He’d already made up his mind that if the docs wouldn’t return him to duty, he’d take the medical discharge and get out of her life.
The pain wasn’t bad this afternoon. It was easy to go along with her lightened mood. Too frequently, he hadn’t been able to. Getting back into shape was harder than he had thought. Running with a headache wasn’t pleasant, but he’d done it before. He had thought if he stayed with it, he would eventually be able to run even when running brought on attacks of nerve pain.
He grinned. “Baby Jane, I think I’ve seen it before, but I’m perfectly willing to look at it again.”
JJ poked him in the chest. “Not that. This is special.”
“That’s pretty special, too.”
“Stop with the double entendre. I’m serious.”
“Okay,” he clicked his fingers for Brinkley to stop snuffling around the hall and follow them up the curving stairs.
At the top of the steps, JJ led him to one of the guest rooms. She threw open the door with a big smile. “I imagine you know what this is.”
“It’s a hyperbaric chamber. What’s it for?”
“It’s for you, silly.”
“Why?”
“I told you about it. That HBOT is useful in treating TBI.”
“Oh yeah. The place the SEALs are running out in California.” He’d made a note to work out how to use his Navy connections to try it.
He’d been a little chagrined that JJ had discovered this use for HBOT, but not because he was a SEAL and should have known. He was a combat medic. When SEALs needed hyperbaric treatment, the Navy had specially trained technicians. The real reason he didn’t know was that his reading was still too slow and he lost his place too easily to use the Internet effectively.
JJ lovingly patted the cloth cylinder that looked like a cross between a backpacking tent and a space capsule. “You refused to go there, so I figured it would just have to come to you.”
“You bought it?”
“Yes. I could have rented, but renting was so expensive—”
“You bought it?”
“Yes.”
“A thirty-thousand-dollar piece of equipment?”
“Twenty-nine. But with delivery and insurance, yes, a little over thirty thousand.”
“David needs an HBOT, so I’ll just pick up the phone and order one?”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Any problem you see, you solve it by throwing money at it. Do you think you can make me better by throwing money at this problem, too?”
“Throw money at it! Where did you get the idea I do that?”
“You do it all the time.” He mimed a phone to his ear. “‘Would you send over an HBOT, please? I’d like it delivered in an hour.’ You want an example? We can start with the fact that you wanted to pay me to marry you and then get out of your life.”
“Don’t go all holy and self-righteous on me! You married me to get the money for your brothers and sister.”
“Haven’t you figured it out yet? I married you because I friggin’ wanted you. I don’t want your money. I don’t want your stuff. I don’t want friggin’ thirty-thousand-dollar Christmas presents. I want you, dammit. I love you.”
“I know.”
“You do?”
“Yes, and I love you, too,” she snapped, obviously unimpressed by his declaration. “I’m not trying to buy love from you or prove my love or anything else. Your problem with this is your issue. Not mine.”
“Issue? What do you mean?” Anyway, when had it become about him?
JJ crossed her arms under her breasts and tapped her toe. “When you were a kid, you decided that everybody was supposed to be part of the family but you. Everybody was supposed to get your mother’s love and attention but you. They were younger, more fragile, and needed support more than you did. You came to that conclusion when you recognized that she was overwhelmed because you are strong and generous and willing to sacrifice yourself to look after people.”
“Wait a minute. You’ve been talking to Elle. This is her theory.”
“I happen to think she’s right, but I had already concluded it on my own. If we’re going to make a family, at some point you have to decide the family’s resources are for you, too.” She poked him in the chest with a sharp fingernail.
David backed away, but she came after him. “When are you going to figure it out?” She poked him again. “The money comes with me. Are we married or not? I thought we were. I thought that meant I was supposed to do things for you occasionally. You’ve given me so much the last few weeks. Out of your vitality, you’ve given me life. Not money, but a kind of abundance I didn’t know existed.” Her eyes shot out icy green sparks. “But you’re saying it’s only supposed to flow one way—from you to me.
“I guess it comes down to this. You married me, but are you going to let me marry you?” She threw up her hands. “What the hell. You don’t want to let me share in your life. Fine. Use the HBOT. If it works, you can have your life back. That’s what you always say you want. You got along without me before. We don’t have to wait a year. I’ll set you free to go have your life. We can be divorced by the end of January.”
“You can’t do that. What about your grandfather?”
“What about him?”
“He’ll say you reneged. He’ll carry out his threat to sell Caruthers.”
“Let him. I can live without it.”
“You can?”
“My umpty-great-grandfather built that business. I can build another one—or find something I like better. I can take the people who want to come with me and help the others to find something else.”
“But you love it.”
“I thought I loved the business because it gave me security and felt like a family. I found out it’s the other way around. It gave me security and felt like a family because I loved it. Caruthers was a place that made my world safe and orderly when I was a child. But I’m not a child anymore. I have security inside myself. In my heart. In the love I feel for you, for all of you. I can lose the business… I can even lose you, but I can’t lose love I give.”
He went for the part of that he understood. “You love me?”
“Yes. I don’t want to be married to you so I can save a business or save other people. Not anymore. I want to be married to you, just because I do. But no more deals. No more contracts. No more quid pro quo. Just love.”
She peeled the giant red bow off the fabric cylinder and stuck it on the center of her chest, over her heart. “Take it or leave it.”
Chapter 52
HERE SHE STOOD IN THE MIDDLE OF THE SPARE BEDROOM, bed and other furnishings shoved against the wall to make room for a contraption that pressurized air for the purpose of squeezing oxygen into people’s bodies, with a red velvet bow blooming on her chest.
She had no idea what time it was or what she was scheduled to do next. This was life in all its confusing, chaotic, engrossing, heart-wrenching glory. And she was in the thick of it.
Before her stood the man who was her heart’s desire. And in the confusing, messy way of love, all she wanted was to give him his heart’s desire. She had begun only knowing that if the HBOT helped him, and he got his life back, he might decide he didn’t want her at all.
And the next thing she knew, she had a bow on her chest and was offering, not her help, but herself.
The thing was, whatever was going to happen, however this was going to turn out, was in the future, and life wasn’t lived in the future. Life was now.
Irrelevantly, she noticed that having shoved the furniture all around but having left the paintings hanging as they were, the paintings now looked unbalanced and haphazard. She thought that was a metaphor of some kind, demonstrating that life is all about relationships, and when one thing shifted, everything else did, too, whether it moved or not.
After what might have been forever or might have been no time at all, David’s clear brown eyes lit. The corners of his mouth lifted. With
one beautifully modeled arm, he reached out and plucked the bow from her chest.
“I’ll take it. I’ll take you and whatever comes with you.”
“For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, whether it makes you richer or poorer?”
“Yes.”
“Together in sickness and in health, meaning your sickness and your health, as well as mine?”
“You drive a hard bargain, lady.” He kissed her solemnly. “I do.”
Chapter 53
RAUL, THE SEAL, HAD RECOMMENDED SESSIONS OF ONE hour twice a day for at least forty sessions. Every brain and every brain injury was different. There was no telling what improvement there would be—or when they would see it—or even if there would be any improvement at all.
The experience of being in the HBOT wasn’t unpleasant. There was a sense of pressure in the ears, much like diving, and in fact, the slang for HBOT sessions was dive.
David almost postponed the first dive because the nerve pain in his face was worse that morning. He wanted to give the process a fair chance.
In fact, the dive didn’t make it worse. The pain was considerably better afterwards and didn’t return for several hours. After the second dive, the pain was gone for longer. After the third, he ran. The pain returned but was much less severe and didn’t last for hours as it had before.
He didn’t get too excited. Though his wasn’t typical trigeminal neuralgia, nerve pain of its type could go into remission for unknown reasons and return for equally obscure ones. He’d had a couple of days without pain before. And days when there were only a couple of very short episodes.
Like a lot of SEALs, he was obsessive about keeping statistics on his performance. At the end of a week, he checked his notes. There had been no pain at all for forty-eight hours. By the end of the second week, the nerve pain had not appeared for nine days. It never returned.
“Who knows?” was Raul’s diagnosis. “Maybe there was inflammation or swelling. The hyperbaric oxygen does help reduce both. Maybe something needed to heal, and the dive speeded the process.”
The dull, always present ache around his eye was less dramatic but steady in its improvement.
On Saturday, JJ came home to the cottage with presents for his brothers and Elle that she wanted to show him. After a few minutes she said, “You act like you’re really enjoying hearing about this.”
“I am,” he said, and meant it. Thinking back, he could recall several conversations lately he had found enjoyable and entertaining. He had always been gregarious, extraverted. He had no idea how much of the pleasure of hanging out and talking he had lost until it was restored. Talking with JJ was the best. Sometimes they talked late into the night. He couldn’t put his finger on why it was better. It was simply more interesting.
Numbers started to make sense again. They were just there, no fumbling around, the way they were supposed to be.
He and JJ drove to Riley’s school to bring him home for vacation. On the way home, Riley announced he had decided to become a neurologist and talked non-stop for an hour about brain chemistry, brain structure, and nanotechnology, which he informed them was the future of neurology. Trying to focus for so long would have made David frantic even a couple of weeks ago. Instead, he enjoyed his younger brother’s chatter and drew him out further with questions.
“Is everyone in your family medically oriented?” JJ laughed when there was a lull in their talk. “Did you ever want to go to medical school?”
“I had four semesters of premed,” David admitted. “Then I wanted action. Excitement.”
“Would you like to finish med school when you get out of the Navy?”
“I think I’d like to work with kids,” he told her. “I love kids.” He read the surprise on her face. “What? I never told you that?”
“David,” Riley, who had been silent for a while, interrupted, “do you think I could try a dive? I have read about it on the Internet. Some people say it helps autistic kids. I read about one kid it made less sensitive to noise. Do you think I would be scared?”
“I’ll do it with you. We’ll play cards.”
Later that evening, after seeing Riley settled in with Lucas, David and JJ returned to the cottage.
“What are you thinking about?” JJ asked David when she found him sitting in the darkened living room, looking out the sliders at the night beach, Brinkley at his feet. It was a question she wouldn’t have asked him a couple a weeks before. He would have said, “Nothing,” or in some way let her know he didn’t want to go into it.
“I remembered something today when we were with Riley. I remembered waking up in the hospital, and Mom was there. I remember being real confused but not wanting to let her know.”
Seeing he was disposed to talk, she sank down beside him on the sofa. “Why not?”
“I think it was what you said. I thought I had failed her in some way. I wasn’t supposed to worry her.”
“You were trying to protect her from knowing you were hurt?”
“I think so. Anyway, I didn’t want to tell her I didn’t know where I was—because that might worry her—so I asked her if she knew where she was.”
He let his head loll on the thick back cushion of the sofa, his teeth showing white, laughing at the memory. Then he sobered. “I wanted to ask her about Riley and Harris and Elle, but I couldn’t say their names. It wasn’t that I didn’t remember. I couldn’t bring their names from the storage place. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“I asked her where were her babies. And she said,” his voice thickened, “‘you’re my baby.’”
JJ took his hand. His hard, masculine, long-fingered hand. “You were her first baby.”
“I kept trying to tell her about the dream I had in Afghanistan.”
“The one in which you dreamed you died?”
“Yeah. I could tell I wasn’t making any sense. What I wanted her to tell me was if that really happened, but all I could say was ‘I dreamed I was dead and then I was awake.’”
“Do you think maybe you did die, or had one of those near-death experiences?”
“I think I came real close. Maybe I did and came back. Who knows?”
“I’m glad you came back.” She lifted the hand she held to her lips. It was the kind of affectionate gesture he would have avoided a couple of weeks ago. Now he smiled.
“Me, too.” He returned to his story. “I wasn’t making much sense, and she kept saying ‘It’s okay, you’re awake now,’ and I was babbling on about dying and her being there, crying, and trying explain that she didn’t have to cry because it was okay. If I died, it was okay… and she started sobbing.”
“Then, you mean? In the hospital?”
“Right. I asked her why she was crying. She said because she was so happy I was alive.”
“Was that the last time you saw her?”
“What happened when is still kind of confused, but I don’t think so. I think she was there a couple more times.”
“Why do you think you remembered this now?”
“I’m remembering a lot of things now. No, it’s not so much that I remember. It’s more like I can put things together now. I thought for a long time the wrong one of us died.”
“You don’t think that now?”
“No. She was glad I was alive. That’s what I needed to remember.”
“I’m glad you told me that. I like knowing more about your family.”
“Yep.” He stood and picked up Brinkley’s leash. “Come on, Brink. Let’s go out and water some bushes so we can go to bed.”
Chapter 54
FOR HIS LAST TRIP OUTSIDE BEFORE BED, DAVID USUALLY took Brinkley to the street-facing side of the cottage, so they could walk along the traffic-less blacktop. The dog couldn’t get the hang of wiping sand from between his toes. Walking on the blacktop instead of the beach saved the need to rinse him before he could come back inside.
Fog had rolled in. It blew in wispy chunks betwe
en nearby street lamps and turned the ones that receded into the distance into little more than glowing reminders of civilization’s presence.
On the ocean side of the cottage, the sea kept up its ever-present murmurs. On the street side, every jingle of the dog’s tags fell into emptiness of noise so profound that silence itself was an entity. It was so quiet David could hear himself think.
JJ had said she liked hearing about his mother. She might want to see the picture of his father, Carl. Carl had given David’s mother the diamond JJ now wore. The shoe box of odds and ends was still in the trunk of his car where he had tossed it when he left his apartment in Virginia Beach.
While Brinkley sniffed bushes to make sure no other dogs had been marking his territory, and if they had, making sure they understood whose turf this was, David opened the trunk and retrieved the memories of love his mother had stored for him.
He heard JJ running water in the bathroom when he shut the redwood door on the damp, dark, deserted street. The cottage was warm. He inhaled deeply of the fragrance of contentment and JJ.
With Brinkley settled in his bed for the night, lamps in the living room turned out, and the lock on the sliders checked, he carried the box into the bedroom and laid it on the beach color-splashed bedspread.
In the closet, dropping his discarded jeans into the hamper, he suddenly wondered what had become of the jeweler’s box the ring had been in. He’d like to keep it with the mementoes, since his mother had saved it all those years.
The last he remembered, he had put it in a pants pocket. He began going through his dress slacks. He didn’t find the box, but in one pair of slacks he found a silk pouch with “It’s all about the ride” embroidered on it.
He chuckled at the memory of purloining it from JJ’s bedroom at Lucas’s house. He probably ought to sneak it back where he’d found it and never admit to anything. He tugged at the tiny snap closure. Yep, that’s what he ought to do—not that there was a chance in hell he would—not until he’d discovered what it contained first.
Mary Margret Daughtridge SEALed Bundle Page 90