by Lena North
“Come up with something better,” Carson snorted.
“I can’t mooch on –”
“Shut the f –” he collected himself and continued, “You have a room here that would be empty if you weren’t in it, you don’t eat much so you cost us nothing, and you can have part of the barn over there to paint in.”
“But I broke up with Kit,” I whispered.
His son hadn’t been to see them once since I’d left the hospital, and I worried that it was because of me.
“So?” was his calm retort.
“So?” I echoed.
“Mary, darling, I’m sure you won’t be shocked when I tell you that Kit has had girlfriends before you and that he ended things with some of them, but a few broke up with him. He’s a big boy, you were never right for each other, and if he hasn’t figured that out entirely yet – he will.”
Oh. Well, crap, that made me feel like an idiot.
“Exactly,” he murmured, reading my face accurately. “If you feel like doing something, then come and help me in the kitchen.”
So I did, and I continued doing it after that. I enjoyed the slow pace and told myself that I should go home and return to University to get my degree, but somehow another day just passed, and I didn’t leave. I still slept in the living room, with the lights on, although I’d started turning some of them off.
Then I started drawing, and that was as if I’d opened a dam of emotions. I hadn’t known there was so much pent up anger and fear inside me. While I filled page after page in my sketchbook with memories from my time in captivity, I thought about what I’d been through. I drew the eyes of the man I’d seen, over and over, and I did a detailed picture of his tattoo. The image of that red snake haunted me, and I painted it in acrylics and watercolor, and then in shades of gray again, thinking that I should send the images to Hawker to help them identify the man. I never got around to it, and moved on to drawing variants of the door with the hatch open and a tray pushed inside the cell. Some of the pages were variants on my nightmares, but as time passed, I started doing pictures of my friends, and then my parents. Then I started drawing my home on the plains just at the foot of the mountains, and the people living there. I’d lost a lot but had also left so much behind. Maybe I was ready to go back? Maybe they were ready to welcome me?
“You’re incredibly talented, Mary, you know that, right?”
The voice next to me jerked me out of my concentration, and I gave up a startled little yelp.
“Oopsie,” Bo said, not sounding like he meant it at all and smiling at me.
I shook off my memories and started to smile as I straightened my back.
“Hey, Boz,” I said.
“No,” he stated, and I blinked. “Don’t even try because it will only make me mad, girlie.”
I blinked again, wondering what he was talking about.
“Wh –”
“Don’t try so hard to be happy, Mary,” he murmured.
“I –”
“We see it, both Carson and I, and it hurts, baby-girl. You try to cover up your pain and be happy, for us. We don’t want that, we want you to be happy for you, and if you can’t be that, then you should just be sad. We’d rather have you bawl your eyes out than fake happiness you don’t feel.”
I swallowed and held his gaze.
“But what if I let go of happy and then I can’t find it again?” I whispered after a while, sharing my biggest fear with him. “What if I just stay sad?”
“Oh, Mary,” he sighed. “We’ll make sure you find it, don’t you worry about that.”
I leaned into him and started crying silently. I cried for my parents and my home, for the awful, horrible days in the cell by the water and how hard everything always was. It took a long time for me to calm down, and through it all, Bo held me gently to his wide chest, murmuring soft words and slowly caressing my back.
“Better?” he asked when I finally calmed down.
“Yes,” I answered.
He leaned back and pushed my chin up, surveying my face.
“You look like you need a facial,” he said softly. “Let’s sneak into our bathroom and steal one of Carson’s face masks, they’ll do wonders for those bags under your eyes.”
My mouth fell open at the thought of rough and rugged mountain-man Carson using a face mask aimed at reducing puffiness, and then I giggled. The giggle grew into laughter, and Bo beamed at me.
“See!” he exclaimed. “I told you we’d help you to find happy again.”
The days after that I cried more than I had in my whole life, but one of the men was there to hold me, and slowly I learned that I always found my way back to feeling good. One of the walls in the barn started to fill up with my sketches, and each night I slept a little bit better.
I was on my way to the house when I noticed Miller’s car outside, and I walked faster, eager to thank him for giving me a way to cope. Carson was alone in the kitchen, though, and I looked around in surprise as I barged into the room.
“I thought Miller was here?” I asked.
“Mary…” he said, and I got a cold, ugly feeling in my stomach when I saw his face.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He’s fine,” Carson replied immediately. “Got himself shot, but he’s fine.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Down by the pond, washing off, but you shouldn’t –”
I ignored him and rushed to the pantry where I knew they kept their first aid kit. Then I ran out of the kitchen. Carson shouted something after me, but I ignored that too and kept running.
Miller was on his way out of the pond when I got there, and I didn’t slow down. I threw the red kit on the ground and kept running. At first, all I could see was the angry red cut on his thigh, but a few seconds later I realized that he didn’t have any clothes on. At all. I stopped running, and he took a few quick steps backward, and then our gazes met. I felt a blush heat my cheeks and wanted to kick myself for acting like a stupid, stupid fool. He was a grown man, and since he was standing up in the water, he clearly wasn’t severely injured. Why had I panicked so?
“Mary,” Miller murmured.
“Yuh,” I said, trying frantically to collect myself, and added stupidly, “Gun?”
“Yeah,” he said.
I scanned what I could see of him quickly, and his lean torso looked mostly unharmed. He had a long scrape over his ribs, although it didn’t look like another gunshot wound.
“Mary,” he said, again in that quiet voice.
Well, shit. He was standing there buck naked and probably in pain, and there I was, staring at him like a fool.
“I’ll just…” I started and turned around. “Dry off and get dressed and I’ll help you with the wound.”
He was silent at first, and then he said calmly, “Sure. Thanks.”
To my surprise, it looked like someone had already worked on the wound.
“It’s numbed up,” he muttered and when I raised my brows at him, he explained, “It was just a stray bullet from a distance. It got stuck, though, so I took it out.”
I blinked.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
He grinned a little and shifted to get a bottle of antiseptic from his own enormous medical kit. I tried to keep my eyes averted because the way his dark gray boxer briefs clung to him didn’t exactly hide a lot, and the lot it didn’t hide looked very, very good.
“Don’t worry, it’s not the first time I’ve –”
“Are you completely out of your mind?” I yelled.
“No, bu –”
“You drove here with a bullet in your leg, and then you operated on yourself?” I asked, hoping that he would tell me that he wasn’t that idiotic.
“Kind of,” he said calmly.
I opened my mouth. Then I closed it again. This made him chuckle, and I slapped him on the shoulder, grabbed Carson’s kit which clearly was inadequate for the kind
of stupidity he’d just performed, and got to my feet.
“I thought you were sane, Miller. As in…” I pulled in as much air as I could, and then I leaned down and yelled in his face, “NOT bat-shit crazy!”
“Mary,” he murmured, and I could see how he struggled to hold back laughter, but I turned and stalked off.
“Mary!” he called out again, and I raised my hands in the air but kept walking.
I marched right through the kitchen and into the pantry where I slapped the first aid kit in its place, yelling, “Your brother is insane, Carson! Get some men here with white jackets that tie in the back, and asap because that doofus needs to be locked –”
I stopped yelling when loud laughter echoed through the kitchen. Kit, Hawker, and Wilder had joined Carson, and they apparently thought I was hilarious.
“What?” I snapped.
“Nothing,” Hawker chuckled.
I glared at him, and he started laughing again. The others joined him, and I thought they’d never calm down.
“I don’t find this funny,” I snapped.
“I do,” Wilder muttered.
“What’s funny?” Bo asked from the door.
I told him, and his eyes widened. He shook his head a little and asked me calmly to please explain again, which I did. Then he looked up toward the ceiling.
“Is the man bat-shit crazy?” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
There was a stunned silence, and then I walked over to the huge man, put my arms around his waist and leaned my head on his chest.
“I love you, Bo,” I said. “Marry me and have my children?”
“Absolutely,” he replied, and added with a wink, “Have to be artificial insemination, though. You know I adore you, but sex? Nuh-uh.”
I smiled at him.
“We can totally do that.”
“Do what?” Miller asked from the door.
“Artificial insemination,” I replied sourly.
He froze and stared at me.
“Say again?”
“Jesus,” Carson muttered. “Everybody, out, except you,” he added and pointed at Kit with a spatula.
We trooped obediently out of Carson’s kitchen and into the living room.
“Come, Mary, let’s sit outside for a while,” Wilder called to me, and I started moving toward her, but Miller took a firm hold of my arm.
“Mary, really, it wasn’t a big deal,” he murmured. “We were just a few hours away, Kit drove me here, and the bullet was close to the skin, just on the side. It’s not like I haven’t operated before.”
I stared at him, and I knew that what he said made sense, but I didn’t like it.
“On yourself?” I asked.
“Nope,” he grinned. “But I’ve been called a pig plenty of times, and I’ve operated on those.”
Shit, I thought as I struggled to keep the tips of my mouth from quivering. That was actually kind of funny.
“You’re crazy,” I said.
“Not really,” he replied, and let go of my arm in a way that made it feel like a caress.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Will be here for a few days, can’t run on the leg or the stitches might –”
He stopped talking when he saw on my face that I realized he’d put stitches in himself too. I pulled in a deep breath and sighed it out.
“How many?”
“Three.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
“I’ll just…” I trailed off and waved my hand toward Wilder who was watching us curiously.
“Yeah,” he said. “Thanks for worrying,” he added.
“Thanks for the art supplies,” I replied.
It looked like he was about to say something else but Wilder called out to me again, so I walked outside to join her on the porch.
Ch
apter Seven
Gray
“I don’t know how you held up in that place,” Wilder said. “In the darkness and silence, hungry and hurt.” She looked at me with eyes that were almost glowing with anger. “We’ll kill them, Mary. Every last one.”
“Wilder, no,” I said. “I knew you’d come. That’s what held me up. Jinx is clever, she’d get my message, and you are tenacious, you’d never give up. I knew that, and I never gave up hope.”
“Tenacious?” she asked and narrowed her brows. “Is that your way of saying that I’m stubborn?”
“Yes,” I grinned.
“Resilient,” she murmured.
“What?”
“When we got that video… God, Mary, it literally drove us to our knees. He hit you right in the face, and you still insisted we shouldn’t do the swap.”
“I guess I can be stubborn too,” I murmured.
“No,” she protested. “Miller said it, and he was right. We calmed down and started planning, but Jinx was crying and saying that we needed to hurry, so they didn’t break you. He put his arms around her and said that she never had to worry about that because you were resilient.”
I thought about that for a while.
“Maybe I am, Wilder, but…” I paused to collect my thoughts, and then I decided that it was time to start sharing some of my past. “You all think that I’m so positive, and happy, and in a way, I am. But you see, I have to be happy. My life is good because it has to be.”
I turned to look at her, and then I told her.
“I have to live a good life because my family didn’t get to live any life at all. So, I need to be happy for them too.”
“What?” she breathed.
“My parents died in a car crash when I was ten, Wilder,” I started, and when she made a choking sound, I quickly continued, “I was at home because I wanted to draw instead of going to the supermarket with them. It was the first time they left me at home alone, and I was so proud. I felt almost like a grown-up, which was ridiculous, of course, because they’d be gone for less than an hour, but I laughed and waved when they left, and they laughed too. My mother stretched her hand out through the window, so that was the last I saw of her. That hand, waving cheerfully as they rounded the corner and disappeared. A truck ran a red light and hit them, four blocks away. Drunk driver.”
“Mary…”
Her voice was just a soft breath, and I held her gaze and made myself tell her the rest.
“My brothers,” my voice hitched a little, and she grabbed my hand. “My brothers were six, three…” I swallowed, “and almost one year old.” I leaned my head down toward my chest, and it hurt so bad but I’d started telling her, so I had to finish it. “All three were in the car. They died too.”
“Oh, God. Mary…”
“So, you see,” I said and tried to smile through the pain. “I have to be happy for them too.”
“Why haven’t you told us before, sweetie?” she asked.
“I haven’t told anyone,” I answered. “They sent me to so many counselors, and I sat there and didn’t talk about it, and finally, they gave up. This is the first time since it happened that I say the words out loud.”
My lips were trembling, and I pressed them together, but I couldn’t stop a few tears from running slowly over my cheeks.
“Where did you go? Did you have any other family members?”
“Plenty,” I said bitterly. “None of them wanted me. When I started University, a few of them came to see me. They apologized, said they’d been grief stricken and that they thought it would be better for me to have a new family so I wouldn’t have to be constantly reminded of what I’d lost.”
“What a load of bullshit,” she hissed.
“Yeah, of course, it was, though by then it was over and done with.”
“Don’t tell me you forgave them. Mary…”
“Hell no,” I said serenely. “I told them to pull down their pants and go sit on a pineapple. Preferably one that wasn’t ripe.”
“What?” she breathed.
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“I used other words, Wilder. Crude ones.”
She started grinning, and I smiled a little at the memory.
“They tried again, so I drew a picture of my hand, had it printed on postcards, and sent to every relative I had. Signed it with my name and nothing else,” I said.
“You sent them a picture of your hand?”
I made a fist, raised it slowly, and flipped her the bird.
She snorted out laughter, and murmured, “Epic comeuppance.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said.
“Did you go into foster care?” she asked.
“Yes,” I replied but didn’t elaborate.
She must have sensed that I didn’t want to talk about those years, and squeezed my hand again.
“I always wanted siblings,” she whispered.
“I didn’t know what I had until I lost it, Wilder. They were mostly a nuisance, and really, how could they not be? I was a quiet, shy girl who liked to draw and help mommy in the kitchen. They were like a small band of maniacs, always shouting and throwing things around.”
I thought about it for a while, and the memories were faded and somehow misty, but I remembered that last day clearly. My mother had worn a pink sundress and huge sunglasses. My dad had been up most of the night with the baby, so he’d been tired, and Mom had tried to make him stay at home, but he’d smiled, ruffled my hair, and said that his big girl would watch the house. The baby slept in the car seat, and the boys had been running around with their action figures, playing war.
“They were totally out of control, so I didn’t know it at the time, but I loved them. I knew that I loved the baby, though. He was well on his way to growing into another pain in my big-sister butt, but he was sweet. I took care of him.” I swallowed and added, “They were called James, Robert, and Andrew. Common names, boring even, and I thought they were little pests, but then I lost them and…” I trailed off, not knowing what else to say.