A Love Like Ours Page 15

  “Thank you.”

  She finally released him and went to give forehead kisses to each of her daughters.

  “Now that you’re here,” Lyndie said to Karen, “I’m going to go unpack groceries and put in more time with Grandpa.”

  “Sure.”

  Lyndie met his gaze before abandoning him to her mother and sister.

  He returned to his seat, and Karen pulled the pink chair a few feet closer to him. She settled into it and took one of Mollie’s hands in hers. “It’s been a long time, Jake. Too long. You were a child the last time I saw you.”

  Looking at her now, he could remember things he’d forgotten. The other parents in Holley had insisted on being called ma’am or sir, but she’d asked all the kids to call her Karen. She’d fixed him tuna fish sandwiches with the crusts cut off, sliced into triangles. Her prettiness had made him shy.

  “I’m glad for the chance to tell you, Jake, how much we appreciate you giving Lyndie a job. She loves exercising your horses, as you probably know.”

  He dipped his chin.

  “She’s been telling me about Silver Leaf. Mike and I are planning to drive out to Lone Star for his first race. Do you think he has a chance of success?”

  “I make it a habit not to predict what my horses will do. Whenever I think I know, they do the opposite.”

  “That’s how life is, isn’t it? Full of surprises good and bad.” She played with Mollie’s fingers.

  “Do you mind me asking what that machine does?” Jake pointed to a black electronic box with two red number readings on its front. It rested on the shelves that also held the books, paper towels, and some medical supplies.

  “Not a bit. That’s an oximeter. It measures Mollie’s oxygen and her pulse.”

  “If there’s a problem, it alerts you?”

  “It does. Though, between Eve, Lyndie, Mike, and me, we usually know if Mollie’s having issues before the machine does. We’re pretty in tune with her after all these years.”

  Birdsong and the sound of Mollie’s soft breathing filled the space. He watched Mollie, saw her open and close her mouth slightly.

  “She’s very peaceful unless she’s in pain,” Karen said.

  Mollie, in pain. Just the thought caused Jake’s heart to take on weight, like a hundred-pound rock gathering mass. In what kind of screwed-up world should a person who’d done nothing wrong be forced to suffer pain? “I can’t remember if anyone ever told me what caused Mollie’s cerebral palsy. Was there a cause?” As he transferred his concentration from Mollie to Karen, he realized he’d probably just offended Karen with his question.

  “I like it when people ask me about Mollie. Every single time they do, God gives me a ministry opportunity through her.” Looking completely un-offended, she bent to unlace her tennis shoes.

  A ministry opportunity? He’d just had to listen to a devotional reading. He had no interest in being the focus of Karen’s ministry opportunity. The flight instinct he’d been battling ever since he’d entered Mollie’s room intensified.

  He forced himself to remain in his chair. It could be that he’d made too much of a habit of avoiding people and situations and reminders that upset him. He’d stay for a few more minutes so that he could find out what had happened to Mollie. Lyndie’s life had been wound together with Mollie’s for as long as he could remember. What affected Mollie affected Lyndie and every other member of the James family.

  Karen folded her knees to the side and tucked her feet onto the pink chair. “When I was expecting Mollie, we were living at our old house in Holley. Do you remember it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lyndie was three at the time, and the biggest worry I had in life was what color I was going to paint the nursery.” She shook her head, as if she hardly knew her old self. “And then I went into labor. There were complications. They couldn’t get Mollie free of the birth canal, so my obstetrician used forceps. In doing so, he ended up fracturing Mollie’s skull in three places.”

  The muscles along Jake’s jawline flexed and hardened.

  Karen threaded her fingers through Mollie’s. “We went into the hospital thinking we’d be coming home with a healthy little newborn, and instead our whole lives were turned upside-down in a day.”

  He understood. His own life had been changed forever in one fast twist of time. “Would she have been completely healthy if the doctor hadn’t fractured her skull?”

  “The medical tests showed that she would have had some issues. But nothing nearly as severe as this.”

  “I see.”

  “The first few years after Mollie’s birth were miserable for me. I was furious at God. We sued the obstetrician, so I had to deal with a trial on top of everything else. I struggled with depression.” Uncensored honesty shone from her brown eyes, eyes that reminded him of Lyndie. “Mollie was in the hospital six to eight times every year. She needed major surgeries, a body cast. Our financial situation almost dragged us under. Mike and I nearly divorced. Our reality wasn’t what I’d wanted”—emotion began to clog her voice—“for Lyndie or me or Mike or Mollie.” Tears glittered on her eyelashes.

  Why had he asked her about this? “I—”

  “Don’t worry, it’s just in my nature to be sentimental.” She gave a quiet chuckle and dashed a finger under her eyes. “I really am glad for the chance to talk to you about this.”

  He struggled to imagine how hard life had been for Karen and Mike, but his brain reeled even more at the thought of Lyndie. She’d been very young back then, and caught in the middle of a storm.

  “Things were awful,” Karen said. “And then your mom, your sweet mom, whom you know I love dearly?”

  “Yes.”

  “She made me go to Bible study with her. For weeks I hated it. It didn’t matter. She came every Thursday morning and drove me to that Bible study. The study ended with a worship concert in Dallas that your mom and I went to together. As soon as the music started that night, I began to cry. I cried all the way through it.”

  He didn’t understand the joy in her expression. “That was a good thing?”

  “For me, yes. Those tears marked the beginning of my renewed trust in God. My whole life was no longer consumed with what might have been.”

  That hit dangerously close to where he lived. What might have been.

  “Instead,” she continued, “I began working through my anger and grief. I moved forward with what was. We went on the wait list for this wonderful thing called the Medically Dependent Children’s Program. For the five years until that came through, I was Mollie’s main nurse. She and I slept together every night. Didn’t we, Mols?” She smiled at Mollie. “Do you remember?”

  Mollie arched her face toward her mother’s voice.

  “Once MDCP came to the rescue,” Karen told him, “I started taking classes for a degree in counseling. It was like therapy for me, to work with people.” Karen lifted Mollie’s hand and kissed it. “God is good.” She looked right into his eyes. “‘His love endures forever.’ Second Chronicles 7:3. Do you know that one?”

  “No.”

  “What I’ve been discovering is that it’s not so much that God provides the medicine that heals. Rather, He is the medicine.”

  Silence fell over the three of them.

  “I best be going.” Jake started to move.

  “Not so fast, mister.” She waved him back into his seat. “I’ve talked about myself twice as long as I should have, and I haven’t heard anything about you.” She resettled her pink glasses. “You’ve been through hardship, too.”

  “Yes.” Karen had been handed a tragedy and had dealt with it courageously. He’d been handed one, and he’d withdrawn from life.

  “An IED explosion took the lives of three of your men and caused your injuries.” She said it with confident ease, as if she were saying to him that the day was sunny.

  He lowered his brows. No one talked to him about the IED. They’d tried to, at the beginning, and he’d told them all to go
to hell.

  “What happened when you came home from the war?”

  What happened? He’d been granted the one thing he’d wanted most—a return to his family and Holley, Texas—only to discover he didn’t want it after all. He’d been surrounded by friendly, concerned people who had no idea what he’d gone through or what war was. He’d missed his squad the way a person missed a leg that had been amputated. He hadn’t wanted to be around anyone, yet he’d been out of practice at living alone.

  Those early months back home had been so bad for him, his mental chaos so powerful that he’d wanted to go back to the desert, the adrenaline he’d never feel again, and the life he’d known. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He spoke low, his voice scratchy. His pulse made a thrumming noise in his ears.

  “Did you go to the VA for treatment?” She asked the question calmly, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Once you were home?”

  “Yes.”

  “And they diagnosed you with PTSD?”

  It still had the power to strip him naked and humiliate him, the acronym PTSD. He’d hoped the doctors would tell him he had anything else, a terminal sickness, even. PTSD had a stigma. It meant he was non-hacker.

  He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Karen knew the answer. “Did they prescribe antidepressants?”

  Silence.

  “I’m guessing they did. You didn’t take them?”

  Inwardly he swore. He eyed the distance to the door. It was none of her business what he’d been prescribed or whether he’d taken the pills.

  “Do you go to therapy?” She tipped her head. “No? Therapy can help. You know, I treat a few vets with PTSD. Would you consider coming and seeing me at the church where I work?”

  “I’m sorry, no.” He pushed to his feet.

  “If you won’t come to my office, then you have to come back here and talk to me and Mollie again.” She, too, stood. “Do you remember how Lyndie has always believed that Mollie has a healing effect on animals and people?” she asked.

  Now that she’d jogged his memory, he nodded. “I do remember.” And now he understood why, when he’d asked Lyndie what he could do for her, she’d told him he could visit her sister. Lyndie hoped to heal him. Like one of her injured chicks or birds.

  “Well.” Karen smiled. “It could be that Lyndie’s right.”

  Dark disbelief shifted through him. It insulted him, the realization that Lyndie viewed him the way she would a cat with a broken leg. He was a successful trainer with an impressive stable, numerous employees, and the respect of people from New York to California. He made a great deal of money. He took part in the lives of his family. He drove his body to the height of its capability for physical strength.

  But she’d known—of course she’d known, just like everyone else knew—that he was wrecked inside. So the woman with the tender heart had decided to help him.

  She didn’t recognize what he recognized about himself. Over the past eight years, his mental and physical scars had driven themselves too deep, had grown too hard.

  He could not be cured.

  “There is no cure for PTSD.” Karen opened a bag of chips that Lyndie had just bought from the store, then tipped them in Lyndie’s direction.

  Lyndie helped herself to a handful and studied her mom. Once Jake had gone, the two of them had relocated to the patio table on the deck with the chips and icy cans of grapefruit-flavored sparkling water.

  “No cure,” Lyndie said. “Really?” It went against her nature. Resignation came harder to her than passionate belief in something, no matter how far-fetched that something might be.

  “Jake can’t un-see the things he’s seen or un-experience the things he’s experienced.”

  “But he can move past them.”

  “He can learn to live with them,” Karen corrected, scooping chips into her cupped palm. “He can improve, he can use coping strategies. The degree of recovery is as individual as the person. There are Vietnam vets still struggling with post-traumatic stress.”

  “What are the symptoms?”

  “The classic symptoms are rage, nightmares, substance abuse. Let’s see . . . survivor’s guilt, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, emotional numbness. Have you seen evidence of any of those in Jake?”

  “The emotional numbness? I haven’t noticed any of the rest—wait. He flinches sometimes at sudden sounds. Is that hyper-vigilant?”

  Karen nodded. “No evidence of substance abuse?”

  “No.” She nibbled on a chip, tasting the crisp tang of salt.

  “It’s good that he’s kept himself from addictions. They only complicate everything else.”

  Lyndie selected another bent and crinkled chip. “I’m assuming that people who suffer from PTSD abuse substances because they’re trying to escape from their thoughts?”

  “And feelings. When these guys are at war, they’re exposed to horrible things. They stuff them down and either pretend they never happened or that they don’t care that they happened, simply so they can continue doing their jobs. There’s not much room for regret or grief when you’re a serviceman on a tour of duty.”

  “I understand.”

  “Eventually, though, they have to deal with what happened to them. Because it did happen, and it’s still there. It was only stuffed down.”

  Lyndie swept the crumbs from her palms, then set her grapefruit water on her lap, cradling it with both hands. Mom and Dad’s neighbor must be going at it again with his smoker, because the scent of roasting meat tipped the breeze. Sun spiced the nearby trees, their leaves riffling sweetly.

  There was joy and peace to experience in this life. She didn’t want Jake to be stripped of joy and peace because he’d volunteered to serve his country.

  When he’d asked her what he could do for her last night, Lyndie had seized her opportunity. She’d asked him to visit Mollie, and she’d asked to spend time with him each day trackside, something she planned to put into practice tomorrow. “Did you ask him to meet you at the church so that you could counsel him?” Lyndie asked.

  “I did. He said no.”

  She wrinkled her nose. Tall, Dark, and Brooding. “He’s stubborn.”

  “Since he won’t come to the church, I told him that he needs to come back here, to visit Mollie and me.”

  “I’ll do my best to get him back here.”

  “Easter’s just four days away. Since we’ve been invited to lunch at Meg and Bo’s, I’ll probably have a chance to talk to him again there. Those eyes . . .”

  “I know,” Lyndie said, with heartfelt understanding. A bleak and unholy light inhabited Jake’s eyes. It was more than enough to cause an old lady to have a heart attack, a young girl to run from him in fear, and a thirty-year-old with a dreamer’s heart to want to love him so much and so relentlessly that he’d have no choice but to come back to life.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The dirt road snaked into land marked with rocks and scrubby vegetation. Jake had grown familiar with this stretch, as they all had. He combed the scene, hunting for anything off or wrong, no matter how small. His main mission today, and every day in Iraq, was to get his squad home safely.

  In the far distance, he could make out two Bedouin men wearing checked head scarves and long white robes. The waves of heat rising from the earth distorted their image.

  A few hungry-looking dogs ran past the Humvee as they slowed to enter the town of flat-topped houses nearest the base. Men squatted outdoors, some drinking tea, others smoking. Irrigation canals bordered the street. A couple of kids hurried toward their vehicle, shouting, “Mister!” in accented English, holding out their hands in hopes of candy.

  Jake’s fellow Marines waved to the kids but didn’t stop. They were headed farther into the desert this afternoon, to the next village. The buildings fell away.

  Rob Panzetti elbowed Justin Scott’s shins. “What were you reading back there at camp?”

  “The Principles of Psychology,” Scott answered from his elevated position in the machine
gun turret.

  “It looked old,” Panzetti said.

  “It was written in 1890.”

  “What?” Dan Barnes, the one they called Boots, leaned in from the backseat. “1890? What can a book that old have to do with anything nowadays?” They went over a hole and the teenager’s helmet slipped down in front.

  “Tighten your helmet,” Jake instructed.

  “It has plenty to do with today,” Scott answered calmly. “I’m going to get a degree in psychology when I get home.”

  “What about you, Boots?” Panzetti spared a quick glance at the kid. “What are you going to do when you grow up?”

  “Well, I ain’t gonna get a degree in psychology. I’m glad to be done with school.” His Texas accent reminded Jake of Sonic and barbecued brisket. “What I wanna do when I get home is marry my girlfriend. I might go to work for her dad someday.”

  A lot of the guys had girlfriends back home. Some of them had a hard time thinking about anything else and worried all the time about receiving a Dear John letter in the mail. It had always amused Jake, seeing how soft his highly trained Marines could act over women—

  A flash of white cut into Jake’s vision. Their vehicle went airborne, ripping apart. Roaring noise.

  Unstoppable power threw Jake through the air. He wheeled his arms and legs, trying to get himself upright. Before he could, he landed with a bone-jarring crush in a ravine.

  He wheezed and bent his arms into his body. Instinctively, he rolled toward the dirt in reaction to the agony in his ribs. His cheek throbbed and pain cut into his thigh and his side.

  My God. What . . . What had happened? His ears were ringing. He could hear nothing except that ringing and the frantic panting of his own breath. They’d been driving. . . .

  He squinted at the sky and saw smoke rising from flames.

  An explosion. They must have been in an explosion.

  His men. He pushed himself to his knees, then staggered upright. His men. Where were his men? He ran with limping, uneven strides.