by Serena Bell
No reaction, other than a few blinks and a swallow. As if they weren’t fighting about a child. What was wrong with him?
“If you guys are doing so fine, what was that phone call a few minutes ago all about?”
She shut her eyes. Seriously? He was going to refuse to admit Sam was his son but then get all up in her business about her life? She took a deep breath. He was damaged. Something had happened to him. He needed her—her sympathy. Her patience. “I have some childcare issues.”
“Some,” he repeated. “Your babysitter bailed on you.”
“What are you doing, volunteering?”
She wasn’t sure where the snark had come from.
“You wouldn’t really want that, now, would you? Near stranger, gimpy leg? Not exactly the best raw babysitting material.”
“You forgot grumpy asshole,” she said.
Again, a flicker of something behind his eyes. “I was about to get to that,” he said.
“You know what? Forget it.” She reached into her purse and pulled out an old credit-card receipt and scribbled her cell number on it. “If you change your mind about getting to know Sam …”
She held it out. He hesitated a moment, then took it.
She felt Jake watching as she walked away.
Chapter 3
He held the piece of paper, still tightly folded, and looked through the window at the boy and his mother.
She was still beautiful. Butter-yellow hair, pink-cheeked fair skin, and a milkmaid’s voluptuousness. He could remember how much he’d wanted her, wanted big handfuls of her, the satin feel of her naked body. How much he’d wanted to bury himself in her.
For weeks now, for months, nothing had penetrated his sexual deadness. His doctor had said to be patient, that the cocktail of medications he’d spent weeks taking on and off could mess him up for a while. That, and survivor’s guilt, and the depression that tended to go with it. Whatever the reason, it had felt as if nothing could reach down to where the real impulse lay, as if the neurons that had once connected his vision and his desire had been snipped.
Now those same neurons sparked and his dick stirred like something coming out of a long hibernation.
I want to fuck her. Still.
It had been so long since he’d wanted anything, it caught him off guard. And as if that realization had propped open a door, it let in the darkest of all the dark thoughts: Mike will never do that again. Not that. Not anything.
He squelched it—the desire and the reminder that his friend was dust.
He wanted to look away, to break her spell. But he made himself look at Mira because then he wouldn’t have to look at the boy. Because as much as he didn’t want to still want Mira, he really didn’t want to know how it would feel to look at the boy.
He unfolded the piece of paper she’d pressed on him. Her name, first and last, and cell number. And then one more word: Sam.
He’d wondered if she’d written something more. You’re his father, asshole. Get with the program. But it was only the series of neatly printed numbers, separated with little dots instead of dashes.
He should have known Mira wouldn’t do anything the ordinary way. She was a girl who’d done a gutsy—if risky—thing when she’d taken her clothes off at the lake all those years ago. She was a woman who’d raised a seven-year-old boy by herself. We don’t need anything from you. We’ve done perfectly fine without you up to this point.
She was a woman who wasn’t afraid to call out a guy who was treating her like crap. She’d called him a grumpy asshole. Guilty as charged.
He remembered, with a pang, how he’d rejected her plea for a relationship. When she’d gotten out of his car in front of her house, he’d almost jumped from the car and run after her. Called her back. Begged her forgiveness, begged for another chance. Begged to have back that last week he’d forfeited.
She snuck a look in his direction, and he cast his gaze away from hers and crumpled the paper so she couldn’t see that he’d opened it.
Even if that boy in there was his, there were good reasons for Jake to stay away from them. The time he’d spend in physical therapy this morning was the only plan he had for himself today. If this day stayed true to form, he’d spend the rest of it sleeping. Or not-drinking. Not-drinking was an activity that now occupied huge portions of his life, the legacy of watching his father drink himself to death and his mother rebuild her life afterward, stone-cold sober. Jake, for his part, doled out Gentleman Jack whiskey to himself as if he were a stingy, hostile psychiatrist prescribing medication. Watching the clock as the numbers gathered themselves toward five p.m. Allocating doses at regular intervals through the evening. Carefully cutting himself off before he could become a drunk ex-soldier. A drunk gimpy ex-soldier.
He was all ex. There was nothing to him now, no present, no future.
He’d once heard some football players interviewed about what they’d do if they injured themselves and couldn’t play anymore. They’d been smart, articulate guys who’d given plenty of good answers to the other interview questions, but when the reporter asked that question, they’d gotten deer-in-the-headlights looks on their faces and gone silent. There wasn’t a good answer. What would you do if your reason for being, the thing you were both mysteriously good at and most loved to do, wasn’t there for you?
When he’d decided that he could make something positive out of his life, that he could do something that meant something, it had been an impulse more than a reasoned decision. It had been a goal stitched together from other pieces of knowledge about himself. He was a tough three-season high-school athlete—football, basketball, baseball—not a superstar at any of them, but strong, varsity, a contributor. Coaches commented on his tirelessness. On his discipline. On his ability to step up and lead or blend as a team player, depending on what the situation called for.
He’d been sent home from school on 9/11, and he sat in his parents’ living room and watched, transfixed, as the planes hit over and over again in repeated news clips. As people jumped, like insects, like toys, improbably, impossibly. As paper floated up like some terrible reverse rain. As the towers collapsed under their own weight. He’d sworn he’d do something. Not just hand wringing and mourning, but something concrete, something big.
Even when he’d enlisted, he hadn’t known for sure that it would feel like he’d found his purpose. That being a soldier would feel like him. But once he fought, he knew. He was meant for it.
That part of him was dead now, a much neater and keener incision than the mess that the bomb blast had made of his foot and lower leg. He’d lost his sense that there was meaning in what he was doing, his conviction that he was doing the right thing, his willingness to trade lives for lives. The man he’d fought beside was dead, and he would never again be certain that what they’d done was worth what they’d lost.
The thing was, when you killed the part of you that knew your purpose, that possessed that sharp, youthful certainty, there was very little left. Numbness. The sick acid panic that he could never shake. The world through a fog of purposelessness and, when he permitted himself, Gentleman Jack.
He squeezed his fist tighter, crushing the paper into a hard knot.
He didn’t want any kid to have him for a father. Ex-soldier. Ex-person. A guy, like his own father, who occupied a chair and sucked the life out of a room, out of the world. And in some ways, he feared even more finding something to fill the hours, to kill the time, something that was a shadow of purpose, a substitute for meaning.
His good leg ached like a mo-fo. Sweat had pooled between the silicone sheath of his prosthesis and his stump—because that’s what it was, not a “residual limb” in the politically correct parlance of all the do-gooder doctors and prosthetists and physical therapists, but a fucking dead, aching, battered stump.
Mira was laughing and brushing the boy’s hair off his forehead as she chatted with the PT. Jake tried not to, but he let himself see the boy’s face.
The ways
he felt and didn’t feel surprised him.
There was no wave of recognition. Or even a ping. Sam looked like Mira, but not so much like Mira that Jake would have found him familiar if he’d met him on the street. And he guessed it was hard to see yourself in a child, because he didn’t. Not himself and not his father, mother, sister, or brother. Sam was just a kid. A good-looking kid, with some baby left to his face, and big eyes, whose color, admittedly, was an exact match for his own.
What he did feel was curiosity. The sensation was unexpected, because aside from the numbness and fog and God, the irritability, the sense of needing desperately to escape his own skin, he felt very little these days. Certainly not a tug, an impulse, toward investigation. Certainly not any wish to know more about anything, let alone something big and complicated, a whole unexplored and deeply fraught territory.
I wonder if he has trouble falling asleep at night. If he’s afraid of the dark. If he hates nuts and beans.
I wonder if he wishes he had a father.
The physical therapist said something and Sam smiled, and Jake took it like a soccer ball in the groin. That smile. Mira’s smile. If the color of Sam’s eyes was his, the way they crinkled and shone was all Mira. The slight asymmetry to his mouth. The dimple in only one cheek.
He had no right to be affected by her smile, whether it was on her face or someone else’s. No right. He’d given her up, walked away from her. And he sure as hell didn’t deserve her now.
But whether he had the right or not, her smile got under the first layer of the numbness and niggled like a splinter.
He told himself he hadn’t walked away yet because he was waiting for his appointment, because he needed this one hour today when he’d know what he was doing. When he had a sense of purpose, even if it was small, even if it was constrained, even if it was dictated by someone else. But he knew he was still standing here, watching them, because he couldn’t walk away.
“Jake?” Linda, his physical therapist, stood in the doorway to the waiting room. “Thanks for meeting me here. We’ll be back at the VA Tuesday—there was just no way for me to teach Pilates here and get back there in time today.”
“I need one more minute,” he told her.
She nodded. “I’ll be in back.”
Linda was a patient woman. She’d hung in with him through a lot of bad sessions. Sessions where he’d sweated and come close to tears, where “agility” had meant tripping over hula hoops and yoga blocks. He’d sworn and yelled and blamed her for the slowness of his progress. And she’d told him to take his time and not worry, that “agility” would come.
“We’ll have you running.”
“Fat fucking chance.”
“And biking.”
“No way.”
“And swimming.”
“I don’t think the hydraulic knee would appreciate that.”
“They make swim prostheses.”
“What about carrying a fifty-pound pack and forty pounds of weaponry over rough terrain?”
“It’ll come, if that’s what you want.”
Now she said, “Take your time.” Her mantra.
Mira and Sam were coming toward them. Sam’s hair was dark and shaggy. His ankle was wrapped.
Jake’s ghost foot throbbed.
He was still here. Because there was some small, not-yet-dead part of him that wanted to be useful, and that part recognized an opportunity when he saw one.
And maybe, as much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself, because it felt good, feeling something again. It felt good, wanting her. Letting himself think about what it would be like to crave, to grasp, to bury himself—fingers, tongue, dick—in her. To get himself back and give himself away again, in one swift purge.
Mike can’t. Not that. Not anything.
I’m alive. He’s dead.
For weeks, he’d let that dark thought make decisions for him. He’d turned away from anything that could remind him.
But now? It felt as if someone had shone a thin beam of light into a dark mine shaft. It wasn’t enough to navigate by, but it shoved the darkness back to the corners.
“I’ll watch him Monday. If you want.”
Mira shook her head. “I can’t do that. I don’t know you.”
“In the biblical sense—” His body roused again at the memory.
“Haven’t we already been over this? You’re the one who denied that we knew each other in the biblical sense. The point is, I can’t leave my son with a guy I don’t know anything about.”
He didn’t like it that her words erased all the intimacy of those few, luminous weeks, but he couldn’t blame her, especially because of the way he’d ended things. What she meant, he was pretty sure, was that she couldn’t leave her son with a grumpy asshole with a gimpy leg, but he didn’t say that. He just said, “Right.”
“I mean, I don’t even know if you’re married. Have other kids.”
He shook his head. “Just me,” he said. “What about you? Is there a man in the picture?”
That wasn’t what he really wanted to ask. What he really wanted to ask was, Have you ever had real sex that was as good as the not-sex we had? Because I haven’t.
What he really wanted to ask was, Who’s the lucky bastard who gets to put his hands all over you?
But he didn’t ask those things, and his brain fed back, swift as an echo, Someone who deserves her.
She was shaking her head. “I had a boyfriend in Florida, but it’s over. Look. What if we meet at a park and you could toss a ball around with him?”
“I’m not much for catch these days. Still working out all the balance issues.” He gestured at his artificial leg.
She reddened. “Sorry.”
“You know what? It was a dumb idea. Sorry I suggested it. Can we forget this whole thing happened?”
Her mouth tightened, the skin around it whitening. “This ‘whole thing’?”
She’d been about to say more, but then she’d looked down at Sam, who was watching them both intently. “Look. You do whatever you need to do. Forget it happened, remember it happened, whatever. You have my number. If you want to get in touch, call me. Otherwise, good luck with the physical therapy, okay?”
She grabbed Sam’s hand and practically hauled him out of the physical therapist’s office. As they passed through the glass front door, he heard Sam ask, “Who was that guy?”
Her response was muffled, but he was pretty sure it was, “Some jerk.”
Chapter 4
She tossed and turned and consulted the clock nearly hourly. At seven a.m., she let herself give up on sleep and get lost in memory.
Jake.
After Sam had come, she’d—yes—selfishly longed for someone who would take turns rocking him after her parents had conked out, who could cry with her nights when the baby wouldn’t sleep. Someone who would be with her and Sam against the world.
And maybe Jake wouldn’t have wanted to be that man. She didn’t know. But she’d used him to fill the role in her head. She’d plugged him into the fantasies, made him her knight in shining armor.
She’d wanted Jake so badly that when Sam was three months old and she had enough energy to do something other than nurse him and sleep, she’d defied her friends’ advice and her parents’ wishes. She’d called his cell phone again, but a recording said it was out of service. So she launched a secret search for him. Because she felt he had a right to know that Sam existed, even if her parents didn’t think so. Because at barely nineteen, she believed that the truth came first and everything followed neatly from it. And, after all, how hard could it possibly be to track down a soldier, even one with a common name like Jake Taylor? How many of them could there be?
Quite a few, it turned out. Google was monumentally unhelpful, and if her particular Jake Taylor had a Facebook account, she couldn’t find it.
She’d started from the assumption that since she’d met him in a Seattle bowling alley, he had to be stationed somewhere in the area. She curs
ed herself for never asking. They had talked about the most intense, most intimate things, but apparently not the things that mattered.
She began with Joint Base Lewis-McChord and fanned outward. She visited JBLM and Yakima, called the others.
“Hello? I need to find a guy named Jake Taylor. Or Jacob Taylor, maybe.”
“Infantry?”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s not Special Forces, is he?”
“I don’t think so.”
Sometimes she got laughed at. Sometimes people made genuine efforts to assist her but came up empty. Sometimes she got to talk to soldiers named Jake Taylor, but none of them were her Jake—although every once in a while, one offered to stand in for him. Once a base operator said, “Honey. Before you waste the JAG’s time making him hunt down this guy—do you really think that’s even his name? ‘Jake Taylor’ is like ‘Mike Smith.’ A name you tell a woman when you want to disappear.”
She’d hung up.
If she had reached him, she would have told him about Sam; she would have asked him to be her baby’s father. She would have consulted him about his wishes for how Sam should be raised. She would have encouraged him to visit. She would have negotiated with him about the terms of their strange new engagement. Money might or might not have been exchanged. He could be only a name on the birth certificate or a parenting partner. They could get married and be the kind of husband and wife whose vows were paper, not flesh and blood or heart and soul.
Except in many of her fantasies, he played that role, too. He kissed away her tears and smoothed her hair back from her brow and relieved her from childcare duties so she could get a massage or have a drink with a friend or take a shower. And when Sam had been tucked back in, Jake had lain beside her in the big empty bed, slipping wordlessly and without effort into her, moving inside her, whispering her name.
