In the Stillness

by Andrea Randall

  He laughs, too. “The hottest.”

  “I wonder whatever happened to them,” I tease as I shakily unbutton his shirt.

  Ryker tosses his shirt to the floor and gives me that heart-melting, kiss-me-the-second-you-meet-me smile as he leans down toward my mouth.

  “This.”

  The End

  While Natalie and Ryker are fictional characters, their struggles are not. If you, or someone you know, are in crisis, whether or not they are considering suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. 1-800-273-TALK (8255). For veterans, press 1.

  5% of the proceeds of this e-book are being donated to The New England Center for Homeless Veterans.

  Read on for an exclusive look at “The Last Hour”, a contemporary fiction novel by Charles Sheehan-Miles set to be released May 15, 2013

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Eight Months Ago: New York

  Tell the Army I said hi! (Carrie)

  The plane touched the ground with a bump and screech of tires, and I felt the force of the sudden deceleration as the engines reversed. I closed my book as we taxied across the airport. For the first time since I’d left my parents’ townhouse that morning, I felt tension, just a slight twist in my stomach. I was excited to see Ray, but nervous too. He’d sounded so stressed when we spoke on the phone last night. Stressed and exhausted. He’d spent another day being questioned by the Army. It was beyond excessive. How many different ways could he tell the same story?

  I wanted badly by the end of that phone call to hug him so tightly that all of the tension would just drain out. And that’s exactly what I was going to do the moment I met him at the security gate.

  I tensed in my seat, watching out the window as the plane inched toward the gate. Now that we were moving slowly, I pulled my bag out from under the seat and put away my book, then took out my phone. The flight had been smooth, and I’d relaxed and read a book since the eight a.m. departure from San Francisco. I was tired, but not so much I wouldn’t be fine making it through the day and evening.

  Finally. The plane shut down, the engines slowing to a stop, and I heard the clicks and thumps as the gate connected. I switched on my phone. At least I’d be off the plane quickly, my frequent flyer miles let me upgrade to business class, so I was on the second row of the plane.

  My phone chirped with an incoming text message, and the screen lit up.

  Damn it. The preview on the screen said, “I’m so sorry.”

  I unlocked the phone and flipped to the messages.

  The Army and FBI just showed up here AGAIN with more questions. I don’t know how long this is going to take.

  The next message read: It’s been two hours. I’ll keep you updated.

  And two more. The first said: Shit. There’s no way I’m going to make it to the airport in time. Take a cab to Glen Cove, and I’ll pay.

  Finally: I’m so sorry.

  I sighed. Poor Ray. They were putting him through the wringer. The thing was, they hadn’t called him in. They hadn’t called him up and said, “We’ll be there tomorrow at 11.” Instead, they just randomly showed up. It was as if they thought he was lying and were trying to catch him on inconsistencies. I couldn’t even imagine the stress he was under.

  Once I got clear of the gate, I called Ray.

  It rang four times, then he answered.

  “Hey,” he said. “Carrie, I am so sorry. I feel awful.”

  “Stop,” I replied. “You’ve got nothing to apologize for, it was out of your control. I’m going to rent a car, just text me your address?”

  “You sure? Wouldn’t it be cheaper to take a cab?”

  “Yeah, but this way we’ll have wheels for the whole visit. You did say you don’t have a car right now?”

  “True. How about we split it?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Ray, I get this ridiculously stupid allowance from my father. Let me use it. Besides, you bought the tickets to the show tonight, and I know that couldn’t have been cheap.”

  “But … all right, fine.”

  “Send me the text, and I’ll be there as soon as I can. Tell the Army I said hi!” I have no idea what possessed me to say that.

  He chuckled. “Cute. At the rate we’re going, you may get a chance to tell them yourself.”

  So I got my luggage, then made my way to the Hertz counter and flashed my membership card, which usually catches their attention very quickly, and ten minutes later I was programming Ray’s address into the GPS. It estimated 39 minutes. I got on the road. Traffic was heavy though, and somehow I doubted the time estimate.

  An hour later I pulled to a stop in front of a large apartment building in Glen Cove. I leaned out and looked up at the building. It was old, the stones painted with a light blue which was peeling off here and there. It was a nice building, and looked to have been built to last, but it wasn’t in the best repair. The lawn was covered in snow, and someone had done a not very good job shoveling the sidewalk. I got out of the car, took my bag out of the trunk and carefully made my way up the walk, then studied the directory next to the front door. I found “Sherman” in the directory and hit the button.

  Just a moment later the buzzer went off, and I headed inside.

  Ray’s apartment—or his parents’ rather—was on the eighth floor. The inside of the building reinforced my first impression. It was a nice building, but was suffering from lack of repair. Ray had told me his parents’ story—they’d been not quite wealthy, but firmly middle class. High paying jobs with lots of debt, and when the jobs vanished, so did their lives. Sometimes, when I heard stories like that, I felt guilty. I took my parents’ wealth for granted sometimes. My father inherited his money, and it allowed us things that few people had, not the least of which was security that our homes wouldn’t vanish out from under us due to a job change or because someone got sick.

  Ray met me at the door and I involuntarily sucked in a breath when I saw him. It had only been three weeks or so, but the reality of him hit me all over again as we looked in each other’s eyes and embraced. Then his mouth was on mine and I forgot the time in between, I forgot the distance, I forgot the Army and everything else other than this very moment. I squeezed him tight, trying to do what I’d planned… easing the stress I knew he was under. I could feel it in his shoulder muscles, which were tightly bunched, tense, rock hard. He kissed me, and it felt as passionate, as hungry, as it had the very first time.

  “I missed you,” I whispered.

  “I missed you,” he replied. “Come on in. They’re still here.”

  My arms and shoulders tensed and the muscles in my neck tightened, rigid, and I walked into the apartment. It was only four o’clock in the afternoon, but for some reason, walking in that apartment felt like walking into midnight.

  The woman was an attractive, professional looking black woman who stood as I entered. She walked toward me, hand out, and said, “I’m Janice Smalls. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Thompson.”

  I took her hand and shook. “Nice to meet you,” I said.

  The man, who was lounging in a seat near her, a notebook in his lap, nodded from his seat.

  “Jared Coombs,” he said. “Federal Bureau of Investigation.” Then he went back to his notes.

  My mother may not have set the best example of sanity in the world, but one thing she gave me was an exquisite sense of manners. I returned his rudeness with icy courtesy.

  “It’s a delight to meet you, Mr. Coombs,” I said.

  He didn’t look up from his notes. My teeth jammed together, and I felt my muscles tense. For the last ten days, these two had been grilling Ray. Without warning, they just showed up at his place. They pried into parts of his life that had nothing to do with the war. They were treating him like a criminal, and I’d had enough.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Coombs. I’ve got a question. For both of you.”

  “Um… Carrie…” Ray said, as Major Smalls was returning to her seat.

  “Wait a second, Ray. Serious
ly. Where do you get off? Ray reported the crime here. Why are you treating him like a criminal? Is this your subtle way of punishing him for doing the right thing? What the hell is it you’re trying to accomplish?”

  Coombs gave me a cold look, and said, “Number one, it’s none of your business, Miss Thompson. Number two, we haven’t yet established just who the criminal is in this situation.”

  Smalls looked down for a second, then up at me and said, “We have to conduct our investigation, Miss Thompson. Your boyfriend here made very serious accusations.”

  “Then do it with some professionalism and courtesy. It’s no wonder he was reluctant to report it, if this is the response you get for doing the right thing.”

  Ray touched my arm, and said, “Carrie, please….”

  I looked him in the eyes. “Fine. I’ll stay out of it. But I want you to know that someone is on your side. Why don’t you show me where the shower is, and I’ll clean up while they finish.”

  He smiled, and ignoring the other two, took my face between his hands and mashed a fierce kiss on my lips. “I love you, babe. Come on.”

  By the time I got out of the shower, Smalls and Coombs were gone.

  Just a guy from Southie (Ray)

  “Okay,” I said. “I agree, you were right about the car.”

  Carrie smiled, which was something I always like to see. She had a purple cap on, and wore a matching purple coat. Velvet? I don’t know… some kind of fuzzy looking fabric anyway. I’m not really up on that sort of thing. She was driving at the moment, but she glanced over at me with that smile and tapped her cheek with one gloved finger. I snickered a little, then leaned over to the driver’s side and kissed her on the spot she’d indicated.

  “You can tell me I’m right any time you want,” she said.

  “I’ll let you know when it happens,” I replied, grinning. “So help me out here, I don’t want to embarrass myself, and I still don’t have your family straight. Who exactly are we meeting tonight?”

  She grinned, and said, “Well, there’s this guy Dylan. He used to be in the Army….”

  “Oh, come on. Seriously, help a guy out here?”

  Carrie laughed. “All right. Sorry, I couldn’t help myself. Okay… Julia is my older sister. Last I saw her she had blonde hair, but that may have changed by now. She wears a stud in her nose, and you’ll know her because of her husband.”

  “That’s Crank Wilson. The guy from Morbid Obesity.”

  “That’s right. And one of my younger sisters is coming, Sarah. Julia picked her up at the airport today. You’ll know Sarah because she’ll be very conservatively dressed.”

  “Okay. And Alex I know.”

  “Right.”

  “You have … how many more sisters?”

  “Two more. Jessica is Sarah’s twin, she stayed in San Francisco, and Andrea is the youngest. She’s in Spain right now.”

  “Okay. I think I got it. Sarah… conservative. Julia … won’t be. Crank… I know what he looks like. So I’ve got a semi-serious question for you. How the hell did your sister get involved with a rocker?”

  She shrugged. “They met when she was at Harvard, he’s from Boston.”

  “Strange world.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “It’s no more unlikely than me being involved with a soldier.”

  “Former soldier, doctor babe. I’m all done with that.”

  “That seems reasonable,” she replied.

  By this time we were almost there. I’d reserved a room at a nice hotel near Madison Square Garden, but the plan was to drop the car off there first, then walk over to Mustang Sally’s on 7th Ave and 28th, where we were meeting Dylan and her sisters for dinner, then over to the Garden. Morbid Obesity was playing a New Years Eve concert there.

  So, we got checked in at the hotel, left the car with the valet and dumped our bags off, then walked hand in hand the two blocks to Mustang Sally’s. Even through my gloves, I loved the feel of her hand in mine. It had only been three weeks since I’d been in Texas, but it felt like an eternity.

  Look, I’m not an idiot. I knew we were moving too fast. You don’t make lifetime commitments when you’ve known someone just a few days here, then a few days there, with lots of phone calls and emails in between. But the thing is, there’s one thing I learned in Afghanistan. Life is fragile. Screw all that hesitant bullshit. We were going to go for it.

  As the thought ran through my mind, I tugged on her hand and pulled her to me. Her cheeks flushed red, and I said, “I couldn’t walk another step without kissing you.”

  Then I leaned in and our lips touched. People were all around us, jostling us as traffic rolled by on our right. But at that moment all I could see was Carrie. The kiss was intense, but even more so was looking in her eyes. She had pale eyes, blue-green, with a dark iris surrounding them in a way that made me feel like I was slowly falling off a cliff. She closed them as our kiss deepened, and her mouth slowly opened, our lips exploring each other, our tongues just barely touching.

  My whole body came alive at that touch, urgent sensation, and I pulled her to me and whispered, “I’m love you, Carrie Thompson.”

  She caught her breath, and said, “I love you, Ray Sherman.”

  We may have stayed there for five minutes, or maybe it was forever. But when we separated, I felt like something had changed. I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her. And I felt like I’d do anything, anything in the world, for her. It was overpowering, wonderful.

  We slowly separated and started walking again, but at a pace which probably drove the New Yorkers around us insane. I had an arm around her waist, and I wasn’t letting go no matter what happened.

  “I want to tell you about something,” I said, my voice low.

  She just raised an eyebrow. I loved that her cheeks were still flushed.

  “When I turned eighteen, my parents asked what I wanted to do for my birthday, and I told them I wanted to go skydiving. I think my mom had a small heart attack. But me and my dad went. We sat through the safety briefings and all that, and then we went up.”

  “Skydiving? Jumping out of airplanes?” For a woman who had stalked mountain lions, her voice had a suspiciously fearful squeak to it when she mentioned skydiving. I made a note to take her up sometime. She’d love it.

  I nodded. “Anyway… the first time… it’s hard to capture the feeling. There’s fear, when you’re looking out the door of the plane, and knowing it’s thousands of feet to the ground. And then, out the door, and the wind is buffeting you, and there’s this moment of incredible terror. Will the parachute open? Will you flap screaming to your death? Is this it? But then… everything went calm after a few seconds. The wind was intense. But there was this feeling of absolute freedom. No gravity… flying. Absolute exhilaration. I could see hundreds of miles of land below us, I could touch the sky. It was the most amazing moment of my life.”

  “Did your parachute open?” She had a wry smile on her face when she asked the question.

  I snickered. “It did. But the thing is… that feeling that I could touch the sky? That’s exactly how you make me feel.”

  Her smile just grew, her white teeth gleaming, her eyes prominent and beautiful, and she said, “That’s the cheesiest thing I ever heard in my life.” Then she giggled and stopped and kissed me again. Which is exactly what I wanted at that moment.

  Our lips parted, and I said, “Would you be upset if I said I want to skip the dinner and the concert and run off to the hotel with you right now?”

  “No,” she said. “But we can’t do it. I don’t get to see my sisters enough as is.”

  “And I can’t wait to meet them.”

  “You don’t actually have to wait. We’re here.”

  I looked up, and she was right. The sign for Mustang Sally’s was three doors down from where we stood.

  “Well… I get a kiss first? To tide me over?”

  She bit her lip, then smiled again, and we were kissing, and I was in free fall all over again.
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  Then, barely at the edge of consciousness, I heard the words, spoken in a clear, loud New York accent, “Isn’t that Crank’s sister-in-law?”

  Next thing I knew, there were flashes, several of them, and I flinched. Both of us whipped our heads to my right, and there was a crowd of photographers, with cameras pointed at us. What the hell?

  “Oh crap,” she said. “Come on, let’s get inside.” She actually gave the photographers a friendly smile, which is a lot more than I could do, because I wanted to punch one of them. The flash had thrown me off, making my heart race, as I instantly became aware of everything around me. Every bit of trash on the sidewalk that might hold a bomb, every coat that might have a gun hidden underneath. My breath sped up, and I said, “Let’s get inside now.”

  I never let go of her hand as we pushed our way through the crowd to the front of door of the restaurant. A bouncer stood at the front door, which was pretty unusual for a restaurant. Carrie said something to him, I don’t know what, because my mind was still focused on the photographers, and he let us in.

  “Jesus, what was that about?” I said.

  She shrugged. “Part of the cost of having a celebrity in the family. You get used to it.”

  You get used to it. I wanted Carrie, badly enough to get used to anything. But that would take some serious getting used to. I didn’t realize I was shaking until Carrie turned and put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, a look of concern on her face.

  “Yeah,” I said, knowing I didn’t sound it. “The flash startled me.”

  Understanding dawned on her face instantly. She wrapped her arm around mine and said, “Come on. Let’s get the introductions out of the way and relax for the night, okay?”

  I nodded, and said, “Sorry. I’ll try not to be too much of a spaz.”

  “Relax,” she said. “I get it. I really do, okay? It’s going to take some time before you’re … completely home. And that’s normal, and it’s okay, and I’m here with you. You hear me?”