Chapter 14
He was losing her.
What she was asking of him was too much. He couldn’t do it. If he talked about it, he’d have to remember. And if he did, the memories would overtake him like an oncoming freight train. They would surely crush him. He couldn’t do it. Couldn’t.
If he didn’t, he was going to lose her.
Except…he knew they could. Nightmares could kill, and they could destroy.
And by God, he wasn’t going to let it happen to him.
Sweating, teeth clenched, Cory lifted a shaking hand and drove his fingers into his hair, pressed them against his skull as if doing so could keep it from cracking under the pressure of the din inside. A din so loud he couldn’t hear his own voice call out her name.
But he did call, and she heard. He saw her pause. The noise in his head subsided to a muted thumping, and this time he heard himself hoarsely croak, “Sam-wait.”
She turned halfway, one hand still on the doorknob. Waiting.
“My father killed my mother,” he heard himself say in a voice carefully stripped of all emotion. “He shot her. Then he turned the gun on himself.”
At the first words her head jerked the rest of the way around, and she stared at him, her eyes nearly black in a face bleached white with shock.
He went on in the same relentless, expressionless voice. “That’s what happened. That’s what I was told.” And then, gently, cruelly, “Are you happy now?”
“My God…” And he could hear the soft, sticky sound of her swallow.
He couldn’t take pleasure in how shaken she was. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled, contrite and emotionally drained, and put an arm across his eyes. “You wanted to know.”
He felt her come closer, creeping uncertainly toward him as if he were a wounded animal, or some unknown and possibly unstable substance. Both of which he supposed he was, at the moment.
She cleared her throat. “Where were you when it happened? Were you there? Did you see it?”
“I don’t remember.” He moved his arm and looked at her, eyes aching with exhaustion, and the unaccustomed strain of functioning without glasses. “Really, Sam. I don’t remember. The newspaper accounts said the children- the little ones and I-were in the house at the time. But I have no memory of it. Sorry.”
“Do they know why it happened?” She was frowning intently at him and trying to sound totally unemotional, the way she did when she was trying to hide how emotionally touched…shaken…hurt she really was.
Encased in his own shell of numbness, and thoroughly regretting, now, that he’d done this to her, he shrugged and said gently, “Classic posttraumatic stress, probably. He’d been in Vietnam. I’m guessing he had a violent flashback, attacked my mother, someone called the police and when they arrived, he shot her, then himself.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “But…he didn’t hurt you or the other children?”
“No.” The pounding had started up again. He wanted to put his hands over his ears to block it out, but he knew it wouldn’t help. Nothing did. He rubbed his eyes instead. “Evidently not.”
“You were there…and you were how old? Ten? Twelve?”
“Eleven,” he said woodenly. He could feel the fear creeping up on him, like icy fog.
Her voice was disbelieving. “Pearse…Cory. Surely, you must remember
He felt the bed dip with her weight, and then a soothing coolness with a little bit of sandpaper roughness to it touched his face, stroked his hair back from his forehead. He’d never known Sam’s hands could be so gentle.
Emotion, a devastating mix of love and despair, shivered through him. He caught her wrist and heard her gasp as he said in a voice tight with pain, “Maybe I don’t want to remember. Did you ever think of that?”
She sat for a long time without speaking, just looking at him with her wounded eyes, and that dauntless and defensive lift to her chin. Then her gaze shifted past him to the IV bag hanging above his bed, and he saw her throat working.
“You know,” she said in a flat voice with a huskiness in it she didn’t bother to clear, “during my training for… this job, they covered PTSD pretty well…the causes and effects, symptoms, prevention…treatment. All of it. I guess they do that, now. Anyway, one of the things they told us is that PTSD can take lots of different forms. Violent flashbacks like your father had, or nightmares and depression, flirting with suicide-the things my dad had to deal with after Iraq-those aren’t the only symptoms. When you can’t-or won’t-let yourself remember, when you shut yourself off from people emotionally…that’s PTSD, too. And you’re not going to get over it, Cory. Not unless you talk about it.”
Her eyes came back to his, and he was shocked to see them brimming with tears. One sat shimmering suspensefully on her lower lash, then tumbled over. Devastated, he lifted his hand and brushed it with his thumb… cradled her head with his palm, fingers sliding through her hair to touch the tender spot behind her ear. The moisture from the tear felt warm and soft, and he watched in awe as his thumb smoothed it like oil across her cheek.
Maybe, he thought.
He held his breath…the door in his mind he’d kept barricaded for most of his life creaked open…just a hair. And he heard the noises…the pounding.
Terror overwhelmed him. The door slammed shut.
“Don’t ask me to do this,” he whispered brokenly. “I can’t. Not now.”
For a long minute more she looked into his eyes. Then she jerked her gaze away and swiped recklessly at her tears. She caught his hand in both of hers to pull it away from her face as she rose. “I have to go,” she said, breathless and rushed.
And then, impulsively, she bent down and kissed him, one quick hard brush of her lips, and to him that was worse than nothing at all. Pain knifed through him. It felt as though his heart was being ripped out of his chest.
She crossed the room in her long, tomboy’s stride, then paused at the door and said without turning, “I’ll be going home to Georgia to see Mama and Daddy after I’m done in Washington. When you’re ready to talk, that’s where I’ll be.”
She opened the door, and was gone.
Sam sat in one of the old creaky white-painted rocking chairs on Grandma Betty’s wide front porch. Her eyes were closed and the sleeping baby on her chest made a small puddle of warmth as she rocked them both gently in the hazy heat of a Georgia July morning. The humid air was heavy on her shoulders, and scented with the roses that sprawled across the porch roof and the lighter, softer fragrance of the baby’s down-covered scalp just below her chin. Birds and insects sang them a lazy lullaby, and Sam’s mind drifted on meandering rivers of memory.
