Day Three

by Patricia Spencer

  Brenna, it seemed, was complicated.

  Still. Daniel had finally taken an interest in a woman who was alive.

  His story got to where he and Brenna had hidden with the children on their way to the airport. She calculated that would be the night before he was airlifted out. That was where he got butted in the face with a rifle.

  She told him about Dr. Alberti’s theory, but all he could remember was thinking he was going to die there.

  What happened between the apartment and Ancona was a blank.

  Any kind of psychological debriefing was a process. Normally, it was broken into small bites, to give a person time to reflect. Today had been too much for Daniel, but it tormented him that he couldn’t figure out how he had left things with Brenna, so he had insisted on working his way through his experiences.

  She slowed, seeing the sign for the pensione. An iron gate gave onto a narrow passageway to the interior. She swung the gate open and trudged in alongside an ancient stone wall.

  Alden opened the room door to her knock. Freshly-bathed and dressed in clean slacks and shirt, he gave her a kiss and asked about Daniel.

  “We talked,” she said, kicking off her shoes and unbuttoning her blouse. She was eager for a shower, her nightgown, and a good long sleep in a bed. Alden was taking the next shift.

  “Mom using her clinical skills? Already?”

  “He was having nightmares.”

  “Good woman.”

  When she emerged from her shower twenty minutes later, Alden was sitting at the little writing table in the corner of the room, surfing the internet on his laptop. His mouth was set in a hard thin line.

  “I did a search on Brenna Rease,” he said. “That woman has a sordid past.”

  “Shut it off,” Margaret snapped. “That woman, as you call her, saved our son’s life. Stop picking through her history. Whatever else she’s done, she also did this.”

  Alden’s mouth puckered. She could see he wasn’t finished with this topic. For now, however, he closed the laptop.

  She sat on the edge of the bed, regretting her irritability.

  He joined her on the bed, and slipped his fingers between hers. “Have you eaten anything?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head in dismay at herself. She usually managed to sequester the burden of what she was exposed to, from her relationships at home.

  “Must have been some conversation.”

  “Oh, Alden.” She leaned her head on his shoulder.

  “Come on, sweetheart. Lie down. You need to sleep. You’re exhausted.”

  “Will you lie with me a bit, even though I was snappish with you?”

  “Miss a chance to play spoons with my best wife, just because she hissed a little?” he asked, opening the covers for her and sliding in beside her. “I don’t think so.”

  “You’ve only ever had one wife,” she muttered, drawing his arm around her waist.

  He pulled her snug and tucked his knees behind hers. “Once you’ve found the best, my love, you stop looking.”

  After his mother left, Daniel was given a bed bath, a hair wash, and a shave. He was almost feeling human. Dr. Alberti stopped by and put him through her little battery of neurological tests—made him draw interlocking pentagons, follow her fingers with his eyes, count backwards, remember three items, the usual.

  “You pass,” she announced at the end. “For this, we inflict more pain on you, and put you out on the street.”

  He gave her a questioning look.

  “We straighten your nose. The swelling has gone down enough, now. Tomorrow, we discharge you.”

  “Great,” he said. A nose job sounded as fun as having had that garden hose pulled out of his dick. “When’s this next round of torture?”

  “Later tonight,” she said, her eyes twinkling. “The other patients will be asleep and won’t hear you scream.”

  His dad showed up in time to keep him company during the procedure, which was performed under local anesthetic. “Much better,” he pronounced, critically eyeing his face afterwards. “But don’t expect it to look like it did before.”

  Daniel was given an ice pack and returned to his room. He woke twice during the night, for more pain killers and ice, and slept fitfully in between. His brain was tumbling through memories of Kavsak, preoccupied about Brenna.

  His mother arrived at first light, looking refreshed. She set a hot coffee and a bakery bag on Daniel’s over-the-bed table.

  “Great,” he said. “I’m starving.”

  His dad declined an offer to eat with them, excused himself with a kiss for his mom and a pat on the shoulder for him, and headed off to get some proper sleep.

  Daniel opened the bag and pulled out a brioche.

  “Gracious,” she said. “Your nose is straight again.” She tilted her head, studying him more closely. “More or less.”

  “There goes the GQ look,” he said, licking his fingertip, picking the fallen crumbs off his sheet and popping them into his mouth. “I aced Dr. Alberti’s neuro exam. She’s discharging me this morning.”

  “That’s wonderful. I’m so happy.” She smiled, reveling in his progress. “Oh, my goodness!”

  “What?”

  “What are you going to wear?” She jumped up, mumbling something about having seen his clothes. She threw the closet door open. There was a clear plastic bag on the shelf, with his jeans and tweed jacket balled up in it. She brought the sack back to his bed, plopped it on the mattress beside him, and unknotted the bag.

  Kavsak wafted out.

  His mother tugged the jacket out of the bag and started shaking it loose.

  “Oh, Jesus,” he muttered, plucking it out of her hands. I made love to Brenna on that. He’d put it between her and the floor, the one protective thing he could do for her. He drew the scruffy fabric to his face and inhaled the smell of that dark green apartment, of Brenna, of his fear.

  Observing his shift, his mother withdrew silently, and sat down.

  His senses reeled. In his mind, he saw Brenna step forward, felt her slide her hand over his shoulder, felt the brush of her breasts. He closed his eyes. Christ, the softness of her, the yielding, the sound of her passion in his ear. The courage. Brenna had laid herself open to him. She had given him the gift of herself. Well, if that’s all you want. He remembered not being able to get enough of her. Despairing because he had found her and she had given herself, and now they were going to die. Brenna, ever one to fight tears, had clung to him and cried at the height of passion.

  Don’t leave me.

  Never, he had promised.

  He dropped the jacket into his lap. She hadn’t delivered him to the Herc and gone back to her life without him. He wasn’t just some man to her. Somewhere in that troubled heart of hers, she loved him.

  He lifted his eyes, and found his mother’s. “Something has happened to her,” he said. “She isn’t here because something happened to her.”

  And three days had passed, three eternal days when bad could turn to worse.

  He pushed his table out of the way and dropped his feet over the side of his bed. “I have to find her.”

  Daniel took a taxi to the UNPROFOR base, wearing clothes he borrowed from his father, only peripherally aware of the red-roofed buildings and shimmering Adriatic Sea outside the car window.

  At the cargo terminal, the thick-necked man who had checked him and Brenna in the week before sat behind the counter, his beefy fingers pecking at a computer keyboard like a pigeon in a psych experiment. Gordon, Brenna had called him. She remembered people’s names. No one was invisible to her.

  “Gordon,” he said.

  The sergeant looked up from his monitor, saw Daniel’s face and executed a classic double-take. “Playing the nets without a goalie mask, eh?” He rolled his chair back and approached the counter. “What can I do you for?”

  “I don’t know if you remember me—I came through about a week ago with Brenna Rease.”

  “Yah,” he sai
d, “and then you came back out on a stretcher about three days ago. Check you in, check you out. That’s my job, whether you’re conscious or not.”

  “I need to talk to Colonel Luc Morriseau. He’s still holding the airport, isn’t he?”

  Gordon straightened his shoulders, an unconscious show of pride in his unit. “Of course.”

  “You guys have a way of talking to him, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. For UNPROFOR business.”

  Daniel pulled his wallet out of the inner pocket of the jacket he had borrowed from his dad, and extracted the business card Luc gave him when they first met. “I’m preparing a story for broadcast. Colonel Morriseau gave me his card and told me to call him if I needed clarification on anything.”

  Gordon took the crumpled card, verified it was his commander’s, and rubbed his chin. “Oh, I don’t know that this was how he meant you to get in touch—”

  “He’s in Kavsak. I can’t exactly call him from a local phone booth.”

  Gordon hesitated.

  “EBS, my network, broadcasts to more than 350 million viewers. I don’t want to risk misrepresenting the Canadian peace-keeping forces because I couldn’t get a few minutes with the Colonel.”

  “Have a seat,” Gordon said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The sergeant came back in a few minutes and had Daniel follow him to an unused office with an empty desk and chair. He punched a button on the telephone, spoke to someone at the other end, and held out the handset. “They’ve patched you through. The Colonel will be on in a minute.”

  “Thank you, Gordon.”

  Daniel sat down and put the handset to his ear. Gordon left the room. The line crackled. It was open at the other end. He heard indistinct voices, and a backdrop of artillery. The phone clattered as it was picked up.

  “Morriseau.”

  “Luc?”

  “Oui.”

  Daniel pictured him, striding confidently across the crowded terminal that first day he had arrived in Kavsak. He remembered Luc’s ill-concealed desire for Brenna. Today, Daniel had called him on the pretext of business just to get him on the line. But he wasn’t calling as some journalist. His relationship with Brenna had evolved. He was calling as the other man. The usurper.

  And just to make it interesting, he wanted Luc to help him find her.

  “This is Daniel Ellsworth. I came through the airport with Brenna Rease a few—”

  “I know who you are,” Luc said curtly. “My medics put you on my aircraft. I take it you lived.”

  “Uh…I did,” he said, taken aback by Luc’s curt manner.

  “You came through with Brenna, and now you’re calling on business.” Luc sounded angry, disgusted.

  “I’m calling because I’m trying to find her. She didn’t get on the plane with me, and I’m concerned that something has happened to her.”

  “You’re worried, professionally, because you have a broadcast to produce and you need her for that.”

  “No,” he corrected. “I’m worried because I’m in a relationship with her and it matters to me how and where she is.”

  Luc was silent. Daniel felt the airwaves burning.

  “Luc—” He didn’t use Morriseau’s rank. This was man-to-man. Personal. “I got a concussion. After a certain point, I have no recollection of what happened. But I do know that she meant to come with me.”

  “Daniel—” Luc said, sighing, his tone more kindly. “Brenna stepped on a land mine.”

  Grief sucker-punched him. “No,” he said, dropping his face into his hand. “Oh, God, no.”

  “Jasha Subasic and his men found her. Not dead. But not good.”

  “Oh, Jesus. Where is she?” He flashed on the Kavsak hospital, on the woman brought in that day with her foot dangling, of the horrendous amputation without anesthesia. “I’ll come get her.” He’d find a way to get there, airlift or no airlift.

  “Don’t come to Kavsak.”

  “The hell I won’t.”

  “She is not here.”

  “What? Where, then?”

  Luc mumbled something off-sides, verifying whether the line was secure, then came back on. “She’ll be in the Washington, D.C. area by early tomorrow. The Envoy wants her on American soil.”

  “Washington?”

  “She was flown to the U.S. Army Garrison in Wiesbaden for medical care—”

  “Wiesbaden, Germany?”

  “Oui. She suffered a lot of blood loss and is very weak. They worry about septicemia.”

  “How the hell did she get from Kavsak to Germany?”

  “Daniel. Her father is an influential man. Did you think none of his people watched her, and the people around her? Consider the political consequences if she had been captured. The Envoy is negotiating with these people in Vienna.”

  His brain reeled. The scope of all this was outside his experience. Brenna’s family moved in different circles.

  “I am telling you this in strict confidence,” Luc warned. “If this makes the news—”

  “It won’t. Do you know what hospital they’re taking her to?”

  “The National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda. Do you have any contacts there? Because you won’t be able to just call information and get her room number. She will be in some VIP section, unlisted, most likely with a bodyguard.”

  “I’ll find her,” he said. “And, Luc—? I’ll take care of her.”

  Luc grunted, and fell silent for a moment. “I have contacts in Wiesbaden,” he said. “But none in Bethesda. I have no way of knowing how—”

  “I’ll keep you updated. Do you have a personal email account you can access from Kavsak?”

  Luc gave him the address. Daniel read it back, then gave him his own.

  “About the children. How do I contact the UN refugee agency you transferred them to? I want to follow up on them.”

  “The children? That’s who she went back for when she stepped on the land mine.”

  “Wait a minute. Back for? We didn’t all come in together?”

  “I don’t have a lot of details. She came in with you and Jasha. She mentioned four children. She went back for them.”

  “Four children. Not five?”

  “Four.”

  He squeezed his eyes shut. Had another child died, or was Luc mistaken? “What about Jasha? Does he know anything more?”

  “Most likely, but he is always on the move, almost impossible to reach.”

  “If you see him, could you ask?”

  “Of course.”

  Daniel stared out the airplane window into the black sky. The first flight he could get home took him and his parents out of Rome at midnight. At Boston Logan International Airport, they would separate. His folks would hop north to Portland on a commuter, and he would go south to Washington.

  Getting out of Ancona had been hectic. He had started by placing a phone call to a physician-friend who worked at the Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, and asked if he could find out where Brenna was, and get him to her. He squeezed in the purchase of key clothing items, then turned his attention to getting Geoff Garrett’s body—which Brenna had had flown to Ancona—cremated and shipped to his parents in Colorado.

  He felt certain that no one else in Kavsak knew who to inform, or even—given the grotesque man Geoff had become—that anyone cared enough to bother. Making the telephone call to Geoff’s parents had been difficult, of course, but helped by the fact that during grad school, Daniel had once spent three days skiing with them.

  Worried they would ask questions he couldn’t answer truthfully without causing them added anguish, he had rehearsed his answers ahead. So when Geoff’s dad asked how his son had died, Daniel had his reply ready. “Exposure,” he said. “Geoff died of exposure.”

  During the remainder of the conversation, he prevaricated. He mentioned that he had hired Geoff to work with him on a documentary. He said it was ‘quite something’ to see him in Kavsak. He reminisced about his friendship with Geoff in grad school a
t Columbia University, and ended by saying his thoughts and prayers were with his family.

  Now, midway across the ocean with his parents, he realized he’d pushed himself more than he should have. He was bone-tired. And the cabin pressure wasn’t helping with the nine yards of antibiotic-soaked gauze stuffed into his sinus cavities. Somewhere in Ancona, Dr. Alberti was probably shaking her head.

  The last time he’d crossed the Atlantic, Brenna was sitting sullenly beside him, refusing even the most perfunctory courtesy. She had understood what she was headed into. If he had to return now, he would be taciturn, too. Particularly if he had to go with someone who had no concept of what awaited and had tried to tie him up with bullshit contracts.

  He shook his head self-deprecatingly. Fool. She’d signed because once they got to Kavsak, none of the rules applied. Contracts were just something that occupied space in a filing cabinet.

  A world that once seemed so comprehensible to him now seemed alien. One short flight away from Kavsak, life was transformed, order restored by the imaginary lines that divided one set of humans from another. There was water, here. Food. Shelter. Safety. Civilization. Kids went to school. Parents went to work. Grandmas fixed dinners. The people in the shops—the shops—were genteel, circumspect, diplomatic. They went about their daily lives uninterrupted, taking peace for granted.

  He still had to write the script for the documentary. However would he organize a surreal experience into words and images that crossed the chasm between comfortable viewers and the unimaginable? He closed his eyes. He couldn’t even begin to think about how he was going to achieve that.

  Anyway, right now he had a more urgent agenda: Find Brenna, and help her be okay.

  Brenna, with the green eyes that looked like sunshine in the pines. Brenna, with the hidden heart and surprising sweetness. Brenna, who blushed. Breath-taking, complicated, unabashed Brenna with the welcoming body that took him deep within her. He wanted her so much he thought he would burst.