by Rachel Lee
Her head was beginning to hurt from all this thinking and speculation. So, nice as Mike was, she was glad when he left.
When she came back from the door, she found Luke teetering on his crutches near his bed.
Exclaiming, she hurried to steady him and ease him onto the mattress. “Overdoing it is not going to make you heal faster.”
“I’m resting now, aren’t I?”
“Too late,” she retorted. “I’ll bring you coffee after I take care of the dishes.”
“No rush, Bri. That was a wonderful dinner.”
“And you could chew it!”
At that he laughed wearily. “I sure did. Do you want to potty train me next?”
She laughed, too, and went to clear up from dinner while she made a fresh pot of coffee. Coffee, the staff of life. When Luke was home there was always a fresh pot except when they were in bed.
Memories of that made her cheeks color, surprisingly enough. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t done all those things with him. In fact, she’d entered exuberantly into whatever foreplay he’d invented. For her, limited though her experience was, he had proved to be an absolutely great lover.
Smothering a sigh, she put the last dish in the dishwasher and poured the coffee. Roaming through those memories could only lead to trouble.
She brought the coffee out to the living room. He’d raised the head of his bed and was looking at the laptop computer on his tray table. Moving carefully, she set a mug beside it. “It’s hot.”
“Good.”
She retreated to the office chair. “Luke?”
“Hmm?”
“Are you worried about your job?”
At last he looked at her. “A bit. I’m a replaceable part.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have thought so from the projects you head up.”
He shook his head just a little. “I’m not unique. Well, if they decided to lay me off because they figure I can’t do this job, there are others out there. At least my skill set is in demand. Or maybe I could do something really harebrained and settle in some place to build houses.”
She hesitated. “But I thought you loved the travel.”
“I used to.”
“What happened?”
“It cost me my wife.”
A giant vacuum suddenly sucked all the air out of the room. His gaze never wavered, as if he was expecting a response. Her brain scrambled wildly seeking any answer to what he had just said.
But then he looked away from her and resumed staring at his computer. “It wasn’t your fault, Bri. You were right. It was more like an affair than a marriage. I can understand why you were growing less happy. Who wouldn’t? We never did the things married couples are supposed to do. Planning and dreaming seemed to be out in the cold.”
Just then the phone rang. The worst time imaginable. She felt awful that he was blaming himself, acutely aware that she’d played a huge role in the problem.
But she couldn’t resist the ring of the phone. She was still a nurse and sometimes...
“Bri,” said the familiar voice of the nursing supervisor, “we need you. There’s been a serious pileup on the state highway. We need all hands on deck.”
“One sec.” She turned to Luke. “They need me at the hospital. Emergency. Will you be all right on your own?”
“I have been for a long time.”
That stung. “Just promise me you’ll use the wheelchair to get around while I’m gone.”
“Promise.”
He never even looked at her.
“I’ll be right there,” she told Mary. “Fifteen minutes.”
“Make it ten. ERT is flying in some really bad cases.”
She hung up and raced for her jacket and boots. She’d get her scrubs at the hospital.
“Wheelchair,” she called over her shoulder as she opened the door.
“I promised already.”
The familiar words I love you almost passed her lips the way they had so often in the past when one of them had been leaving. She caught them just in time and swallowed them.
They sat in her stomach like lead.
Chapter 9
Sleep took Luke even though he wanted to keep on working. Mike’s visit had filled his head with all kinds of information that would give him a sound basis for making recommendations. As soon as his brain had returned from la-la land, he had set to work proving his ability to manage the progress even though he was laid up. Defending his job.
Still, he was exhausted, and despite his best effort of will, he needed sleep. He kept dozing off in the middle of the sentences he was trying to type, and finally he slipped from a doze to a deep sleep.
His dreams were troubled, and they mostly involved Bri. When eventually he woke, it was deep in the night and by the light of the little lamp they had been using as his night-light, he stared upward at that boring ceiling and thought about it.
Today had been a mistake. She was right. No way could they recover from the mess they’d ended up making, so what was the point? Yet today for the first time he’d understood what Bri’s problem really was, and it pained him.
He gathered from what she had said that it wasn’t her happy feelings that had been bottled up, but the other, less pleasant ones. Anger. Frustration. Irritation. Bottled to the point that she couldn’t even tell if they were justified, and from what she’d indicated, whether they were even real or what was causing them.
It wasn’t right, damn it. Those feelings had reasons, however silly they might sometimes be, and expressing them was necessary to clearing the air. To solving problems. That emotional truncation had left him wondering what was going on and what, if anything, he could do about it.
It had worked for a while. He’d watched those moments in her when there was obviously something that bothered her. Then they’d blew away rapidly, leaving him to believe it had nothing to do with him.
Increasingly, though, he had realized those ephemeral moments were very much grounded in their marriage, but by then it was too late. Unspoken, unexpressed, they had become a bomb that had finally exploded, destroying everything.
How did you deal with that? He’d never dissuaded her from talking. He’d often asked what was wrong, because he really wanted to know. Then the smooth, smiling face would return and everything would get lost again in lovemaking or some other romantic pastime.
Glumly, he faced the fact that he’d never really known her. She hadn’t allowed it.
Compounding his idiocy, he had drawn her onto his lap today. Had held her and kissed her and rediscovered the passion that had apparently never died. That was going to make things smoother. Not. He still ached for her, he still wanted her and, damn it, he wanted to really get to know her.
She’d always fascinated him, always seemed like a bit of a puzzle, but now he wished he could put that puzzle together. It might turn out that they had never been suited at all, but that was better than wondering, as he did all too often, where he had gone wrong and whether he could have done something to salvage their relationship.
There were questions that had never been answered, and he still wanted those answers. Even after three years. He needed to know where he had failed. That failure plagued him constantly, enough that he hadn’t dated seriously since.
He refused to place the blame entirely on her shoulders. Clearly he had been doing things wrong or he wouldn’t have seen those flashes of unhappiness.
He had gathered that she was reluctant to date, too, because of the first muddy mess they’d made of everything. Well, that wasn’t fair to either of them. Somehow he needed to find a way for them both to sort through this so they could move on.
Because it was quite clear now that he wasn’t the only one who couldn’t move on. She’d said as much, and considering that he’d half expected to find her remarried when he knocked on her door, it was a little shocking to realize she still bore the same wounds he did.
Failing at marriage was no small deal, evidently.
S
ighing, he sat up and reached for his chair. Nature called and he’d promised. Much as he hated it, he was going to keep that promise. He still endured the occasional bit of dizziness, and he’d deserve every bit of brimstone that would rain down on his head if Bri came home to find he’d taken another fall.
Then he wondered if she had somehow come back but hadn’t wakened him. He listened intently but heard nothing at all. A truly silent night.
He made his way to the bathroom without trouble, extremely glad he no longer needed help for this chore. Then he peeked into Bri’s room. A pale shaft of moonlight poked through her curtains, enough to tell him she wasn’t there.
Making up his mind, he headed for the kitchen. Even a simple task like making coffee was difficult in that chair, but he managed. He remembered other nights when she had come back from something like this, all wound up and unable to sleep. A glance at the clock on the microwave announced she’d been gone for nearly five hours.
It had been bad, whatever it was. Yeah, she was going to arrive home all keyed up, pacing, maybe even needing to talk. They hadn’t shared much about their jobs, but when she’d come home from a really bad night, he’d watched her try to pace it off, and sometimes she had talked, just a little.
He couldn’t remember if he had ever told her how much he admired her for the work she did. He couldn’t imagine the horrors she must have seen, and the sorrows that had come with them. Nor had she ever really said. All he could see was her reaction to the adrenaline that had been pumping through her for hours as she helped battle to save a life.
He clearly remembered her decision to get out of the emergency room into another branch of nursing. Apparently, out here, that didn’t matter when the sky fell and they were shorthanded.
He wondered about the nightmares she must live with, nightmares she never talked about. It had to have affected her. No escaping it.
He wished he could break down her walls and get her to just spill it. But that hadn’t worked before, and he doubted she had changed that much.
Hell, she’d taken her ex into her house and treated him well. Whatever animosity she must bear toward him, she had swallowed it once again.
He cussed. The coffeepot finished and he stretched to get a cup out of the cupboard.
Well, he promised himself, she wasn’t going to come home to a silent house tonight. He’d be here. Whether or not she wanted to talk, she wasn’t going to be alone.
He wondered if that would even help.
* * *
Black ice. A five-car pileup including a van carrying a family of six. For hours there had been no time to think about anything except treating and stabilizing.
Some were flown out as soon as they were stabilized. Others could continue their treatment right there. Bri didn’t see the dead, but there were dead, one of them a small child who had been hit by flying debris, unprotected by her child safety seat.
When they let her go, she was wound tight as a drum. Fifteen peoples’ lives had been changed inalterably by a slick road. It didn’t make sense. It never made sense. Sometimes she wondered if anything made sense.
Or if it even mattered.
By the time she arrived home, she felt as if every muscle in her body had tensed. It would take time to ramp down, time for exhaustion to hit her. Then she’d fall asleep and have dreams, ugly dreams that always seemed to pursue her after something like this. Somehow she never got used to it.
Pulling into her driveway, she saw that the kitchen light was on. So Luke was up. She pressed her forehead to her steering wheel, wondering if she could handle that, too.
Part of her wished he’d never shown up. Part of her wished she’d never uncovered her own lacks to realize she had been a major problem in the marriage. Part of her wished he’d never held her and kissed her, reminding her indelibly that some things apparently never died.
But part of her was also glad she would not be walking into an empty house. Part of her was glad that it was Luke waiting for her. He’d never said much, had just been a solid, steady presence after events like these, comforting just by being there. Maybe that hadn’t gone away, either.
Sighing again, she climbed out of her car and headed for the mudroom that was just off the kitchen. Because she hadn’t been paying much attention to the steps and small porch, she clung tightly to the railing. Evidently Jack had cleared the worst of that heavy snowfall, but the world had been slowly thawing and she should have salted this area.
But she hadn’t. She’d let a lot of things slide, she thought. Mainly because of Luke. The fascination remained.
Shaking her head a little, she let herself in. Some snow had clung to her boots, and she stomped it off on the mat. Then she doffed boots and jacket and headed into the kitchen.
Luke was sitting there in his chair, and the smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the air.
“Welcome back,” he said.
“Thanks.” The coffee probably wouldn’t help her unwind one bit, but she didn’t care. It smelled good, and she was hungry suddenly. Searching the fridge, she found a couple slices of cheesecake. She pulled them out and slid them onto plates, one for her and one for Luke. Then she got her coffee and two forks and joined him at the table.
“Thank you,” he said when she passed him a fork.
“Welcome.”
“Bad?”
“As bad as it gets.”
He sat silently for a few minutes, and she ate a few mouthfuls of the cheesecake. Slightly tangy, but creamy enough to settle a stomach that right now felt it might never settle again.
“I can’t imagine,” he said finally. “I can’t imagine the things you’ve seen, the awful things you’ve dealt with, or how it must affect you.”
Slowly she looked up. The grace of adrenaline numbness was beginning to wear off. “It’s awful,” she agreed. “But I’m not the only one. Lots of medical people have to deal with this.”
“I know, but I’m talking about you. I see the aftereffects, or at least I did when I was around, but that’s all I know. That you run on adrenaline and then it hits you. You think I don’t see it, but I do. Some nights when I was lying beside you, you had nightmares. I never woke you from them, but you’d mumble in your sleep and I’d know where you were. Fighting death. Fighting to save shattered bodies. I got it, Bri, even though I don’t actually know what it’s like.”
“Nobody should have to know what it’s like,” she said quietly. Adrenaline was turning into grim steel, not that that would help for long.
“You’re amazing.”
“I tried to run from it.”
“No, you did it for as long as you could stand it. Not everybody is cut out for an entire lifetime of trauma medicine. That’s not a failure. That’s facing reality.”
“Something I don’t seem to be very good at.”
“Bri.” His tone chided her gently, but he said no more.
She went back to sipping coffee and eating. She desperately needed some fuel. “Not everybody made it,” she said a minute later. “Some may still not make it.”
“Traffic accident?”
“Yeah. The worst of it was, five cars piled into one another on black ice, some coming from the other direction. Bad enough except that they were there for a while before another motorist came upon them and called for help. Have you heard of the golden hour?”
“Vaguely.”
“It’s the hour after the trauma. The hour when we have the most hope of saving a life. You get much past that and the odds start diminishing. We’re not sure how long they were out there. We were battling a time clock we couldn’t see.”
She wondered why she was telling him this. She’d never talked about this subject before. It was something to be locked away from those who’d never been there. At least to her way of thinking. Why share all that terrible stuff with someone who was innocent of it? Although to judge by the reality programs she had begun to see on TV, emergency rooms had become something of a spectator sport. She always switched
to something else. Even the sanitized horror the TV showed was too much for her because she knew what lay behind it. The harsh reality.
Then, for some reason, she kept talking. “We lost a few, including a little girl. Some of the patients kept crashing. Hard to stabilize them at all. Those are the ones we might still lose. Some were transported to a trauma center—in time I hope. We’re just a little community hospital. Yeah, we deal with almost everything sooner or later, but wherever possible we transport people who need the best expert care to have any hope. We’re just not equipped...” Her voice broke. “Not equipped to deal with this much. Fifteen people were involved.”
“My God.”
“Yeah,” she said dully. “My God. I think we emptied the supply room. All hands on deck. Some are hanging around to keep an eye on the patients. I go back at seven a.m. to help spell them. Everyone needs sleep.”
“Are you going to get any?”
“I need to try. I don’t want to make a mistake that could kill someone. Or doze off on the job.”
She stared blindly at the remains of her cheesecake. She was coming down now, coming down hard.
“Let me just hold you,” he said.
Her head lifted wearily. “How’s that going to help?”
“We’ll see. Come on.”
He managed to turn his wheelchair and head out to the bed in the living room. To his amazement he heard her dragging steps behind him. He jacked himself into the bed, turned onto his side and scooted until he’d left plenty of room for her.
“Just lie down, Bri. Try it.”
She didn’t know why she did it, but she did. She climbed in beside him, still fully clothed, her head pillowed on his good arm. Then his casted arm rested across her waist, encircling her. Telling her he cared.
She needed that caring just then almost as much as she needed to breathe.
Then, quietly, helplessly, tears leaked out from behind her closed eyelids. She kept thinking of the children.
The children. That was the most awful part of all.