Chapter 8
Rhett
The dream is always the same. Not the details.
The details shift and rearrange the way dreams do, swapping faces, stretching hallways, turning daylight into dark.
But the bones of it never change. I’m in a building that’s coming apart around me.
Concrete dust and the copper smell of blood and a sound I can’t place that might be gunfire or might be the walls collapsing or might be someone screaming my name.
I’m looking for my men and I can’t find them.
I’m calling their names and the names come back wrong, echo-warped, and I know they’re dead before I find them, but I keep looking because that’s what you do. You keep looking.
I find them.
I always find them.
I wake up on the floor. Not the bed. The floor, tangled in the sheet I must have dragged down with me, my back against the cold boards and my heart hammering so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
Chief is standing over me, his nose pressed to my jaw, making the sound.
The low, keening whine he only makes when I’m like this.
When I’m on the floor and he can’t tell if I’m here or still there.
I put my hand on his neck.
“I’m here,” I tell him. My voice is wrecked. Scraped raw. “I’m here.”
He doesn’t move. He stays over me, breathing against my face, until my heart rate comes down and my hands stop shaking and the cabin reassembles itself around me. The woodstove. The ceiling beams. The window grows gray with predawn light.
Not there. Here.
I sit up. The sheet is soaked with sweat. My leg is seized, the femoral nerve locked in a spasm that turns the whole left side of my body into a single rigid line of pain. I breathe through it. I’ve been breathing through it for four years.
This is the part I don’t tell anyone.
Not the nightmares. People know about the nightmares.
Colt knows. Nora probably knows, even though I’ve never said the words.
What I don’t tell anyone is what comes after.
The hour I spend sitting on the floor in the dark with my dog pressed against me, waiting for the world to stop smelling like dust and blood.
How I check the perimeter of the cabin even though I know there’s nothing there.
How my hands don’t stop shaking until the sun is up and the light is strong enough to burn the images out.
The way the guilt comes in after the fear leaves.
Because the fear passes. It always passes.
The body can’t sustain that level of adrenaline forever, and eventually the nervous system winds down and the tremors stop, and I’m just a man sitting on the floor in a cabin in the mountains.
But the guilt is patient. It waits for the fear to finish, and then it walks through the door and sits down across from me and asks the question it always asks.
Why are you the one who gets to have mornings?
I don’t have an answer. I’ve never had an answer.
What I have, for the first time in four years, is a reason the question hits harder. Red hair. Green eyes. A voice so quiet that I have to lean in to hear it.
You’re letting yourself want something. You know what happens to things you want.
I pull myself off the floor. I make coffee. I don’t drive to town.
I don’t drive to town the next day either.
Or the next day.
I chop wood until the leg can’t take it.
I sharpen every blade I own. I fix the hinge on the generator shed that’s been loose since October.
I do the things that fill the hours and keep my hands busy and require no human contact, and every evening I sit on the porch with Chief and don’t look toward town and don’t think about the clinic and don’t think about her sitting on the floor of my cabin with her knees pulled up, telling me the truest thing she’s ever told anyone.
I don’t always know which one is real.
I think about it anyway.
I think about the curl I tucked behind her ear. The way her skin felt under my knuckles. The way she didn’t look away, even though looking away is what she does. What she’s always done. She didn’t look away from me.
And I ran.
Not dramatically. Not with a fight or a speech or any of the things that would give her something to push against. I just stopped showing up.
Stopped driving to town. Stopped walking Chief past the clinic at the end of her shift.
And I pulled back the way I’ve always pulled back, quiet and total, because I learned a long time ago that the cleanest way to leave someone is to never explain why.
My phone rings twice on Tuesday. Nora. I don’t answer.
It rings once on Wednesday, Bianca. I stare at her name on the screen until it stops, and then I set the phone face-down on the counter and stand there with my hands braced against the wood and my eyes closed.
Chief watches me from his bed. His paw is almost healed. He can put his weight on it now, and when he walks, the limp is barely noticeable. He watches me with that steady, unblinking patience of his, waiting for me to do the thing he already knows I’m going to do.
I don’t know what he thinks I’m going to do. I don’t know either.
Thursday morning. I’m on the porch, drinking coffee that’s gone cold because I made it an hour ago and forgot about it. The valley is bright and sharp below the ridge. Autumn morning. The mountains look painted. Chief is lying beside me with his head on his paws.
I hear the car before I see it.
The sound of tires on gravel, slow and careful, coming up the switchback.
Not a truck. Something smaller. The engine note differs from anything that drives this road, which means it’s not Colt and it’s not the propane delivery and it’s not anyone who has a reason to be coming up this mountain on a Thursday morning.
Bianca’s car comes around the last bend and pulls into the clearing beside my truck.
She doesn’t get out right away. She sits in the car with the engine off for a long moment, and even from the porch I can see her hands on the steering wheel. Gripping. Deciding.
Chief lifts his head. His tail moves.
She gets out of the car wearing scrubs. She came here from the clinic, or before the clinic, or instead of the clinic. Her red curls are pulled back; there are shadows under her eyes that weren’t there last time, and she looks at me across the clearing, and my throat closes.
She’s scared.
Not of me. Scared the way you get when you’re doing the thing every instinct tells you not to do.
She’s showing up.
She climbs the porch steps. Chief meets her halfway, pressing his head against her thigh. She drops a hand to his ear without looking down, her eyes still on me.
“I won’t ask what happened,” she says. Her voice is quiet, but it’s not small. There’s a difference, and I can hear it. “I’m not going to ask you to explain why you stopped coming to town. You don’t owe me that.”
She takes a breath.
“But I won’t disappear because you went quiet. That’s what everyone else does, and I don’t want to be everyone else.”
I say nothing. My jaw is locked and my hands are tight around the cold mug, and I can’t get enough air.
“You can tell me to leave,” she says. “If that’s what you need, I’ll go. But I won’t guess. I spent my whole life guessing what people wanted from me so they wouldn’t leave, and I’m not doing it anymore. Not with you.”
She’s shaking. I can see it in her hands, the same fine tremor I saw the day I delivered firewood. But she’s standing on my porch, looking me in the eye, and she’s not making herself small.
She’s brave.
The mug is shaking in my hands. I set it on the railing before I drop it.
“I had a nightmare,” I say. The words come out rough. Unfinished. “Monday night. About the mission. I get them sometimes. The bad ones put me on the floor and I can’t—”
I stop. Breathe.
“Afterward, there’s this voice. It asks why I’m the one who gets mornings. Why I get to have coffee and a porch and a dog and—”
I look at her.
“And you.”
Her eyes are bright. Wet. She doesn’t wipe them.
“The guilt tells me I’m going to ruin everything I touch.
That the people I care about end up gone, and the ones who don’t are the ones I should have protected better.
” My voice is cracking and I can’t stop it.
“I pulled back because I’m afraid I’ll ruin you.
That you’ll get close enough to see all of it and it’ll be too much, and I’d rather lose you now than watch it happen slowly.
I figure it would be better to be forgotten. ”
The porch is silent. The wind moves through the pines. Chief presses against Bianca’s leg, looking up at her, and she’s looking at me with tears running down her face and no pity in them. No fear.
She steps forward. One step. Close enough that I could touch her if I let myself.
“Rhett.” Her voice is steady even though her face is wet. “You’re the first person who ever made me feel brave.”
I can’t breathe.
“You told me I didn’t have to be small to be safe,” she says. “And I’m standing on your porch right now because I believed you. I drove up this mountain because I believed you. So don’t tell me you’re going to ruin me. I’m right here, and I’m not ruined. I’m just here.”
She didn’t stop knocking.
I reach for her. Both hands on her face, her skin is warm and her cheeks are wet and her eyes are wide and green, and looking at me with everything she has.
I press my forehead to hers.
We stand there. Her hands come up and wrap around my wrists, holding my hands against her face, and I can feel her pulse under my thumbs. Fast. Alive.
“I’m sorry,” I say. Against her skin. “I’m sorry I went quiet.”
“Don’t be quiet with me,” she whispers. “Be anything else. Just not quiet.”
Chief pushes between us, pressing his head against both our legs. The sound he makes isn’t the keening whine from the nightmare mornings. Lower. Steadier. He leans his weight against us both and goes still.
I don’t let go of her face.