The Mountains Trilogy (Boxed Set)

by Phoebe Alexander

  Maggie whipped around. “Really? You didn’t even tell me?” Her eyes were red and glaring. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  James sighed. “We talked about it when I first got back. Don’t you remember? You said it was okay.”

  “I said it was okay and was under the assumption that if you chose to do it, you would at least tell me,” she seethed.

  It had been a long time since he had heard her voice throbbing with anger. A long time, maybe since high school, he thought. Funny how some people have a certain tone that can just stab right through your heart. Hers does. He placed his hand on her thigh and watched her eyes soften at his touch. “You’re right,” he conceded. “I should have told you. It was just coffee though, I promise. And I do hope to see her again, probably next month in the play she’s in. I was hoping you’d come with me.”

  “Really?” Maggie’s eyes widened. “What kind of play?” Her posture began to relax.

  “It’s a musical called Chess. She has the lead and I think it will be a really good show. She told me all about it when we met up last week.” He watched his fiancée’s eyes begin to acquiesce, the anger fading. “She’s a good person, Maggie. I think you will like her,” he said, his tone lifting and brightening as he spoke of Sarah.

  Maggie smirked as if she was considering whether or not to believe him, her head and heart tugging in slightly opposite directions. “Okay, honey. I’ll go with you. Just promise me you’ll tell me if you make plans with her again, alright?”

  “Of course,” James replied, relief washing over him. He squeezed her thigh again and smiled, then stood up to head back to his computer where he’d left Abby hanging.

  ***

  Sarah felt the tears welling up in her eyes as her daughter descended the staircase. She wore a long, fitted teal satin gown embellished with rhinestones and beads from the bust line spilling down the side past her hips. Her hair was done up in curls, piled on her head and held with pearl and rhinestone combs. The most beautiful element though was the glowing smile stretched across her face. Owen, Rachel, and Kathy all applauded as she hit the bottom stair.

  “Absolutely stunning!” Sarah’s mother pronounced. “You look amazing! Beyond amazing even!”

  Rachel nodded in agreement. “I can’t get over how grown up you look, Abby. You’re breathtaking!”

  Sarah was struggling to formulate coherent thoughts. How do you look at your almost-grown daughter and impart to her all you want her to know, how much you love her and how proud you are of her? How do you tell her that you desperately miss that little girl she used to be but are thrilled at the beautiful woman she is becoming? She wiped away a tear that had trickled down her cheek and simply said, “I’m the luckiest mother in the world.”

  ***

  Sarah pressed send and imagined the documents she’d attached to the email flying through cyberspace toward their destination in Poland. I can’t believe I’m doing this, she thought. If they want me in the fall, I’m going to have to scramble to get the kids’ passports and get everything arranged.

  There was a knock at her office door. Sarah hoped it wasn’t the department secretary again. She’d already interrupted her several times. My grades are turned in, it’s officially summer break. I shouldn’t even be here! Why does she keep bugging me? she thought, annoyed. She tried to sound pleasant, though, when she called, “Come in.”

  She’s expected to see Mary’s homely but rosy apple-cheeked face appear in her door frame, but instead she saw glowing tan skin, blue eyes, and thick-fingered hands wrapped around a hard-covered book. Her heart suddenly felt like she’d just sprinted across campus. “James! What are you doing here?”

  He stepped in, a sideways smile curling on his lips as he extended the book toward her. “I bought your book. Will you sign it for me?”

  I can’t believe he’s standing in my office. Standing here holding my book, no less. It had just been released the prior week and, being published by an academic press, was only widely available online. He must have been watching for it, she guessed. She smiled at him, overwhelmed with humility. “I can’t believe you bought my book.”

  “Of course I did,” he replied. “I was going to just download it to my e-reader, but I wanted a print copy so you could sign it.”

  “I’d be happy to,” she said, taking it from him and setting it on the desk while she fumbled for a pen in her drawer. Shit, I don’t know what to write. I want it to be meaningful, but I don’t want to get him in trouble. She stalled under the guise of searching for the writing implement while she composed a simple message in her head. He took a seat in her throw-covered chair while her trembling fingers inscribed: To my dear friend James with love, Sarah.

  He smiled as he read over it and then closed the cover. “The picture you sent of Abby was beautiful,” he said.

  “I know. I can’t believe how grown up she looked in that dress! My petite little girl is getting some curves. When the hell did that happen?” Her melodic laugh resonated through the small room.

  His smile was still wrapped around his face as he soaked up her laughter. “I can’t believe you wrote a book. It’s a huge accomplishment. I’m really proud of you, Sarah.”

  “Thanks, darling, I’m proud too. Hey, here’s some news,” she changed the subject. “I may be going to Poland next year to do a fellowship.”

  His eyes suddenly bulged with surprise. “Poland?!” He shook his head. “Why on earth would you go there?”

  Sarah laughed at him, remembering the conversation they’d had prior to his deployment about him wanting to go to war. At least Poland is a lot better than Afghanistan, she thought. “Just for a change,” she explained. “It’d be at Pawel’s university. You remember him, right?”

  James nodded. “And Garrett’s okay with you going?”

  Honestly, I hadn’t even factored Garrett into this equation, she realized. I guess I never really considered him to be a long-term thing. “Oh, he’ll be fine with it. He’s an academic too. He gets it.”

  “I see.” He shifted and crossed his leg so that his ankle rested on his knee. He was wearing khaki shorts, a black t-shirt and dusty brown sandals. I’m kind of surprised he’s off work today, Sarah thought. Wonder why?

  “Maggie saw me Skyping with Abby the other day,” he revealed.

  “Wow, really? Was she mad?” Sarah questioned.

  “At first but she got over it. I think I’m going to bring her to see Chess. I wanted to make sure that’s okay with you.”

  Sarah felt like she’d just had several gallons of ice water dumped over her head. Chilled. Frozen.

  So, let me get this straight, she thought as her mind struggled to un-numb itself. He wants me to perform not only under the pressure of him watching me, but having him be there with his fiancée too. Does he think I’m Superwoman? She stood up, attempting to walk off the paralysis.

  “If it’s too much I won’t come at all,” James offered, sensing that she was too overwhelmed to speak. “I don’t want you to be uncomfortable.”

  His phone rang and he instinctively reached into his pocket to determine the identity of the caller. “I have to take this,” he said. “It’s work.”

  Sarah nodded. Saved by the phone, she thought, her mind still scrambling for an answer to his question. Can I really stomach seeing them together? Will I be able to sing knowing she is out there watching me, studying me, knowing I’m the last woman her fiancé slept with?

  She watched James’s face darken, his eyes cast to the floor as the brief phone call was terminated. His whole demeanor had changed by the time he slipped the phone back into his pocket. Now he looked like the one paralyzed, a victim of ice water being dumped over his head.

  “Everything okay?” Sarah asked, noticing that his face had drained of color and tears were starting to glisten in the corners of both eyes.

  In moments he collapsed into her arms, only managing to say, “It’s one of my guys. He shot himself.”

  ***


  Chapter Seventeen

  Someone Else’s Story

  Sarah drove straight to Rachel’s house after James left. She still felt his weight against her body, his tears soaking into her skin. She’d stood in the middle of her office bearing the brunt of his sobs as he bent and buried his face in her shoulder, her arms instinctively wrapping around him like a mother holding a small child who’d just been wounded. It was as if he’d been a tightly coiled spring, and the phone call had released all of the tension he’d been clinging to, ejecting a flood of emotions directly into the wide net of Sarah’s comforting embrace.

  Her head was spinning as she processed what happened during the previous hour. She wanted her mind to be clear so she could relay the details to her friend, but everything was hopelessly jumbled and disorganized. She’d held him for what was probably a minute, but it felt so much longer, the bulk of his muscles rippling under her fingers and flooding her with memories that she’d tried to repress. She finally coaxed him back into a seated position and wheeled her office chair closer so that their knees brushed together. “I’m so, so sorry,” she finally said, other words escaping her.

  “If I’d had to guess who was going to suffer from PTSD it was Jason,” James said, his eyes fixed on the wall over Sarah’s head. “I should have known. I should have been able to do something.”

  Sarah shook her head, “No, sweetheart, no, you can’t do that, you can’t blame yourself. I know you all undergo psych evals when you return...someone else would have seen it.” She watched James fold himself in half, his elbows resting on his knees, face buried in the palms of his hands, and eyes dripping with tears.

  She tried desperately to console him, to convince him that there was nothing he could have done, that he needed to take care of himself. She reminded him that he had enough stress and obligation on his own plate; he couldn’t bear this burden too. She remembered reading the statistics about post-deployment suicide. It was far too common.

  The last thing he’d said before he left her office was, “I thought I had everything mapped out. I thought I knew what I wanted and where I was going.” As he reached the door, he turned back to face her again, his eyes streaked red and puffy from the earlier waterworks. “And now I just don’t know.”

  Rachel almost cried from empathy hearing the story. She was holding Amethyst while she napped, her chubby little body curled up in her mother’s arms. She bent down and placed a gentle kiss on her daughter’s wispy dark-haired head. “I can’t even imagine what he’s going through. He just returned from war, his mother has cancer, one of his men committed suicide, he’s supposed to get married, and he’s still in love with you,” she said. “That’s a lot for a man to bear, even a man as strong as James.

  Sarah nodded, still feeling numb and disjointed. “I don’t believe he’s still in love with me, but everything else you said is true. That’s enough to bring any man to his knees.”

  Rachel’s eyes were locked in on her, as solemnly as Sarah had ever witnessed. “He is still in love with you, Sarah. Trust me on this.”

  ***

  Sarah returned home from play practice late, having agreed to drinks with Garrett and Liam along with Lisa, the woman who played Anatoly’s wife Svetlana in the show. Lisa was a lovely woman, though smart-tongued and sarcastic, especially under the influence of alcohol. “How funny that we’re all at odds in the show but we can come together so nicely around the table!” Sarah had mused over her glass of wine.

  Garrett had winked, silently adding “and in the bedroom” to Sarah’s observation. She already knew he had plotted a strategy for getting Lisa to join in the next play session, insisting she must be at least bi-curious. Sarah had just sighed and laughed at the devious way Garrett’s mind worked.

  She unlocked the back door and went upstairs to check on Abby and Owen, keeping with her normal nightly routine. She was not surprised to see Owen was already asleep, his long eyelashes nearly brushing against his cheeks as he slumbered angelically. Abby was hunched over her e-book reader with her phone at her side. She and Chloe enjoyed reading the same book simultaneously while texting each other commentary.

  Sarah was glad that her daughter had such a good friend in Chloe, but was still curious about what had happened between Abby and Bree and Brooke. Her daughter had been rather evasive with the details of their on-and-off-again friendship. I can never remember which girl is the older sister, Sarah thought, shaking her head. I know she went to prom at Abby’s school but Abby hasn’t mentioned her since. I think it’s Bree?

  Sarah was contemplating the nature of high school relationships as she slipped off her clothes and slid on her pajamas. I’m going to check my email and then drift off blissfully into dreamland, she sighed as she pulled back the quilt and sheet and felt the coolness of the fabric seeping into her skin. She pulled open her laptop and logged into her personal email in one tab and into her Facebook account in another. In the latter, she saw a new message from an unfamiliar person. Curiosity piqued, she clicked on it.

  Dear Sarah,

  I know you don’t really know me so I hope you don’t mind me contacting you here. I saw you on Garrett’s friend’s list and thought this would be my best shot at communicating with you. I’m Natalie, Garrett’s sub. This is so awkward, and I apologize again, but I wondered if Garrett had asked you to go get an STD screening yet? He promised he would speak with you about it last night.

  I’m kinda new at all this but I’m trying to be fair to everyone who may have been impacted. Thanks and again, I'm sorry to cause any problems.

  Natalie

  Sarah threw down the laptop and leapt to her feet. She began to pace back in forth beside the bed. "Fuck," she said aloud while her mind echoed it a dozen times more. Do I call him? Do I go over there? What the fuck do I do?

  She threw her clothes back on and headed into Abby's room. "I've gotta run to Garrett's for a little while," she said, finding her daughter still propped up in bed with her phone in hand relaying a juicy observation about a scene from the novel she was reading to Chloe via text.

  "You okay, Mom?" she asked.

  "I don't know," Sarah admitted, her tone failing to disguise her frustration. "Call me if you need anything."

  She slammed the door to the house and to the car as she enclosed herself in it. Starting the ignition, she remembered the last time she drove while she was so upset. There had been near fatal consequences.

  ***

  James had been unable to sleep since he heard the news. Maggie was at her wit’s end trying to soothe him. She’d begged him to speak to the psychologist on staff at the hospital or the one at Ft. Meade. When he’d refused, as a consolation, she made him promise to try some of the Ambien she persuaded one of the doctors on her shift to prescribe for him. Even with the sleeping drug, he couldn’t doze off for more than a few minutes without violently jerking awake, his head pounding as if his heart had elevated into his skull.

  That night he sat on the deck in the starry stillness letting the warm summer breezes wash over him like waves on the shore. His yard was alive with the sound of cicadas, crickets, and the bullfrogs that lived on the banks of the creek flowing through his woods. He let the sound resonate through him as he closed his eyes and focused solely on breathing. He felt his brain spinning in circles, spiraling a persistent dull ache out toward his extremities.

  He’d just gotten off the phone with his father. He wanted to believe that his father of all people would know just what to say to his son, considering his illustrious military career, but the truth was that his father had never seen combat. He’d been too young for Vietnam and too old for Desert Storm. He kept repeating what everyone else had told him, broken records that continually absolved him of any responsibility. He was waiting for just one person to say, “Lt. McAllister, you fucked up.”

  He thought back to the moment he heard the news, taking the phone call in Sarah’s office soon after she’d autographed her book for him. He’d broken down in her arms
, silently sobbing, his broad, muscular frame quaking against her. And she’d held him, wordlessly, for a minute or two, lovingly absorbing his pain. When he’d gotten home and shared the news with Maggie, she’d held him too. She’d stroked his hair and down his neck as he leaned against her. But for some reason it wasn’t as comforting. Maggie saw death every day in her job. She worked with the terminally ill. She was practically immune to it.

  I can’t compare them, James thought. I shouldn’t compare them. Why can’t I just let Sarah be Sarah and Maggie be Maggie? I have a place for both of them. I need them both.

  ***

  Sarah tried to formulate a script for confronting Garrett during her drive to his apartment. We had a promise, she kept repeating again and again in her mind. She noticed there was another car parked on the curb outside his building. Oh great, she fumed, he’s not even alone. This is just perfect.

  Her mind was cycling through so many different scenarios that she wasn’t even sure where she would start once he opened the door. How the hell are we going to get through the damn show? she wondered. How are we going to stand on the same stage and keep it together...cause I don’t think this is going to go down well. She knocked as gently as she could on the door, trying to push the foaming anger down into her core.

  A young blonde woman with mascara streaked down her cheeks answered the door. Sarah immediately recognized her both from the profile on the fetish site and the Facebook account from which she’d received the earlier email, the one that catalyzed the visit. “Natalie?” Sarah asked, feigning calmness.

  “Yes,” she confirmed. “Sarah?” She opened the door wide enough that Garrett was revealed, slumped in his armchair, a half-empty bottle of vodka on the floor next to him.