Doctor Crenshaw may be right—there may be something good in every day, but there’s so much bad that outweighs it.
I pick up the pace, loping into a sprint, my aching legs protesting with each step I take. Nuke pants at my side as I run through town as if the devil himself were chasing me. Truth be told, I think he jumped on my back the day I deployed and the bastard hasn’t moved since.
When we’re a little farther from the pier I can breathe easier, though the tightness in my chest doesn’t fully let up. Sweat pours off of me. Despite the injuries I sustained in that desert, I’m in peak physical condition so I know it ain’t the jog that’s got me gasping for breath. I lean over, my hands rest on my knees, and my dog jumps up to lick at my face despite his own exhaustion. I scratch behind his ears and whisper in a ragged voice, “I’m good, buddy. I’m good.”
I glance down the road. From here I can see the red and white tape sectioning off the footbridge. It fights against the breeze off of Mobile Bay and I watch it move in the wind and think about yesterday’s checklist.
Morning Run? Good.
Crash? Bad.
Blue eyes and . . . what was it she said again? Whiskey lullabies? Jury’s out on that one too, for far too many reasons.
I unclip Nuke’s leash and allow him a moment to shake and just be a dog. Normally, I’d never let him off-leash here or anywhere else around town, but he’ll likely spend the next twenty-four hours cooped up inside with me so just this once, I let him go. His eyes dart right to the ducks in the pond but he doesn’t make a move towards them, though his head is high, his ears straight, and his tail slightly wagging. I head for the beach, needing to feel the bay water on my feet and the sand beneath my toes. It’s then that I notice the beat up red Datsun parked a couple yards away. My eyes scan the beach for that mane of windswept blond hair and that of her son’s. And there she is, watching the water, as her son plays in the sand just a few yards away.
I take a step forward and then falter.
I should leave them be.
I’m glad to see her doing better. The last glimpse I had of her was as an ambulance carted her off on a stretcher, her son screaming for his mother as Olivia tried to wrangle him into her minivan. Now, less than a day later she’s here, alive, and clearly feeling well enough to get back behind the wheel, even if her car is a little more beat up than usual.
Walk away, you pussy, before this becomes another of those bad moments.
I take another step forward and gunshots ring out. The squealing whistle of the bullets assail the air around me and my body moves on autopilot. The kid screams and covers his ears. Nuke and I take off down the beach, headed right for the both of them. An explosion sounds, a loud boom overhead, and she turns toward me just as I shout, “get down.”
Our bodies collide. She hits the sand beneath me and I shield her from the hail of bullets and debris.
“Get off me,” she yells, beating my arms and chest. On shaking limbs, I lift my weight off of her and turn to see my dog attempting to console the screaming child. There’s a boom from overhead and my gaze zeroes in on the idiots occupying a wooden row boat. They’re setting off fireworks. The afternoon sky is ablaze with red, white, and blue starbursts.
“Get OFF!” She shoves at my chest more forcefully this time.
The kid screams with every bang and the woman is frantic beneath me. Disorientated, I sit back and yell for Nuke to heel, but for the first time since I adopted him, he doesn’t obey. I get to my feet. The blonde is already running down the beach, and despite the fatigue in my muscles I run across that sand faster than I ever ran across any battlefield.
I reach her son before she does and find the kid flat on his back, squealing in delight as Nuke licks his face and whines.
“Nuke heel.” My dog clambers off the kid’s body and sits by me.
Breathing raggedly, Ellie drops to the child’s side. “Baby, are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Mamma.”
“Did he hurt you?”
“No. He about licked me to death though.”
Assessing that there’s no permanent damage, she turns on me. “Your dog needs a muzzle. He attacked my son.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s not usually like that.” I grab Nuke’s collar and clip on the lead. He whines, but sits awaiting my next command. “He’s trained to detect distress. Granted, he’s only supposed to talk me off the ledge, but I guess your son needed him more.”
“He could have killed him,” she snaps and crouches down in the sand by her kid. She doesn’t touch him, or offer him physical comfort, which surprises me. “Baby, are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” he says, impatiently. “What’s your dog’s name, mister?”
“Nuke.”
“Oh my God, you’re bleeding.” She takes his arm to inspect his wounds further, but the kid pulls away.
“Don’t touch me. Don’t like to be touched,” he shouts, covering his arm from her view.
His hands make a warding gesture and she nods, speaking slowly and calmly as she says, “I know. I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”
I silently observe this exchange. The kid scoops up fistfuls of dry sand and lets the grains sift through his fingers. Nuke whines and butts his head against my hand. The woman sits, studying her kid for a beat before rising and turning her angry glare on me.
“Your dog did this.” She points to the scratch along his arm.
I feel sick that he got hurt, but I know Nuke didn’t mean no harm. “I’m truly sorry, ma’am.”
“Don’t you dare ‘ma’am’ me.” She pokes her finger at the air in front of me, and I flinch as if she were really making contact with my skin. “Spencer, we have to go.”
The kid continues sifting sand through his fingers, watching on as if mesmerized, and I think I understand the peace he finds in that one repetitive motion.
“Spencer,” Ellie says, all patience gone and the smallest bit of hopelessness leeching out of her voice, as if she were battle-weary but summoning the morale to keep on moving. “Please, baby?”
He jolts back to the present and stares at his mother. There’s a vacant kind of recognition there as he assesses her and the grains of sand sticking to his hands, and then he brushes them off and slowly gets to his feet.
“I’ll pay for the doctor’s visit,” I say, as if that makes up for throwing her on the ground in one of my episodes and allowing my dog to hurt her son, even if it was an accident. “For you both. I guess I hit your head pretty hard, and you should get it checked out after yesterday.”
She flushes beet red and glares at me. “I don’t need your help. Just put a leash on your damn dog.”
My dick twitches with her anger. It’s been a long time since I felt anything but distrust towards another human being, but this woman stirs something within me that I thought was long dead.
“Yes, ma’am.” I grin down at her. The insane urge to invade her space, to lean into her and provoke her even more, just to see what sort of a reaction I’d get, fucks with my head, and causes sweat to bead across my brow. She turns on her heel and stalks away, her little boy waving to me and Nuke, and then trailing along behind her.
“You’re supposed to keep me outta trouble, not in it.” I flex my hand and Nuke butts his head against it. If he ignores my commands and deserts once more, I’ll have to speak with Olivia, but I can’t risk anyone taking him away from me. I know my dog. He charged that kid because he believed he was in distress—sometimes he just doesn’t know his own strength.
“Pull that shit again and I’m gonna head straight to your supervisor,” I say, but I smile as we set off for home. “Now don’t go gettin’ ahead of yourself. I ain’t asking for her number. Can you imagine datin’ a woman like that?”
Nuke glances up at me as he trots along the beach at my side.
“Don’t look at me like that. I’m serious. That kind of woman would have your balls in her handbag by the time you’d pa
id the check on your second date.” Even as I say those words, though, I know they aren’t true. Her mamma bear instincts had been out in full force, but I’d watched that woman from afar a number of times. I know she’s fiercely protective of her son, but she don’t strike me as a bitch, even if she did chew me out like I was back in the Marine Corps.
I decide to go easy on Nuke on the way home and we stroll by the water, even though everything tells me to hurry because those morons in the rowboat were just the very beginning. The later it gets, the more anxious I become.
Once we make it back, I dish up an extra-large portion for Nuke’s dinner. I don’t bother fixing myself something. Instead, I go around closing all the curtains in the house and retreat to my bedroom. I start off on the bed, but within seconds I huddle on the floor beside it, and I’m sweatin’ so bad the carpet beneath me is damp.
The first pop sounds and the trembling begins. I squeeze my eyes tightly closed. I cover my ears and the explosions get louder. My bedroom window lights up with each bright starburst of fireworks painting the sky. My quiet tree-lined street explodes with color.
Outside, the whole town celebrates. I imagine the kids are squealing as they chase one another with sparklers and celebrate a freedom they know nothing about, but in this room, my dog’s even breathing and the licks to my face are the only thing keeping me from puttin’ a gun to my head.
God Bless America.
Land of the free and the home of the brave.
Chapter Three
Ellie
Hell and damnation. Could my luck get any worse?
I took Spence home and with a lot of struggling, an epic meltdown that I just didn’t have the heart for, and half a tube of Neosporin plastered all over the bathroom floor later, I’d cleaned up the scratches on his arm. We’d finally made it to the market before they closed, though there’d been another meltdown there about the way Tina Tisdale had stared at him a moment too long at the checkout, which of course had led to every woman and her dog telling me how I should raise my child with a firm hand and how tantrums shouldn’t be tolerated.
I don’t consider myself a violent woman, but I swear if I’d stayed to hear one more word come out of those uneducated, judgmental former beauty queens’ mouths, I’d yank their lacquered hair from their vacant heads and strangle them with it.
My son doesn’t have a behavioral problem, and he doesn’t throw tantrums; he’s just wired different than we are. They don’t understand that tacos are absolutely the most important thing about Taco Tuesday, and that we can’t just go without the refried beans because Mamma forgot to pick them up from the market on Sunday after church, or that on Tuesdays he wears his Taco-saurus Rex shirt and he can’t now because it’s stained with blood. They don’t understand that you can look him in the eye for two seconds, but not three, because three is a number he doesn’t like. Three seconds makes him so uncomfortable he has no way of expressing himself but through tensing every muscle in his body and screaming at the top of his lungs or throwing himself face down on the ground at the Piggly Wiggly because he don’t want anyone looking him in the eye for more than two seconds.
They don’t understand that, but I do. It breaks my heart to see the repulsion on their overly made-up faces, and today I had no choice but to pick up my screaming child and carry him to my car with the groceries in tow. I pulled out of that lot like a bat outta hell so Spence wouldn’t be faced with their ugliness a moment longer.
At home, as I juggle the bags of groceries inside behind Spencer, the phone begins to ring. Olivia’s number comes up on the caller ID. For a moment I think about not answering it, but Spence hates it when I let it ring three times, and I can’t afford another meltdown, so I pick it up and juggle the paper grocery bag between my hand and hip.
“Hey Olivia. Now is really not a good time.”
“Honey, Lady died.”
It’s at this point where my heart breaks in two. If I thought everything that has happened during the last two days was bad, this is so much worse. The sack of groceries falls to the floor and I sob into the mouthpiece. “No.”
“She got out. I’d put her in with Pebbles last night after feeding so neither one wouldn’t be alone—you know how they get—and I mustn’t have locked the kennel properly because it was wide open when I came in this morning. Billy Foster found her by the side of the road out near the Biscuit King Café and called me an hour ago. I been trying to work out a way to break it to you ever since.”
“This is all my fault,” I mumble through my tears, thinking of that gorgeous Golden Retriever and all she’s done for my son.
“Oh, sugar, how in the world do you figure that?”
“If I hadn’t crashed my stupid car into that footbridge, you wouldn’t have been here last night. You’d have been home with her. I am so sorry, Liv.”
“Honey, it’s not your fault.” She sniffles. “It’s mine. I didn’t double check the gate, and Pebbles is a repeat escape artist.”
“Is she alright?”
“She’s still kicking, if that’s what you mean. Billy said she was huddled in against Lady’s side; she snapped at him when he tried to lift Lady into the back of the truck. He wound up putting Pebbles in an empty crab crate ’cause she tried to bite his hands off.”
“At least she’s okay.”
“Oh, she’s fine; it’s me I’m worried about. How am I gonna rehome a Chihuahua with that much sass?”
“I’m really sorry.” I take a Kleenex from off the top of the fridge and dab at my eyes. “I better go break the news to Spence.”
“Well, I know it ain’t the same because tomorrow is Wednesday and he was expecting to see Lady.” Olivia’s voice cracks, and she clears her throat. “But if you bring him by Friday week, I’m taking in a whole litter of Retriever pups from the Beasleys. We’re training them up as seeing-eye dogs for the center in Mobile, so you bring that boy by in the afternoon and he can keep them entertained for a bit.”
“I will,” I say, and lean my head back against the cupboard. “I’m so sorry, Liv.”
“Me too.” She chokes up as she says this, and my own tears begin to fall faster as I hang up the phone and prepare to tell my son the bad news.
As expected, he does not take it well.
He cries so hard I swear to God he stops breathing, and just when I think he’s cried himself out, he cries some more. I don’t know what to do, so I cry with him, and there in a puddle on our kitchen floor, around spoiled ice cream that I’d really been looking forward to and the remainder of the bag of groceries spilled out around us, he climbs into my lap and lets me hold him for the first time in a long time.
We cry over Lady, the dog who would have been his Autism assistance dog if only I could afford to keep one and if Mr. Williams had allowed us to own a pet, and when Spencer falls asleep and I carry him into bed, I send a silent thank you to Lady—who I just know is in doggy heaven for all that she’s given to my little man.
Chapter Four
Jake
I stand with my hands on my knees, my torso pitched forward, and my lungs on fire as I gasp for breath. I don’t know where the hell I am, and I don’t much care either, as long as I’m not cooped up in that doctor’s office no more.
Rising to my full height, I hug my ribcage and wonder if I ran so hard I dislodged a piece of shrapnel from my side. A beat later the pain subsides, and I call myself a pussy for the eighteenth time today, and it’s not even noon yet. I stare at the car window in front of me and see what looks to be a homeless man reflected back.
Jesus. When did I become a fucking mountain man?
I scrub my hand over my too long beard and then up through my hair. When I was in recovery in that German hospital after my service, I wanted nothing more than a hot meal, a buzz-cut and a clean shave. I’ve grown both my beard and my hair since my return to US soil, but then pretty blondes weren’t exactly lining up around the block to date me.
What, like they are now?
&nbs
p; I run over today’s checklist in an attempt to shut that voice in my head up.
Run with Nuke? Good.
Leaving Nuke at the house? Bad.
Appointment with my shrink? Bad.
Wanting to punch my shrink in the face when he pushed too hard? Bad.
Going through with it? BAD. BAD. BAD.
I rake my hands through my beard and step away from the curb, glancing around the quiet leafy street. Houses line each side. Not grand or overly large, like the ones on Sea Cliff Drive, but they aren’t rundown either.
Across the road, a surly old man watches me from his front porch stoop, but they aren’t the only eyes trained on me. I turn around. The single story Créole-style home might be a little run down, but she is a beauty. The cream roller shade covering the glass-paned door moves. It flicks up violently, stunning me and exposing the small, angry blonde on the other side of it. Painted on the door between us is a logo that reads Big Bama Hair and beneath that in pink script I can just pick out the words close shave.
It must be my lucky day, after all.
Ellie Mason turns and gives me her back as I amble up the walk. I open the door, the bell above let out a high-pitched ding. Cool air-conditioning wafts towards me from the vent and it’s a small mercy because my whole body is burning up from running several blocks in the Bama heat.
“Ma’am, are you open for business today?”
She turns abruptly and narrows angry eyes on me. “I was just closing up, actually.”
Toward the Sound of Chaos Page 2