Looking back, two things had saved him. His family. And a paradox. A desperate man, seeing a road with no end, would quit running sooner than one who knew there was a finish line.
A horrendous idea struck him.
When all the cautious approaches failed, only the outrageous one remained. He straightened with resolve, went to the window and pulled the string for the shades. The room flooded with sunlight.
She grimaced. Even with her eyes closed, the contrast was too great.
“You remember when you found me in the stairwell at the Kavsak hospital?” he said without preamble, but loudly enough that he knew she could hear him. “After the surgery with Mariana?”
Her eyes opened. From the lift of her eyebrows, the catch of her breath, he knew she recognized him.
“I’d been sitting there, thinking about what I’d done—holding that woman down. Brutally, Brenna. Digging my hands into her thighs. Bruising her. Pushing hard to keep her still—so goddam hard I thought I was going to snap her bones—while Mariana sliced into her intact flesh. Oh, that woman screamed. Frothed at the mouth. The snot ran out of her nose. And her eyes—good Christ, the hatred with which she looked at me…”
He yanked the drawer open on Brenna’s bedside table, fished out her toothbrush, toothpaste, hairbrush, soap, and slapped each one onto the tabletop in turn.
She tracked his hands, the objects, his face.
“Shit,” he hissed, looking for the plastic washbasin. He heaved at the cabinet door beneath the drawer so hard it came open, banged against the wall, and slammed shut again. “Who the fuck was I to force that on her? She had the right to say she’d had enough. Not me. But I trapped her with my big, cruel hands because I was more powerful, and I knew what was best for her. Oh, by God, I knew some day she’d be grateful. But then, finished with my heroics, I came home and left her alone with it.”
He jerked the door open again, snatched the basin, and smacked it on the bedside tray. “I don’t even know what her name was. Mariana said it was better to stay detached. Detached, Brenna. Impersonal. Even worse.”
He seized the basin, stalked to the bathroom, and turned the taps full-force, spattering the front of his suit and shirt. On the way back, her eyes locked on him, he sloshed the basin onto the bedside tray.
“That was her life. Her pain. Her leg that Mariana sawed off and dropped into the trash. Not mine. Mine are here beneath me. These are the legs I own. This is the body I own. I am the man I get to choose for. Me. And nobody else.” He stood there, seething, his breath ragged, aflame with anger and regret and self-loathing he didn’t know he had.
He went back to the chair, snagged the washcloth, towel, and gown off the linen pile and tossed them atop her bedcovers. He pressed the button that lifted the head of her bed. “Sit up.”
He stuffed pillows behind her, balanced her until her dizziness passed, sat on the edge of the bed beside her, and rolled the tray nearer. He dropped the washcloth into the basin and watched it soak up water, forcing himself to calm down. He wasn’t angry with her, just with himself, for actions he’d taken a million miles away in another world, thinking he knew more than he did. He stopped, gave himself a moment.
He squeezed out the washcloth and put two fingers under her chin. She jerked unwittingly, fractionally as vital as she once was. He countered, gently insisting. He dabbed the cloth over her face, smoothing it over her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks, the corners of her mouth.
When he finished, he dumped the cloth in the basin, rolled the bar of soap in it, and worked up a lather.
He picked up her left, nearest, hand. “You can die clean just as well as dirty,” he said, consciously gentling his voice, slowing his movements. “Just as well having eaten and drunk, just as well under your own control as an institution’s.” He covered her hand with the washcloth, using both of his own to massage the suds around each of her fingers, maximizing the physical contact. “Your life belongs to you. Not to me, or James, or Dr. Lee. You. You decide to live or die. Here, or elsewhere. Now, or later.”
He dipped the cloth into the basin, wrung it out, rinsed her hand, and blotted it with the towel. Setting it down, he reached for her far hand, palm up, wordlessly requesting she place it into his care.
She contemplated his outstretched hand.
Come on, he thought. Choose to trust me, as I did you, in Kavsak.
“Suicide is just as much an act of will as living is,” he said. “If you want to end your life, do so—intentionally. Don’t die tied to a bed, force-fed, pharmaceutically reduced to docility. You’re bolder than that. Pick your own means. Die quick.”
He couldn’t believe what he was saying. And yet, he remembered his own desperation—the paradox. Knowing he could quit also made it possible for him to keep going. Pain without end was unendurable. But fragments of time could be survived if you made them small enough. I’ll live this moment. And now this one.
Eventually, pain blunted. Living became possible again in longer and longer time segments.
His arm was tiring. And still she deliberated the unspoken challenge his open hand represented. He crooked his fingertips like someone guiding a driver into a parking spot. “Act of will, Brenna. Spurn the default. Be who you are to the last possible moment. Die on your own terms.”
This was brinksmanship of the worst kind. When a person was standing at a precipice, you tried to get them away from the edge. You didn’t suggest a better spot to leap from. He was gambling with her life. Which maybe wasn’t as risky as it sounded as, evidently, she had already decided to let it go.
His hand was drooping. He lifted it higher, not willing to quit. Finally—finally—her hand rose, a frail amalgam of skin and bone, and landed soft as a wren in his open palm.
His heart collapsed inside him. Relief flooded through him. And no sooner did he want to cheer, he wanted to howl.
His hands trembled with the enormity of what he had done. He finished washing her. He dabbed her toothbrush with paste, dipped it in her water glass and handed it to her, dumbfounded by his own argument. She brushed, spat, and gave it back, wordlessly inspecting him as only a photographer could. Looking for signs of vacillation, he supposed. He untied her gown, glimpsed her breasts as the fabric fell forward and he replaced it with the fresh garment.
He wanted to take back everything he’d said. To shake her, insist she must live. Tell her that dying was unthinkable. That he loved her too much, that he couldn’t bear it if she did. But he had spoken the truth. Her life was hers to do with as she pleased. Even if that meant she might leave him forever.
He straightened her bed covers, cleaned up the mess he had made on the tray, sat beside her again, and picked up her hairbrush.
She had escaped from Kavsak, flown across the Atlantic, and landed in D.C. But she wasn’t anywhere near what could be called home. He intended she have one.
His.
“I propose you sign yourself out of here—now—and that you and James come home with me,” he said, guiding the brush through her hair. “Give yourself some breathing room to decide what you want to do. If you want to die, you have to choose it mindfully, just like you have to live mindfully. A life is a precious thing to throw away, and if you take it, you can’t get it back. It’s gone. Done. Whatever good lies ahead is lost. The people who love you and get left behind will be wounded.”
She took her brush out of his hand, and spoke for the first time since he had entered her room. “This is like you stepping out in front of a Kavsak taxi.”
He took back the brush, gently pulled it through her hair.
“You make your choices, Brenna. I’ll make mine.”
Against medical advice, Brenna started the lengthy process of checking herself out of the Naval Medical Center. She was tired of being in a hospital. Scared of being under Dr. Lee’s control. Going to her little carriage house was out of the question. She couldn’t even get to the bathroom by herself.
Her space on 34th Street was a one-woman, t
ransitory place. James had been at her side, mostly sleepless, for weeks now. He was flagging. She couldn’t so much as offer him a bed. He needed Daniel’s help as much as she did.
Just as significantly, her first attempt at setting Daniel free had been excruciating. She didn’t have the strength to send him away a second time. It was like asking an ancient mariner to erase the North Star from the sky.
He had come back, re-linked himself to her, thrown himself in the path of an emotional wreck. She didn’t want to hurt him. She just couldn’t fight how much she needed him.
The day wore on. The wound care specialist came by, declared her sufficiently healed to remove the Wound-VAC, and dressed the injuries. A private ambulance was arranged to transport her, visiting nurses were set up, prescriptions were written, discharge instructions explained, and paperwork signed. At dusk, she was given a last-minute dose of pain-killers, transferred onto a stretcher, and loaded into the vehicle. Daniel took the prescriptions, walker, and her passport and travel documents—her clothes had been cut off her in Weisbaden—in his car and went ahead to prepare her room.
James rode with her in the ambulance, calling Gary on the way to see if he could come down from New York City for the weekend. Moral support for James. Nursing care for her. It turned out Gary was planning to surprise James and was already on his way.
The lurching, rolling, and turning of the ride across town put her in a cold sweat.
It was dark by the time the vehicle pulled up Daniel’s driveway and the rear doors were opened. The attendants, an older black man and a younger white woman in blue uniforms, whose names she didn’t get, pulled the stretcher out. The undercarriage unfolded beneath her with a jolt, and the wheels started bumping up the brick path. She felt like throwing up.
She glimpsed a two-story white brick colonial house with black shutters, a Sycamore tree coming into full leaf, and a wide verandah with rocking chairs. They lifted the stretcher, carried her up the front stairs, and set her down in the entry foyer. Daniel waved them to the left, into a cozy bedroom with a built-in captain’s bed, and an oak desk and bookshelves.
The attendants transferred her from the stretcher to the bed using a draw sheet.
Daniel took one look at her and disappeared, momentarily returning with a plastic wastebasket. “Here,” he said, setting it beside her. “In case you have to woof your cookies.”
As if she’d eaten any lately. She closed her eyes, fighting nausea. Last thing she needed was dry heaves.
“I’ll get you a ginger ale,” he said.
James signed paperwork, saw the attendants out the front door, and returned, his brow furrowed with concern. He was a doctor, an independent thinker, but nevertheless trained to the system. Unhappy as he had been with her prospects at the hospital, she wasn’t convinced he felt any more reassured here. He rolled out the desk chair and sat beside her.
“Un-bunch your eyebrows,” she mumbled. “I’m too whipped to do myself in tonight. I’ll be lucky if I don’t puke all over Daniel’s nice clean sheets.”
Daniel appeared in the doorway, ice clinking in a frosty glass of ginger ale. A flexible neon-pink straw poked festively out of the top of it, bent at an angle, swinging around like a miniature periscope surveying the room. He set a small saucer of saltines and ginger snaps on the shelf bordering the captain’s bed, then held the glass for her.
Courtship, revisited.
She sipped. Cold and sparkly, it eased down her throat. It tasted wonderful. She took three thirsty swallows and leaned back on the pillows stacked behind her back. This had all started with another drink—water he’d held for her in the Herc, despite her horrid behavior toward him.
He crouched by her bed, silently watching her.
The nausea gradually subsided. “I can’t decide if you’re brilliant, or an idiot,” she told him.
He tucked his chin against his chest, pulled his glasses down his nose, and peered over the frames at her. “Let’s start with my good points,” he said.
“If I hurt myself, I hurt you too,” she said, playing with the hospital ID bracelet still circling her wrist. “You’ve tied us together after all, bower bird.”
“Actually,” he said, “the male uses the bower for seduction. It’s the female who builds the nest and creates the family.”
She lifted a single eyebrow at him. “That’s arcane.”
“I watch a lot of documentaries,” he shrugged. “Now. How am I an idiot?”
“Kavsak taxi drivers rarely use the brakes.”
Daniel’s Adam’s apple bobbed in his throat.
James looked from Daniel to her as if they weren’t speaking English.
Daniel pushed his glasses up his nose, and eased the saucer of cookies forward. “Sweet, or salty?”
She plucked up a ginger snap and nibbled off an edge.
Daniel suppressed a smile.
“Wait.” She stopped chewing. She hadn’t consciously decided if she was going to bother eating. She shot him a look. “Sneaky, Ellsworth. Very sneaky.”
“Go ahead,” he grinned. “Eat. You’ll need your strength to resist me.”
“Don’t get your hopes up. I’m a good resister.”
“Don’t get cocky. I’m a good cook.”
James’ cell phone rang. He flipped it open, saw the Caller ID, and put it to his ear. “Hey, hon.”
He listened. “About five minutes,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
He slapped the phone shut. “Gary’s at the Metro station. I’m going to walk down and get him.”
Daniel reached into his back pocket and pulled out Brenna’s prescriptions. “There’s a 24-hour pharmacy on Connecticut. How about you fill the prescriptions, get the dressings for the wound, have a leisurely dinner with Gary, and bring me back something? I’ll be up late.”
James got up. “About Gary, I haven’t asked if it’s all right if he—”
“You two can stay in the bedroom next to mine. It has a queen bed.”
“You haven’t even met him yet. How did you know?”
Daniel cuffed his arm. “Get going. He’s waiting.”
James pecked Brenna’s cheek. “You behave, Li’l Bear.”
The front door closed. “Where does the ‘Li’l Bear’ come from?” Daniel asked.
“Brenna Elizabeth Anne Rease. BEAR.”
“Elizabeth Anne. That’s lovely.”
“After my mother, though she just went by ‘Anne’.” She played absently with the ID bracelet, her smile turning wistful. “She started out with high hopes for me.” Her mother would have been disappointed. She had bestowed her name on her daughter, only to have it be tarnished.
Daniel stood up, went to the desk. There was a framed black-and-white photo of an Asian woman on the bookshelf beside it. One of those head-and-shoulder shots corporations used to announce promotions in the newspaper. Photographically, nothing remarkable. Just a likeness. The woman was Daniel’s wife, she assumed. Beautiful. Petite. The intelligence in her eyes was arresting, and she had that over-achieving, irreproachable look to her.
Probably never had sex on a billiard table with a head of state.
God, she thought. What am I doing here?
Daniel dug through the top drawer, found what he was looking for, and returned to the bed. “Time to reclaim you.” He grasped her wrist and carefully slid a pair of scissors under the plastic ID bracelet.
She stared at them. They were the old-fashioned, government-style, steel-bladed scissors, pointed enough to drive into one’s belly, sharp enough to drag across a wrist. A weapon of self-destruction, not four feet from her bed. A mundane tool that desperation could transform into something very different.
He snipped, then froze, seeing how she was looking at them. His eyes met hers, horrified.
She held his gaze, wordlessly daring him to leave them in the room with her. He claimed she owned her life. Did he truly mean it?
He tossed the ID bracelet into the wastebasket, got up, returned the s
cissors to the drawer, came back, and sat beside her on the bed.
“Well. Nerves of steel.”
Slowly, he gave his head a single shake. “No.”
He picked up her left hand, and pulled her wrist across his lap. He uncapped a fine-point permanent marker she hadn’t realized he’d brought back from the desk drawer.
“The thing about suicide,” he said, his face a study in worry as he lowered the tip of the pen to her skin, “is that when it beckons, you don’t think about who loves you. You don’t think about your Mom or your Dad or your friends. All you feel is the pain. All you want is relief. At that point, death isn’t frightening. One, quick, deep cut, you think. A few minutes of bleeding out, and it’s all over with. You’re not scared. You’re calm. That’s what Dr. Lee doesn’t get. To him, suicide is theoretical. He’s never stood at the threshold.”
“You came that close, after Aya and Joseph Alden died?” she asked, her breath in his hair.
He picked up her right hand. She didn’t look down. She was mesmerized by his openness. “My life was centered around them. From one moment to the next, I had no field of gravity. I couldn’t think of anything else that mattered. I had nothing to get out of bed for in the morning. That’s when Sam sent me home.”
“Then what?”
He shrugged. “My parents held onto me. I waited it out. Gradually, the pain became tolerable. I had moments when I felt better. The moments grew longer. The time between the bad spells stretched out more. Recovery didn’t happen fast.”
He capped the marker. “I’m not going to tell you I’m the same man I was before. I didn’t rebound intact. I’m…less shiny, you know? More worn. I dropped a lot of things off the list of what I thought was important.”
“What’s left?”
He looked out the window behind her into the night that lay beyond the glass panes. “Love,” he finally said, looking back at her.
“And?”
“Just the one item.” He smiled, a half-apologetic turn of the mouth.
His telephone rang somewhere in the house. He glanced at his watch. “That’ll be my mom. She calls me nightly. Are you okay? Would you mind if I took it?”
Day Three Page 37
