A Baby for the Soldier
Henley Maverick
Contents
1. Bear
2. Lexi
3. Bear
4. Lexi
5. Bear
6. Lexi
7. Bear
8. Lexi
9. Bear
10. Lexi
11. Bear
12. Lexi
13. Bear
14. Lexi
15. Bear
16. Lexi
17. Bear
18. Lexi
19. Bear
20. Lexi
21. Bear
22. Lexi
23. Bear
24. Lexi
Epilogue
Also by Henley Maverick
About the Author
Copyright © 2018 by Henley Maverick
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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1
Bear
“He’s dead.”
I wasn’t even sure I heard the words right, because they didn’t make any sense. I was in my tent in the middle of that god-forsaken desert, and I had to be finally losing my damn mind, because I couldn’t have heard Mike right.
He stood in the entrance to my tent with a solemn look on his face, pale as a sheet like he was going to be sick.
I shook my head, thinking it would clear out the ear wax or whatever was getting in the way of me understanding the words that came out of Mike’s mouth.
“What?”
He swallowed, and I swear he went even paler. “Wyatt’s dead.”
The words still didn’t make any sense. He must’ve got it all wrong. I had just had dinner with Wyatt and we had plans for cards once he got done calling Lexi and the kid. He had the wrong guy.
Or he was fucking with me.
I narrowed my eyes at Mike, tried to suss him out. He always pulled pranks like that, going too far with jokes without realizing it wasn’t fucking funny. But he wasn’t laughing, and he had a shit poker face.
All at once, my blood turned to ice and the words finally sunk in.
Wyatt’s dead.
My hearts raced, choking me as I jumped to my feet, pushed past Mike, and ran out of the tent, straight for the infirmary. Maybe he got it wrong. Maybe Wyatt just stubbed a toe or something and complained about how he’s dying. That sounded more accurate. That was more believable than the thought of my best friend somehow no longer being with us.
It seemed like time crawled by like frozen molasses trying to go uphill; it felt like I was wading through air so thick I might not be able to push through it. It felt like there was an anvil on my chest squeezing all the air out of my lungs, and all I could do was pray that Mike was wrong, that he’d been mistaken, that I misheard him.
I stumbled into the infirmary tent and looked around at the sea of uniforms, trying to spot my friend. I spotted the captain first, standing by a lumpy cot with a sheet pulled up to cover the mound underneath. He caught my eye and his mouth fell into a grim line, a dull sadness in his eyes evident even across the few yards between us.
I approached slowly, my feet seemed to move on their own, dragging me to that cot with the sheet-covered lump against my will.
“Captain,” I said with a slow nod, my voice rough and strained. My throat was tight, my whole body thrummed, vibrated, adrenaline rushed through my veins, protests and denial screamed out in my head.
My fingers twitched, and I wanted to reach for the sheet, but as soon as I moved my arm, the captain gave me a sharp look and shook his head.
“You don’t want to see that, son. Believe me.”
But it didn’t seem real. Surely whoever is under that sheet wasn’t Wyatt. It wasn’t my best friend from elementary school, cold and lifeless under that thin layer of cotton. It had to be someone else. Anyone else.
I thought back to a couple hours earlier, when we wolfed down shitty Sloppy Joes in that mess, planning our card night, talking shit to each other. He went to call his wife first, like he had done every week…
What could have happened? It didn’t make any sense.
The captain looked at me, sensing the unspoken questions on the tip of my tongue.
“Suicide,” he said, sending every thought racing down the highway of my mind screeching to a halt until there was a massive pile-up and only that one word repeated, reverberating through my head.
Suicide?
“What?” was all I could ask. That sounded even less believable.
Captain nodded, his face was still grim. “One clean shot, through and through. Couldn’t have felt a damn thing.”
I swallowed thick, bile raised up in the back of my throat at the thought of Wyatt with a bullet hole in his head. The thought of his brains splattered all over his tent, his face mangled from the impact of the exit wound.
I saw it. I saw the aftermath of that shit. I knew how messy it was. I knew how haunting it was, but until I superimposed Wyatt’s face on those memories, I didn’t think I realized just how bad it was.
“You make sure you talk to somebody, you hear me, Calhoun?” Captain said, giving me a stern look. I knew what he was saying, but I couldn’t focus on the words because all I could think about was Wyatt’s brains outside of his skull and I was about to puke.
I didn’t say a word before I ducked out of the infirmary tent, upchucking the Sloppy Joes from earlier, heaving until there was nothing left in my stomach but acid and regret.
How the hell did that happen? Everything was fine… Except clearly it wasn’t. Clearly Wyatt was dealing with things I didn’t understand, things he didn’t tell me about. I never even knew he was depressed, and then that? With no warning? It was like a blow to the back of the head. It came out of nowhere, coldcocking me, and leaving me confused and reeling, wondering how I would move on from there.
Wondering how did I let this happen.
Wyatt and I came to this hellhole together and we swore we were going to leave it together. I’d promised his wife and kid that I’d look out for him, that I’d take care of him.
I’ve failed at a lot of things in my life, but none of that seemed all that important anymore. None of those mistakes ever made me feel like my whole world was upside down and falling apart all at once.
There were people around, and I even heard someone call my name, trying to talk to me as I doubled over dry heaving, sobbing uncontrollably over the shock. But I couldn’t make out the words, I couldn’t even pick out the voice. Everything sounded like I was underwater, like it was moving in slow-motion, and then the tunnel started to close in. I reached out blindly for something to support myself on as the world spun and blackness crowded around my vision, but wasn’t anything to grab. My fingers slipped through the tent fabric and I fell forward, everything faded to darkness as I did.
2
Lexi
Three Months Later
Routine was the only thing that seemed to keep me grounded those days. Without routine, without every minute planned, my mind had the chance to wander. To remember.
I pulled my hair back into a ponytail, my bangs falling in my eyes. I blew out a puff of air to move them out of the way, and just as I did, I caught my own reflection in the mirror. A whisper of a memory floated to the surface, remembering a teenager hiding behind my hair, Wyatt pushing my bangs back, telling me he loved the cool gray of my eyes and I shouldn’t hi
de them.
Immediately, the memory brought fresh tears to my eyes, and no matter how much I tried to push them away or ignore them, they weren’t going anywhere. They were there to stay.
I slipped back into my bedroom from the attached bathroom and sank onto the edge of the bed, letting the sobs wrack my body, my shoulders shaking as the hopelessness crashed into me all over again.
People kept telling me that things would get better. That it’d get easier. That I just had to give it time.
Well, it’d been three months, and I still didn’t see an end to the dark tunnel. I still hadn’t caught even the faintest glimpse of light. I felt like I’d been thrown into a deep dark cave, left to fend for myself when I was always told I’d have somebody by my side. Somebody there with me to make things easier.
But he’s not there anymore, and he never will be again.
It brought even more tears. I was so sick of crying. I was sick of my eyes being puffy all the time, I was sick of everyone giving me those sad sympathetic looks that pushed me over the edge all over again.
I was so exhausted from the grief, but it didn’t care. Grief didn’t care that my life had to keep going, that I only had so much paid time off I could take from my job because I couldn’t manage to pull myself out of bed. Grief didn’t understand that I have a little boy who hurt as much as I did and I needed to be strong for him.
It didn’t understand, and even if it did, I don’t think it gave a shit.
Grief is an asshole, and it’s an asshole that seemed to have taken up permanent residence in my life.
I knew Dallas knows, too. As much as I’ve tried to shield him from it, to protect him from how bad I hurt, he wasn’t dumb. He might only be seven, but he was observant. He knew how much I struggled while his dad was overseas and how I had to manage everything alone. I didn’t want him to see that, either, but he did. And then he saw how much I hurt. And I knew he hurt too. Wyatt went to Iraq when Dallas was still learning his first words. Now he’s in second grade and barely ever met his dad.
I always thought they’d have plenty of time to bond after Wyatt’s tour was finished. We’d already talked about it and he wasn’t going to renew. I don’t know what happened? What changed, what made him…
An unbearable wave of despair slammed into me. What kind of wife doesn’t know her husband was struggling like that?
What kind of person did that make me?
For all my grief and confusion, there’s also anger. How could Wyatt do that to me? To us? How could he abandon us? How could he leave me to deal with all of it?
Since fourth grade, it’dbeen me and Wyatt. Ever since some older kids tricked me and Wyatt ended up sharing his candy with me. He never cared when his friends teased him for being friends with a girl, and we were practically joined at the hip from that point forward.
Ours was one of those fairytale stories you heard about. Childhood sweethearts since elementary school.
I never expected it would be a tragedy though. I thought my fairytale was more Disney than Grimm. Guess the joke was on me. Guess Wyatt didn’t see our story the same way.
I flopped back in the bed, tears still streaming out of my eyes, though the sobs stopped. It was hard to keep up the energy of being so sad all the time. Sometimes, the anger and enormity of it all was too much and I just had to lay there and quietly listen to my tears plop plop on the sheets under my head.
I didn’t even know who I was without Wyatt. I didn’t know how to go on without him. I didn’t know how to function.
But I had to. It’d been months and all my paid time off had run dry. There was no way for me to take more time off of work, and I needed the money anyway. Due to the circumstances of Wyatt’s death, the military wouldn’t be issuing any of his benefits. Which was just great. Insult to injury. Not only did my husband abandon me, leaving me to pick up the pieces and raise our son alone, but he did so in a way that ensured he wouldn’t help support us at all even from beyond the grave.
It wasn’t like Wyatt to be so short-sighted. Then again, I started to realize that maybe I never knew Wyatt as well as I thought I did. Maybe he never really let me in all the way. I thought he did. I thought we were in this together. To the very end.
That’s what we’d always said. I guess I’m the only one that had taken it to heart.
But even being mad at him felt wrong. It felt like thinking ill of the dead, like I’d just invited some more bad juju into my life. My eyes wandered over to the clock on the nightstand and I groaned. The thought of going in to the library was too much. It’s a small town and the library’s never very busy. Just me and the books, silence and my thoughts… With a different job, maybe the work would be a distraction, but with my line of work, it just gave me all the time I could possibly want to dwell on thoughts that aren’t helpful in the slightest.
And I was mad at Wyatt for making me dread the job I loved so much. I was mad and I was sad and I wanted to break things and scream and dig him up and shake him and ask him why he did this to me when he vowed to always be there? I wanted to ask him if our wedding vows meant nothing to him? If they were all just pretty words that he never cared about?
But that wasn’t fair. I knew it wasn’t. I knew suicide wasn’t that simple or that cut and dry. I knew that for Wyatt to choose that option, he must have felt like there were no others to choose. And I think that’s what finally made the tears come back in earnest. The thought that my sweet, lovely husband felt so lost, so hopeless, so alone, that the only reasonable option he could see was taking his own life.
I was blubbering on the bed still when my bedroom door opened and my mother walked in. She’d been staying with us ever since Wyatt’s death, helping with all the funeral arrangements and all that, and then she just stuck around because she could tell that I wasn’t back to my normal self yet.
She stopped in front of me, with her hands on her hips, and pursed her lips.
“Lexi, you have to go to work,” she said impatiently. “You’re going to lose your job at this rate, and then where will you be?”
I sighed, swiping at my tears. Mom had been as supportive as she could be, but her patience had been running extra thin the last few weeks. I could tell she thought I should be over it and moved on by now, and the fact that I wasn’t yet was clearly a major character defect of mine. I was too sensitive or something.
“I know Mom,” I grumbled, wiping smeared makeup off my eyes. I needed to stick with waterproof only for a while, I thought.
“Do you? Because it seems like you think the whole world is just going to hit the brakes and wait until you’re ready to hop back on, but it’s not. The world’s still going without you.”
I sighed again, groaning. “I know, Mom.” She might’ve thought her tough love approach was helpful, but it really just made me feel worse about myself. I already felt bad enough for all the conflicting feelings I had about Wyatt. I already felt guilty for being mad at him, for part of me hating him. And she just came in there and made me feel like a failure of a person on top of being a failure as a wife.
“If you got ready a little bit earlier, you could walk Dallas to the bus stop instead of me. He keeps asking for you to do it.”
Great. I was a shitty wife, person, and mother. Thanks, Mom.
I didn’t say anything, waiting to see if she was done punching me down. I knew she was trying to be supportive, in her own weird way, but I almost thought I was at the point where she was doing more harm than good as far as my recovery went.
“I know you’ve lost a lot,” she said with a sigh, sinking on the bed next to me, slipping an arm around my shoulder. “I’d just hate to see you lose even more.”
I let out a long slow breath and extracted myself from her embrace with a nod. “Thanks. I’ll try to do better,” I snapped. I wasn’t going to get into that with her. I wasn’t going to try to make her understand how I felt because I knew where that would go. That’d just end up with her saying I’m dwelling, I’m wallowing
, I need to move on. It’d just end up with her making it all too clear how she thinks I’m over-emotional and defective for it.
Sorry I’m not some Stepford-bot without feelings, Mom.
I didn’t wait for her response. I already knew I didn’t want to hear it based on her tight-lipped frown. Instead, I got up from my bed, leaving her there, and went back into my bathroom to re-apply my makeup.
I kept expecting her to say something else, to try to force me into some argument that I didn’t want, but she didn’t do that. As I swiped a neutral shade of lipstick across my lips, she stood from the bed with a deep breath.
“Well, I’m going to walk Dallas to the bus now, but think about what I said, will you?”
“Mhm,” I said dismissively, blotting my lipstick on a tissue. I was done. I was so wiped that I couldn’t even find an ounce of caring about my mom’s feelings on the matter. As well-intentioned as she was, she wasn’t helping, and I think it was probably time to admit she’d overstayed her welcome.
If I really want to get my life back on track and under my control again, I couldn’t rely on a crutch. I couldn’t have someone there to catch me because I couldn’t manage to get out of bed.
I had to be strong for my boy, but more important than that, I needed to be strong for me. I needed to prove to myself that I could do it without Wyatt. He may have been there my whole life, but he hasn’t been there for the last few years and I’d managed all right. Granted, I managed because I could talk to him every week and we made plans for what we wanted to do when he came back stateside, but I managed before, and I knew I could do it again.
A Baby for the Soldier (Boys of Rockford Series Book 2) Page 1
