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“YOU CAN’T PROTECT ME,” Tameka Jackson told Zeke. She stood in front of him, her rounded belly swelling each day with the growth of his child. He didn’t know at this point if it was a boy or girl and he didn’t care.
“I can take care of you both. I will quit school and get a job, and we can move to a small town somewhere and start over, just the three of us,” Zeke said with teary eyes.
“I think you are sweet, but you are twenty-one years old and a year away from graduation. Finish college and go on about your life. The baby and I will be fine, plus I’m already married,” she told him, touching the side of his face.
“Jun maybe many things, but he is not an idiot. If he is capable of doing basic math, which I’m sure he is, then he will add up the dates and realize the child was conceived while he was at football camp. Plus, you are going to have a real hard time explaining a high yellow baby when your husband is as dark as the bottom of my shoe,” he told her with emphasis.
“Get up and get dressed and go back to campus. This conversation is over,” Tameka said to him.
“It’s not over. I love you and you love me,” he pleaded with her.
“Love is for fools. I live in the real world and yes, this was fun and a nice distraction, but I am nearly 33 and, again, married. We allowed this to go too far and I’m ending it now,” she told him, turning her back.
“Tameka, don’t end us like this. That is my child. I’m not okay to allow another man to raise my baby,” Zeke said, standing on the side of the bed, bare, naked down to the bases of emotions.
“You are a sweet young man. One lucky lady is going to be happy to have you, but I’m not her. Don’t dawdle Zeke. He will be home soon,” she told him, rushing to change the bed sheets.
“I’m not okay to leave it like this. I will come back for you tomorrow night, so be ready,” he told her, dressing in a hurry to slip out the back door.
She didn’t answer him.
She didn’t answer the next morning when he called.
Frustration held him at gunpoint, almost unable to move through the sight of the bright red and blue lights blaring when he turned down the street where she lived that afternoon. He stood frozen in the crowd of onlookers as the gurney was wheeled out of her home, the sheet covering her head. All he could see were the splatters of blood on the white fabric, etching in his memory the loss of not only the woman that he loved, but the child he would never know. Rage filled his every muscle as the police brought out Jun, the professional football running back who, too, was covered in blood.
Her blood.
The blood of Zeke’s unborn child.
I failed her.
Years passed as he entered the federal service and became a secret service agent. Ten weeks were spent training in Glynco, Georgia where he received special commendations earning him a two-year assignment in fraud cases. At twenty-five years old, he was an up and comer invited to many special events in the Nation’s Capital. One fateful night, at a political fundraiser, a bomb scare on New Year’s Eve left many politicians scrambling to find a safe place and one Senator frightened out of her mind. Zeke stepped forward.
“I will protect her,” he said to the Special Agent in Charge. “I got her.”
Moving with ease and grace, he stole the Senator away to a safe location, getting her to her vehicle, but she wouldn’t let go of his hand. He held her hand all the way to her home, securing her inside the domicile and calling an all clear to the SAIC. Impressed with his work and quick thinking, Ezekiel Neary headed to D.C. for a 17-week intensive course in training to become a Special Agent. His first assignment was a four-month stint as the agent assigned to a Vice Presidential candidate.
The candidate lost, but the winner had a young daughter whom Zeke was assigned to protect. A spunky teenager with too much smarts and not enough common sense. Guarding her was like watching a wildfire in the winter months ravage a countryside. One day she tried his patience a bit too much, and he found himself turning into his father. He broke protocol, but he laid down the law with her.
“I know it is no fun to be under constant scrutiny, but your father is the second in command of this country. People will set you up to fail just so they can watch him squirm and use it against the Office of the President. Acting out doesn’t make you a rebel, it makes you a pain in my ass, so get it together, young woman, and pretend like you care about someone other than yourself,” Zeke told her.
She cried as if someone had just run over her cat. He expected any day to be called before the disciplinary committee, sanctioned, or even stripped of his credentials. Imagining himself in the counterfeit unit chasing down plates to make funny money was not his idea of the perfect job assignment, but to his surprise, word did get back to his superiors.
“Neary,” as Rob Haskins liked to call him. “I just got off the line with the Vice-President and he tells me you had some choice words for his daughter.”
Zeke wouldn’t lie about it. He’d been tough with her and the time had come to own up to it. Never say anything in private you don’t want made public, his father often said.
“Yes, Sir. She was acting out, sneaking around, and slipping through the gardens to hang with a group of local teens. It was the third time I caught her, and I’d had enough,” he said with his chest stuck out.
“Well, whatever you said to her hit home. The VP is impressed,” Haskins told him. “So are we. You are getting a bump up.”
“A bump up, Sir?”
“We have a new candidate that has entered the election and he seems like he may go all the way. You are being assigned to his wife,” he told him.
“Starting when, Sir?”
“Once the party makes the nomination official next month, you are assigned to Lady Eagle,” Haskins said.
“You mean...?”
“Yep, you are moving to the big leagues, and you will be her primary agent,” Haskins said with a smile. “Congratulations, Neary.”
“Thank you, sir. I will protect her with my life,” he said, floored by the honor.
“Good. Good. She will be here within the hour to meet you, and it goes from there,” he told him.
She was everything he’d imagined. Graceful and elegant with a genuine spirit about her that filled him with pride. Just shy of his 32nd birthday, he would be moving to the White House, should they win, and would become the Special Agent for the First Lady of the United States.
Eight years later, he found himself in a hospital, his shoulder blown to bits and a total shoulder replacement. On rainy days like today, it hurt like a son of bitch and since he’d been in Georgia, it had rained non-stop. He also ached from the side of his neck to his left shin from the bullets which had ripped his body apart. Often when he closed his eyes, he was back in Rwanda, the gun pointing at his face, one click away from death, and it replayed over and over in his head like a bad scene from a car accident.
The coffee in the mug he held was now as cold as he felt. The room had become chilled and he heard Michelle cry. It snapped him out of his trance to look about the room. His Tameka sat there, holding the little girl. My daughter.
“I will protect her,” he said to himself, rising to add some more wood to the fire. He needed to go out back to the porch to bring in another load. The work would give him another matter to focus on while his new wife prepared the afternoon bottle. The chill he felt would not easily be codified not matter how many logs he put on the fire. He could feel that niggling tug. Danger was near.
The room warmed considerably after he added more fuel to the fire. He could sense her eyes on his back. Zeke could almost hear the unspoken words.
“Say what’s on your mind,” he said softly.
Tameka cleared her throat. There were a lot of things she wanted to say, things she needed to share about her ordeal, the fear which kept her from sleeping peacefully and the child who never seemed to get enough to eat. For now, she would start with the obvious issue on her mind.
“Zeke, do you think this is going to work out between us...for us, I mean?” she asked softly.
He moved to the sink, pondering his answer as he washed his hands.
“I don’t see why it shouldn’t. You have nowhere else to go and I have nothing to go back to, really. By all accounts you are damaged, and I am broken. The only thing we both have to keep us in the moment is this child. She will be our anchor, and together, we will raise her to be kind, honest, and loving,” he said, taking a seat in the big chair covered in the ugliest plaid fabric she’d ever seen in her life.
“Okay, but what about love?”
He wanted to tell her that love was for fools. Love is what got her chained like an animal in a shack by an evil man. Love is what killed his unborn child. Love is what got a bullet in his shoulder and shattered whom he believed himself to be as a man.
Instead he took a softer approach.
“By loving the child, we will learn to love each other. The rest, we will figure out,” he said, picking up his book.
Tameka watched his face as he opened the book, but it was upside down. The soft glow from the fireplace was not enough to read by as she stood up and clicked on the lamp next to the chair. The lampshade had seen better days and was as ugly as the chair in which he sat, pretending to read the upside-down book.
“The book is upside down, Zeke,” she said to him, calling him out on his cool façade. “You aren’t fooling me. This whole situation is a shit storm and you know it.”
Not one to lie unless his life depended on it, he looked at her head on. “True, but you are my wife. Michelle is my daughter, and we are a happy, dysfunctional family trying to heal,” he said flatly.
“Healing is one thing, but what in the hell are we going to do up here for three more weeks?” she asked. “What were you planning to do keep you occupied while you were down in the woods?”
He closed the book and leaned forward.
“Paint. I was planning to paint the walls a brighter color and reupholster the furniture. I brought with me a few cans in various shades of blues, golds, and neutrals with me,” he told her. “Most of this stuff has been here since my Grandfather had the place and I was small boy. It is good furniture. It just needs to be updated.”
Had he not been looking at her, he would have missed the spark that blazed momentarily in her eyes. There it was. The connector they needed to get through the hard part. She loved to work with furniture.
“Would you like to help me? I mean, we have to wait for it to stop raining so we can vent the rooms as we paint. I don’t want Michelle breathing in paint fumes,” he told her.
“Sure, but we don’t have any tools,” she said, suddenly feeling better about life in general.
“Of course we do,” he said with a smile. “My Mom had planned on doing it years ago, so there are bins of fabric in the garage. There is a sewing machine in there as well as a kiln. She fancied herself to be a potter at one phase of her life and kept making these crooked ass coffee mugs.”
He held up the one which sat beside him on the table. She actually smiled.
“I thought that was something you and your brothers made at summer camp,” she said with a slight grin. Most of the gunk was gone from her teeth and the smile nearly melted away the remaining buckles around his heart.
“Nope, this was all Mom. Those lopsided plates are hers as well as the goofy flowerpots on the front porch overgrown with weeds,” he said.
“This could be a nice home,” she told him. “I’ve always wanted to live in a cabin in the mountains with one yellow wall covered in black and white photos of my family, in black frames with white mats.”
“It could be ours, if you want it to be,” he said to her.
“I would like that, but we need a bedroom for Michelle, a real hot water heater, a propane tank, and a master suite with a claw foot tub in our bathroom for me to soak in after I’ve worked in my garden all day,” she said optimistically.
“Plus, a king-sized bed to hold us and our kids on stormy nights,” he added with a smile.
The room grew quiet as they stared at each other.
“I know how to make furniture,” she added, staring into his blue eyes. “We are going to need a bigger table for when Nate, Sharon, and their kids all come over for dinner.”
“Sounds like we have a lot of work to do, Mrs. Neary, but keep in mind, I only have one good shoulder and a gimpy left leg that works when it wants to,” he told her.
“That’s okay. You have enough heart to compensate for everything else,” she said, causing him to smile at her. A genuine smile that brought out the little crinkles at the corners of his eyes. The bright blue aura was around him again, and it brought a feeling of peace to her, chipping away at the darkness, telling it to leave her soul.
He stood, leaning forward, his lips puckered for a kiss. She met him halfway, returning the modicum of affection as he sat back down. This time, the book was turned the right way. He cracked open the pages, pulling his reading glasses from his pocket.
“Chapter 10,” he said as he started to read aloud.