Compass (Siren Songs Book 2)

by Stephie Walls

  Hooking my cane on my left arm, I extend my right in greeting. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Carly’s here to show you a brand new product they have called The Aid. It’s designed to help patients regain mobility.”

  Carly begins to show me the functions of the little contraption worn just under my left knee, calibrated by a computer for my steps, to send electrical impulses to the muscles in my leg with perfect timing. The impulses do what my brain is struggling to, forcing the muscles to move in time with my stride allowing me more freedom.

  Fitting it on my leg, I spend the next hour freely roaming the room, and for the first time in months, I hardly notice my limp and a short distance doesn’t exhaust me.

  “This thing is amazing. How do I get one?” My excitement is obvious, like a fat kid wanting cake.

  “Well, unfortunately, Moby, it’s not covered by insurance because it’s not considered medically necessary, but those of us at Walker Assist believe it’s lifestyle necessary.”

  “How much?” Might as well cut straight to the chase.

  “Five thousand.” She knows the sticker is shocking, but she also knows the product would revolutionize my life. “What we’d like to propose you do is wear it home today. Use it for a week. Talk to your wife and the two of you decide if it’s worth the investment.”

  “So basically, you want me to try it out so I know I can’t live without it regardless of my ability to pay for it?” I laugh, but it’s the truth—an ugly truth.

  “We believe you and your family will agree it’s a game changer.”

  Sitting down, I start to slide the device back down my leg. “I can’t ask Piper for anything else. She’s already given up too much. We don’t have five grand to throw at this on top of all the medical bills still piling in. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  Carly sits down beside me, putting her hand on my arm. I don’t like the feel of her skin on mine. The angle she’s playing is crooked; praying on the handicapped. Just as I’m handing her the gadget back, Piper walks in to pick me up.

  She smiles warmly in my direction, waving to the ladies with me while she waits in the lobby.

  “Is that your wife?” Carly asks as she starts moving in Piper’s direction.

  Before I can stop her, she’s shaking my wife’s hand and ushering her toward me. Piper’s eyes are like fireworks. I can see the excitement burning.

  “Put it back on, Moby. I want to see.” The bitch got my wife. Piper will move heaven and earth to make this happen.

  “We can’t afford it, Piper.” My voice is slight. The admission is a kick straight to the balls—total emasculation.

  She just raises her brows indicating there’s no need to turn this into an argument so I do as she wants. When it’s on my leg again, she motions for me to walk around. After taking a few steps away from her, I circle back to see her hand cupped to her mouth and tears streaming down her face. There’s a smile behind the hand, and I know she feels what I do…which is exactly why I didn’t want her to see it.

  “We’ll figure it out, Moby,” is all she says to me before giving her attention to Carly. “How much is it?” Piper’s expressions are priceless. You can read everything she’s saying by the look on her face and her eyes go wide hearing Carly’s response. “Any chance of a discount if we could pay cash instead of a credit card?”

  Once Carly confirms a twenty percent discount for paper versus plastic, Piper grins before barreling into me, wrapping her arms around my waist in the tightest hug I’ve received from her since the stroke. Pulling her closer with my right arm, I kiss the top of her head, taking in the scent of her shampoo, and the warmth of her embrace. Damn, I miss my wife.

  Piper goes into an all-out fundraising mode. We’ve been fortunate, our out of pocket maximum was ten thousand dollars, and the insurance company picked up the remaining seven hundred thousand dollars in medical expenses from the hospitals and different treatment centers. Between the money we got from the gym, our 401K, and the sale of the condo, we were able to pay our portion as the bills came in but it wiped us out.

  Piper never once asked either of our parents for help. Had I not gotten into this program I have no idea how we would’ve paid for on-going physical therapy. I never thought she’d be the type to ask for a handout, especially financial but she’s on a crusade to come up with four thousand dollars in a week’s time to pay for the Aid. Having this contraption is the difference between night and day. I can walk unassisted. If I wear pants, no one can tell I have it on; my limp is almost undetectable. She sees what it does for my confidence, and she’s determined to secure it for me.

  Her parents have agreed to pay for half if we can come up with the other half. When Piper calls my mom and dad and asks them to match the donation she received from her side of the family, it shocks the shit out of me. My parents don’t have the disposable income hers do but agreed to another thousand leaving us needing a grand before next week.

  “Piper, don’t get your hopes up. A thousand dollars might as well be a million right now, and we don’t have time to come up with much of a plan to earn it.” It will crush me if we can’t make this happen but even more, I don’t want to see her disappointment.

  “Shush! I’ll come up with something. A thousand dollars is nothing. That’s ten hundreds or twenty fifties. I bet my friends would each contribute.” Her face is alight with optimism.

  “We’re not asking our friends. Or my brothers.” Not doing it, hell no. I will not take charity. I don’t want to do it from our parents, but our friends are off limits.

  “That’s silly.” She continues doing dishes in the kitchen blowing me off as if what I’d said was ludicrous. “Our friends want to help. They told us to ask for assistance, Moby. At what point are we going to do that?”

  “We have asked. They’re all acting as taxi drivers, babysitters, physical trainers. We’re not asking them to become banks too.”

  “Okay, don’t ask your friends. I’ll ask mine.”

  “Fuck, no, Piper. You’re not asking for handouts from our friends.” She stops what she’s doing, turns the water off, looking at me—shocked by the tone of my voice and my firm stance.

  Her eyes are huge, she dries off her hands before continuing the conversation. “What if it were a loan—with interest?”

  I cock my eyebrow at her in question.

  “I know Cam would lend us the money, Moby. She’d never mention it to a soul, and I’d offer to pay her back with interest.” She shifts on her feet nervously, waiting for my permission to ask her friend, my brother’s fiancée. “Moby, we just don’t have time to do anything else.” She pleads with her face as much as her words.

  I can’t help but give in, I want it as much as she wants me to have it, and it might enable me to go back to work sooner. As a man, it goes against who I am admitting I can’t take care of my wife and myself. It’s embarrassing as hell to know I blew through my inheritance playing around, and when I need it there’s nothing to fall back on. I don’t want to be lectured by Dax about my irresponsibility, but at this point, I know I don’t have a choice. “Fine. A loan only!” My voice is raised indicating my opposition to this idea.

  Like a giddy schoolgirl, she hops up and down in front of the sink, clapping her hands.

  “I’ll talk to her tomorrow when we go out.”

  “Please ask her not to mention it to Dax.” I dread hearing his mouth—like adding salt to an open wound.

  “I can ask, but I’m pretty sure that will be a negative. She doesn’t do anything without his permission. You know that.”

  I shake my head in resignation, not at her but my brother and his silly lifestyle choices. I guess it works for them, but it just doesn’t make sense to me. Women worked so hard to be liberated from the confines of the home in the sixties; Cam is a product of that movement. I don’t understand why she’d revert to a submissive role when she’s solid in a dominant one. The only thing I can figure out is after her incident, Dax became he
r salvation, but I’ve never asked. She adores him, and he thinks she walks on water.

  “Well, try to get her to keep her mouth closed,” I plead hoping she’ll see my desperation and hear it laced in my tone.

  “Would you want me lending someone money without your knowledge?” She raises her eyebrows back at me with an in-your-face grin.

  “Fine,” I surrender.

  Admittedly, I’m not looking forward to the girl-time this weekend. It’s not that I don’t love my friends. I do, but for the first time in ages, I was anticipating time with my husband. Kissing him goodbye, I go to Cam’s house early to talk to her about the loan for the Aid.

  I park in the circular driveway. I step out of the car and find myself standing at their front door. She and Dax live in a beautiful old farmhouse he restored years ago. I’m in awe of it every time I come by. I love the sound my knock makes on the solid wood.

  Dax opens the door, no shirt, jeans hung low on his hips, obviously commando, no socks, no shoes. I blush. Heavily. I should not be attracted to my husband’s brother and my best friend’s fiancé, but he’s as beautiful as Moby was prior to the stroke. This family has amazing genes. Brooks and Landis are equally gorgeous in their own right.

  He swings the door wide, raising his arm to allow me to duck under it as he issues his greeting, “Hey, Pipes. You’re early. Cam’s still upstairs getting dressed. You’re welcome to join her or come hang out and watch TV with me.”

  “I’ll head up. Thanks.” Giving him a big, toothy grin, I trot up the stairs to the master bedroom.

  “Cam,” I call out, so I don’t scare the crap out of her walking in unexpectedly.

  Her head pops out through the bathroom door, quickly smiling back at me. “Hey! You’re early.” She has a curling iron in one hand and a bobby pin in the other.

  “I was hoping I could talk to you before anyone else got here.”

  “Sure, come on in.” She steps up to allow me to pass behind her into the vast bathroom to take a seat on the closed toilet. “What’s on your mind?”

  “You know I’d never ask you this kind of thing if I had any other option,” I ramble my opening statement.

  “Nope, because I don’t know what you’re asking.”

  With a slight roll of the eye, I ignore her interruption and continue. “Moby got this amazing device that helps him walk. Like seriously mind blowing. He doesn’t need a cane and when he has it on I can hardly notice his limp at all.”

  “That’s great. Where’d he get it?” She sets the curling iron down to face me, giving me her full attention.

  “Well, right now it’s on loan. We have to either come up with the cash to pay for it by Tuesday, or he has to give it back to the company that makes them.” I look at the floor, suddenly ashamed. If it were for anything else I wouldn’t do it but seeing the change in Moby, I’d stop at nothing to make this a reality for him.

  “Yikes. How much is it?”

  “Four thousand if we pay cash, five if we put it on a credit card. Six months ago none of this would be an issue; we had tons of money in savings, but we’ve cashed in everything we had in 401K, bonds, savings, and anything else of value to pay for therapy and medical bills. We’re just tapped out.”

  “I don’t know how you’ve done as much as you have, to be honest, Piper. I can only imagine how high the expenses are.”

  “So, I wanted to see if I could borrow some money. I want to pay interest on it too.”

  “How much do you need?”

  “A thousand.” It seems like an enormous amount of money hearing the words come out of my mouth. “We’ve managed to cobble together the rest through various sources.”

  “I don’t think it’ll be an issue, but we need to talk to Dax.” Unplugging the curling iron, she grabs her make-up bag and my hand, pulling me toward the door.

  “Ugh, Cam…Moby doesn’t want Dax to know.”

  She stops to face me. Raising her eyebrows in question.

  “I know. I told him that would never work, but I told him I’d try.”

  Laughing, she takes my hand again, and we rush down the stairs calling Dax by name. I cringe. She’s going to make me be the one to talk to him.

  Right on cue, we enter the family room. “Piper needs to ask you a question. Well, she asked me a question, but I can’t answer for us, so now she needs to ask you.”

  I look at her, confused by the dumb-girl rambling I just witnessed. Sometimes I wonder where my bright, well educated, friend has hidden in lieu of allowing her nitwit of a counterpart to take her place.

  Inhaling a deep breath, I give Dax the same information I gave Cam. He’s irritated Moby doesn’t want him to know, but I think secretly understands, too. No guy wants to ask family members for financial support, but most men never go through what we’re currently experiencing.

  “You’re a good woman, Piper. I have no idea how my brother got lucky enough to land you, but I’m glad he did. You guys have had a shit time since you got married.” He looks to Cam for some non-verbal commitment she apparently gives him. “We’d like to give you the money as a late wedding present.”

  “Nope. Nope. Nope. Can’t do that. Moby will slit my wrists the moment I walk in the door. I’m not looking for charity, just a loan. I can pay it back in about a month, maybe six weeks depending on the bills that come in between now and then.”

  Shrugging his shoulders, he replies, “It’s a gift or no dice. Up to you, Piper. Is your pride more important than Moby having the device?”

  “That’s not fair, Dax. You don’t understand. Moby already feels like a failure, like I’m carrying the weight of our relationship financially. He didn’t even want me to ask Cam. This isn’t about my pride. He needs the damn thing, and I’d whore myself out to pay for it if I had to.”

  “You just won’t take it as a gift? That makes no sense.”

  I sit down on the ottoman to cry. The generosity of this couple never ceases to amaze me. Cam is like my sister and Dax is Moby’s brother, but they always go above and beyond.

  “Piper, you have enough on your plate. I’ll get you the money on Monday, and I’ll take care of Moby when I pick him up. Don’t worry about it. Just know he’ll have what he needs.”

  I stand to give my brother-in-law a teary hug, squeezing his middle tightly. “Thank you.”

  I shoot Moby a text, refusing to let this consume any more of my day.

  Me: Money’s taken care of. Dax will pick you up this afternoon. Have fun!

  Moby: You too, baby. Enjoy yourself.

  Lavish is not an adequate word to describe the day Cam has planned for the Fish. We all meet at her house where a limo takes us, and our bags, to check into the swanky hotel downtown. It reminds me of high school prom. There’s something youthful about riding in a limo with your girlfriends. I want to open the sunroof and hang out in a Pretty Woman tribute, but Cam will likely frown on that. The bellhop takes our luggage to our room while we pile back in the limo. Inside we’re rewarded with fruit and champagne but given warning not to get full, as we have an appointment with the caterer after the dress fittings. The adult luxuries aren’t prom-related, but the nostalgic feelings remain, along with a goofy grin and reminiscent thoughts.

  When the limo pulls up in front of The Crystal Sequin, the chauffeur opens the door to allow us to pour out onto the sidewalk in front of the lush store. The name sounds like a horrible strip club, but they’re known for their selection of couture gowns, and it’s very difficult to get a Saturday appointment. I can’t imagine the favor Cam called in for this. Armed with my entourage, I let go of the emotional wreckage waiting for me at home, the financial stress, and the medical nightmare in favor of enjoying the day with my friends.

  Cam leads the pack, followed by Rachel, then me, Charlie, and Sutton. A gorgeous redhead greets us at the door, introducing herself as Natalie before asking Cam to tell her about us. It’s all very formal, and I worry how well this is going to go, Sutton and Charlie are far from proper la
dies and Rachel just doesn’t give a shit. I see the look in Cam’s eyes, she’s silently praying we don’t get her thrown out, and I can’t help but laugh. The roar catches everyone off guard.

  Nudging me in the side, Cam sneers under her breath. “What are you laughing at?”

  My laughter grows louder, all the Fish stare at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Piper,” Cam growls in my ear as she grabs the top of my arm, squeezing a little too tight for my liking. “Get a grip!”

  I try desperately to gain my composure, but the bubbly on the ride here had more of an effect than I realized. My hand flies to cover my mouth, and my arm goes around my stomach as I double over in uncontrollable hysterics. I haven’t seen this silly side of myself in years and even knowing how angry Cam is, I can’t bring myself to stop enjoying the freedom of the moment. The irrepressible laughter hasn’t surfaced in so long I can’t remember the last time I was…well, giddy.

  Natalie offers an enormous smile; one dental commercials are made from. “We’re here to have fun, ladies.” She directs her attention to Cam. “The shop is only open to you and your friends, so unwind and be yourself. Have a good time.”

  Cam visibly relaxes while Sutton pops me on the arm. “Damn, Piper. Since when are you the one causing trouble?” Her playful attitude puts me at ease. They have no idea how stuffy my life has been. The last hour has brought me more joy than the last six months. Being able to unwind with the Fish mentally takes me to a more simplistic time where life was easier, and my greatest stress was which tennis shoes to wear.

  The shop is fantastic. They’re never open to the public and they treat their customers as elite, even if we’re not. Obviously, Natalie has done her homework and seen pictures or given very accurate descriptions of each of us and our various body types.

  With our group spread out on an oddly shaped couch designed to hold ten or more people, Natalie stands before us. Another woman, who’s name is never offered, brings us white wine and an enormous tray of fruit, cheese, and crackers before disappearing into the background. Being served wine in a dress shop makes you feel incredible. This isn’t our lifestyle, none of us, but for the time we’re here, they treat us like royalty, and I feel like a princess.