Night Watch

by Suzanne Brockmann

  Then go searching for the gusto. And try looking someplace other than Lana’s sister’s house. Although she’d practically pushed Amber at him last night, after thinking it through, she’d changed her mind. Amber was not the right woman for Wes Skelly. Not right now, anyway. Talk about making things complicated….

  He’d drained practically half the bottle in one slug, and now he laughed. “Yeah, you know that’s roughly what I told Andy last night when we talked about Dani.”

  “You did?” It was all Brittany could do not to grab him by the lapels and grill him. What did Andy say? What really happened with Dani? Instead, she asked, “Is Andy okay? He seemed all right last night at the party, and then again this morning, but…”

  “Yeah, it’s just an act,” Wes said as he took off his tie and slipped it into his jacket pocket. “He’s doing a good job hiding how hurt he really is. Apparently, Dani really did get busy with that other kid, what’s-his-name. The jerk from the baseball team.”

  “She did? The little bitch!” Brittany couldn’t help herself. “Andy must be devastated.” She closed her eyes and pressed the cold of the bottle against her forehead. “Oh, my God. And he had to sit on the same bus as Dustin Melero for seven hours today.”

  “You know that expression, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?”

  She looked at Wes. “I’m not really that worried about Andy. Dustin’s the one who might get killed.”

  “Oh, come on. That sounds like something I might’ve done when I was nineteen, but not Andy.” Wes took off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair before he sat down at the table and started rolling up his sleeves. “He’s smart enough to know that fighting with Melero isn’t going to make the situation any better.”

  “He may know that intellectually, but emotionally…?” Brittany sat down across from him. “Andy still carries a lot of anger inside of him from when he was little. I’m pretty sure his biological mother used to beat the hell out of him. Whatever the case, he learned pretty early on to try to solve his problems by using his fists. You and I both know that doesn’t solve anything.”

  Wes rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m still working on learning that one, myself. And my parents didn’t even hit me. Well, I mean, my dad sometimes smacked us, but it was meant to startle, you know, not injure.”

  “I don’t think kids should ever be hit,” Britt said. “I’ve seen enough kids in the E.R. whose parents only meant to startle them.”

  “Yeah, I’m with you there, completely. But my dad was old school, so… Still, I’m sorry Andy had to deal with that.”

  “He’s still dealing with it. He works very, very hard to control himself, but the potential for violence is always back there. I guess it is in a lot of people, but Andy—because of his past—really struggles. He’d never hit a woman, I know that for a fact, but in his mind any man who pisses him off is fair game. I know he reminds you of your brother, Wes, but he’s not Ethan. He’s not even close.”

  “Yeah.” Wes drew circles on the table with the condensation from his beer bottle. “I know he’s not Ethan.” He looked up at Brittany, his eyes somber. “I do know that.”

  She wanted to reach for his hand, but she didn’t dare. “When did he die?” she asked softly.

  He turned his attention to his beer bottle, his fingers fidgeting with the label, peeling it off in strips. He was silent for such a long time, she thought he simply wasn’t going to answer.

  “It was right after I went through the first phase of BUD/S,” he finally said. “You know, SEAL training.” He forced himself to look at her, forced a smile. “So I guess it’s been…damn—more than ten years. God.” He drained the last of his beer and pushed himself out of his chair. “You probably have more homework to do, so I’ll—”

  “I’m done.” She held up her beer. “This signifies the official end of the night’s homework.”

  “Well, you probably have to get up early,” he said as he rinsed his empty bottle in the sink.

  “No earlier than usual.” She stood up, too. “How did he die?”

  “Car accident.” He stood there, with his back to her. “He was coming home from work and apparently, there was a patch of ice. He hit a telephone pole. It was, um, pretty bad.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  He glanced at her before putting his bottle in with the other recyclables. “Yeah, that was a lousy night. Colleen called to tell me he was, you know, dead. Jesus, it’s been ten effin’ years, but when I say it aloud, I still get hit with this wave of disbelief. Like, you know, it can’t be true. He was just sixteen. There was nobody who met him who didn’t love him. He was… He was a great kid.”

  “You don’t get a chance to talk about him very often, do you?” she asked quietly.

  He rinsed out the sponge, squeezed it out and started wiping off the kitchen counters, unable to stand still, especially talking about this.

  “I never talk about him,” he admitted. “I mean, I flew home for his funeral. It was, like, unreal. I flew in and flew out right away because I was in the middle of training. I was in Oklahoma for about four hours total. Bobby Taylor came with me, which was a good thing because I was numb. He pretty much moved me around—made sure I was in the right place at the right time. He got me back on the flight to California. He even got me drunk and started a fight with these marines who were hanging at one of the local bars—he knew I needed to pound the crap out of someone, you know, to start coping with…everything.”

  That was how he’d coped? “You did let yourself cry, right?”

  Wes looked at her as if she’d suggested he should put on a pink ballet tutu and pirouette around the room. Okay, maybe crying, even over a dead brother was something to which he didn’t want to admit. She hoped he had cried. Imagine holding all that grief inside for ten years…

  “Did you go to grief counseling?” she asked as he dried his hands on the towel hanging on the handle of the stove door.

  He laughed at that. “Yeah, right. What is it with women and group therapy? Colleen found all these counseling groups out in San Diego and tried to get me to join one of them. I think I went to one meeting and stayed for like two minutes. It was so not my style.”

  “So you just…never talk about Ethan. Not with anyone?”

  “No. I mean, Bobby knows, of course. He was at the funeral, but…” He shook his head. “Most people don’t want to hear about my dead kid brother.”

  “I do,” Brittany said.

  Wes just stood there, looking at her, with the oddest expression on his face. She would’ve paid six months rent to know what he was thinking.

  But then he turned away, started fiddling with the controls to the toaster. “It’s not something I, uh, really know how to do. You know?” He glanced at her. “I mean, do I start by telling you that he bled to death, trapped inside the car, before the rescue team even got to the accident scene?”

  Oh, God. “Yes,” Britt said.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I… It’s better if I don’t….”

  “Was he conscious?” she asked.

  Wes sat down at the table and ran his hands down his face. “Ah, Christ, you’re going to make me talk about this, aren’t you?” He looked up at her. “Seriously, Britt, I don’t think that I can.”

  She opened the refrigerator and took out the rest of the six-pack of beer. She set it on the table in front of him. “Maybe you need a little more lubrication.”

  “What, are you going to get me drunk?”

  She sat down next to him. “If that’s what it takes to get you talking, yeah, maybe I am.”

  He pushed the beer out of his reach. “I told you before, I’m a sloppy drunk. All kinds of nasty truths come out when I drink too much. Let’s just not go there, okay?”

  “Maybe that’s a good thing. You can say whatever you want, whatever you feel. I swear, it’ll never leave this room.”

  He looked her in the eye, his gaze unwavering. “I’m afraid I’m an a
lcoholic,” he said. “I have this one beer a day limit that I’ve imposed on myself, but I start anticipating it and planning for it by about noon. Where’m I going to go to get it. What kind of beer is it going to be? If I get a draft, the glasses are sixteen ounces, compared to a bottle which is only twelve—but both only count as one beer, so I usually always have a draft.” He smiled ruefully. “See, I’m not afraid to tell you personal things. I’m just not ready to talk about Ethan.”

  “Fair enough,” she said, putting the beer back into the fridge. “But if you ever change your mind… I’m a nurse. I’ve seen more than my share of accident victims. I know what a telephone pole can do to a car and the person driving it. And I’ve seen plenty of DOAs. Most of the time they have massive head injuries. They hit and they’re unconscious and—”

  “He was conscious,” Wes told her. “His legs were crushed though—he had to be in godawful pain.”

  “Oh, God.” She put her arms around him, hugging him from behind as he sat at the table, resting her cheek on the top of his head. “Oh, sweetie, I’m so sorry.”

  “It wouldn’t have made any difference if I was living at home, you know? I’ve thought about it enough. He had the accident a solid twenty-minute drive from my parents’ house. By the time I could have gotten there… Unless, I was in the car with him…”

  “And then maybe you would have been killed, too.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Wes said. He actually sounded disappointed that he hadn’t been.

  Brittany straightened up and started rubbing his shoulders and neck.

  He sighed, tipping his head to the side to give her better access to his neck. “Oh, my God. Don’t ever stop doing that.”

  His shoulder muscles were impossible tight. “You’re incredibly tense.”

  “I’m terrified of what you’re going to get me to talk about next.”

  “Okay. Let’s talk about something nice. Tell me something good about Ethan.”

  Wes laughed. “You don’t quit, do you?”

  “You told me not to stop.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Talking about someone you loved shouldn’t be hard, sweetie. Tell me… Tell me what he was like when he was a little boy.”

  He was silent for a moment. But then he said, “He was quiet, always reading—not real good at sports, like me and Frank. He was allergic to everything—I think he had asthma. He had one of those inhaler things. But he was always smiling. Always genuinely happy.”

  “He sounds great.”

  “He was. And he was smart, too. And very sweet. You know, when he was six he saw one of those Save the Children commercials on TV? And he figured out that if we all pooled our allowances, we could afford the 14.95 a month it cost to sponsor a child. This was a six-year-old. When I was six, I could barely count to twenty. But he was relentless about it. Frank was the holdout—that’s kind of ironic since he’s the one who became the priest—and Ethan and I spent a lot of nights sneaking into his bedroom, trying to brainwash him into giving up his allowance while he slept. You know, ‘You will wake up in the morning and give Ethan all of your money.’ Frank had his own room because he was the oldest. Ethan and I bunked together even though he was a lot younger than me, and then my sisters shared a room.”

  “How many brothers and sisters do you have? I had no idea you came from such a large family.”

  “There were seven of us—four boys, three girls. Frank, Margaret, me, Colleen, Ethan, and then Lizzie and Sean. The twins. They’re much younger than the rest of us. They were my father’s little retirement surprise—born right about nine months after he did his last tour on a carrier, right about nine months after he started working at the base in Norfolk, and living full-time at home. I was seventeen at the time—which is a really bad age to have a hugely pregnant mother.”

  Brittany laughed. “I bet.”

  “Frank caved in eventually, by the way. No one could say no to Ethan for too long. With my parents’ help we sponsored a little girl. Marguerita Monteleone, from Mexico. She’s a teacher now, in Mexico City. She still sends birthday and Christmas cards to my parents every year.”

  Brittany couldn’t stop the rush of tears to her eyes. “Oh, my God, are you serious?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Have you ever met her?”

  “No, but Frank did. He went down to Mexico about two years after Ethan died, to see her graduate from high school. I thought… Well, my parents decided to send her to college with the money they’d saved for Ethan to go to school.”

  “Okay,” Brittany said. “That’s it. Now I have to cry.”

  “Oh, come on.” He tipped his head back to look up at her and smile, and she had to move back, away from him. She had to stop touching him because the urge to lean over and kiss him was just too strong.

  And if he didn’t want Amber Tierney kissing him, he surely wouldn’t want Britt to try.

  “Ethan sounds like he was an amazing kid,” she said, taking a tissue from the box on the counter and wiping her eyes.

  “He was.” He turned to face her. “Are you okay? I’m sorry—”

  “Your parents are pretty cool, too.”

  “They’re all right. They’re not perfect, but… They’re okay.”

  “You should definitely go to Mexico and meet her,” Britt told him with a final blow of her nose.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “Why not?”

  He was silent for a moment as if deciding how to answer that. “It seems a little creepy,” he finally said. “Like, he was an organ donor, too, but I wouldn’t want to meet the person who got his eyes.”

  Brittany had to ask. “You really don’t talk about Ethan with your parents or your brothers and sisters? When you go home and—”

  “I don’t go home,” he admitted. “Not very often.”

  Oh, Wes. “So you didn’t just lose your brother. You lost your whole family. And they lost you, too.”

  He put his head down on the table. “Okay. I surrender. I think you better get that beer back out of the refrigerator, because I need all of it, right now, immediately.”

  Britt didn’t move. She just leaned back against the counter, a safe four feet from him. “You know, I don’t think that’s such a good idea anymore.”

  He lifted his head off the table and turned to look at her. “I was kidding,” he said. “I wasn’t serious. I was just… Let’s not go any further with the psychoanalysis tonight, okay?”

  Brittany nodded. “If you want, I won’t keep any alcohol in the house while you’re staying here.”

  “No,” he said. “Seriously. You don’t have to do that. I mean, unless you really want to. But I’m not going to, like, go crazy on you or something. I won’t. I wouldn’t. Not here.”

  “If you really were an alcoholic, you wouldn’t be able to have just one beer a night, would you?” she asked.

  “Sure,” Wes said. “Not all alcoholics drink until they’re blind night after night. Although to be honest, I’ve been thinking lately about quitting altogether. Zero beers a night. See, every now and then I have more than just one. I have a lot. Way more than what you’ve got in the fridge there. And I get totally out of control. It used to happen one or two times a year, but lately it’s been more often. But like I said, it’s not going to happen here. It’s not like I turn into Mr. Hyde or something at the random drop of a hat. It’s something that I let happen. Kind of intentionally. Like, to blow off steam, or something. When I was younger, I called it partying. Lately it feels kind of ugly though—more like bingeing than partying. It’s just… I’m at a point in my life where I’d rather not feel the need to get totally skunked and wake up lying facedown in someone’s front yard, you know?”

  She nodded. “That’s a pretty mature observation.”

  “Problem is, I don’t like myself very much when I don’t have even just a little bit of a buzz on,” he admitted. “I don’t like myself very much then, too, but at least I don’t car
e so goddamn much.”

  God, what could she say to that? “I know you don’t want to talk about this anymore right now,” Britt said, “but whose idea was it to give Ethan’s college fund to Marguerita?”

  Wes shrugged and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, okay, it was mine. Good guess. But big deal. It was obvious that it was something Ethan would’ve wanted to do. And it wasn’t like it was my money.”

  Brittany crossed the room and kissed him. But it was the way she kissed Andy these days, on top of the head. “I’m going to bed,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow. And—in case it’s worth anything to you, I like you very much, even when I’m stone sober. I wish you could somehow get inside of me and see yourself through my eyes.”

  She kissed him again, then headed down the hall, for her bedroom, hoping he would follow. Or at least stop her.

  But he didn’t move, and he didn’t speak.

  “Good night,” she called. “Don’t smoke tonight, okay?”

  “I won’t.” he finally answered. “Hey,” he said. “It’s me, sorry I’m calling so late,” and she realized he’d already dialed his cell phone.

  Wes was talking to Lana. Had to be.

  Brittany closed and locked her bedroom door, and went into her bathroom, terribly glad that she hadn’t done something stupid, like throw herself at him. Just like with Amber, he would have turned her down.

  Brittany looked into the mirror above the bathroom sink. Don’t fall for this guy, she admonished herself.

  But as she thought of him out in her kitchen, talking to Lana-the-bitch, her stomach churned and her teeth were most definitely clenched.

  Too late.

  He had her at “I think I’m an alcoholic.”

  Why, oh, why did she do this? Even if this guy wasn’t in love with the wife of a good friend, he was completely wrong for Brittany.

  He was completely perfect.

  No, no, no. He was imperfect. Tragically imperfect. Any woman in her right mind would run from him, screaming.