Second Nature

Chapter 38

38 

Cade and Gen and the others strolled down Stanton Hill toward the dock. Newpod seemed to sense the weight of the downhearted procession. The dog stuck close to Gen, his brown eyes as sad as a doe's. They had waited until evening, when the setting sun turns the sky and bay into a symphony of colors. "We'll make it a ceremony," Gen had told Haven. "We'll dress up, it'll be beautiful." 

Some ceremony, Cade thought. They couldn't give Gen a single gift or memento to take with her, for what can a dolphin carry? Jimi had suggested clipping a radio transmitter to her dorsal fin, so they could find her again, but she'd talked him out of it, explaining that Eberhard would also be able to track her down that way. 

Haven had braided yellow and red hibiscus blossoms into Gen's long, dark hair. At Haven's insistence, Cade wore flowers in his hair, too; so did Lana and Jimi, even Newpod. Gen was nude beneath a white terrycloth bathrobe. Lana wore an ankle-length cotton dress to hide her miracle legs. Haven wore a pastel blue Easter dress and white straw bonnet with pink ribbons. Jimi wore a charcoal gray suit with a royal blue shirt and tie that matched his eyes; Cade wore yellow linen slacks and his best Hawaiian shirt with a necklace of white puka shells. Everyone except Lana went barefoot. 

Cade held Gen's right hand, Haven held the other. Gen looked so pretty it hurt, so Cade kept his eyes fixed ahead, gazing out over the expanse of the bay. 

Would he ever encounter her again, swimming and leaping with her dolphin pod? Should he just let her go and never even try to find her? He hated to think how much he was going to miss her. The pain was already gnawing the edges of his heart; he tried to steer his mind away from it, focus on the moment: holding her slender hand, graceful fingers entwined in his. 

When Cade was ten his father had died; stolen away from him forever, just like that. The following year, his mother died; same rip-off, same grief and anger, but not just multiplied by two to account for the second loss-multiplied by infinity. So at nine, Cade began a rebellion against his damaged life and the snoring God who didn't give a fuck what the boy wanted or needed. If life was going to hurt him, he'd see what he could do to hurt it back.  

Cade had fought at school. He had fought after school. He had fought on the beach, at the basketball court, on the football field, in the church yard. He had fought in his nightmares and in his daydreams. Finally, a county judge cut Cade a major break and allowed the seventeen-year-old to join the Navy instead of sticking him in juvenile detention for assault and battery (those two jerks should never have mocked his sister's awkward gait). 

In the Navy, Cade trained as a SEAL commando, and went to the Persian Gulf in 1990 to fight an actual war. He had killed four Iraqi soldiers: one with a rifle bullet, from long range; two with a grenade, from shouting distance; and one with his bare hands, pressed up close, panting hard in the other's face, like lovers. He had watched a teen-aged Iraqi soldier die after a rocket attack, clutching his spilled intestines in his lap like slippery pink balloons. He had heard enemy soldiers burn to death inside their underground bunker, screams echoing around the walls like shrieks of bats in a cavern. And somewhere in the blast-oven heat of the Kuwaiti desert, with oil fields blazing like flares from Hell, Cade's anger had finally burned itself out. 

There and then, he had made up his mind never to hate anyone or anything, especially not life itself, for he very much wanted to live, to redeem himself, make his life worthwhile. 

Then, on the month-long voyage home from the Persian Gulf, he got shipmate Anna Rodriguez pregnant. Not the best start at being his new, responsible self. Anna had no use for a baby and wanted to abort the fetus. But Cade had talked her into having the baby and letting him raise the child alone, with absolutely no claims attached to her. Anna gave birth to a girl at the Pensacola Naval Hospital, handed over the newborn to Cade, and the following day took off to parts unknown with one of his SEAL buddies.