She went to the bureau and extracted one of the gauzy cotton gowns. Knowing he was watching, she dropped her towel, shook out the gown, and slipped it over her head. Never had any man made her feel so sexy and desirable.
She thrilled to know she had the power to bring that look of sexy contentment to his face. She kicked her towel out of the way and went to him. She laced her hands on the back of his neck. “I have another question. Something I thought about all day. If you hadn’t come across David, in what he called the borderland, would you have come back yourself?”
“I don’t know.” Garth detached her hands from his neck. He went to look out the dark window.
Bronwyn regretted the loss of physical contact, but so many subjects were closed between them. She saw a chance to get to know him better and wasn’t willing to let it slide. “Can I touch your back?”
“Yeah.”
Bronwyn stroked the deep groove of his spine, hoping to let him know he wasn’t alone. “He thinks you went to get him. Did you?”
“I was bothered that he was somewhere wounded, alone. We train to have each other’s back at all times. It gives you something, an extra bit of morale, to know you always have at your side a man who would give his life to save yours. Every SEAL is prepared to die, but the worst thing for all those who are left alive is when a SEAL dies alone.”
“But once you were with him, he wasn’t alone.”
“Yeah. But then it felt wrong, period.”
“Wrong? Okay, I get it that SEALs don’t consider just dying to be wrong enough. But you’re saying you decided to come back because he…”
“Right.” In profile she watched his lips quirk upward, acknowledging her humor. “Someone had to change his mind.” She felt his back tense. The muscles of his shoulders bunched. “It was morally wrong. Cosmically wrong. He didn’t deserve to die. It was a miscarriage of justice of monstrous proportions.”
“Why?”
He turned and looked at her in surprise—as if his reasons were self-evident. “You’ve seen Davy. He’s… good—you know—a good man.”
Bronwyn shook her head, denying what he implied. “You’re a good man.”
His face was the most expressionless it had been in days. And still she saw something like hope or wonder fill his eyes until they glittered. “You think so?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you before. I didn’t think so at first, but now I do.”
Chapter 32
On one of the few occasions in her life, Bronwyn woke the next morning as dawn was breaking. She pulled on yesterday’s clothes and stole from the house.
Sometimes you find out things about yourself you didn’t really want to know. Bronwyn had yesterday, when she compared her attitude about paranormal events to the attitude of the men. Somewhere along the line, she had become as hidebound and as unwilling to look at data that disagreed with her beliefs as the most rigid of her professors. It wasn’t how she thought of herself; it wasn’t how she wanted to be.
Scrubby pines had been allowed to encroach on the house during the years of its neglect. As she cut across what should be lawn, her feet slid on pine needles. She inhaled the wet resiny smell of the pines and felt the sticky prickle of their needles on her arms as she brushed by three- and four-foot pines that were bright yellowish-green. Funny, the scrub pines were soft, almost fluffy-looking from a distance.
Finally she found the overgrown path to the river. The sandy soil was soft underfoot. Overhead, a woodpecker’s hollow hammering bounced from tree to tree.
The barely discernible path abruptly slanted down. Through the trees she caught glimpses of shining silver, and then she was out of the trees and on a narrow strip of sand, and there was the river.
In the breathless stillness of dawn, in the east where the sun was just clearing the distant pines of the opposite shore far down river, the water had a silken look. Around her was an all-encompassing stillness—as if she had penetrated to the absolute center point of creation about which all else moved and turned.
This was the peace like a river.
Pink was a meaningless name for the liquid luminescence suffusing the air. It was the color of hope, the color of thoughts more profound than any human utterance. It was the color of the still point between past and future, the place of forever.
Pilings, like black, upraised fingers, poked through the mirrored surface of the water, cradling the gray, weathered planks of a narrow dock. Here and there between the rough boards were black blanks. So black, so blank—it was as if the dock had been built to bridge a chasm, a hole in the fabric of the universe.
The dock was her very own promontory into limitless space. Promising little safety, it lured, charmed, and tantalized with invitation to “Come in. Come, get as close as you can to walking on water.”
The first plank was spongy underfoot, but it took her weight. She moved onto the next and then the next, ignoring her heart’s swooping flutter when the dock chose to sway just as she stretched her stride across a three-plank gap. It hadn’t seemed so challenging when she had come here with Garth. She made it to the end; that was all that mattered. She rested her hand on the deeply grooved piling, damp from last night’s dew, chilled by the morning air.
She had entered medicine because she wanted to tend the sick and wounded, to ease their suffering and to heal them. For a while the frenetic energy and fast pace of the ER had satisfied her. Her patients were the sick and wounded, and they needed her right now. She wasn’t an adrenaline junky—okay, she was, a little—but what had really appealed to her about the ER was that she liked challenges, liked to rise to the occasion.
All this she had thought before. This morning she pushed on mentally. She didn’t believe in ghosts, the supernatural, the afterlife, but it wasn’t because she believed only in what she could see. It was more because believing that everything either had scientific explanation or it didn’t exist, maintained the illusion that if she knew enough, life would be predictable. Such an attitude offered a firm-feeling but very false sense of security—as she should have realized the morning she walked into Trauma Room 3.
A fish plopped, loud and close. The sound jarred her from her reverie. She turned to face the shore. Looking up the long slope, she could see undulations left by the river’s slow eons of shaping the land. She could also see bits of her house’s roofline and hints of the house through the thick screen of pine and bay magnolia.
Once upon a time, the house had gleamed white and proud. It would be that way again.
She had come here when she recognized that if she continued to squeeze herself into modern medicine’s paradigm of caring for patients, she would die. Now she recognized that as long as she continued to suppress her ability to see all that she saw, whether it fit her ideas of how the world worked or not, she would only be half-alive.
Garth met her on the porch when she returned to the house. He handed her a cup of coffee and laid a companionable arm over her shoulder. He gave her a moment or two to drink before he asked, “What were you doing down at the river?”
“Thinking. So many nights after Troy died and my world came crashing down around me, I sat up, hanging on, just hanging on, until the sun’s first rays signaled night’s end. This morning I woke with that verse from Psalms in my mind, ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.’” She squeezed his waist and leaned closer. “This morning I realized I didn’t have to wait for dawn. I decided to walk toward the east to meet it.”
Chapter 33
“What’s this place we’re going to?” Bronwyn asked as Garth exited off the highway and drove into the small town. They seemed to be going through a warehouse district. The windshield wipers slapped a desultory rhythm, clearing what was more a coalescing of moisture than rain.
“The Sunnyside Oyster Bar.”
“And why are we going there?”
“I asked Doug
Cruikshank to recommend a special place. I get tired of the restaurants that are really the same. Anyway, he said if we wanted authentic eastern North Carolina without the hush puppies, something you’ll never find anywhere else, this is the place.”
He turned the big pickup into a gravel parking lot beside a building so small, it didn’t look like it could contain anything. He stopped the truck and came around to help Bronwyn out.
For their first official big date, she had put on a short black skirt and the soft-pink, short-sleeved sweater JJ had given her, and her highest heels. The sudden cool spell had dictated a raincoat. Now a damp wet wind brushed her bare legs, found its way under her coat hem, and chilled her thighs.
As soon as she stepped onto the sand and packed gravel underfoot, a wobbly rock threatened to tip her. She extended her arms for balance in a move she knew was something less than graceful. “This is it?” she asked. The restaurant didn’t even have a paved parking lot. “This is the special place?”
“Look over there.” He pointed to a stretch limo, gleaming and supercilious-looking among pickups and SUVs. “Doug told me this place is a bit of a destination. Guess he was right.”
Inside they found themselves in a large, dark room with an ear-damaging noise level punctuated by the steady slapping of the screen door as clumps of people entered and exited.
The big room’s one source of heat was the hot air blasted from an overhead industrial heater. The center of the room was hot, the corners and near the door distinctly chilly. Old black Formica-topped pedestal tables were shoved higgledy-piggledy. Around some of them, people in ladder back chairs that had lost most of their varnish crowded two deep, while other tables had no one (and no chairs either). A huge flat-screen TV blared the UNC-Clemson game. The room was mostly lit by neon beer signs.
When the outside door opened, which it did almost constantly, damp chilly air diluted the cigarette smoke inside.
Garth looked as stunned as she felt at this example of fine dining. “Umm, wait here,” he told her.
In a minute he returned. He put his lips next to her ear in order to be heard. “The next room is quieter and nonsmoking.”
In the next room, white painted, unsanded board walls glared under the long fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Pinball machines lined one wall. On the other side of the room, two orange vinyl booths offered seating—although there was still no evidence that people ate there.
The sitter had assured Bronwyn when she asked that there would be no babies in infant carriers. In fact, Bronwyn saw no children under the age of ten or eleven. While there were a couple of foursomes, she saw only one other couple on what looked like a date.
Most of the crowd looked like multigenerational family groups. Well, except for the New York models on long skinny legs, their perfectly made-up faces frozen in bland or bored or maybe stoned expressions. She assumed the limo out in the parking lot was their ride, since she saw no one else remotely sophisticated looking.
Even if you counted the dive near the hospital where college students and interns hung out, Bronwyn had never been anywhere less classy or possessing less fine-dining ambience. And though everything was worn, chipped, scratched, and patched together or mended, the place was spotlessly clean and filled with happy, laid-back people, laughing and shouting at the top of their lungs (except for the New York models), and a fresh, warm ocean-y smell.
“Grab that booth,” Garth directed when one emptied. “I don’t think we should wait for service. I’ll get us something from the bar.” He returned shortly with two beers. “It’ll be about thirty minutes before we can be seated. They told me fifteen if we didn’t mind sitting separately.”
Finally they went down two steps into the oyster “bar,” a small room, again with board walls painted white, where a U-shaped counter covered with galvanized tin took up most of the room. Fixed barstools left only enough space for patrons to approach them single file. Coats hung on one wall. Garth took her coat and hung it up.
In seconds, a man with a seamed face the color of eggplant appeared before them. His sinewy arms were bare, his deep amber eyes knowledgeable. “I’m Samuel. This you folkses’ first time here? Well, welcome to the Sunnyside.”
His knuckles were large and stiff. On the fingertips, his skin was so thickly calloused it was grayish. With deft movements he spread paper place mats before them and, like a magician fanning cards, dealt them each three shallow white crockery bowls and a bread plate. One bowl he filled with cocktail sauce, one with melted butter. “You from the Coast Guard Station at Elizabeth City?” he asked Garth, putting plastic wrapped saltines on the bread plate. “You look like one of those swimmers.”
“What swimmers?” Bronwyn asked.
“Swimmers like they train at Elizabeth City. Coast Guard rescue swimmers. World famous. My grandson just graduated from there. The Coast Guard saved over 33,000 lives after Katrina. My grandson was just sixteen, yep. He saw it on the TV, and he said, ‘Granddaddy, thas what I goan do.’ An’ he did it, too.”
There was no menu. Samuel told them they could order steamed oysters, steamed shrimp, or steamed scallops. Garth and Bronwyn settled on oysters, which were ordered by the peck. In a few minutes, Samuel brought the oysters in a galvanized bucket and dumped them with a loud clatter into a deep gutter. Briny steam billowed.
The oysters were as delicious as promised. Samuel shucked them with his bare hands so fast and smooth it was hard to see to see how he did it. One gleaming oyster would appear in the tiny bowl, and when Bronwyn ate it, another would appear.
Bronwyn dipped her oysters in butter and listened to Garth draw Sam out in that easy way he had. She supposed it was skill developed by being in the military, meeting so many strangers and needing to get acquainted fast, It was a facility she envied.
Once or twice, Bronwyn found herself missing Julia and hoping she was getting along okay with the sitter. She mentioned it to Garth, and he handed her his cell phone.
“Thirty-three thousand,” Garth said, as he started the truck for the drive home. Bronwyn glanced at him sharply, struck by a note of wonder or awe, something she’d never before heard in his voice.
“What?”
“The Coast Guard rescued 33,000 people in the aftermath of Katrina.”
“Were you involved in the rescue effort?”
He was silent so long, Bronwyn wondered if she should repeat the question.
At last he shook his head. “Some SEALs were. I was… out of the country.”
Bronwyn wanted to ask, Where were you? What were you doing? But she’d already learned that when she heard the tiny hesitation, it meant, Don’t ask. She stifled a sigh of frustration. She wanted to keep the conversational ball rolling. She wanted him to tell her what that odd note in his voice had meant. She took a guess. “Thirty-three thousand. That’s a lot. Almost too many to get your mind around. Do you wish you had been part of it?”
“It’s more than I ever did, that’s for sure.”
“What does the number matter? SEALs save people. They do hostage rescues. I’m sure you’ve helped anytime you could.”
He flipped on the windshield wipers. “Yeah.”
“And you must have believed when you were operating that you were contributing. That destroying terrorists ultimately saved lives all over the world.”
“That’s the theory.”
This laconic gruffness of Garth’s was a mood Bronwyn had never seen. “I’m not helping, am I? Something is bothering you. I wish you’d tell me what.”
“Nothing. It’s all right. I just wish I’d been there, that’s all. They knew they did something good.”
He tossed off the comment like it was a careless observation, but the longing just underneath the surface tore at Bronwyn’s heart. “Well, I know two people you were there for. Maybe it wasn’t as dramatic as plucking someone off a roof, but you saved them from certain dea
th.”
“Who?”
“David and Julia, of course. Oh, and the little boy trapped in the car. That’s really a lot of people in a short time. I think rescuing people is what you do.”
“Huh.” The sound was noncommittal, but in the light of the dash, Bronwyn thought Garth’s face relaxed a little.
She laid her palm on his hard bicep. “You’re a good man, Garth.”
He was silent. Bronwyn saw him swallow a couple of times. Then he cocked a hopeful eyebrow. “And a great date?”
Not knowing exactly what had happened but relieved at his lightened mood, Bronwyn laughed and shoved at his arm playfully. “Well, I’ve never had one like it, so you win the novelty prize.”
“But did you like it?”
“You know what? I really did.” While the atmosphere had been distinctly not aphrodisiacal, there had been something innocently carnal about eating oysters for the pure enjoyment of them with no pretense of fine dining, no dilution of the experience with refinements.
On the drive home they laughed at their immersion into a North Carolina experience, wondered if the models had eaten anything at all, and told stories of their childhoods.
Chapter 34
Civilian friends tell you not to do something stupid when you are drunk.
Team guy friends will post 360-degree security so you don’t get caught.
—SEAL joke
Outside in the soybean field adjacent to the runway, a behemoth tractor’s deep-throated put-put-put shook the air. The tractor had been out there all morning, and as the sun climbed to noon, it still labored. In his faux-wood paneled office, Garth checked his log to make sure he had done every job scheduled for the day. He had. Which gave him time, he thought as he put his work boots up on the desk, to think about what else he could do to move Julia’s situation along.
Seventeen days had passed since Garth had pulled the baby from the cardboard box. If someone was looking for Julia, she wouldn’t be that hard to find. He hadn’t put her into the hands of the system because he hadn’t wanted her to disappear, but he had left enough of a trail that anyone who knew she had been on that plane would be able to find him.
SEALed Forever Page 24