Reckless (19 page)

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Authors: Ruth Wind

BOOK: Reckless
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The memory of the fall came back to him, just a quick, blurred impression of falling and falling, the ground rushing up at him. It made him feel dizzy, and he pushed the memory away. Time enough.
He didn't remember landing. Suddenly, he wasn't sure he could feel his toes and attempted to wiggle them. They moved. With pain, it was true, but they moved. He tried the same with his fingers. The right ones moved fine, but he couldn't seem to locate his left ones. He shifted his head a bit to try to see them. An enormous cast covered his arm from fingers to shoulder. No wonder he couldn't move them just yet.
A fierce, wild feeling rushed through him. He was
alive.
“Jake?”
He jerked his head to the side, not sure if he was imagining that soft, warm voice or not. The sudden movement sent a zinging pain through not only his head, but all the way down his neck. He grunted.
“Easy.” Her hands were on his shoulder, small and warm.
By concentrating very hard, Jake brought Ramona into focus, though there was a nimbus of light surrounding her, as if she were some otherworldly creature. Maybe she was.
He reached for the hand he could feel on his shoulder, found it and closed it tightly in his own. “Hi,” he managed. The effort hurt his throat.
“Hi. Do you want some water?”
He nearly shook his head, but remembered how it had hurt to turn it. “No. Throat's too sore.”
“I bet.” She smiled, and there was a motion at the edge of his vision, then her hand settled very lightly on his cheek. “You had surgery.”
“Anything missing?” It hurt to talk, but he had to know.
This time she chuckled. “Nothing you can't live without. They took your spleen. Fixed some torn places inside.”
Her hand moved, smoothing his hair gently back from his forehead. It was the best thing he'd ever felt. Ever. He tightened his fingers around hers, wishing he had the wit to lift it and kiss it. But he couldn't. Or didn't. Or something.
“You were so lucky, Jake.”
A remembered sensation of falling, falling, falling made him dizzy for a minute. “Yeah,” he rasped. “What—” The words stuck in his dry throat, and Ramona turned away then back, putting an ice cube against his mouth.
“This will help.”
It was cold and slippery against his tongue and Jake was torn over whether this or her hand were the best sensations ever. “What else?” he said.
“What else did you do to yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Broke three ribs and your arm in two places. Multiple bruises and contusions. Bruised some internal organs, but none seriously.” She took a breath. “Your back should have been shattered, the way you landed, but it wasn't.”
He had the sense she struggled a little to keep her voice even, and he tried to bring her face more clearly into focus. It was too hard. “Thank you,” he sighed, and closed his eyes again.
 
Ramona stood there for a long time, her hand clasped in Jake's. Looking at him. Touching him. He was battered almost beyond recognition—his face violently discolored from bruises and scrapes. His mouth was swollen and held three stitches—and she didn't think he was going to be happy to learn he'd knocked out two bottom front teeth. His ribs were taped, his arm in a cast, his legs and torso covered with bruises inflicted on the torturous way down. On his back, a wide red bruise from shoulder to hip showed the impact of his landing.
When he really woke up, he was going to hurt. A lot. She doubted he'd be able to move without help for several days at least.
But he would live. Ramona gently pushed her fingers through the thick, dark weight of his hair, smoothing it away from his wounded and beautiful face. He was warm and breathing and alive. For almost twenty-four straight hours, Ramona had not let herself think, first just to get through the rescue and the surrealistic night. Later, she had not wanted to consider all the things that could go wrong, or recall similar case histories with unfortunate endings. She had practically held her breath, waiting for Jake to awaken and recognize something, someone.
And now he had. It was nothing short of a miracle. In a sudden release of tension, Ramona felt her strength give way. She sank into the chair she had stationed at his side, bent her head to the bed beside him and wept In gratitude and relief and a recognition that her life was forever changed.
If she had never been raped, if she had never gone cross-country skiing that day, if—as she had wished a million times—that day had never happened, she would never have known the back way down the mountain. She would not have known any way to get Jake off that ledge until morning.
And if they had waited till morning, Jake would have probably died from internal bleeding. He'd been close to succumbing to his injuries by the time they got to the hospital.
She pressed her forehead to his fingers, lax now as he slept, and let the strange, unsettling knowledge of that wash over her again and again, unable to do anything but marvel at it. Too much had happened, and she was exhausted, and she just couldn't think about any of it. Not yet.
A hand fell on her shoulder and smoothed over her back. “Ramona, let me take you hope,” Tyler said, and she noticed absently that he was using her first name instead of the formal title he'd always insisted upon. “He's going to be okay now. You need some rest.”
Shakily, Ramona lifted her head and wiped her face, too tired to even care that she was totally falling apart and revealing everything. He handed her a box of tissues and she accepted it gratefully. “I'm sorry,” she said in a breathy voice, still struggling to pull herself together. “I think I'm just overwhelmed.”
“He's needed someone to love him like you do. For such a long time.”
“I didn't want to.”
A shadow crossed his pale gray eyes, and Ramona remembered another hospital room and a long vigil, one that had not ended so well. “I understand.”
“I guess you probably do.”
He fixed his gaze on Jake's sleeping face. “I still miss her. Every day.” Ramona put her hand on Tyler's arm, but said nothing. For another moment, he seemed lost in memory, then he roused himself. “Let's get out of here. I'll buy you a sloppy fast-food breakfast on the way out.”
“Is it morning?” Ramona looked out the window. A faint hint of dawn pushed at the horizon. “I guess it is.”
 
She slept a solid, dreamless twelve hours. When she awakened, a soft summer evening had crept into the mountains. Ramona carried a cup of hot, sweet coffee out to the porch and sat on the steps, gazing without thought at the long fingers of buttery light slanting through the feathery branches of pine. Dust motes swirled and danced on the strands of light. Starlings stuttered and sparrows sang from hidden boughs, and through the gilded bars a blue jay flew, calling out his warning.
It made Ramona think of Jake, sitting on her porch that morning in a towel, teasing her.
With a sense of unreality, she realized it had been just over a month since Lance's wedding, since the day Jake had turned everything in her life upside down with his charm and his vulnerable blue eyes and his pain and his kisses.
A kaleidoscopic whirl of images rose in her mind, all of them of Jake. Jake with that devilish grin when he teased her and his sultriness when he taught her to dance. Jake's eyes burning with that fierce blue pain, or dancing with delight. Jake's mouth smiling, frowning, moving toward her, pressing against her lips.
She thought of him holding her so fiercely through the night while he slept, and of his still, pale face as he lay on the ledge in the mountains.
With a small cry, she buried her face in her hands. Next to her, Manuelito groaned softly and pushed his head into her lap. She hugged him, feeling her heart squeeze painfully, as if a fist were crushing it slowly and steadily. Clutching thick handfuls of fur, she tried to breathe deeply, to tamp the fierce sorrow.
She loved Jake, loved him in all his rugged beauty and when he was wounded and low. She loved the dashing slant of his cheekbones and the way he held Mr. E so close and the pleasure he took in sailing and cooking and dancing and music. Loved him for a hundred things, a thousand, some nameable, some not.
But she couldn't be with him. The way he'd called for her when he fell down the mountain, and the way he'd clutched her hand at the hospital told her that he thought he needed her. He might even think he loved her.
And maybe he did. That almost made it worse. She rubbed Manuelito's back idly, watching tiny hairs fly into a bar of sunlight to dance with specks of floating dust. She thought of the way Jake had made love to her, reverently, as if it were a holy act, this joining of their bodies. He had been so serious, so intense.
No, she hadn't imagined the purity, the rightness of that joining.
She sipped her coffee. Even if he loved her, and she loved him back, she could not commit herself to that relationship. Not until he had found a way to make peace with his demons. She could not bear to pick up the pieces like this, over and over again. She couldn't bear to see his face battered, see his body broken.
It would be a life lived on the brink of disaster. And Ramona had spent too many years building a solid, stable peace to let his roaring, unpredictable pain make a shambles of it.
She'd let the lion over the wall surrounding her quiet garden. She'd befriended the dangerous beast and tried to take the thorn from his paw. She'd made a place for him to sleep in the sun and he'd scorned it.
So be it. He belonged in the wild, and she belonged in her garden. As she sat in the calm, peaceful world she had made for herself, her grief-stricken heart shredded into bits, but her resolve was strong. She could take almost anything, but she could not bear to sit back and watch Jake kill himself. She couldn't bear to be on the other end of the line when that last, sober call was made.
No.
Chapter 19
A
t Ramona's recommendation, they moved Jake to the VA home. He was glad to be there as he began to mend. He wished Harry was there with him, so they could sit side by side in the sun-room in their wheelchairs, but that grief had been blunted a little by the letter Harry had left him.
Jake had carried the letter with him to the mountain. It had been in his pocket when he fell, and there were small tears and smears on the envelope now, but Jake read it every day.
It was a very simple letter, written by a man who had learned not to take simple things for granted. In a thick scrawl that Jake could barely read, Harry had written:
Jake,
Please don't get all choked up about this. I'm going home to Jean. I tried to stick around awhile for you, but I reckon you're in good hands with Ramona, and I'm just tired.
I've always thought of you like a son, and I'm going to leave you with a father's advice. You're too hard on yourself, and you need to ease up. For me, I wish you'd go to the groups, but I'm not making it a deathbed request. You'll do what you know is right, just like you always have.
Good luck to you, son. Harry.
Jake had read it in the hospital, as soon as he could hold it, and he'd understood that Harry had taken the place of his own father. He wished he'd understood that sooner.
He missed the old vet deeply, but he realized that he could let him go. The truth was, Jake felt extraordinarily blessed. As if there must be a purpose for which he'd been spared, if only he could figure out what it was. For a couple of weeks, he lived in a kind of exalted state. Everything in the world seemed newly made. A morning sky could move him nearly to tears. Raindrops and flowers and apple pie were wonders never to be equaled.
It was just so damned good to be alive.
He didn't go to a meeting and he didn't make an appointment with a counselor. There was time enough for that, if it turned out he really needed it.
The trouble was Ramona. At first, he was so preoccupied with his recovery, he didn't notice that she flitted in and out, never staying long. No one did, except his mother, who patiently mended or put the finishing touches on new clothes for Curtis as she sat with him.
He knew Ramona was busy with her practice. He tried not to mind when she seemed to only give him the same five or ten minutes she gave everyone else. Even though he wasn't her patient, she managed to stop in to talk to him when she made rounds. Even those brief stops lit up his whole day. He looked forward to the evening and Ramona's smile.
But by the end of the second week, he was physically much better. Cranky from being cooped up, as a matter of fact, but Dr. Richards was still worried about some whatsis or another and wanted Jake to stay a little longer. Truthfully, he doubted he had the strength yet to manage a normal life. He felt just better enough to wish for more.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to get on with his life, the life he'd tossed aside so carelessly. He wanted to get outside and smell the mountain air. He wanted to dance and cook and make love.
To Ramona.
But as the days passed, he began to realize she was avoiding him. She kept her visits short and platonic, cheerful and encouraging and completely void of intimacy. And Jake, like all the others, watched for her arrival with a hungry, puppylike eagerness.
He hated himself for feeling like that. It was pathetic the way they all waited, as if for the blessing of some benevolent goddess who deigned to walk among them.
It pricked his pride.
One evening, he hobbled his way outside and stationed himself on a stone bench near the parking lot. He waited while the sun went down and lights began to come on behind the curtains of the rooms. He watched old men turn on their televisions and settle in for a long night of situation comedies, and his irritation grew. One day, he might be one of those old men, but he wasn't now.
Finally, long after the crickets had set up their nightly serenade in the flowers edging the sidewalk, Ramona came out, carrying her leather briefcase in one hand, her keys in another. She didn't see him right away, and that gave him a strange, fierce twist in his gut at first. He could be anyone, any creep, and she'd be vulnerable to him.
But it was crazy to think like that. The truth was, she knew everyone here and she did pay attention to her surroundings. It wasn't exactly a dangerous spot—and, noticing the keys again, he bet she knew how to use them as a weapon.
It was only then that he noticed how drawn she looked, the cheerfulness sliding from her face like a melting mask, revealing a weariness he hated to see. He'd meant to be firm with her, to take a stand and make her see him like a man instead of a weak invalid. Instead, he stood up and called her name.
“Ramona.”
She stopped, took a breath and came forward. He saw her attempt to compose her features, but the struggle was evidently too much. “Hi, Jake.”
Her eyes were luminous in the night, as if they somehow magically caught the light and reflected it back. He lifted a hand, thinking to reach for her, but let it fall back to his side. He'd rehearsed a dozen things to say in this moment. Strong things. Flirtatious things. Even angry things. But he heard himself say, “I miss you.”
Stricken, she stared at him. It seared him straight to his soul, and he stretched out his arm, hooked a hand around her neck and pulled her close. She pressed into him, burying her face in his chest, and he felt a shudder pass through her. Her forehead touched his throat.
Jake closed his eyes, holding tight to the back of her neck, her thick hair tangling around his fingers. Heat and yearning and peace welled up in him, and he couldn't speak. He pressed a kiss to her crown.
Everything would be all right.
But after a moment, she gently pushed away from him. “I can't do this, Jake. I'm sorry.” She backed away as if she would just leave it at that.
He limped forward and snagged her arm. “Wait a minute. Tell me what's going on here. I don't get it.”
She wouldn't look at him. “I just can't do it.”
“Can't do what? Can't love me?”
An expression of sadness crossed her face. “Oh, I can love you.” She raised her eyes. “But I can't heal you. I can't be the doctor who always comes running and patches you up. You need something, but I can't provide it.” She pulled her arm out of his loosening grip. “I can't,” she whispered. “I'm sorry.” Quickly, she turned and moved away from him.
Jake stared after her, his body going hollow, like a pumpkin ready for carving. He watched her go, feeling as if he'd been told he'd won the lottery only to find it was a cruel practical joke. A bright pain pressed behind his eyes, and Jake clenched his jaw.
He whirled around and hobbled back into the home. To hell with her, then. To hell with everyone.
 
That night, his nightmare came back. It was the first time it had appeared since the night at Ramona's house, and Jake had dared to believe it was gone. That his close brush with death had magically cast his demons out.
Sitting bolt upright, his heart racing, Jake was at first bewildered. He couldn't remember where he was. The room and the sounds and the bed felt totally unfamiliar, and he stared into the darkness for long, confused moments before his mind cleared.
Stricken by the realization that he had not, after all, escaped, he fell back on his bed and stared at the ceiling, depression crashing in on him. That night on the mountain, when he'd finally realized it might be possible to live with the memories and somehow move past them, he'd thought that he would be done with this. He'd convinced himself that Ramona had healed him, that her magic touch had made him whole.
He'd felt himself saved.
Staring into the blackness, with the sound of a machine beeping distantly, gradually he arrived at a different conclusion. His body had been so severely traumatized that the need for healing sleep overrode any mental aberrations. Now that he was healing, his mind was going to let the demons back in.
He swore, covering his eyes with his forearm.
He had used Ramona as a shield. In her arms, he didn't need to dream. When he held on to her, he could pretend he was fine, because she was real and whole and solid.
A slow glimmer of understanding finally penetrated his thick skull. This was what she had meant. This was what she couldn't do. She couldn't be his Saint George and slay his dragons for him. He had to do it himself.
And for one moment, he let himself imagine her running toward him, imagine her next to him, warm and soft in his arms, her hair smelling of sunlight.
Ramona. He missed her so much.
 
It was raining when Jake made his way down to the meeting he knew was being held. A collection of soldiers gathered around the table, everyone from World War II through Vietnam. Jake hesitated, realizing he was the only vet from the Gulf War in the room. Maybe they'd go back to their rooms and tell each other what a wimp he was.
But Dr. Richards was following behind him. “Come on in.” He limped to the table and sat down. “This is Jake,” he said. “He was a major in the army by the age of thirty. He resigned his commission four years before full retirement. Some of you here might know what that feels like.”
“Good to meet you, Jake,” a middle-aged man said. “You feel like talking?”
“Maybe not just yet.”
“That's fine.”
But he did talk. Not the first time, and not the second. At his third meeting, he found himself saying, “The only thing I ever wanted in life was to be a soldier.”
And they listened. Nobody pushed him to go further when he felt the tightness in his throat and stopped. Nobody probed his psyche. And when he finally broke down and confessed his “sin” to a room full of old soldiers, he knew he was one of them. That he had not betrayed them, that he'd done the best he could.
Alone in his condo later, Jake held a lapful of cat and let himself remember the feeling of holding that little boy's hand. He let himself think of the look in the big dark eyes—terror of such magnitude it couldn't be expressed except in a dying scream. All he'd ever wanted to do was protect the weak and defenseless—and he couldn't even save the life of one little boy.
Jake closed his eyes and finally let himself mourn that dead child, mourn all the dead children and violated women of the world. He had been so proud to wear his uniform. So proud to be a soldier. He'd wanted to protect and save them all. He'd wanted...
He bowed his head in humility. It would be a long time before he could sort out the finer points. For now, he understood at last that he'd done the best he could.
He was a veteran. That pretty much said it all.
And out there, waiting, was a woman he had discovered he couldn't live without.
 
Ramona diced plums on her kitchen counter. They were beautiful this year, firm and sweet, with dark purple skins that would turn the jam a vivid, deep red. On the back of the stove, jars rattled faintly in a boiling-water bath. Sugar waited in a snowy mound in a bowl, along with the pectin and lids neatly lined up on a clean dish towel.
Ready. She poured the diced fruit into a heavy cast-iron pot, taking care not to bruise them. Then she added the sugar and stirred it in, grinning to herself over the resulting color—a dazzling shade of ruby that nearly vibrated.
Manuelito, lying on the floor next to the stove, lifted his head suddenly and growled. Ramona glanced at him, then out the window. She absolutely could not stop until this step was done. Naturally there was someone at the gate. She inclined her head. “Go chase them off, baby,” she said. The big dog leaped up and streaked toward the screen, knocking it open with his nose.
Outside, she heard his deep, throaty bark, then the curious set of happy yips and whines that meant he was greeting someone he knew and liked. Ramona frowned and glanced out the window again. She couldn't see anyone, but it didn't matter. She trusted Manuelito's judgment, and the jam was too close to finished to stop now.
Deftly, she snatched jars from the water and lined them up, admiring the curls of steam they sent into the air. Humming softly, she took the jam off the burner and began ladling it into the jars. It was as beautiful as she had imagined it would be, and happily she lined the jars up in a row as she wiped sticky residue from the edges with a sterilized cloth, then put the lids on with a twist of her wrist.
She forgot Manuelito had gone out until she turned around to put the pot in the sink and saw the shadow on the floor. Startled, she looked up—and froze. Her heart literally fluttered.
Jake.
She tried not to react. Tried not to stare. But stare she did, standing like a victim of Medusa in the middle of her kitchen with the pot still her in hands.

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