by Donna Alward
Emma went closer to the bank, creeping up on the ducks and gulls that were in the grass. Her giggles reached Jonas’s ears and he took long breaths, forcing himself to relax.
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” She didn’t need to know what he’d been remembering. Besides, it was over now. And this time the memory had been shorter and he’d snapped back quickly. Maybe it was getting better after all.
“Your leg’s all right?”
“Seriously, Shan. I’m fine. I’m just glad to be here.”
She took her place back on the blanket, stretching out her legs and drinking in the summer sun. “Your physiotherapy is helping. I noticed at your appointment, and watching you walk today.”
Jonas squinted through the sun to look at her, her blond hair gleaming, her slim legs crossed at the ankle. She’d painted her toenails a ripe, berry red. It helped to rid himself of the memory of Chris Parker. “Emma is helping more.”
Just as he said it, Emma plopped down on the blanket next to his knee. “I’m thirsty.”
Jonas slapped his leg, ridding himself of the glumness. “Know what? So am I. I wonder what’s in this bag, anyway.”
He handed Emma the bag and let her root through it. “Mama! There’s lemonade! The pink kind!”
He grinned as Emma pulled out a bottle. “We’d better open it before it gets warm.”
Shannyn watched the two of them with a lump in her throat. His fingers unscrewed the cap on the bottle before handing it to Emma and then ruffling her hair. Jonas frightened her on so many levels, but seeing how he responded to Emma touched her deeply. He’d come back and had started making demands, never asking, always expecting his orders to be followed. He’d been cold and autocratic. She supposed his training had taught him that. And naturally she balked at being told what to do. She’d been doing the parent thing single-handedly for years. But at times like this, she forgot about the orders and saw behind them to the kind, generous man who was trying hard to be a dad.
Emma reached into the bag and pulled out a paper-wrapped package before plunking herself back on Jonas’s lap.
Jonas’s penchant for bossiness wasn’t what scared her. What scared her most were moments like these. Normal family moments. Moments she deeply wanted for Emma, but ones that were dangerous for her. She couldn’t let fancy get the best of her. Like now, when his low laugh reached her ears. The way the muscles corded when Emma tripped and he caught her in his arms. Remembering those arms wrapped around her. Realizing how much she still wanted it automatically led to the fear that she’d lose it again. Getting over the heartbreak once had been bad enough. Jonas had said himself he could offer no guarantees. And she knew she couldn’t move forward without them. No matter how many times she went through this in her head, the answer was always the same: friends. Co-parents.
“Shan?”
Jonas held out his hand to her, even that simple gesture tying them together. “I brought sandwiches.”
“You mean, you brought a picnic,” she teased, but her smile was weak. Jonas had thought of everything, it seemed. It pleased her but threw her off her stride. Usually she was the one looking after details like snacks and blankets.
“I came prepared.” He flashed a grin at her.
His grin was like a bolt of lightning, reaching into her and bringing her to life. It made it seem like Jonas had never been away. Even though she knew that friends was absolutely the right thing to do, she also recognized that it wouldn’t take much and her heart would be completely lost all over again. And that terrified her. There were still so many questions between them that were unanswered. Answers she wanted to share with him but that he was unwilling to give. And a niggling fear that if she knew the truth, maybe he was right. Maybe she wouldn’t look at him in the same way.
He still held out the sandwich and wiggled his eyebrows at her. In all the times she’d seen him since he’d returned, never had he been this mellow, this approachable. Maybe he was feeling as comfortable in their new “friend” capacity as she was uncomfortable. She took the paper packet from his hand and unwrapped it. “You sure did.”
For minutes they munched quietly. Emma sat in the vee of Jonas’s outstretched legs, her head leaning back against his chest. He lifted one arm and pointed out over the river at a duck taking off; Emma’s finger raised and followed the same path. When Emma’s glowing face turned to say something, he leaned forward and kissed her forehead as laughter shook his chest.
There was no denying it now. He was a part of Emma’s life and by extension, hers too. And somehow she would have to find a way to fortify her heart against him. Keep the status quo. Make sure nobody got hurt. Establish themselves as friends, like he wanted. The surest way to her heart wasn’t with pretty speeches, or flowers, or any of the traditional trappings. Seeing him with Emma, seeing how he naturally responded to her, touched Shannyn in a profound way.
But he didn’t love her. She thought now that perhaps he never had. So she’d have to bury her own emotions if it came to that.
The very thought seemed laughable. She could never be just friends with Jonas. Feelings would always get in the way.
The loudspeaker crackled and an unseen emcee’s voice echoed over the riverbank.
Shannyn watched the show quietly, absorbing the way Jonas put his arm around Emma to point out features of the different aircraft. There were small bi-planes and single engine private craft. A pair of old World War Two bombers flew up the river in formation, their engines rumbling loudly. Jonas laughed when Emma put her hands over her ears as the CF-18’s did a fly-by, and when she laughed at the painted nose of the A-10 as it screamed past.
“Do you know what they call that?” he asked her.
She shook her head and he grinned. “A warthog.”
She giggled. Shannyn caught his eye. “She’s having a wonderful time.”
“So am I.” His gaze held hers, making the simple words mean more.
“Me too,” Shannyn replied, and meant it. She was glad she’d come along, although from the way Jonas and Emma were getting along, she needn’t have worried about them spending time alone. She’d never seen him so comfortable, and it was clear Emma trusted him completely.
The river quieted as the announcer told everyone to listen. An aircraft was approaching. Still, there was no sound. Jonas’s smile grew with each passing second. He nodded to Shannyn, then pointed at a speck behind them in the distance. It took her a few seconds to find it, but his trained eye had picked it up right away.
Still there was no sound, until suddenly the plane passed in front of them and the boom followed. Jonas’s voice echoed the announcer. “That’s a B1B stealth bomber.”
When the words were out of his mouth, his face clouded over. His jaw tensed slightly and his eyes lost all their warmth. Shannyn could tell he was remembering something. She wished he’d tell her what. What was so painful that the memory kept haunting him over and over? What was it he couldn’t get past?
After the bomber, they looked up high and saw a parachute team jump. Emma’s finger pointed and her mouth made an ‘o’ as the jumpers got closer and closer, their chutes billowing in the wind as they steered themselves toward the ground. Shannyn looked away from the parachute team and examined Jonas instead. Something was wrong. Emma was talking to him but his face looked like it had been carved in stone. His eyes, clear green, focused on nothing in particular and his chest barely rose and fell as he breathed. He was pulling away again but this time something was different, and Shannyn couldn’t put her finger on it.
One by one the parachutes landed in a wide circle that had been marked off and the audience clapped enthusiastically. The speaker started again, remarking on the team’s accuracy and telling the crowd to look downriver. As the team divested themselves of their chutes, a helicopter wound its way up and towards the wide white-marked circumference—waiting to extract the team.
As the announcer droned on about the challenges of a quick extraction in a combat situa
tion, Shannyn never took her eyes off of Jonas. Her heart pounded as his face paled, and his hands started to visibly shake. In a matter of a few seconds, he’d gone from vibrant father to a shell.“Emma,” she said quietly, tugging on the little girl’s sleeve. “Emma, come sit with Mama for a moment.”
At Shannyn’s quiet, commanding tone, Emma did what she was told. Shannyn put Emma by her right hip, so that she was between Emma and Jonas. The helicopter came closer, closer, the syncopated rhythm filling her ears while Jonas remained deathly calm.
One by one the parachute team was loaded into the waiting helo, the end of the performance. But Shannyn felt real fear when she saw a single tear trickle down Jonas’s pale cheek. His eyes never blinked, his lips never moved, but that one tear crawled its way down his cheek and dropped off his jaw.
Chapter 10
Nothing existed beyond the sound.
Heavy rotor blades cut through the air as the Chinook hovered a few feet from the ground. Jonas saw the pilot, close enough he saw the headset over his ears and saw his lips move as he spoke into the mic, the deafening noise of the helo drowning out the nearby voices.
“Let’s clear these men out!” The announcer crowed with enthusiasm.
“Let’s clear out, eh Parker? Or that fiancée of yours’ll get bored and find someone else.” Jonas teased his partner as they bounced along the dirt road.
“Yeah, well it sure won’t be you,” Parker shot back with a wide grin.
Jonas laughed.
The Iltis hit a rut, jostling the soldiers sitting in the back. “Hey, Sergeant Kirkpatrick. There’s something up ahead.”
Jonas leaned forward, peering through the windshield of the Iltis. Before he could open his mouth, everything shifted. He felt himself thrown into the air, out of the back of the vehicle. For a moment he was weightless. And everything went black.
At first he was only aware of sounds. Shouts and skids as the rest of the vehicles in their small convoy ground to a halt behind them. Then it was smells.
The heavy, coppery scent of blood mingled with dust filled his nostrils in the desert heat, but he saw nothing. Sudden weakness caused his eyes to close against the blinding sun. Gunfire echoed, tinny and thin, through his ears along with the dry crackle of fire—the charred, mangled pieces of the Iltis.
Everything was fuzzy, like being underwater.
With huge effort, Jonas turned his head to the left, opening his eyes enough to squint. What he saw was a narrow radius of carnage. Parker was dead, his mangled form sprawled motionless on the hard gravel of the road. Jonas blindly touched his leg, drawing his shaking fingers up and seeing the blood staining the tips as he fought the nausea curling through his stomach. Behind him he heard the shouts of his comrades; rifle fire popping over the ridge.
He heard a shout for a medic. He heard someone calling to get on the radio for an extraction. His eyes slid closed, trying to keep things linear and logical in his mind. Confused shouts echoed all around him.
“Hold on, Sarge.” A steady voice was at his right side but couldn’t distinguish who it was. Hands pressed against his leg and he gritted his teeth. “Help’s coming. Hang in there.”
The syncopated whomp whomp of helo blades reached his ears. He squinted into the sun, enough to see the dark hulking shape of a Chinook hovering several meters away. The feeling was going in his leg, the cold numbness crawling up the rest of his body and he knew it was too late.
“Jonas,” Shannyn said, reaching over and gripping his arm.
He turned his head, his eyes unfocused.
“Park! No!” He gave a mighty shout and leaped to his feet.
Without saying a single word more, he ran up the embankment towards the truck.
Shannyn pulled back as if burned, shocked by his outburst and frightened, not for herself but for him. She knew without a doubt that he hadn’t seen her when he’d looked into her eyes. She wanted to race after him, but she had Emma to worry about. “Honey, you pack up the food and I’ll get the blanket, okay?” She ignored the stares of people around them and hastily folded the green blanket, gathering it and Jonas’s jacket in her arms.
“What’s wrong with Daddy?”
Shannyn gripped Emma’s hand tightly. This was what she’d wanted to avoid. Putting Emma through any sort of stress. She should have known at their first meeting, when Emma had hit his leg. She should have known when he had those moments when time seemed to stop completely. Now Emma’s face mirrored her own—concerned and frightened. Shannyn was torn between concern for Emma and worry for Jonas.
She paused a moment, squatted before Emma because she didn’t know what frame of mind he’d be in when they got to the truck.
“I don’t know for sure, Emma. But I think your Daddy has some very bad memories. And I think that helicopter today reminded him of something bad and he got scared.”
“Daddies don’t get scared.”
Shannyn pulled her into a quick hug.
“Yes, honey, they sometimes do.” She pulled away and held Emma by the arms, fighting to keep her own hands from trembling. “Mommies and Daddies. Now, when we get back to the truck, Daddy might still be upset. So you’re going to do exactly what I tell you, okay?”
“Yes, Mama,” Emma replied meekly.
When Shannyn got there, Jonas was hanging on to the tailgate with one hand, his other hand braced on his thigh and his head hanging.
She approached carefully. “Jonas?”
When he looked up at her, all the colour was drained from his face. Somehow he looked smaller. But he was reachable, she realized. She let out the breath she’d been holding.
“Emma, Daddy’s fine. I’m going to talk to him, so you sit up in the truck, okay?”
She got Emma settled with the remainder of the lemonade. Behind them, the emcee’s voice was muffled through the speakers.
“What happened?”
Jonas took long, restorative breaths, but they didn’t help. Fear and shame overwhelmed him. Each day he went to work he told himself he was getting better. Even today, after the first flash, he’d convinced himself it was all fine. But it was a lie.
He’d told himself the debriefing he’d had with the shrink in Germany had been enough. Another lie. Never before had he had two episodes in the same day. Not even dealing with live fire exercises on base. It was something else and he couldn’t put his finger on what was different now. It had been almost a year. Things were supposed to get better, not worse!
It had been easier when he hadn’t felt anything. But lately…seeing Shannyn, remembering how he’d loved her, and now becoming involved with his daughter…he was feeling again. And feeling something meant feeling everything. Not just the here and now, and not just trying to fight his attraction to Shannyn. But everything he’d denied himself for nearly a year. Guilt, grief, resentment. Love.
Now she was waiting for him to explain, and he had no idea what to tell her.
“I need a minute.” He took more breaths, willing his heart rate to calm completely as he searched for words.
“All right.”
She couldn’t understand. Didn’t know what it was like out there. No one did unless they’d been through it. And who could he talk to? The only one who understood him was Parker. And Parker was gone. Jonas closed his eyes, flooded with guilt and without the will to fight it.
She waited patiently for him, leaning against the door of the truck and slowly he felt control slipping back, giving him enough strength to move out of the moment. He couldn’t believe she was still standing there and not running. He remembered the feeling of thinking he was going to bleed to death and how his last thought had been that maybe he’d made a mistake leaving her. It was selfish. It had been selfish then and it was selfish now, but as the paralyzing fear drained away, all he was left with was need. For her.
When he looked into her face, it was with apology in every fiber.
“I am so sorry. What you must think…”
“We can worry about what I t
hink later.” She dismissed his apology with a hand. “We need to worry about you right now.”
It was a fresh wound. He didn’t want to be anyone’s worry. It was his job to worry about others. To protect them. It was something he used to do very well, but lately he had done nothing but fail at it.
“I’m fine.”
Her laugh was sharp with disbelief. “You can’t possibly expect me to believe that. Oh Jonas, you are so far from all right. You’ve slipped away before, but it’s more than that, isn’t it? More than you’ve let on.”
He bristled. What did she know about it anyway? She hadn’t lived through it. She hadn’t seen her best friend die. And he wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone. As much as he wished he could lay his burden down, he knew that it wasn’t fair for Shannyn and Emma to pay the price for his problems. He’d done a horrible job so far. The best thing he could do for them was protect them from the ugliness.
“It’s for me to deal with.”
Her lips formed a firm line and she waited five long seconds before speaking again.
“Not if you expect to have any sort of relationship with your daughter.”
He was in no shape for her to be giving ultimatums. Sudden anger piled on top of the confusion left in the wake of his vivid memory. It overrode the longing for her and the self-loathing he felt at his weakness, propelling him into action. He let go of the tailgate and squared his shoulders. “Don’t threaten me, Shannyn.”
She glanced into the truck and back at him. “Let me make it easy for you, Jonas. If you want to see Emma, you’re going to have to let me help you. Even if it kills you.”
Shannyn watched his fingers on the wheel, gripping as if his life depended on it. His jaw was set firmly; he grit his teeth. He was furious with her. It came off him in angry waves.
She didn’t care. Emma sat between them, her animated chatter of earlier silenced. She might only be five, but Shannyn knew Emma understood that something was wrong. It wasn’t fair of them to put her in the middle of all their problems. From the first moment he’d showed up, Shannyn had a feeling that there would be nothing but trouble. But she hadn’t anticipated it being this bad.
