A Sea of Lies

by H Dillon Hunt

  Been there. Had that convo. Pulled that hair out.

  “But no, Aubree, you just had to go and grow up too fast-”

  “I had to grow up when I realized the grown-ups in my life weren't actually there to protect me,” I snap back. “And what you’re doing right now is exactly why I don’t want to come around you and your snotty family.”

  “They’re your family too.” I can hear the eye roll. Seriously. “And you had better start acting like it too, or else-”

  “No, actually they aren’t. And you have nothing left to hold over my head mother so you can take the rest of that sentence and shove it up your-”

  Maddie comes out of nowhere and yanks my phone away, pressing the end button. “Let’s not go there again with your mother, yeah?”

  I groan and flop back onto my pillow. “Yeah yeah, you’re right. Now go away.”

  “I don’t even know why you answer her anymore. I swear that woman has a map of your buttons to poke at.” She laughs, ignoring me.

  “Oh and she loooves to poke them,” I sigh and sit up. I jump a little when I first lay eyes on her. She’s got a green clay face mask on and her long dark hair is piled on top of her head. She’s also wearing nothing but a pair of cotton shorts and a bra.

  Blame our profession, but modesty has no place in this house. “Mads, you look like the boogie man.”

  “Whatever,” she lifts her chin defiantly. “My pores were being assholes so I’m smothering them.”

  Elle pops her head in as she’s passing my room and laughs “You do look like the boogie man!” She giggles. She walks in, pulling her short hair into a little dark sprout on top of her head. She jutts her chin towards Maddie, “My pores are assholes too, do mine.”

  “You got it, dude.” Maddie gets what we call her sloth smile, where she does this creepy grin and tucks her chin into her neck, giving herself all kinds of double chins.

  I fight a laugh at the identical twins with identical personalities, “I live with weirdoes.”

  “Elle, Bear-Bree needs her coffee!” Maddie calls as she skips to the bathroom. I roll my eyes but it’s true. I’m a hazard to myself and others when I’m not caffeinated.

  Elle grins and saunters away from my door. I get out of bed and dig around in my laundry basket for some yoga pants, but they’re all dirty so I give up. My oversized t-shirt is good enough. When I walk into the kitchen, the coffee maker is hissing to a stop and Elle, angel that she is, hands me a hot cup of black, sugary coffee.

  “I really, really love you,” I mumble around the rim of the hot mug.

  “It amazes me how you can go from a four-year-old in a tantrum to a twenty-two-year-old adult with one sip of coffee.” Elle snorts as she pops another pod into the coffee machine.

  “You’re the freak that makes your green tea in a coffee maker.” I eye the yellowish liquid dripping into her clear mug. “There’s just something wrong with someone who drinks tea over coffee.”

  “Okay, scratch what I just said,” she deadpans. “You don’t grow up until one cup of coffee.”

  I shrug, taking another long sip.

  Ryan always used the thirty-minute rule with me in the mornings. He would bring me my coffee, but he stayed away for the first thirty minutes, showering or making breakfast until I could act human again. After that, we would snuggle in bed, watching the news and lounging for as long as we could before one of us had to get ready for work or class.

  That was, of course, before we got married and everything went to shit.

  After that, I had to get my own coffee.

  A heavy sigh escapes me at the thought of him. It still aches; the distant pang in my chest that grasps for closure. Closure I'll never get. All of mine and Ryan’s loose ends were left frayed and damaged. We never got the chance to resolve things one way or the other before he died.

  Maddie and Ellison moved in with me a few months after he died. They made it their mission to pull me out of my grief. I had three classes with them the semester following my class with Sam. When the spring semester ended and summer classes began, Ryan left for Afghanistan.

  I studied with them, went for drinks with them on the weekend, and filled the majority of my free time with the twins. They filled a small portion of the hole in my life that Sam had left when I walked away from him.

  After a year of knowing them, Ryan died. I hadn’t seen them in weeks since the funeral. They knew I was married, but I never told them anything about Ryan. I’m not even sure how they found out about his death because we had two unspoken rules from the moment we all became friends.

  1. Don’t talk about Ryan.

  2. Don’t ever talk about Sam.

  Nonetheless, they showed up at my doorstep that summer, not asking, but to let me know they were moving in. I had climbed out of bed to answer the door (it was noon, I was still sleeping). They announced they were moving in, and that I wasn’t going to live alone anymore. I shrugged but left the door open and shuffled back to my room to go back to sleep.

  They let me have my space for about a week before they started invading it. The two of them treated me with the exact opposite of the gentleness of Sam. And I needed it.

  If they were eating, I was forced to eat. If they were studying, I was forced to study. I wasn’t allowed to mope, sleep past noon, or isolate myself. And when I pitched major bitch fits and told them to leave me the hell alone, they only took it as an invitation to push harder. They took my threats, insults, and aggression for what they really were; an attempt to push away two of three people in my life to ever show me compassion. It’s a nasty twist of fate that Sam happens to be the third person in that category.

  Eventually, they got me to see a therapist. At first, I didn’t want to tell a stranger about my baggage. But then I decided if I was going to talk to anyone, a stranger was the perfect person. I wasn’t completely against the idea of dumping all of my crap on a completely unbiased third party, so I went.

  My therapist was a sixty-year-old man named David. He was the exact opposite of the image you get in your head when you think of a therapist. He was a tall, partially bald man with a strong presence and a calming smile. He always wore stiff looking dress shirts in a different shade of red or blue with heavy gold cufflinks. His office reflected his family and love of football, and it always smelled softly of cinnamon and I could never tell if it was from his gum or cologne.

  I didn’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t him. I also didn’t expect to like him so much. It seemed much less patient and counselor and much more like an unlikely friendship.

  He was very blunt with me, he spoke freely. I liked that he didn’t stare at me with a notebook in hand and make notes about me, or ask me open-ended questions that just go in circles.

  We talked about my life and my present situation like it was a distant third party for the first few weeks. We would sit shoulder to shoulder on a dark leather sofa and examine the factors and consequences, the actions and reactions of my past three years. I liked to look at things factually. It was easier to talk about that way. Like it wasn't actually happening to me, we were just examining it.

  He looked at me out of the corner of his eye one day when the situation had been explained and analyzed and it was time to talk about the real stuff. He had sharp eyes, small and insightful. He saw the things I try to hide.

  “You’re keeping yourself stuck in your pain,” he told me, eyebrows raised as he put the pieces together. “You can’t move on because you refuse to.”

  “Shut up David, I like my pain,” I grumbled.

  “Why?”

  “Because I can feel it,”

  He laughed. I glared at him. His laughs always foreshadowed wisdom.

  “Bree, you want to feel the pain because you think you deserve it. You’re perfectly capable of moving on, you just have to want it. Right now all you want is to punish yourself.”

  I huffed and crossed my arms. I hated when he was right. “Shut up, David.”

  But a
fter a while, a few months more of moping and self-deprecating, I relented that he was right. It was about a year after Ryan died that I decided to want to move on, to stop punishing myself.

  “Okay, you were right,” I walked in and told him one day.

  He didn’t appear to hear me. He still sat, legs crossed with his glasses on the tip of his nose reading. At this point, I knew David well enough to know he wasn’t ignoring me, only waiting for me to go on.

  I paced the length of his desk until I could begrudgingly spit out the words.

  “I want it,” I finally stopped in front of him. “I want to move on.”

  He nodded slowly, digesting this. “Then now... is the in between.” He told me, finally.

  “The in-between what?” I asked impatiently, sitting down on the couch beside him. I didn’t want vague, I wanted direct and tangible ways to stop feeling what I was feeling.

  “The time in between deciding to move on with your life, and actually moving on with your life,” He says simply, placing a bookmark in his book and shutting it. He used a leaf for a bookmark. I laughed when I saw the title of the book; Leaves of Grass. He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye as he set the book on the coffee table. “You know the steps, Bree.”

  We had talked about the details in length before this, the steps to moving on. We’ve gone over the steps to forgive myself; the ways to have a new normal and cope with it. But we had discussed those steps like it wasn’t me, like I didn’t have to actually go through them.

  Suddenly I felt stuck. Stuck in the in between. Ever since then, I’ve been going through the motions, trying to figure out what my life is supposed to look like now…And trying desperately to appease my twin roommates that think that they are my other therapists.

  I drain the rest of my coffee, ignoring Elle across the kitchen studying me.

  “You had that face again,” she points at me.

  “What face?” Maddie asks, walking into the kitchen with a clean face.

  “The self-deprecating one,” Elle raises her brows.

  “Bree,” Maddie warns, drawing out my name. “We’ve talked about this; you can’t keep that all bottled up in your head.”

  “I’m stuck in the in-between,” I tell them. “That’s what David and I have decided, that’s what I was thinking about.”

  “You still seeing him regularly?” Elle asks.

  “Once a week, every week.” I nod and sip my coffee.

  “And it helps?” Maddie asks tentatively.

  “You tell me,” I deadpan. They exchange a look that agrees I’m no longer a bitchy nutcase. I nod, “That’s what I thought.”

  I move to make another cup of coffee but they step in front of me in unison.

  “You are very brave to interfere with my caffeine,” I warn in a low voice.

  “You can have your caffeine,” Maddie grins. Elle continues, “But first you have to promise us.” Maddie again, “It’s been over a year, and we think it’s time to move on.” Elle nods her agreement.

  I cross my arms and sigh at them for added drama even though I agree. “I am moving on. I have worked through the guilt and the resentment and the pain, and now I’m in between wanting to move on and actually moving on. So, mother one and two.” I give them each a pointed look. “Give it a rest. I love you both and I love that you care, but I’m good. Really.”

  They both smile at this. I have appeased my self-proclaimed therapists for the time being.

  “We just want you to be happy,” Maddie tells me.

  Elle nods seriously, “You deserve love and happiness, Bree.”

  “God, you two sound like your brother.” I laugh. They both look wide-eyed at me and I realize what I just said.

  “Does this mean we’re not pretending he doesn’t exist anymore?” Elle asks, slowly grinning.

  “I don’t pretend he doesn’t exist,” I cross my arms defensively. “It’s just a touchy subject.”

  “Why?” Maddie asks, ever curious about my relationship with Sam. “Just tell us what happened with you two; I thought you were really close?”

  “Yeah,” I say quietly. “We were. But now I’m sure he likes to pretend I don’t exist. We didn’t really end things on a positive note.”

  They exchange a look, having one of those annoying silent twin conversations.

  “Trust us, Bree,” Elle says with a broad grin. “Sam most certainly knows you exist. In fact, I think you’re the only woman he’s thought about for the past two years.

  A funny feeling flutters to life in my stomach as Sam’s little sisters grin at me.

  Chapter 3

  Sam

  Present Day

  “Starting chest compressions,” I grunt, bending over the kid that wrapped his car around a tree and pumping his chest. “Come on kid,” I mutter under my breath. “Don’t give up on me.”

  The doors to the ambulance slam shut and I feel the jolt of Jace’s foot gunning the gas. Normally, I'd yell for him to ease up on the speed, but this kid doesn’t have long.

  Mitch cuts off the patient's shirt around my pumping hands, he swears under his breath when he checks the kid’s pulse. He shakes his head a looks at me for direction.

  “Prep the defibrillator,” I order. Mitch attaches electrode pads to the patient's bare chest and I stop compressions, looking to Mitch for the go ahead.

  “Clear!”

  I deliver the shock; the barely sixteen-year-old boy’s back bowing, coming clear off the table.

  We wait, suspended and frozen in time for the few seconds it takes. I’m transported back to Afghanistan in my mind. I’m waiting for the beep of Ryan’s heart monitor to sound, and when it doesn’t I shock him again. And the sound never comes. I never hear the steady beep of his heart pumping life into his body. I see Bree’s broken face in my mind, and I nearly lose my damn head.

  But the beep of the kid’s heart monitor sounds, and it brings me back. It means I saved this kid, a total stranger, even when I couldn’t save Ryan.

  Mitch slaps my shoulder, “We got him, he’s back.”

  I collapse back against the wall while Mitch finishes up with the kid on the stretcher in front of us.

  I don’t know if this job is torture or therapy. Sometimes it’s both. On nights like this when I can save someone, get to them before death’s cold grip can pull them under; I feel like I’ve earned a little more salvation for my sins. For the mistakes that tore marriages apart and ruined the life of a girl I love.

  But there are also times on this job that I have to relive the horror of losing the struggle with death. And those are usually the nights I lock myself in my house with a bottle of bourbon, only to come out the next day when the pounding in my head is loud enough to drown out my own demons.

  The blaring sirens quiet and come to a stop at the entrance to the ER. A group of nurses and the doctor on call are gathered as we begin pulling the patient out of the ambulance. Just as I place my hands on the stretcher, the patient starts convulsing.

  “He’s seizing!” Mitch yells.

  “Get him on his side,” I order, glancing over my shoulder at the nurses gathered around the back. “Get me a dose of Diazepam, now.”

  I catch the glint of fiery red hair as I haul the patient out and race him into the ER. I hold him steady as the doctor injects the sedative. The seizure slows until the patient is still and I continue to guide the gurney down the hallway.

  “What have we got?” Doctor Reynolds asks. I hand him the chart, giving him the details of the accident. “He needs a CT scan. We lost him for a minute on the ride here, but we got him stable.”

  “Good man,” He nods curtly, taking over my place on the side of the gurney. “We’ll take it from here.”

  I step back, watching as they wheel the kid down the hall and around the corner. I make a mental note to come back and check on him when my shift ends. I turn on my heel to head back to the ambulance, but I see the red-headed nurse again. Only this time I see her face, her porcelain
skin, pale like she’s seen a ghost. She stands frozen at the end of the hall, by the doors to the ER.

  “Sam?” Bree says quietly as I approach her. “What are you doing here?”

  I reach her and her eyebrows furrow over jewel-toned eyes. That odd mix of blue and green always tell me exactly what she’s feeling.

  “That was a stupid question,” She says, more to herself than to me. She looks up, taking a deep breath and offering me a weary smile. “Hi, Sam,”

  I stare down at her, warmth flickering through me. “Hey, Aubree,”

  She rolls her eyes, looking down at the chart in her hands. She scribbles her notes across the bottom and tries to hide her smile. “No one calls me that but you.”

  “Even more reason for me to call you that.” I smile for what feels like the first time in my life. She looks back up at me and my chest constricts.

  God, I miss her.

  It’s a breathless feeling being near her again. There’s this drowning desperation to grab her and take her far away with me. Just the two of us. I hate the feeling that I know a stranger so well. I know each freckle on her face, what makes her laugh and cry, how she drinks her coffee.

  But I don’t know the person standing in front of me now, not anymore.

  I fight the battle in my mind to stand here with my hands by my sides, or to reach for her like every cell in my body is begging me to do. Every fiber of my being is straining towards her. I don’t know where we stand, or how to be around her.

  It’s been a year since I’ve seen her last, two since I’ve spent any time with her. But it feels like there’s a lifetime of space between us

  “That was a good call back there with the Diazepam.” She nods towards the hall they led the patient down. I watch her mouth while she talks and wonder how long we stood in silence before she broke it. “I think had Doctor Reynolds not been so impressed, he would have been embarrassed. That was his call to make, not some medic.”

  “I think he took it well,” I nod. “Considering it was coming from, ‘some medic.’”