Chapter 16 #2
The cold shower hadn’t helped her. Shana still felt spent after a night’s restless sleep and the steady spray of icy water on her head for ten minutes.
She took a long gulp of the hot coffee before she pulled the Jeep’s door open and got in.
There was no thought involved. No decision to be made.
Whatever primal connection she had with Dane compelled her to go back, to see him.
No matter if it brought her to her knees and turned her into a sobbing mess.
But she would try her damnedest to hold it together.
Tillie, of all people, had given her a strapping lecture on being strong and holding up, being the person for Dane to lean on, to dump on, to love.
It was up to her to make sure he knew there was more to his life, that he had plenty to give, to live for.
It wasn’t that she thought he’d be suicidal. Not exactly. But his zombie-like state of the previous night scared her. She didn’t know what to do with it. Not yet.
She pulled the Jeep onto the street and wished the drive to the beach shack was longer than five minutes. To home. If she were honest with herself.
She wasn’t the same woman who’d left Australia over a year ago now.
“Father Donahue will be here within an hour.”
“How—”
“Helicopter.” Dane didn’t want to explain that their old friend Toly Ivanov was having his son, the big shot priest from Boston, flown down to the Vineyard to make all the arrangements for him.
“What’s going on.”
“Father Donahue is making the arrangements.”
“What arrangements?”
He walked past her out the door. He couldn’t stand to look at her face, at the pain there in her swollen eyes. He could see through her sunglasses, knew why she’d left them on in the house.
He went out the door to go for a run. Maybe he would never stop. He understood he was behaving like Forrest Gump, but the thought didn’t make him smile. It should have. He knew how he should be feeling.
But he couldn’t feel a damn thing. Didn’t want to. That’s why he couldn’t stay with Shana.
It took no time to arrange the cremation. Maybe because Dane had lost his sense of time passing. There was no ceremony. He and Father Donahue had gone to the small funeral home and picked up a plain black urn filled with ashes.
It felt heavy in Dane’s hands as he carried it out back.
Shana had followed him outside. Father Donahue had counseled him to let her be, to allow her to grieve in her own way. Dane had no idea what that meant except that he couldn’t ask her to leave, couldn’t rebuff her.
But he did his damn best to avoid looking at her. The sight of her pulled at him, pulled at something inside him that he didn’t want unraveled.
He carried the urn to the spot where Father Donahue had planted a wooden cross. Dane had told him he wanted a marker. It didn’t matter much to him what it was. It wouldn’t matter to his mother. She was gone.
He had no past. His happy childhood had disappeared in the dark swirling pool of blood in the ocean where he’d lost her—lost the tenuous hold on his understanding of happy innocence. Gone.
In the spot where the grass met the dark wet sand at the edge of the stone wall holding the harbor from his land, the wooden cross stood waiting. Dane walked, aware of the mechanical motions of his body, but not living them, not feeling them.
He opened the urn, and holding it over the trench Father Donahue had dug in a ring around the cross, he poured the ashes of his mother’s body.
He felt nothing. He watched the dark sooty ashes fall into the dark sand, blending in and felt absolutely nothing. It wasn’t his mother. He did this for her, following the instructions she’d given him a long time ago. Or maybe it was only a short time ago.
He’d remembered what she said, what she wanted him to do upon her death. He’d dismissed the notion of her death, but kept the memory locked away with all the other hundreds and thousands of horrors and evils and soul-torturing ideas and memories he’d amassed. Beginning with the death of his father.
But this would be the last. Because now he couldn’t feel any of it. He was immune to the horrors buried in his soul.
Maybe he had no soul left.
Watching Dane spread the ashes, Shana stood, ramrod stiff and determined not to shed another tear. Determined to drag Dane back to the living. Somehow.
The urn was empty and he stood motionless now. She waited a few beats. Then waited a few more. She looked up at the morning sun rising in the sky.
Dane still didn’t move.
“Let’s go inside.”
He turned. She hoped he’d argue. Hoped he’d get all annoyed at her telling him what to do.
But he didn’t get annoyed. He barely looked at her with his empty eyes. She didn’t even know if he saw her. But he’d heard her because he walked back to the house and she followed.
Inside, he stopped in the middle of the kitchen like an old man with half his mind gone who forget why he came inside.
“Let’s have something to eat.” She spoke to him as if he were half out of his mind, not because she thought he was, but because she wanted to get him mad.
He turned and she thought she saw a spark of annoyance. But if she did it had faded. Or maybe it was her own spark of annoyance reflected in his eyes.
“You have to eat, Dane.”
He shrugged.
When she thought he’d go back to his room to sleep, he didn’t. Instead, he pulled open the freezer door and pulled out the bottle of tequila.
“Tell you what, girlie. You have something to eat. I’m drinking my dinner tonight.”
A bubble of euphoria, misplaced as it was, rose in her chest and she threw her arms around him as if he’d announced he’d struck gold.
“What the hell.”
There was definite irritation in that voice and so she squeezed him harder. He was alive. He wasn’t back, but he hadn’t fallen into the abyss. As warped as it was, even the desire to get drunk was an improvement over the desire to do nothing.
She would take it. She would ride with him all the way back to his redemption, until he could look at himself in the mirror again, until he could live and laugh and be.
#The End#
Read the beginning of the next story, Let It Snow, now:
Let It Snow
By Stephanie Queen
Chapter 1
Dane would be in hell no matter where he went now.
He stared out his kitchen window again. This time snowflakes filled the sky, obscuring his view of the bay and the ocean.
Didn’t matter. Let it snow. He wasn’t going anywhere.
Or maybe he should pack his bags and leave.
Head for the next war-torn abyss, the next destructive mission. Leave a mark somewhere.
Try to make up for allowing his mother to die. Maybe save someone else’s mother.
Was it strange that a grown man—scratch that—middle-aged man should feel like impaled gutter trash, so devastated by the death of a mother he’d seen only a handful of times in the last decade?
The bullet that killed Dane’s mother might as well have hit him.
It had left a cannonball-size hole in him, obliterating whatever had been left of his heart and soul.
Maybe there hadn’t been much there anyway.
How could there have been? He’d spent a lifetime fighting the soul-killing hurt in all the most hellish places on earth.
To no end. Saving some people, but not saving everyone. Never saving everyone.
But he’d survived. In body, anyway.
This—his present personal hell—wasn’t about his past catching up with him. No. Dane knew what this devastation, this pain and now this numbness was about. It was all because he felt responsible for his mother’s death. Any shrink would have told him this.
The problem was—he was responsible for his mother’s death.
She’d been murdered on his watch. At the hands of his enemy.
It didn’t matter how much of the devastation he felt was guilt.
It should be pure gut-gnawing guilt. He deserved to feel guilty as hell.
He deserved to be in hell. He was exactly where he belonged.
He should have been able to protect her. Least he could have done. She’d protected him all those years. Without his father. She’d seen to it that he reached adulthood when it was not at all a likely thing.
He might as well leave. Head for Somalia. They needed some guns there and they’d been calling. He hadn’t told Shana. It wasn’t like his beach shack or Martha’s Vineyard—or even Shana—held the solace for him that they once had. Too many things happened here. Too much violence. And now death.
“I invited Cap over for eggnog.” Her voice cut him.
Dane turned around to face Shana, who stood on the threshold of the kitchen. The glint of her beauty cut into him further. She stared him down, her arms folded like she expected an argument. Like she expected to win the argument.
He wouldn’t bother arguing. He’d retreat to his bed. Bring a bottle with him. Then he remembered she’d hidden or tossed all the bottles. No matter. He wouldn’t join them. She could celebrate the season with innocent eggnog and Cap if she wanted.
The thought of Cap—Captain Colin Lynch—and Shana together stirred an ember in him, but not much. Nothing like the spark it might have created before. There was no fire to be had in his belly. Not today.
“Go for it, girlie.” He smiled. It cost him to muster that much for her.
But she deserved whatever he had. She tried hard.
Probably too hard. He walked by her and headed to his room half hoping she’d follow him.
Then he could seduce her, lose himself in mindless sex.
But he’d drawn the line short of letting her put up her body for his use to cure him of his self-pity.
Besides, sex was never a simple matter with Shana.
He couldn’t give her what she deserved. He’d end up feeling guilty about it. More guilt. If it were possible.