He could not let on how much it meant to have John’s unquestioning acceptance at that moment. John’s hands on his shoulders made him flash back to the morning after Rachel was gone when John swept him up in his arms where he was safe from any power on earth. Doc reached across with his right hand to fiercely detain John’s left hand on his shoulder until his pride set John’s hand loose again.
“I’d better help with the dishes.” John recovered his hand and disappeared into the kitchen. Doc heard Rachel’s voice interspliced with John and Anna’s conversation. She emerged from behind the swinging café doors to the kitchen with a warmed up plate of food and sat down at the opposite end of the table.
“Do you remember me at all, Rachel?”
She paused and looked up, “I’m sorry, I really don’t remember you from back then. I’m still trying very hard to remember Mom. In a way it’s like being born a forty year old woman. I have none of the wonderful memories that the rest of the family have. I look at pictures, but I wasn’t there for all those Christmases, birthdays and vacations. I know that I love Mom and John, but not with that special bond I‘ve seen on television shows - it’s just love. Maybe I’ll never be able to love like the little girl in the painting.”
She pointed her manicured index finger at her picture on the wall. There’s nothing to work with where Steve is concerned. He’s a picture on the wall and a collection of greeting cards. It’s like some big hoax where maybe he isn’t even real. Why is he throwing away what I couldn’t have? I try to be sad that Jack died, but nothing registers. It’s like a stranger died. Rose and Patty are wonderful to me, but they seem more like friends than sisters.”
“What about me, Dolly?”
“It’s Rachel, remember? Maybe that’s why you scare me. Whenever you’re in the same room with me, I’m terrified that I’ll wake up with Aaron and find out that my family is just a dream. When I was with Aaron, I watched families on television and pretended that I was one of the characters in the show - sometimes the daughter, sometimes the mother or the friend or the neighbor. I could never understand which one I should be or why.”
“Sometimes you know who you should be, but you just can’t do a good job at being that person,” he said thinking of his own life.
“What is there for me now? Who wants a forty year old woman without a past? It’s too late to be a wife or a mother or have a career. What do I do now, Doc? You used to think you had all the answers to fix my life all those years in Fort Worth.”
“It’s so much easier to have all the answers when you’re not trying to run your own life. I come into people’s homes for forty minutes, solve all their symptoms, suggest sweeping changes and disappear back into the night with my self-inflated ego thinking that I’ve handed out a prescription to fix every problem. God will make me pay for trying to steal his thunder. I’m sorry, Rachel. When I was six years old, I could be forgiven by my naivety, but I have no excuse for not protecting you from Aaron.”
“You would still need forgiveness even if it turned out that I wasn’t your sister. You’ve got a cold heart, Doc. I’ve lived in the cold, so I see it better than Mom or John or Ben.”
“I’m sorry, Rachel. I’m trying to change.”
“I don’t know what happened to my brothers, but being an outsider, I can see that you guys all have a chunk of your heart paralyzed. You hold everybody you love at a distance so that you don’t have to relate to them emotionally. Even Aaron in all his inherent evil took me into his heart. That seems to be more than you’re capable of.”
“I do love you, Rachel. Just like when we were kids.”
“No, you don’t, Doc. Maybe you did back then, but I would know it if you loved me now.”
Doc pushed away from the table. Rachel prodded and poked at her dinner.
“Cut and run, dude? Just like a coward.”
“I beg your pardon?” Doc returned with a start.
“If anybody has a right to be angry at life, it’s me, but where would it get me? I could spend the rest of my life wondering why God let me be fed to the wolf that Halloween night. I could curse Him, curse my life, and dedicate the rest of my days to making everybody pay for my hurt. I’ve thought about doing just that, Doc.”
“You would have every right to, Rachel. It wasn’t fair,” Doc agreed.
“There’s the four letter F word, Doc. Fair. Where do we get off expecting life to be fair? You had parents, friends, a home, an education, and then you had a wife, children and a career. And you go around complaining that life isn’t fair? Explain it to me, Doc. I dare you to explain it to me.”
“It’s complicated.”
“No, Doc, it’s not complicated at all. All you need to do is wake up each morning and thank God for the people who love you. Then you do everything in your power to make them happy.”
Doc snorted his disdain for Rachel’s indictment of his life. “I guess you’re an expert on relationships from watching all those daytime talk shows and TV psychologists.”
“You can’t hurt me, Doc. I’ve survived more hurt than you can hand out. And when I wake up in the morning, I’ll have Mom and John, and Rose and Patty, and good things will happen for me.”
“I guess some of us can’t be as charitable to the people who have hurt us, little sister.” Doc slammed the back of his chair into the dining room table as he pushed it in and stomped off toward the front door. Rachel finished the last bites of her dinner and took the plate into the kitchen where she hugged Anna before rinsing it off in the sink.
Doc and Rachel were civil to each other in front of John and Anna for the rest of the visit. Rachel was penitent about their disagreement, but Doc dismissed it as irrelevant to his life.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Texas baked through the summer heat and sweltered through the fall. Ben was hard a work at college at TCU although he found time for free dinners and a ball game with Doc. When Ben went home for Christmas, Doc missed him. Doc called him more frequently when he returned for the spring semester. Ben appreciated his father’s interest in his life.
When spring came around, the thunderous deluges of rain flooded the usual locations. Sooner or later the water would suddenly inundate major intersections and patches of roadway where seasoned drivers knew not to tread in heavy rains. Every year a couple young officers would get trapped in a flash flood and have to abandon their cars to walk out of the rising water. The patrol cars never seemed to learn to swim. Doc’s team was lucky to escape that embarrassment so far.
The rain came down in torrents since early evening until everyone out in the elements was soaked. The heavy rain always caused a flurry of burglar alarms to come across the dispatch screens and each alarm required at least one unfortunate civil servant to slog through the water and mud to check all four sides of each building.
Around two in the morning the rain let up to a slight drizzle. Doc took a break from paperwork that conveniently kept him inside all shift and stood outside the front door of the sector under the portico breathing in the clean, damp air. As the rain quit, a few officers dropped back to the sector to change into dry uniforms. Doc returned to his paperwork after a quick break.
He could hear the front door open and close, followed by the sloshing of boots on the tile floor past his office. One set of footsteps caught his attention as they paused before crossing the river of florescent light created on the hallway tile by his office doorway. By the time he turned around, the owner of the footsteps had hustled down the hallway.
Doc looked out of his window at the marked patrol cars under the mercury vapor lights. The tail of J195 was in the row directly across from his window. Doc poured a cup of coffee before going back out to the portico to lie in wait for James the Elder. In a short time a dry James the Elder walked nonchalantly out the door without seeing Doc leaning against the adjacent brick wall.
“Is it wet enough for you , Jim?”
James the Elder whipped around, startled by Doc’s voice. “Yes, sir. It rained
cats and dogs. Never gonna find homes for all of them.” James the Elder turned back around trying to cover the distance to car J195. “I better get back to work.”
“You’ve got time to chat, son. There’s nothing important holding and you do work for me, remember?” James the Elder returned to the portico. “What’s new in your life, Jim?”
“Nothing much.”
“That’s not what I hear. I’m hearing that there are some problems brewing at home.”
“Nothing I can’t handle, sir.”
“Every man likes to think that he’s the master of his own destiny.”
“It’s complicated, Doc.”
“Someone very dear to me said it wasn’t complicated. You just wake up each morning and do everything in your power to make the ones you love happy.”
James the Elder laughed nervously, “Doc, there are some people you just can’t please no matter how hard you try.”
Doc knew what he wanted to share of his own life. He wanted to say that he was capable of change, that he had mistakenly been measuring his life by what he didn’t have or by what he failed to get rather than by measuring with the yardstick of those who graced his life.
James the Elder looked over at him lifting an eyebrow inquisitively and asked, “Are we done yet?”
“Yeah, for the moment,” Doc replied since he couldn’t find the right words to attempt to heal James the Elder’s life. He would be better prepared the next time he cornered Jim. James the Elder escaped into the night.
Spring break came late in March. Doc had hoped to get away with Ben and Will for the week, but couldn’t get vacation time.
The air was a bit crisp for late March in Texas. Doc considered donning his windbreaker, but the macho inside of him discarded that idea immediately. He was only a tad over forty, but his bones and joints had become sensitive to sudden drops of temperature.
Doc hated to leave for work since both of his sons were staying with him after they returned from Galveston in Doc’s old red SUV for a week long cruise to Cancun, Belize and Roatan. They entertained him with digital photos of shipboard partying and stories of exploring Mayan ruins at Tulum and snorkeling in the crystal blue Caribbean waters. Will and Ben had only known that they were brothers in the last couple years, but they were becoming very close.
Will and Ben would be chattering and laughter long into the night, but there was no way he could take the night off. A part of him was jealous because Jack and Steve were never close to him. His relationship with Steve was limited to rare e-mails since face to face visits and live conversation was fraught with the chance that a stray comment would reawaken Jack’s death or Steve’s estrangement from their mother. E-mail limited emotional content and left family fences intact.
The past year or two had been devastating for Doc with the discovery of a fully grown son, the crushing divorce from Amelia, and the pain and uncertainty of trying to force a place in his life for Rachel.
The digital minutes raced by as he ran into construction traffic near the malls. He already made a quick stop for gasoline and coffee just before hitting the freeway although he was cutting his travel time short. The workplace rule of never letting a vehicle go under a quarter tank of gas migrated into his personal life. The coffee warmed his hands until the old car’s heater took charge. Once the interior temperature became toasty, the coffee was relegated to the console cup holder until it sank into a cool lividity of brown water and grounds.
Doc’s stomach was a little queasy with the feeling he used to get on airliners when the sky became turbulent and the cabin became warm and stale. He felt the groundswell of a headache forming and the possibility of revisiting his dinner. Two-thirds of the commute was behind him when he had ten minutes to the hour left. He used to worry about promptness if he was running late, but he had a new philosophy. One is never late until the projected arrival time passed. Certainly having ten minutes left to cover fifteen minutes of ground meant that he would be late, but the new rule was worry-effective. Why worry about what hasn’t happened yet, even if it is inevitable? Worrying didn’t make him any less late.
Suddenly he felt a ferocious blow to the back of his head; he could feel himself fading into unconsciousness. His brain reverberated inside its skull while his dinner reconsidered its changing its course upward. The pain, the pain, the enormous pain was like a knife thrust deep into his cerebellum. There was a timelessness and a weightlessness that descended instantly upon him; a confusion of place and purpose ruled the place formerly defined by his very existence.
It was extremely unlikely that an intruder had hidden in the back seat of the coupe when he left it unlocked at the gas station. The perception that a physical blow had been suffered was proven false when a glance in the rearview mirror revealed no one else in the car. The old coupe shuddered as it scraped along the cement barrier on the driver’s side before it found its way back to the fast lane.
He was also mistaken about losing consciousness. Through a weird twist in reality, his physical surroundings had shifted. He could not describe exactly how everything had moved, but everything had been displaced to the right, or the left - he couldn’t tell which way. He could see his fingers in the cast-off illumination of the dashboard light, but mentally he could not feel their presence, much less assure himself of their obedience to command.
His hands were both on the steering wheel again and the coupe was traveling more slowly easing between the lanes of the westbound freeway. He didn’t know what to do next, so he watched as his hands and feet reflexively controlled the car with messages issuing from a part of his brain which seemed to have a perilous handle on the situation. His right foot responded to his command to slow down, and his numb and spongy hands grasped and released the wheel upon his mental commands.
He was fascinated and horrified by the impression that signals sent to his brain required an interpretation before being forwarded to his hands leaving unsettling split-second time warps. How had this happened that his mind and body had become removed from each other?
The coupe crawled forward at forty miles an hour. Doc closed first one eye and then the other only to find that each eye maintained a duplicate but incongruent physical world in front of him. The horrific pain below the crown of his head served only as reassurance that he would not lose consciousness. At last there was a moment when the immensity of the situation enveloped him. He was scared, oh so scared that the very core of his being had been misplaced. It was almost impossible to think through the pain, yet an autonomic force seemed to be functioning in some remote corner of his mind keeping a fragile attempt at maintaining the status quo.
He knew who he was, where he was headed, which day was drawing to a close, yet he felt that memories that should be accessible were now behind a mental iron curtain. Maybe there was information missing or maybe he was just overwhelmed by an unjustified psychic emptiness - perhaps these were memories that had been forgotten all along and Doc had not been able to view them for years. Can a man realize that he had lost a memory without remembering the substance of what was forgotten?
It was fortunate that the back of the parking lot was empty as maneuvering the powerful coupe in close quarters would have been a travesty. The back lot was reserved for patrol cars, but the evening shift officers had not yet come in. Personal cars were occasionally left in these spaces before without question; Doc had no choice but to attempt to line it up between the yellow lines of a reserved space. His spatial orientation was unreliable, so he put it in park and cut the engine with this first shot at the parking space and leaned forward.
The leather bound steering wheel cushioned the purposeful banging of his forehead against it. “If only I could feel the shock of my forehead against the leather,” he thought to himself with his eyes solidly shut. If he could only knock the focus into his head like slapping the side of a malfunctioning television set. It was only then that he realized that tears were coursing down his face. He had to pull himself together immediately
if not sooner.
The driver’s door opened with a quick tug on the handle, but Doc discovered that removing his body from the low-slung vehicle was a trick. He lifted his left foot with both hands and pushed it over the door sill to the ground with great difficulty only to discover that it would not bear his weight, much less straighten out to lift him from the seat. He could not rely on his spongy left hand for assistance either as he really couldn’t sense whether it was to be trusted. The only solution was to move his right leg out also and exit the car like a little old man. That seemed to work well enough to get him on his feet and propelled toward the front door of the building.
The pale light from behind the counter of the desk officer’s cubicle was thankfully unrevealing. The rest of the midnight team had not yet arrived except for Gar who acted in Doc’s stead on his nights off. Doc was terrified that Gar would see just how seriously impaired his body was. Like the specter of Roosevelt, Doc leaned along the counter and shuffled against the wall opposite of where Gar stood in puzzlement. Doc’s head was still screaming from the hammer-like blow to his head, and only his right eye maintained full vision. The left eye perceived Gar’s frame as if filtered through cheesecloth.
“Are you all right, Doc?” Gar asked in a voice that sounded far away and muffled. Doc tried to reply in the affirmative, but his words were tinny and garbled. The problem was not in Gar’s voice, but in Doc’s own perceptions. The room was ringing in a high pitched squeal - the kind of squeal given off by a loose engine belt. Doc hoped that Gar would figure out that he was going to retreat to the supervisors’ office all night instead of out on the streets, and that Gar was to lead the team at roll call. Gar approached Doc as if stalking a timid rabbit. When he stepped within five feet, he stopped and took in the disparity between the left and right side of Doc’s face.
“Let’s head to the ER, boss,” Gar urged, “You’re looking pretty rough.”
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