“R… Ro… Rowan…” she stuttered, a note of confused terror like I’d never heard from her before was interwoven through the syllables of my name.
I turned my head only to see my wife’s normally beautiful face drawn tight into a pained grimace. Her teeth were clenched, and her back began to arch, pressing her body hard against the shoulder belt. A split second later she was shaking uncontrollably. Her head snapped back, thudding against the headrest as her eyes began to roll upward.
The Jeep suddenly lurched forward as her feet slipped from the clutch and brake, her right foot landing momentarily on the accelerator. I dropped the phone, grabbing at the steering wheel as I wrenched the stick shift into neutral. The engine coughed then settled to an idle, but we were still rolling forward.
“Felicity!” I screamed, but she couldn’t hear me. I could only barely hear myself as the driving rhythm continued to grow inside my head.
Her body was bucking in violent spasms against the safety harness, and she continued to vibrate with the physical tremor. Her arms were drawn up to her chest, turned inward, and her hands were postured like tight paws, her fingernails digging into her palms.
A trickle of blood ran from the corner of her mouth as she frothed, and I could see that she was biting her tongue. The back of her head continued to slam against the padded headrest, and I mutely thanked the ancients for it being there.
Sharp but distant noises began to invade the heavy beat in my head, and I recognized them as blaring horns. A quick glance forward told me that the traffic signal had switched to green. We were moving forward, rolling by the grace of leftover momentum, but it was far from what traffic would bear. Still, it was too fast for my liking considering the circumstances.
“Felicity!” I called out again, ignoring the futility of the action.
I was struggling to guide the rolling Jeep while at the same time unbuckling my own seatbelt. My first thought was to get my foot on the brake and bring the vehicle to a stop, but I wasn’t the most limber individual on the face of the planet, and I wasn’t sure I could get around my wife’s stiffened legs. In a hostile attempt to assume control of my emotions, a wave of panic began sweeping over me as it elected to challenge my desperate concern for Felicity and move itself into the top position.
A prolonged whimper emanated from my wife as she jerked against the tensed muscles of her body, and I realized it was a scream that couldn’t escape. The other realization that struck me square in the face was that the tables had turned. I was helplessly watching her go through all of the things she had stood by and watched me suffer so many times before.
I managed to release the catch on my shoulder harness and twist toward her, levering myself against the back of the seat. As I brought my leg up, my knee cracked hard into the dash, sending a lance of pain through the joint. I barked out an expletive as I pitched forward, and the back of my hand raked against the jangling key ring that hung from the ignition switch.
It was then that I realized the panic had taken over long before I’d ever noticed its icy fingers clawing at my stomach. A brief but welcome stab of lucidity hit me, and the logic it brought along set off a chain reaction in my brain. I reached for the keys and gave them a hard twist, switching off the engine. That done, I quickly wrenched the gear shift into first with a hard shove, doing little good for the transmission but bringing us to a lurching halt.
The dark music was pounding inside my skull as I scrambled from my seat amid the dulled blare of horns. Angry motorists were pulling around our stalled vehicle and speeding off, narrowly missing me in the process. The commotion began to die down only after I could be seen pulling my wife’s still-seizing body from the driver’s seat.
It was official. I was no longer in a good mood.
CHAPTER 8:
“Lemme get this straight…” Ben’s voice came at me over the cell phone. “Firehair went all Twilight Zone this time instead of you?”
Firehair was just one of the nicknames he had for my wife, but it was by far his favorite.
“Yeah, kind of,” I answered. “Or maybe in addition to.”
Felicity and I were parked diagonally across from one another in a booth at Seamus O’Donnell’s. She had pressed herself as far into the shadows of the corner as she could get, and I was keeping a close eye on her.
The pub wasn’t my first choice of places to be given the situation, but it was the closest for what she needed. Fortunately, the evening rush had not yet started, so I was able to carry on the phone conversation without yelling over the noise of a crowd or stepping outside.
“What?” he chirped, a note of concern leaping into his tone. “You were both all zoned out in a moving vehicle?”
“No, not exactly,” I explained, still trying to get a handle on what had happened myself. “I had some ethereal background noise in my head, but I never stepped over the line. I did that this morning before you came by.”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Do what?” he barked again. “So you did the la-la land thing this mornin’, and you’re just now tellin’ me?”
“I didn’t have anything to connect it with at the time, Ben,” I replied. “Then the whole thing with the kidnapping happened… I mean, give me a break.”
“So you think it all has something to do with the Brittany Larson abduction?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“Don’t be so goddamned overconfident, Rowan,” he chided.
“Cut me some slack, Ben,” I replied stiffly. “I’m still a bit rattled. This kind of thing has never happened to Felicity before. I’m not real happy about it, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“Yeah… Sorry. You’re right,” he apologized. “So listen, where are you two right now? Home?”
“No.” I shook my head out of reflex as I spoke. “We’re in a bar down on Oakland called Seamus O’Donnell’s.”
“What’d ya’ go to a bar for?” he asked, a note of confusion in his voice.
“It was the closest place where I could get her out of the heat and let her rest up,” I told him. “Besides, it’s actually where we were headed for dinner anyway.”
“She doin’ okay?”
“Seems to be.” I looked across at Felicity. She was still at the far end of the booth but had leaned forward now, elbows on the table, eyes closed, and fingers slowly massaging her temples. “But judging from the looks of her and speaking from experience, she’s got a killer headache at the moment.”
“What about you?” he pressed. “You gonna go all loopy or anything?”
“Like I actually know when that’s going to happen, Ben?”
“Yeah, forget I asked.” He huffed out a heavy sigh then muttered, “Jeezus fuck, white man. What am I gonna do with you two?”
“Wish I could help you there, Chief,” I told him. “I’m wondering the same thing myself.”
“Not what I wanted to hear,” he replied. “So listen, stay right where you are. I’m pretty much done here, so I’m gonna shake loose and come down there.”
“We’ll be waiting.”
I thumbed off the phone and clipped it back onto my belt then turned my full attention back to my wife. Her eyes were still closed, and she was carefully working her fingers from temples to forehead and back again. Her lips were parted slightly, and I watched the rise and fall of her chest as she struggled to regulate her breathing. I knew exactly how she felt, and it was killing me to see her like this.
Of course, I suppose now I knew exactly how she felt when the roles had been reversed.
“I’d like to tell you it gets better,” I said softly. “But, it’s more like you just get used to it.”
“Fek,” she muttered the colloquial Irish profanity.
“Yeah, I know,” I agreed.
“How do you do it?” she asked then moaned, still not opening her eyes.
