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“But you did? You stayed? You tried to be of help in some way?” The sudden weariness in his eyes told her everything.
“Nothing I did to support Joe made a difference,” he admitted tiredly.
Reaching out, Sierra laid her hand on his knee. “You were just a child, Mace. Only fourteen. Who took care of you in all of this?”
“What do you mean?”
She heard the defensiveness in his voice. “You were a child. They were adults. They were supposed to give you comfort, protection and support, not the other way around.”
“Comfort?” His voice rose with disgust. “There wasn’t anyone in our family who comforted anyone, Sierra. We were all torn apart. My father was blaming me…” and then he snapped his mouth shut, looking away for moment.
Sierra jerked in a breath, her eyes widening. A muscle in Mace’s jaw leaped. He was clenching his teeth. “Why did he blame you?”
“I don’t know,” Mace said irritably. “I was the oldest. I grew up being told by my parents that I was responsible for Caleb and Joe.” He rubbed his furrowed brow. “I did a shitty job of it.”
Her heart broke for Mace. Sierra could see him as a tall, skinny fourteen-year-old, carrying so much on his shoulders that he had no control over. “It wasn’t your load to carry in the first place, Mace. It belonged to your parents. Not you.”
“Yeah, well that sure as hell didn’t work, did it?” He jammed the paintbrush down into the can, slopping some of the white paint out and onto the tarp.
Sierra wanted to press him. She felt Mace trusted her more than anyone else in his life. They had shared an intimacy so deep and beautiful that he was allowing her inside those walls of his. “The death of a child often breaks up a marriage,” she said gently. “You were a child yourself, Mace. No one can blame you for anything. You were the innocent in this dysfunctional drama.”
He closed his eyes, his mouth thinning. “I’m hardly innocent.” And he opened his eyes, staring at her.
“At fourteen, you were,” she insisted. “When your mom got ill, did everything fall on your shoulders again?” She saw his shoulders sag, as if still carrying all those ancient loads.
“Mom got sick with cancer a year after Caleb died. My Dad had to farm. I started to cut classes to come home early to take care of her.”
Sierra couldn’t imagine a young boy like Mace being the primary caregiver. “It must have been so hard on you.”
“Joe was never home,” Mace said bitterly. “He was always running with a gang at school. He got into drugs and began selling them. He was cutting classes. The teachers were calling my dad about his drug dealing, but he was so screwed by work and his wife dying in front of his eyes that he couldn’t handle one more tragedy.”
“And so, it all fell on you?” She spoke the words quietly and watched his eyes grow dark with anguish, feeling how many tears he still carried inside him over those grim days of his family’s struggling life.
Mace stopped painting, looking off in the distance. His voice was tight with his unshed tears. “It had nowhere else to go, Sierra. Things got worse after mom died. Joe lost it, accused my father that it was all his fault she died. And then he ran away to Charleston, never to be heard from again.”
“Awful,” Sierra whispered, her voice trembling. “That must have been so terrible…”
Mace set his brush in a can of water and then picked up a cloth and wiped his hands. “My father broke right in front of my eyes. I’d never seen him cry, but he was sobbing. His whole life had been ripped out from under him.”
“What did you do?”
Mace sighed and looked over at her. “I wanted to do something… anything… to get my dad back. I went over and held him, and I promised him I’d go after the drug dealers in South America who were sending that shit up to the States. The same shit that killed Caleb. That turned Joe into a druggie.” His mouth turned into a slash. “My Dad just clung to me, sobbing. He couldn’t stop. Later, when he stopped crying, he told me to go kill those sons-of-bitches for him and for my mother and for Caleb.” He paused and then said grimly, “I promised him I would.”
Promised.Sierra sat very still. She knew what a promise meant in Mace’s world. Swallowing hard, her voice unsteady, she said, “Then, you joined the Army at eighteen with that goal in mind. Right?”
“Yes.” He looked down at his paint-splotched hands. “A promise is a promise.”
“You’ve done it for fourteen years, Mace. Isn’t that enough?” She couldn’t keep the tears out of her eyes or out of her voice. He slowly looked over at her and her heart shrank with such pain that she couldn’t breathe for a moment.
“Does a promise have a time limit, Sierra?”
The pain in her heart increased and she wanted to cry for Mace. He had never been kept protected. He was the oldest of the children and had grown up strong and forced to mature way too early. She could see how, during what should have been his innocent childhood years, the dysfunction of his family had shifted suddenly onto his shoulders, his father no longer able to carry the load.
“I don’t know,” she answered quietly. “I do know you’re an honorable man. And that your word is your bond, Mace. You don’t give it lightly but when you do, people can count on you to carry through with it.” She saw him give her a sad, remorseful look for a moment.
“Yeah, someone will scratch that into my tombstone someday,” he said in disgust.
Getting up, Sierra couldn’t stand to feel that terrible aloneness that had always cloaked Mace. She stepped her long legs over the fence that separated them and knelt by his side.
