Every single letter ended the same way: “I’ll come for you and our son when the time is right. All my love, Daniel.”
Our son? What son?
I felt like someone had sucker-punched me right in the chest.
I sat down hard on an old crate and started reading more letters.
The letters painted a picture I never could have imagined. This Daniel fellow had been writing to Martha about a child, their child, for over a decade. He wrote about watching from a distance, about seeing “little James” grow up, about how proud he was of the boy.
James.
My firstborn son, James.
I had to read that name three times before it sank in. The boy I’d taught to throw a baseball, the kid who’d followed me around the garage while I worked on cars, the young man I’d walked down the aisle at his wedding. The letters were talking about my James.
The next day, I drove to the care facility with those letters burning a hole in my jacket pocket.
Martha took one look at my face and knew exactly what had happened.
“You found them,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears.
“Martha, who the hell is Daniel?” I demanded. “What son is he talking about?”
She broke down sobbing right there in her hospital bed. Between the tears and the gasping breaths, the whole truth finally spilled out.
Before she met me, she’d been engaged to a young man named Daniel.
He got drafted to Vietnam in early 1966. Right after he shipped out, Martha found out she was pregnant with his baby.
“He begged me to wait for him,” she cried. “He wrote me letters every week, promising he’d come home to us, that we’d raise our child together.
But then his plane went down over Cambodia. Missing in action. Everyone said he was dead, Gerry.
Everyone.”
Leave a Comment