by JoAnn Ross
“Do you want anything to eat?” he asked. He seemed uncharacteristically distracted. “I didn’t think about it when I was buying the wine, but I might have some crackers.”
“The wine’s fine.” She sat down on one of the rush-seat, ladder-back chairs at the table.
“Okay.” He sat across from her. “So,” he began without preamble, “you know how I said that I’d told the guys you were my one regret?”
“That would be a bit difficult to forget.”
“There was this Marine. He was really young. Nineteen. He was skinny with a bunch of freckles and carrot red hair. Sax called him Opie.”
“After Ron Howard. From Mayberry.” She took a sip of the wine, which definitely lived up to both its price and reputation.
“Yeah. That’s him. Sax pretty much nailed it when it came to how he looked. But he was one helluva shot.”
“Was?” She knew where this was going.
He swiped a hand through his hair. Took a deep breath. “We fought a lot of battles that day, but one of the worst was the first one, when we were trying to evac the copter before it blew. The kid was a Marine sniper and his shooting could well be the reason Sax and I lived to tell the story.
“So, I don’t know how long we were fighting. Time has a way of both speeding up and slowing down during moments like that. It doesn’t matter how well you can plan a mission—and this one was a clusterfuck from the get-go—the one thing you can always count on is that the plan falls apart with the first contact with the enemy.”
“I’ve heard about that. The fog of war.”
“That’s it. But fog’s too benign a word for it.” He took a pull on the brown bottle. “Anyway, we’d taken all the bad guys out, and were starting to breathe again when the kid started screaming bloody murder.
“Turns out he’d stood up during the last volley and gotten shot below his chest plate. In the pelvis. Which is one of the worst places you can get shot, because the aorta splits low in the abdomen, forming left and right arteries.”
“I didn’t know that.”
But he did. Madeline thought about how even as horrific as the situation must have been for all the men on that downed helicopter, it had fallen on Lucas’ shoulders to keep the wounded—and it sounded as if there was a lot of them, along with that pilot Kara had mentioned—alive. She took a longer drink of wine.
“Not many people do,” he said. “Because it’s not their job. The arteries branch into the exterior and deep femoral vessels, which serve as the primary arteries for the lower part of the body.”
“And that’s where he was shot?”
“Yeah.” He dragged his hand down his face. It was not as steady as she was used to seeing it, revealing how painful this memory must be.
“You don’t have to tell me about this,” she said.
“Yeah. I do.” He took another deep breath. “Because it’s always going to be with me. I’m not saying that it always hovers over me like some dark cloud, but it’s part of who I am. Who I’ve become since that summer we spent together. And it’s not that I’m trying to impress you, but you said we needed to get to know each other better. And so, if you figure you can take it—”
“I can.” She realized it was important that she hear the entire story, as horrific as she feared it would be. Because he was right. It was part of him. Part of the man he’d become. The man she was falling in love with all over again.
“I got an IV going and kept squeezing the bag with both hands to get replacement fluids in him and try to keep him from bleeding out. I’d gone through six bags, but the wound just kept spurting like a fucking geyser.
“By now the kid had figured out what had happened. He might’ve been young, but this damn well wasn’t his first rodeo, and he’d seen other guys die the same way. Especially since chest plates don’t provide any lower-body protection against IEDs. Almost anyone else would’ve been crying for their mother, which happens more than you might think—”
“Whenever I get a cold, I still want my mother. Or Gram.”
He nodded. Managed a half smile. “There you go. Anyway, the kid sucked it up and stayed amazingly calm. But meanwhile, I’m about to lose it because he’s still spraying blood like damn fire hose, which means that the only way I’ve got even a prayer of a chance of saving him is clamping off the artery.”
“But…” The thought, as she imagined the scene, was so frightening Madeline felt her blood go cold. “Wouldn’t that mean—”
“I’ve got to go into the wound.”
“With your hands?”
“Well, it wasn’t as if we had a fully equipped operating room on the battlefield. The worst part was that because of the altitude and the fact that he’d lost all that blood, I didn’t dare give him any morphine, because his blood pressure was so low, it would’ve killed him for sure.
“So, like in those old Westerns, when a guy’s gotta bite a bullet while the doc works on him, some of the team held him down and kept taking turns pressing on his abdomen to keep pressure over the artery while I went spelunking through his skin, muscle, and fat. Not that he had much fat, because like most Marines, he was in great shape.”
“Except for the fact he was dying.”
“Well, yeah. There was that. I was still optimistic, because, hell, that’s part of a medic’s job description. If you allow yourself to think the worst, it just might happen, so you just keep focusing on the task at hand and figure out how to make things work.”
It made her realize how different their lives had been these past years. Until Maxime’s sex video had gone viral, the worst thing Madeline had had to suffer since she and Lucas had broken up had been a collapsed soufflé or curdled hollandaise.
Meanwhile, in all those years in all those war zones, this couldn’t have been the first patient he’d lost. And worse than a patient, she considered. A teammate.
She took a deep gulp of the wine, then reached across the table and put her hand on his. “I want to hear the rest.” Okay, that wasn’t exactly true. She didn’t necessarily want to. But knew she needed to. And, from the despair she heard in his voice, Madeline understood he needed to tell her. “But first I want to say one thing.”
He looked down at her hand, then turned his so they were palm to palm. “What’s that?”
“I need to apologize.”
He looked honestly confused. “For what?”
“For thinking the worst of you all these years. I was so wrong.”
“Hey.” He linked their fingers together and lifted their joined hands to his lips, brushing a kiss over her knuckles. A kiss as soft as snowflakes, but as warm as the embers that she could no longer deny had continued to smolder all these years. “At least you were thinking of me.” His quick grin lightened the mood.
“You really are an optimist.”
“Roger that. At least, let’s just say I’m hopeful where you’re concerned.…So, getting back to this story of how your name came up, as bad as things were, they were about to get a lot worse. I couldn’t find the artery because it had retracted back into his abdomen.”
Madeline’s stomach clenched. Sickness welled up and burned her throat.
“What did you do?”
“We called for an evac copter, but were told we’d have to wait.”
“That’s what Kara said. Which is beyond horrible.”
“It wasn’t what we wanted to hear, all right, but the military lives by rules of combat engagement, and the rules for this mission were clear from the start. No planes flew within thirty minutes of sunrise. So putting another bird down before nightfall was not going to happen, because as far as command was concerned the LZ—that’s military speak for landing zone—was still hot—”
“Military speak for dangerous.”
“Yeah. Like the entire damn mountains weren’t,” he muttered, pushing the heels of his hands into his eyes. As if he could block off the visions, which she suspected were permanently etched on his mind.
“And
to keep things in perspective, since the entire war wasn’t about us, they’d been getting intel from the high-altitude, fixed-winged bombers heading back to base that there were a lot of guys down around us who weren’t looking like friendlies.
“So the commander told us to hang on the best we could—we were, after all, SEALS, and used to working in dicey situations—and they’d get to us as soon as they could.”
“How lovely of them,” she said dryly.
Then had a horrible thought. What if Lucas had died up there on that mountain? She suspected that, as angry as she’d been at him, the loss would have hurt for a very long time. Undoubtedly forever.
“So, what did you do?” she asked. “About the Marine? Opie?”
“We were down to our final option. Which was to cut directly into his abdomen, hunt down the slippery damn artery, and clamp it. The problem was, the more I dug around looking for it, the more blood he lost, so I decided to try a transfusion.”
“You had bottles of blood with you?” Kara had told her that Lucas carried more supplies than any medic anyone knew, but what were the odds of that?
“No. This was a person-to-person deal.”
“On the battlefield?”
“It’s admittedly risky but yeah, it can be done. In a worst-case scenario, which this definitely was.”
“But wouldn’t you still need to match blood types?”
“Yeah. We got lucky.”
That definitely wasn’t the word she would have used.
“One of the guys was type O. Which is a universal donor.”
“That’s an amazing risk he took.”
Lucas shrugged. “The kid might not have been a SEAL, but he was one gung-ho Marine, and as much of the team as any of us. Any guy that day would’ve done the same thing.”
“Fighting for the other guy in the foxhole,” she murmured. It had always seemed like a war movie cliché. It never would again.
“That’s it. By now the kid was in so much pain, I decided to risk giving him some morphine. I finally managed to find the artery and clamp it; then I shoved some Kerlix, which is a kind of bandage, into the wound, but by then, even with the transfusion, he’d lost so much blood, his chances of surviving were slim to none.
“Quinn, the sniper I told you about, gathered up some of the ponchos from the guys we’d lost, because they didn’t need them anymore.”
“And Opie did.” Strange how knowing his nickname made the story all the more personal.
“Yeah. By now the wind had really picked up and was blowing snow mixed with sand, so we realized we had to get the kid somewhere more protected. The Chinook would’ve been the best bet, but we’d already had some fires on it after we were hit in the air, so we didn’t want to risk another spark setting off the fuel.
“Meanwhile, Shane, the wounded Army pilot who’d been ferrying us, didn’t look all that hot, either, so we decided we had to get them into the bunker.”
He lifted the beer to his lips, drank, then studied the label for a long, silent time.
Suspecting he was revisiting that horrid night, Madeline waited.
“The guys who were still mobile managed to get them into the bunker,” he continued. “We covered them with the ponchos, some insulation we pulled from the copter, and pine boughs that had been shot off the trees during the battle.
“We all kept our best faces on, and although everyone in the bunker knew it was a damn lie, I assured the kid he was going to be okay. He might’ve been young, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew he was going to die.
“So that’s when he started telling us his life story. About his mom, who died of ovarian cancer when he was nine…”
For the first time since Lucas had started telling this story, Madeline found something she could identify with. But even then, her parents’ deaths were quick. Cancer was not.
“Since his dad was an active-duty Marine, he went to live with his grandmother in Kentucky.”
Something else Madeline could identify with.
“He was real proud of his dad, who was deployed as a gunnery sergeant in Desert Storm. Apparently, there’d been Cunninghams—that was the kid’s last name—in the Marines since they were first founded in Philadelphia in 1775.”
“That’s quite a coincidence. That you all would name him Opie, and Ron Howard played Richard Cunningham in Happy Days.”
“There’s more. The kid’s name was Richard Cunningham.”
That would have made her smile if the tale hadn’t been so tragic.
“I had no idea the Marines went back that far, to before we were a country.”
“According to the kid, who had no reason to lie, an ancestor had fought with George Washington, and after that, through every generation, whenever America needed a U.S. Marine, anywhere in the world, a Cunningham male had always been there to answer the call. Unfortunately, according to Zach, one of the guys who met his dad later down in South Carolina, Opie ended that streak.”
“Oh, that makes it even worse. Not that anything’s worse than death, but…”
“I know what you mean. And yeah, I agree. He was from Salt Lick, Kentucky, and had a fiancée who was going to school to be a beautician. They figured she’d be able to get a job fixing hair wherever he might be stationed after they got married.
“They were going to have two kids. And a couple bluetick hounds so he could take his boys hunting with him, the way he’d gone with his dad. Shane asked what he’d do if they had girls, which seemed to come as a surprise. But he thought about it for a minute, then decided he’d have to lock them in a closet to keep guys like us away from them until they were thirty.
“Or, maybe he’d switch from the Baptists over to the Catholics and lock them away in a convent.…We all laughed about that idea.”
He blew out a breath. Looked out the window at the wide, empty expanse of ocean.
“It’s going to sound really odd, because you had to have been there to fully understand, but it was cool for a while. The night was quiet, and it made the war seem like something that was happening to someone else. It was as if we were just sitting around in a bar, shooting the bull.
“Everyone started telling their own stories. All about girls.” He smiled at that, but his eyes were sad. And distant. “Zach, he was the guy with the type-O blood, talked about a girl back home in South Carolina. Sax talked about Kara. About how he’d fallen in love with her, but she’d been in love with someone else, so he’d never gotten to tell her how he felt.”
“I remember, during that time, thinking it must have been hard on him,” Madeline said. “Nearly everyone in town except Kara could see what had happened. At least he finally got to tell her. And they’ve definitely made up for lost time.”
“That’s for sure. I talked about you. Not because I was bragging or anything about us, you know…”
“Having sex like bunnies all summer.”
That earned a faint smile. “Well, I didn’t put it exactly like that, but yeah. I told how much I’d loved you, and how you said you’d loved me—”
“Which was the absolute truth.”
“I was a cretin who didn’t deserve you. And, for the record, every guy in that bunker, including Opie, told me I was an idiot.”
“Even a couple days ago you wouldn’t have received any argument from me about that. But things change.”
And people changed. Hadn’t they both? Yet the chemistry was still there. Even stronger than ever. It was something she’d never experienced before with any other man. Not even Maxime.
In the beginning, when she’d first met Lucas when she was thirteen and he was fifteen, although there weren’t any sexual vibes going on, there had been an instant connection. At first she’d thought that it was only because it was her first year living there and he was a summer boy, which automatically made them somewhat outsiders.
But then, each summer when he returned, the bond had grown stronger. Until what had started out as friendship blossomed into love.
But they’d been too young and too inexperienced in the ways of working out relationships. Although he’d definitely gone about it in the wrong way, she also knew now that he’d been thinking of her when he’d sent her off to Europe.
Again, while she was being totally honest, she had to admit that if she hadn’t followed through on her dream, not only would she not be the person she was today, with the career she’d established and the ability to help the other person she loved, but she might actually have come to resent him for holding her back.
“You’re right about things changing,” he said, breaking into her thoughts. “But here’s the thing, Maddy. I understand that you’re a planner. You always have been, which is why you had your entire life plotted out by your teens.”
“And look how well that turned out,” she murmured.
“Except for the Frenchman, you’ve done really well, and, yeah, you might not be exactly in the place you thought you’d be ten years ago, but you’re damn close. While I’ve always been more of a go-with-the-flow kind of guy.”
“I don’t believe that. Kara told me that no medic carried more supplies than you, so you’d be ready for anything.”
“That was life and death. Which is my point. Life doesn’t fit neatly in all those boxes on a calendar. Or on a spreadsheet or a timetable. One minute you’re getting engaged and planning on babies and bluetick hounds, and the next minute, you’re dying in a bunker in some godforsaken place thousands of miles from home. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“We’ve already lost ten years.” He leaned toward her. “Which weren’t really a waste, because if we’d gotten married back then, it might not have lasted. But we’re adults now. I’ve never—ever—felt the way about any other woman the way I feel about you.”
“I’m the same way,” she admitted. It was difficult to say, given that she’d gotten married for what she now realized were all the wrong reasons. “About you.”