I sit in the driveway, unmoving, blasting Metallica until the Jeep trembles and hoping Sawyer will take the hint. The house looks strange—so grandiose and empty—from out here. Especially when I imagine it through Sawyer’s eyes. After his divorce, he’d moved into a cottage at the Blue Rose. And though I’d never seen it, I knew the home Cole bought for us would dwarf it like one of those wooly mammoth skeletons presiding over an entire room in a museum. Too big to be believed. Too big for one person. A half a person at that. Maybe I’ll sleep in the Jeep tonight.
Sawyer raps forcefully on my window with his prosthetic knuckles, shrugging at me when I jump. I lower the music to a soft throb and crack the door.
“I tried the real thing,” he says, fluttering his fingers at me. “But I guess you’ve probably gone deaf by now. If only I knew sign language.”
“Ha. Ha. Ha.” I shut off the car, relenting. Sawyer’s not the hint-taking kind. “You really didn’t have to come all the way out here. I’m fine. Totally fine.”
He doesn’t argue. Which makes me nervous. Instead, he opens the door the rest of the way and waits for me to step out. Which I don’t. “I assume you’re using the Aerosmith definition of fine. Since you are a heavy metal groupie. You know, fucked up, insecure—”
“Neurotic and emotional,” I finish for him, punctuating it with a dry twist of my mouth. “Technically, Aerosmith is hard rock. And I meant fine fine. The Webster Dictionary definition.”
“It’s okay if you’re not. We all have bad days.”
“Do you? Because you always seem so well-adjusted for—” I flip my hand toward him, then draw it back, wincing at my own cruelty. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s okay. I guess I am pretty well-adjusted for a guy who left his arm in pieces in the desert. A guy whose only kid died on his watch.”
He smiles sadly, and I sink back into my seat with a sigh.
“Aren’t you angry?” I ask.
Sawyer says nothing. He moves with purpose, shutting my door and walking around to the other side, sliding into the passenger seat. Definitely not the hint-taking kind then. I flash him a look, equal parts dread and expectation.
“Since you’re obviously not coming out . . . and yeah, I’m pissed as hell sometimes. You know, after Noah died, I wanted to reenlist. To be downrange again. I needed to go somewhere. Anywhere. Afghanistan, Iraq, Timbuktu—I didn’t care. As long as I could blow some motherfuckers up.”
I blink against the harshness of it. But it resonates deep down. The need to watch someone else’s life go boom. “I didn’t even know that was possible. With an injury like yours.”
“It’s rare. But it happens. You have to apply for a waiver that gets reviewed by a bunch of higher-ups. Anyway, some desk jockey said I was too messed up in the head to go back. That I’d be a risk to the other guys. That I wasn’t doing it for the right reasons. Hell if I know what those are.”
“That’s sort of the way I feel about doing therapy again. Like I’d be more harm than good to anybody. But sometimes I wish I could get lost in someone else’s problems for a while.”
My stomach turns. Because tomorrow is Tuesday. The day Wendall Grady promised he’d come back. He hadn’t seemed the sort of man to shirk his promises. Or change his mind. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad they wouldn’t take you, Lieutenant Sawyer.”
My hand makes its way to his thigh. I glare at it like the traitor it’s just proven itself to be.
“Me too. I realized it’d be the last thing Noah would want. Me putting my life—and my buddies’ lives—on the line out of anger. Because I couldn’t just man up and forgive myself.”
In the silence, our fingers intertwine, and he side-eyes me, his face brightening. “Wanna know what I do now when I get really hacked off?” He takes his hand away and reaches into his pocket, then scrolls through pictures on his cell phone until he finds the one. “I look at this.”
A little blond boy dressed as Spiderman grins at me from the screen. He’s carrying a pumpkin so stuffed with candy that a mini Snickers bar has gone over the edge and tumbled to the sidewalk below. His blue-sky eyes and mischievous grin belong to Sawyer. “This was one week before he died. The last picture I’ve got. He slept with his costume on that night. I can’t be mad at this picture. He was like joy personified, you know?”
My throat tightens as I nod, thinking of Dakota. All her Halloweens. The princess. The penguin. The zombie cheerleader. “I just need some kind of closure. I can’t even look at Dakota’s pictures without thinking of him. Without imagining what he did to her. He’s tainted every memory, and I don’t even know his name. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.”
Sawyer pulls me to him in an awkward embrace. There’s the console between us and the stinging cold metal of his left arm against my side. But it’s perfect too, and I inhale him. Earth and pine needles. “Well, you would know,” he teases, his voice muffled in my hair.
I laugh, but it feels like a deep breath. A cleansing one. And then, I hear myself say it. “Do you want to come inside?”
Sawyer pulls back to look at me, uncertain, and I turn away. Desire and shame and the whole messed-up night swirl inside me, distilling to one pure emotion. The one I know best even if it makes no sense. Even if it’s misdirected.
“Really? You’re saying no. After all the times you’ve begged me to—”
“To go out to dinner with me. And I haven’t begged you to do anything.” He tries to touch me, but I curl against the door suddenly and unreasonably, wishing I had just gotten out of the car ages ago. “You’ve also made it pretty clear you didn’t want anything serious. Or frankly to even lay eyes on me beyond a goddamn parking lot until those—I’m guessing—drunken texts you sent last night. So forgive me if I’m a little confused.”
He’s right. He’s so right. I know he’s right. “Whatever.”
I have a flash of a petulant Dakota, her tone heavy with sarcasm, and the lump is back in my throat again. Which only confirms how right he is.
“Mollie, c’mon. This isn’t a no. It’s a not tonight. It’s a one step at a time. Are we clear about that?”
I fling open the door and step out, looming down to growl at him. “Crystal clear.”
Then I stomp toward the house, me and my lonely shadow, until both of us are swallowed into the belly of the beast.
Chapter
Nine
(Tuesday, October 2, 2018)
I can’t stop looking at Wendall’s black Stetson, positioned on the table between us. Me, in my posh ergo chair, channeling my long-lost doctor self. Wendall, all loose skin stretched over bone, contorted on the sofa. One toothpick leg crossed over the other.
The hat is a line in the sand, a point of demarcation. Without it, I might forget who I’m supposed to be. The reason I woke early this morning, sober as a judge. The reason I set the alarm for the first time in months. Put on lipstick and a shirt with buttons, pants without a drawstring. I even flat-ironed my hair.
Because if I’m going to do this again, I want to do it all the way. To prove to myself I’m better than Sawyer. I can be downrange again, taking fire in the trenches. Bring it on.
So far, Wendall has played his part, rolling up early—but not too early—in his spiffy Cadillac. Summoning me with two delicate beeps of the horn. And offering me a gracious smile as he followed me inside and penned his name at the bottom of my treatment form.
But that hat is strangely disquieting. As surely as I try to keep my eyes from it, it draws me in, constantly flitting into my periphery. Like a broken-winged blackbird, unable to take flight. Or one of Luciana’s tarot cards, facedown and waiting to reveal my fate.
“I appreciate you seein’ me. Wasn’t sure if you would, to be honest. I thought maybe I spooked ya good last week.”
“It takes a lot to spook me these days,” I say. Like
guys in VWs, yearbook photos, hood ornaments. Cowboy hats. “Besides, you piqued my curiosity.”
He coughs, a dry, relentless hacking that judders his whole body and sends the stench of tobacco wafting. I offer my regrets to the sofa, which has no doubt been sprayed with wintergreen Skoal. “Did I?”
“I don’t usually begin this way.” Nothing about this seems usual. “With a question pertaining to myself. But, if you don’t mind . . .”
“Not at all. I’m a bit unorthodox myself.”
I take a quick breath to steady myself. I don’t look at the hat. Especially not at the brim. It takes the shape of a sinister smile. “How did you know about my daughter?”
“Well, I’m an old man. I still read the papers. And I remembered you.”
“Remembered?” I hope he can’t hear the wariness in my voice, the way it creaks and cracks, like ice in a springtime thaw. “Do I know you?” There. Better.
“From Napa State Hospital.” He tilts his head, waiting. He wants me to ask any one of the hundred questions ripening in my brain. But I wait too. In here, I can outwait anyone. It feels good to be a part of the game again. This chess match of therapy. “I wasn’t a patient,” he says, finally. “If that’s what you were thinkin’. I worked there as an orderly for fifteen years.”
I search his face for a hint of recognition. For something familiar in those loose bags under his eyes, the creases in his forehead, the bit of stubble above his thin upper lip. His earnest expression. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe we ever met.”
He shrugs. Which, of course, is not a yes or a no. “I retired a few years after you started work, I believe. The patients, they always seemed to like you. And when I saw the story in the Chronicle about your little girl, I followed it every day, hoping for you. But you must’ve realized, working with the kinds of people we did, what the outcome would be.”
I leave that one alone. It feels dangerous to admit how hope can take hold, how cruel it can be. How merciless. And in its absence, a whirling black vortex not unlike Glory Hole that had sucked me under and spit out my bones.
“So last week you told me you’d come here to unburden yourself. To push some stones off your chest, I believe. Tell me more about that.”
He rights himself on the cushions and nods. “I agree. Let’s get right down to brass tacks. Neither of us has time to waste. It all started back in Nam. The wretched things I saw over there. The wretched things I did. It’s like napalm to the soul. Nobody came out the same way they went in.”
My father had always said war was like a blade. It excised the soft parts from him. And he’d come back all teeth and sinew and metal fragments. He’d even let me press on the spot where the doctors had left a small piece of shrapnel in his calf. “How did it change you?”
“Obscenely.”
I sit back, contemplating that, his hat fully in view again. I know better than to ask the question my twelve-year-old self hadn’t been able to resist. Did you ever kill anybody over there, Daddy? Which had gotten me a smack to the side of the head and a slurred diatribe about showing some goddamned respect for a veteran. But that word—obscenely—and the way Wendall had said it, with a gratuitous raise of his thinning brows, demands exploration.
“But,” he begins before me. “Change might be the wrong word. I prefer reveal. The war revealed me—my true colors—like one of them paint-with-water pictures the kiddies used to like. Before they got suckered into video games and cell phones.”
“Revealed in what way?” I ask, trying not to sound too curious. Neutral, always. Neutral and encouraging.
“Before the war, I’d been engaged to marry Clotilda Abbott. A real sweetheart, that one.”
“And after?”
He shakes his head. “We married, alright. I pinned that goddamned Purple Heart to my uniform, and we took our vows at Holy Hope Baptist Church. But I kept expectin’ God to strike me down ’cause I was somebody different on the inside. Somebody she didn’t know. Like old Charlie got inside of me and gobbled up all the good stuff.”
I fend off a shiver. Remind myself he’s a dying old man. Skin brittle as fish scales. Bones I could crack with one solid kick. A dying old man who said he could help me. “How were you different?”
He waves off the question with a scarecrow hand. “Tilda’s been dead going on twenty-five years now. Her kidneys never did work right. And the doctors said she was too sickly to have a baby. I always wanted a son of my own. A little Grady. But let’s be honest, I would’ve messed up a kid somethin’ awful.”
“What makes you say that?”
He chuckles like he knows what I’m thinking. That my dad had screwed me up royally.
“You know how it is. The apple don’t fall far. And this tree is rotten through and through. Anyway, I took care of Tilda the best I could. I tried to make her happy. But a man has needs.”
I feel a little silly. Infidelity. That’s what he’s here to confess. Nothing more. But the relief doesn’t hit me the way I expect. My hands are still clasped tight in my lap, keeping a death grip on each other.
“Needs?”
“Needs,” he repeats. It sounds like a dirty word. Looks like it too, the way his wiry eyebrows arch. “I’d call us dogs, but that would be an insult—to the dogs. Anyway, I don’t need to tell you how men are. You’ve got experience.”
He may as well have punched me in the throat. My words stick there like a shard of bone. How could he know that?
Wendall happily fills the silence, plugging along as if I’m not reeling. “Yep. Napa State could be a real education on the male gender. Now, those were some sick puppies. Am I right? Oh, shoot. There I go again, disparaging the doggies.”
“It sounds as if you have quite a negative view of men.” I’m relieved I manage to croak out some therapist mumbo jumbo. But Wendall doesn’t seem to notice. He looks off into the corner, as if he’s gone somewhere else in his mind.
“We did meet one time, you know. There. At Napa State. There was an incident on the night shift. One of the patients had knocked a nurse unconscious in the day room. They were supposed to keep that door locked after hours, but whoever’s job it was had forgotten or not shown up or just been plain lazy. You know how understaffed they were. It’s all about money, money, money.”
It takes me a second to catch up to him again, to stop chasing my tail. We did meet one time. And when I do, there’s this: A furtive flash of movement behind the dayroom door. I’d walked a few steps past, too tired to notice. I’d already slogged through an eleven-hour shift. By the time I’d run back, Karen Dalton’s eye had swollen shut, and she wasn’t moving.
“You looked tired that day. Probably that’s why you don’t remember me being there.”
I wait again, certain he’s about to expose his king. Whatever it is that’s brought him here. To me, of all people. But he shifts toward the edge of the sofa and reaches for the hat. He’s decided without me. It’s time to go. Game over.
“It’s a good thing I was, though. Poor Nurse Dalton was about to find herself in a very compromising position. She never did thank me properly.”
It wasn’t the first attack I’d witnessed at the hospital nor the last. So it takes me a while. But after I sift through the years of pummeling fists, broken arms, and blood spatter on linoleum, I find him. A middle-aged orderly about Wendall’s height, with bright eyes that had practically glowed in the dark room. He’d been kneeling beside Nurse Dalton when I’d burst in. The patient who’d attacked her had already bolted.
I want to shout, I remember you! But instead I ask, “Are you leaving? We’ve only just started.”
“My stamina’s not what it used to be. This damn cancer . . . I swear I sleep like a cat. Sixteen hours a day.”
“Are you sure that’s it? I wouldn’t be a very good therapist if I didn’t point out that you avoided my question. About your needs. And now you�
�re hightailing it out of my office.”
He shakes a long finger at me. “You are a sharp cookie. Turns out unburdening isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. Now that I’m here with you. Face-to-face. The stones . . . well, they aren’t pretty.”
“Would you like to come back again tomorrow?” I stop short of begging him. Please, you said you could help me. Because looking at him, I can’t imagine how. “We can take it one stone at a time. Start with the little ones first.”
“Now you’re talkin’. I know it’s a tad unorthodox, like you said. But maybe we could bend the rules a little. If that’s okay with you, of course, Doc.”
“As long as we stick to a schedule.” My halfhearted attempt to maintain some kind of professionalism. Some semblance of a therapeutic frame, patched together with matchsticks and Scotch tape.
“A schedule it is then.”
He perches the hat on his knee so I can see it clearly now. What had me captivated. “Are those . . .” I point at the edge of the felt, the little indentions in the shape of—what else? A sickle. “. . . bite marks?”
He holds it up, squinting to inspect it more closely. “Well, I’ll be damn. I reckon they are. I’ve had this hat for thirty some odd years. Used to bring it on my hunting trips. Some kind of critter must’ve grabbed ahold of it. You never can tell what a warm body will do when it’s fightin’ to stay that way.”
I imagine tipping my own king in resignation, the sound of Wendall’s gravelly voice scratching in my ear. Checkmate.
Chapter
Ten
“¡Ándale!” Luciana whoops and giggles, extending her hands out of the Jeep’s sunroof, her ringed fingers splayed in the wind as I pilot us down the freeway toward Allendale. “A girl could get used to a ride like this. Especially compared to a beater like mine.”
I shake my head at her with mock disapproval. “Don’t bad-mouth Boludo. You’ve already given him a horrible complex with that nickname. It’s no wonder he’s always breaking down on you.”
Shadows Among Us Page 8
