Hunted in Conard County

by Rachel Lee

  And as burdens went, he knew damn well he could be one himself at times. Shaking his head a little, bracing himself, he rose and pulled on his jeans, leaving them unbuttoned. She might as well get used to that, he thought. He liked to go shirtless unless it was cold.

  Even though it was getting late, she was brewing coffee. In for the long haul, he thought with amusement. He’d never turned down a cup of fresh brew, though. It didn’t interfere with his sleep at all. Sometimes he wished it would actually keep him awake. Hah!

  “What do you want to eat?” she asked.

  “There was dessert we never got to. Peach cobbler, some cherry pie. Whichever.”

  She pulled out two of the plastic containers and placed them on the counter. “Warmed up?”

  Oh, this was getting businesslike. “Sure, if you don’t mind.”

  He sat on the stool, watching her buzz around, and reminded himself she wasn’t angry, even though she was doing a good imitation. No, he’d brought up a sensitive topic and she was trying to deal with the required honesty. She really didn’t want to go there. His fault, but he knew they were going to have to address it all. Their own fears. Each other’s fears.

  He had just wanted her to understand that she wasn’t alone in those very things she’d mentioned before. Now this. He should have kept his mouth shut until a better time, not when they were enjoying the afterglow.

  On the other hand, what better time? They were as open to each other as they could be at this point in their friendship.

  Soon she had two plates in front of them, and the warmed desserts ready for serving. There was more than enough of each for two, so he helped himself to some cherry pie. She chose a small piece of cobbler.

  With hot coffee, the combination was like ambrosia.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Then she didn’t say any more. Oh, this wasn’t going to be fun. He wanted her to lead the way. She struck him as a very strong and independent woman and he sure as hell didn’t want to step on her toes over something so important. She’d already accused him of lecturing her.

  “You know,” she said at long last as she reached for a second piece of the cobbler, “I want you to know that you just gave me one of the best experiences of my life.”

  “Then I blew it.”

  She gave a small shake of her head but didn’t look at him. “No. No, you didn’t ruin it. Reality had to return sooner or later.”

  That so closely echoed his earlier thought that he gave her his reaction to it. “That was reality. The best kind. But go on.”

  He thought he saw a wisp of a smile touch the corner of her mouth. He craved another round with that mouth. Hell, they’d hardly explored all the avenues available to them.

  He took another bite of pie and restrained his natural impulse to take charge. This one was for her.

  “I don’t even know how to explain this,” she said slowly. “I’ve told you my problems, but I’m not sure I’ve conveyed what they’ve done to me. I not only feel like I could become a serious burden but...”

  She trailed off and finally looked at him. “Stu, I’m scared all the time.”

  Wow. That was an important moment, deserving of full attention. He nodded to let her know he’d heard her, but he wasn’t sure how to respond. Or even if he should respond. His desire to reassure her might be exactly the wrong reaction when she’d admitted something that must be perilously difficult for her to say.

  “I never used to be this scared,” she said after a few beats.

  His heart was thundering now, and he felt as if he were on the edge of something that could be dangerous or could be wonderful.

  “It’s been like one shock after another,” she said quietly. “Being deputized by the sheriff had me walking on air. Then I remembered all the ways I could mess up. Not just by missing something because I have a seizure, but a million other little things, from not realizing when something was significant, to failing to gain May’s trust, to just being generally rusty.”

  He nodded again, keeping his gaze on her, pie and coffee forgotten. He wanted her to realize that she was the only thing on this planet that had his attention right now. As if he could think of anything else.

  “I keep telling myself to put one foot in front of the other, to keep moving, to deal with one thing at a time. Well, that’s a form of hiding from myself. It’s not coming at me one thing at a time. It’s been coming like a tsunami since I was shot.”

  “I bet,” he answered, and said no more.

  She looked down, passing her hands over her face as if wiping something away. “I can’t even begin to explain, because once I start, everything has to be linear. This then that. Only it hasn’t been linear, and it sure hasn’t felt like it’s one thing at a time. How many do I have to list, anyway?”

  “However many you need to.”

  She sighed, rubbed her eyes again. “Yeah. The laundry list. First there was waking up. Big hole in my memory for a while. By the time most of that came back, they’d done enough tests to know I had brain damage. Brain damage! That was worse than realizing I’d been shot. Gut shot would have been emotionally easier to deal with. Dammit, Stu, they told me my brain was permanently altered. I wasn’t me anymore.”

  “That would be scary,” he agreed. Very scary. “How could you tell how much of you had changed?”

  Her gaze searched him out. “That was it. That was exactly it. When the brain changes, you can’t know how or how much. Not really. What had I lost? How different was I? No way to know. Not unless it was something obvious to people who knew me, and I doubt any of them would have told me, anyway. I get that we all change with time, but it’s not the same when you don’t even have a touchstone anymore. It’s gone. Part of me was gone. Maybe. How was I to know?”

  He nodded, then reached for his coffee. Cold. “Want a warm-up?”

  “Please.”

  He rounded the counter, emptied their cups in the sink and poured fresh. Then he sat beside her again. “Okay, the terror of losing part of yourself. No way to know how much. I can’t imagine, but I’ve seen it happen to others. And then?”

  “And then. Then. An MRI doesn’t tell you when you have seizures. At least not unless it catches them happening. I had my first observed seizure about the time they put me in physical therapy.”

  He looked sharply at her. “Physical therapy? You had physical problems from the shooting?”

  “It was mostly to regain my strength. Bed rest is a killer to muscles. During one of my sessions, the therapist caught it. Then off to an EEG to see if my brain waves were dancing around the wrong way. The side I’d been shot on?”

  Stu nodded encouragingly.

  “They said it was working slower than the other side of my brain. Whatever. Out of sync sometimes, I guess. As it happened, I was diagnosed with a seizure disorder. I don’t know if it had a particular name. Just that it meant I lost touch sometimes. Then off to neuro again to try to find a medication that could at least smooth out the jumble. You see how well that worked. They reduced the number but couldn’t erase them.”

  “That sucks,” he said frankly.

  “You bet.” She sighed, sipped the hot coffee and lifted a crumb of the cobbler to eat. “Okay, that was all pretty much a straight line. Not the way it felt, but a straight line, anyway.”

  He was aching for her, even though he’d only heard a part of what was coming. She was opening up like a person who desperately needed to talk to someone besides herself, and he knew they were at the tip of the iceberg. If he hurt for her now, he was going to hurt more very soon.

  “Then I went back to work, but I was already worried about whether I could do my job. Part of me was missing. I couldn’t escape that. It kept beating on me.”

  “I guess I can understand that part,” he said, keeping his voice calm.
He didn’t want to interrupt her in even a small way.

  “They sent me to a psychologist, routine after a shooting like that, for evaluation. I assumed it was about how well I was dealing with being shot. No, it was a necessary step toward retiring me on disability. For the next several months I sat at a desk stacked with folders and papers, all stuff I couldn’t screw up, while the disability was processed.”

  She paused. “Stu, I felt betrayed. I couldn’t help it even though I know it wasn’t justified. They couldn’t keep me around as a glorified clerk forever. They needed an active officer to replace me. Hell, I couldn’t even work in the evidence room because I could slip up. No more badge, no more law enforcement work, no more job. I crashed.”

  “I bet.” He could understand the sense of betrayal despite her own admitted understanding of why it happened. Police were a brotherhood, and her brotherhood was deserting her. Not because they wanted to, but because they had to. Awful.

  “Everyone was so nice. Even after I packed out and went home to try to figure out if it was worthwhile to carry on, my buddies stopped by often. But even that became too much. It was a constant reminder, crazy as that sounds.”

  “Not crazy.” Then he shut up again.

  “It was sometimes like having salt rubbed in a wound. But other times... Stu, this is going to sound crazy. I started to get worried about the way I was leaning on them.”

  “Leaning?” He sipped coffee and pushed the cobbler closer to her. As stressed as she was right now, talking about all of this, he believed she needed some naked calories.

  Seeing his gesture, she reached for a fork and took a piece into her mouth, swallowing it with coffee.

  “Leaning,” she repeated. “I realized I was waiting for them to come over and talk about the job. I’d begun to live vicariously. Well, how far was that going to get me?”

  He gave her high marks for realizing what she was doing. A lot of people would have clung to those visits, never realizing how dependent they were becoming. This woman had. She was amazingly self-aware.

  “Anyway.” She shoved the cake around with her fork, drank more coffee and sighed. “I realized it was time to accept that my whole damn life had changed permanently and I’d better get going on building a new one before I turned ninety and realized I hadn’t left my apartment in nearly sixty years, y’know?”

  He nodded. “Almost got there a few times myself.”

  She cocked an eye at him. “Really?”

  “This isn’t about me. You can ask me later. This is about you.”

  A spark of life had reentered her pretty eyes. “Promise?”

  “Promise. You can have my core dump later if you want it. Go on.”

  She nodded. “None of this was any kind of sequence,” she went on. “Like I said, it wasn’t linear. Things would bubble up, then dissipate for a while. So while I was leaning I was also beginning to consider other possibilities. Flip-flop time. And all the while I felt as if I was staring into a huge, black hole of uncertainty. Afraid. Where could I go? What could I do? Then, even before I’d answered that question, it slammed me hard. I had to get away from everyone and everything or I’d never have any clarity again.”

  “Heavy.”

  Her face quirked a little. “Shocking, maybe. I wasn’t just thinking I needed a new job. I was thinking I needed a whole new life. A friend suggested that I could probably teach criminal law and I seized on that, maybe because I’d still be close to my first love. But I wanted a small place, not one where there’d be too many people.”

  “Why?”

  “Because by that time I’d become terrified of my seizures. A charity got Snowy for me, and we trained together, but I was still terrified. I knew he’d protect me from freezing in traffic or something, but he couldn’t deal with people and the way they’d react. I wanted to keep contact to a minimum.”

  “Okay.” Now his chest was really aching. “I guess you came to the ends of the earth.”

  She shook her head. “Not quite. This is a nice town. Small, comfortable. My classes aren’t big enough to be intimidating. The only thing I didn’t consider was public transport, probably because it was so easy where I used to live. So here I am, building that much-vaunted new life, and I’m still scared all the time. What if I do something stupid when I’m seizing? What if the seizures get worse? Like today. What if that was a seizure?”

  “Snowy acted differently.”

  She shook her head. “Nobody knows how Snowy will react if I drop out for ten or fifteen minutes. It’s never happened. So the question remains, what if it’s getting worse? What if it becomes more frequent? What if I screw up this amazing chance Gage has given me? What if I blow every damn thing, including any possible friendship?”

  “Kerri...”

  She waved a hand. “It’s possible, Stu. Nobody’s infinitely patient. But the bottom line is, I’m scared all the time. All the time. I don’t trust life anymore. I’m sure you know all about that.”

  He did indeed but talking about the lessons of war didn’t seem appropriate right then. She’d had her entire life upended. Of course she didn’t trust life. Most people lived blithely with the belief that tomorrow would come, that horrible things wouldn’t happen out of the blue, that they’d eventually dandle grandkids on their knees. Soldiers lost that faith, and he could sure see why she had.

  Surviving was no guarantee, and once that trust was lost, it didn’t return easily.

  He’d have liked to offer comfort and reassurance, but those would just be words. She needed to wrestle with herself on this one, just as he wrestled with himself. Even group therapy and talking to others in the same boat couldn’t change that.

  She’d fallen silent and he decided to speak. “Have you considered that you’re grieving?”

  She turned her head slowly to look at him. “Grieving?”

  “There doesn’t have to be a death to cause it. The loss of your old life is enough. A part of you died. That’s why it comes in waves. Maybe. Just a guess. I don’t see a psychology degree on my wall.”

  But she was thinking about it. “Grieving,” she repeated as if trying it on.

  “From what I’ve seen and heard, it’s not a level ride emotionally. You can go through different parts of it over and over again. Anger to despair and so on. Bouncing around. Which, I would think, makes it harder to deal with.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “But the brain can only take so much,” he said. “You’ve heard of the thousand-yard stare.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a sign that someone has checked out from overload. The brain can’t handle it, and just shuts down to an elemental level. Anyway, I suspect grief is much like that. Just so much a person can handle at one time. God knows you’ve had enough to handle.”

  “I feel weak. Like a fraidy-cat.”

  “Good heavens! That’s the last way I’d think of you.”

  At last a wan smile dawned. “Thanks. But that’s how I feel. I’m a mess, but I don’t want to admit I’m a mess. I’m trying to soldier on, if you’ll pardon the expression.”

  “It’s a good one.”

  “I don’t know how well I’m succeeding. But there you have it, at least as much as I know how to explain. My biggest fear right now is that I’ll blow everything up, from my teaching gig to this job Gage has given me. To our friendship.”

  That last almost wounded him, but he reminded himself that she probably didn’t feel she knew him well enough to trust him completely. Unfortunately, he couldn’t create that trust. Time and experience had to do that.

  Snowy whined and her head whipped around. “He must need a walk.”

  At once Stu stood. “I’ll take him, if that’s allowed. All I need to do is pull my shirt on.”

  “And button your pants,” she said drily.

  He flashed a grin. “I’m
showing off.”

  “Doing a good job of it, too. Yes, you can take him. He likes you.”

  “Will you be okay?”

  “Without his support? I think I can manage that. I’ll just sit someplace where I couldn’t possibly fall. As in not this bar stool.”

  A minute later he was out the door with the eager dog. A glance back told him Kerri had settled on the recliner.

  She thought she’d be a pain to other people, but when he considered the adjustments she was making, he figured she was the one with all the pain.

  Outside the night had grown crisper, though not cold. He wondered if they’d even have another warm day. As Snowy did his thing, Stu turned slowly around.

  They needed more streetlights here. He didn’t understand why they hadn’t been put up when these apartments were built for all the people who’d come to work at the semiconductor plant.

  The now vacant plant. As near as he could tell, boom and bust was a frequent cycle in this small town, at least since the heyday of ranching. Sad. It really was a nice place.

  For an instant he thought he caught sight of a shadow among the shadows, but then he couldn’t be sure. His eyes weren’t fully dark-adapted yet and could easily play tricks during the adjustment period.

  He turned his head to look away, then quickly looked back again. No shadow. His imagination.

  But uneasiness suddenly clung to him like cold, wet leaves. The rapist. Could he be hanging out around here?

  He looked up at Kerri’s windows and saw the lights. Not very inviting to a guy who depended on the darkness to conceal him.

  Snowy didn’t seem disturbed, so he took that as a good sign. In fact, the dog evinced a desire to head back inside. Apparently, he wanted to be close to Kerri again.

  Now that was something Stu could fully understand.

  * * *

  Ivan had withdrawn to the deepest shadows beneath the trees that shaded one end of the parking lot. Not that they had many leaves left, but he’d hardly stand out among the trunks.