by Dianne Drake
So now this emotional aftermath was hers to deal with, and the most she wanted to deal with was this table, this window, and the mountain she could see from it. Sighing, Shanna shut her eyes, trying to block out all the images that didn’t want to be blocked.
“Is this seat taken?”
His voice came to her so clearly she could feel the tears welling behind her closed eyes. “No,” she whispered, wishing the memory wasn’t so vivid. By now it should have faded. She wanted it to fade.
“It’s the only table with a view of the mountain, and I love to sit and watch it. It makes me feel like a part of something important.”
It was so real, the memory of that day, the words she’d said to him, his voice... She opened her eyes, hoped he was there. But he wasn’t. So she closed her eyes again, this time not even trying to hold back the tears that were starting to fall. Please, go away, she thought. How can I get over you if I can’t get away from you?
“I’d never really looked at those mountains from this window, though. Not before you pointed them out to me.”
“Ben,” she choked, spinning around to find him standing behind her. “You... What...? Why are you here?”
“It seems I have a doctor who wants me to rest. So I came here to rest.”
“Your doctor wouldn’t have approved your trip halfway around the world. Not yet.”
“He’s a competent doctor. Great cardiologist. Pronounced me in good shape, no permanent damage. But in bad need of some serious relaxation. Thought Tuscany was a great idea.”
“You went for your tests?” she asked.
“Actually, I caught a ride with your grandfather. You left before he did, and he had room to take me. Having a jet at your disposal comes with some advantages. He dropped me off in Buenos Aires on his way back to Chicago.” Smiling, he said, “May I join you, Shanna?”
Oh, how she wanted him to. But he scared her, and she already hurt so badly. “I was just getting ready to leave, so you can have the table to yourself. It’s better than sitting in the back, staring at the wall.”
“What if I want to sit here at this table and stare at you?”
“But you don’t, Ben.” She swiped away the tears on her cheeks. Drew in a bracing breath. Squared her shoulders to face the hardest thing she’d ever had to do—reject Ben. Not for herself, though. For Ben. “Maybe you think you’re doing the right thing, or trying to end something that never got started, but you don’t have to do that. I lost my way for a little while, but I’m fine now.”
“Which is why you’re sitting here, crying?” He stepped around her, and took that seat. Then reached across the table and wiped away a stray tear with his thumb. “I’m sorry, Shanna. I knew you were falling in love with me, and I supposed there was a huge part of me that wanted you to.”
Finally, she looked into his eyes. “But the warning was out there, Ben. It was always out there. Even that night when we made love, you didn’t let me have all of you. I knew it. Didn’t want to see it. But I did know it.”
“But you didn’t know me, Shanna.”
“And I’ve apologized for that. I was wrong for assuming...anything.”
He shook his head. “You were right for assuming everything. It’s what I put out there for people to see, and you saw it. But only part of it.”
“The part you wouldn’t let me see.”
“The part I couldn’t let you see.”
“Why not?”
“Because to admit it to you is to admit it to myself. And after I admit it, then I have to come to terms with how it’s a part of me that doesn’t fit into anything good, or noble, or all the things you think I am. It’s a hard thing to do, see a flaw that can never be fixed. It’s easier to ignore it than admit to it, because...”
“Because admitting it shatters the barriers you’ve put up around yourself to protect yourself from it. Then all that’s left is vulnerability, and vulnerability can turn into such a deep, abiding pain if it’s not tended properly.”
“You’re always amazing, Dr. Brooks.”
“Not amazing, Dr. Robinson. Connected. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as someone once told me. The thing is, all I’ve ever wanted in my life is to fit somewhere...somewhere I love, somewhere I want to be. And that was with you, which made me so vulnerable, because you shut me out every time I got close.
“Sure, maybe I could have hung around Caridad longer, waged a harder battle to get what I wanted from you, but what I’ve figured out is that I shouldn’t have to fight for it. I fell in love with you for more reasons than I can count, and I’m still in love with you. I think you’re in love with me, or you wouldn’t have followed me halfway around the world. The feelings I have for you scare me, though, because you’re who makes me vulnerable. But loving you makes me happy and hopeful. It’s the same with you, I think.
“Loving me makes you vulnerable. But for you the remedy for that is to shut people out when they get too close. You shut me out because you don’t know what to do with that vulnerability, and I don’t want any more of that.”
“It’s conditioned in me, Shanna. Not meant to hurt anybody, but...”
“But protect yourself. I understand. People can be cruel, and I’m sure you’ve experienced more than your share of cruelty. So you keep yourself separate, push people away—”
“To protect them,” he interrupted. “Them. Not me.”
“Because you have scars? I don’t understand.”
“Scars,” he said. “Deep scars.”
“But this isn’t about your physical scars, is it? It can’t be, because that would make you...shallow. And you’re not. So, who do you think I fell in love with, Ben?”
“You fell in love with an image. Someone you think is me, or you want to be me. But someone who isn’t me.”
“Who isn’t you? The man in the café that morning who was so befuddled when a stranger sat down with him that he didn’t know what to do? Or the man who spent the night knocking on doors, giving yellow-fever vaccinations to people who’d already refused them? Or spent the night, sitting in the chair at Maritza’s bedside, watching her breathe, checking her pulse, reading—in very bad Spanish—bedtime stories to her?
“Tell me, Ben, which one of those people isn’t you? Because the man who did all that is the one I fell in love with, the one I watched, and admired and realized he was worth everything I might lose if I stayed with him. And I want to stay with him, Ben. Now, even when I know you don’t want me, I still want to stay with you, be a part of everything you are. Yet you’re still pushing me away. You came all the way to Italy after me, and you’re still shutting me out.”
“You don’t want to be part of everything, Shanna, because you don’t know everything. And that’s what I had to settle with myself before I came after you. What I had to face down in the mirror. Because you deserve to know everything.”
“You mean before you push me away again?” she asked, withdrawing her hand from his. Glancing out at the mountain, she saw such majesty there. Looming over the entire village, it looked after the people, protected them, sheltered them, the way Ben did the people who came to Caridad. Yet there was a deadliness to the mountain. The snow that could take an inexperienced skier. The avalanche that could swallow up an unsuspecting village. No blame went to the mountain for these things, as the mountain lived up to its legacy.
So did Ben, and because she trusted in him with all her heart, she truly believed that no blame could go to him for whatever he perceived as his own deadliness. “You’re right. I deserve to know,” she finally said, hoping he understood where this had to go. Because this was up to Ben now. The rest of it was his to deal with because she’d gone as far as she could go. Loving him the way she did meant she would support him in anything, but he had to step up to take that support. With everything in her, she hoped he would.
“You flew from Argentina to Italy, but there’s still one more step to take.” The step where he proved his trust. Because in that trust she w
ould find where she truly wanted to be.
He smiled, but sadly. “You see through me, don’t you?”
“Not through you. But what I see encompasses some of you. It has to encompass all of you, though. And you have to be the one to allow it.”
“Or it encompasses none of me, which you’ll understand when you know everything.”
“That sells me short, Ben. After I’ve told you my feelings for you, I don’t deserve that.” Rather than responding, he stared out the window for a few moments. Were his eyes focused on the mountain, or on something so distant she couldn’t begin to fathom it? She didn’t know, so she waited because, ultimately, this would have to be in Ben’s good time, or not at all. So, two, three, four minutes ticked off the clock in utter silence as she watched him barely blink, barely breathe.
Then it happened. He drew in a deep breath, held it for a second, and let it out. “You’re right. You don’t deserve to be sold short, and I’m sorry you thought that’s what I was doing.” Finally he faced her again. “I wasn’t. But you were right when you said you scare me, because you do. More than anything in my life ever has.”
“Why, Ben?”
“Because you make me realize I have to face things in myself that I’ve never faced. Ugly things, things I’ve done, things I don’t want to be part of me but are.”
“You’re not alone, you know.”
He nodded. “I know. And maybe that’s what scares me most. I know how to be alone. Do a pretty damn good job of it. Anything else...” He shrugged. Shook his head. Drew in another deep breath and let it out. “I was burned, as you already know. Had thirty-three surgeries, and survived in spite of some pretty overwhelming odds against me. That’s really just the preface, because the real story starts later, after those surgeries.
“It was this never-ending grind, going from one surgery to another, never having a life in between. But I managed it. Managed to move on, go to college, get myself into medical school. Deluded myself into thinking that my life could be normal, in spite of the stares and the things people said behind my back. Or even to my face. But people will talk, won’t they? Most of the time I just shut it out. It was hard to do at first, but after a while it became easy.
“Then I met Nancy. Nice girl. Not the love of my life by a long shot, but I honestly believed I could find something with her. Long story short, my shirt came off, she gasped, drew back in unadulterated repulsion, and that’s when I knew that I couldn’t shut it out, that people would always react the way Nancy did. Which was an excuse. It wasn’t Nancy’s reaction that mattered. It was mine. I just found it easier to blame the whole succession of events that followed on the easiest target.”
“Events, like drinking?”
He nodded. “It’s easy to shut out a lot of the world when you’re drunk. But I never could get drunk enough, so I started taking pills. I’m a doctor, had doctor friends. Easy access to whatever I wanted to medicate myself with. End result, an alcoholic who was also addicted to drugs.
“Two years of it, Shanna. Two years of wallowing. I managed to live my life through the first year of it, but couldn’t keep going during the second year of it and got myself kicked out of my residency. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a surgeon. I was in the program, and got kicked out of it because being a surgeon didn’t really work well with who I was turning into.”
“But you pulled yourself out of it.”
“Not at first. I took a year, and simply wallowed. The more I wallowed, the more miserable I was. Vicious circle. I tried a couple of twelve-step programs and failed. Reapplied to a surgical residency, was turned down. Decided to skip surgery and try for family practice, and your grandfather turned me down.”
“You went to another hospital, though. You said it was a better fit for you.”
“I went there as an outpatient in their drug and alcohol rehab clinic, ended up doing some volunteer work, then accepted a residency because no one else wanted to work there. It was old and underfunded and difficult, and they took me because no one else wanted the position. I will say it was the best thing for me because I saw medicine from a perspective I’d never have found at Brooks, and that’s what made me able to come here and do what I do. But the way I was accepted there wasn’t as a bright and shining endorsement of anything.”
“Except a commitment to move forward despite the circumstances.”
“See, that’s the thing. I didn’t have that kind of commitment. Before I ended up there, I’d got to the end of my rope, didn’t see a way out. I was drinking, I needed pills just to get me moving, and my medical career was washed up. Nothing in that mess was moving forward.”
“But look where you are. How did that person turn into the one who got you to Caridad?”
“Suicide. Or, shall I say, suicide attempt.”
She gasped.
“What your grandfather turned down that day, Shanna, was me, at the bitter end. I went back to my hotel room, blamed him, blamed Nancy, blamed the world for the way I felt. Drank some more, popped more pills. I was just so...tired. So defeated. The worse I felt, the more I needed the crutches that were destroying my life—booze and pills. I can’t even begin to realize, after all this time, the lengths I went to when I needed to find that numbness. A stronger man might have faced his fate earlier on, but I wasn’t a stronger man. I was the man who made excuses.
“That’s all I did until the day I quit. And don’t get your hopes up about me. It wasn’t a moment of clarity, or some great manifestation of what my life could become if I let my tragedy work for me. You know, make me stronger. In fact, what happened was one of the least noble incidents of my life. I...I...”
Shanna swallowed hard, suddenly understanding where this was leading to. The inevitable ending to the kinds of suffering he’d gone through. “You tried to kill yourself.”
“I thought about it. Spent days and nights planning it. Even went out to this hilly area where I used to play when I was a kid and climbed up to the top of one of the peaks, and thought about stepping off. Must have stood on the edge a good two hours, looking down at what could have easily been my destiny. One step, and everything would have been solved.”
“What stopped you?”
He chuckled, but bitterly. “Ironically, after all my self-destructive behavior, it turned out I didn’t want to die. I’d worked too hard for too long trying to live, and here I was, on the verge of taking one step farther because... You pick an excuse. I had a lot of them, and they all centered on somebody else doing something to me when I was the one doing it to myself.
“That’s when it all became clear. No voices booming at me from the heavens, no lightning bolts. Just some pretty deep soul-searching and the discovery that the world was full of people suffering far worse than me, who didn’t give up, and who succeeded in doing what they wanted in spite of their suffering Then there I was, always looking for the easiest way out. The epitome of weakness.”
“Or maybe that was the time when your true character decided to develop. We all get there in different ways, Ben. For some people it’s easy. Who they are just manifests itself. But for others the journey is so hard. Maybe because what you’re supposed to do in life is so immense, or difficult, you need to learn to deal with the adversities before you can accomplish great things.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to my mirror, because every time I look in it, the person looking back looks weak to me. That’s the monster I see, Shanna. Not the scars. Me. I know who I was, who I could become again. For me, every single day of my life is spent close to the edge. I’m still looking down, wondering what it would take to make me take that one step farther. How can I ask someone to be part of that?”
“But I know who you are, Ben. And when you’re looking in the mirror seeing weakness, I’m looking in that same mirror at you, and all I see is unbelievable strength. To go from where you were to where you are now... Going through rehab, fighting to get back into a residency program. Setting up a hospital in Argentina. T
hat’s what someone in your life would be part of. What I would be part of, if you let me.”
“That’s what I want, Shanna. But what if I backslide? That’s always a possibility. The biggest fear in my life. They teach you in the twelve-step programs that you’re really only a step away from it at any given day, any given time. And it was so ugly. I was so ugly.”
“Do you want to be with me, Ben?”
“More than anything. I want a future with you.”
“Do you see marriage in that future?”
“I think I wanted to marry you the first time we sat here at this table together and you scared me so badly I ran to the back of the room to stare at the wall. But it’s not that simple.”
“I walked away from my life. Gave up a lot, actually. Stepped outside a medical practice I knew into something I had no idea existed. Turned my back on my family, who will now probably turn their backs on me. Fell in love with the most impossibly stubborn man I could have found, who loves me back but won’t do anything about it. And you think that’s simple?”
She scooted herself back from the table, then stood. “You know what? I’m tired of looking up at that mountain, wondering what’s up there. Life’s short, and we’re wasting time. It’s time to find out.” She held out her hand to him. “I’m with you, Ben. But are you with me?”
Ben stood, then took her hand. “I’m with you.”
“For the whole journey? Because that’s what it’s about. The whole journey or nothing.”
He nodded. “I am tired of looking up at the mountain. I’m ready for the whole journey.”
They stepped outside the café, and simply stood on the curb, looking up at the mountain together, Ben’s arms wrapped around Shanna and Shanna leaning back into his embrace. “It’s a long way up there,” he finally said. “It’ll take an hour to get to the lift and, depending on the lines of people, it might take us another hour to get to the top.”
