One September Morning (32 page)

“I gotta go.” He grabs his laptop and strides to the door, expecting Abby to try and stop him. To apologize. To maintain the peace. To beg him to stay.

But she is conspicuously silent as he pushes out the door into the driving rain.

My mistake,
he thinks.
My mistake from the beginning. I was wrong to e-mail her when I learned about John. Wrong to try and help her. Wrong to come here. Wrong to fall for her.

Opening up to Abby was like sticking a knife in his own gut and twisting it around a few times.
I am the king of schmucks.

Outside Fort Lewis
Emjay

W
hen you’re on guard duty, every dark doorway might open to an insurgent with a rifle. Every person walking on the street might be your murderer.

Emjay Brown did not want to venture out alone.

He would have preferred to stay in the apartment, keeping watch at the window.

But he needed to ease the pain, dull the fear. He ran out of pills from Doc, burned through the beers and whiskey he bought with his last pay check.

And the only way he knows to self-medicate in a pinch is whiskey.

So here he is, creeping along the street in the middle of the night, a moving target as he passes under the yellow gloom of streetlights.

Not a good hood to be out in at night without a partner, without a second pair of eyes to cover you.

But he has his rifle.

“A soldier never goes anywhere without his rifle.”

“Sir, yes, sir!”

His trench coat covers the weapon just fine, so people don’t freak out. Of course, he walks with a limp, the rifle swinging against his leg when he moves. That’s okay. Better to be bruised and alive.

In the distance, two white lights pop out of nowhere, and he breaks into a run.

The lights are coming at him, closing on him, faster, faster…

He lunges toward a bus shelter and swings inside for cover just before the lights of a car try to sweep over him. They miss, but too close for comfort.

His breath is a raspy hiss in the hollow shell of the bus stop.

Damn, but they shouldn’t send him out here alone. A one-man mission is suicide in the desert.

The pumping, slamming, jamming in his chest has got to stop. Goddamn, it’s so fast. But it will only slow when he gets a drink.

And where are the reinforcements?

His mission objective is two blocks away.

Two long blocks.

Heart racing. Erratic. It’s going to pop before he gets there.

This is the dark stretch of road, no light here by the park.

Like you need a park here in the middle of nowhere, here where green surrounds you.

He crouches low as he moves along the park’s perimeters. It’s a relief to be out of the light, but there are too many shrubs and trees in the park where insurgents could hide.

Stay low.

Keep away from them.

Suicide bombers.

Roadside bombs.

Rocket-propelled grenades, missiles that will scorch your soul.

He scurries quickly past a hunk of stone the size of a tractor, then crouches behind a bench. If his heart would stop thudding, clamoring, it would be easier to get there. With his sleeve, he wipes the sweat from his brow and stares into the park, looking for them.

Fear flares in his chest at the thought of moving on. How will he get there alive with all these obstacles coming at him? Oh, God.

Another set of white lights floats toward him…and another. And one in the distance. A convoy.

Our guys? Friendlies? And can they be trusted?

He squints into the light, hopeful, until it happens.

The explosion from one of the cars, a shot that cracks the night.

“Eerrr!” Belly in the dirt, he fires his weapon, bracing his finger on the trigger. But the familiar jolt of rapid-fire rounds never comes. There is only one shot, a single bullet that skitters off harmlessly into the dark abyss.

What the hell?

What is this piece of shit in his arms?

He looks down and sees, not his familiar M-16, but an old hunting rifle.

What nightmare is this?

He combat-crawls under the park bench and curls up there, shivering. Something skitters over his head and he scratches his scalp feverishly to scrape off the itch. If he stays here, low and quiet, maybe they won’t come. Maybe the convoy will move past him and the night will become quiet again. Squeezed into the compact space, he thinks himself safe.

Safe as the hill beyond the chicken coops on a balmy summer night.

Lakeside Hospital
Madison

“S
o…do you think I’m crazy?” Madison asks as she goes through the books on the shelf of the shrink’s office. Mostly dusty, fat textbooks. Snooze.

“I think crazy means different things to different people,” he answers. “The question is, would you like to have more psychological stability? Would you like to feel more grounded?”

“Yes…and no.” She takes a deep breath, thinking about it. “I’d like to feel safe, like it’s okay to stand still for a minute. But then, I wouldn’t want to give up the ability to fly.” She turns back to face him, the man in the navy doctor’s coat who now sits straddling his wheely desk chair like a cowboy in a saloon. He’s cute—a buff body lingers under that lab coat—but way too military for her taste. Something about him seems so anal. Probably washes his soap dish. “The thing is,” she goes on, pacing over to the wall where a bunch of degrees are mounted, “if you’re going to keep flying, sometimes you’re going to crash and burn.”

“And you don’t mind that? The moments when you’re crashing?”

“Of course I do.” She reads the first diploma from Rutgers. That’s right. She remembers he went to school with John. “Charles D. Jump.” She turns back to him and crosses her arms. “What’s the D. stand for, Chucky?”

He winces. “I usually don’t tell, but I will if you promise not to call me that again?”

“Hit a soft spot, did I?” She grins. “So what should I call you?”

“Doc would be fine.”

“As in, ‘What’s up, Doc?’” When he doesn’t laugh, she shrugs. “Yeah, I guess you heard that one before.”

“Only a hundred times.”

She can feel him watching her as she crosses to the closed door, where two fresh navy lab coats are hanging on a hook. “What’s with the lab coats?” she asks, pulling one jacket off its hook and slipping it on. The fabric feels crisp under her fingers. “Do you need a degree to wear one of these ugly things?”

“Yes, you do. That ugly coat actually costs about a hundred thousand dollars in student loans.”

“Ouch. That’s fickle fashion for you.” The sleeves dangle down to her knees and she’s getting the soft scent of fabric softener. Suddenly, the act of trying on the coat seems sort of sexy, like she was jumping into his bathrobe or something. Quickly, she sheds the jacket, hangs it up and goes to the window.

She didn’t want to come here. It’s nerves that are making her blabber on like this, nerves and a streak of rebellion that flared when she learned Dr. Charles Jump was going to be her therapist. When she agreed to see someone, she pictured a kind, nonintimidating woman like Abby.

Not a rangy man with eyes like glue. Not a shrink with a hot bod under his lab coat. Definitely not someone so army.

Aren’t you supposed to be able to pick your own therapist?

Madison didn’t like her mother hooking up with a doctor who carved the roast at Christmas Eve dinner. “Geez, Ma, you really beat the bushes to find someone for me,” she had complained to her mother.

But, hey, it could be worse. What if she complained and they switched her to a warty old lech? Or a brittle birdwoman? Or one of those foreign doctors you can’t understand? Sienna had to see this Asian gynecologist who cracked a joke about burned eggs, and Sienna freaked, thinking that the eggs in her ovaries were scorched. Scary.

“You know, you’re welcome to have a seat,” he says.

“Do you want me to lie on the couch?”

“You can if you want to.”

“Do other people come in and flake out there?”

“Many people find it freeing. Relax the body, free the mind.”

“I think it’s weird.” She goes to the leather couch and perches on its square arm. The leather feels slippery under the seat of her jeans. “Does somebody clean it, like the seats on a commercial jet?”

“It’s very clean,” he says. “As is the fish tank, which we’ll discuss next session. I’d like to spend part of my time hearing about you, Madison.”

“What do you want me to say?” She shrugs. “Honestly, my life is boring. School. Homework. Text messaging. Hanging out. Only I’m not allowed to do that anymore because my parents are sure my friends are a bad influence.”

“Are they?”

Madison takes a breath, not sure how much of the truth she wants to share. “They don’t influence me,” she says curtly. “Although I wish they did. My life would be so much more interesting.”

He leans his chin on the back of the chair, a listening posture. “In what ways? How are your friends so outlandish?”

Now there’s an open question. And the ironic part is that there’s nothing outlandish to reveal. What is she supposed to say, that Sienna likes to be with Ziggy when she’s feeling slutty? That Ziggy has a weakness for weed?

Boring.

“If I tell you, it’s confidential, right?” she asks.

He nods. “Doctor-patient privilege.”

“You know all those fires that were started in state parks, all around the Seattle area?” She bites her lower lip, improvising. “My friend Ziggy started them. He likes to go out on weekends and play pyro.”

“Does he? And how do you feel about that?”

She shrugs. “Sometimes I get nervous that he’s going to get caught. I mean, he’s seventeen. They would try him as an adult now, right?”

“Probably.”

Madison turns away and stares into the fish tank, conjuring her next story. “And Sienna? My BFF. She’s got her issues, too.”

“What’s up with her?”

“It’s awful.” As an angelfish flutters by she considers telling Doc that Sienna is a nympho who sleeps with all the male teachers at the high school, but that seems so stale. “Sienna has a problem with…”

Quick! Fill in the blank,
she thinks.

“…cutting,” she says, going on to tell him how Sienna has scars up and down her arms. All self-inflicted cuts from a razor blade. Winging it, she tells him that Sienna carved Ziggy’s name into her arm. But as soon as she says it, she realizes how stupid she sounds. Nobody would ever do that, would they?

“Cutting is a problem we’re seeing more and more of these days,” Doc says.

“Not such a big problem in this part of the world,” she says wryly, “since we never get enough sun to wear a short-sleeved shirt.”

She turns away from the fish tank to catch his eye, but he’s not laughing.

But at least he’s not pissed off, either.

“Forget Ziggy and Sienna for now.” He straightens, his pale blue eyes zapping her. “How about Madison? What does Madison like to do for fun?”

She folds her arms across her chest. “For fun, I send e-mails to my brother,” she says.

“To Noah? Or John.”

Madison grins. “Both.”

Now he smiles, but it’s just a little trickle of a grin, as if he’s trying not to laugh at a funeral.

But still, it’s a smile, she thinks, letting her gaze slide down his buff body down to the cool green clogs. His scrubs are navy blue, and the color suits him well. You can see the chain of his dog tags at his neck, and he likes to grab hold of this gold medal that also hangs there and run it over the chain. She just bets that medal is hot to the touch, and she can’t help but wonder if he’s wearing boxers or briefs under those scrubs.

Not that she would ever do anything to find out. She’s in enough trouble without getting into an older man’s pants, especially an older man who’s her therapist. Ick. It’s just that sometimes her mind goes to weird places.

“Do you miss your brothers?” Doc asks.

“Well, duh.”

“I’ll take that as a yes,” he says casually.

Madison turns back to the fish and begins to think that therapy might not be so bad after all. In fact, hanging with Doc is going to be okay.