“I’m Ace, well, that’s not my birth name or anything.” I chuckle.
Silence.
Even though it doesn’t exactly feel natural to talk to someone who’s unconscious, I can’t stand the quiet. It’s a roaring reminder that this woman might not be okay, and that’s not something I want to think about right now.
“I got the nickname when I joined the SEALs. Everyone has a hard time with training, it’s designed that way for a reason. They want to weed out the weak, until only the best remains. I’m telling you, I struggled harder than just about anyone they’d ever seen. But I never gave up. Not my style. And I sure as shit never complained. Sorry.” I look down at her apologetically for cursing.
Of course, she doesn’t flinch at my blue language. Nothing registers on her face at all and it makes me feel squirmy inside. Will she ever wake up?
I push the thought away and clear my throat. “Anyway, I might have needed to work harder than a lot of the guys to keep up, but I did it. I ran until my lungs burned so bad I thought they might pop, I studied twice as long than the guys for every written test and I beat the crap out of the water when it was time to swim. I still never did great. I always just barely passed, and then something inside me clicked. All of a sudden, I’m leading the pack in the morning run. I’m swimming in full gear like an Olympian. You know, if an Olympic swimmer wore combat boots and fatigues. I even did better on the written stuff. So, they started calling me Ace. ’Cause I was acing everything all of a sudden. But my real ace in the hole was not ever giving myself the option of giving up. That literally never crossed my mind.”
The room is hushed. The eerie lack of noise overwhelms the room. I’m grateful when I hear Razor out in the kitchen preparing some food for Gunnar. I smile as I listen to our massive pup prancing around excitedly for his evening meal. Most nights we just feed him whatever we’re eating, and I know he’s gonna love chomping down on this stew.
“And you shouldn’t give up either,” I continue, my tone softer. I lean toward her, like I’m telling her a secret. “I know I don’t know your story, but you gotta fight to come back. We’ll help you through the hard times, you can trust me on that. It’s kinda what we’re good at.”
I smile and my eyes glaze over with memories from my youth. Making the best of things is how Razor and I roll. Lord knows, we’ve been dealt more than our fair share of hardship. Still, we always manage to overcome. We always find our way. I lean back in my chair and eat a bit more of my supper as I let my mind travel back to a time so long ago it almost feels like a dream.
“So, my real name isn’t Ace. It’s Adam. Back when Razor and I met, we didn’t go by our nicknames. But, after years in the SEALs, we got more used to the names we earned in BUD/s than the ones we were born with. Way back when, I was just Adam. And Razor went by Derek. We were both a couple of lost boys who managed to make the best out of a bad situation. We were in the same foster care home. I grew up with him. I still remember when he showed up there. I was a little punk kid, bitter about my grandfather dying, and when he came to the house I sized him up pretty quick. He had this bear he carried around everywhere with him and, now I’m not proud of this mind you, but, well, I stole it.”
My thoughts swirl back to that time. Back when a kid with a bear was something worth envying. I didn’t have any toys. All I had was the clothes on my back, and half the time they didn’t even fit right. I don’t know what it was. If it was the clear comfort the bear brought him, or just jealousy over a new boy being in my space, but the first chance I saw that the bear was unguarded, I swiped it.
“Razor made a big fuss over it, of course, and the people caring for us, and I use that term loosely, knew I took it. They were gonna beat my ass pretty good, but he stopped them. Told them he thought he left it at school and had made a mistake about it being missing. That stopped them from tanning my hide, and I remember when they cleared out and left us to go to sleep, I started crying.”
My throat feels dry and I swallow the scratchy feeling down with the last mouthful of stew.
“He asked me what I was crying about and I pulled out his bear, I said sorry for stealing it. But the thing was, and this is the thing about Razor to this day, he gave me a smile and told me he knew I took it and he didn’t mind. He made me hang onto it for the night ’cause he thought I needed it more than him that day. He was right.”
I fight the lump in my throat. I’ve never really opened up about this stuff with anyone. Even when the military forced me to see a shrink after what happened on our last deployment, I refused to get into this shit. Of course, Razor knows all about it. He lived those days with me. But we’ve never just sat and reminisced about those times. I think once we escaped foster care, neither of us wanted to look back.
“Anyway, after that night we took turns sleeping with the bear. If I had a bad day, Razor handed him off to me. And when he was overwhelmed, the bear was his. It was a good system. Probably helped us through things more than we’d like to admit.” I smile.
A memory bubbles up to the surface of my brain and pops, releasing the vibrant details behind my eyes and making me laugh.
“Although, let me tell you, the time that Razor and I decided we’d had enough of our paper route and we ditched about three hundred papers behind an old abandoned house, that bear didn’t do nothing to help us then.” I shake my head. “We got our asses beat raw for that one, but at least we got rid of the stupid job. Our foster parents forced us to hand over the measly pay we earned to them anyway, so it just kinda fucked them over.” I smirk, still sort of proud of the small rebellion we led.
“Yeah, that was our biggest badass move back then, huh?” Razor’s voice cuts through the darkness and my head snaps up. He stands in the doorway with his arms folded over his chest and his head cocked to the side. Even through the shadows, I can see he shares the same smile.
“I think the writing was on the wall then, you know, about how we’d turn out.” I laugh dryly.
“I think you’re right,” he agrees and walks into the room. “Hey, so I can take the first night shift if you want to catch some shut-eye,” he offers.
I didn’t expect myself to feel reluctant to go. I guess just talking to this woman made me feel close to her. Connected. I know it’s stupid, she can’t even hear me. Still, I drag my feet as I make my way out of the room.
“Sure, well, holler if you need me. Otherwise, I’ll come in to take over in three hours.” I glance back into the room, longing to sit in the seat next to the bed.
“You got it.” Razor settles in and I sigh. Just like when we were kids and he let me borrow his bear, he knows what’s best for me. I shuffle into my room and plop down onto the bed face first, the exhaustion hits me like a ton of bricks. He always knows. My thoughts wander and mix up in my head. Fragments of my life play out like a movie in my mind, my breathing deepens and I fall into a dreamless sleep.
6
Razor
I can hear Ace’s snores through the wall and Gunnar competing with them in the living room. The sleeping beauty in my bed doesn’t snore. She doesn’t stir. She lies perfectly still.
I should check her vitals again.
Hopping up, I pluck my first aid kit from the side of the room and pull out a flashlight. I check her pupils and they dilate properly. No change there. Her pulse is actually stronger than before, so that’s a nice improvement. Her breathing is steady.
She just looks like someone in a deep sleep. Not someone who survived a plane crash. The only way you can tell she’s been through anything is from the bump on her head. That’s already reducing in swelling too, although the color is still the same hue you see when the sun slides behind the mountains and dusk turns everything into a blue rainbow.
I heard Ace in here chatting with our guest. It’s probably a good idea to talk to her, it might even help bring her out of this. The thing is, I’m not good with idle chitchat. Even when I had a therapist breathing down my neck, trying to direct my convers
ations, I had a hard time spitting out my words.
Of course, those didn’t feel like the friendliest conversations. Just another tick in the box that needed to be done so the military could see us out the door. It’s funny, when you go on deployments overseas, you always expect that you might be picked off in a firefight, or that you’ll be coming home with a few less buddies than you headed over with. When you have those ideas, when you allow yourself to go down those dark paths, you always imagine it will be because the enemy will take you out. Maybe you’ll hit an IED. Maybe you’ll get ambushed. Maybe one of you will get nabbed and be used as an “warning” to other SEALs of what can happen to them if they don’t back off.
You never expect to watch men in your unit, your brothers in arms, die because of something like an equipment malfunction.
Something in my mind flips like a switch and it’s all in front of my eyes again. The flames. The ball of fire engulfing our SEAL delivery vehicle. The muffled screams of our guys. Ace and I were on lookout when it blew. My first thought was they drove over an IED. It didn’t make sense, they were behind the wire, on the base. How could that happen?
The answer was, it didn’t.
Faulty wiring. That’s what they called it. Nobody to blame or turn the anger onto, no enemy to seek revenge with. Just a shitty circuit board in the vehicle, that’s what killed six guys in a flash. Six legacies wiped clean. Six families that lost a brother, a father, a son. Six men I’d give my life for, taken too soon.
The military didn’t want it getting out that almost an entire SEAL team was wiped out on a mission because of some badly crossed wires inside a US military owned vehicle. They paid Ace and I hush money and forced us out the door. Those little chats with the therapist that they made us go to were just part of them giving us the boot. After the life we grew up in, the military and especially the SEALs were the first thing Ace and I really belonged to. It was the first thing we really let ourselves believe in. So, it hurt like hell to see them cover that up. It wasn’t right.
Even after we sent the families some money and high-tailed it up here to get away from all that shit, it never settled into my gut. It always plays on my mind. It’s funny how, when you feel like you have right on your side, and then your eyes are opened like that, you never see anything the same way again. It’s hard to believe in heroes when the only ones you ever looked up to let you down.
I sniff loudly and clear my throat. Wiping my eyes on the back of my hand I snap back to reality. The here and the now. There was nothing I could do to help those guys. I couldn’t save them. But I might be able to save her. I look down at the beauty in her deep, uninterrupted sleep. “I will do everything in my power to help you,” I whisper my promise.
Ace had the right idea, I should be talking to her. I might not feel like making a one-sided conversation, but a little reading can do the trick. I slip off the side of the bed and put my medical supplies away before heading over to my bookshelf. Running my fingers over the spines, I breathe in the scent of the old books I’ve collected and lugged around with me over the years. Many of them are tattered and dog-eared after being thumbed through and well-read again and again. My hand hovers over the small library and stops at a book of poems. I wiggle it free from its brothers and sisters and plunk back down in the chair by the bed, cracking the cover.
I read through the most famous ones first, “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “The Road Not Taken” were ones I studied in school as a young boy. I remember how Ace used to cringe whenever we had to learn poetry. He wasn’t a fan of all the flowery language and preferred his messages short, simple and sweet. If he ever had to ax one of those things, it was always the sweet.
I always enjoyed it though. The same way I enjoyed making up stories for people, I liked getting lost in the short stories of poems. They were like a little glimpse into a moment of someone’s life. Their deepest, and often darkest, thoughts shared in a few verses. To me, it felt like reading someone’s diary and realizing that you have the same fears and rage, the same depressions and laughs as that person. It made me feel understood in a world that usually made me feel alone.
My fingers flip through the pages and I automatically stop at my favorite poem of his. Robert Frost always summed up perfectly how I felt as an outsider looking in and realizing how far I still had to go before things would change for me. I begin to read “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” to her, delivering each line in a slow, deliberate tone. My voice is barely above a whisper as I share the poem that means the most to me with a perfect stranger. Now I’m letting her read my diary. I wonder if she’ll understand me any better after taking a peek inside?
“And miles to go before I sleep,” I read the words I have memorized by heart.
“And miles to go before I sleep,” she murmurs and rolls over in the bed.
I drop the book on the floor with a bang and jump to my feet. My mouth is open as I stare at her, wide-eyed, waiting for her to stir again. It probably takes more than five minutes to finally move. I sit on the edge of the bed and wait for her to give some other indication that she’s conscious, but there’s nothing. The only proof I have that it wasn’t just a figment of my imagination is that she’s lying on her left side now instead of her back.
“Hey.” I give her shoulder a slight shake. “Are you up?”
Nothing.
“Hello?”
She’s back in her dream world. Since it’s night, I should probably leave her alone. Obviously, the crash was a lot for her and she needs to recuperate. I make my way back to the chair and pluck the book up from where I dropped it at my feet, but I don’t look away from her. I can’t help but wonder if she just repeated the line because she heard me say it? Or was she uttering the poem from memory, knowing that last line is written twice? I watch her in silence and wonder just who this woman is and finding myself more intrigued than ever about what kind of person she really is.
7
Caitlin
I roll over and my head throbs violently. Damn, how much did I drink last night? I don’t remember hitting up the bar, and I sure as hell don’t remember going home with anyone. Opening my eyes into little slits, I peer around the unfamiliar room, looking for something that might bring back some memories.
The flannel blanket is cozy, but I don’t remember rolling around under it with anyone. The entire room is strange and new to me. Okay, I don’t remember ending up here. So, what is the last thing I do remember?
My thoughts scatter like dandelion seeds on the wind. I rest back against the plump pillow and try to work through this backward. The last solid thing that comes to mind is getting my plane packed for a flight. I had to head out to do maintenance on equipment at a weather observation station. I service quite a few of them in Alaska, so that’s nothing new.
I remember snow. Not that snow is exactly a revelation up here. We’re surrounded by it most months of the year. But something about this snow was different. How though? A shiver makes my limbs spasm and my head send an angry stabbing pain behind my eyes. This isn’t some simple hangover, I know that much.
Running my fingers carefully over my forehead, I wince as they climb what can only be described as a small mountain erupting from my skin. I know it’s probably a small bump, but when you aren’t expecting to feel anything, even a small bump is pretty jarring.
What the hell happened to me?
I sit up in bed and search the room. The plaid shirt slung over the back of the chair next to the bed is definitely a man’s. The dark sheets look like something a man would pick out too. The entire room even has a faint smell of a manly musk.
As if to confirm my suspicions, I hear a deep rumble of conversation outside the door. I tilt my head, straining to make out the words, but I can’t. The only thing I can figure out is that there isn’t just one guy in the house, there’s at least two.
Quietly I slip out of the bed and almost gasp when I catch sight of myself in the dresser mirror. As I figured, the lump on my
head is a nasty color, but not nearly as big as it felt. My hair is crazy and I look a little pale, but that’s not what has me nervous. It’s the fact that I’m dressed in my nightgown, the one I packed before flying out. How did I get changed into it? Did one of the men out there put me in it?
Why?
Why did he take off my other clothes? I frown and bite my lip, urging my mind to cooperate with me and help me figure out the details I’m missing here. Did I get roofied or something? I heard those things make you lose a bunch of time. I sit with the idea, but it doesn’t feel like the right answer.
Easing my way carefully across the floor, I inch over to the heavy wood door and listen. Yep, there’s definitely two of them. They sound like they’re not sitting right outside the door, so I cling onto the handle and hope the hinges won’t creak as I open it up a crack.
I don’t see them, but the deep timbre of their voices grows louder. What I do see is a fireplace with a nice, toasty fire roaring inside. Next to it is a poker. That’s as good a weapon as any. I creep out the door and over to the hearth, wrapping my fingers around the sturdy metal.
Scurrying around toward the voices, I tiptoe to the kitchen and stop. As far as I can tell, these guys have no idea I’m up yet. I try to eavesdrop in on their conversation so I can get some kind of idea of who they are or how I ended up here.
“Storm is just getting worse from the looks of it,” one says.
“We’ll just have to do what we can until it passes,” the other chimes in.
Woof!
I turn abruptly and try to stifle a scream as a big black bear jumps to its feet. My scream sounds more like a whimper and my mind races, trying to figure out what to do. I lift the poker and squeeze my eyes shut, preparing to swing wildly to defend myself.
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