by Ash Harlow
“Take it from me,” Adam continued, “I tried my best to not have a relationship, I failed and I have to say it is the best failure I’ve ever experienced. You can’t go any further with your healing until you decide whether or not you’re going to pursue things with Lulah. Do that and you can work out how to move beyond whatever it is that happened in Vegas.”
“I’m going to have to cut loose; it’s only fair on Lulah. I lost it in Vegas in the hotel room. One minute everything was going fine, and the next thing I knew I was in the midst of this sort of half-flashback. It brought with it an odd glimmer of clarity about how the way I am would affect Lulah if we took our relationship to another level. I never fully came out of reliving that nightmare, and I lashed out at Lulah over nothing. Not with my fists, but with words that were equally damaging. Once I’d done about as much damage as possible, I picked up my gear and, like a fucking coward, I walked out on her.”
They sat in silence as if they needed the quiet to digest what Vince revealed. If he kept this up, they’d be helping him pack, but he still had one thing to share, and he didn’t know if telling them would make things better or worse.
“I love her.” He blurted it out.
“Have you told her, Vince?”
“I told her, yeah. I guess I shouldn’t have done that. Selfish, really. Right after I told her, I lost it. I made Lulah feel vulnerable, unsafe. That’s what she said, that she didn’t feel safe around me.”
“Defense.”
“What?”
“Classic defense move. You told Lulah you loved her, and that exposed you, so you tried to drive her away before Lulah rejected you.”
“I wasn’t trying to drive Lulah away. It was an attempt to drive myself away, because I don’t deserve Lulah. She makes me feel so good, but I can only enjoy that for the moment before I’m overcome with guilt, because, you know…”
“Because the others didn’t come home, didn’t have their chance of love and life, to experience what you have with Lulah.”
He nodded. Marlo had left the room to make tea, to nurture and ground him the same way Lulah would and it fueled his desire to set things right for Lulah. If he told Adam why he had to leave then Lulah would have people she trusted to talk with, people who understood his problems. It wouldn’t make him a better person in anyone’s eyes, but it might help Lulah move on.
“You know, I have such rage inside me. Not in a way that would be a danger to Lulah, but at the way things turned out and at how lost I’ve felt since returning. Whenever I’m with people, I don’t know if I should be defensive, tell them everything, or close myself off. Or if even a little is too much. And always this rage, because you go over there to protect people, and after a bit, you can lose sight of who the enemy is.” He checked the door again for Marlo.
“It’s okay,” Adam assured him.
“I don’t want her to hear me like this.”
“She won’t; she’ll stay away.”
“I’m haunted by such terrible things. I tried to do what was morally right, but the very act of war compromises that. You think it will be balanced by the good you do, but that’s not how it works.”
“Do you think living behind this big wall you’ve built is going to work for you?”
“It will work. So long as I’m not hurting anyone, it will work. I’m not going to drag Lulah behind the wall to crouch with me, so I’ll head off for a bit when Lulah returns. When I’m gone, can you convince her, as I’ll try to, that I’ve gone because I love her…that’s why I have to go.”
“Whatever low opinion you have about yourself right now, Vince, you’re wrong. I want you to understand that. You were a warrior, are still a warrior, protecting those around you. Not only with weaponry, firepower, and the sacrifice of at-home comforts, but you try to protect their hearts and souls, too.”
He shrugged. “Goes with the territory.”
Adam stood as Marlo re-entered the room. “Let me find the contacts for the people who want you to make them carousel dogs and the gallery interested in your work.”
“Are you okay, Vince?” Marlo asked as she handed him a cup of tea. “I know what Adam can be like when he’s in full ‘let me understand and solve your problems for you’ mode.”
“I’m good, yeah.”
Adam returned to the room, handing him a slip of paper. “Here you go. All these people want you to recreate their dogs.”
Vince studied the list. Six names and two galleries. “Wow.”
“You have a lot of work there if you want it, Vince.”
“I’ll think about how to do this. I need to find somewhere to live with a workshop.” He saw Marlo give Adam a questioning look, and Adam’s barely perceptible head shake in answer. He drained his tea and stood before Marlo decided to ignore Adam and ask the tough questions.
Throughout Doc’s memorial service, Vince focused on the words about the man, the story of a life with an early finish. In all the hours he’d sat across the room with Doc, he’d heard little about his family beyond a brief acknowledgment of the after-hours existence of a well-loved wife and three children.
Doc always focused on Vince, deciding each session which particular piece of psychological shrapnel should be eased out and which shard should be left because the damage of removal, the reopening of that particular wound, may on a given day do more harm than good.
Now at the graveside, he steeled himself as the tide of memories from four other funerals swamped him. He stepped back, a retreat from the fellow mourners, to find support instead against a tree.
Several hundred yards away, a quiet back-country road ran as the demarcation line between the cemetery and the living world. Beyond that, a small copse of trees gathered like a battalion awaiting orders.
The wind dropped, and with the quiet of the stilled fallen leaves, the voice of the minister also faded so that Vince only heard snatches of past conversations. They were the voices of his fallen friends, his cardinal points, coming at him from the four compass marks so that his own center struggled to find its bearings within the chatter. Calliope stood sentry for him, facing the gathering, ready to act as protector of his personal space.
The voices of his dead friends drifted from the copse, and the south was Zane, the motivator and the charmer. He was the guy who carried everyone’s spirits, determined to make the most of his life. If Vince looked carefully, he could almost make them out in the trees.
Caleb, west, guardian of the setting sun, standing in that ready-for-action manner with his legs braced, his chin tipped that little farther up than people usually carried themselves, as if to say ‘hit me, I can take whatever you throw my way, but prepare yourself for the consequences.’
Nathan to the north, a leader, the one who took the dirty jobs because he would never ask anyone to do something he wasn’t prepared to do himself.
And Will, east, the hyperactive one who could get by on little sleep and less food. Will’s motto they adopted as their own—no lives half-lived— and Zane finished it: no woman half-loved.
No lives half-lived; no woman half-loved. He could hear them saying it now, sometimes as a rally cry, other times as an affirmation before they knocked glasses or beer bottles. Clink. Nathan would close his eyes as he touched bottles, calling estimates as to how much each bottle still held, half-full, half-empty, depending on his mood, because even a leader has vulnerable moments when every bucket seems half-empty and leaking.
A number of times, he told Doc he would welcome death without fear. Death could take him, and it would be a relief to join his brothers, because the debt of survival, added to the things he’d seen and done, was such a terrible weight.
Still focused on the trees, he saw a movement, or a trick of light, that seemed to bring Nathan one step forward, and as he tried to find a clear image through the blur of his tears, Nathan’s voice rang soundly in his mind. “No lives half-lived.” With that, his battle buddies appeared to position themselves like a four-point compass-rose imprint
ed on the earth before slipping finally from view.
The mourners were leaving the graveside now, and Vince waited to pay his last respects, his mood eased somewhat by what he’d witnessed. Nevertheless, it was a hard swallow, like shifting a rock, before he managed the words that would tell his therapist that he was safe for now. He bowed his head and whispered, “It’s not going to go away, Doc, but neither am I. Not today.”
He walked back towards his pickup, and Adoette, the VA chaplain who sometimes sat in on their group sessions, waved him over.
“How are you, Vince?”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“Will you be at group on Thursday?”
“I’m not certain.”
“Vince, don’t give up because Doc has gone. It’s more important than ever that you stick with us, so that together we can honor and improve upon all that important groundwork you and Doc have already laid down.”
With that, the emotion he thought he’d dealt with, presumed he’d left at Doc’s graveside, welled in him. He cast a glance back to the copse and saw it for what it was: a bunch of trees at the edge of the road. Like the phantoms that came for him when tired or stressed, he knew that his friends were memories, incapable of manifesting as a group in the trees.
He’d known that all along, but when he’d tried to make new friends, tried to set his sights in another direction with Doc so that he could get along with his life, Doc was snatched away, too.
Understanding it as a ridiculous superstitious notion, he continued to recognize the part of himself that insisted he was jinxed and that Lulah wasn’t safe, because anyone close to him was soon stolen.
Adoette cosseted him in the warmth of her espresso-brown eyes. “I don’t know if I can carry on with everyone leaving me like this. I’m too scared to love anymore.”
“I understand you’re recently divorced. Do you have good support around you?”
“Yeah, I do.” Well, I did until I abandoned it.
“Vince, I’m one person who you don’t have to tell what you think I want to hear. Okay? You can’t trouble me.”
He shook his head, an attempt to back her off. “Too soon,” he managed.
She pressed a business card into his hand. “I’d like you to come to my office, tomorrow, ten-hundred hours. My number is on this card. Vince…”
He studied the card she’d placed in his hand before he closed his fingers around it. She had stopped mid-sentence, waiting for his attention. “Yes,” he answered.
“Be there. Don’t disappoint me; we both know you’re better than that.”
Chapter Thirty
“How are you, Lulah?”
Vince was loading something onto the back of his pickup when she arrived, and now he stood alongside her SUV, holding the door for her. His eyes briefly clouded with concern before he smiled.
She felt shattered, to be honest. Shocked by the way his words and withdrawal affected her, showing her that she’d offered up more of her heart to him than she ever intended. “I’m okay, really.”
“You’re not. Please…please don’t protect me.”
“It’s flying. I hate it.” She swung out of the SUV, reaching the ground as Joker came tearing around the side of the cabin to greet her. The dog’s immense, unadulterated thrill at seeing her filled her with joy she hadn’t known for a couple of weeks and she spent some time greeting him, rubbing him all over, trying to anchor the resolutions she’d set for herself over the past few days. Now she felt strong enough to face Vince with a smile.
“Joker will be pleased you’re home. He’s been stoic but unsettled.”
“How about you, Vince? Stoic and unsettled?”
“I’m good, thanks.”
Not even a smile. He stood there, tense arms at his side as if he held everything together within a tight framework. God, when had they become so awkward with each other? “How was Doc’s funeral? Did you manage that okay?”
“Let me get your bags.”
She stepped away from the vehicle to give him access. “That bad, huh?”
“I’m glad it’s over.”
Lulah headed for the steps to the cabin porch. This edginess rippling through her needed to be dealt with. To be honest, she wanted to shout and rage and strike out at Vince, because this place they’d reached, this pointless polite dance around the border of something too hard to face, was not the way she did things.
“I have some food for dinner, unless you have plans.”
She unlocked the cabin door and pushed it open before turning back to him. “Thanks. I don’t have plans, but if we’re going to eat together, we’re going to talk through what happened in that hotel room.”
He gave her one sharp nod and followed her through the door, placing her bags beside the entrance to her bedroom. “Your bags, ma’am.”
“Would you like a tip?”
“Sure.” He sounded uncertain.
“Those jeans you’re wearing, the way they fit…hot!”
His mouth widened into a slow grin. “I’ll keep them on.”
Even hesitant, he embodied such strength and masculinity as if he would slay demons, rescue fair maidens…and who was she kidding? That was a fantasy Vince of an earlier war. The one standing at the door of her cabin ducked in and out of the shadows, his potency caged as if he believed that by releasing it he would cause all manner of destruction. And if that glimpse she’d caught in Vegas was anything to go by, she wasn’t up for the fight. Whoever took that on had to be strong enough to expose his soul, care for it, heal it, and put him back together again. It appeared she couldn’t unleash his passion without letting the destructive side of him loose, too.
“I’m going over to the Sanctuary to catch up with Marlo and Adam. I’ll be back around six.” She waited for Vince to leave, the door to close, before she took a deep breath and looked around.
Home. It felt as if the cabin, too, had paused mid-sigh when she’d left ten days ago and, like her, only now exhaled and drew a new breath. Obviously Vince hadn’t used the bathroom or kitchen and she could picture him, monk-like, washing from a basin, eating cold meals. The barn his cell, a place of contemplation where in his solitude and meditation he might hope to discover everything he needed to know.
She pushed her bags into her bedroom from the place at the door where Vince left them. Their placement in the living room, the common area of the house, made it seem that Vince had withdrawn permission to allow himself into Lulah’s more personal space. She would unpack later. If Vince was going to be here preparing dinner, unpacking might be a reasonable excuse to shift from his presence, because depending on his mood, he was capable of overwhelming her by his proximity.
Joker kept her in sight on the bike ride over to Dog Haven Sanctuary. She rarely went away, but after the few times that she did, Joker became needy on her return as if sticking close to her would prevent her disappearing again.
Marlo was finishing her assessment on two new dogs recently arrived from a dog-fighting ring bust. They were young, without the scars of seasoned fighters, and were mainly suffering from the isolation of being tied out near some woods for most of their short lives. Joker went off to wrestle with Justice, and Lulah followed Marlo up to her office.
“Tell me, how’s Ray?”
“He’s coming along. He needs all kinds of rehab. First for his head injury then I want him to go into rehab for gambling, though I haven’t really talked to him about that yet. And let’s face it, he has to be the one to make that decision.”
“You know we’re here to help, Lulah. You don’t have to take all of this on by yourself.”
“I know; it’s just that I don’t even know where I’m going to be. If someone else is appointed to run the service dog training here, I’m not sure if I’ll stick around. And there’s…” She waved a hand in the air. She wanted to say Vince, but if she made him part of the equation of where she was going to be in her life, that would be admitting to Marlo something she hadn’t even admitted to he
rself.
“Vince?”
“No.”
“Yes.” Marlo’s eyes narrowed. “I can’t even start to believe you’d try and deny that.”
“Things didn’t go at all well in Vegas, Marlo.”
“I know. Vince talked to us. It seems you hit the first bump in your relationship.”
“In a relationship we’re not having.”
“Lulah, you’re both saying the same things, and neither of you sound convincing.”
Lulah pushed to her feet. “I don’t care how I sound right now. Managing my father is draining the last bit of spare energy from me. I have the feeling that the more he improves in the hospital, the less cooperative he’ll be about rehab. There is nothing left in me for Vince’s dramas. Jesus,” she said, sitting back down, “look at me. I’m surrounded by broken people, and no matter how hard I try not to be sucked into their needs, they’re like this vortex I can’t pull out of.”
“Perhaps your lesson is in there.”
“Thank you, wise mistress, that’s exactly what I needed to hear.”
“Maybe you are the key to their recovery.”
“Oh no, not this time. I was the whole damned set of keys for Dad as a teenager, until he lied and cheated one time too many. He’s not taking me down, Marlo. I’m not going to allow that again. Vince paid off the debt to the loan sharks. Did he tell you that?”
Marlo shook her head.
“Well, he did, and raises new issues, because I’d vowed not to pay Dad’s debt, but I knew I had to after they beat him up. All the while I’m feeling guilty, rotten, half-responsible for Dad ending up in the hospital, and next thing I know, Vince waltzes in and pays the debt. I’ll have to pay him back. Which means I’ve lost my money to buy the cabin. Damn, maybe I should be packing up and moving on.”
“Lulah. This is one of life’s moments when you’re at a crossroad, but the devil isn’t there. You’re not being asked to sell your soul if you reach for what you want. And there is no hurry; there’s no deadline. Take your time to make any decisions, and when you do, be sure you listen to your head and your heart. Whatever you choose to do, don’t bolt like a frightened animal, okay?”
