Bed of Lies (The McRae's, Book 3 - Zach) (The McRae's Series)

by Teresa Hill

  "Uncle Zach!"

  She threw herself into his arms just as he rounded the back corner of the house and spotted Emma. She was sitting on the ground under a giant oak tree, planting purple and yellow pansies. Her twelve-year-old, Dana, was lying in a hammock on the other side of the yard, talking on the phone. Soon he found himself mobbed by females, the girls first and then Emma.

  She grabbed him and didn't let go for a long time, then talked the girls into taking their brother inside and attempting to get him down for his a nap. Emma took Zach by the hand and dragged him back to her tree, where a whole flat of bedding plants waited to be transplanted into the soil.

  "You're putting 'em all in today?" he asked, as he sat down on the ground beside her.

  "Yes, why?"

  "Jamie might have taken out a few by the mailbox when he spotted me."

  Emma shook her head. "He moves so fast he doesn't take time to even look where he's going. Last week, he ran into a tree and scraped the whole side of his face. He said he was chasing a butterfly and it turned faster than he could."

  "Sounds reasonable." Zach glanced across the yard, like he needed to inventory the kids' toys and the landscaping, anything rather than look his sister in the eye. "How are you feeling?"

  "Still a little queasy, and I swear, I sleep all the time, but I just can't seem to get enough rest."

  "Cut back at work?"

  She nodded and went back to work on her plants. "I've gone from three days a week to two. Thank goodness we just took on a new partner a few months ago. Otherwise, I don't know how I'd be able to make that work."

  "Just kids, or grown-ups, too?" Zach asked, checking the distance between plants and clearing a small rock, then another, from the spot where she'd want the next purple flower to go.

  "What?" Emma asked.

  "The new person—does she just do kids? Or grownups, too?"

  "Oh." She dug into the soil with her tiny shovel. "Jane Atwood. She's great. Part of a big practice in Philadelphia for twenty years. She has an aunt here who's getting on in years, and needed someone with her, and Jane was ready to escape the big city. She sees adults and children. Why?"

  Zach tried to tip a tiny plant out of its plastic container, roots, dirt and all, not very successfully. "How do these work?"

  "Turn it upside down and squeeze it a little. The whole thing should pop out in one piece."

  "Oh." He managed, kind of. "She any good?"

  "Jane? We wouldn't have brought her into the practice if we hadn't thought so. What are you really asking me, Zach?"

  "You know what I'm asking you," he said, taking the tiny hand shovel from her and starting to dig in the dirt by his side, suddenly feeling antsy and ready to grumble. Anything but this. "Is that a shrink thing or something? To never answer a question, just ask another one?"

  "I answered a lot of your questions, and you know it," she said, forgetting the plants altogether. "And you might not have noticed, but I've been really good. You've been in town for nearly twenty-four hours. It wasn't easy, but I've been waiting for you to come to me."

  "You wouldn't have lasted another fifteen minutes," he said, more than happy to bat words around with her that had nothing to do with what was wrong. "That little boy wouldn't have been asleep for a minute before you were in the car, headed for Mom and Dad's house."

  "I would not have," she insisted, then admitted, "Okay, I was going to wait until tonight, once the kids were asleep. I thought this would take more time than I'd have with Jamie napping. Wouldn't want to rush you, once I finally got you talking."

  He frowned at her, practically mauling a flower as he tried to place it correctly in the hole he'd dug into the ground. Only problem was, the hole was about three times too big.

  "I think I showed admirable restraint to this point. And don't kill my flowers. It's not their fault." She put her hand on his, trying to save the next bloom. "You have to let me help now, Zach."

  He laughed then, emotions rising inside him, clogging his throat and making saying anything difficult.

  "What?" she asked gently, her hand on his arm now.

  "You," he said, dropping the flower and just sitting there with her. "Just saying it that way. That I had to let you help me. Not making me ask. I really wasn't looking forward to asking."

  "We've been trying to help for months. You just weren't ready to let us."

  "I know." He finally looked at her, saw the worry in her eyes. "I'm sorry."

  "It's okay."

  "So... " What were they talking about? Oh, yeah. Him and his little issues. "It didn't bother you when George got out of jail?"

  She didn't balk at the abrupt leap in the conversation. She just sat there and looked at him, and finally said, "Of course it did."

  "But it didn't do this to you?"

  "Do what?"

  He took a breath that wasn't at all steady. No way he could make it steady. "Make you feel like... like you were choking? Like you were coming apart at the seams, and all these things about the past you could have sworn you'd put behind you were suddenly right there? Right beneath the surface fighting to get out?"

  "No. George didn't do that to me. Mark did, though—that guy I was seeing freshman year in college."

  "Oh." Zach remembered. That guy had hit her. Left bruises on her. Broken into their parents' home to get her. Thank goodness Rye had been there to save her.

  "That guy made you think of George?" Zach asked.

  "Worse than that, he made me think about Mom."

  She meant Annie Greene. She called Sam and Rachel by their first names, although she definitely considered them her mother and father, but she'd always referred to Annie Greene as Mom.

  "Sorry." Zach suddenly felt guilty for escaping so much more of the past than Emma. "I didn't even think about that, Em. That guy must have brought back so many bad memories for you."

  "Not just the memories," she said. "The feelings. They're the important part. I was so angry at Mom for the way we lived, for letting him hit her and hit me and scare us to death. I thought she must have been the weakest woman on earth and the stupidest. But at the same time, she was our mother, and I loved her, too."

  That would be difficult—loving and still being so angry.

  "I didn't think I'd ever understand her," Emma said. "Then there I was, living her life for just a little while and scared to death, just like she must have been."

  "Oh." He saw what she was getting at, kind of. "I thought... You and that guy. It was just the one time that he hurt you, right?"

  "No. There was another time. That's what made me come home from college in the first place. And the whole thing from start to finish only lasted a few days, which is nothing like what she lived through, but... Well, let's just say I had a whole new understanding of how scared she must have been."

  "I'm sorry," he said, struck by how many times he'd said that lately, and to so many different people. It seemed totally inadequate in comparison with the pain suffered by so many people who were close to him. "I should have known—"

  "Why?"

  "Because you're my sister. I just didn't... I didn't think."

  "I didn't want you to think about it. Or to remember it or have it screw up your life the way it is now."

  "You knew?" he asked. "All this time, you knew what my little problem was all about?"

  "I knew the memories and the feelings had to be inside you somewhere, and if they were ever going to come out, ending up face-to-face with George Greene seemed to be a likely time for it to happen."

  He shook his head, baffled. "I didn't even know I had anything of those feelings left in me. I didn't see how they could possibly be this strong, this awful, when I remember so little about that time."

  "But the impressions were so strong, and even things you don't consciously remember from your early years can still have an effect on you. Think about Jamie. He probably won't remember much from his life to this point. But do you honestly believe he could have lived with a violen
t drunk, scared and neglected, maybe beat up until he was four, and have it not affect him later, even if he had a perfectly wonderful home from now on?"

  Zach pictured that laughing, happy, completely secure little boy ever being in a place like the one he and Emma had lived in. "I didn't think about it that way."

  Jamie. So little. So vulnerable. He couldn't stand thinking about Jamie living the way he and Emma must have, and yet, he couldn't quite see himself, either, as terribly vulnerable and only four years old.

  He must have been bigger, he thought at first, tougher, more capable of taking care of himself, of shielding himself from it. Surely, he had. And Emma had been there, taking care of him, but still... Four? Jamie was what four looked like? What Zach had been, when all those bad things happened? It didn't seem possible.

  "It all gets inside us somewhere," Emma said. "We carry it all around, whether we realize it or not. We can build defenses against it, like building a well inside us, dropping the emotions to the bottom and sealing it tight. But it's still there, and one day something happens to bring those issues back to the surface."

  "And then what?"

  "It all comes out. It's like poison. You don't want it inside you."

  He nodded, working really hard to breathe right now. He'd been kind of hoping she could tell him how to stuff it back inside. Poison, she'd said. "It feels like that, and I don't know what to do with it, Em."

  "That's all right. I do."

  She sounded so calm, so accepting, he found the courage to confess, "I feel like I'm falling apart."

  "It's just the walls coming down, Zach, letting you feel all those feelings you've been trying to hide from. And it's scary, but you'll get past it."

  Next big, scary question. "So you don't think I'm crazy?"

  "No, you're not crazy."

  God, he'd really needed to hear her say those words.

  "So, you can fix me? You or someone like you?"

  She looked perfectly calm and confident. "It's what shrinks do, Zach, help you deal with emotions like this."

  He nodded, both comforted and dismayed, like a man who's been told the disease isn't fatal but the cure is really hideous. "I was afraid it would come down to that." How about that? He'd admitted that, too.

  "There's nothing wrong with needing help," Emma said.

  "It's just not a place I ever thought I'd end up."

  "Me neither," she said.

  He looked up at that and could not have been more surprised. "You, too?"

  She nodded. "After the mess with that guy."

  "I never knew," he said.

  "Well, most people don't exactly take out an ad in the paper when they go into therapy." She sighed. "I probably should have told you, but it made me feel stupid and vulnerable, thinking I couldn't handle it on my own. I'd handled so many other things."

  "Yeah. Exactly. I feel like I've handled things that were so much harder than this."

  "It just means it's time to deal with it. That's all."

  "So, this doesn't surprise you? I come over here and tell you I'm falling apart and I need a shrink, and... it's no big deal to you?"

  "Did you think I'd be shocked?" she asked, grinning.

  "There you go," he complained, trying desperately to make light of this, "with that damned question-to-answer-a-question again."

  "Sorry. I'm not shocked, and I'm not nearly as worried as I was before you came home. It would be a big deal if you were determined to try to run from it. That's when people get into trouble—when they need help and don't get it, because they're scared or ashamed or just don't know there are people who can help."

  Okay, he got to spill his guts in therapy. Maybe he could bring himself to tell the shrink everything he still hadn't said to anyone else. "I really hate this, Em. I don't even want to tell you what I thought might happen..."

  "When you finally said those things out loud?" She smiled back at him. "It'll be all right. Promise."

  Now he really wanted to be done with this conversation. He had the perfect diversion. "Mom mention that Gwen and I called it quits?"

  "Finally." His sister grinned broadly. No surprise there, either.

  "What is this?" he said, more loudly than he normally would have, feigning outrage. "Everyone knows more than I do about my own life?"

  She just grinned some more.

  "Women," he muttered. "What's a guy supposed to do with them?"

  "You could probably address that in therapy, too, " she deadpanned.

  He sat there, absolutely still for a moment, then realized she'd made a joke about him going into therapy. She wouldn't be able to joke about it if she were that worried about him.

  A split second later, Zach laughed, and then he lunged at her, shoving her sideways in the grass, careful to grab on to her and roll her so that he hit the ground instead of her.

  She landed on top of him and shrieked, "You rat!"

  Emma grabbed a handful of leaves and threw them at him. He threw some right back, manhandling her some more until she was flat on her back on the ground, and they ended up wrestling, him trying to get at her ribs, because she was ticklish as hell.

  She was giggling and still shrieking when he got her in a particularly tender spot, and it was after one of those shrieks that her husband came barreling around the house and into the backyard, yelling her name.

  Zach saw Rye coming and held up his hands in surrender as Rye stopped short, a foot and a half away. "Sorry. It's just me."

  Zach took his sister by the hand and tugged until she was sitting up on the ground beside him. They both laughed again, until they caught the thunderous look on Rye's face.

  "Jesus, Zach. You took ten years off my life, and I really can't afford to lose time like that, now that we're having another baby." Emphasis on another baby. "What the hell were you doing?" Rye demanded, still breathing hard and glaring at Zach.

  "It's all right," Emma said, brushing her hair out of her face and finding leaves tangled up in it. She started pulling them out.

  "God, I thought someone had jumped you in the backyard or that something had happened with the baby."

  "Nothing's going to happen to me or this baby," she said. "Zach tickled me, and you know what happens when someone does that. You do it, too."

  Rye took another breath, calming down a bit. Zach knew nobody messed with Emma. Rye made sure of it. He came to stand beside his wife, gently moving her hands out of the way and freeing the last of the leaves from her hair.

  The gentleness of his touch, the way he let his hand linger there, as if he'd stroked it through her hair a million times and wanted to do that very thing a million times more, suddenly seemed so intimate, Zach had to look away.

  She was just fine, he reminded himself. No matter what she remembered of her time with George and Annie Greene and what emotional wounds had been inflicted, his sister was whole and surrounded by love.

  Rye finished with her hair and then sat down on the ground beside her, pulling her against his side and glaring at Zach. "This is how you treat pregnant women?"

  "Only ones who happen to be my sister," Zach said. "Sorry. I forget how loud she can be when she's riled." He leaned over and kissed her, trying to get back into her husband's good graces.

  Rye shook his head and took a breath, then looked over at Emma. "And you couldn't wait for him to get home?"

  "He'll behave now," she said, kissing her husband. "And if you really want to hurt him, you and Sam can gang up on him on the basketball court tomorrow. Rachel called earlier, and she said it's supposed to be nice and warm. She wants to get everybody together for a cookout."

  "Whipping him on the court might make me feel better," Rye admitted.

  "Oh, right. Like the two of you are going to hurt me?" Zach boasted. They shouldn't be able to. Even though they were both in great shape, he had more than twenty years on Rye and even more on Sam.

  "You sit in a courtroom all day in a fancy suit, Zach. Makes a man soft and slow."

 
"We'll see who's getting soft," he bragged.

  Rye's cell phone rang a moment later. With a warning to Zach to behave, Rye got up and took the call, walking toward the front of the house.

  Zach got to his feet and then helped his sister up, taking a minute to fuss over the little bulge of her tummy. "I didn't hurt the little guy, did I?"

  "No, and my little guy's a girl," she insisted.

  "You know that for sure?"

  She nodded. "Genetic testing. I'm thirty-seven now."

  "Everything okay?"

  "She's perfect."

  "I meant with you. Rye sounded worried."

  Emma sighed. "Well... this was something of a surprise. Things happen, you know?"

  "Emma—"

  "I did not make this happen on my own," she said, feigning outrage over a question he hadn't yet had a chance to ask. "I had help from my husband, and I assured him that if he's up to making babies at his advanced age, I'm pretty sure he'll be around to help me raise them."

  "Oh," he said.

  "You know how he gets. Every time I get pregnant, he starts running timelines in his head, grumbling about how old he'll be when the baby does this or that. And then once they arrive he forgets all about that and just turns into a great dad."

  "You don't worry?" Zach asked.

  "He's my husband, and we're going to have a new baby together," she said. "And we'll raise this baby together, the way we're raising all our children."

  She looked serene when she said it, and triumphant, he thought. He wished he could borrow just a little bit of her faith and tuck it away inside.

  She gave him a giant hug, and said, "I'm so glad you're home. Don't you dare go ducking my phone calls like that again."

  "I won't," he promised.

  Dana opened up the screen door and yelled. "Mom? Amy called to remind you of your three o'clock appointment. It's quarter till, now."

  "Thanks, sweetheart. I'm coming." She turned back to Zach. "Walk me to the office?"

  "Sure." He took that to mean she wasn't done with him. Or maybe she'd introduce him to her colleague Jane.

  Time for Zach's adventures in therapy.

  Great.

  Chapter 14