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“You also had a daughter, didn’t you?” Lauralee asked, her voice quavering. She took his trembling hand and clasped it to her bosom. “You did, didn’t you? You had a daughter. Her name was Lauralee.”
She could feel the leap of his pulse as she clung to his hand. She knew that she had hit a nerve. She knew that she had found her father!
Tears flooded Boyd’s eyes. “Lauralee?” he whispered. He tried to raise himself on an elbow but his weakness caused him to fall back onto the bed. “Are you my Lauralee?”
Lauralee could not hold back her emotions any longer. She bent to her knees beside the bed and leaned over and embraced Boyd, her body racked with heart-wrenching sobs. “Father,” she cried. “Oh, Father. I never thought I’d see you again. I . . . thought . . . you . . . were dead.”
The dreaded word “dead” came to her like a bolt of lightning. Soon he would be dead. She had only a short time to be with him, to relish, to form remembrances that could last until her own dying breath.
Bony arms enfolded her. Boyd’s tears mingled with hers as she placed her cheek against his. They clung and cried.
They stayed that way until Dorothy entered the room, gruff and bossy.
“Heaven sakes, Lauralee. What are you doing?” Dorothy asked, gasping loudly. “Get away from the patient. Don’t you have any more control of yourself, than that?”
Dorothy went to Lauralee and grabbed her by the arm and jerked her to her feet. “I’m going to report you,” she snapped in a disgusted tone of voice. “We don’t need someone like you sobbing and weeping over men you don’t even know. What has gotten into you, anyhow?”
Lauralee jerked away from Dorothy. “Get out of here,” she said, leaning to speak into Dorothy’s face. “Do you hear me? Get out of this room.”
Dorothy paled and stiffened. “What did you say?” she balked. “Are you actually ordering me around?”
“It’s time somebody did,” Lauralee said, taking Dorothy by the arm. She ushered her toward the door. “You are the one who is going to go on report. And as far as my father is concerned, never enter this room again. I forbid it.”
Dorothy stopped and glared at Lauralee. “You are not in the position to forbid me anything,” she snapped back. Her mouth dropped open. She turned and stared quickly at Boyd, then back at Lauralee. “Your father?” she said in a drawn out whisper. “This man . . . is . . . your father?”
Lauralee smiled down at Boyd. “Yes, after all these years, I’ve finally found my father,” she said, then glared at Dorothy again. “Now please, leave us alone. I’ll see to his needs. I’m aware enough about pneumonia to know what is required to make him comfortable.”
Lauralee closed the door, then went and sat at her father’s bedside. She wondered about the gleam in his eyes, and the smile fluttering along his pale, thin lips.
“My daughter has grown into a little spitfire, I see,” he said, reaching for her hand, patting it. Then he grew somber. “I imagine you had to learn how to protect yourself after what you must have been through.”
He swallowed hard. “Tell me, Lauralee. Tell me all about it. And I don’t have to ask to know that your mother is no longer alive. I sense it in your behavior. When did she die, Lauralee? Where is she buried?”
Lauralee could hardly find the words, or the courage, to tell him everything. But she knew that he deserved to know. Due to fate, he had not been able to return to his family before the Yankees destroyed everything that had mattered to all of them.
“Mother?” Lauralee managed to say. She rubbed tears from her cheeks with both hands. “Her grave is on the hillside overlooking the house. And even though I was only five, I knew to say a prayer over her grave.”
Tears rolled down Boyd’s cheeks. “She died when you were five?” he gasped out.
“Yes, not all that long after you left, Father,” Lauralee said, her eyes taking in his gauntness. He scarcely resembled that once powerful, muscled man. “The soldiers came. One in particular was the worst of the lot. His hair was red. His eyes were piercing blue. He . . . he . . .”
She hung her head, then blurted out the rest of the truth of that dreadful day. “Oh, Father,” she groaned. “The red-haired, blue-eyed Yankee raped Mother, then . . . then . . . killed her. I was hiding. He didn’t know I was there.”
After she finished her tale, she wished she hadn’t told her father the most brutal part. His color had worsened, as well as his breathing.
Lauralee moved from the chair and sat down on the side of the bed. She swept her father into her arms. “Please don’t blame yourself,” she sobbed, as she could hear him beneath his breath cursing his absence that day, and all the days since. “You were called to duty. How were you to know that the war would be so horrible? And that the soldiers could be so devious? Please, Father, don’t blame yourself. Don’t you see? Your daughter is fine. I was r
aised in the orphanage that sits on the grounds of this hospital. The priests and nuns were good to me.”
“An orphanage?” Boyd said, peering up at Lauralee as she moved out of his embrace. He could not get enough of her. Her face was exactly the same as her mother’s. Small, oval, and exquisite, her eyes veiled with thick, dark entrancing eyelashes.
Yet there was something in her eyes that cut him to the very core—the lack of peaceful happiness.
“Yes, I was taken to the orphanage by a kind man,” Lauralee said, nodding. “There I have lived until now. Soon I will be twenty. Then I will be expected to leave. Father, you and I will leave together. I will make you well again. We will be a family!”
“Lauralee, don’t fool yourself into believing this ailing man will ever leave this hospital alive,” Boyd said, coughing into his cupped hand. “As for you, I must find a way to see to your future before I die. It must be a future with family.”
He paused, then grabbed her hands. “Sweetheart, you are such a beautiful young lady, as you surely were as a child growing into maturity,” he said, his voice growing much weaker as he spoke. “Why is it that . . . no . . . one ever adopted you?”
