SEALed Forever

by Mary Margret Daughtridge

  “Trust yourself. They might be satisfied with what they’ve found out, but you’re not. If they’re wrong, you’re the one with the most to lose. Don’t ask. Tell them you want a referral.”

  “I can do that?”

  “Yes, you can. And by law, they have to. The doctor at Lords was way out of line.”

  “Where?” Carole’s deep blue eyes were no longer shadowed with anxiety or weakened by indecision. Suddenly Bronwyn could see the self-assurance of a woman who had created a successful business in a male-dominated trade. “Everybody says Lords is the best in the South.”

  “Sloan-Kettering.” The answer popped instantly from Bronwyn’s mouth.

  “Where is Sloan-Kettering?”

  “New York City.”

  “Why there?” Carole snapped the demand for more information out crisply.

  Bronwyn hid a smile. She could just imagine how offended those doctors with delusions of godhood had been if Carole had used that tone when she questioned them.

  The truth was Bronwyn didn’t know exactly why she had said Sloan-Kettering, since there were other good cancer centers. She only knew she had been absolutely sure. But the last thing Carole needed was another doctor saying, Do it because I said so. “That’s a good question. You could ask for referral to Duke, but I think it’s important to look at treatment options in different area of the country. Medicine isn’t practiced exactly the same everywhere. You will see doctors who have trained in other places and, therefore, might have had good experience with a different approach to treatment. And of course, Sloan-Kettering is an entire hospital dedicated to cancer treatment. They see a huge variety of cancers. If they concur with the doctors at Lords—okay. Well, then you’ll know.”

  ***

  “I saw my first patient today—well, the second one, if you count the munchkin—but my first official patient. Mary Cole sent her.”

  “Um-hmm.” Garth murmured, to let her know he was listening. He liked these times when they lay in the dark after making love and talked.

  “Here’s the thing: she’s wealthy, educated, used to feeling powerful. But dealing with grave illness strips people. They have too much at stake. They don’t know what questions to ask. With her connections she could have talked to anyone in this state. But she had to come to me to find out she could and should get a second opinion.”

  “I detect a note of wonder or disbelief in your voice.”

  “Yes, you do. And I’m feeling both. For a woman with her resources to be unable to find a doctor who would simply listen to her… it’s mind-boggling. But it is the state of the art. Anyway, seeing a patient felt good. What I did made a difference.”

  “And all you did was listen?”

  “Yes. Sounds unlikely, doesn’t it? I imagine other people she had talked to thought the issue was that her husband was opposed to radiation therapy, but what really had to be addressed was her fear that the doctors had insufficient data to make a good treatment plan. I had to listen for a while before I understood that was the problem. The arrogant SOBs at Lords had browbeaten her for daring to question them. In spite of her confidence and intelligence, she had been no match for them.”

  “How long did you listen?”

  “I’m not sure. More than eight minutes, I can tell you that.”

  Bronwyn turned on her side and put her head on Garth’s chest. “People are so vulnerable to the power games doctors play,” she mused aloud. “In managing her business, Carole would never have let anyone get away with the emotional coercion that doctor was using.”

  For the first time, Garth felt real doubt that Bronwyn would be able to handle the moves that being married to him would entail. While it was true that as an ER physician she could likely get a job anywhere, asking her to do so would be asking her to be less than she was. He would have a hard time doing that.

  Chapter 30

  Now the reason the enlightened prince and the wise general conquer the enemy whenever they move and their achievements surpass those of ordinary men is foreknowledge.

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  “Did you make an appointment with a contractor to come this morning?” Bronwyn asked Garth a couple of days later as she adjusted the yellowed but functional blinds to keep out the hot morning sun. She worked as hard to regulate the temperature of the house’s interior as the air-conditioner did. Garth hoped she was wearing down. He hated the necessity of letting the air-conditioning go unfixed, but it was for her own good.

  “I heard from Davy an hour ago that he, Do-Lord, and Lon were on their way, but I don’t know anything about a contractor. Why?”

  She gave him a worldly-wise look. “Something that looks like a contractor’s van just pulled up.”

  “Stay here.”

  It was indeed a commercial van, complete with ladders mounted on racks on its sides. Garth laughed when the “contractors” piled out. They were Davy, Do-Lord, and Lon, all wearing bill caps and blue coveralls with a building contractor’s logo emblazoned on the back.

  “Glad you could come,” he called, meaning it. He waved them inside. The pleasure he felt was out of proportion, given that he wasn’t closely acquainted with either Do-Lord or Lon. But damn it felt good.

  His job with Coastal Air had isolated him and had put him into solitary confinement, and he hadn’t even noticed it. What did that say about where his head had been? Things were clearing up now. He couldn’t wait to get back to being who he should be: a SEAL. He hoped these trusted friends would be able to tell him whether MacMurtry’s story was in any part true.

  Lon looked at the entry and staircase curiously when greetings were over. Lon had aged since he was Garth’s lead B/UDS instructor. He must be close to fifty now, and his once sandy-red hair was heavily streaked with silver. Even so, his burly build showed no hint of softening. “How much surveillance do you think you’re under?”

  “So far? None that I can detect—which, given the situation, is weird.”

  Lon nodded. “Then what’s with the cameras?”

  Garth explained about the “ghost.” Lon accepted the story without comment, but the eyes in Do-Lord’s bony, homely yet handsome face lit with interest. Anything having to do with the paranormal was right up his alley. In addition, he was known to be an information sponge, always curious, always eager to explore new territory.

  “Come on,” Garth told them. “I’ll introduce you to Bronwyn.”

  “Everybody, this is Bronwyn,” he told them when they had joined her in the family room at the back of the house. “And Bronwyn, this is Caleb Dulaude, aka Do-Lord.”

  “Yes. I’ve heard about you from Mrs. Lilly Hale Sessoms.” Bronwyn offered her hand to him. “She includes you among her grandsons—but I gather you’re not related?”

  “I’ve been fortunate enough to be unofficially adopted by her,” Do-Lord acknowledged with a way-too-charming smile. “She’s a special lady.”

  Garth touched Bronny’s arm. Okay, so he was marking his territory. So sue him. “And this is Senior Chief Lon Swales.”

  “Nice to meet you.” Bronwyn pointed from the senior chief to Do-Lord. “Are you two related?”

  “No, ma’am, though we’ve been asked that before.” Lon gave Do-Lord a derogatory look. “I don’t see the resemblance myself.”

  “Me either,” averred Do-Lord. “I’m so much better looking, there’s no comparison.”

  Lon turned back to Bronwyn. “Doc here tells me you’ve got a big renovation project. I thought I’d better see it for myself. I used to flip houses as a sideline before the market went south.”

  Bronwyn looked around, puzzled. “Who is ‘Doc’?”

  “Davy,” Garth told her. “SEALs usually call hospital corpsmen ‘Doc.’”

  “Oh, yes, of course. I wasn’t thinking. JJ always calls him David.”

  “Are you used to thinking of yo
urself as ‘the doctor’?” Lon asked with an impressive degree of insight, Garth thought. “Would you prefer for us to call you Dr. Whitescarver?”

  “Not at all. I’d like for you to call me Bronwyn. I meet few enough people who see me as, first of all, a person. And yes, I’ll be delighted if you will share your renovation expertise. My plan was to work on the house a bit at the time, but I’m afraid I was naive and didn’t understand what was entailed. I’m not going to give up, but the prospect seems overwhelming. I’ve had one general contractor come from one of the larger towns, and his bids were scary-huge.”

  Lon looked to Garth, “Where do you want to start?”

  “There’s water coming in somewhere. Doc and I checked the roof. Maybe you can figure it out.”

  ***

  A half-hour or so later, the outside door opened and the four men trooped into the family room with Davy limping and being supported on either side by Garth and Do-Lord.

  “You guys are trying to make me look like a cripple,” Davy groused. “I don’t need this much help.”

  Bronwyn quickly shoved the battered coffee table in front of the big brown chair. “Sit him here. Put his foot on the table.” She rested her hand on his foot. “What happened?”

  “Stupid. I stepped off the ladder wrong. Really. I’m not hurt.”

  “Let the doctor tell us that,” Lon told him. “He didn’t want to come in at all.”

  Garth gently swatted the top of David’s head. “I thought I was going to have to threaten to carry you. Again.” Bronwyn was stunned at the amount of tender affection she saw in Garth’s face and equally stunned that the other men didn’t seem to perceive it.

  “What do you mean, again?” David asked.

  Garth grinned. “Don’t you remember?”

  “Sorry. No. Wait…” David looked puzzled. “Actually, I do. But… where were we?”

  “Afghanistan. When you were injured.”

  David shook his head. “That can’t be it. I don’t remember being hit in Afghanistan. The docs say I probably never will.”

  “But you do remember I threatened to carry you?”

  “Yeah, I have dreams about arguing with you about whether I’m dead or not,” Davy laughed at the absurdity. “But in the dream we’re not in Afghanistan—we’re in Colorado.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Do-Lord interjected.

  Garth answered. “I had a near-death experience when I was wounded. Davy was there. He was part of it. It was so real. Beyond real. Something about this,” he indicated the group, “reminded me. I think Davy remembers it, too.”

  “Wait,” Do-Lord held up a hand. “Don’t say any more. You need to write everything down independently before you compare stories.”

  “In a minute,” Garth said. “First let Bronwyn look at Davy’s ankle.”

  Bronwyn visualized the bones and the complicated arrangements of ligaments and tendons on the inside as she ran her fingers over the skin of the ankle. She detected swelling and a small degree of darkening of the skin. “Nothing too serious, I think.”

  “I told you guys. It’s already stopped hurting. And the swelling is going down, too.”

  Lon frowned. “Are you looking at the right ankle?” he questioned Bronwyn. “That’s not how it looked a few minutes ago.”

  Bronwyn looked to David for confirmation that she had examined the right ankle. “Garth told me how fast you men heal.”

  Lon’s bushy, sun-bleached eyebrows slammed together. “Not that fast.”

  Bronwyn shrugged. “Well, anyway, it will be all right, I think. It may take a little while longer for the bruising to disappear, but it should go away soon, too.”

  ***

  “Here.” Do-Lord handed David and Garth pencils and paper when they had moved out to the porch, hoping to find a cooler spot. “Write down what you remember. Add sketches if you need to. Include as much detail as you can. Try not to censor. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make any sense.”

  While Garth and David wrote, the porch’s silence was broken only by the soft clatter of the magnolia’s leathery leaves when the wind picked up.

  Julia woke. Bronwyn changed her and brought her downstairs. She fixed the baby a bottle of juice. Julia’s usual dandelion fluff of hair had been matted with sweat. For their size, babies needed a huge volume of fluids.

  “Let me have her,” Lon said when Bronwyn returned to the porch. “I can give a baby a bottle.”

  Bronwyn passed the baby over, prepared to take her back if Julia didn’t react well to a stranger. But Lon tucked the baby into the crook of one brawny arm with sure competence. Julia relaxed in his hold and in a second or two appeared interested only in her bottle.

  Left with nothing to do except observe, Bronwyn tried to keep her expression neutral. She had a hard time believing how seriously these tough, practical, earthy men were taking this exercise. And they were actively engaged even though they teased Do-Lord about making them into guinea pigs for his research.

  Joking and teasing was how a group of dominant, aggressive men related—when fighting was out of the question and competition would be nonproductive. Bronwyn knew. She’d seen, and taken, plenty of it in the medical world.

  Among these SEALs, the teasing was rougher, but also, she thought, better-natured. It didn’t disguise the obvious respect they had for Do-Lord and the formidable intelligence he hid under a good ole boy persona.

  A typical group of doctors would have been scathing in their derision, and probably refused to participate as well.

  “I’m done.” Garth handed his writing tablet to Do-Lord.

  After glancing over what he had written, Davy followed suit. “Me too.”

  “Now we’re going to score both accounts just as we do for remote viewing experiments.” Do-Lord opened his coverall and extracted a pair of wire-rimmed glasses and a highlighter from his shirt pocket.

  Bronwyn smiled on the inside. She had already guessed Do-Lord was a nerd in SEAL’s clothing. With the gold glasses perched on his nose, she knew it.

  Swiftly he went through both accounts marking words and phrases in yellow. He turned to Bronwyn. “Have you heard this story before?”

  “No.”

  “Do you believe in the paranormal?”

  She didn’t want to offend Do-Lord who was clearly serious about his hobby. Bronwyn sought for a tactful way to say she didn’t. “I think most of what people call ESP is the mind’s ability to draw conclusions from a lot of minimal cues. The brain takes in thousands of times more information than we are consciously aware of. It’s a wonderful ability that too few appreciate, but there’s nothing ‘extra’ about it.”

  “Good answer!” Over the rim of his glasses Do-Lord sent her the prideful smile a true academic gives a promising student. “Your skepticism will be useful. I’ll let you be the other independent judge of whether their stories match.” He addressed the rest of the group. “Ideally, we’d make sure both judges were completely blind, of course—unaware of who wrote the accounts and of each other. But we’re not looking for scientific rigor in this case; just enough validation, or not, to establish a hypothesis.”

  Julia had finished her bottle and Lon had propped her on his broad lap while he listened to Do-Lord. Keeping an arm as solid as a tree branch around her, he aimed a pointer-finger pistol at Do-Lord. “Step away from the chalkboard, Professor. You’ve gone into lecture mode.”

  David leaned confidentially toward Garth. His whispered aside was clearly audible. “He didn’t used to be this bad. Comes from being married to a PhD in biology.”

  “Cut the clowning, guys. You doan thenk”—Do-Lord’s accent suddenly thickened—“they gonna pay me the big bucks, if I talk iggorant—which I am.”

  Do-Lord grinned at the guys’ loud hoots and catcalls “Show a little respect.” He produced another highlighter—green th
is time—and handed it to Bronwyn. “Try to avoid getting caught up in the story line. Instead, highlight words or phrases that are the same—or that mean the same thing.”

  “So what conclusions do you draw?” he asked Bronwyn when she had finished.

  Bronwyn studied the papers dotted with green where the words had matched. She tried to ignore the cold flutter under her breastbone. She had been certain she would find the internal correspondences to be flukes. Instead, she had found more unanimity in the two accounts than Do-Lord did.

  She had been prepared to be gracious in disagreement. Now she could only be honest.“Um… I would say that even though Garth claims to remember an event, and David says he’s only recounting dreams, both are telling essentially the same story.” She shook her head hoping to dispel the sense of unreality. “But I don’t know how to explain it. I can’t believe they both left their bodies while they were near death.”

  Do-Lord tilted his head. Behind the glasses, his keenly perceptive gaze turned kindly. “Many impossible things turn out to be possible when the exact circumstances under which they occur is finally understood,” he replied in a soft voice.

  “True. But… But thinking people don’t take this woo-woo stuff seriously! Frankly, I can’t believe that you, a SEAL, are spending even a minute looking into it.”

  “I’m a private consultant these days.”

  “Yeah, he’s the only one of us,” Davy pointed out, laughing, “who really is a contractor.”

  Lon grinned. “Yet another piece of the war machine. Another opportunist feeding at the public trough, making three times what he could have if he were still in the navy.”

  “Cut it out, guys,” Garth ordered. “In Do-lord’s case, that’s not a fair assessment. Do-Lord is working for his country. He’s probably more useful out of the navy than in it.” Speaking to Bronwyn, he explained, “Do-Lord is researching ESP in battle situations. He hopes to be able to teach officers to make better use of it.” Garth’s blue eyes lit with humor. “On a line-item budget will be called leadership training, but if he were still in the navy the course content would never be allowed.”