he watching her? Were they
“In case she needs lookin’ after, my sister Jess is a nurse, lives right there with my mother,” C.J. put in, rather like a punctuation mark-as if that should settle it.
C.J., who’d let her down and turned her in to the police and got Mary Kelly killed. Now he expected her to go home with him? Let him and his Southern relatives take care of her?
Caitlyn’s head felt as if it might explode. Through the hum of sound inside it, like the conversation of angry bees, she heard a chorus of agreement:
“It’s not a bad idea…”
“Actually, it’s a
“It’d be the ideal place…”
“She’d be protected…”
“It’s the perfect solution.”
“We’d have to get her there without anybody knowing,” Jake said slowly. “And I mean
“Do I hear somebody playing my tune?” That was a new voice, light and musical as birdsong.
Someone said, “Eve!” and it was echoed around the room in varying tones of surprise and delight, along with cries of “Hey, when did you get back?” and “I thought you were in Afghanistan!”
Jake’s weight was gone from the bed. Caitlyn heard, “Hey, Waskowitz…” in a voice deep-throated and husky with intimacy, and after a moment, more softly, “You just get in?”
“Just,” the newcomer murmured back. “I came as soon as I got your message.”
“How was your flight? Get any sleep?”
“Okay…not much…never mind…”
Chafing with impatience, Caitlyn waited, listening to the exchange of mundane and essential information between partners and lovers-for that much was obvious from the first word spoken by the newcomer-reunited after a separation prolonged both in time and distance. She stared fiercely into the nothingness as if she could penetrate it with the sheer effort of her will, and was struggling against a childish sense of exclusion, the urge to cry out, “Hey! Over here! What about
Then she felt her hand covered with one that was slender but strong…the skin roughened as if it had recently been too much exposed to hot dry winds and too little to soap and soothing lotions. The bright, musical voice said, “Hey, I’m Eve Waskowitz, Jake’s wife. And you’re Caitlyn, right?”
Before Caitlyn could utter a word, a new, lighter weight settled onto the bed beside her, and the voice became nearer and almost a whisper, like secrets whispered by best friends in the friendly dark. “They said you can’t see at the moment-gee, I can’t imagine how confusing it must be, surrounded by a bunch of strange people all talking at once. Are you doing okay?”
“Yeah…I’m fine.” And for the first time in a long time, Caitlyn found herself thinking she might be. “Nice to meet you. Did…somebody say you were in Afghanistan?”
“Yeah…filming.” There was a gust of breath. “Long story. In a nutshell, I make documentaries. Cable, mostly, although this one’s for one of the major networks-
“We’re havin’ a council of war,” Charly said-and the last word sounded like
“Oh, goody,” Eve chortled, while Caitlyn, talking over her, was saying flippantly, “We’re planning to set a trap for the bad guy, and use me as bait.”
Someone-C.J.-actually growled, and Jake sucked in air and said shortly, “We’re not going to do that.”
“Anyway, that’s puttin’ the cart in front of the horse,” Charly said in her distinctive, dry way. “We need to get her well first. To do that, we’ve got to get her tucked away someplace safe where the bad guys can’t get at her.”
There were restless stirrings from C.J.’s side of her bed, and his voice said testily, “We have a place. What I’m gonna do is take her home to Georgia with me. The trick is getting her out of
Eve made a sound like a self-satisfied cat. “Then nobody would be apt to notice one more, would they?”
There was a short, fat silence, and then Jake murmured, “Eve…” just as C.J. said, “Hah!” and Charly, chuckling, said, “It’s perfect.”
“Of course it is. Simple, too. We’ll just smuggle her out as part of my crew.” Eve’s hand squeezed Caitlyn’s and her weight was no longer beside her on the bed. “It’ll take me a couple days to round ’em up-they’re still trickling in from Afghanistan-I came ahead to get things set up for postproduction-but you’re not going to be ready to go for a while anyway, right? She’ll need to be on her feet, at least. And, hmm, let’s see…those bandages might be-”
“Eve,” her husband said in a low, warning tone, “nobody in your crew can know about this. I mean,
“Well, of course. Not a word goes beyond the people in this room.” Caitlyn felt the brush of a cool cheek and then Eve’s voice, light with laughter, faded into distance. “Don’t worry, my love-leave everything to me!”
To C.J., still tuned to the nuances of sound in a sightless world, the silence that followed her leaving had a vibrancy to it, like the aftermath of the ringing of a bell.
For long seconds nobody seemed to have anything to say. Then Charly, in her dry, sardonic way, said, “Well, I guess that takes care of that.”
Jake cleared his throat, gazed distractedly after his departed wife and muttered, “I wouldn’t quite say that… Uh, there’s a lot to take care of on my end. So…guess I better get on it. I’ll be in touch.” The last was for Caitlyn as he touched her hand in a brief farewell.
As if that was a signal of some kind, Wood Brown took a step forward and Charly glanced at her watch and said, “Well, I’m gonna head on back. What about you C.J.-you comin’?” He shook his head, and she gave the blanket-draped lump that was Caitlyn’s foot a friendly squeeze. “Okay, y’all keep me informed, now, y’hear?” She and Jake went out together, as Wood moved to his daughter’s side.
He took her hand and gently squeezed it. “Okay, honey, guess I’d better go see what your mother’s up to. I’ll tell her what we’ve decided.” C.J. thought his quiet ways must be very reassuring under those circumstances. For a moment he felt a twinge of something akin to envy-he could barely remember his own father. And then Caitlyn’s father leaned over and brushed her forehead with his lips and was gone.
It was the moment C.J. had both wanted and dreaded. Alone with the woman he knew deep down in his heart he’d wronged, he felt tongue-tied and useless. And yet, he didn’t want to leave simply because, right then, at her bedside was the only place in the world he knew how to be. No matter how bad he felt being there, he knew he was going to feel worse somewhere else.
But in a way, it was even more fundamental than that, nothing whatever to do with thought, just a heaviness inside him that was bone deep, as if his body had somehow taken root in that hospital chair.
Seconds ticked by. Wood Brown’s footsteps were swallowed up by the hospital sounds. C.J.’s breathing seemed loud enough to him to wake the dead.
“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Caitlyn said in a low voice, turning a shifting, unfocused gaze toward him. Searching for him in her private darkness.
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. With that sound her gaze found him and sharpened unnervingly, almost as though she could see. Uncomfortably he mumbled, “You need anything? Can I get-”
“I’m fine.” But she flinched as she said it, as if she acknowledged the lie it was.
C.J. watched a frown pucker the middle of her forehead, the unmarred part just below the purple lump bisected by a dark line held together by neat, white butterfly bandages where she’d met the brick courthouse steps on her way down. From out of nowhere came a throat-tightening urge to touch his lips to the spot, and he swallowed
