SEALed Forever

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

  Once thoroughly wet and cold, recruits were ordered out of the surf and told to make “sand cookies.” That meant roll on the beach until coated with sand head to toe. Then it was on to the next exercise: running, jumping, vaulting, and pushups, endless pushups, while sand relentlessly scraped in every skin fold and was ground into every orifice.

  Oh, yeah, he knew raw skin. Now that the soaked diaper and shirt had been removed, and her skin cleaned, her legs already looked less red. He dried her carefully, patting creases behind her knees and under her arms. He didn’t see any sores, blisters, or breaks in the skin. If she could be kept clean and dry for twenty-four hours, she would probably heal up just fine.

  Nevertheless, ignorance of babies aside, she didn’t look right to him. What alarmed him was her lethargy. Although she roused and looked at him from time to time, her eyes would almost immediately close again, which didn’t make sense. He’d handled her enough to have woken her up by now.

  “Wake up, baby,” he told her as he shaped her little arms and legs under the towel to finish drying her. Her condition, whatever it was, went beyond the first aid he’d been taught. Before he could take her to the sitter, he would have to get her medical attention.

  At the sound of his voice, her droopy eyelids raised slightly. For a second her eyes searched his. Her wispy eyebrows angled in an ineffably sad look of disappointment.

  He’d never spent much time—okay, none really—looking into baby’s faces. But something about her disconsolate gaze pierced his chest right in the very center. His heart softened. He felt it happen.

  “I’m not the person you want me to be, am I? But I will take care of you.” Hot determination filled his chest. She was no longer a duty to be discharged, a problem to be overcome. Protectiveness and hypertrophied accountability were part of his nature; he would have done his best no matter what, but for the first time in a long time, what he wanted to do and what was unquestionably the right thing to do lined up. “If I’m going to tell people I’m your daddy, we need to get acquainted. What’s your name, little one?”

  He picked up her tiny right hand between two fingers and shook it. It wasn’t a fifth the size of his, but like his, the fingers were long. “Until you or someone can tell me different, your name is… Julia Vale. Julia is my mother’s name.” His heart squeezed, and his eyes went unaccountably damp. “She’d be happy to let you use it. She has long fingers, too.”

  Security issues kept him from being able to tell his mother specifics about his life when he was operating. These days his mother believed he managed Coastal Air, a small airfreight company whose primary clients were exotic floral importers. Mostly, even if he could tell her, he wouldn’t. He didn’t want her to know. He did what he did so she would never need to know.

  He’d never tell her about the baby he had named Julia, either. But he felt good to be pursuing a goal that his mother would think—without reservations—made the world a slightly better place.

  He opened a new package of T-shirts and wrapped the baby in one in lieu of any clothes.

  Chapter 6

  The only easy day was yesterday.

  —SEAL motto

  “Look at it this way, Mildred,” Bronwyn told the big, shaggy dog panting beside her in the dark. “Now you can write a book like Snoopy’s that begins, ‘It was a dark and stormy night.’”

  Mildred didn’t laugh.

  Okay, as jokes went, it wasn’t very funny. It had been a dark and stormy day as well, and they were both hot, tired, and on edge. Once a cold front passed, the hot mugginess oppressing the tiny town of Sessoms’ Corner, North Carolina, should abate, but the collision of hot and cold air masses had created a line of slow-moving thunderstorms. Renewed rumblings promised another was on its way.

  Bronwyn pulled up the hem of her T-shirt to wipe sweat from her face. The house’s ancient air-conditioner had rumbled without letup but still had fallen further and further behind the heat index. A damp 78 was the best it could do.

  Despite the heat, Bronwyn had spent the day sorting her belongings into the beginnings of order in the old house. Mildred had supervised.

  Now a fuse had blown; the air-conditioner was off; and the old house was really dark. Dark such as Bronwyn, child of the city, had never seen. This dark wasn’t just a concept; it was a thing. It had substance, thickness, weight. Being afraid of it didn’t seem all that silly.

  Mildred pressed her rough head against Bronwyn’s thigh, looking for—and giving—reassurance.

  “Get a grip, Mildred,” Bronwyn told her, feeling her way around the kitchen and trying not to stub her bare toes on open cartoons sitting everywhere. “We’ve never been afraid of storms, and we are not going to start now. And we’re not going to let our imaginations get the best of us.”

  She saw no reason to remind the dog that they had abandoned making the bed upstairs when the encroaching clouds had blotted out the last bits of daylight. The storm wasn’t really the problem—what had her unnerved was the persistent way the house shifted and creaked. The house constantly made her look over her shoulder to see who was there. Which was ridiculous. She was a woman of science, a doctor, an ER physician noted for her ability to stay cool.

  And she wasn’t going to second-guess herself about her decision to move here. One day about six weeks after JJ’s wedding, she hadn’t been able to get out of bed. No matter how she told herself to keep on keeping on, you can push through this, put one foot in front of the other, her body refused to get up and get dressed.

  She had wished she could go to sleep and never wake up.

  A doctor had the means to make that happen.

  But she had a dog, and the dog had to be fed and taken for walks. Mildred got her moving again. So she was saved by something even deeper than her love of medicine. If she couldn’t hang on any longer, she would have to change. She began to recover from her exhaustion—the exhaustion of both grief and an ER doctor’s inhuman schedule. Hope put out tender green leaves again.

  She had called Mary Cole Sessoms.

  ***

  All she and Mildred needed was some light, and they would be fine.

  Bronwyn fumbled through a kitchen drawer, searching by touch for her flashlight. She was sure she had tucked it in one of the drawers when she had unpacked, but which one?

  Massaging the German wirehaired pointer’s shaggy neck with one hand, Bronwyn tugged at the next drawer down with the other hand. The humidity-swollen wood refused to budge. Whatever was in it was as lost as whatever was in that room upstairs with the door stuck tight in its jamb.

  Lightning filled the kitchen with white glare. Bronwyn was alternately blinded by light, blinded by dark.

  The dog pressed herself more tightly against Bronwyn’s leg.

  Overhead, renewed downpour drummed on the kitchen’s tin roof. Booming thunder rattled the windows. The whole house creaked and swayed under the impact of a sudden gust.

  This was the kind of thunderstorm that produced tornadoes. Tornadoes weren’t as frequent on North Carolina’s coastal plain as they were in the Piedmont, but they weren’t unheard of. This house actually boasted a storm cellar. “Boast” being the operative word. Bronwyn hadn’t explored it yet, but the more she had explored the rest of the house, the more work she saw to do. And really, she’d be happy to let the cellar stay unexplored. Dark underground spaces creeped her out.

  When she’d seen the stately house, she’d fallen in love with its wraparound porch, one side of which was enclosed, and its high-ceilinged rooms, a fireplace in each. But what had stolen her heart was a view of the river from the upper stories. At a more practical level, the arrangement of the rooms would make dividing the house into living quarters and a doctor’s office simple.

  Best of all, she could live there rent free. If she stayed for five years, the house would be deeded over to her.

  Mary Cole Sessoms had introd
uced Bronwyn to a group of citizens of Sessoms’ Corner who were concerned that their town was dying. Even young people who saw the opportunities the area offered—and who desired a simpler, slower lifestyle based on enduring values—bypassed the town for communities where medical services were more readily available. Mary Cole’s group hoped the whole town would benefit if they could make it economically feasible for a doctor to live there.

  Bronwyn was wondering if she should take herself and Mildred to the cellar, no matter what its condition, when she felt Mildred go on the alert beside her. The dog sounded the deep, baying Aaarrooo! that was Mildred’s way of saying, Someone’s at the door. Only then did Bronwyn realize that, in addition to the drumming of the rain, she could hear pounding coming from the front door.

  Another flash of lightning showed Mildred’s shaggy eyebrows raised in a What are you going to do about it? look. That was the kind of watchdog Mildred was. She was intelligent, curious, and determined to be in on all the action, but she only reported intrusions; she left dealing with them to Bronwyn.

  The thing was, Mildred knew as well as Bronwyn did that they had heard someone at the front door several times today and answered it, only to find the deep porch empty. Bronwyn didn’t know what was causing the noise. At first it had seemed odd, then mischievous, then mysterious, then downright eerie. Neither woman nor dog hurried to the door any longer when they heard what sounded like fists thudding on the thick oak.

  Tonight, in addition to a reluctance to feel her way down a pitch-dark hall on a fruitless errand, Bronwyn was conscious of a deeper dread. Unsettling as it had been to turn on the porch light and see no one, it would be even creepier to be unable to turn on a light and thus unable to tell if anyone was there.

  The pounding came again. Mildred’s toenails clicked a doggy Morse code of excitement on the bare wood floor.

  “You want to answer the door?” Bronwyn asked the dog.

  Expecting a reply might be irrational if the dog were anyone but Mildred. Mildred was a cartoon character of a dog who defined “body” as a language. She could speak paragraphs with just the slant of a tail.

  Mildred had been a present—a fat, fuzzy, gray puppy with floppy, chocolate-brown ears and too-large skin that made her look like she was wearing some other dog’s hand-me-down flannel pajamas—given to Bronwyn by her fiancé, Troy. The puppy had quickly grown into her skin to become eighty pounds of stubborn, impulsive, half-grown dog. Not an ounce of meanness in her, but destructive in her heedlessness.

  Bronwyn and Troy had argued over the insanity of trying to keep such a dog in an apartment. She was already impossible to control. What would she be like at her mature weight?

  And then one day, the miracle. Mildred had realized that the sounds Bronwyn made were words and that she could understand them. Bronwyn had been looking right at her; she had seen the moment it happened.

  Mildred’s legs had stiffened, and her ears had flown straight up when she had had her Eureka! moment. Bronwyn could read the exclamation as clearly as the letters on a theater marquee. Electrified joy had blazed from Mildred’s liquid acorn-brown eyes. I have discovered interspecies communication! In that moment, it was like a chrysalis had burst open and Mildred had emerged a transformed dog.

  The clicking accelerated, and Mildred jingled her tags for emphasis.

  “You’re right, Mildred. Since the power is out, the doorbell isn’t working. This time, there really might be someone out there. Okay.”

  ***

  Okay. Mildred loved okay! Okay meant she got what she wanted! (Mildred thought in exclamation points. Anything that wasn’t worth an exclamation point probably wasn’t worth getting off the floor for.) There was someone human at the door and something else. Though the door was closed, Mildred had detected one of the most intriguing, most promising scents she’d ever picked up.

  Mildred dashed down the hall, her large, web-toed paws thudding on the bare wood floors. In no more than three bounds, she realized Beloved wasn’t right behind her. Eager as she was to find out what was on the other side of the door, duty came first.

  Humans were handicapped. Having only two legs made them unstable—real easy to knock over—and sl-l-o-ow? With ridiculously small ears and noses, they had terrible hearing and a worse sense of smell. And they could stumble into things in their own house—just because it was dark! Unimaginable, but true.

  Mildred skidded to a stop. She padded back to Beloved. She positioned her head under Beloved’s hand and led her to the door.

  Chapter 7

  Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible. Thus he is the master of his enemy’s fate.

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  The big, white house’s girth was increased by wide porches on the first story, topped by a narrower second story and a cupola with a widow’s walk on the very top. Illuminated by flashes of lightning and lashed by silver sheets of rain, the house looked like a gigantic wedding cake gone terribly wrong. Garth positioned his truck so that his headlights lit the porch and left them on while he dashed for shelter.

  When he bounded up the shallow steps, a huge black shadow suddenly loomed in front of him. His heart lurched and then resumed its steady rhythm. His own shadow, of course, but still. A SEAL wasn’t the kind of man to let his imagination run away with him, but it didn’t take much imagination to think he’d wandered into to a SyFy Channel movie.

  Once upon a time, he would have laughed.

  Garth pounded on the door. His first priority had to be medical attention, and the closest source was this new doctor. Though he didn’t mix with the locals, everywhere Garth had been for the last couple of weeks, he’d overheard the buzz that a doctor, the first doctor in the area since 1967, was moving into this old house on the edge of Sessoms’ Corner. The house was dark, but that might not mean anything. The whole town had plunged into darkness just as he’d approached the outskirts.

  The porch offered little protection from rain driven sideways by 50-mile-an-hour gusts. He shifted the too-still bundle he had tucked under his poncho. Garth pounded on the door of the doctor’s house again. If the doctor wasn’t in, Plan B was to drive sixty miles to the closest hospital ER. He’d take her there if he had to, but a brush with the medical establishment would leave a paper trail as wide and easy to follow as I-95.

  Under his slicker, the infant whimpered—a weak mewing sound. What he wouldn’t give to hear her cry like a baby—like his nieces and nephews did, howling their dissatisfaction anytime they didn’t have exactly what they wanted. He shifted his hold so that she was sheltered from the rain while he pulled her diaper up.

  When he’d gone back to retrieve the box she came in, he’d found two diapers tucked under the pink blanket—more evidence she hadn’t been someone’s throwaway. But apparently there was more to getting a diaper to stay on than met the eye. Reinforcing the little tabs with duct tape hadn’t helped.

  Somewhere within the house a dog barked. Good. He had someone’s attention. He pounded the door again.

  ***

  Mildred snuffled ecstatically at the cracks around the front door while Bronwyn struggled with the knob of the old-fashioned lock. It wouldn’t turn to the right so she twisted it to the left, but the door still wouldn’t open so she turned it back to the right. This time when she pulled on it, the door opened on hinges that shrieked their need for oil.

  After the dark of the hall, Bronwyn was almost blinded by the brightness of headlights shining directly into her eyes. She threw up a hand to shield them. Squinting through her fingers, she was able to make out the huge, dark shape before her as a man in a poncho. She couldn’t see his face. His features were lost in the deeper darkness of the raised hood.

  “Are you the doctor?” a voice like oiled gravel demanded. His tone implied that she had better have a damn good excuse if she wasn’t.

  The
hair stood up on the back of her neck. Who the hell did he think he was to come pounding on her door demanding to know if she was “the doctor”? She was a doctor. Period.

  She took a deep breath and told herself to get a grip. If there was a grain of fairness in her, and there was, she could admit she was sensitive on the subject, having already met too many times with people’s disbelief and their suspicion that she was a kid playing a trick.

  Snapping at him wouldn’t deal with a problem that was essentially hers. She was tiny and deceptively, very deceptively, fragile looking. Ridiculously young looking, as well. Her mother assured her the day would come when she’d be glad. That day had not arrived, although she would be thirty in a couple of months. She never wanted to hear another Doogie Howser quip as long as she lived.

  And to be fair, she couldn’t blame him for wondering about her. Barefoot, in an ancient T-shirt and shorts, she didn’t meet anyone’s standards for professional appearance. Even worse, without a stitch of makeup, with her slippery hair coming down from its ponytail, and with her less than impressive height and chest development, she looked about sixteen.

  “Do you have a medical emergency?” she countered in her most businesslike voice. “If so, you should go to the ER in Burgaw. The rescue squad will transport you if you can’t drive.”

  “You are the doctor. I have a sick baby. You have to see her.” His dark tone didn’t project threat so much as determination.

  At Bronwyn’s side, Mildred waved her nose in the air, wagged her tail madly, and all but cavorted with joy. The dog’s obvious welcome made it hard for Bronwyn to match the stranger’s imperative tone with steely determination of her own. She restrained the dog by her collar while she tried reasonableness.

  “Please understand, it isn’t that I’m trying to turn you away. I’m not equipped to handle patients—I’m not even moved in.”