Nine Lives - Danielle Steel Page 0,7

first. He had won a string of races in Southern California, and then headed to Mexico to race there. After that, he wrote and said he was thinking of going to City College in San Diego, but hadn’t decided yet. The lure of all the things he wanted to do was greater than school. He wrote again that he was going mountain climbing in Argentina, and after that she got a postcard from him that said he was trekking in Nepal. He had told her he was taking any small jobs he could find, saving his money, and then taking off again as soon as he had enough to pay for the next step of his travels. He obviously hadn’t gone to San Diego. She wondered if he’d ever settle down. She couldn’t see it happening. The world was too big and too full of things that excited him. He had an unquenchable thirst for adventure, and she didn’t. Not out of terror like her mother, but she just didn’t want to roam all over the world looking for mountains to climb and challenges to conquer.

When she graduated, she went back to Chicago. Tommy was a senior then and, after graduation, nearly broke his mother’s heart when he turned eighteen and joined the Navy. He said he could get a better education there. He wanted to be an aeronautics engineer eventually, and a Navy pilot. He did his officer training course the summer after graduation and owed the Navy three to five years after college. He did specialized training, flying fighter planes, and whenever Maggie saw him, he told her he was happy. He looked just like their father and loved flying just as much. His plan was to work for a company like Boeing when he mustered out after graduate school, and he would easily get a great job. His career path seemed like the right one for him.

Maggie had a good job then too, working in the finance office of a TV network. She made a respectable salary and had a small apartment in Chicago. Her mother and Harry had finally moved to the suburbs. Harry was sixty-one and planning to retire in four years, to play golf, watch TV, and drink beer with his wife, which was enough for both of them.

Maggie had discovered that she had a knack for finance, and had put her dreams of art and design aside. She wanted a solid job she could count on, and not have to take a risk by trying to develop a talent that might never pan out. She had learned from her mother the value of a sure thing, and how important being safe was. She set her sights higher than her mother had, but Emma had convinced her that safety was vital for a happy life.

When Tommy was twenty-three, flying for the Navy, they sent him to Iraq, which drove his mother into a constant state of anxiety. She quit her job at the hotel and sat glued to the TV every day, watching CNN, terrified of what she would see there. He had been in Iraq for four months, when her worst nightmare happened. His plane was shot down and exploded during the bombing of a convoy. There was no body to send home, and Emma looked like a zombie at the funeral. She never recovered. She clung to Harry as though she were drowning. He and Maggie got her up and down the aisle behind an empty casket, draped with a flag they folded and handed to her, just as they had the one on Kevin’s casket nineteen years before.

Maggie was so worried about her mother that she quit her job, and spent three months taking care of her, but Emma was never the same after that. She looked dazed and distracted, and was frightened of everything. She cried when Harry left for work, and she rarely left the house. Her hands shook violently, and six months later, she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s and dementia, but Maggie knew her mother was dying of a broken heart. Losing her son had killed her. She had lost two men to their love of flying planes, and their love of their country. And Maggie had lost a father and a brother. She was twenty-eight when Tommy died, and she felt different too. She understood better now what her mother had been trying to teach her, the importance of a stable, safe life. She never