Reckless

by Ruth Wind

  “Don’t I know it. You ready to take a little spin in the garden, you old codger?”

  “Hell, yes, I am. They found my last pack in my shoe and took it away last night.” He scowled. “Treat us like a bunch of children.”

  “I got you covered.” Jake pushed the wheelchair outside and down a bricked pathway to a sunny spot next to a grove of scrubby trees, twisted and anemic from the long, icy winters. From beneath his jean jacket, worn for the express purpose of hiding the dark brew, Jake pulled out the bottle of Guinness, a keyhole opener and a red pack of Winstons. He glanced over his shoulder, checking the area for an orderly or a nurse who might feel obligated to reprimand them. “All clear,” he said, and popped the lid off the ale.

  Harry drank gustily and lit a cigarette with hands as steady as a twenty-year-old’s. With a contented sigh, he exhaled. “At my age, that’s a hell of a lot better than sex,” he declared. “Though I wouldn’t object to that, either. Got a woman in that coat of yours?”

  “Well, Harry, the trouble is, I keep trying to bring one, but they’re plumb worn out by the time I get done with them.”

  “Huh. Selfish little upstart.”

  Jake chuckled and leaned back against a tree. He closed his eyes against the warm sunlight and let it seep into him. “Nice day,” he commented idly.

  “Be better with a woman.”

  “Nah, women talk too much.”

  “True enough.” Harry lifted his cigarette and inhaled with satisfaction. “That was what I always liked about my Jean. Never much of a talker, that girl.”

  Harry’s wife, Jean, had died, while Jake was away. From his days mowing Harry’s lawn, Jake remembered her as a small, birdlike woman with curly hair that never stayed brushed. She was always busy with some household task, washing windows or mending clothes or digging in her pretty garden. “I remember,” he said.

  Harry settled into some place a long way from the veterans’ home. Maybe he was thinking about Jean. Though she had died some ten years before, Harry still spoke of her daily.

  Letting the sun soak into his bones, Jake lazily wondered what it would be like to have loved a woman so long and so well. To have shared a life with another person day in and day out, so by the time you were old and sitting in a garden on a sunny summer morning, the fabric of your life would be so interwoven with that of your spouse that the whole color of your existence would have changed. In his lazy, musing state, the metaphor pleased him, and he imagined that Harry was red and Jean blue, and their lives had woven together to make a warm, rich purple.

  Nice, but it didn’t always work out that way. His own parents had been ill-matched and their life together had been an uneven and blotchy weave. No blend. Just clumps of one color or the other, jarring the eye no matter how many times you expected you’d get used to it.

  He might have drifted in the color metaphor for a long time, but Harry said, “You gotta get some sleep sometime, boy.”

  Jake jolted and leaned on his knees. “Yeah. Tell me about it.”

  “I had a nightmare about Bataan last night,” Harry said, picking a bit of tobacco from his tongue before lifting the cigarette to his lips again. “Always the same one, for more than fifty years now.” He cracked a grin. “Sometimes I think heaven would just be never having that dream again.”

  “I understand.”

  “Yeah, I reckon you do.” He drank a little more Guinness. “You oughta join one of the support groups. Good bunch of fellows. Nobody else is ever gonna know what you’re feeling.”

  Jake rubbed his face. “Yeah, maybe.” He was reluctant to turn down Harry’s advice straight out, but the idea of wandering into that group of World War II and Korean and Vietnam vets shamed him.

  “It don’t get better on its own, boy.”

  Jake nodded. That much was obvious. It had been more than five years now, and he only seemed to be getting worse, not better. “Sometimes,” he said quietly, “I really think I’m going insane.”

  Harry merely nodded and went back to smoking, his pale blue eyes fixed on something far, far away. Feeling safe and protected with Harry only a few feet away, Jake leaned back against the tree and slept with the sunlight against his lids, burning away any image that might sneak in.

  Ramona pressed her stethoscope against her pregnant patient’s belly, and listened quietly. “Sounds good. Fast heartbeat still—probably a boy.”

  The young woman smiled. “My husband is dying for a boy.”

  The nurse popped her head in the door. “Dr. Hardy, do you have time to see Louise Forrest before lunch? Her son just brought her in with a sprained ankle.”

  “Of course,” Ramona said. “Which son brought her?”

  “The oldest boy. Jack? Jake?”

  Ramona smiled. Now why wasn’t she surprised that Louise would have a little accident just before the end of office hours on a Friday and just happen to call her eldest son to take her to the doctor’s office?

  “No problem,” she said to her nurse. “Put her in three, and I’ll be in there in a few minutes.”

  “Okay. I’m going on, then, if you don’t mind. I need to leave early for the school party.”

  “That’s fine. See you Monday.”

  Ramona finished with her expectant mother, then headed down to exam three, half-smiling at Louise’s predictability. She would bet a large sum of money there would be nothing at all wrong with the ankle—Louise wasn’t above subterfuge to get what she wanted.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Forrest,” Ramona said cheerfully as she came in. Louise sat on the table, an ice pack on her bare ankle. Jake sprawled on the chair in the corner, his face turned away, and Ramona frowned. He looked haggard as hell. “How are you, Jake?”

  It seemed to take him a long time to turn his head, and when he did, Ramona found that his eyes were just exactly as blue as she remembered. The color called Persian blue, the color of columbines. “Fine, thank you,” he replied politely.

  A lie. His jaw was shaded with the dark bristles of an unshaved beard, and his eyes were sunk into purple hollows. She thought that in the short week since she’d last seen him he’d lost weight. The wonder was that he was able to sit upright at all.

  But she let the lie slide for the moment and turned to Louise. “What did you do?”

  “Oh, it was the silliest thing. I slipped on the steps going to take out the trash.”

  “Hmm.” Ramona lifted the ice bag to examine an ankle as trim and neat as a girl’s. She poked at the unswollen, unbruised, untraumatized flesh with two fingers. “Does that hurt?”

  Louise frowned. “A little.”

  “We’ll fix you up.”

  “Jake,” Louise said, “why don’t you wait outside and let me talk to the doctor about my medication while I’m here.”

  He shrugged and stood. Ramona resisted the temptation to gawk at his long, lanky form, but it was impossible to avoid sneaking a peek from the corner of her eye. She had not forgotten the way he’d felt against her, nor the wonder of the kiss they had shared.

  Not to mention the sheer size of him. In the small examining room, he seemed to take up most of the available space. “I’ll be in the waiting room,” he said, and ducked out.

  As soon as the door was closed, Ramona put a hand on her hip. “There’s nothing wrong with this ankle. You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “I know, I know. I’ll pay your regular fee, just like a patient who really has something wrong.”

  “Louise, you know it isn’t the money.”

  The older woman raised a hand and waved all that away. “I had to get him in here somehow. He’s bad, Ramona. I don’t think he’s had any real sleep since before the wedding. For a bit there, right after he bought the restaurant, he seemed to be getting better, but he’s gotten worse again. You can see it for yourself. I’m scared to death he’s going to kill himself.”

  Ramona frowned. “You think he might be suicidal?”

  “Not strictly.” She pursed her lips. “Not as
in taking a rope and hanging himself or anything like that, but he could very well kill himself another way—wreck his car, drink too much one night, fall, something. You know what I mean.”

  “Yes.”

  “I just want you to talk to him, Dr. Hardy. Maybe he’d take sleeping pills.”

  Ramona sighed. “He needs more than I can give him, Louise. I’m only a medical doctor, and he needs counseling. He can get it through the veterans’ office.”

  “He won’t do it.” Louise grabbed her hand. “Honey, I feel certain you can help him a little, maybe just get him going in the right direction. Everybody knows those old soldiers love you like you’re some kind of queen. Please?”

  Ramona narrowed her eyes. Much of what Louise said was true. She had survived her own case of PTSD and she’d been able to use that knowledge with some success. She was also predisposed to take combat veterans under her wing. “The thing you have to understand is that I can’t help him until he’s ready. It’s like trying to get an alcoholic to stop drinking. You can beg and plead all you like, but the decision to accept help comes from within or it isn’t successful.”

  “So you’ll talk to him?”

  Ramona laughed. “I knew we should have barred you stubborn Texans from this state a long time ago.”

  Louise jumped nimbly off the table. “Right, you go, then. I’ll just wait until you call him into your office.”

  “Okay.” Her hands in her lab-coat pockets, Ramona paused by the door and felt compelled to offer another warning. “Don’t expect miracles, Louise.”

  The stubborn Texan winked. “Oh, I’m always looking for miracles, sugar.”

  Ramona left Louise and walked down a short hall to the waiting room.

  Jake sat in one of the chairs, his head flung back against the wall. His eyes were closed. With his hands folded on his stomach and his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, he looked very peaceful. Ramona hated to disturb him.

  It seemed impossible that he should still be so gorgeous, even with the torture that lay on him like a banshee, eating him from within, but he was. He looked like exactly what he was: dangerous and haunted and unbelievably sexy.

  Ramona was well-educated and had basic good sense. But she was a woman, too. A woman who had never had much time for relationships until she reached her thirties, and she’d liked it that way.

  But she had the normal hormones, and they worked as predictably as any other woman’s. For a long time after the rape, she had felt no interest in men at all, but eventually she’d made peace with the difference between acts of violence and acts of sex. There had been a sweet, gentle boy in college who had eased her through the worst of her fears, and in matters concerning sex, Ramona believed she was no different from any other woman. She’d been too busy to date a lot, but on the rare occasions that she actually met a man whose company she enjoyed, she had no mental block about a physical relationship:

  Jake somehow aroused an altogether different reaction in her than the usual pleasant attraction. When she did date, she tended to choose calm, intelligent, nurturing men. Jake was not like them. He was volatile. He was intense. He was hard and wary.

  And the visions he roused in her imagination were also different. She didn’t imagine a life spent going for walks or fixing him supper. She imagined panting, tangled, sweaty bodies. She imagined that beautiful mouth kissing hers again and again and imagined how he might sound when he made love.

  Pretty earthy stuff. Admiring him in her waiting room, she had to smile. In a way, it was rather comforting because she knew her daydreams would never amount to anything. They might become friends, and she might be able to help him with his problems, but Jake was not her kind of man— and she wasn’t his kind of woman. They were mature enough to realize that.

  She walked over to him and spoke his name quietly. “Jake, can I talk to you for a minute?” No response. “Jake?” A little louder this time..She bent over and touched his knee. “Jake.”

  In an instant, he was upright, his hand curled around her wrist in a fierce and painful grip, his other hand raised as if to strike her. A feral, brutal expression burned in his eyes, and Ramona couldn’t help the protective gesture she made.

  “It’s me,” she said, holding up a hand to guard her face.

  Several long moments passed before his grip eased, before he seemed to realize where he was and what was happening. Abruptly, he let her go. “Don’t ever touch me when I’m sleeping.”

  It wasn’t an uncommon trait among ex-soldiers. Sometimes even very old men still reacted to a sudden awakening this way—but few of them retained Jake’s powerful strength. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I won’t do it again.”

  “What do you want?” he asked gruffly.

  “Can you come into my office for a minute? I’d like to talk to you.”

  He blinked. “What’s wrong?”

  She only responded, “Why don’t we go to my office? We can talk there.” Before he could protest, she moved away, knowing he would follow.

  Blinking tiredly, Jake followed Ramona into her small office in the back of the clinic. She looked different today, efficient and brisk, her hair in a knot up on the back of her head, her lab coat hiding her figure. As he sat down in a chair upholstered in a floral print, his heart thudded uncomfortably. What could be so wrong with his mother that they had to have a private conference about it?

  It seemed to take Ramona forever to round the desk and sit down. “Spit it out, Ramona,” he growled. “What’s wrong with her? Cancer? Her heart?”

  She smiled. “It isn’t your mother, Jake. She’s as healthy as a horse, and I expect she’ll be around to meddle in the lives of her great-grandchildren.”

  Relief flooded through him, followed quickly by perplexity. His sleep-deprived mind couldn’t seem to make the jump from there to—whatever it was he was here for.

  His expression must have reflected his confusion, for Ramona sobered and inclined her head. He’d forgotten how velvety those big brown eyes were, how much they invited him to just relax, let her take over. Resisting her spell, he sat up very straight in his chair.

  “She doesn’t even have a sprained ankle, actually. It was ploy to get you in here.”

  “Damn.”

  “She’s worried about you, Jake, and probably with good reason.”

  “I’m fine. She’s just projecting. Her father lost it after combat, so she thinks anybody who’s spent a little time in the field is going to go crazy.”

  “Are you fine?”

  He forced himself to look at her. “How long is your hair?”

  She chuckled. “Nice try. Answer the question.”

  “I already did. I’m fine.” Restlessly, he stood and wandered toward the window that looked out toward a view of the town, tumbling down the slopes of the mountain like a storybook village. “It just takes a while, you know.”

  “To do what?”

  He shrugged a shoulder, peering out at the sunlight. “Adjust to civilian life, I guess.”

  “Well, that’s true. You were in the military a long time.”

  “Sixteen years.”

  “Didn’t you go to West Point?”

  A thick, panicky feeling rose in his throat. “Yeah.”

  She said nothing for a minute, and Jake employed his favorite tactic. Stay quiet, and the rest of the world will do the talking for you.

  But Ramona’s silence stretched way longer than usual, and he was finally curious enough to turn around to look at her. She calmly sat behind her desk, her hands folded on the blotter in front of her. When he met her gaze, she asked quietly, “How long has it been since you slept, Jake?”

  He didn’t know why he answered her, but he did. “Forever.”

  “I thought so. I can give you a prescription that would help, but I think you need to consider counseling to go along with it.”

  “I don’t need any—” he halted the foul word rising to his lips “—damned counseling.”

>   “My hair is to my waist,” she said, picking up a pair of wire-framed glasses.

  “What?”

  “My hair,” she said patiently, pulling over a prescription pad. “It’s long. To my waist.”

  Jake couldn’t quite summon a smile. “Touché,” he said, and sat back down in the chair. “Is that prescription for me?”

  “Yes, if you’ll take it.” She finished writing and ripped the note off the pad. She held it out to him.

  The glasses radically changed her appearance, hiding the softness of her eyes, obscuring the nice, clean line of her cheekbones. They made her look serious and purposeful and a lot more like a woman who had the drive and ambition to become a doctor. Jake felt a sudden wash of memory. “I remember you,” he said. “You were in some of my classes, weren’t you?”

  Ramona grinned. “Yep.”

  “How could I have forgotten your name?” He narrowed his eyes. “In the eighth grade, you took the regional spelling bee. I wanted to kill you.”

  “I also seem to recall a science fair that annoyed you a tiny bit.”

  This time, Jake did manage a smile, which was followed by a small, miraculous chuckle. “Don’t remind me. I still remember your project, too—the heart/lung demonstration. The minute I saw it, I knew I was cooked. It made me furious to be beaten by a girl.”

  Ramona laughed. “Oh, I loved beating you at any academic contest. You took it so seriously.”

  Jake fell quiet, reminiscing. He had taken it seriously, and he’d loved the rush of competition, the fierce pleasure of pitting his brain against others. “I did.” He met her patient gaze. “Nothing feels like that anymore. Did I just get old?”

  “No.” She paused, then removed her glasses. “No, that’s not the problem. I think you’re suffering from a pretty serious case of posttraumatic stress disorder, Jake.”