by LS Sygnet
His hand left my side, swept hair away from my neck. Johnny’s lips pressed beneath my ear. “Helen, I love you so much. Tell me what to do to bring you back to me.”
Of course, he believed I was sleeping soundly, that his words didn’t penetrate my skull. My awareness dragged tension bone deep. It radiated around me.
“Did I wake you?”
“Mmm, not sure,” I mumbled. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he whispered. “I didn’t mean to disturb you. It seemed like you were resting this time.”
Opposed to the tossing and turning I’d done since coming home and refusing to leave the bed when he tried to lure me back to the land of the living. I pushed the instinct to withdraw from him into the pit of my stomach and rolled onto my back. Our eyes met in the dim light that flickered from the fireplace across the room.
“Johnny, I know you’re worried. Please don’t. I just need a little bit of time to process everything that happened. I was chained to a wall for days without food or water. I killed two men to try to save myself before realizing that I was still just as trapped as I was when they were alive.”
Agony filled his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”
Fingers skimmed over his weary face. “It wasn’t your fault, Johnny. It wasn’t even my fault. This time.” I forced a tiny smile.
His concern deepened. “Why would you think it was your fault?”
“You know. My tendency to run off and finish things alone.” Yes, it’s as much a part of me as anything. Maybe that’s all that I’m sure is left of Helen Eriksson. Habit.
“I wish you’d talk to me, Helen.”
“I thought I was.”
“You know what I mean. Those days, alone on that ship while you were trapped, what you must’ve thought. I hope you knew that no matter what, I was coming for you. I would have never stopped searching.”
Yeah, I did know it. That was part of the problem. My lips rolled inward.
“Helen, please talk to me. Don’t shut me out. I can’t stand the thought that a stupid fight has put this wall between us. I was wrong. I can admit it now. I knew when it was happening, but it hurt me, you know?”
Ah yes, our infamous wedding day fight over what my love of a male friend really meant. Johnny is a jealous man, and to be honest, I never discouraged my friend Devlin Mackenzie’s crush. But loving a friend is different from… well whatever I felt when I could still feel anything.
Ordinarily, his plea for understanding would’ve melted my guts. Tonight, my eyes were dry. My mouth mute. The brain understood that a response was necessary. I nodded.
“I hope you knew.”
“Yeah,” I pushed the word out. “I didn’t really believe that our spat would’ve stopped you from looking for me.”
“I love you,” he said.
Nod. “I know.”
Johnny pressed a tentative kiss along the corner of my mouth. “This isn’t how I imagined our marriage beginning.”
“It’s not too late to change your mind,” I said. “It’s still just a piece of paper, Johnny. We haven’t…”
We hadn’t made the marriage legal in the physical sense. Biblical, he’d probably call it.
“Is that what you think, that I want our marriage annulled?”
My eyes flitted away from the intensity of his stare. “If this isn’t how you imagined it, maybe it means something, Johnny.”
“No. No! That’s not what I want.”
“All right.”
“Is that what you want?”
“No, Johnny.” Another lie. It would be easier to figure out what to do without him by my side every moment of the day. I could vanish if that’s what I needed to do.
“Helen, do you still love me?” His thumb and index finger anchored my chin and forced me to acknowledge him and his question.
“Yes,” I said. “Of course I do.”
“You haven’t said it since before this happened.”
“Haven’t I?”
He let go of me. “You don’t anymore, do you? You blame me for what happened –”
“Johnny, no. Am I feeling a hundred percent? Not exactly. I told you, I’m trying to process all of this. You weren’t here for the other times that I’ve been through similar… trauma.”
“No, because you pushed me away, and I allowed it.”
“Allowed it?”
“I’m your husband, Helen. You’re supposed to need me. Lean on me. Let me help you through this. Can’t you see how much I want to –”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then why do you keep running away from me? Why can’t you tell me you love me? Why won’t you tell me what you’re thinking? I know you so well. In all this time, I’ve never felt so… cut off from you. Not even when you avoided me for two months after you were shot.”
I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him against me. “I’m sorry. I don’t know how to make this better. I don’t know what to say to make you stop worrying. I will be fine, Johnny. I need time. Can’t you trust me, just this one time?”
“I trust you completely.” Urgent words flooded my ear. “I want you to trust me enough to let me in, baby. Even against your better judgment. I know you’re plagued with thoughts. I can hear them churning in your brain. Talk to me. Maybe it won’t be so bad if you talk about what really happened out there.”
He handed me a perfect opportunity. I nodded against his shoulder.
“Yeah?”
“I already told you everything related to Gutierrez and Gillette.” Not quite everything but close enough. “But Raul was terrified of me. They didn’t even come in and retrieve Gillette’s body after I killed him. It happened shortly after we left Darkwater Bay, at least I think it did.”
“That you had the opportunity to kill him?”
I nodded. “I was in that cargo hold for days, Johnny. Sick. Using a corpse to relieve the weight of my body being held up by chains.”
“Honey,” he said and pressed a kiss to my temple.
“I wanted to die. I started thinking about what they planned to do to me. I hoped I didn’t survive, I prayed that our baby wouldn’t survive, because I would rather that he die than be born into slavery.”
The tension built in his shoulders. I knew it would be difficult for him to hear certain things, but giving voice to those thoughts, the ones that weren’t riddled with confessions of what Gillette hinted at would silence Johnny. He’d believe that I suffered in emotional pain, worried for our child.
“When you showed up, I couldn’t believe you were real. I thought I was hallucinating, that maybe some kind of delusion had made me imagine that I’d killed my captors.”
“I know,” he said softly. “You called me Gillette. Begged me to kill you.”
“Johnny, I wasn’t sure when I was finally lucid. I didn’t know if it was really a hospital or…”
His lips pressed my flesh and didn’t move away.
“You can’t imagine what that feels like. I’ve always… my mind, my ability to reason.”
“I know.”
“I kept thinking maybe I lost it, you know? Maybe I’ve snapped. Maybe none of this is real. I could still be on The Celeste, or worse, another ship you couldn’t find or even identify.” That part was absolute truth. I shuddered with lingering fear that maybe I was still trapped, simply living a fantasy in my head.
“You are safe. You’re home, Helen, in our bed, in my arms. I will never let anyone hurt you again.”
“Johnny you can’t make that promise.”
“Yes, I really can. If it means that I literally become the ball and chain type of husband –”
“Please don’t do that. I want you to have a life, your career. We can’t live in fear because I’ve had a little bit of bad luck.”
“It’s more than a little bit.”
“We’ll get back to normal.” Had Johnny and I ever known normal? Had I ever known it? “I know you’re real, that I’m home, that I’m safe. And I thank God you found
me, that our baby is fine. But I still feel sort of…”
“Disconnected?”
My fingers ruffled through the back of Johnny’s hair. “Yes. And whether I’ve said it or not, I do love you, Johnny.”
His weight pressed me into the bed. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“You love me… differently than you love other people?”
For the first time in days, I felt a twinge of something inside my chest. It wasn’t fear or rage or hatred. It was the opposite of the void, the black hole of uncertainty. “I love you like no one else I’ve ever known.”
Johnny’s body shifted, moved lower. His lips began a gentle assault on my neck, the sweet spot that he owned. “I’d really like to make love to my wife now,” he murmured. “Is it too soon?”
To say no would make his concern grow exponentially. Agreement would reveal my lie. I can’t pretend to feel what isn’t there anymore. I bit down on the inside of my cheeks hard enough to cause tears to spring to my eyes.
“Helen?” Johnny peered down at me. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I want you so much. It’s just…”
“Too soon?”
I nodded.
“I asked you this before.”
“He didn’t rape me, Johnny.”
“Did he touch you?”
The image flashed in front of me again. Was it happening now? Reality slipped away from me. Andy Gillette’s taunting sneer replaced Johnny’s stricken expression.
“I’ll kill you if you touch me,” I hissed. “Do you hear me? You can chain me until the end of time, and I’ll find a way to make you die!”
Fingers wrapped around my upper arms and shook me hard.
“Helen!”
The murky rage receded.
“Johnny?”
“Jesus,” he said. “What did he do to you?”
I rubbed my eyes. “Where am I?”
The end of the evening news broadcast flickered on the television a few feet away from me. Johnny perched on the edge of the sofa. Was I dreaming? Dreaming that I wasn’t dreaming.
I bolted upright from the corner of the sofa where I must’ve fallen asleep and clung to Johnny. “Hold me,” I said.
“Honey, you’ve got to get more help for this. I don’t know what to do.”
“Promise me Andy Gillette is really dead.”
“I swear it,” he said. “Helen, Andy Gillette can never hurt you again.”
With the dream still fresh in my mind, and what I believed Johnny feared, I tightened my grip around his neck. “I love you, Johnny.”
Air rushed out of his lungs. “I love you too. We’ll get through this, honey. I promise.”
“Take me to bed, please. I need to put what happened behind me.”
“Are you sure?”
I wasn’t. “I need to feel safe again. I need you to hold me.”
He nodded. “Whatever you want.”
Chapter 3
“The parade begins soon,” Johnny reminded me. After a week of reclusive behavior and struggling to sort reality from nightmares, indecision versus formulating a plan, I realized that prolonging the inevitable would only raise suspicions.
“Who’s coming again?”
“Chris, Crevan, Dev, Maya, a butt-load of people from Central Division.”
Hmm. “No one from Downey?”
“Shelly said she would try to come by. Is there someone specifically from Downey that you’d like to see?”
I snorted. “Not particularly. I figured it would be the good Catholic thing to do though, pretending to be pleased that I survived more or less intact.”
“Helen, if you’re ready to make peace with Tony Briscoe, I’m sure he’d be delighted.”
“I guess I wouldn’t be offended if he showed up.”
See, I have an ulterior motive. I’ve often believed the men in this city are worse gossips than any woman ever conceived of being. Tony Briscoe rates at the top of that heap in my opinion. His history lessons in Darkwater Bay proved invaluable to me. Burying the hatchet might be the first step I could take in my covert little investigation. God knows, I need to figure out where to begin asking some innocent questions. I can’t do it with Johnny. He’s still pretty suspicious that I haven’t told him everything.
Maybe, if he believes that I’m putting all of the past into proper perspective, he’ll at least stop working from home. I’ve barely been able to pee with a modicum of privacy since I got out of the hospital.
He kissed my forehead. “I’ll give him a call.”
“You don’t have to say I asked him to be here.”
“Hadn’t planned on it. He wanted to come all along, Doc. I told him I wasn’t sure it was such a good idea just yet.”
He barely had the phone in his hand when the alarm at the gate sounded. “I’ll get it. You call your pal.”
Within a minute, Maya was standing in the foyer of the house hugging me like there was no tomorrow.
“I’m so glad you’re feeling better. I’ve been out of my mind with worry, Helen.”
She wasn’t the only one. “I’m really done with the law enforcement thing this time. I don’t care what happens, I’m staying out of it.”
Maya grinned. “I’ve heard that before. I’ll believe it when I see it. Are you really feeling better? You still look a little wan.”
Johnny’s eyes met mine. We still hadn’t told anyone the rest of our news. The wedding was one thing. I had no idea how to spit out the rest.
“She’s fine, Maya,” Johnny said.
I swallowed a lump that materialized in my throat. “Actually, there is something else that none of you know.”
His eyes widened. “Helen, are you sure you want to tell everyone?”
I nodded. “We won’t be able to keep it a secret forever.”
“What’s going on?”
“I should make you wait until everyone else gets here so we don’t have to repeat the news over and over,” I said.
Maya hooked her arm in mine and strolled toward the living room. “You’ll do no such thing. I got to hear about the wedding first. Whatever you have to say, you’re telling me right this instant.”
Johnny grinned. “Remember the advice you gave me about Helen’s nausea?”
“Oh! I was right?”
He nodded.
“Congratulations! When are you due? Oh my gosh, everything’s all right, isn’t it? I mean, those bastards didn’t hurt you, did they?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “In fact, we’re both fine.”
“Why didn’t you tell me right away?” she asked.
I shrugged. “What can I say? We were a little distracted with work, Maya. I think Johnny and I were having a hard enough time staying focused after we got married without telling everyone that in a few months, we’re having a baby too.”
The house quickly filled with people who were instrumental in building my new life in Darkwater Bay. Devlin ignored Johnny’s previous warning to keep his hands to himself. He hugged me tightly, kissed both cheeks, and then begged for my forgiveness.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Dev. None of what happened was your fault.”
“He was my partner for years, Helen, and I had no idea.”
“Well, my father raised me, and I had no idea he was a criminal either. I married a man who laundered money for the mob. We don’t know what even those closest to us don’t want us to know.”
Johnny was hovering nearby. He overheard my remark and frowned. A moment later, he pried me out of Devlin’s arms and shot him a look.
“We’re not starting this nonsense again, are we?”
His arm tightened around my waist. “No, but we’re not turning this into a morose event where we try to outdo one another in the who got the wool pulled over their eyes harder competition either. We’re here for two reasons – to celebrate that my wife is home and safe, and so that you cretins can see with your own eyes that she’s fine.”
>
My attention drifted away from the men doting to one who hung back away from the rest of the group. I watched, I thought covertly, ignoring the banter between Johnny and Devlin over the cretin remark until Johnny dragged my focus back to their conversation.
“Go talk to him, Helen.”
“Who?”
“Crevan,” Dev chuckled. “At least she still zones out like she always has.”
My hand glided down the front of Johnny’s shirt. “Would you mind terribly if we had a private conversation? He looks upset.”
“Worried is more like it,” Johnny said.
Apparently, there was more than enough guilt to go around.
I drifted across the room to my friend, a man who might well be my twin brother. The longer I looked at him, the more the idea appealed to me on some level. There were certainly enough physical clues to support the theory.
“Hey,” I said. “Were you planning to at least say hello?”
“I think I’ve got a little more than that to say to you, Helen,” he stared at the keys on the grand piano in the living room. “I should’ve grown a pair like Dad always wanted me to, huh?”
“Crevan, it wasn’t your fault.”
He shrugged. “I have a thing for anagrams. Always have. I knew those messages weren’t gibberish.”
I slipped my hand into his and gave a gentle tug. “Come outside with me. God knows a sunny afternoon is a rare treat in this city. Let’s go sit on the swing in the back yard and have a talk.”
“Can you ever forgive me?”
Our eyes met. I felt like I was looking into a mirror. Only Crevan’s eyes were filled with emotion, and mine, well, they felt as dead as the rest of me.
“I was never angry with you, never blamed you for what happened, Crevan. There’s nothing to forgive. Johnny and I could’ve explained why I was acting like a maniac. He told me that you were concerned because I’ve been a bit more erratic than usual these days.”
Crevan opened the back door and held it for me. I tugged him through behind me.
“There’s actually a good explanation, Crevan. Beyond people thinking that I’m just insane.”
He chuckled. “I had a theory.”
“And you were right if you’re talking about the morning sickness thing.”
