Sometimes, the doctor would not prick and then ask, “That?” And Isaac would say, “No.”
Other times, he would prick and not ask.
Over his lower abdomen, down his hips, his thighs, and on, with nothing different from the dozens, scores of times this simple, horrible test had been performed.
All the way to his feet, no change. Over the top of his right foot. His right heel. By that time, Isaac was just shaking his head, his eyes closed; he’d given up bothering with the word ‘no.’
Lilli saw the shadows massing around him and knew that he’d been far more hopeful about that itch than he’d let on. She bent down and kissed his creased forehead. “We’re okay, love. Whatever. We’re okay.”
Then his eyes flew open. “Do that again. Yes. Fuck. Yes!” Lilli looked down at Isaac’s feet. The doctor poked again, and she saw his right foot move—just a tiny spasm, subtle but unmistakable.
~oOo~
After a couple more tests, Isaac was dressed again and in his chair, and they were sitting in Kendrick’s office. The air was dense with tension.
The doctor cleared his throat. “I tell you what. I’m going to go out and have one of the girls get the scans scheduled for this afternoon, and you two can talk in here for a few minutes. It would be best to make a decision today.” He got up from his commodious leather chair and left the room.
When they were alone, Isaac reached out and put a gloved hand on her knee. Feeling desperate and angry, she glared down at it. “Lilli, the financial situation is the same, so the problem is the same.”
He had some limited feeling, and some reflexive response, in both feet. Even Kendrick, who was usually reluctant to offer much hope, had been encouraged by the development. He wanted Isaac to check into rehab immediately for intensive therapy. He now thought there was a chance, slim but measurable, that Isaac could someday walk again. With intensive therapy.
But Isaac wouldn’t go back to the center. He said they couldn’t afford it. He was right, but Lilli could not have cared less.
“No. The problem is totally different. There’s a legitimate chance that you could walk. Isaac, hear me when I tell you that I will not bring you home. I will not. You have to check in. You have to. You can’t turn your back on this chance.”
“Please, Sport. You hear me. There’s more to think about than this. We can’t make a decision about our whole family’s future based just on my legs. We have to—”
“—Isaac, I’m pregnant.” She hadn’t yet found the time or the way to tell him; she guessed now worked as well as any.
His face went completely blank, like she’d uttered that sentence in Farsi rather than English. “What?”
“I’m pregnant. About ten weeks, I guess, the way the doctor will time it.”
His brows drew together. “Ten weeks? What? How?”
“That night at the center. Our anniversary.”
“That wasn’t ten weeks ago, Sport.” There was a dark rumble in his voice. Jesus—he was—Jesus.
“No, Isaac. The doctor will count the weeks from my last period. It happened on our anniversary. That’s the only time it could have. I haven’t been fucking anybody else, and fuck you for even thinking it.”
The smile that moved up his face was real and wholehearted, and he took her hand. “We made a baby that night?”
Considering that he was much calmer about the news than she’d anticipated, she decided not to hold that brief doubt against him. “Yep.”
But then his smile faded. “Wait. You can’t—you can’t be pregnant. You can’t have a baby. No.”
“Yeah, I can. I am. We are. We will. We’ll take care. I’ll take care, and it’ll be fine. But it would be cool if you could get back on your feet and help me out with everything. If that’s possible, it would be cool.”
Again he shook his head. She wanted to beat him, but she didn’t suppose it was good form to slug a guy in a wheelchair. Even an obstreperous, vexatious, infuriating guy.
“Isaac, don’t start your shit. I’m pregnant. That fight is over. It’s done. We’re having another baby.”
“I can’t lose you, Lilli. Jesus, don’t you see that?”
“You won’t. Dr. Andrews told us that there are precautions. They’ll monitor things, and I’ll have a C-section, and we’ll bring a baby sibling home for Gia to terrorize.” She smiled, thinking of their precocious, willful daughter. “Pip will appreciate the break.”
Isaac was quiet, staring at their linked hands. Lilli watched him, trying to follow his thoughts as they moved over his face. She saw the ghost of a smile. Finally, he looked up at her again. “We need to be careful with money even more than ever, then, Sport.”
Oh, Jesus. He really needed a slap. But Lilli took a breath, found patience, and spoke calmly, trying reason and logic out. “The wine bar is starting to turn a little bit of a profit. The B&B is moving into its busiest season, and Shannon has weddings booked now through fall. We still have some savings left, too. We’ll be okay. If we need to, we can mortgage the house.” He opened his mouth to protest, and she put her hand up. She was going to win this fucking battle. “Fight, Isaac. Fight. Please. You can’t give this chance away. Not over money. Fuck, not over that.”
Neither of them said more. The minutes ticked by.
Dr. Kendrick knocked and opened his office door. “We’ve got the tests scheduled. Have you made any decisions about how you want to proceed after that?”
Lilli stared hard into Isaac’s eyes. She didn’t know how she’d deal if he didn’t make the most of this chance. It felt something like a miracle to her. The cosmos seemed to be thinking that perhaps they’d suffered enough, paid enough.
He turned from her and faced the doctor. “I guess I’m going back to St. Louis.”
EIGHT
“Isaac, I know you’re frustrated. But it gets in your way. It’s always gotten in your way, and you know it. You need to give your body time to try out the new connections it’s forging before you make demands on it for more.”
Noah was sitting against the end of a long metal table in the therapy room. Isaac, soaked in sweat and sore all the way to his marrow, was fucking pissed off. He was missing yet another goddamn ultrasound because he was imprisoned here. He was in a constant state of worry, a low-grade hum spiking to a jackhammer with every OB/GYN appointment. She was having scans monthly, and every time she brought him a funky black and white photograph, he was elated and furious in equal measure. He hated not being there for her. He hated it.
Today was her twenty-week scan. They were hoping to know what flavor she was baking—in addition to making sure everything was okay. She was alone, and he was here, strapped up in his torture winch, dragging his legs along behind him.
He could now feel his legs and his feet, waist to toes. The sensation he had was eerily akin to the way his arms had felt at first, when he was still on his back. Like Novocain, or as if the lower part of his body had been packed in cotton padding. But it was something, and it gave him an impatient fire to have more.
But he still had no control. He was gaining some reflex reaction, but he could not will his legs to move, and they certainly would not hold his weight. He spent hours every day in this cursed room, but nothing was working. He was becoming the fucking Hulk above his waist, but his increasingly meatless legs dragged on behind him.
“Let’s do it again.” He wrapped his hands around the bars, ready to hoist himself back between them.
“Dude, no. First, you’re not my only patient, and your time is up. Second, you are going to undo the progress you’ve made if you don’t rest when you’re supposed to. I like your fire this time around, Isaac. It’s good. Until it’s bad. You have made incredible progress. I don’t like to throw the word miracle around, but I think you need to stop and remember where you were, like, seven months ago. Or, hell, three months ago.”
“It’s not fuckin’ enough.”
“Yeah, well, you’re wearing me out.” With one brawny arm aro
und Isaac’s waist, Noah helped him out of the harness and back into his chair.
~oOo~
He was fresh out of the shower and ensconced in the recliner in his room, reading, when Lilli came in. He loved the way she looked pregnant. She was bigger, he thought, with this one than she had been with Gia—or maybe it was that the rest of her was smaller. She’d lost a lot of weight since he’d been shot. For awhile, when the bones in her shoulders had become pronounced, he’d been worried, but she’d filled back out a little, especially since the baby. But she definitely wasn’t the muscular Amazon she’d once been.
He loved the round swell of her belly, the way it stretched her t-shirt. With Gia, she’d barely shown the first half of the pregnancy, but this time she was quite clearly pregnant. She’d given up jeans in favor of yoga pants more than a month ago.
She closed the door behind her, and he set his book aside. “Hey, Sport. Missed you.”
“Hey, love. How was work?” They’d taken to calling his therapy ‘work.’ He couldn’t even remember how that had started.
He shrugged. “Same old. This might be as good as it gets.”
“Uh-uh. Don’t start that. You don’t get to decide when it’s as good as it gets, remember? You get frustrated too fast to be trusted with that kind of power.”
Time to change the subject. He held out his arms. “C’mere.” She came to him, dropped her messenger bag at the base of his chair, and sat on his lap. Even a month after some sensation had returned to his legs, he felt his throat constrict and his heart race at the feel of her body on his lap. He could feel her weight on him. He could feel her. He would never take it for granted, the simple sensation of his wife’s body on his.
“Everything go okay at the doctor?”
She fed her fingers into the top of his braid, along his scalp, and he groaned a little at the pleasure of her touch. “Everything’s good. As it should be. Totally normal.”
He sighed his relief. His awareness of his own anxiety always increased, oddly, at the moment she told him that all was well. “Got a picture for me?”
She smiled and reached down for her bag. “I have a couple.” She pulled them out of the bag and dropped it back to the floor. He took the slips of paper she held out to him and examined the blurry image on the top. He could discern the head, arms, legs. The proper count for each.
“Do we know what you’re baking yet?”
“Next picture.”
He pulled the second photo forward. There were words printed over this image, with a little arrow pointing to…something blurry. The words said: BABY BOY LUNDEN.
A son.
“Holy fuck, Sport.”
“Yep.”
He set the photos on top of his book and put his hand on her belly. “A son. Fuck. I hope I don’t fuck him up.”
She grabbed his chin, and he looked her in the eye. “If he learns to be a man from his father, Isaac, then he will be amazing.”
“I fuckin’ love you. I love you so fuckin’ much, Lilli.” He brought her face to his and kissed her.
~oOo~
“Hold up. I need a minute.”
Sitting behind the wheel of their SUV, Lilli sat back. “I need to pee. The kid has been using my bladder as a trampoline for the whole ride. Just FYI, so you can figure that into your calculations. Pregnant woman in distress over here. But, you know, if you need a minute, by all means.”
“Smartass. You know, you used to be more sympathetic.”
She grabbed his hand, her playful snark set aside. “Take the time you need. But this is a good thing, love.”
He thought back to the last time he’d come home from the center, pulling up to their house to see everybody standing there, waiting to offer him some kind of fucking hero’s welcome, and the hot, red fury that had rolled through his blood at it all. The sick, futile pretense of it.
“Okay, let’s do it.”
“Just a sec.” Lilli released her seat belt from around her seven-months-pregnant belly and opened the driver’s door.
He reached out and grabbed her arm. “I got it.”
“You sure?”
He reached into the back seat and grabbed the walnut stick with the sterling silver horse’s head. A gift from Show. “I’m sure. Let’s go.”
He opened the passenger door and put his feet on the ground.
With his fancy new walking stick to keep him steady, he walked into the clubhouse of the Night Horde MC.
When he crossed the threshold, his brothers were standing. As he walked in, they applauded.
He was home.
~oOo~
The kutte he’d refused was hanging on a wooden hanger in the Keep, on the wall immediately behind the head of the table. The President’s place.
“Fuck, Show. You just won’t listen.”
“You telling me you’re sorry I didn’t burn it?” Show sat in his VP seat. “Isaac, that kutte, that patch, that seat is yours. In all these months—what, ten?—that seat has stayed empty. It’s yours. I don’t want it, and I’m not any good at the head. Things are quiet, moving steady, so I haven’t fucked anything up, I don’t think. But you are our leader. Have been from the moment you first wore that patch. From before that. Big Ike was shit at the head by the end, and you know it. You started leading from the seat I’m in right now.”
Isaac sat now in the President’s seat because there was no option. He wouldn’t take a brother’s chair, even when only he and Show were in the Keep. “Everything that’s gone down for the past three years is on me, Show. Worst run of trouble in the club’s history, and it’s on me. The Horde needs a change. And I still can’t ride. Can’t be Horde if I’m not on the road. The head of the table can’t go empty forever.”
“You know why you’re good at the head? Because you don’t act on your own. You bring everybody in, give us all the information you’ve got, and tell us what you think. We trust you because we’re all in it together. So you didn’t drag us into our trouble. We rode in with you. At your side.”
Show leaned back. “And you’ll ride. You got your legs back. Get ‘em strong again, and you’ll ride.”
Isaac swiveled the President’s chair and looked up at the pristine black kutte, with its bright white patches, hanging on the wall. The kutte C.J. had destroyed had been on Isaac’s back for twenty years. For all the tender care he’d paid it over those decades, it had clearly shown the ravages of the life he’d lived in it. The leather had been soft, the pebbled texture worn mostly smooth. The patches had been discolored and stained, foxed around the edges, the embroidery thread plucked and frayed.
It seemed an absurdity, even an abomination, for a President to wear an unused, unsoiled kutte.
But maybe what it really was…was a second chance.
He turned back to Show. “I won’t wear it until I can ride. You know the rules. Don’t bend ‘em for me. I’m not at the table until I can ride.”
“And then you’re at the head?”
Isaac paused and thought. For ten months, he’d been certain that he was no longer fit to lead—if he ever had been at all. For ten months, he’d pushed away any thought of being able to stay in the club at all.
“I want it put to a vote. But the club wants me there, then yeah. At the head.”
Show stood and slapped Isaac on the shoulder. “Good man. Your bike’s in the bays. Boys cleaned it up for you.”
~oOo~
His legs already feeling tired and shaky, Isaac leaned a little heavier on the horse-head stick as he walked back to the bays.
He laughed when he went through the doors. His bike, a 2009 Dyna Fat Bob, all matte black and badass, was dead center, with a spot shining down on it. Like it was Excalibur or something. He expected angels to sing and harps to play. He wondered whose idea the pomp was. Probably Omen. He could definitely see Omen doing something so lame. And awesome.
He fucking loved this bike. It wasn’t flashy. Just big and mean. Raw power. It felt like part of his body when he rode. He ha
dn’t been on it in ten months—fuck, he’d barely laid eyes on it in ten months. Just a fleeting glimpse the day he’d told Show to get rid of it.
Stroking the handlebars, the gas tank, the saddle, he almost sat astride it. But then he pulled back.
No. Not yet.
Ride or die.
He would fucking ride.
~oOo~
Isaac had wanted to wait outside the Keep, but Show wouldn’t hear of it. So he stood back by the door, his heart in his mouth, while the Horde voted.
The club was different now. The last time he’d been in this room when the whole club was at the table, Bart, C.J., and Vic had seats. Since then, Vic had been sent to meet his Maker as a traitor. C.J. had nearly brought the whole club down. He’d nearly brought Isaac down, too. And Lilli had killed him for it.
And Bart had given up his patch to save the Horde.
Now, Omen and Dom were patched in, and they had three new Prospects Isaac barely knew. He’d have to get to know them, though, because the vote had circled the table to Show, who’d elected to vote last.
Sitting in the VP’s chair, before he said anything, Isaac’s best friend leaned forward and pushed the gavel to the head of the table, in front of the empty President’s seat. “Aye. It’s unanimous.”
Every man in the room stood. The unsteadiness Isaac felt as he came around to the head of the table had nothing to do with weakness in his legs. He stared down at the gavel resting on the ebony table he had made with his own hands and asked himself one last time whether he deserved the seat. Whether he deserved the respect of his brothers. Whether he had earned it.
He didn’t know. But if he hadn’t, he would never stop trying.
He picked up the gavel. Show took the new kutte off the wall and held it open to him. He shrugged it over his shoulders and swallowed hard to force back the emotion that surged up his throat at the blessed weight of leather on his back.
Show yanked him into a hard embrace, and the room exploded in applause.
In Dark Woods (Signal Bend Series #4.5) Page 6
