The Merciful Scar

by Rebecca St. James

  “Emma, shoot!” I screamed.

  She didn’t.

  “Shoot her!”

  The bear advanced but the gun was still, held in the hands of a statue that threatened to crumble.

  If the bear didn’t tear it apart first.

  My mind screamed, Run, Kirsten! Run! and I did, straight for Emma. With the bear close enough for me to hear her jaw popping, I snatched the gun from Emma’s hands. My own hands shook as I pulled back the lever. Beside me, Emma covered her eyes and gave a tortured cry. I shoved her behind me and groped for Frankie’s voice again.

  “. . . shoot until the gun was empty . . . it would have to be in her neck or head.”

  The gun that had always seemed so heavy in my hands was now a mere toy against this animal whose eye was larger than the barrel. I pointed it without bothering with the sight. She was closer than any target I had ever shot at.

  I can’t do this! I can’t do this!

  Yes, you can. Frankie said . . . shoot until the gun is empty.

  I moved my finger to the trigger and squeezed. The shot cracked Emma’s statue.

  “Patrick!” she screamed. “No!”

  The mother bear wagged her head, eyes furious. I’d done nothing but tick her off. I pulled back the lever and once more squeezed the trigger, and again Emma screamed Patrick’s name. On my third shot she went to the ground. The bear was still standing, still coming for me, lessening the distance between us and horror.

  Three more rounds. I only had three more chances.

  I jammed the lever back and tried to take aim at her chest. The shot didn’t seem to faze her but I didn’t wait. Again—cha-ching—just the way Andy had taught me—I fired and saw the bear flinch, as if I’d attacked her with a slingshot.

  One more. One more and then we had to run.

  With Emma bordering on hysteria, screaming for Patrick, and the bear so close I could smell her hungry breath, I fired my last round, into the front of her neck. The gun was empty. The bear gave a hideous roaring gasp. Emma’s screams went on, painful and raw. I could do nothing but grab her and run and hope that one of those shots gave us enough time to get to the truck.

  “Come on—run with me!” I cried.

  Emma let me pull her only a few steps before she clawed at my arm and cried, “I can’t leave Patrick! I can’t leave him!”

  “We’ll come back for him!” I said.

  In that moment that Emma wavered, I got her around the waist and pressed her against my side and ran, hard, clumsily, but away from the grizzly. Emma sobbed and wailed all the way, and when we reached the truck and I let go of her long enough to get the door open, she tried to stumble back to the path, still screaming Patrick’s name. I hurled myself after her and brought both of us to the ground. The gun bounced away with a spray of pebbles—and Emma froze, eyes bulging at it.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll come back for Patrick, I promise. Come on, Corporal. Let’s get you in the truck.”

  By the time I pulled into the driveway I was starting to believe Emma and I were on a battlefield. She rode with her upper body folded into her legs, hands behind her neck, and cried and cried and cried for Patrick. When Andy jerked the door open, I was crying too.

  I hadn’t been able to call ahead to Joseph and Frankie because it had taken all I had to keep the truck on the road and hold on to Emma in case she tried to eject herself. Now I said to Andy, “She thinks we’re in Afghanistan. Call Joseph.”

  “Let’s get her in the house first.”

  It took both of us to carry the struggling Emma inside and get her into one of the wide armchairs. Andy made the call while I tried to wrap her in a throw, telling her I was a medic, but she kept straining to get up, insisting hysterically that she had to get back to Patrick. The only thing we had going for us was that she was wearing out and her trembling arms had turned to noodles.

  Frankie arrived first and went straight to her as if no one else was in the room. She took Emma’s face in her hands and spoke to her in a voice that would have soothed the wretched bear herself. Frankie was here. It was okay.

  “You were strong enough to survive the real trauma, Emma,” she said. “God brought you through it. You’re strong enough to let God bring you through the healing too.”

  She said it again, and then again, until Emma blinked as if she were waking up in a strange place.

  “You’re safe,” Frankie said.

  Emma looked around, eyes searching, I was sure, for something she recognized. Her gaze found me sitting on the table next to Frankie. With a cry, Emma came forward in the chair and threw her arms around me. And sobbed.

  I held her, but I didn’t know what else I should do. I was sure my face looked helpless as I stared over Emma’s head at Frankie.

  “It’s all right,” Frankie said. “That’s a healing kind of weeping.”

  It did seem that the longer I held Emma, the less she shook, in spite of the sobbing that no doubt came from some dark place.

  When Joseph arrived, sprouting alfalfa from his shirt and mopping rivulets of sweat from his neck, Emma slid from my arms into his and began to babble as if a dam had broken inside her. I wasn’t sure I should be there, but when I whispered that to Frankie, she patted my leg and whispered, “I think Emma wants you to stay.”

  I wasn’t sure about Emma, but one look at Andy and I knew I shouldn’t leave him. His face was ghostly.

  “I saw it again, Joseph,” Emma said. “I saw it all today. I was there and it was happening again.”

  “It didn’t happen again,” Joseph said. “It’s never going to happen again—not if you get it out.”

  Emma closed her eyes. I knew she was seeing the pain, and my heart broke.

  “We were just trying to save the Afghani children—Patrick and me—the area where they lived was about to be occupied. All we wanted to do was move the mother and babies to safety. That’s all!”

  “And what happened?” Joseph said. “Tell me what happened.”

  Emma curled over herself as if she were in physical pain to match the torture in her memory. “I got a mother and two children out and Patrick told me to go on and he’d get the rest.” She opened her eyes and clung to Joseph with them. “I was holding a toddler and pushing the mother who was holding her baby and I heard . . . I screamed for Patrick to get out of there and I saw him running toward me with a baby. And then”—Emma pulled her arms around herself and gasped as if the memory had ripped her breath from her—“and then the mortar hit—and then he wasn’t there. There was nothing.” She trembled toward silence. “All they ever found was his dog tags.”

  The cry I heard next was my own. Frankie took my hand and led me out to the kitchen. Behind us, Emma was once again sobbing in Joseph’s arms.

  “That was hard to hear,” Frankie said.

  “I hated it for her. Wasn’t it enough the first time without having to go through it over and over?”

  Frankie brushed back a tendril of hair that was tear-stuck to my face. “You are the soul of compassion, my friend. So hang on to this: we have been praying for Emma to be able to get this out for over four months. This means she’s free to begin to heal. And that’s of God, Kirsten. Hard as it is, this is good.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  But if that was what it looked like to finally face the thing that trapped your soul, I wasn’t sure I could do it. I wasn’t as strong as Emma.

  “Kirsten?”

  Frankie gave my hand a shake.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Did something happen on your hike that might have triggered this?”

  I sank against the kitchen counter. “Oh, Sister,” I said, “you have no idea.”

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  You were strong enough to survive the real trauma. You’re strong enough to let God bring you through the healing too. #TheMercifulScar

  Chapter

  SEVENTEEN

  Emma stayed at the main house that night. Fra
nkie offered me a room too so I wouldn’t have to be alone at the Cloister, but I declined. I’d just spent a half hour convincing the wildlife conservation people that if I hadn’t shot the bear, both Emma and I would have probably met the same fate as the contents of the backpack they found the cub devouring a few yards from his mother’s wounded body.

  Obviously very concerned, the little ingrate.

  Joseph finally intervened on my behalf.

  Intervened? He practically escorted them out at gunpoint.

  “You said yourself the animal will probably live,” Joseph told them. “The girl saved you six more weeks of chasing the two of them down with a tranquilizer gun.”

  Then he actually did all but escort them out at gunpoint.

  By then I was so tired my bones ached and I just wanted to be by myself. No one seemed to be concerned that I might go to the Cloister and break out a razor. Even if I’d wanted to, I didn’t have the energy.

  I missed Emma the minute I walked in the door, but other than that the silence welcomed me. That and the promise of a hot shower and a cup of Joseph’s blend with Hildegarde’s cream to help me breathe away the tumult that had been today.

  My, my, look who’s self-nurturing.

  Who would have thought, huh?

  I barely had my sweats on and my tea brewed to perfection when someone tapped on the front door.

  Look first. If it’s Ranger Rick, climb out the back window.

  I absolutely would have, but it was Andy who stood under the porch light, shoulders hunched as if the first blizzard had just hit. I couldn’t tell whether his chill was from inside or out. I slipped out to join him and handed him my tea.

  “You look like you need this more than I do,” I said.

  “No—”

  “Your teeth are chattering. Drink it.”

  He cupped his palms gratefully around the mug and took a sip that made him wince.

  “Yeah, it’s hot, but it’ll warm you up. You want a blanket?”

  Andy shook his head, but he did take the rocker I offered him. I let him sip until his shoulders sank away from his earlobes.

  “I’m sorry I can’t invite you in,” I said.

  “I know the rules. It’s okay.”

  I curled into a ball in the rocker facing him.

  “If you’re too cold—”

  “I’m fine.” I smiled at him. “I live on a sheep ranch in Montana. This is nothin’.”

  Andy tried the grin, but it wavered. “Is that what it takes to get free, Bo?” he said.

  “You mean Emma?”

  He nodded.

  “I was asking myself the same thing,” I said. “I didn’t get very far though. It scared me too much.”

  “It terrified me.”

  He did look haunted. Dark smudges formed half-moons under his eyes and his skin was pallid. And yet there were still those shoulders and that strong jaw.

  “Whatever it is, you can handle it,” I said. “You’ve got family, you’ve got God . . . you’ve got me.”

  “That’s a lot.”

  “And you’ve got you,” I said. “I should be half as strong as you are.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “No,” I said.

  Andy put the mug on the porch floor and leaned into the space between us, his hands on the arms of my chair. “Who took down a grizzly bear and brought home a woman in the middle of a PTSD crisis and stood up to the wildlife inquisition all in one day?”

  “That’s different,” I said.

  He looked around as if he were clueless. “You gonna explain that to me?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, ya do, Bo.”

  His eyes held on to mine.

  “That was all outside of me. I guess I can handle anything if it’s not about me.” I pressed my hand to my throat. “It’s this stuff that I wimp out on.”

  “Is that where it lives, in your throat?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mine’s right here.” He pumped his fist lightly against his chest. “I can’t tell you how many times this past year I thought I was having a heart attack.”

  “That’s why I used to cut,” I said. “To try to let the pain out.”

  “I get that.”

  Andy rocked back and ran his hand through his hair. I’d been right about the cause of the spikes. They stood up on his head in boyish disarray.

  “Cutting doesn’t work anymore,” I said.

  “Neither does denial.”

  “Then I guess that answers your question. What Emma went through today—that is what it takes to get free.”

  “It took her a long time to get there.”

  “She had three months on us.”

  Andy grinned. “So do we just hang out for a couple more months and see what happens?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I was afraid you were gonna say that.” He scooted forward again until our knees were touching. “You want to pray with me?”

  “I’m not very good at it yet,” I said.

  “What does that even mean?” He put up a hand. “Never mind. I know that’s the default Bo Response to anything she’s not perfect at. I got a flash for ya: there is no perfect way to pray.”

  “Then . . . the Lord be with you,” I said.

  We prayed long after the sun left us in silhouette. Andy prayed out loud more than me, although I felt moved to murmur along. When we left our prayers with God there were still hours of night left and we spent them talking and being quiet so Andy could point out the sounds for me. A coyote’s yip. Avila’s guardian bark. A low moan from Hildegarde.

  “Doesn’t she ever sleep?” I said.

  “Too ornery. Speaking of sleep, don’t you need to get some?”

  “You can go if you’re tired,” I said. “I just want to sit here for a while.”

  So he sat with me and we talked more and listened more. Somewhere between the whispers and the silences, Andy tilted my chin up with his finger and kissed me. It was a whisper and a silence and a prayer . . . and I didn’t want it to end.

  When the sun stretched its first sleepy arm over the mountains again, Andy left. I stayed on the porch and watched Montana wake up and notice that Kirsten Petersen was in love. It did take note. That had to be what made those orange tongues of sunlight wag in the sky. They spoke as Andy did, with a warmth that assured me it was going to be okay. I could do this.

  When I stood up I whispered one more prayer: “If You’ll help me, I will.”

  Over the next four days, deep into the middle of July, Andy and I spent every possible moment together, as well as some we coaxed out of the impossible. Kisses were stolen behind towers of hay bales, hugs among the sheep. It was the looks I treasured the most though. The grins tossed back and forth in the barn. The secret smiles exchanged across the supper table. The soft, open eyes that simply met and crinkled and made the rest of the world disappear.

  But we didn’t meet on the porch at night again. I wanted to keep our romance away from Emma, who was mourning the loss of Patrick inside the Cloister. The quiet weeping, the waves of memory, the emptiness where her grief had once been stuffed away—that all had to be hard enough without us building a new love right under her nose.

  Emma’s and my Improving the Moment time was also sacred, and Andy got that. I told Emma I didn’t expect coffee and talk to improve these sad moments, but she said somehow they did. She still made the coffee and we still rocked side by side and I still marveled at her strength.

  “You saved my life,” she suddenly said one afternoon. “A soldier never forgets that.”

  That pretty much says it all.

  It did. So I just nodded and took the hand she offered me.

  It was Joseph who helped Emma most, that was clear. Every time she came back from riding on horseback with him somewhere on those thirty-eight hundred acres, she seemed a little more sure, even in her sorrow. Every time Andy saw them, he grew a little more troubled.

  “I�
�m really trying to remember, Bo,” he told me more than once. “But I still don’t get why I can barely look that incredible human being in the eyes.”

  We got part of our answer one afternoon about five days after Emma’s breakthrough.

  Andy and I were bucking hay and I was getting a little cocky about the whole tossing thing. Even I could see that I’d developed some biceps on my previously scrawny arms. So I decided to impress Andy with a one-hand-on-the-string pitch and only got the bale as far as the tailgate. It bounced off, broke open, and split into an inviting pile on the ground.

  “That is screaming to be jumped into,” Andy said.

  I howled and beat him to it, but he was there before I got the next giggle out. Holding me around the waist with one steel-band arm, he grabbed a hunk of hay with the other and dropped it over my head.

  I shrieked, “You are toast!” and rolled away from him. I now had the perfect behind-his-back opportunity to get him good. Still shrieking, I wrapped my arms around both of his and held on tight. Obviously I wasn’t going to keep him pinned for long—he would have me doing a somersault over him any second—

  “Let me go!”

  “Are you serious? A lightweight could get out of this!”

  He had to say it a second time before I realized his voice was thin and frightened.

  I pulled my arms away and watched his face writhe. He was having another memory, but unlike Emma, he didn’t hold it back. The pieces came out in a torrent of images.

  “A man picked me up and held me too tight—he held me all wrong—he didn’t know how to carry me—I was screaming—”

  “‘Let me go,’” I said.

  As he’d done before, Andy pulled his legs into his chest and held on. “Bo,” he said.

  “I’m here.”

  “It was so real. It was so real and then it got away.” He looked at me, eyes still bright with fear. “I couldn’t tell if it was Joseph holding me. But it was Joseph yelling.”

  “What was he yelling?”

  “Stop. He was yelling stop.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “It’s so confusing. He was yelling and I was crying and someone was under—I don’t know. I can’t see it.” Andy crossed his hands over his chest. “It just hurts, Bo. Right here. It hurts.”