The chilly air surrounded me like a blanket as I picked my way through the forest of headstones toward the grave where my father and my sister had been laid to rest. The sounds of the traffic on the surrounding streets faded into the background the deeper I went into the cemetery until I had to concentrate to hear them at all.
It didn’t take long to reach the plot, and as I always did whenever I visited, I knelt in front of the headstone and gently traced the letters etched into the block with the tips of my fingers. Silently, I reached into my coat pocket and brought out the gleaming silver flask I’d hidden there. Before I unscrewed the cap, my eyes rested briefly on the flask’s inscription—TEMPORARY PERIODS OF JOY—an homage to what I’d been told was one of my dad’s favorite William Butler Yeats sayings. I lifted the flask in salute to my father.
“O m’anam,” I toasted, taking a long draught from the flask. The Jameson burned a little as it slipped past my lips and slid down my throat, but it provided a welcome heat. I blew out a shaky breath as I proceeded to pour the rest of it into the grass in front of me. It would’ve been rude of me not to share.
“Did you save any for me?” my sister asked from behind me.
I turned my head so I could glance at her over my shoulder. “Nope. You know what happens when you miss the toast.”
“You suck.”
“Tell me about it.” I put the now-empty flask back into my pocket and watched as Rory laid the flowers she’d brought next to the whisky-soaked patch of grass.
The silence hung between us as I took my time settling myself so my back was leaning against the grave marker and my knees were bent in front of me to serve as a platform for my forearms. I paused to gauge the discomfort level of my injured shoulder and briefly debated putting the sling on again. But I didn’t want to wrangle with it. Instead, I leaned my head back, relishing the feel of the cool marble against my hair, and closed my eyes. I felt Rory settle herself next to me and rest her head on my good shoulder.
I drew in a deep breath, pausing to regard the misty white puffs that escaped my mouth upon my exhale. It’d be winter soon. The thought alone chilled me, and I balled up my hands and pulled them into the sleeves of my coat as a light shiver wracked me.
“We should’ve brought a blanket,” Rory said.
“Next time. I assume we’ll be back in a couple of months. You know, on the day they…”
“Died.”
“Yeah.”
There was a long pause. “So, shit’s pretty fucked up,” she said softly.
“Yeah.”
“Did you go talk to someone?”
I canted my face in her direction, but she didn’t lift her head off my shoulder to meet my eyes. She just wrapped both of her arms around my biceps and trembled. “You mean did I manage to squeeze that in during the handful of hours since you nagged me about it? No.”
“Didn’t think so. Are you ready to talk to me?”
“No.”
“Do it anyway.”
I scowled and tried to put a lid on the annoyance that was suddenly boiling over inside me, leaving scalding splatters in its wake. “Rory.”
She did look up at me then, her expression pleading. “Humor me. Please.”
“I thought we were here for them,” I said, banging my head lightly against the grave marker.
“And I think they’d want you to get this off your chest.”
I shook my head at her insistence and sighed. “I don’t even know where to begin,” I confessed softly. “Maybe that’s part of the problem. Maybe I’m too overwhelmed. I definitely know I’m too tired to think straight, which isn’t helping anything.”
Rory snuggled closer and rested her head on my shoulder again, saying nothing, apparently content to let me continue in my own time now that she knew she’d won. I propped one elbow on the fleshy part of one thigh so I could rest my chin in my hand and let the other dangle uselessly over my other calf. I raked my eyes over every part of the cemetery I could see from my position as I searched for a threat. It’d just occurred to me that Rory might be in danger simply because she looked like me. Worms of anxiety began gnawing away at the tender tissue of my belly, and I checked and rechecked the distant trees before I made myself focus on the conversation again.
“Luce is dead.” I stumbled a little as I said her name out loud for maybe the third time since she’d been killed. It felt weird to me, like I didn’t have the right to even say it.
“Yeah,” Rory breathed softly.
I went back to studying the foggy breaths wafting in the air in front of me. “Do you think she’s with Dad and Reagan?”
“I don’t know. I guess anything’s possible.”
I wasn’t sure whether the notion made me happy or not, so I didn’t comment on it.
“I’m sure she’s at peace, Ryan.”
I frowned and gathered the strength I’d need to get through this next part. “It’s my fault she died, you know.”
Rory shook her head. “No. It’s not.”
“Kind of. I mean, I didn’t actually pull the trigger, but I’m responsible.”
I swallowed hard against the lump forming in my throat and willed myself not to cry. Fleeting images of Lucia’s face in those final horrific moments of her life flashed in my mind’s eye. My heart clenched, and my stomach churned and writhed as though it were alive.
“She was there because of me, Rory,” I said, my voice wavering and weak. “She’d read a text message from Allison on my phone, and she—” I broke off to clear my throat, unable to finish the thought. Lucia had been there, and now Rory was here because of me, and if whoever was trying to kill me was following me… I inhaled sharply and compressed my impending panic into a tight, more manageable ball just below my throat. It was tough to breathe around, and my right hand twitched with the desire to reach for the weapon I no longer wore.
“Anyway, it’s my fault she was there. If I hadn’t hurt her, she wouldn’t have come to confront me. She would’ve stayed at the front of the motorcade with the intel car, and she’d still be alive.”
“Ryan, you don’t know that. She might’ve come to talk to you anyway.”
“Or she might not have.”
Rory let out a heavy breath. “You have to let it go. As tragic as it is, she was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”
I closed my eyes and scrubbed at them with my fingertips. I didn’t want to argue with her about this, but nothing she could say would make even the slightest dent in how I felt. “Maybe.”
“Definitely.”
“I’m a little bit pissed at her,” I said after a while, figuring if I’d already gone this far, I might as well tell her the rest.
“Who?”
“Luce. For dying. As horrible as I feel about getting her killed—and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so bad about anything in my entire life—a small part of me is almost irritated with her for starting that argument. Can you believe that? I’m actually mad at her for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Because if she’d just listened to me and gone back to her car when I told her to, I’d be the one dead, and I wouldn’t have to deal with all these stupid feelings.”
Rory sat up slowly and shifted so she was more or less facing me. Her brows were pulled down, and her eyes were cold. Her mouth was set in a grim line. “Don’t even joke about that.”
“I’m not.” When she opened her mouth to retort, I rushed on, cutting her off. “Hadn’t you heard? She basically saved me by punching me when she did. Her knocking me off balance is why the bullet went through my shoulder instead of my brain stem. So not only did I get her killed, but she’s actually the reason I’m here. Yet I’m still angry at her for dying and angry at her for making me feel guilty to begin with. The angrier I get, the guiltier I feel and—”
I broke off my anguished ramblings to catch my breath. The pressure collecting inside me was unbearable, like someone blowing up a balloon just under the surface of my skin. I could feel it, straining agains
t me, pushing its way out. I was afraid of what would happen when it finally popped. I was also afraid of what would happen if it didn’t.
I swallowed hard against the lump growing in the back of my throat and sniffled. “So…yeah. Shit’s fucked up.”
“Everything you’re feeling is perfectly understandable. I’d say it’s even normal.”
A sound escaped my lips that was probably the worst impersonation of a laugh ever attempted. It was more like the noise you’d expect to hear if a goose honked inside of a tin can. It was sweet of Rory to pretend my thoughts were okay instead of all kinds of messed up, but she was my sister. She had to say stuff like that. It didn’t make it true. “Great.”
Rory was silent for a long time. “What does Allison say about all this?”
“Nothing.”
“You haven’t talked to her about it?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged and hissed at the pain, cursing myself for forgetting not to do that yet again. I’d never realized how often I did it until now. I rubbed at the wound until Rory yanked my hand away. “I just haven’t. There hasn’t really been time. She got called back to DC right after I was discharged.”
“And the three days when I couldn’t get her to leave your hospital room long enough to eat something that wasn’t an energy bar? You couldn’t have talked about it then?”
“I was pretty doped up half the time.”
“And the other half?”
I hesitated and tapped the palm of my hand against the grass, using the prickling of the blades against my skin as a grounding technique. “I’m not really good at talking about stuff.” I paused a moment to chew on the inside of my upper lip. “Especially not with her.”
“Shouldn’t she be the one person you can talk to about anything?”
“Probably.”
“But…”
I wasn’t sure exactly how to explain in a way that she’d really get it. Would it make sense to her if I told her that Secret Service agents are supposed to be strong? That there’s this mystique about us that gives people the impression we’re always even-keeled and in control? Maybe it was the focus we exhibited when we were in public. Maybe it was the sunglasses. I wasn’t positive. What I did know was assumptions were made about us that we then felt obligated to live up to. We don’t show weakness, we don’t show emotion. We deal with situations as they are, reacting on less than a moment’s notice without so much as breaking stride, and then we continue as if nothing had happened.
What if I told her that Allison was the quintessential Secret Service agent in that regard, that she was the paragon to which we all aspired? Calm, cool, and collected, Allison rarely got fired up or flustered no matter what was going on around her. She played the part so much better than I could’ve ever hoped to on my best day, and it was one of the many things I admired about her. Would Rory understand my reluctance to talk about my feelings if I explained all of that?
Allison really was a lot to live up to. And not just professionally, either, but on a personal level, as well. I’d always looked up to her as an agent and had wanted so badly to be someone she could be proud of, someone who was maybe a little bit worthy of her attention. I guess I’d allowed my tendency to avoid showing any type of vulnerability, my attempt to live up to some ideal she’d never even said she’d wanted, to spill over into our relationship. Maybe I hadn’t trusted her to stick around if she realized I wasn’t even half the superhero she was. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t fair to either of us.
“Do you ever listen to any of Dad’s stories?” I asked finally.
“Huh?”
“When Dad talks about big cases in the office, do you ever listen to him?”
Rory rolled her eyes. “Of course not. That stuff never interests me.”
I nodded, even though I’d known that’d be her answer. “I do.”
“I know you do. You always have. Even when we were kids, you always hung on every word he said.”
“Right.”
“I don’t understand. What does that have to do with you not talking to Allison?”
I ducked my head and picked at the grass. “I knew who she was. Before I ever met her, I knew.”
“What?”
“You said it yourself. When Dad talks, I listen.”
“He told you about her?”
I nodded again. “When I was going through the application process, she took down one of the biggest identity-theft rings in Secret Service history. It was all he could talk about for weeks.”
“I didn’t think he mentioned the agents by name. Some kind of privacy thing.”
“He doesn’t. But he did reference her gender. That’s what caught my attention. Most of the agents are men. I’d actually assumed the case agent on that investigation was a man until he said something about her being available to accept the Agent of the Year award.”
“I still don’t see what this has to do with anything.”
“I spent a considerable amount of time admiring Allison as an agent before I ever met her. I was so taken by the idea of a woman doing all these amazing things and earning Dad’s respect so effortlessly. I’d never heard him talk about a female agent before. There just weren’t that many women around, or maybe they simply didn’t work as hard as Allison did. I don’t know. But hearing his stories about this superstar agent who also happened to be a woman fascinated me. I asked him about her a couple times, and he told me a little bit. The rest I found out by listening to other agents in the office before I left for training.”
“Awww, you had a crush on her. That’s adorable. Does she know?”
I kicked at her ineffectually and went on. “No. And you’re not going to tell her. The point is, once I did finally get to meet her, once I got to know her and saw firsthand how smart and capable and driven she is…I just don’t want her to think I can’t handle it, you know? Because I can. I’m not going to fall apart over this.”
Rory’s expression softened and she let out a low exhale. “Oh, Ryan. Talking to her about how you feel isn’t going to make her think any less of you.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” I thought about how our past few conversations had gone and shook my head. “That’s not the entire reason, though.”
“Then what is?”
I paused to take a deep breath and attempt to gain control over my rampant thoughts and emotions, which was a lot like trying to stop a tornado with your bare hands. My mind was stuck in the by-now-familiar rut of reliving the moments just prior to and just after the shooting in super slow motion.
“Well, for one thing, it seems gauche to lament to the woman you’re currently sleeping with about how you got the last woman you were sleeping with killed.”
Rory elbowed me lightly in the side. “Stop saying that before I hit you someplace it’ll really hurt. That’s not what happened. And it’s also not the real reason. So what is?”
“I don’t want Allison to think it’s her fault,” I said softly after a long moment.
Rory looked confused. “What? Lucia’s death?”
I nodded.
“Why would she think that?”
“Because of the text message.”
“She doesn’t already know about that?”
“I told you, we haven’t talked about it. I haven’t told anyone besides you. And I don’t want to bring it up because I know her. She’ll feel responsible. No matter what I say, she’ll be convinced she’s to blame, that Luce never would’ve been where she was if not for that text, and she’ll be devastated.”
“So, she’ll board the same crazy train you’re riding right now?” Rory asked with the barest hint of a smirk. “You really are perfect for one another.”
I glared at her. “It’s not crazy.”
“It kind of is, though. Are the two of you seriously so arrogant you really believe all the events of the world revolve around your thoughts and actions? Is that an agent thing? Are you all like that? Or is it just you two
?”
I huffed and looked away. When she put it that way, it did sound pretty stupid and more than a little egotistical. Not that I was going to admit it.
My frustration with Rory’s refusal to empathize with my feelings was building and making it difficult for me to sit still. I slowly disentangled myself from her and struggled to regain my feet. I paced back and forth in front of the headstone, careful not to trample on the flowers as I strode. I shoved my hands deep into my pockets to keep them warm and counted my steps. One, two, three, turn. One, two, three, turn.
If I’d held any illusions that engaging in such a mundane, repetitive feat as pacing would be enough to distract me, however momentarily, from my gnawing feelings of helplessness and dissatisfaction, well, I was disappointed. If anything, it sparked a greater longing inside me. As much as I abhorred running, in that moment, I wanted nothing more than to bolt for the distant hill and never look back, to just keep going until I dropped. Logically, I knew I couldn’t outrun any of this, but that didn’t mean the thought of trying wasn’t suddenly appealing.
The burning, roiling emotions were all twisting together and gathering strength to become the perfect storm of chaos raging in the confines of my chest. I was a woman of action. I needed to have a plan of attack to deal with and assuage my anguish head-on. And not being able to come up with one was driving me nuts.
For days now, people had been telling me I needed to talk to a professional, and while I recognized the theoretical benefits of that suggestion, I was having some serious doubts I’d be able to reap any of those merely by unburdening my soul. This sort of pain went well beyond simple verbal confessions, and if detailing all my woes to Rory hadn’t taken the edge off my emotional agony, I had less than no faith that speaking to someone who didn’t even know me would help.
I let out a long, loud huff. Clearly, none of my problems were going to get solved tonight. I’d just have to resign myself to enduring for another day. Maybe tomorrow I’d be able to figure something out.
Worthy of Trust and Confidence Page 8