Beautiful Disaster

by Laura Spinella

  “Why? Because it would destroy Michael or hurt me?”

  “Both, of course,” she answered, sounding genuinely offended. “I’ve always had your best interest at heart. Please tell me you believe that much?”

  While she did, a pat on the back wasn’t her focus at the moment. Mia craned her neck, looking past Roxanne’s shoulder. “I have to get in there.”

  “Five minutes. Just give me five minutes to talk to you.”

  Glancing through the glassed portion of the door, she caught Nurse Margaret’s eye. There was a flurry of medical personnel going in and out of Flynn’s room. Mia would just be in the way. Sucking in a sigh of surrender, Mia pointed to a small conference room. Roxanne followed and started to close the door. “Leave it open,” she said, “so they can find me.” Offering a curt nod, Roxanne sat on the edge of the table, holding tight to a thin folder. There was an exchange of uneasy stares. Roxanne wore dark-rimmed spectacles that clashed with a layer of beauty queen she was still trying to disown. There was a judgmental scan as Roxanne took in Mia’s appearance. She drew a deep breath, shaking a head full of damp, untidy hair. Raising her arms, they slapped against her wet raincoat, a spray of water hitting Roxanne. Mia knew how everything looked—a mess. It didn’t matter. “Let me save you the trouble, Rox. I’m not leaving him. I have every intention of explaining things to Michael just as soon as—”

  “Soon as what? Just as soon as Flynn wakes up so he can add his two cents? It’s not a bad plan, Mia. Screwing up your life is what he does best.”

  “Oh, for the—” Mia edged toward the door. Agreeing to the conversation was a mistake. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t I? Just because I’ve been on the night shift doesn’t mean I haven’t been around. I’ve been up to his room at three a.m. I know the kind of time you’ve spent here, seen the sweater you left behind, the discarded lunch. Cheese fries and a double soy latte. Who eats that besides you? The pages of sketches tacked to his walls. Anything for close collaboration, huh? Tell me, is it as good as it used to be?”

  Mia’s gaze, which had been fixated on a coffeemaker, jerked to Roxanne, assuming they weren’t discussing interior design. “You can’t even imagine,” she said dryly.

  “Mmm, thanks, but I’ll pass. He’s an addiction, Mia—like any drug . . . nothing more. He crashes back into your life and you can’t tell up from down, right from wrong. He skews everything. Or did I miss the part when you took your vows: ‘til death do us part or Flynn rolls back into town’?”

  “That’s not fair. You have no idea what this is doing to me. It’s not like I chose this situation, Roxanne. I’m not the one who abandoned Flynn in the middle of the night!” It was a colossal mistake. Admitting any wrong he might have done gave Roxanne the opening for which she’d been waiting. So it was something less than Mia expected when Roxanne didn’t pounce. Instead, she pulled the glasses from her face, massaging the bridge of her nose and heaving a sigh.

  “Yes, well, I hope you understand there’s no way I could have anticipated this situation either.” When Roxanne looked up, she was blinking back a tear. It accentuated the gravity of a weighty situation. “I’d forgotten the virility of the patient,” she murmured. “So what are you telling me, Mia? You’re just as in love with him now as you were twelve years ago?” Mia nodded. A verbal confession might taunt an undecided fate. “And if he wakes up tomorrow, what will you do? Just waltz out the door and say, ‘Gee, thanks, Michael. It’s been swell, but it’s time to move on’?”

  That stings, Roxanne.

  “Destroy him to be with . . . with . . .”

  Strange, she seemed to be struggling hard with words about Flynn that she would generally toss around like dirty laundry. It gave Mia time to put into sentences the jumbled thoughts that had been swirling around her head for weeks—maybe years. “I can honestly say I don’t feel any different about Michael than I did before Flynn turned up. I just have better perspective. While I never would have chosen to leave Flynn, I did decide to marry Michael. I own that. No one is responsible but me.” An eerie flash of lightning lit a dismal sky. When a crushing boom of thunder didn’t follow through, destroying her, Mia dug in. “You know something else, Rox? There are about a million ifs in this conversation. And I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have the answers. But since your type-A personality requires one . . . If Flynn did wake up, if I had the answers that are locked in his head . . .” If he wasn’t a wanted fugitive. Mia swallowed that one down, knowing it was the biggest if of all. “If Flynn wanted me back, well—”

  Roxanne couldn’t take it, pounding her fingers against her temple. “Oh, Mia, think about what you’re saying! What makes you think he even wants you? Regardless of Michael, or anything else, you’re balancing an awful lot of your future on a shaky past. If you remember correctly, it didn’t go so well in the end.” Roxanne’s cell rang. She yanked it from her waistband, glancing at the caller ID. “I have to take this.” She stalked to the other side of the room, snapping instructions at whomever she was talking to.

  Mia slumped onto the edge of the table. She shivered, her skin chilled from the rain. Or, more likely, the one memory she’d been trying to avoid.

  It was right before college graduation, the following spring. A year had passed in the swiftness of a heartbeat. June took her by surprise, actually having had the nerve to come around again. The weeks before had been bumpy. Change was in the air. Mia had kept a positive spin on their unspoken future, feeding Flynn hints about possible plans: There’s a design house in Atlanta . . . pass the salt . . . an entry level position . . . would you grab the mail . . . not my dream job, but a start . . . come back to bed . . . it’s everything if you’ll come with me. She had kept all his secrets, understood his nightmares, and loved Flynn for exactly who he was. Would he do this for her? He hadn’t answered.

  It began oddly, Flynn spending the night at her apartment even after they had argued. Flynn rarely slept when he stayed, and he didn’t stay often. But with Roxanne gone until Monday morning, he’d agreed. Thinking back, she was the only one arguing, saying something ugly about the way he lived his life before turning her back, burying her head in a pillow. He was his usual noncombative self, unwilling to engage her effort to goad him into an all-out fight. All night he seemed more restless than usual. She had dozed on and off, catching glimpses of him, knowing that he didn’t want company. Mia worried that she was holding on too tight, had made too many demands. You couldn’t do that with Flynn. Closed spaces, smothering arms—they didn’t work. He was there at one, staring out the window into blackness. Mia rolled over at three, half awake, thinking he might have come to bed. It was only the pillow. She forced her eyes around the room. Flynn’s back was to the wall. He was sitting, writing something. Even in the dim light from her desk, she could see his intense focus. She thought he might be doing a crossword puzzle. And the last time she opened an eye, right before five, he was on the floor, eyes closed as if deep in meditation. Not long after that, Mia felt his fingers brush across her forehead as he softly kissed her cheek, whispering something she still couldn’t recall. The rumpled covers smoothed tight around her and she felt better, drifting into a sound sleep.

  Silence woke Mia later that morning, her senses detecting the signs. She ignored them. Her fingertips reached out, anticipating the warmth of his body, meeting instead with the cool cotton sheet. Her nose didn’t fill with the aroma of brewing coffee, coming on strong like an ardent admirer. A man who rarely slept often had a cup by five a.m. Even the bedroom seemed awkward, overly bright with sunshine. Awareness piqued. Mia padded into the living room. The coffeemaker sat cold, the apartment empty. She threw open the front door. His motorcycle was gone. The roar of the engine should have woken her. She fought the omen, tried to reason that he’d gone back to the cottage, maybe to the bike shop. She was humoring herself.

  Hanging on to a breath of hope, she went to the cottage. Her heart officially snapped in tw
o when the desk clerk told her that he’d paid up and checked out the previous day. He had been planning it. Flynn left, vanished just like he promised he wouldn’t. Peculiarities from the night before made stinging sense, his disinterest in arguing with her. Why fight with a woman you planned on leaving in a few hours? It was so final. There was no telling which way he’d continue on down that broken road, no way to find him. Mia went back to the apartment and got into bed. She figured she’d wait there for the rest, for the breathing part of life to be over.

  She lay motionless, not crying, just listening—meticulously absorbing the details before they vanished too. Mia could hear the sound of his voice through the rain that fell that night, feel his hands brush along her arm as the sheet pulled around her, his steady breath against her as she held the pillow tight. Days later the sun made an unwelcome attempt to alter her reality and Mia heard the bedroom door open. She didn’t allow a moment of expectation. “Is it . . . Is it Monday, Rox?” she asked without looking.

  “Yes, of course it’s Monday. My organic chemistry final is in a half hour. I just got back. Isn’t your final design project due today? Why isn’t there any coffee? Is something wrong, Mia? Are you sick?”

  “Sick? No.” She still didn’t move, the first flood of tears finally pushing past the desolation.

  “What’s the matter?” she whispered. “Oh my God, he’s gone.”

  The conversation had gone something like that. It was hard to remember; her mind had been caught in a looping rerun of the past year, convinced that she had driven Flynn away. Too many demands, too tight of a grip—obviously she had loved him too much in all the wrong ways.

  The cell phone clicked off and it took Mia a moment to refocus on Roxanne. “Be reasonable, Mia. Think about the possibilities.” Her eyes lit as she strode back across the room. “Flynn . . . he could be married. Did that occur to you? He could have a wife and a bunch of kids, a double-wide, all waiting for him in a premier mobile home community. Perhaps, right now, there’s some poor woman dragging around a lot of sniveling brats just hoping to find their daddy!”

  “Stop it, Roxanne.” Mia rose from the table’s edge, turning away. It was preposterous; she couldn’t even put the picture together in her head. He belonged with her. “Just stop, he wouldn’t . . . there just isn’t . . .” But like so many instances, there was nothing tangible that she could offer in his defense.

  “Good, Mia, keep denying it. Why not? It’s worked so far. And while my theory about those girls might be a late-night movie run amok, I do know that there never was and still isn’t—even in his dreamy comatose state—anything too innocent about Sergeant Peyton Flynn McDermott.”

  “Sergeant Pey—” She stopped. His whole name. It was something she’d managed to keep hidden from Roxanne for thirteen years. “How do you know that?”

  “I did what I had to, hospital policy. I gathered from our last conversation that you weren’t going to offer much information. Aside from that, how would you know if anything he told you was the truth?” Roxanne said, gripping tighter to the folder she held. “As his admitting physician it was my responsibility to do everything I could to identify him and his next of kin.”

  Mia struggled for control. Roxanne couldn’t know everything; the attitude wasn’t nearly self-righteous enough. “So, that’s what you were doing in his room at three a.m. Swabbing his mouth. Roxanne, tell me you didn’t—”

  “Doesn’t matter. If I hadn’t done it, someone else would have. Someone else also wouldn’t give you the benefit of this conversation. At least I was discreet. There was a preliminary match to his DNA, and an initial ID.” She stood, rounding the table as she spoke. “So let’s compare notes, see if you really know anything about him. He wasn’t discharged from the Marines, Mia. He was court-martialed.” Roxanne stopped, her fingers squeezing hard into the back of a leather chair as she watched Mia’s face. As if there were a gun to her head, Mia held painfully still. A change in breathing might tip her off. Roxanne was intuitive, if not plain clairvoyant at times. Dropping the folder onto the table, she flipped it open. “Peyton Flynn McDermott, United States Marine Corp. Elite Forces, first in his recon training class. Well,” she said, glancing up, “that explains his brain. Rank, Sergeant. Arraignment, March 1991. Court-martial, July 1991. Subsequent proceedings, investigation, trial, and sentencing—classified. Trial and sentencing, Mia. As in prison. So how much of that comes as a surprise to you?”

  Mia shrugged. “I didn’t know about the first-in-his-class part,” she said, feeling a swell of pride.

  Roxanne returned the cool stare. “You might want to save the smug look. Serial killers often operate under misguided brilliance. As for the rest of the record, it’s sealed, wrapped up in all kinds of military red tape.” Her head cocked the opposite way, eyes narrowing. “No wonder my theory about those girls sends you into a panic attack. Give it up, Mia. What was he in for?”

  She half-smiled, knowing a shot of truth serum couldn’t drag it out of her. “It’s no different than all those years ago. It wasn’t your business then and it still isn’t. Why would I tell you anything? You would have treated him like a crime scene waiting to happen. You did treat him that way. Adding a criminal record to your crazy theory—do you really think I was going to hand you that kind of information?”

  “Oh, you mean that crazy theory of mine that just got a boost from reality? The DNA will come back. Whatever you’re hiding, Mia, it will come out. You can’t protect him forever; it’s only a matter of time until you find out what he’s really capable of. You know there will come a day when you appreciate my concern, when—”

  “When what? I’ll thank you?” You’re right, Roxanne, it is only a matter of time until you hear the details. When that happens you’ll probably have Flynn shackled to the bed, comatose or not. He’s still a fugitive. They’ll come for him before he even wakes up.

  “Facts, Mia, are indisputable. You know, on my way up here, I was thinking of the irony, what a grand time a good prosecutor would have with him. Imagine what your father—”

  “Leave my father out of this,” she snapped. Having made peace with that very thought years ago, she wasn’t about to let Roxanne dredge it up.

  “Fine, but this is only another piece of an ugly puzzle.” She closed the folder, pushing it toward Mia. “How can you keep doing this? You’re a successful, smart woman who, need I remind you, married the right guy.”

  Mia’s gaze darted guiltily around the room. No need to go down that road, Rox. The truth is the right guy didn’t ask . . .

  “You’ve moved miles beyond the college girl who took in Flynn like a stray dog. I just don’t under—”

  “Faith, Roxanne,” Mia replied. “That girl had limitless faith; I have limitless faith. Look it up—it doesn’t require a letter of reference, a testimonial, or your judgment. And believe it or not, it’s still not something I have to prove to you.”

  Roxanne was poised to launch into another rebuttal when a lethal buzzing noise vibrated through the room. Morphing into some kind of automated doctor mode, she flew past Mia, plowing through the ICU’s double doors. A crash cart went sailing by, nearly colliding with her. Seconds later, Mia realized that the buzz was echoing from Flynn’s room. Medical personnel thundered past, Roxanne joining the stampede. Nurse Margaret’s voice permeated all of it.

  “Crash cart is on its way, stat! Flatline, code blue, six B!”

  Mia fell to her knees.

  Chapter 17

  ATHENS

  Neither Mia nor Flynn said a word on the way to the hotel, having narrowly escaped the frat boys. Flynn got out of the car first, slamming the door so violently the entire frame shook. He couldn’t get away fast enough, two steps ahead of her all the way to the room. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to speak to him, only that she was at a complete loss as to what to say. Wow, that was really cool, Flynn! Exactly how many guys can you beat the crap out of at once? It didn’t seem appropriate. Mia replayed the heart-stopping
scene over and over in her mind. It was terrifying and fascinating. And for the first time she wanted to know how deep his secrets went. The precision skill, the detached calm demeanor—it gave her more insight than anything he’d confided in the months since they’d been together.

  Once inside he disappeared into the bathroom, slamming its door too. Mia could hear the shower running. She sat on the corner of the bed, debating whether to pound on the door and demand some answers. But she couldn’t decide which question to ask first. The water stopped after a time. Flynn emerged, shirtless, his hair soaking wet. He marched right over, catching her off guard. Mia leaned back, finding herself in the same position she was in on the blanket before all hell broke loose. She blinked up at him, briefly concerned about his state of mind. Was he aware of his surroundings and everything that had happened? He stood at the edge of the bed in between her splayed legs, so close that his hair dripped into the cleavage of her blouse. His arms hung straight at his sides, fists clenched. The expression on his face had not changed. Solitary, unflappable anger.

  “That’s what I get for being goddamned polite. I should have said something the second I saw you. I don’t want to see this outfit on you again, ever.”

  “What? Don’t tell me what I can or can’t wear. You don’t own me.” Mia felt her own face go red over the domineering demand.

  “Like hell,” he hissed through gritted teeth. “If the way you’re dressed is going to put me in that position, you can bet your sweet ass I’m going to have a say in your wardrobe.”

  “Well, I only did what you said.” He narrowed his eyes, inching back. “Sticking up for myself, not letting some jerk insult me or whatever.”