“Calling Annette to warn her that Nell has a new puppy tactic.”
That Monday morning Zach had the gardens to himself, which made it easy for his thoughts to wander where they wanted to.
Fran.
He had never had pleasure like he had heating her cool to the boiling point of abandon. To the point, but not past it.
And then she’d tried to wrap her calm back around herself like a cloak.
He picked up the handles of the wheelbarrow and followed the empty path toward the house.
In another of Kay’s ideas about how to spread the word on Bliss House, everyone else—including the construction crew—had fanned out in groups of three and four to give presentations about their town’s most historic building. They were at the middle schools and high school now, after hitting grade schools in the morning. The younger students were off this afternoon while their teachers prepared for parents’ night.
Parents’ night.
He’d helped create Nell, but he wasn’t her parent.
Could he live with that? Could he live up to Fran’s view of him?
Part of him wanted to get out of here. Nell would be better off, secure in having Steve and Annette as her parents. And he wouldn’t be torn.
But something…something held him here. Like the old man’s grip during those twenty-seven hours whenever he’d had a point to make.
But what was the point?
Zach turned the corner of Bliss House with the wheelbarrow and came face-to-face with Nell.
The hope he read in her face switched to disappointment as she recognized him. He felt a pressure in his chest, as if he couldn’t get enough oxygen.
“Oh. It’s you.”
“Yes. It’s me. What’s wrong, Nell?”
She looked past him down the path. “I need Fran. Or Max.”
“Everybody’s doing programs at the schools. What’s wrong?”
“Isn’t Lenny here? Or Eric? They work with Max. They should be here.”
“They’re not. Nobody’s here but me. Now, what’s wrong?”
He saw her weighing the situation. Not wanting to turn to him, but needing… He dropped the wheelbarrow handles and stepped around them. There were no overt signs of injury or illness, but…
“Are you okay? Are you sick or—”
He had one hand on her shoulder, assessing her pupils, breathing, skin color, temperature. All seemed fine. But there were small tears in the long sleeves of her heavy shirt.
“It’s not me. It’s Pansy.” Her voice wobbled.
“Pansies?” He looked at the bright-colored flowers Fran had planted by the front door.
“Not pansies—Pansy. My puppy.” The scorn ebbed and fear stepped forward. “She’s stuck and she’s crying and I can’t reach her.”
“Stuck where?”
It was as if something unlocked in her, possibly the recognition that he was her only hope. “C’mon, you have to help her.”
She fisted her hand around the hem of his T-shirt and yanked. He heard a faint rip when he didn’t respond fast enough.
She headed for the farthest, wildest corner of the grounds.
He had a feeling, a bad feeling. They passed the last tree. He could hear the dog’s pitiful, low cries, which eased one major concern—it was alive. The sounds came from near the wall. And the only thing between them and the wall were bushes. He’d always liked blueberries. Please…
“There!”
Nell dropped to her knees in the dirt in front of the oldest, biggest, most thorn-laden raspberry canes he’d ever seen. He bent, and through a thicket of crisscrossed canes, he saw a brown-and-white dog not yet out of puppyhood, caught in the V between canes thicker around than his thumbs.
Raspberry bushes.
“Pansy! Pansy!”
The dog moved forward, encountered a thorn, yelped, tried to turn, felt another one and gave a low cry.
“No—don’t call her. She needs to stay still. Stay, Pansy.”
“She doesn’t know that yet,” Nell objected.
But apparently the dog recognized what was in her own best interest and stilled.
He straightened.
“Where are you going?” It was less a question than an accusation.
The eyes…the eyes tumbled him back four months. Not the wild eyes of the puppy, but the expectant yet wary eyes of the child, and the wise, resigned yet still expectant eyes of old Miguel.
“I’m looking things over. Talk to her quietly, Nell. Keep her calm.”
She talked to the dog, but kept her eyes on him. He tried to ignore her suspicious glare as he assessed the extraction. Leverage could clear part of the path but not all of it. He needed equipment.
See the big picture, focus on the details. Inch at a time.
Zach had relied on those details to give him that little slice of distance from Miguel. It was the only way to keep your heart pumping. Otherwise it could crush you. The death, the sorrow.
Sure, everyone said live rescues weren’t the only reward. There was the necessity of finding the dead, for practical reasons like public health and survivors’ legal rights, and especially to help the living heal. But live rescues kept you going—either the hope of them or the memory of them.
But with the old man, it was neither.
Everyone had known. Everyone who’d worked like hell to get him out, who’d plotted and strained and sweated and prayed. They’d done their damnedest, even knowing he wasn’t going to make it.
Even Miguel. Especially Miguel.
“You can’t let Pansy die.”
He jerked. He couldn’t—wouldn’t—promise to hold off death.
“I’ll be right back, Nell.”
“You’re leaving.” Mere accusation would have sounded good after those two words. They were a pronouncement of high treason.
“I need to get some things. I’ll be right back.” He met her eyes. “I’ll be right back.”
He saw disbelief. He wanted to argue with it, but that would be another moment of pain and fear for the puppy. He wasn’t that selfish. Especially when arguing wouldn’t convince this child.
He sprinted away.
If he could put his hands on a spreader for a quarter of an hour… He did find loppers, a shovel, three pieces of two-by-four, balancing them along with the tools as he headed back to Nell.
She glared at him.
“You were gone a long time.” Her chin wobbled.
Not more than five minutes.
“Your job is to talk to Pansy,” he told her. “Let her hear your voice.”
The old man had talked. A lifetime told in twenty-seven hours.
As Nell talked to Pansy, Zach pulled his gloves on and started cutting with the loppers. The young growth caught on the old canes, his gloves, his shirt, his neck.
He swallowed a curse.
“You don’t like raspberries?” Nell’s voice quavered.
Pansy wasn’t the only one who needed calming. He yanked free of raspberry thorns and kept going. Creating a tunnel to Pansy.
“Not the plants, not since I was a kid.”
“Why?”
Inching forward, he told her about picking raspberries as a boy with Steve and Rob by the old highway bridge over Tobias River. She asked question after question. He answered automatically. She’d know details of every outing if he didn’t get this dog free soon.
The tunnel wasn’t wide enough to accommodate his shoulders as he got in deeper. His shirt and skin took more punishment.
“Got it.” He wrapped the end of the leash around his hand. “Call her, Nell.”
“Pansy, Pansy, come! Come, Pansy.”
But the puppy had learned her lesson from the thorns too well. Moving meant pain, so she held absolutely still, except for trembling.
He had to go in and get her. But, Christ, why did it have to be raspberries? Fate had a wicked sense of humor.
He wedged the two shorter two-by-fours on either side of the tunnel, then put the longer p
iece between them.
He belly-crawled into the tunnel. Branches curled past the two-by-fours, snagging him. Worse, there were canes under him, tearing at him, piercing his elbow as he used it to pull himself forward.
Another foot.
He looked up, eye to eye with the frightened animal.
“Hi, Pansy,” he said softly. “You’re going to be a good girl now and come right to me.”
He stretched out his gloved hand.
He saw his hand. No longer covered in a rough work glove, but in the latex of his profession. Not moving. Frozen, his hand reaching, not touching. Knowing the old man was dead. Not ready to confirm it.
The puppy whimpered, and he was back in Tobias.
He slipped his hand under Pansy’s belly. She spread her stiff legs in classic canine passive resistance, but she was small enough that he drew her to him with no problem. Going backward, the thorns got in a few more jabs.
At last, he cleared the end of the raspberry tunnel and sat back on his haunches, handing the puppy to Nell. It was a reunion of relief and joy, tears and licks.
“She’s bleeding!”
Zach shrugged off his torn shirt and wrapped it around the puppy, then handed her back. Nell cuddled the animal.
Car doors closed and voices came from the direction of the drive.
“Zach?” Miss Trudi’s voice called.
“In the kitchen garden,” he called back. “With Nell.”
The tenor of the voices changed, and in seconds, Steve, followed by Annette, then Fran and the rest of them, arrived.
“What happened?” Steve demanded. “Are you okay, Nell?”
“I’m okay, but Pansy…” She held up the wrapped puppy to her father as if he could heal her with his touch.
“Her cuts will need cleaning, but no stitches,” Zach said.
“What about yours?” Fran asked.
He looked down at his blood-speckled chest. Some of his, some of Pansy’s. “No big deal.”
Annette took the puppy from Steve, while he squatted to eye level with Nell.
“How did this happen, Nell?”
“I had Pansy’s leash. I was holding it tight, like you said. But then Squid—that’s Miss Trudi’s cat,” she said over her shoulder to Zach before turning back to her parents, “ran along the top of the wall and Pansy—” she flapped one hand “—ski-dabbled.”
“Skedaddled,” Annette murmured.
“She ran right through the raspberries and she didn’t get hurt or anything, but then she turned around and her leash got tangled and I tried to reach her and she tried to reach me and she got stuck. So I went to look for help. But I couldn’t find anyone, just him. He cut her out.”
Zach helped up the loppers by one handle like a trophy. “The jaws of life.”
No one laughed, but the atmosphere did ease, all except around Steve. He didn’t look at Zach, only at Nell.
“You and Pansy were supposed to be at Laura Ellen’s house, Nell. How did you get here?”
“Her sister drove us. Laura Ellen’s got extra homework because she was talking in class.”
“Why did you come here? You knew we wouldn’t be here. We told you all about it this morning.”
Nell said nothing but her gaze slid sideways toward Zach.
Steve stood up abruptly. “We’ll talk about this at home. First we’ll take Pansy to Dr. Maclaine and make sure she’s okay.”
Annette touched Steve’s arm lightly. But apparently she didn’t think that was going to do the trick, because she also turned to Zach, gave him a smile and said, “Thank you, Zach.”
“No problem. Glad to help.’
Steve jerked his head in what might have been a nod, but he didn’t look at his brother or say more. He picked up Nell, who was still holding the puppy in Zach’s shirt, and strode toward the cars.
Annette patted Zach’s arm, exchanged a look with Fran, then followed.
Zach watched the three of them—four including the dog—a family, united by a hundred, maybe a thousand such crises overcome. By a thousand moments of love and connection.
He had just this one with the child he’d helped create.
“C’mon, Zach,” Fran said from beside him. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Looks like you’ve been shot with buckshot.”
“A thousand cuts,” he reminded her.
A thousand cuts. A thousand connections. That was the difference.
“Here’s the first-aid kit. Now, you sit down and let me fix you up.” Fran steered him by the arm toward the closed toilet seat.
She’d fussed about his scratches in her understated way, and couldn’t be budged from her insistence that they return to her house to tend them.
It was time to tell her. After last night, past time.
But he didn’t have to tell it all.
“I’ll do it, Fran. This is my job.” He took the first-aid kit from her, put it on the edge of the sink.
“You don’t have to be macho or—”
“I’m not being macho. I mean it literally. This is my job.”
He reversed places with her and urged her to sit while he perched on the side of the tub. Her head came up, her eyes wide. But she said nothing.
“You might even say it’s my calling.” His mouth twisted a bit—not at the idea of having a calling, but at the irony that Zach Corbett had ended up with one.
“You don’t work for the county government? You lied to me?”
“I didn’t lie about anything I told you—I do work for the county. But I didn’t tell you everything. I trained in the army as a medic.”
“A medic?” The blankness sharpened to recognition in an instant. “That’s why you knew what to do for Muriel when she fainted.”
“That’s because it is what I do. I work for Fairfax County, Virginia, now with the fire-and-rescue department.”
“But why didn’t you tell me?”
“There’s more. I’m a member of Virginia Task Force One—it’s an elite urban search-and-rescue team. We work here in the States and we’re one of two in the country that the feds can deploy overseas. It’s…it’s the best thing I’ve ever been involved with, Fran.”
Her mouth worked a moment before sound came out.
“What do you do?”
“Me? I’m a small cog. But the task force—we respond to disasters, from hurricanes to earthquakes to bombings of buildings. We were in Turkey and Iran, and then the big one last spring in South America.”
“The Americans who rescued that family that came out alive after four days—I saw that on TV. And—” Her mouth formed an O. “That’s why the reporter who came after Kay knew you. He recognized you. But…I would have recognized you. If you’d been one of the rescuers they showed on TV, I would have recognized you. Even if you used a different name.”
“That was Blue Team’s rescue. I was on Red Team.”
Their extraction had been news for only a blink of the eye, before Blue Team’s rescue had drawn all the attention.
“But…why haven’t you said anything? Why haven’t you told your family? Oh. Or maybe you did and…”
“You’re the first one I’ve told, Fran. Kay figured it out, thanks to that tabloid sleaze, but she agreed it was my choice whether to tell or not. As for why…I don’t know if I can explain. That’s who I am now, but coming back here, back to Tobias, I’m still the kid who ran away. I didn’t want… I couldn’t…”
She put one hand over his, brushed back his hair with the other.
“They’d be so proud of you. As proud as your friend Elliott must have been.”
Training kept his muscles still when they wanted to jerk. But nothing could make him talk about whether Elliott had been proud of him.
“I’m not interested in buying the Corbetts’ approval. That’s not why I do it.”
“I know, and that’s why it wouldn’t be buying approval.”
“They’re comfortable seeing me a certain way. Why shake them up?”
“Because yo
u’re not twenty anymore, Zach. Whether they accept you as the man you are now or not, you have a responsibility to show them that man. That hero.”
“I’m not—”
“A hero,” she repeated firmly. “I promise not to tell anyone else, but I will not pretend you’re not one. How did you come to be on the task force, Zach?”
It all came out as he treated his cuts. Training in the army, joining a smaller search-and-rescue team, moving to Virginia to join the Fairfax department as a paramedic, then working for more than a solid year at getting on the task force roster and waiting another year before his first deployment.
He told her about the training, about the characters, about that first deployment. He made her laugh, he made her mouth form that tempting O again, he made her eyes widen and tear up.
Letting her see how much the work, the team, and the team members meant to him, he told her everything.
Except about his last deployment.
Chapter Ten
“What’s wrong, Fran?”
“Nothing. Just need to get to work. I have phone calls to make.”
“I’ll go out and get something to put together for dinner.”
“Please don’t do that. We have so many leftovers from the weekend. We need to clean out the refrigerator.”
“Okay. I’m going for a run, unless…you’re sure nothing’s wrong.”
“Not a thing. Enjoy your run.”
The door closed behind Zach and she sat at the table, the two calls on her list already completed. She’d lied to have an excuse not to talk to him.
Wrong? How could there be anything wrong?
Zach Corbett had found his calling. He helped people. He saved their lives. He closed the gaping unknown for survivors of tragedies searching for their loved ones. He was a hero.
No, not just a hero. A rescuer.
She laughed. Startled at the sound, she swallowed it. Zach Corbett was a rescuer. He didn’t need help, he gave it. He was no longer the boy with angry blue eyes, the swagger and the dark confusion swirling around him. He was sure and grounded—she’d sensed that in him the first day. She’d told Steve that.
And yet she’d indulged in some idiotic fantasy, thinking she was rescuing him.
He hadn’t been so…attentive yesterday out of gratitude that she’d listened to him, perhaps given him a bit of guidance. She’d been fooling herself.
Baby Blues and Wedding Bells Page 17