Her final steps are a slow walk until she’s directly in front of him.
Nash sucks in a sharp breath, then drops to his knees.
Forty-Three
Nash
While the first part of Captain David Blairs’s story burrowed itself into my heart, it’s the second part that solidified it as one of the most impactful stories of the power of love I’ve ever heard.
After hearing his wife’s voice down the hall, Blairs recalled that stretch of time lasting a length indistinguishable from an eternity.
“The seconds I laid in that hospital bed waiting for her voice to find me took longer than it took those bastards to get me out of Vietnam,”he recalled with a chuckle.“But seeing her face finally fill the doorway was like seeing an angel,”he said.“I was bone tired, but just seeing her there—tears in her eyes and the same pearls around her neck she wore on our wedding day?—”
He stopped then, his voice snapping right in two, emotional over that moment even all those years later. He turned his head on the screen playing the recording of his interview. Next to him sat his wife, Rose Blairs, her hair white as snow. Every line on her face telling a story that somebody knew.
“Just as pretty too,”he said.
They smiled at each other then, so devoted and true.
Even though I was watching a recording of the interview with a sheet of glass separating us, I felt the love and history between them; its palpability transcended the most cold and intricate barriers of modern technology.
“He always gets like this.”Rose laughed with a sniff, her eyes watery from the same memories as him.“The mushiest man to ever fly a jet.”
“I was,”Blairs admitted with a slight chuckle.“But either way, seeing her in that doorway gave me the strength to sit up in that hospital bed. Stand up even though it hurt like hell.”
But, like I said before, Rose showing up at that hospital all those miles from home wasn’t the whole story.
You see, the day Blairs left for his deployment seven years prior, his new wife whispered a secret in his ear. One that made him grin ear to ear like the naïve baby-faced soldier heading off to war that he was. Turns out, even then you didn’t have to be married long to make a miracle happen.
His young bride was pregnant.
“I told her I’d be back before she knew it,”Blairs recalled.“Promised I’d be right there holding her hand the day she made me a dad.”
Of course, whether it’s a time of war or time of peace, no human in history has ever really had the power to promise where they’ll be at any given moment. We like to think we do, sure, but if history has taught us anything, it’s that we can never really predict the future. We can make all the plans in the world, but we forget so is everyone else. We forget that sometimes, our planned timelines and theirs can cross over in ways that are completely out of our control. A perfect storm that might lead to the love of a lifetime as much as the loss of one.
Blairs had no way of knowing when he made that promise to his wife that instead of watching his baby girl being born less than nine months later, he’d be months into a yearslong brutalcaptivity as a POW. Had no way of knowing he’d look death in the eye multiple times and repeatedly resign to the belief he’d never meet his child or hold Rose in his arms again.
But none of that mattered in that hospital room.
Though it was his wife that raised him to his feet, it was the little girl holding her hand that brought him to his knees and ripped the sob from his mouth.
“You never have to see your kid before to know they belong to you,”Blairs said. Then, with a laugh,“Her holding her mother’s hand helped narrow it down though.”
Rue calls Bennie’s name, but it isn’t necessary.
Because when my daughter looks at me with eyes she might as well have plucked right from my own face, there’s no fighting the sob it rips from my throat or the way gravity pulls me right to my knees.
Forty-Four
Bennie
Ifound the first postcard by accident.
It was right before Christmas when Gypsy forgot the mail. I saw the picture of the palm tree covered in lights on one side and knew it was something good. On the other side was a short note that said,
Come and get me, Rue Conway.
—N
