Heaven’s Gate
Part VI: The River of Life
86 Agence Portes du Ciel
“I have to go back to Paris,” Jessica said when she came into the bakery early in the morning on June twelfth. “It’s not like I don’t like going to Paris, but it feels like I’m working harder now than I ever did as a model. And it is nowhere near as glamorous.” Xan took her hand and led her to one of the café tables that the kids cleared for her. I brought her a cup of coffee and one of the breakfast crepes Dani had prepared for the kids’ breakfast this morning.
“What’s taking you back this time?” I asked.
“Conrad has acquired two more agencies and merged them into Agence Portes du Ciel. That means that I have two more staffs to weed out and a hundred new models to interview and assess. And while I’m in Paris, he’ll be buying another agency or two in New York. When we go public in September, we’ll be the largest international agency in the world.”
“And then?”
“The day we go public all my shares go on the block. With luck I’ll be out of the business by the end of the year. I’m a model. I wasn’t cut out to work for a living,” she said with a straight face. I looked at her and we both burst out laughing. I’d been to one shoot with her three years ago, just before she quit modeling. I couldn’t believe how hard they worked and for how long. It was easily a twelve-hour day.
“Est-ce que je peux vous accompagner à Paris, Tante Ciel?”
“Your day is coming, Xan. But not this trip. I need to talk to your mommy about coming with us. Let me get through the mergers and IPO and maybe I can convince your mommy and papa to all come to Paris for your eighth birthday. There are wonderful fireworks in Paris on New Year’s Eve,” Jessica said, smiling at my daughter.
The more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t imagine Jessica with a baby. But with an intelligent little girl Xan’s age, she was truly becoming Tante Ciel—Aunt Heaven.
Jennifer took charge of Jenny Lynn and I took charge of Courtney. The twentieth, summer solstice, was Court’s thirtieth birthday. Elaine, Renee, Lamar, Sarah, Jessica, Dawn, and Cathy had all passed that milepost, but most of us who were in the original agreement would turn thirty in the coming year. Courtney was the first.
“Am I getting old, Brian?” she asked plaintively as we lay next to each other in the master suite.
“I don’t think so, sweetheart. Pretty soon we’ll all be thirty-something.”
“Maybe we should shoot a revival of that show. Thirty-Something on the Ranch.”
No one would believe it.
“You are as pretty as the day I met you. Only now when I look at your breasts I really do want to drink the milk.”
“Oh, you! Better slurp it up while there’s still some left. Jenny is eating solid food and only coming by for a snack occasionally. I’m drying up.”
“I love you, my courtesan.”
“Then give me a birthday bump, lover. I still love it when you play with my bottom.”
Whitney called on July Fourth.
“We had fireworks,” she said.
“Did you get them?” I asked.
“Well, we got some of them,” she said. “It’s like that kid’s arcade game, Whack-a-Mole. You whack one and one pops up out of a different hole. You just keep whacking them until someone says ‘game over.’ They’re sick.”
“Are you bringing them back to the US to stand trial?”
“There are no extradition treaties between Somalia and the United States. The police in Mogadishu, though, were very thankful for our assistance in breaking this ‘dreadful ring of sex traffickers,’ as they said. Well, there were a couple of scum who were actually in the act of raping our people who chose to jump out a fourth floor window rather than be taken into custody. The fall totally crushed their testicles before they died. But the Somali State Police took the rest into custody. Sadly, there was an accident on the way to the prison. The driver of the police bus barely escaped with his life. None of the other fuckers made it to trial,” Whitney said coldly.
I listened to my friend, my master, my lover. I wished I could see her eyes. Whitney had seen death. In fact, she’d dealt it.
“You’re coming home now? Back to Leonard Wood?”
“No. We did such a good job we are being rewarded. My unit will be joined by several others as I’m taking command of the Marine Corps Security Detachment at Camp Lemonnier. It’s a new Naval Expeditionary base and will become the home of the Combined Joint Task Force—Horn of Africa. We’ve had too many catastrophes in Africa and they’ve finally decided we need a permanent base there. It’s in Djibouti. We’ll be a small detachment with a skeleton staff for a while, but eventually, there will be Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines stationed there. We’re the police. Only in this instance, we’re also the grunts who do most of the work moving supplies and cleaning latrines.”
“That’s a reward?”
“It keeps my unit where we can still respond to further incidents. And in a year, if I do well, I might get my oak leaves.”
“You know, you could have had a master’s degree and be well on your way to a PhD for as much time as you’ve spent in school since you became a Marine.”
“It’s hard to believe it’s been over seven years. It’s what I was made for, Brian. To do whatever is necessary to protect and defend the ones I love. Unless I could coach basketball.”
Hannah’s twenty-ninth birthday almost slipped by unnoticed in the chaos of working on the new script and production plan. Staffing and location research were eating into everyone’s time. But Hannah grabbed April to bring her to bed since she was afraid I would not suitably celebrate April’s thirtieth the next week. April was pretty relaxed in her role as a career girl and felt no need to have a full-time man around as long as Hannah and I, or Jason, were willing to satisfy her urges occasionally. I had a feeling that even with the baby, Hannah was satisfying April’s urges as often as Samantha’s.
Of course, we had a big celebration at the Cortaleses’ for Melanie’s eighteenth birthday. That celebration did not include sex. Even Lily and Sly knew that Melanie was not pure and had quite a hot affair with her co-star in the last miniseries, but seemed to forget about it as soon as the show was finished. Even though she was now eighteen, she’d asked if Sly could go with them to LA for the initial read-through because she wanted her daddy nearby to protect her. Lily rolled her eyes a little but grinned at her daughter. Stephanie was simply happy to be a kid in rural Indiana. She and three of her girlfriends were showing horses at the 4-H fair. She had no interest at all in being anything but a happy, free, twelve-year-old girl. I looked at her and thought that Xan and C-Rae would be twelve-year-old girls before I knew it. I sighed and Sly looked at me. He just nodded like he understood what I was thinking.
Two weeks later, I was holding my newest daughter in my arms. Cassie had an easy delivery and credited having had all her muscles stretched by Ruth on the first go-round. I knew for a fact that when I entered her there was no evidence of any stretching. I held mother and daughter in my arms. Bea and John were in the room as soon as the door was opened. My moms were right behind them. Dad would be down over the weekend. Mom said he was stressed out because his company was shipping part of their manufacturing to China and had already laid off over a hundred workers. Dad planned to stay at the ranch for a week’s vacation and really step up the search for a job in the Bloomington area.
I pulled Mom and Anna close.
“Just move here,” I whispered. “I’ll take care of you all. You don’t even have to wait for a house to be built. Now that the miniseries is over, we have half the bunkhouse empty. It would be temporary housing, but you could have it. I know the landlady.”
Mom and Anna both kissed my cheeks. Then they got their turn to hold Patricia Frost Whitaker. I kissed Cassie.
Well, what she was afraid of in seventh grade finally came to pass. One little kiss in the woods and she ended up pregnant.
The next weekend the triplets turned thirty. Debbie and Dolly used the occasion to announce they were pregnant again and due in January. George had just finished his coursework for his PhD and was working on his dissertation. I was a little chagrined. I’d always thought that I’d be the first one in our group to have a doctorate, but now it didn’t even seem important. If I could get a PhD in bread baking I might consider it.
Each week, one of the girls spent a couple days down in Bardstown with Bart. They owned the café in Kentucky, unlike the two in Columbus and Indianapolis. Those were franchised locations. I had a feeling that when Debbie and Dolly were more advanced in their pregnancies, Dani would have to pick up more of the trips. I was counting the ages of my children on my fingers. Could I leave a ten-year-old boy in charge of the bakery so I could travel with Dani? If we left on Sunday and got home on Tuesday, he would only be there one morning. Of course, that was ridiculous. He could only do that if there was a mom willing to supervise. Well, if Dani was taking Debbie and Dolly’s travel shifts, perhaps they could fill my spot at the bakery. Matthew had proven every day that he was both devoted to the bakery and was becoming quite accomplished.
I was so proud of my son.
Jennifer’s thirtieth birthday was almost overshadowed by Mary’s emergency delivery. Dawn spotted right away that something was not right about the progress of the labor. She immediately called the ambulance, which was at the house from the fire station in five minutes. Bea took over the kids, except Patricia who went with Cassie and me to the hospital. Josh had refused to be separated from Mary and since he was a firefighter, he was allowed in the ambulance.
We waited in the emergency room with Dawn. Since she was not technically part of the hospital medical staff, she was not allowed in the room. I’m not sure how Josh threatened the staff to let him stay, but it might have been the grip Mary had on his hand that prevented them from moving him.
The doctors elected to move directly to a C-Section and pulled Josh’s son from Mary’s tummy just in time to get the umbilical cord unwrapped from his neck and save the baby’s life. When Josh came to tell us the news that both John William Whitaker and Mary were resting and would be available to receive visitors shortly, we all broke down and cried. Even Patricia. Cassie handed me my daughter when she’d been nursed and I danced around the emergency waiting room singing a little nonsense song to her. It comforted me as much as Patricia.
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