I heard Ryder’s gasp as the light caught my features. “Lindy, what did he do to you?” He tried to look away, but always came back. “He cut your face, your beautiful face.” His lips pressed in at the only unscathed patch of skin, my forehead, the same place he’d kissed me before I left. His head twisted and he pulled me against his chest.
“I’m so sorry. I never should’ve sent you. Don’t ever leave me again.”
I let him hold me, if nothing else so I didn’t have to hold myself. He still had Vanessa, nothing had changed for him.
Everything had changed for me.
In the last week my world had broken. Trust and love, belonging; all of it was irreparably damaged. Weakness threaded every vein as my vital systems shut down and succumbed to the pain. Still, it felt good to allow him to brush his lips over my cheeks, to kiss the raw spaces that represented so much evil only a day before.
It felt good, so, I let him.
“Shane is coming, and your mother. She flew in this afternoon. I’m not supposed to be here. She didn’t want me here, but I had to see you. I had to see for myself what he—” It was too much to finish. “I’m so sorry.”
He kept talking, and I tried to listen, but my body swayed with vertigo and weak limbs. Pain lit up my arms every time he shifted his hold and I wanted to reprimand him for causing me more agony, but my tongue refuse to function.
“What are you doing out here? I have to get you back inside. You need help.” His arms propelled me forward, bracing my body as it struggled through the motions. “I never should’ve given up on you,” he continued as if talking to himself, “I should’ve looked for you. I shouldn’t have assumed that you would run. I was wrong and I’m sorry.”
I felt blood trickle free, slick as it slipped over my abdomen. In my escape from the hospital I must have pulled some stitches. I parted my lips and struggled to say something, but my mouth only hinged back and forth like an abandoned door.
He stopped us on the ramp. The darkness hid my struggle, but my hands gripped the rail and for a second I wondered if I appeared almost normal.
In the dim light cast by distant street lamps, I watched Ryder’s mouth as it pressed together into a long straight line, then released again as he spoke. “I know I’m with Vanessa, but she’s not you, and I feel it every time we’re together. You’re all I’ve wanted for so long, everything I’ve ever searched for.”
His words pulled free the deranged ranting of Dallas and his hunt for the perfect match. My knees buckled underneath me.
Dallas died. I’d killed him and now I was dying as well.
It fit. It all made poetic sense.
Yet nothing made sense, not anymore.
Ryder shifted to take me back into his arms. It released another wave of pain before he braced me up again.
“I think we need to give this a real try.” He kept me moving back toward the door. “We never had a shot and I think we deserve it. This may not be great timing, but you know me. You know you can trust me.”
I pulled away and shuddered at the mere mention of the phrase. Ryder moved to capture me again. The light faded in my eyes as we moved beyond the reach of the street light into the dark. It was too much. He was asking too much when I had nothing to give him. I felt my eyes roll back, but I pulled myself through to consciousness again. Lights filled the distant parking lot, and I knew on instinct the shape belonged to Shane’s cruiser.
“Huckleberry, I’m pouring my heart out here. I know you’ve been through something impossible for me to understand, but I want be with you. Let me prove it to you.”
The idea was humorous. He was begging for a moment to prove that he could take care of me, and yet he couldn’t see my struggle. Dallas’ words filled my mind, I couldn’t take care of someone like that.
I’d known it years before. I‘d broken my own law for Amos and had relearned the lesson. How many times did I have to be taught I was better off on my own?
“Lindy!” My mother’s voice floated on the wind and I wished I could reach out to her, but my arms had gone limp. My body was systematically shutting down and the monster had free reign.
“Lindy?” Ryder’s face fell in panic as the lights from Shane’s cruiser caught my face. “Lindy? You don’t look good.” He brushed the hair from my eyes. “Lindy, hang on. What have I done?” I felt the asphalt beneath me, and rain on my face as it increased its speed. My mother’s heels clattered against the wet blacktop and Ryder bent low to hold my head in his lap. “She’s bleeding again! Get a doctor!” His hand clamped over the saturated bandage and I heard Uncle Shane yell through the growing storm. When Ryder’s hand came away, crimson stained the skin.
The siren on Uncle Shane’s car still blazed in the night, lights swirling and reflecting against the raindrops that pelted my face. I could feel myself slipping beneath the water, like Jackie had, dipping low, once, then twice, almost gone.
Morning would never come for me.
I thought of the pain I might cause him if he thought I’d died when we still had a chance. It wasn’t hard to imagine him broken by the death of what might have been. Ryder needed to be free of me. I had to release him from whatever held him captive. My body was done, but he still had a chance at happiness once I was gone. I knew I could let him go. I could set him free if I could speak one last time.
Tears fell from Ryder’s eyes and splattered with the rain on my face. “Please Huckleberry, I just got you back. Don’t leave me now. Please, hang on.” His shoulders shook as he drew in a deep breath. “Please, stay with me. I need you. I want to be with you, Lindy. Don’t you want that too? Don’t you want to be with me?”
My shuddering breath earned his undivided attention. With every part of my soul, I wished I could be selfish, say ‘yes, always’, and take my last breath in his arms knowing he was mine, but he needed my sacrifice so that he could keep living when I didn’t make it. I had to be strong for him. One last time.
I clawed through the sludge and mud that clouded my brain and found the two words I needed in order to set him free.
“I don’t.”
The End.
Turn the page for a sneak peek into the next book in the Lindy Johnson Series, Sparrows & Sacrifice:
Sneak Peek
Sparrows & Sacrifice-Book3
I could feel the cold glass beneath my fingertips. That was a triumph all on its own. It rattled as I pushed it across the wooden top of the table.
“Lindy, are you done with dinner?”
I looked up to see my mother staring at me. She wore the apron she bought me the previous year for Christmas. Someone ought to wear it. Dinner, she’d said something about dinner. I looked down and saw a plate of food. I touched the mashed potatoes. They were as cold as the empty glass.
Every sentence I spoke was like a quilt I had to stitch together piece by piece. Even then the words were slow and calculated. “It’s cold.”
Her smooth skin wrinkled between her eyebrows for a moment, then relaxed again. “You’ve been sitting there for half an hour staring at your glass. Your uncle and I finished the dishes.”
Another time lapse. At least I’d only lost a half hour this time. She told me the day before that I’d stared out a window for three hours. I thought it was only ten minutes.
She pulled the plate from the table. “I’ll warm it up for you, sweetheart.” The edges of her mouth pulled down and in. I thought I saw her chew on the inside of her lip. She only did that when she worried. Had I done something wrong?
“I’m not hungry,” I said as I pushed from the table. She sighed as I shuffled from the room, but I pretended not to hear. Uncle Shane sat in my living room, so I decided to take my chances with him. My body still ached as I lowered it to the chair. Too much trauma, too hard to tell where the injuries ended and my relapse damage began.
“You want to watch the game?” Uncle Shane asked as he set down his book.
“What game?” I asked.
He knew I meant more than
what teams, I meant the sport. I meant what season was it? I meant how much time have I lost? I’d only ventured from my room in the last couple days. And everything before that, everything I remembered, was disjointed and dark.
“The Colts and the Titans play tonight. Colts are the obvious favorite, but it’s early in the season, so you know anything can happen.”
It was a test, his way of checking my memory and reaction. Colts meant football, early in the season meant it was autumn.
“It’s September?” I asked cautiously.
His mouth twisted slightly before he corrected me. “First week of October.”
There was nothing wrong with my long-term memory. I could remember my childhood, both the good and the bad, or in my case, the real and the implanted. I could remember college, criminology courses and psychology internships. I could remember the cases I’d worked as a private investigator, the close scrapes and the solved puzzles. I even remembered the summer with ease. Dallas and his quick smile tore at my psyche and threatened my resolve to not cry.
The violence was easy to recall as well. I knew why my skin still carried the marks from a mad man’s knife. There was no forgetting my captivity in the cabin. I just added it to the dark pit of nightmares that consumed me when my guard fell. Though I wished I didn’t, I could remember the way the knife felt as I took his life to save mine. It was survival, but it didn’t lessen the filthy feeling that gouged out my soul every time I thought about it.
After that, it was hazy, snatches of images I could pull up, or feelings and impressions of the time. There were red flashing lights, the feeling of rain on my face, and Ryder’s words. My chin dropped into my chest as I thought of him.
He pled with me. He held me. Ryder kept me anchored so that I couldn’t slip away. How had I repaid him? With one phrase, “I don’t.”
Such a tiny phrase to carry so much.
I don’t want a relationship.
I don’t want help.
I don’t want you.
I lied. I wanted him. I wanted him so badly that my stomach ached and my head got foggy, but I’d lied to protect him, to keep him from the hardship I knew was crashing down around me. He didn’t need to be a part of my vacant stares and empty days, he was better than that. What could I give him emotionally? I’d been the victim of something horrific, and at the hands of someone I trusted and cared about. What did I have left?
I’d wanted to spare him my inevitable demise, because at the time, I thought I was dead.
Somehow, I was still alive and it surprised me every day. But the phrase had worked, and after the rain and the wet asphalt, I had no memory of Ryder.
I’d lived in darkness after that, memories weren’t stored in my brain as I relapsed, though I carried impressions of what had happened. Whether they were real, or whether I’d fabricated them from stories I’d heard, I had no way of knowing. Strong impressions of doctors without faces clung to me. There’d been steroid infusions to stop the active destruction of the disease in my brain. I was sure I’d heard the beeps and clicks and buzzing sounds that had gone along with a hospital stay. The one distinct memory I had was someone holding onto me, the weight of their forehead pressed hard against the back of my hand, and the feeling of love that had spread like honey through my body.
There were snatches of arguments, not the words, impressions of the feelings: desperation and anger, betrayal and compromise. I must have come home at some point, though I couldn’t recall when. My mother told me the day before that I’d been coherent for a couple weeks, but I had no memory of it, at least nothing solid. My words improved every day, and the memory followed. Like climbing up out of a valley, every day pulled me away from the fog.
“Lindy,” my mother said, drying her hands on a towel. “Lindy did you hear Uncle Shane?”
She talked to me like a child. I tried not to resent her for it. To her, I looked helpless. I spoke in jarred sentences that were difficult to formulate. I had a short attention span, and lost track of conversations as they were happening. But in my mind, I was sharp, coherent, and eager to put my life back together. I wanted her to go home and let me do the hard things. My small house was too compact for both of us, and I needed space to find my independence again.
“I’m sorry, no, I didn’t hear you,” I said.
My mother shot my uncle an expression that I knew meant something, round eyes and elevated eyebrows, matched with a tight lip. I was still regaining my ability to process facial expressions, but my gut told me it meant, “I told you so.”
As usual he ignored his younger sister and asked again, “So that was a no to the game, then?”
“No, I think I’ll go lay down,” I said. I arranged the words in my mind and said, “I’m a little sleepy.” I started to leave the room when something silver caught my eye. Two arm crutches, stored at an angle by the door, as if they belonged there.
They didn’t.
“Why are those here?” I asked as I raised a hand and pointed to the offending objects.
“We talked about that yesterday,” mom said, as if it was enough of an answer.
“No, we didn’t,” I snapped.
Uncle Shane stepped between us before our argument could escalate. “Dr. McAlister sent them home with you from the hospital. He was afraid your mobility would be limited, but you’ve surpassed expectations as usual. I’m taking them back tomorrow.”
“Maybe we should store them in a closet,” mom suggested, “in case you need them later.”
It was as if the crutches were watching me, taunting me with their presence, telling me I’d never be what I once was.
“I won’t need them,” I said. The ‘ever’ was implied and hung in the air unspoken.
“I’ll take them back,” Shane restated with emphasis.
I nodded and took a step toward my room. My foot caught on something slick and I bent to pick up the plastic bag. There were little grains of sugar at the bottom, clear and white miniature cubes. My heart quickened with excitement.
“Was Ryder here?”
They looked at each other, and I hated how they could talk without speaking.
“No,” my mother said, “Ryder doesn’t come around.”
“But, this is sour sugar. It goes with those gummy worms he likes,” I contended.
She snatched the bag from my hand and crumbled it into a ball. “I had those yesterday. We shared, don’t you remember?”
Uncle Shane turned away and walked to my window that looked out to the street. His arms clenched tight across his chest. My mother rubbed her shoulder as if it had released a sudden twinge of pain. Something felt off, but the haze was thick, fatigue had set in again. I let it go and shuffled to my room.
I shut my door, but turned the knob and let it fall open again. I wasn’t helpless, I was cunning and strong and I refused to let her lie to me. Their voices seeped through the crack in the door as I listened.
“You can’t keep things from her, Pamela. She’s grown, and she has clawed her way out of worse than this.”
“I can shelter her from whatever I want. I’m her mother. If I think she needs protection from the world, or her job, or that boy, then I will protect her.”
“This case needs her, whether you like it or not. She has a gift and when you stand in the way, you are sacrificing someone else’s child.”
“I don’t care,” she snapped. Then, as if she realized I might hear, her volume dropped again. “It’s my right to protect Lindy. She’s too weak to go wandering through the Cascade Wilderness, and if—”
“She’s stronger than you give her credit for, stronger than either of you have ever given her credit for.”
“If this is another lecture about Germany, Shane, you can keep it to yourself.”
I knew the sound of my uncle’s aggravated growl. It was always louder and deeper when he was arguing with my mother. “Stop controlling everything. Let her find her way. The chief has waited for three months on this case. He’s never going to
find his daughter without Lindy.”
“She can barely walk,” mom argued.
“I’m sending someone with her.”
“No, you’re not doing that to her. You heard what she said to him. She was very clear.”
I swore his voice shook my walls. “She was dying!”
Mom’s voice went tense, but hushed, like sound forced through a tight space. “Lower your voice.”
I slid down the wall and pressed my hands against my temples to stop the confusion in my brain. My mother spoke again, “I want to take her home to California, away from all of this. She needs a quiet life, no more guns and knives and death.”
“She’s good at the guns and knives and saving people, Pam. She doesn’t want to go home. This is her home.” Uncle Shane was right about that, I wasn’t going to California. “If she does this favor for the chief, it wouldn’t mean a consulting job for her. There’s a good chance he’d let her on the force. You know she’s wanted that for a long time. Could you really hold her back from that?”
There was silence for nearly a full minute before mom replied, “Fine, but give her three more weeks to recover before you say anything, maybe then she’ll be strong enough.”
The front door popped open and rattled the frame of the house. “Lindy is already strong enough.” The door shut and my mother sighed.
Three weeks, I thought, three weeks to put my life back together.
Sparrows & Sacrifice
Lindy Johnson Series Book 3
Coming in 2019
Note from the Author
Saddles & Sabotage deals frequently with strength vs. weakness. This is a lesson I’ve learned and will continue to learn as I live with MS. I spent a great deal of my time hiding after my diagnosis, as if acknowledging this new weakness in me would somehow make me worse off. But that’s part of what I’ve learned, our weaknesses can be our greatest strengths. There are lessons I never would have learned without the effects of MS in my life. Over the years, dare I say, I’ve had days I’ve felt grateful for this trial. Even more so though, I’m thankful for those around me in this very special community of MS Warriors who brace me up.
Saddles & Sabotage Page 31
