Welcome to the World, Baby Girl!

True Love

New York City

1977

One of the hundreds of things Dena did not know about Gerry O’Malley was that he believed in true love. His father and mother had been madly in love with each other so he knew that it did exist and what it looked like. His father had been in the military and had a big job at the Pentagon and his mother usually left their home in Middleburg, Virginia, to go to Washington to be with him during the week. They hated to be apart even for a few days. Gerry and his father adored her. She was so bubbly, so alive, so much fun to be around, until his sister was born, with cerebral palsy. After that their lives had changed. His sister needed constant care and his mother, who had been the toast of the Washington party circuit, almost never left the house anymore. Gerry was sent to military school at the age of twelve.

As she got older, his sister’s condition grew worse, and as hard as his mother tried to take care of her, she could not. His sister finally had to be put in a special school in another state where she could receive twenty-four-hour medical care. It devastated his mother when she was forced to let her go. Each time he came home from school he noticed that his mother was drinking more and more, and his father would come downstairs to breakfast alone, saying his mother was sick that morning. He and his father had never discussed it then and so it was not talked about.

A year later, she never left her room.

The only time he had ever seen his father cry was one day after he and his father had been to visit her in the convalescent home. After they left, his father put his head on the steering wheel and sobbed. Gerry knew that he was crying over having to leave first his daughter and now his wife, who had slowly retreated into another world and had left him so alone.

His mother died of acute alcoholism the first year he was in college. His father had become so despondent from years of watching his wife slowly destroy herself and feeling helpless that he too withdrew from the world and left Gerry feeling helpless, not knowing what to do to reach him. The feeling of wanting to help but not knowing how or what to say was what caused him to change his major from music to psychology. Years later, his father remarried. It was nice. He had someone, but it wasn’t love. He never got over his first wife. Gerry knew it took courage to love like that. He knew firsthand how painful and dangerous it could be, but as it turned out he didn’t have a choice in the matter. Gerry recognized the woman he loved at once, remembered her as one remembers an old dream, and he was at once lost, at once found. His life was as changed as if he had gone to bed in one place and the next morning found himself clear across the world, a world vaguely familiar but new and full of wonder, as bright and fresh as the world had seemed as a child after a rain when the sun came out, a place of endless possibilities. He had all but forgotten that old dream of finding her. But dreams have a way of crashing through the darkest of places, the thickest of walls, and there it was, and her name was Dena.

From the moment she walked in his door that first day he had felt his former life, the one that had been so carefully planned, all behind him, barely remembered. He knew he would follow this woman wherever she wanted him to go. And there was something almost merciful about that moment; he didn’t have to fight it, or struggle, or regret, because he was as sure of this as he had been of anything in his life. He knew that trying to stop it would have been as futile as trying to stop himself from sliding down a glass mountain. He felt himself falling but there was no fear, no terror, only the sweet, burning anticipation of landing beside her, in her arms.

On the other hand, the object of all this earth-shattering activity was unaware of it. Dena Nordstrom did not believe in love, true or not. It almost killed him when he read in the paper that Dena was now dating Julian Amsley, the president of her network. Every time he saw their picture together in the paper, which was often, it almost broke his heart. But there was nothing he could do.