Walter was already there, sitting in the threadbare easy chair by the window.
“Find out what happened,” he demanded, pointing a shaking finger toward the computer as if it were a pet he couldn’t get to obey.
She sat down and booted up the system, shoveling bites of chili into her mouth while the computer hummed through the start up.
Attacked.
There were so many varying degrees of how bad it could be, that she couldn’t actually wrap her head around it. And she didn’t want to guess. She’d played the worst-case-scenario game last year while Jack was on sabbatical, and she knew all it did was give her ulcers.
But in the back of her head, in the soft spot on her neck, she felt a chill. Whatever had happened, it was bad enough to send Jack, wounded and wasted, back to Rocky M.
She went immediately to the BBC website and typed in Darfur.
The last article was dated four weeks ago and she clicked on it.
The first headline exploded across the screen and she dropped her spoon: Scientist Killed In Crossfire.
“No,” she breathed, panic an animal clawing its way out of her body. “No, no, please, no.”
She scanned the article, piecing together information. Searching for Oliver’s name. Her brain barely able to process everything.
“Read it,” Walter demanded. “Out loud.”
“Ahh…” Her voice shook. “‘Three hydro-engineers working in tandem with Water for Africa were repairing a broken water well outside the Sudanese city of El Fasher when the Sudanese government broke the cease-fire between itself and rebel militia forces in the area.
“‘The area was bombed late last night.
“‘Oliver Jenkins, part of the engineering team responsible for the revolutionary drill and well system, was…’” She stopped. The next word, right there in horrible black and white, stuck in her throat. She couldn’t say it. Because it couldn’t be true. Couldn’t possibly.
Not Oliver.
“He dead?” Walter asked. “That Oliver guy?”
That last night, in Santa Barbara, Oliver’s laugh had filled the room. His eyes had picked her apart, found her pain and tried to help. He’d seemed, he’d always seemed, somehow larger than life. Larger than all of them.
“Yes,” she whispered, her entire body splitting with a grief so hard and horrible it felt like something else. Like anger. Like pain. “He’s dead.”
“What else does it say?”
Walter was worked up, his eyes damp, his skin red.
“The well was destroyed,” she said, finishing the last of the article. “And surviving engineers Devon Cormick and Jack McKibbon were evacuated to Kenya where they received treatment.”
She pushed away from the desk. Her emotions needed action. Her confusion needed answers.
“That’s it?” Walter asked. “That’s all it says?”
She nodded and before she could think better of it, she turned and headed down the hall toward Jack’s old room.
Oliver was dead and Jack had come back like some kind of ghost and she was just supposed to sit back and…what? What the hell was he doing here? What did he want?
She pounded on the door and waited but there was no answer.
“I know you’re in there, Jack,” she cried, her voice breaking with the tears she was swallowing like so much glass. When he didn’t answer she grabbed the knob and turned it. There were no locks on any of the doors, a little leftover from Victoria’s reign of terror, and the door slid open across the thick carpet in Jack’s old room.
It was bare now. All the posters and music, the science fair ribbons and rock samples, the stacks of books—all gone. He’d taken them when he left, erasing himself from this house as if he’d never been there.
But Jack sat on his single bed, staring out the bare window at a bright moon.
His sandy hair gleamed in the bruised twilight and Mia’s grief outran her, bringing her up short.
“Oliver?” she whispered, and Jack’s head bent.
She turned and faced the door frame, biting her lip until the tears drained from her eyes and she could speak.
“What happened?” she asked, pressing her thumb against the notches in the wood that had grown along with Jack when he was a boy.
Jack didn’t answer. He sat unmoving, staring at his hands. Silent as stone.
“What the hell happened, Jack!” she cried, circling the bed to face him. He didn’t look up and all she saw was the bone-white part in his hair. “He was my friend, too!” she yelled, her fists clenched against the emotions that threatened to tear her to pieces.
Finally, he glanced up and she gasped at the sight of his eyes. Dry as dirt, but wasted all the same. Ghost eyes. Empty.
“Mia,” he breathed, his voice damaged and raw. “Please—”
She saw something pull apart in him, a long string unraveling. And she remembered Oliver and Jack, brothers in a way. Conspirators and teammates. More than friends. As terrible as her grief was, she couldn’t imagine what he felt. The loss he carried. Not just his friend, but his life’s work. Gone.
“I’m so sorry, Jack. I’m sorry I wasn’t there when it happened.” She crouched down beside him, careful not to touch him, because she couldn’t tell where he wasn’t hurt.
His eyes met hers and she searched through those chocolate depths for a sign, a glimmer of the boy she knew, the man she’d loved.
You’re there, she thought, all those old feelings she thought she’d banished after Santa Barbara surfacing. I know you’re there and I know you came here for a reason.
You must feel something for me. You must.
“Leave me alone,” he said.
She blinked, rocked back on her heels.
Right. Of course. How could she forget? Jack didn’t need her. He never needed her. Happiness. Grief. Health. Injury. Jack did it all on his own.
“Screw you, Jack,” she breathed, and left him there to rot.
WALTER STOOD OUTSIDE his son’s bedroom door. Shut for two damn days. Fool boy was going to kill himself.
He wanted to kick the door down, pull that boy up by the scruff and shake him until he started fighting.
Dying without a fight was a shameful way to go.
Walter knew, because he was giving it his best shot.
Hypocrite, he told himself, but the word didn’t even leave a mark.
Mia’s door opened and she slid out into the hallway. She seemed so small these days, tinier than usual. Which was saying something.
She looked like her mother. As the girlishness left her face and womanhood settled in around the corners of her eyes and lips, the fact that Mia was Sandra’s daughter was unmistakable.
Sometimes, in a certain light, after enough to drink, Walter was sure Sandra was back. In his home. Bringing the warmth and laughter that had vanished when she left.
“Did he come out?” she asked, when she saw Walter standing outside Jack’s bedroom like a crippled scare crow, rooted to the spot.
Walter shook his head, gripping the rubber handles on the walker with his useless, trembling hands.
“You should go lie down,” she said.
Go lie down. Take a seat. Have a rest.
It was all he ever did.
That and think. And then drink to forget everything he thought about.
“He come here to die?” he asked, nodding toward the door and, behind it, the boy he hadn’t seen in more than five years.
Mia had always known Jack better than Walter did and if anyone could answer that, it’d be her.
“He has a sprained knee and a broken hand,” she said. “He’s hardly about to die.”
But Mia’s eyes were dark. Her face, pinched and drawn.
They both knew that whatever was wrong with Jack was way worse than a sprained knee.
He’d survived an air raid that had killed his best friend. Walter didn’t understand much about what was going on over there in Sudan, or who exactly the bad guys were. They all seemed to be
doing their best to blast the country to hell and back.
But Jack, who’d only been trying to bring clean water to a desert, got caught in the middle of it.
“It’s the only reason he’d come back here,” he said. He knew the truth, had lived with it every day, practically since Jack was born. “Victoria drove that boy away and I let her.”
Mia tugged on the sleeve of his old blue sweater. “Come on, Walt. Don’t you have some drinking to do?”
He had so many of her sarcastic barbs in his hide, that one glanced right off. He shook his head and she stepped back to stand in front of him. Her eyes were skeptical. “You’re not drinking?”
“It’s seven in the morning.”
“Hasn’t stopped you before.”
Now that one hurt. Walter didn’t say anything, just turned his walker around in tiny increments until he faced the hall leading to the kitchen and dining room.
“Gloria is coming today,” Mia said. Gloria came and cleaned up and cooked every other day. Filling the freezer with casseroles and meaty soups to put in the slow cooker, and sweeping and dusting around him in the living room, as if he were just another piece of furniture.
In the kitchen, he watched Mia pour coffee into one of the travel mugs and take a big slice of ham out of a bag in the fridge.
“You want something?” she asked and he nodded, pointing to the coffee.
She grabbed a mug and filled it with black coffee, setting it down beside him as he collapsed into a chair.
He wanted to tell her to sit down, eat a proper meal. But he knew how much work she had to do, and how many hours of sunlight to do it in.
Shame burned through his veins and his fingers twitched, searching out the weight of his whiskey glass.
“I’m sorry,” he said and she turned toward him, chewing her meat.
“For what?”
For drinking. For screwing up the money. For getting sick.
“Three days ago,” he said. “The pilot light.”
Her smile was sad, sweet, and his shame burned hotter. She deserved better. Hell, that boy locked up in his room deserved better. She shoved the last of the ham into her mouth and wiped her hands on a tea towel. Then she grabbed three plastic amber bottles from the windowsill.
“If you’re really sorry,” she said, plunking the bottles down on the table in front of him, “take these.”
Mia grabbed her keys, her beat-up ball cap from the counter and left. Leaving him alone with the medication he refused to take.
Doctors told him Parkinson’s wasn’t a death sentence. That if he took those pills like he was supposed to, he could have a life.
But it wouldn’t be his old life.
No horses. No working cattle. None of the things he’d done and loved forever.
All those things that made him who he was.
A cattleman. A tough son of a bitch.
And without the work, who was he really?
He wasn’t a husband, hadn’t been for a long time. He’d never really been a father. Not much of a father-in-law, either.
He’d been a waste, and the disease was here to put an end to a miserable life.
Without the pills, death crept closer on shuffling feet, its face a thick, unmovable mask.
The booze helped, too.
And Walter went to bed every night knowing he was another day closer to leaving all the shame and the bitter regrets behind. And he liked it that way. The pain was bad, sometimes real bad, and the electrical currents that ran through his body as if he were water were getting worse.
But pain was nothing.
The booze helped with that, too.
Walter sniffed hard and felt the scruff of his beard with a shaking hand. He used to shave every morning, gave the guys a hard time if they didn’t.
When did I stop? he wondered. When he first had trouble with his hands, two years ago? When Mia finally made him go to the doctor and get diagnosed a year ago? When he started drinking?
“My boy is back,” he said aloud, the words echoing through the empty kitchen. His empty home and life.
Well, he realized, not so empty anymore.
Jack was back for a reason. Signs and shit weren’t something he usually believed in, but his son was back, sleeping in the bedroom he’d grown up in.
Victoria, at long last, was gone, and it seemed as if Jack being here now was a chance to make things right between them.
It took a while to wrestle his hands into action, to put them where he wanted them, on the white caps on top of those amber bottles, and it took even longer to open them.
“Damn it,” he muttered as the pills scattered away from him, rolling over the table and falling onto the floor. But he got three, a yellow one, a big white one and a small orangish one, cupped in the valley of his palm.
If he lifted his hand, they’d spill from all the shaking, so he bent his head and licked the pills from his palm, tasting the salt of his skin. The bitter medicine.
He swallowed them dry and he turned, five small moves, pulling his ruined body around to go find the whiskey to wash it down.
OH, GOD. The heat was terrible. The sun was melting him down like wax.
“Jack!” Oliver cried, and Jack turned to look for him, but he couldn’t find him in the dunes. Sand kicked up in his face, the sun blinded him.
I hate Africa, he thought.
“Jack!” Oliver yelled again. “Why didn’t you tell anyone the maps were wrong?”
The guilt was a vise around his throat. And he couldn’t breathe for the pain.
“I meant to,” he gasped. “I did. But Mia—”
“Don’t blame her.”
“I don’t!” he managed to yell past the pain. “I blame myself. It’s my fault!”
He woke up with a start, jerking himself upright. Freezing despite his dreams of the desert.
His whole body was drenched in cold sweat.
The morphine beckoned but he ignored it. Looking at his father’s face three nights ago, at the ravages alcohol had made in that man, killed the allure of those painkillers.
He wouldn’t go down that road. Not if it meant being anything like his father.
He pulled himself from the bed, knowing from weeks of hard experience that once the nightmare woke him up, there’d be no sleeping.
Without turning on the light, he opened his bedroom door and made his way to the bathroom. Hazy moonlight slipped in the window on the far end of the hallway, but Jack didn’t need the illumination. Preferred things without it, truth be known. The dark was another layer he wrapped around himself, insulating him from the cold, harsh realities of the outside world.
Realities like Mia. Like his father. Like George Gibson, dean of Cal Poly, who called Jack’s cell phone yesterday to remind him of the board meeting in six weeks’ time.
Might as well call it a reckoning.
No. He’d take the dark.
The bathroom tiles were cool under his feet and he reached into the shower and cranked on the hot water, tempering it with very little cold.
Hilarious that he dreamed of the desert but couldn’t seem to get warm.
Once the shower was steaming he stepped in, the heat scalding his flesh and he gasped, welcoming the pain, until his body got used to it. He braced his hands on the wall of the shower, his cast thunking against the tiles. The plaster was getting wet, but he didn’t care.
The hot water beat down on the back of his head, rolling past his ears. He opened his lips and the water was warm on his tongue.
Why are you here? he asked himself and spat out the water.
He thought he’d be able to hide out in peace, but there was no peace here. Not for him.
Christ, his father. He hadn’t anticipated how hard it would be to see him like that. Wasted by disease.
And even his old room, empty of every physical reminder of his childhood, was still filled with memories. Few of them worth having.
And Mia, here. The anger wasn’t fading. It was an ember i
n his chest, burning white-hot.
She hadn’t even known about the attack.
She hadn’t bothered to answer an email or a phone call or, apparently, watch the news. It was as if she’d left every tie to him behind on that roof in Santa Barbara.
While he’d been fighting hideous pain in a Red Cross helicopter with memories of her, she’d been oblivious. Unconcerned. And his anger about her abandonment made him uneasy.
He liked how he knew Mia, who she was to him. He liked the slot she occupied in his life. Wife but not wife. Friend from afar. It made sense.
Sex on a roof didn’t make sense. Being here didn’t make sense. Being hurt and angry about her didn’t make any sense.
What made sense was going back to his condo.
The reporters would be gone at this point. The university would get their pound of flesh in another month and a half. He could shower all night long at his empty apartment in San Luis Obispo. He could torture himself with guilt, staring up at the ceiling over his own king-size bed.
He didn’t need to be here anymore.
So why did he stay?
Because you deserve it, a voice said, ugly and insidious.
Water seeped into his cast and the tickle turned to an itch. An itch that spread, as all the itches did. Spread like wildfire, like lice eating his skin. It was making him crazy.
With his good hand he turned off the water and yanked a towel off the rack, tucking it around his waist. He flipped on the light, blinking at the sudden brightness. The drawers in the old oak vanity didn’t have any scissors big enough to do the job. The hallway led him to the kitchen, where the big knives were stuck to a magnetic stripe over the stove.
He grabbed the biggest and slid it, sharp side up, under the loose plaster around his forearm. The knife sawed through the plaster, cutting it into ragged chunks. The tip of the knife pierced his skin but he didn’t let up because he needed the damn thing off. His leg was better. The cuts were healed. This cast was the last of the desert he still carried on his body and he wanted it gone. Now.
His Wife for One Night Page 6