie played at the park. When Ellie was her constant shadow and every day brought new adventures, new moments of laughter and love.
Today Caroline didn’t feel like talking about the happy times. If Ellie wasn’t going to write back, maybe she wasn’t reading the letters. Maybe they went straight to the trash. She poised her pen at the top of the page. In case she did read them, maybe this was the time to be honest, to tell Ellie how it had been, what life had been like after her father moved them to San Diego. Ellie was hardly a child now. She could know at least a little of the truth.
Caroline summoned her determination and started to write.
Dear Ellie,
Sometimes I feel like I should stop writing to you, and then I remind myself. I can never stop. This is one of those times. I know you probably hate me, and I understand. What I did was terrible, unforgivable. But I have to write. See, usually I write about the old times, about how much I love you and miss you, and how badly I long for the years when you were a little girl. But today I want to go back to the days after you and your dad left. I moved in with my friend Lena Lindsey at first. I stayed with her until the baby came.
Once she started,
the story flowed easily.
Lena and her husband, Stu, personified love—the sort of love Caroline and Alan had shared in the beginning. Caroline wrote slowly, so her words would be legible. While she lived with Lena and Stu, Caroline spent her nonworking hours doing one of two things—thinking of ways to find Ellie, and hating herself for sleeping with Peyton Anders.
Lena took her to church, a different church than the one she and Alan had attended. They met with one of the church’s female counselors. By then Caroline was willing to try anything, willing to apologize and change, willing to get marriage counseling. But it was too late. Caroline worked at the doctor’s office until the baby was born. When she tried to return, her position had been filled, and like that, she was without a job.
The story poured onto the page, a story Caroline had never shared in any of her letters before. With no way to fix her mistakes, Caroline had stayed with Lena and Stu, learning to forgive herself and trying to figure out a way to face life alone with her baby. Six months later, Stu and Lena moved to Atlanta, and Caroline took an apartment with a single mom she’d met at her new church. They shared a two-bedroom apartment, and Caroline found a new job at a doctor’s office across town. Without her seniority, the pay was minimal. But it was a start.
Caroline reached the bottom of the page and took another piece of paper from the kitchen drawer.
Through all of it, I wrote to you, Ellie. And not once, not one time, have you written back. I’m not asking for your sympathy. I just want you to know I’m sorry. I’ve lived with my choices every day since you and your dad left. I miss you with every breath.
It was true. After the first year, she had saved enough vacation time and money to buy airfare to San Diego. The thought of surprising Ellie terrified her, but still she would’ve gone. But that winter John caught pneumonia. They couldn’t fly with the baby’s poor health, and, despite her limited insurance, his medical bills wiped out her savings. By then it was clear Ellie didn’t want to see her, anyway. Caroline wasn’t sure she would have survived, but she had John to care for. John and her job and her renewed faith in God. As the years passed without word from Ellie, Caroline resigned herself to the truth: This was the only way. The letters she sent. Nothing could stop her from this Sunday afternoon routine. She would write to her daughter as long as she lived.
Caroline ended the letter by telling Ellie the same thing she always told her.
I pray for you every day, for the two of us. That God—in all His mercy—might bring you back to me. I’m sorry, Ellie. What I did to you and our family was inexcusable. It still is. I can only pray that one day you’ll forgive me. I miss you. I love you.
Love,
Mom
With John still playing ball across the street, Caroline slipped the folded letter into an envelope, stamped and addressed it. Then she walked to the mailbox at the corner of East Bolton. And for the twenty-third time that year, she dropped the envelope through the slot and did what she did every time she sent a letter to Ellie. She begged God that somehow, some way, this time it might reach her. Really reach her.
Not just her hands but her heart.
Chapter Eleven
Alan Tucker kept one hand on his revolver as he strode down the cement hallway between the rows of the most dangerous inmates in the Pendleton brig. He needed to stay on his game, needed to focus. Last week the prisoners had rioted, and one of the guards was in the hospital because of it. Broken ribs and a concussion.
But if ever there was a day when he was distracted, it was this one. Today was Ellie’s twenty-sixth birthday.
“Look at you, big man. . . . Think you’re all tough out there.” One of the prisoners grabbed the bars and slammed his face against them. Almost through them. “Watch your back, big man.”
Alan kept walking.
He was good at this, good at ignoring them. Good at intimidating them. Same way he’d been good at intimidating his wife and daughter a decade ago. He did it because he was right. But somewhere along the life of knowing it all, it seemed, Alan Tucker had gotten things very wrong.
Because the only two women he’d ever loved were gone. Forever gone.
“Come here, pretty boy.” The call came from the opposite side of the corridor. The prisoner cussed loud enough for everyone on the floor to hear him. “Tell you what, pretty guard. You come a little closer, and I’ll trade your freedom for mine.” He laughed like a crazy person. “Come on! I dare you!”
Alan stopped. He turned slowly and faced the man, squared up to him from his place ten feet away. “You must’ve forgotten, Joey. You’ll never be free.” He kept his cool. As if he had ice in his veins. “Never again.”
From half a dozen cells along the hallway came laughter and more expletives. Joey backed up to the cell wall and charged the bars. “Watch your back, pretty guard.” His words dripped venom. “You won’t be free forever.”
Alan stared at him. Just watched him for a full minute until the prisoner shouted more profanity and jerked away, turning his back to the cell bars. Alan walked away, satisfied. Another victory. More catcalls from Joey’s neighbors, guys in for murder and rape and armed robbery. Joey had lost. They all knew it. Alan made it to the first of four steel doors and passed through them one at a time, using various keys and codes.
His shift was over. Another day of survival, keeping his prisoners in line. His supervisor patted him on the back as he grabbed his things from his locker. “You’re good, Tucker. Very good.”
“Thanks.” Alan looked to the window. Somewhere out there, Ellie was celebrating her birthday without him. “See you tomorrow.”
He kept his hand on his gun as he walked to his car. He didn’t expect a problem, but he lived ready for one. It was what made him good at his job. That and the fact that Alan Tucker had a secret weapon. When he stared down a criminal on the Fourth Ward the way he’d just done to Joey, Alan did something he doubted any other guard did.
Alan prayed.
He prayed against the spiritual battle raging between them, and he prayed for God’s mercy over the prisoner. He prayed it all in the name of Jesus Christ, not blinking, not looking away. And Alan knew, in the invisible places, in the spiritual realm, the demons in the cells and hearts of the Pendleton brig prisoners could do only one thing in response.
Flee.
Now if Alan could just get the prayers to work for himself.
The letters were killing him.
Alan Tucker stepped into his bedroom closet and took the oversized box from the top shelf. In a single motion he heaved it onto the end of his bed. Hundreds of letters. More letters than he could begin to count. Each of them weighed on his soul like so many bricks. Nearly eleven years ago, when his mother called to tell him Caroline had written to Ellie, Alan stopped by her house on the way home from work. He took the letters and hid them in his bedroom drawer. Five or six letters, and he figured that would be it. Surely Caroline wouldn’t keep writing. But she had. She still did. The letters came like clockwork, some thicker than others, and over time he transferred them to the box in his closet.
At first he spent every weekend thinking of a way to handle the problem. He could contact Caroline and tell her to stop writing, or return the letters unanswered. He had no intention of giving them to Ellie. Their daughter had been hurt enough by her mother’s betrayal, without a letter reminding her every week. Or he could read through them and see exactly what his unfaithful wife intended to tell their daughter.
Many times he considered throwing them away, burning them, or having them shredded, the way people did with boxes of old tax records. But always when he came close to doing that, he imagined Ellie—all grown up—and somehow finding out what he had done. Something in him could never go that far.
And so the tradition remained, week after week, year after year after year. He would swing by his mother’s house on Friday after work and collect whatever Caroline had sent. Six years ago, after Ellie took up with the soldier and left home, Alan’s mot
her began showing signs of dementia. Eighteen months later, she was diagnosed with aggressive Alzheimer’s, and Alan set her up in a full-time care facility. He moved off base and into her house. The letters continued.
Once a week, at least.
He dipped his hand into the box, sorted through the mountain of envelopes, and pulled out one at random. In all the years he’d been collecting the letters, he had never opened one, never gone against his feelings that it would be wrong to do so. But today, on Ellie’s birthday, he was at a complete and utter loss.
The envelope felt smooth in his hand. Maybe it was his imagination, but he could almost feel the words written across the front, the dip and swoop of Caroline’s handwriting. The hope she must’ve felt in her heart as she dropped this very letter into a mailbox somewhere in Savannah.
What was wrong with him? How could he have cut her out of his life so completely? What sort of man was he to never check to see if she was surviving or if she’d kept the baby or if she’d found a way to exist on her own? He held the envelope close to his face and studied the postmark. March 2011. Two years ago. Always she included a return address, the same one for the last decade. So she at least had housing.
He ran his thumb over her name. Her married name, the one she still apparently went by. Caroline . . . what happened to us? You were the only girl I ever loved. Flashes from his past hit his heart like so many lightning bolts. The day he had met Caroline at a church picnic. She had been only nineteen, barely more than a child, and he was twenty-seven. Headed into a military career. Ten minutes into their first conversation, Alan had two thoughts.
First, he was going to marry her. And second, he would never love anyone else.
So what happened?
More flashes. Alan winced and tightened his grip on the letter. He could hear himself barking at her, using the same tone he used at work as a drill sergeant. Caroline, why isn’t the laundry done? Where were you all afternoon? Can’t you make that baby stop crying? The Bible says a wife should obey her husband; keep that in mind.