Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Peabody turned on the meter, and it screeched like Rowan’s, also nearly immediately tapping out. He turned it off and looked in consternation at the machine. “I believe it’s stuck on Rowan’s.”
“It’s accurate,” I said sadly. I knew it was a proper reading.
TJ cleared his throat then looked at me. “It’ll pick those up?” he asked me.
I nodded to him then said to Peabody, “TJ is a medic in the reserves. He’s been deployed to war zones.”
Peabody said, “Ah, yes, that explains this one,” and pointed at the middle meter.
“This one, I assume, is the Minory heritage, but this one is a mix.” With excited movements, he pulled out more meters, assembled them, and took more measurements.
When he was done, he looked concerned and then turned his gaze first to Rowan then to TJ.
“No, I’m sorry, but I think that this meter is still picking up on Rowan’s energy.
Rowan’s energy signature is quite specific in its ratios, a kind of fingerprint, if you will.
And I can see his imprint on TJ’s readings. Rowan, will you please step outside?”
Rowan shrugged and walked to me as he took in the machines now consuming the surfaces of his office library.
“I’ll call you when it’s done,” I said and brushed my hand up his arm.
He shivered as my connection lit up his synapses, then grinned back at me. “Or you can come with, and we can take our time coming back?”
TJ made a loud retching sound.
Peabody cut in. “No, no. This is both his and not his…” Then he pulled a ticker tape out and up, utterly confused, and to TJ said, “Let’s do this one more time. Will you two,” he said to Rowan and me, “go stand by the door? This is most confusing.”
Rowan and I did as we were told, and TJ put his arms out as Peabody stared at his meters and put the wand back up to him.
He clicked them on with one hand, and the far meter’s hands hit maximum as violent clicking filled the space.
Peabody shut them off and, dropping the wand on the table, picked up the ticker tapes again.
“Fascinating. It is the same as last time.” Peabody’s gaze went from TJ then back to his meters as Tee watched him warily.
“Not sure I’m getting the fascinating part, Doc.”
“The one. The big one—what was it? Not the most carnage, but the one that hit you,” he said, thumping his chest, “the hardest. The one that left the biggest imprint upon you, as if it took—and this is more psychology than metaphysics—a piece of your soul?”
TJ opened his mouth to say it, but no words came, then looked back at me in a silent plea for help, and I explained.
“It was a couple of years ago. One was dead when he arrived; the other made it to the hospital but died later,” I said, then added when Peabody did not react, “There was lots of gore, blood, gunfire, and bullets.”
Peabody took off his glasses and folded his arms, nodding. He was like that for a few beats, digesting this information and its implications for the data he’d recorded. Then, back to TJ, while his eyes said he was sorry, his mouth asked, “Why?”
TJ looked confused. “Why what?”
“Why is it this one? You are a medic, yes?”
“Yes, sir.”
“This was the first time you had seen that kind of wartime ugliness?”
“No, sir.”
Peabody nodded. “Then I wonder, why is it that this memory, this one, why is it, do you think, that it sits persistently with you?”
TJ shrugged. “Dunno… It was the last major one?”
Peabody gently pressed. “There’s something more there. Tell me.”
I said, “Tee, I remember you telling me that you couldn’t believe that after everything, the guy died, right?”
TJ took a deep breath as if he were about to go underwater, and blew it out. “Yeah, things were shit, and he was, like, this one good thing I had in all that. That at least this nutso mission that nearly got us a black mark on our records meant something.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain it.”
I squinted at TJ. “Black mark?”
“The COs, all the way up the chain, were all over our asses for going out without confirming that it was an RAF aircraft. The Brits weren’t claiming it, but we had good intel that it was them. It was. Fuck them. Command knew,” he said as if reliving an old argument.
Rowan spoke up from the doorway. “Two years ago?”
“Yeah, what’s it to you, Braveheart? You wanna tell me I did all I could and should forget about it?”
“TJ,” I cut in sharply, “Rowan’s RAF. He likely knows who you’re talking about.”
Rowan, I noticed belatedly, had gone sheet white.
“Navigator, shot through the head. Pilot, hip wound, septic,” Rowan said as if he were repeating a report he’d read. “I was the pilot.”
TJ’s gaze on Rowan went from dark to blank. I felt the room grow warm and lose focus, as if the press of history had fogged us into place, weighing in on what was being uncovered.
“The pilot’s name was James.” TJ had told me that, thinking back on it, he’d known the pilot was in bad shape, even there in the rescue bird. He’d given his first name when TJ had made small talk to keep him conscious. “You’re Rowan. Fuck you,” TJ said, guarded.
“Rowan is my Scots name. James is my Christian name, the one I used when I enlisted. I was the pilot who lived.”
“Fuck you,” TJ said again, but I could see emotion gripped his guts, as his brow creased. He might have been reluctant to tell Peabody the details, but now some kind of dam broke in him, and Tee slipped into the memory. “The pilot’s dead. I was told in Germany that he wasn’t there—he died, man.”
“I didn’t take to being in hospital well…
I discharged myself as soon as my legs could hold me.
There’d been a targeted strike that was bringing in bodies faster than they were leaving.
I was able to discharge without hassle and updated my commanding officer on the way home.
They’d already declared Vick and me dead because our plane went down and there were no orders to retrieve us.
” He laughed, a sound that was hollow and devoid of joy.
“The paperwork, I hear, to undo that was not worth bringing me back from the dead.”
“Rowan was the one who gave you hope,” I breathed.
TJ stared at Rowan as if he were seeing a ghost. “It had been a shit week, month, year, and little hopes were all we had left. I applied for R and R after that.” I could fill in the rest. He was in the peach orchard with me a few weeks later, unloading the burden of that memory.
And now that memory and the interlaced events that led to it and followed were being rewritten.
Rowan and TJ, gazes locked, stood on opposite ends of the room, sinking into their shared memory with its new puzzle piece fitted into place. A silent communication was happening between them, and they were the only two who could understand.
“One shot in the head, the other—” Rowan shed his sport coat with jerking movements, tossed it onto his desk, and then, with a fistful of his shirt front, he yanked the hem out, exposing the scar at his hip.
“I saw that, the other night with Pipsqueak out on the cairn knoll… So that is a bullet wound.” TJ swallowed, looking to the scar then back up at his face, as my own skin broke out in goosebumps from head to toe. “You survived.”
I’d held my brother as he wept in the peach field, and I, too, had wept for the man he mourned.
This man whose death tormented my brother wasn’t some nameless, faceless human.
He was the man whose history called to me from across the Atlantic.
But now I knew that it was TJ who was the first Minory to deliver Rowan from his suffering, before I unwittingly answered the pull of the MacLaoch curse a year later.
Peabody’s soft exclamation broke through the heavy weight of emotion in the room. “My god…this is absolutely incredible. This, this is the reason for the mixed energy reading. My stars… Rowan, Tiberius, do you realize what the event was? At the moment, the curse’s requirements were fulfilled—”
“The Minory was there. He was there,” Rowan said, following along in disbelief.
“Tiberius is the first Minory to be called to the MacLaoch chief.” Peabody turned and smiled at me, stating a scientific fact. “Not you.” Then back to TJ and Rowan: “How long was it until Tiberius showed up?”
TJ shook his head. “I’m sorry, what the fuck are you on about?”
“Tee,” I said, settling down on the arm of the settee next to him. “Remember what Marion and Flora said? The thing I’m here for, the thing that changed everything? It’s love, but it started out as a curse for the MacLaochs, for Rowan.”
“Yeah, I remember. But that’s just fairy-tale shit.”
“Sure, but answer me this, who was that man you thought you saved? Who is Rowan to you?”
TJ looked over at Rowan, dismay clearly written in his frown.
“You know who he is,” he whispered.
I nodded. “In the peach orchard, you told me about the dead man and his copilot.”
“He,” Tee said, nodding to Rowan, “didn’t live.
I’ve held that here,” he said, putting his fingertips to his chest, and I heard the hiccup of emotion in his voice.
That was a predecessor to tears for TJ. “We received that beacon, downed aircraft, and it was one of ours. The insurgents were going to be at their crash site in minutes. We had to go. No one would let us go, and at the same time, they weren’t stopping us.
I saddled up… Richy, Pat, and Carol all volunteered.
We didn’t talk about it. We just went. Everything was…
” He paused, thinking about the right words.
“It felt right. We were doing the right thing.” He looked down at our clasped hands then to me.
“I thought it was because you don’t leave your man behind.
They were our allies, our brothers in arms, right? ”
“That’s right.”
“But now it might be more? I’m in this curse shit too?”
“Apparently” was all I said aloud. It was new for me too. This was the why. It was right, and it was a power beyond us that snapped her fingers and made it so.
Rowan made his way across the room and up to TJ, his shirt front as rumpled as his emotions. He put his open palm up between them. TJ let go of my hand and grasped his before yanking him into an embrace.
From beside them, each head buried into the other’s shoulder, I could hear snippets of my brother’s voice.
That day had been a series of miraculous events: the odds that their chain of command let the helo go, that the helo hadn’t been shot down by enemy fire, that they were fast enough, that the equipment was what they needed for that particular skirmish, that their medic skills in a flying ambulance in a war-torn land would be enough to save Rowan’s life and their piloting skills enough to protect those manning the bird.
There were a thousand little things that made that potential nightmare into a complete miracle.
I heard Tee say that when he went to check on that pilot in the hospital, only to find his moment of hope in all of that endless war gone…
Well, it was a gut punch to end all gut punches.
Now, here he stood. And here, Rowan, who held his own traumas of that day, was getting answers to unasked questions. Who had been those cowboys who had saddled up to save their allies in an unsanctioned mission?
For me, it was shocking; my brother had picked up the man I was destined to spend the rest of my life with, taken him out of the war-torn desert sand and used his skills to keep him alive despite the bullet wound at his side that was hemorrhaging blood. All while dodging enemy fire.
I felt the tears on my cheeks before I realized I was crying. This was the kind of beautiful born of the ugly that was rare.
Peabody quietly picked up another machine and, holding the nozzle up to Rowan and Tee, turned it on.
The sound of the vacuum broke the moment and sent all eyes to Peabody, who, engrossed in his work, murmured, “Magnificent!”