fucking country.
Lana had sat cowering from him, but now she merely looked away in her revulsion. He was mad. And she knew if she looked at him now, he
She didn’t answer.
She was terrified.
“I can’t hear you,” he taunted in a singsong voice.
“Yes,” she said very quietly.
“All right, you bitch. Now open your mouth.” She wouldn’t.
“You want Daddy and Mommy in trouble? And how about you? You want to end up a friggin’ monster like that brother of yours?”
Her gut turned. She knew he was right. He
“Hey!” He grabbed her hair, shaking her violently. “I
He had his hands around her throat again, pushing the thumbs hard up into her. As she gasped for air, he jammed it into her mouth, thumping her head against the wall, screaming again how he could ruin her, her family, how he could do anything he wanted. She thought of Frank Shirer, the pilot who had taken her out in Washington before she’d ever met Jay La Roche. They’d made love, but it hadn’t been good — her first time and painful beyond belief — but Shirer had been kind the moment he realized he was hurting her. She could see him now, the pale blue eyes, quick yet serene, the eyes of one of the navy’s top guns, of a man who wouldn’t blink at danger, she’d thought, but a man who was warm and loving. And funny. He’d put on the “nuclear” eye patch that he’d kept since his stint as one of the pilots of Air Force One. It had frightened her at the time, but now she clung to the memory of it, so different it was from the horror of Jay in her mouth. Frank Shirer, wherever he was, was as different from Jay La Roche’s type as you could imagine.
Suddenly La Roche’s whole body shuddered violently, smacking her head hard against the wall, and then, breathing laboriously, satiated, he stumbled back from her, turning, his back to the wall, sliding down, eyes closed. “I love you,” he said.
The terrible thing was, she knew he meant it. She ran to the bathroom and vomited.
Early in the morning, his eyes bleary from drink, he staggered from the bedroom, picking up a spilled bottle of Scotch on the way. She could tell from the way he paused to pick it up rather than kicking it out of the way as he normally would have that he was entering his magnanimous “let’s be reasonable” phase — his “must,” as he called it, now expended.
Still half-drunk, standing unsteadily in the bathroom doorway, his shirt out, his reflection reeling, disappearing from view in the mirror, his body reeking of deodorant, sweat, and booze — so powerful, it seemed to engulf her — he told her, his tone of magnanimity as revolting to her as the sight of his spent body, “If you don’t want to stay with me, okay. But—” he used the bottle as a pointer “—don’t you ever try for a divorce. You’re mine.”
No matter how much she had rinsed and washed her face, she still felt dirty. “So you want a respectable front,” she said bitterly, holding an ice pack to her jaw.
He nodded. “So? That’s what we all want, isn’t it? A front. You don’t know who the hell
Lana wanted to say something about his mother — of what she would think if she knew the real Jay La Roche — but instinctively she refrained. It was too dangerous. He was offering a deal. Best to take it while she could. “All right,” she said. “But I’m going back to the States.”
He walked slowly away from the door, stopped, and came back, bottle of Scotch still in hand. “Lana!”
She cringed, her flesh turning cold and clammy, with the sensation of something reptilian crawling over it. She knew what he was going to say. She could tell him not to say it, but to do that would only drag the whole thing out. It was easier to go along, let him play it out, then he’d leave her alone for a few days, if past performance was anything to go by — enough time to pack and make the arrangements. “What?” she asked sternly.
“Love you, babe.”
It was a different man speaking, but she despised the supine, ingratiating tone as much as she hated the psychopath who’d attacked her like an animal.
“Hear me?” he pressed, his voice even, modulated — as forgiving as a father making up with a child after a bad day.
“I hear you,” she said without turning around from the sink.
“Look at me, babe!”
She stared up at him, lost in the mystery of how it was that she had ever been attracted to him. But of course, then he had been someone else. He met her stare and did not avert his eyes from the burning hatred he saw in them.
How could she ever begin to explain to anyone about the disaster that had been her marriage? She had told no one, not even her friends among the nurses she’d worked with in Halifax before her exile to the Aleutians. And certainly not her parents. All they knew was that “things hadn’t worked out.” Certainly she had never gone into any of the sordid details with anyone, and only in her letters to her older brother, Robert, somewhere on duty in the North Atlantic, had she hinted at anything like the full horror of it all.
“Can’t you work things out?” her father had asked. “Your mother and I — well, we’ve had our tiffs now and then. But you don’t just get up and—”
“No!” she had told him. They couldn’t work things out. And that was that. There was no one at Dutch Harbor she could talk to, no one in whom she could confide. There was the padre, of course, but she was only a nominal churchgoer and, at least for now, couldn’t bring herself to resurrect the things she wished exorcised.
She began walking back to the base. At Dutch Harbor, the lights were twinkling brightly against the cold, blue twilight, and beyond, the cloud cover was lifting. The isolation and boredom of the place would have been more bearable if the weather were not so foul, so unpredictable. It wasn’t unusual for rain and snow driven by gale-force winds to sweep down from the Arctic and then the next minute to see clouds rent by the sun.
Her job so far had been to assist in making an inventory of medical supplies throughout the Aleutian Chain, and had it not been for the Unalaska-Alaska flights, the boredom would have been overpowering. Keeping to herself, she had not made any really close friends either here or in Halifax, except William Spence, the young British sailor, when turmoil had enveloped her again. Or had it really? Was her life more the consequence of her own actions than she was willing to admit? Was she what her father so disparagingly called “one of the world’s willing victims”? Was there something deep in her psyche that sought to purge itself by seeking out the worst as a form of punishment? Did she enjoy the “heroic” pain of the victim as an athlete takes secret pride in the pain of the effort? How else could she have possibly become embroiled with the young Englishman, a boy really, who was to die before his twentieth birthday? His loneliness, she had thought, was there for anyone to see, and surely it had only been fate that had put her on the ward aboard the hospital ship when the big Chinook choppers brought young Spence in, hands bloody stubs which had to be amputated following a savage Russian Hunter/Killer attack on the British and American convoy hundreds of miles north of Newfoundland.
When he was first transferred from the chopper to the hospital ship as one of the most seriously injured from HMS
