Kiss

by Ted Dekker

  9

  Shauna held Wayne’s hand as they took the long way into Town Lake Park, toward the three-acre spring-fed pool that was Barton Springs. The October weather was mild enough, and dry today, to lure a few faithful swimmers into naturally warm waters. With an astounding nine hundred feet of pool to swim in, everyone had plenty of elbow room. The green waters were clear, almost clear enough for Shauna to see the natural gravel-and-limestone bottom.

  Wayne spread out a blanket under an ancient pecan tree. The hundred-foot lacy-branched shade trees were a common sight in Austin, most older than the city itself.

  The view brought back nothing more recent for her than memories of her childhood, doing cannonballs here with Rudy. They’d come in the spring when the towering cottonwood trees were starting to let go of their white fluff, and the tiny clouds would sink through the air and dot the water. She stopped swimming sometime in her teens, self-conscious of the burn scars under her arms.

  On the opposite side of the pool, Shauna watched as a sturdy, fit man in a lightweight green jacket, blue ball cap, and sunglasses found a place for himself on the grass, facing them.

  Wayne sat down next to her and squeezed her hand. “Anything?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Tell me about you. There’s still so much I don’t know.”

  Wayne talked, and she listened to the way the waves of his voice rose and fell in the telling. He reminded her a bit of a news anchor, a bit more mellow than the animated prime-time talking heads. But even her attentive ear couldn’t bridge any of the gaps in her mind.

  “Born and raised in Tucson. Hardworking blue-collar dad, drunk mom. Track star in high school, high achiever, a military stint after college.”

  She wished she were a journal keeper. She might have written down what she had first seen in him. That first spark.

  The man in the green jacket pulled a large pocketknife out of a sheath on his belt and began using it to pry divots out of the grass. Shauna found the pointless damage to the grounds mildly disturbing.

  “Went off to Oregon after I served my four years, got a civilian job in corporate finance, then got called up on reserve duty when the Iraq war started.”

  Wayne took a breath and stretched out his legs.

  “Went on two tours, was honorably discharged after an injury, spent a year abroad in Thailand, and met Mr. Wilde on the flight back to Washington, D.C.”

  She leaned toward him, grinning, and bumped him with her shoulder. “You should get a job at Cliff ’s Notes.”

  “I didn’t want to bore you.”

  “You’re not boring! Hobbies?”

  “Muay Thai. It’s Thailand’s national sport, a combination of boxing and martial arts.”

  “You practice here?”

  “It beats the gym.”

  “I’ll have to ask for a demonstration sometime.”

  “I don’t know. You weren’t too impressed with the first one.”

  “You’ve shown me?”

  “Lucky for me you’ve forgotten it.”

  She playfully socked him in the arm.

  Wayne took notice of the man with the knife. He’d stopped digging and held up the blade to one eye on its flat side. He pointed the tip in their direction. If the weapon were a rifle, he’d be sighting their position.

  “He’s an odd one,” Shauna whispered.

  Wayne shifted so that his body blocked her view. He stared at the man long enough to let him know they were aware of his strange behavior. “There’s one in every park,” he muttered.

  “Tell me about your time in Iraq. I mean, if you don’t mind.”

  “Not my favorite subject, but that’s okay.”

  When he didn’t start right away, Shauna prompted him, “So in your experience, which story is true: the Iraqis were thrilled we came, or they hated us and wanted us out?”

  “Both. And with equal passion.”

  “I think the war was a terrible idea. So much violence. So much death.”

  “You’re not alone in that opinion.”

  She put her hand on top of one of his. Hers wasn’t much smaller, but her palm and fingers were far more slender. “I can’t imagine what you must have seen.”

  Wayne tugged at a clump of grass with his other hand.

  “How were you injured?” She let her fingers trace the ridges of his fingers and tendons.

  “Grenade. Took shrapnel to my left hip.”

  “Ouch.”

  “In a word.”

  Her eyes involuntarily went to his hip, and when she caught herself she blushed as if she had been indecent. She looked away, but not before she caught him watching her.

  “Were you glad to come home? I know that sounds like a dumb question, but I hear it’s hard to leave war buddies behind. The bonding. The shared intensity. Do you think?”

  Wayne didn’t respond right away. “You hate to let anyone down. But if you’re not an asset to the unit any longer . . .”

  Not an asset any longer? His implication lingered over the water for a second. Shauna regretted she had raised such a delicate subject.

  “Something you’d rather forget?”

  He slipped an arm around her shoulders.

  “On that point I envy your memory loss.”

  “You don’t,” she said.

  “I do. Sometimes the truth of your past isn’t helpful.”

  “I’ve been thinking along those lines myself.”

  “So”—Wayne leaned in toward her mouth—“let go of the past, whatever it is, and focus on the future.”

  There was something missing from that plan, something about helping Rudy and staying out of jail, but with Wayne so close, she couldn’t think of what it was. She lifted her face to his.

  “Sounds good to me,” she said.

  The first time Shauna kissed Wayne, still reeling from her father’s rejection, she felt nothing. Nothing except perhaps the hope that something might come of it. Eventually.

  This time, when his mouth connected with hers, Shauna blacked out.

  The sensation of floating in cool water carried her out from under the shade and into a black sky dotted with more stars than she had ever seen from the Austin hillsides. The night was so still, so silent, that the sound of her own breath was a distraction.

  It muffled what she was straining to hear: the sound of imminent death.

  She noticed her thumb tapping her thigh as she lay on her back. A new nervous tick.

  “Marshall!” She flinched at the muffled yell. Why bother whispering at all if you’re going to do it so loudly? But then she realized what was happening. Another dream in which she was not herself. Her mind evaluated the trick but could not sort it out. She could not step out of this person’s perspective of the stars or of the situation. She felt strangely disembodied and grounded at the same time.

  “What?” She—Marshall—kept her voice low.

  “What are you doing out there, man? Get back in here.”

  “In a minute.”

  “You got a death wish?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes.”

  The disembodied voice swore and grabbed her ankle. What? The guy was going to drag her in? She kicked him off.

  She heard more swearing, then the sound of someone doing a belly crawl across dirt. She stayed on her back, looking at the stars, as the silhouette of another soldier placed his mouth inches away from her ear.

  “You have men in there who are counting on you.”

  “Plenty of other men to count on besides me.”

  “Look, I’m sorry about Johnson.”

  “You know how he died?”

  “All of us do.”

  “Only ’cause Nelson survived to tell.”

  No answer.

  “Waterboarding, of all things. You’re not supposed to die from waterboarding.” The dissonant sound of Marshall’s voice in her own throat spooked Shauna. It sounded identical to Wayne’s. What was going on? Some malfunctioning memory bank? Some paranormal groping fo
r a connection with this man?

  “That does defeat the purpose. But if the brain thinks the body’s gonna die, anything can happen. Heart attack, embolism—”

  “I hate it all. Every insane moment. Every stinking body. Every inch of sand. And no one can tell us why we’re here!”

  “Not our question to ask.”

  “You get boarded in training?”

  “Just once.”

  “How long you last?”

  “Ten seconds.”

  “I made it eleven.”

  “You’re the man, then. Get your sorry self back inside and do your job.”

  Marshall grunted and gave up his view of the stars, rolled over on his belly and propped himself on elbows on the sand. “I am so through with this war.”

  “You and a few million others.”

  “No, I mean I am over. Outta here.”

  “You get orders?”

  “Don’t need ’em.”

  The silhouette fell as silent as the sky. Then, “And just where are you outta here to?”

  “Nowhere I can’t go with a few American dollars.”

  “You’ll be dead before you hit the edge of camp.”

  “You think I didn’t spend some time figuring this out?”

  “I have never heard a more cockamamy plan in my entire life.” The shadow’s palm smacked the side of Marshall’s head. A thousand needles pricked Shauna’s temple. “Put your headgear on. Finish this tour. Go home. Go AWOL later, when you’re back on your own turf.”

  “Either I die tonight or I die tomorrow,” he said. “Or the next day. I’ll never survive another six months in this Armageddon. I don’t want to.”

  The shadow started swearing again and pointed to Marshall’s sternum, then opened his hand. “Gimme your tags.”

  Shauna sat up and lifted her dog tags over her head. “Thanks.”

  “Thanks, nothing. I don’t want to know another detail. I’ll find these later next to a poor headless sucker. That’s all you get from me.” The first barrage of enemy fire hit the abandoned village. The stars disappeared behind the brilliant flash.

  “Thanks anyway.”

  “Well, good luck with the court martial and all. Hope you live to see it.” The shadow crawled back into its bunker—an old bombed-out, burned-out house—to deal with the pending mess.

  “I love you too,” she muttered as she strapped her helmet on tight. She rose to her knees, adjusted her MOLLE vest, and reached for the supply pack at her feet. She slung it onto her back as the second strike hit, much closer. Her heart rate began to climb. Was it her heart or Marshall’s?

  Marshall checked his handgun. The man’s thoughts bounced around in Shauna’s mind. No rifle for this run, just the standard-issue 9mm M-9. Had to travel light, and if he couldn’t get out of a bind with this, he probably couldn’t get out, period. He checked his watch.

  Time to go.

  Explosions from behind fueled Marshall’s momentum as he sprinted out of the village and toward his first contact, faster than a plummeting grenade, dodging the heavy breaths of shellfire and damnation.

  Shauna gasped. The assault stopped and was replaced by a breeze that rattled leaves.

  She saw Wayne bent over her, haloed by pecan tree branches, eyes wide and worried.

  “You okay?”

  “What happened?” Shauna said.

  “I don’t know. You just dropped.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “Four, five seconds. Are you all right? You dizzy? Hurt anywhere?” He took her hand.

  The muscles in Shauna’s legs were quivering under the surface, the way they did sometimes after an intense workout. She put a hand over her taxed heart and made herself take conscious, slow breaths.

  “I can’t explain it.” A vision of war? Like the football dream, she didn’t know enough about Iraq to have concocted such a bizarre scenario. Unlike the football dream, this one made her feel afraid. What was happening to her?

  And who was Marshall?

  She camouflaged her fear with feigned embarrassment and a giggle. “I’ve never passed out from a kiss.”

  Wayne didn’t find any humor in that. “It might have been a seizure of some kind. I’ll take you to the hospital.”

  “No—don’t. I have an appointment with Dr. Harding already.”

  “She’s not the kind of doctor I had in mind.”

  “Let’s not blow this out of proportion yet.” Shauna forced herself to sit up. No spinning head, no tilting earth. She was fine. Really. “I’ll tell her what happened.” Maybe the therapist could answer Shauna’s deeper questions too.

  “Dr. Siders needs to know. Dr. Carver too—if this is some side effect—”

  “I’ll make a note of it, all right?”

  Wayne eventually conceded, but he did not seem convinced.

  They rose to leave, and as Wayne shook out the blanket and turned to gather up their things, a glint caught Shauna’s eye. The stranger with the knife was standing, angling the blade to bounce sunlight in her direction. When he had her attention, he folded the knife and returned it to its case, tipped his fingers to the bill of his ball cap in a gentlemanly salute, and walked away into the trees.

  10

  Dr. Millie Harding’s office for private therapy sessions was a cluttered suite in a corporate complex. The furniture in this space could generously be described as yard-sale: a small wooden desk painted lime green faced two metal folding chairs, and a squat vinyl footstool hunkered down between them.

  This office, bright and haphazard, seemed a far closer match to Dr. Harding’s inexplicable sense of style. Plum and gold southwestern-patterned rugs over-lapped each other under the crazy furniture. The walls were painted Mexico pink and—today anyway—matched the psychiatrist’s blusher. Potted succulents were crammed into the mismatched bookshelves, and books displaced by the plants were stacked on the floor.

  Shauna and the psychiatrist sat opposite each other in the folding chairs. She wondered if any of the doctor’s patients actually felt calm in this environment.

  For her own peace of mind, she focused her attention on the one item in the room that stood apart: a platinum-colored file cabinet, sleek and modern and as out of its element as Shauna at Landon’s estate. She homed in on the digital combination pad embedded in the face of the top drawer while she tried to formulate her thoughts about these—visions. For lack of a better word.

  War? Football? She didn’t think she knew enough about either of those topics to give her imagination enough material to fabricate such elaborate stories. Were those Wayne’s experiences? It seemed to make a weird kind of sense—he had told her about playing football and being in the military in Iraq. The visions had seemed so real, as if she’d experienced them with Wayne.

  How in the world was her mind making these leaps?

  She had decided not to say anything to Wayne until she had a clearer idea in her mind what was going on. She was less certain how much she should divulge to Dr. Harding.

  So when the therapist growled, in that coarse voice of hers that somehow sounded maternal, “Tell me how you’ve been sleeping,” Shauna was a little surprised not to have any trouble talking about the disconcerting nature of her dreams about Wayne.

  “Tell me about what happened before each of the occurrences,” Dr. Harding said.

  “Um . . . the day of the first one was terrible. The worst twenty-four hours of my life,” she explained.

  “The dream was that night?”

  “Yes.”

  “And before the second dream?”

  “It was more of a vision really. I don’t think I slept—it was more like I fainted. Wayne kissed me. That’s hardly reason. It wasn’t traumatic or stressful anyway.”

  Dr. Harding crossed her legs. “Well, there are several things going on here, any of which might trigger episodes of dreaming. Stressful episodes, for one, induce the brain to work on problem solving, and sometimes this comes out in the form of dreams, even if they see
m unrelated to the inciting event.”

  Shauna took her eyes off the file cabinet and tried to focus on the therapist. She had such distracting hair, the way it stuck out in a mass of coppery frizz.

  “Another factor at work here is that your brain knows it’s missing some memories. Then along comes Wayne, who has connections to this blank chapter in your story. On a subconscious level, you figure he can help you fill in the blanks. Your brain might be processing this possibility by generating vicarious scenarios that involve him. Dreaming is really a very personal attempt to construct and reconstruct important memories, but not always rationally.”

  “Too bad dreams don’t distinguish between what’s real and unreal.”

  “Dreaming can be valuable, nonetheless.”

  “What about the drug trials? Could the pills cause these . . . visions?”

  “We’ll certainly be looking into that as a side effect. But these drugs aim for the centers of your brain that involve memory storage.” She tapped a candy- apple fingernail on her temple. “And because dreaming is about the process of accessing and disassembling memories, it’s entirely possible that your dreams are at least partially drug induced.”

  “Should I stop taking the medicine?”

  Dr. Harding’s laugh sounded closer to a cough. “I don’t think so. We can sit here all day and theorize and not avoid the possibility that the dreams are nothing more than delusional confabulations.”

  Delusional what?

  “You might even consider enjoying them as private entertainment. For now.”

  The suggestion left Shauna both relieved and dissatisfied. Entertainment?

  “Keep a journal if you want. And let me know if the dreams grow more frequent or”—she searched for the right phrase—“change in tone.”

  “Change tone?”

  “Do the dreams frighten you?”

  Shauna weighed this. The real sense of pain had frightened her, as had the confusion, the sense that she was someone else.

  “On some level.”

  “I’ll want to know if that level goes up. Come see me again Tuesday. Let’s see how the weekend goes.”

  The independent film, a gloomy Scandinavian project that had done well at the Sundance Festival, showed at the Dobie Theater at ten. Wayne and Shauna arrived with enough time to park some distance away and walk down the Guadalupe Street Drag, a street known for its underground bookstores and tat-too parlors and eclectic stores. On this Friday night the Drag was crowded with university students looking for a distraction from their studies and midterms.