Chapter 4 #2
It confirmed what I’d suspected. Combat PTSD. The crash had been the trigger, but the buildup had been happening since he’d walked into the crowd, maybe since he’d driven down the mountain. Sensory overload compounding until one sharp stimulus blew the circuit.
“I’ve got him,” I told Auden. “Keep people back.”
Auden nodded. He turned and became a wall, protecting Mac’s privacy as best as he could.
I turned back to Mac. His eyes were fixed, his chest heaving, and the tremor had spread from his hands to his shoulders. His lips were moving slightly but without sound.
“Mac.” I kept my voice gentle but firm, the doctor who expected to be heard. “Mac, listen to me. I’m Arek. Remember me? I was at your place with my boys because Jules got hurt. You’re in Forestville. You’re on Main Street. It’s Saturday. It’s March.”
Nothing. The blue eyes stared through me at something I couldn’t see and didn’t want to imagine. “You’re standing on pavement. You can feel it under your boots. Solid ground, Mac. Feel your feet.”
A minute flicker, like a signal trying to get through static.
“There’s a breeze. Can you feel it on your skin? It’s wet but refreshing, coming off the river. You can smell the cinnamon rolls from Brianna’s booth. My mouth waters from the scent. Guy Fuller is singing ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ and doing a decent job of it. Can you hear him?”
His breathing stuttered, then changed, the rapid, shallow bursts morphing into something longer, rasping.
“You’re safe. No one’s going to hurt you. It was crates that one of the vendors dropped. Just wooden crates.”
Mac blinked. Once. Twice. And then his eyes shifted, unfocused, wandering, searching for something to hold on to like a man reaching for a lifeline.
They found my face, held my gaze, and I watched him come back.
Awareness first. Then location. Then time.
Then the slow, devastating recognition of where he was and what had happened.
The shame hit his face like a physical blow.
I saw it arrive in the tightening around his eyes, the jaw clenching so hard the muscle jumped, the way his whole body tried to fold in on itself.
He looked away from me, at the ground. His hands were shaking badly, and he shoved them in his jacket pockets.
“I need to…” His voice was wrecked. “I need to go.”
He pushed off the wall and took a step. He staggered slightly, his legs not fully back online.
I didn’t grab him. I let him catch himself because I understood with absolute clarity that the worst thing I could do right now was take away the one thing he had left, which was the belief that he could stand on his own.
“Mac.” He stopped but didn’t turn around. “You’re not in any shape to drive.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. And we both know that.”
His shoulders were rigid, every line of his body saying let me go, let me go, let me run back to the mountain and never come down.
“Give it ten minutes. Sit somewhere quiet. Let the adrenaline clear. Then drive.”
He stood there. The festival moved around us—laughter, music, the smell of grilled food—and Mac stood on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets and his back to me, fighting a war I couldn’t see. Then he turned enough that I could see his profile. “Where?”
I signaled to Auden that Mac was okay, then led him around the corner, away from Main Street, away from the crowd, to a bench behind the library that faced the tree line and nothing else.
The muffled sounds of the festival filtered through the buildings like noise from another world.
He lowered himself onto the bench, and I sat next to him, leaving a foot of space between us.
I didn’t talk. This was the hardest thing, so much harder than the grounding.
Silence was not my natural habitat. I filled silences automatically, compulsively, because empty spaces felt like a question I was supposed to answer.
But Mac didn’t need my words right now. He needed my presence without pressure.
He needed someone to sit next to him and not require anything.
So I sat and said nothing, fighting the silence.
His breathing evened out, and the tremor in his hands subsided from visible to barely perceptible. His jaw loosened beat by beat. The color crept back into his face, blotchy and uneven but present. He was coming back minute by minute, like watching a tide return.
Five minutes passed, then ten.
Mac spoke without looking at me. “This is why I stay on the mountain.”
I looked at him, at the silver hair and the scars and the leather jacket.
The hands in his lap, which had held a first-aid kit for my son, set trail markers on a mountain, and built cabins, were curled into loose fists.
I looked at this man who had come down from his mountain to a spring festival because something in him was still trying, still showing up, still reaching, despite everything, and had been punished for it by his own fractured mind.
“This is why you shouldn’t,” I said.
He looked at me then with blue eyes stripped of every defense, every wall, every layer he’d built around himself. Raw. And I held his gaze because looking away would’ve been an act of cowardice I wasn’t willing to commit.
Then Mac closed his eyes, and with a deep breath, the walls started going back up—his jaw setting, shoulders squaring, the vulnerability sealing like skin closing over a cut. “I’m okay now.”
“Okay.”
He stood and looked down at me on the bench, and I could see the words he wasn’t going to say: “thank you,” “don’t tell anyone,” “I’m sorry,” and a dozen others, all impossible to actually say. What came out was: “I’ll see you.”
He walked away, and I watched him until he turned the corner, out of sight.
I sat on the bench again. The sun was warm on my face, the trees were that impossible green, and the festival was still going, people still laughing, music still playing as if nothing had happened.
My hands were shaking. I looked down at them.
Steady hands. A doctor’s hands. Hands that had irrigated my son’s wound without a tremor, that had sutured lacerations at three in the morning, that had held dying patients and never wavered.
They were shaking now, a fine vibration that started in my fingers and ran up through my wrists.
It was the adrenaline crash, the delayed reaction my body had been too disciplined to have in the moment.
And underneath the adrenaline, something else. Something I couldn’t redirect, diagnose, or file under not my problem. The way Mac had looked at me, like I was the first real thing he’d seen in years.
I should go back to the festival. Find the boys. Check on Jules’s leg. Make another round. Smile. Remember names. Be the Arek Forestville expected.
But my hands wouldn’t stop shaking, and I couldn’t stop thinking about a man driving up a mountain alone.
And for the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t want to go back to the crowd.
I didn’t want to perform. I wanted to sit in the quiet and be the version of myself that had existed for fifteen minutes on this bench, the one who didn’t fill the silence, didn’t charm the room, didn’t make everyone else feel better.
The one who’d just been there. And somehow, for someone, that had been enough.
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs and waited for the shaking to stop.
It took a while.