“Did you make it with butter and salt?”
“Butter and salt? No, I put milk and sugar on it.”
“She likes it with butter and salt.”
He sighed in exasperation. “Then I found some other hot cereals and she wouldn’t eat those either, and we were back to the damn mossed egg thing.”
“I wanna damn mossed egg,” Trinity said.
Emmy made a face even as she fought a smile. “You have to be careful about bad words. You’ll never get one past her and she’ll repeat it every time.”
Chagrin filled Declan’s handsome face. “Sorry,” he muttered.
“And she doesn’t get juice—I know there’s a bottle in the fridge, but that was here for Mom. Juice isn’t good for kids—too much sugar. Trinity only gets milk or water. And in a plastic glass with a lid on it—always a lid or—”
“I spilt it,” Trinity supplied.
Declan just shook his handsome head in defeat.
“Remember I showed you the drawer that’s hers...” Emmy reminded him.
“I thought that was a drawer she played in—when you showed it to me, that’s what she started doing,” he said defensively.
“She does play in it, but it’s also got her bowls and dishes and cups to use.”
At least he had found Trinity’s miniature silverware in the silverware drawer. Emmy supposed she should give him a point for that. If for nothing else.
“I’ve liberated whole towns and villages from insurgents with fewer problems,” he said then, his frustration still showing. “And you’re probably thinking this is worse than having the kids on your own,” he added as if he had no doubt she was finding fault with him.
Which she kind of was.
But she needed help and she had to hope that he’d get better, so she resisted the urge to take his monstrous failure and rub it in anymore. Instead she said, “It’s harder than it seems sometimes—I keep finding that with the work outside.”
He raised his chin to acknowledge her point, but it didn’t seem to make him feel any better.
“I should also probably show you how Trinity likes her egg scrambled because you can’t just beat it and put it in a pan to cook it. You have to break the egg into the pan and use a spatula to just sort of break the yolk and fold that and the white a couple of times so that there are still some all-white and some all-yellow parts. If there aren’t, she doesn’t believe it’s an egg and won’t eat it—probably why she didn’t eat the one you scrambled for her.”
“She’s finicky.”
“She’s three—she wants things the way she wants them.”
“Or else.”
“Kind of,” Emmy confirmed. “But it does make a good egg, especially with some cheese added just toward the end, which she also likes. I’ll show you,” she suggested then, taking an egg and some already-shredded cheddar cheese out of the refrigerator.
It took only a few minutes and the egg was ready. She slid it onto a plate, put it in front of her niece and Trinity ate it without complaint.
“Yeah, that is not how it went for me,” Declan grumbled.
“Did you eat?” Emmy asked.
“Yeah, most of what she wouldn’t so the food didn’t go to waste,” he said. “Why don’t you have something while I get started cleaning this mess.”
Emmy made herself an egg, too. As she did, she said, “Trinity was awake earlier than usual this morning, and you were already up?”
“With the sun.”
Except that the sun hadn’t even been up yet.
“Is that a military thing?”
“I was a farm boy—it started there. Chores before breakfast.”
Chores...
Emmy had been so involved in thinking about Declan, about what to wear, about using a little blush and highlighter, eyeliner and mascara, and lip gloss, that she’d lost sight of the fact that she still had to go out and do the morning chores. In her good jeans and nice sweater.
It was something she’d had to do every day for the last six weeks, so it should have been a habit by now. How could she have so completely forgotten about it?
She could have kicked herself.
“I do those after the kids are up and fed,” she said as if she’d remembered the chores all along.
“If you walk me through it today, chores are probably something I can take over without making a disaster of everything.”
He was willing to take over the morning chores?
Emmy wanted to jump for joy. Mandy had loved animals—she’d become a veterinarian to make them her life’s work. Before meeting Topher, Mandy’s dream had been to work in the country, to care for large animals, to have a working farm and eventually also a sanctuary for animals that had been abused or abandoned or were handicapped.
Emmy had admired that dream. Supported it. And when Mandy had met Topher—a small-town farm boy himself who aimed to return to his family’s long-held farm and convert it into all organics after he finished his tour of duty—Emmy had agreed with her sister that it seemed like a match made in heaven.
But Emmy herself was a city girl. Through and through. And while she’d been doing her best to take care of the farm and the animals without complaint for Mandy’s sake, the truth was that she didn’t relish any of it.
The thought of being spared the daily tasks with the animals bought Declan a full pardon for demolishing the kitchen with breakfast.
But she wasn’t going to let him see how thrilled she was, so she said a simple “That would be helpful.”
“That’s what I’m here for—believe it or not so far,” he added facetiously.
“Although you might want to do a little sleeping in yourself after a night with Kit,” she said. They should probably trade off the morning chores the same way they were planning to trade off the night duty.
“I don’t sleep in,” he said as if it was unfathomable to him.
“Even if you’re up until three thirty in the morning the way I was last night?”
“Since the day my mom married my stepfather—who was a retired marine—I’ve been up at the crack of dawn. Hugh’s main objective was to get me and my brothers ready for the marines, and early rising was part of that—regardless of what time we’d gone to bed the night before. I have an internal clock that’s more reliable than any alarm you’ll ever buy.”
“Well, I love to sleep in and I don’t love to collect eggs or milk cows and goats—especially the goats. So if that’s a job you want, go for it. I’m happy not to do it for however long you’re around,” she said. And it was good to find this difference between them, she decided. The more things they didn’t have in common, the better.
She was glad that the morning’s turmoil was making him talk more, though.
When she and Trinity had both finished their breakfast, Emmy cleared enough space on the table for the three-year-old to color, then pitched in with the kitchen cleanup.
As they cleaned, she was discouraged to note that whatever had inspired Declan to speak more than a few words at a time had apparently waned. He was back to speaking in short, terse phrases—and only when spoken to.
Once the kitchen was back in order she suggested Declan get started collecting the eggs while she dressed the kids. Again with no more than an “Okay” from him, they parted ways.
After that, with Trinity in tow and Kit in the stroller, Emmy showed Declan the hail damage to the barn and the structures near the house.
In a lean-to behind the barn was a tractor that Declan recognized from his youth. He marveled that it was still around.
“Mandy used it, but I don’t know how to operate it and when one of the co-op guys tried it a couple of weeks ago it wouldn’t start,” Emmy explained.
Declan didn’t comment on that. But after lunch, when she’d put both kids down for naps and was pulling the
shade on Trinity’s bedroom window, she saw him go back out to the tractor and begin to work on it.
He stayed out there while the kids slept and Emmy did laundry and preliminary preparations for dinner, and by the time both kids were waking up again, she heard the tractor start.
For the remainder of the afternoon—with Kit either strapped in a sling or sitting in the stroller—she showed Declan the rest of the hail damage, ending with the orchard.
They’d been side by side for everything else, but when they reached the outskirts of the orchard she said, “Go ahead and check it out. I’ll wait here. I’m not sure how stable some of the branches are and I wouldn’t want the kids in there if anything broke loose.”
Declan didn’t seem to find that curious, and as he surveyed the work that needed to be done there, she wondered if she could delegate that job to him alone.
They had done a lot of walking, and as they returned to the farmhouse, Emmy noticed that Declan was limping slightly again.
She didn’t say anything about it, and through their beef stew, biscuits and salad dinner she filled his silences only with chatter about the kids and the farm.
But once the kids were in bed and Emmy again found herself alone with Declan in the kitchen—supervising as he tried his hand at making formula—she needed something else to talk about. And since she was not only curious about his injuries but needed reassurance that he was capable of the work that needed to be done, she decided to broach the subject that he’d obviously avoided the previous evening.
“When Mandy was notified about Topher, she asked about you. They said that you were badly hurt in the explosion, too. But there weren’t any details...”
She thought that should have been enough to prompt him. But as usual, he wasn’t forthcoming and said only, “No?”
“No.”
Still nothing from him.
She didn’t actually want him to go back to being the charming guy he’d been in the past because she didn’t want anything to disarm or mislead her. But come on! Had he lost the capacity for simple conversation?
Then something else occurred to her and she said, “You seem a lot different... You don’t talk much...” Or ever smile or do or say anything that showed his personality was intact. “Is that from the explosion?” And if so, was she expecting too much of him?
He frowned at her. “Are you asking me if I had a brain injury?” he said, cutting through what she was trying to address with some sensitivity. Then, before she could answer his question, he glanced back at what he was doing—measuring infant formula powder—and said only, “No, I didn’t have a brain injury.”
Even that was delivered so emotionlessly it didn’t seem as if he really cared. But clearly if she didn’t ask him outright he wasn’t going to say more, so she said, “How were you hurt?”
“A hidden IED went off under the right front tire of the Humvee I was driving.”
“No, I meant what parts of your body were hurt,” she qualified, unsure if he’d genuinely misunderstood her or was intentionally skirting an answer.
She didn’t think he’d genuinely misunderstood her when silence was what followed.
Again.
It was getting aggravating.
“Are you giving me the silent treatment?” she asked suddenly. “Is that what’s going on here? Because I didn’t do anything to you.”
“I didn’t do anything to you either,” he said with another frown, not missing the inflections in her voice and seeming confused.
Emmy couldn’t deny the truth in that—he hadn’t done anything to her. That neglect at the wedding had just left her feeling spurned because it had seemed as if more was going on between them.
She decided to use his own tactic of skipping over something he didn’t want to talk about and ignored his comment. Instead she said, “So if you haven’t had a brain injury and you aren’t giving me the silent treatment, talk for crying out loud!”
He seemed unaffected by her annoyed outburst, but at least he finally did answer her question about his injuries.
“There were cuts, bruises, three broken ribs. My arm and hand were broken, too. And my leg was nearly crushed. It was touch and go for a while with the leg—there was a lot of talk about amputation. But I had seven surgeries to keep it, to get me here, and—like I said before—I’ve been in hospitals and rehab until a few days ago.”
“Wow...” she responded. She’d had no idea how much he’d gone through. Maybe he had PTSD.
Whether or not he did, though, she could see that what he’d been through would have dampened his disposition—especially coupled with the loss of Topher in that same explosion—and she felt guilty for being impatient with him.
The issues she’d brought back with her from Afghanistan had sometimes made her short-tempered and nervous and fearful and edgy. She’d kept it under wraps when she was with her family or in a professional setting, but it had come out with Carla.
Carla had ridden it out with her, though. Her friend had never been annoyed or irritated. Now maybe it was time to pay that forward with Declan. Regardless of their missteps in the past.
So with less hostility than she’d shown up to then, she said, “Don’t get me wrong, I need help around here and I’m grateful that you want to give it, but...after all that and just now coming out of rehab, it doesn’t seem like what needs to be done around here is anything that you should be worrying about.”
“The most important thing to me is that I get back where I belong—to my unit, to being a marine. I spent the last two months in rehab, recuperating, but I was also working out every minute they’d let me—and sometimes more than that on the sly. I did it to be duty-ready. I’m actually stronger now than I was and certainly capable of doing farm work.”
“But the limp...”
“It happens. The knee stiffens up. But I’m still doing physical therapy exercises for it and it isn’t weak.”
Emmy wasn’t sure if she should believe him. But desperation—and the fact that he’d gotten the tractor working and knew how to use it—made her not argue.
“A little pain here and there is nothing,” he added in a way that made it sound as if he thought he deserved that—which started her wondering about something else.
“They said that Topher was in the passenger seat of the Humvee. That you dragged him out of the wreckage—how did you do that in the shape you were in?”
“Needed to be done.”
“He was still alive then?” Emmy ventured despite the strong sense that Declan did not want to talk about this.
And he didn’t for several more silent moments before he seemed to concede and said in a very deep, very quiet voice, “He was moaning but he wasn’t conscious. He didn’t get back to being conscious. I kept telling him to hang on, to stay with me, but I don’t know if he even heard. He was gone before the rescue team reached us. They said they wouldn’t have been able to save him even if they’d gotten there earlier... He was just too messed up...”
There was suddenly such a heavy pall in the room that Emmy regretted bringing it up. And for a while neither of them said anything at all again.
Then, thinking this time about his mental state, she said, “Have you had counseling?”
“Now you sound like my family,” he grumbled.
Emmy hadn’t had any herself. Carla had tried to convince her to, but she’d been determined to handle her problems on her own.
“While I was in the hospital, my brother Conor sent in shrinks and spiritual guidance people right and left,” Declan went on. “So I’ve had that shoved down my throat. And in order to get the hell out of rehab I was required to sit through group therapy sessions. But I don’t have flashbacks. I don’t have nightmares. I’m not jumpy or agitated, and there’s nothing in me that isn’t ready to go back to what I came out of. I haven’t had the need to self-medicate
with booze or drugs—I haven’t even taken most of the pain medication they want to load me up with. I’ve seen PTSD. I’ve lost people to it. Luckily I don’t have that and every professional I’ve had to meet with about it has given me an all clear.”
“And your family—”
“Is still not convinced. They watch me like hawks—I think they’re figuring I’m going to crack at any time. But I’m not. Am I different than I was before this? Yeah, I am. I lost one of the most important people in my life. It wouldn’t have been any worse to lose either of my own brothers, including my twin. And I was driving...” he said with a heavy dose of self-condemnation. “But that’s what life is, isn’t it? Things happen, we cope. But we don’t always come out the same person we were.”
Emmy couldn’t argue with that. Since Afghanistan there were changes in her, too. And while the fearfulness of things like the orchard weren’t good changes, she still felt as if some other changes in her were—she had a stronger sense of what was important, which she was convinced was helping her to more easily accept sudden parenthood and the life-altering it was requiring of her.
When it came to Declan, Emmy could understand if his gloomy detachment alarmed his family. But it didn’t matter to her. In fact, she thought it might make things easier. The old Declan had been funny and charming—and ultimately insincere. Maybe with this new, more serious version, they could rebuild some trust and actually have a productive working relationship, taking care of the farm and the kids.
But she did feel the need to tell him some things, so she returned to what they were talking about before she’d posed the counseling question.
“When Topher died, Mom and Dad and I started trading off weeks to come here to stay with Mandy so she wouldn’t be alone. The last week I was with her, just before we lost her, she said she was going to try to find out how you were, where you were, so she could thank you.”
The Marine's Family Mission Page 5