Chapter 4
Who knew seeing Santa was that exhausting?” Sam murmured. “She’s out cold.”
Patrick glanced in the rearview, confirming Sam’s assessment that Natalie was indeed asleep in the back seat, laid out across the bench seat, the seatbelt tucked around her chest and hips. He glanced over at Sam, trying to gauge how she was coping with everything. He’d seen her skittishness at the mall, remembered it well. The panicked feeling of too many people, of no easy access to cover. It wasn’t a rational fear but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
It had taken him a long time to put those instinctive reactions behind him and even then, they were still there, a latent energy that sometimes snuck up on him.
“She’s not the only one who needs a nap,” Patrick said quietly.
“You didn’t sleep when you left earlier?”
“No. Dropped off my stuff, got some coffee, and met you at the house.” He was more relaxed than he’d been earlier. Less tense once they’d left the mall.
He’d watched her trying so hard to be normal. Trying so hard to pretend that she was just another parent at the holidays, trying to squeeze in a visit with Santa in the chaos of last minute shopping.
But she wasn’t a normal parent. She was a mother who’d deployed to Iraq.
It had dawned on him when they’d first stepped into the mall and he’d seen the fear etched into the lines around her mouth, the panic in her eyes.
This was more than having a hard time adjusting to being home. There was a very real thing going on with her, and he figured out in that moment that she was trying to ignore all of it.
She was trying to do what so many soldiers did: stuff down the uncomfortable and unsettling thoughts and emotions. Lock them away and pretend that nothing about the war was out of the ordinary.
Pretend that deployment was just another day at the office, except that the office was now half a world away. Ignore the fact that sometimes, you needed help in coming home.
When you were deployed, there were no trips home to reset the mind. To release the tension and the stress until the next day.
No, whether you were out walking the streets or working at a desk, the stress was constant. The fear of a mortar didn’t only haunt the infantrymen or the maneuver forces. Patrick knew that all too well.
And until she dealt with everything that’d happened to her downrange, she would never come home. Not fully. He wondered if she’d even considered seeing Doc back at the unit. Doc could point her in the right direction. Keep things quiet for her.
“There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts off Broadway on the way home,” she suggested.
“That is a brilliant idea.”
They drove in silence for a little bit before they stopped to order coffee, being careful not to wake Natalie. She’d normally sleep through a train wreck, but that didn’t mean he wanted to test that theory.
There was so much he couldn’t say with Natalie in the car. But there were other things he could.
“When I came home from that first tour, I hated leaving the house.” He kept his voice neutral, his words soft. Not some big revelation of a tragic homecoming. Just a statement of what had been. “I couldn’t stand going to the grocery store and listening to people complain about the lines or about Wal-Mart being out of their favorite toilet paper.”
She cracked the barest smile. “I was so happy when we got to the FOB that we had a real toilet. And showers. We were always out of toilet paper, though. I carried a roll in one of my cargo pockets.”
“I can see where that would be a problem.” This was such a simple conversation. Like they were talking about the weather instead of latrine conditions in a war zone. “You know, if I ever deploy again, I’m going to take pictures of all the Porta-Potty graffiti. Maybe write a book about it.”
“Valuable history, huh?” she said dryly.
“Some of it was pretty good. ’Course, I can’t imagine hanging out in a Porta-Potty long enough to draw some of it.”
She snorted softly. “That’s some dedication right there.”
“Well, there wasn’t much else to do.”
“You have a very limited imagination if drawing on latrine walls is all you can think of to pass the time in Iraq.” Her voice thickened a little at the mention. Just a hint of emotion but enough that he noticed it, now that he was looking for it.
“Well, I didn’t exactly have free time. I worked pretty much round the clock. Except Sundays. Sundays were the big sleep days.”
“We did that too. There was always a movie playing at the chow hall after evening chow.”
Silence stretched between them. He wanted to ask her what she was thinking about. Were there other memories that haunted her beyond losing Melanie?
“It’s funny the things I remember. Like I remember how the gravel felt beneath my boots and the mural on the T-wall outside the chow hall. But all the days? Most of them blended together.” His throat tightened as memories circled, just out of reach. Sensations, really.
“Except for the ones that stand out.” She looked out into the cold Maine afternoon.
He reached for her then, daring to cross the chasm between them and rest his hand on her shoulder. A tentative gesture. One meant to offer comfort. Solace.
Understanding.
His breath lodged in his throat when she covered his hand with hers.
“Yeah, there were a few of those.” He twined his fingers with hers. “More than a few I wish I could forget.”
She didn’t look at him, keeping her focus at the hazy winter sky. “I haven’t slept well. Not since about halfway through my tour.”
A quiet admission. He could guess how much it cost her to admit but it was an opening too precious to ignore.
“Did you ask Doc for some Ambien? Maybe talk to someone about not sleeping?”
“No.” That single word was laced with fear. She unthreaded their fingers, slipping away from him once more with that quiet admission.
He swallowed, tapping his thumb on the lid of his coffee mug before taking a sip, buying himself some time. He wanted to push her, to ask her why she was trying so hard to be so tough when she clearly needed to talk to someone. Hell, it didn’t have to be him, but someone. Anyone.
Instead, he took a deep breath and chose a different tactic. “My first tour, I worked eighteen-hour days. Nonstop. I remember curling up under my desk to catch a nap, then I’d get back up and keep going.” A deep breath. “I hit the wall about eight months in. Punched my ops sergeant major for taking my last RipIt.”
She looked at him, a single eyebrow arched. “You punched someone over a RipIt?”
“And some copier toner. It was already a tense relationship. Then he used the last of the toner for no smoking signs around the TOC when I had a packet to prepare for the brigade commander. I missed my briefing and got my ass handed to me. Then he took my last RipIt, and it was all over.” He smiled flatly. “I don’t actually remember doing it. My boss at the time was less than impressed that his brand new captain socked his senior NCO. Sent me to the doc, and ordered me to get some sleep.” He shrugged. “So I kind of appreciate what a good night’s sleep can do for the soul.”
A long moment stretched between them. “I don’t even remember what that feels like.”
He hesitated, unsure how far he could push this relative truce.
“Maybe when we get back to Texas, talk to Doc. Can’t hurt, right?”
Can’t hurt, right? She let his words sink in, turned them over in her mind. He wanted her to talk to Doc. For sleep meds. She’d thought about it, so many times. Had even gone so far as to make an appointment with Doc only to cancel it at the last minute. Because fear was such a powerful thing.
Can’t hurt, right?
Except that yeah, it could hurt. A lot. Because what if it didn’t work? What if she was well and truly broken and nothing would ever help put her back together again?
She sighed softly. “I tried an Ambien once. Terrible nightmares and woke up feeling like hell the next day.” She badly needed to turn the subject into something safer. Something that involved less soul-baring intensity.
She wasn’t ready to unpack everything that happened in Iraq. Yet somehow, they’d just carried on a completely normal conversation without dredging up bad memories or worse.
And he wanted her to talk to Doc.
It was a completely normal conversation between two people pretending to be normal about a situation that was everything but normal.
He took a sip of his coffee. “I had a sergeant major who chewed them like they were Tic Tacs. Said it took five of them to knock him out every night.”
She looked over at him. “The RipIt sergeant major?”
“Nah, this was my second tour. He’d stayed in and volunteered to do back-to-back tours to put his kid through Johns Hopkins Medical School.”
“Why do I feel like you’re not making that up?”
He covered his heart with one hand. “Swear to God. Sarn’t Major Megholtz. Meanest SOB you ever met. Daughters had him wrapped around their little fingers.”
“Sounds like someone else I know,” she said quietly.
He glanced back at Natalie. “She’s a good kid.” His words were suddenly thick.
Her heart ached at the love in that simple sentence. “You’re a good dad.”
He said nothing for a long moment. The muscles in his neck bunched, his knuckles tensed on the steering wheel. “Whatever happens between us, Sam, please don’t take my daughter.” His voice cracked a little in the fading afternoon light.
She closed her eyes at the pain in those words. Pain she’d caused. She folded her arms over her chest and sank into the seat, struggling to hold in the wave of sadness his words sent surging.
There was nothing she could say to make things right. Nothing to take back the hurt she’d inflicted on him.
Nothing to make her feel the happiness that she should feel when he was around her daughter. The joy and the gladness that her daughter would grow up with a father who would be there for her. Who wouldn’t leave her.
But Patrick was a soldier. And soldiers who went to war sometimes didn’t come home. She knew that now. Up close and personal. And the thought of him at war again while she waited at home…
The sadness was back. Seeping out of the box. Threatening to destroy the latches and the hinges and send everything crashing over her.
She couldn’t do it. It was easier not to feel. Easier to pretend she didn’t care. Easier to pretend she didn’t need help, that she’d snap out of it if she just tried harder to feel normal.
If she told herself she didn’t care often enough, maybe it would be true. Because not caring was the only way to survive his next deployment.
Or hers.
God, how was she going to get on that plane again and leave Natalie? What if she didn’t come home?
What if she was like Mel? There one day, gone the next.
Who would Natalie have left? Her biological father? That scumbag had no claim on Natalie. His name wasn’t on her birth certificate. He could never come back and hurt her if anything ever happened to Sam.
Patrick was the only father she’d ever known. And he was a good father. A good man.
She trusted him with Natalie.
She just didn’t trust herself with him anymore.
“Where’d you go just then, Sam?” he asked quietly.
“Nowhere.” She sniffed. “You can’t fix this.”
“Maybe not.” A cautious pause. “But we won’t know unless we try. We haven’t even tried. You…you just left.”
She couldn’t answer for the longest time. Her throat closed off and her eyes burned. She swiped at her cheeks, trying to keep the tears at bay.
Her voice broke when she finally managed the words. “I don’t want to take Natalie from you.”
“This isn’t just about Natalie, Sam. This is about you. This is about us.”
They rolled to a stop at a random light in the middle of nowhere. He turned to face her. “This isn’t over yet. And the sooner you accept that, the better off all of us will be.”
“Maybe it’s been over a long time…we’ve just both been gone too much to see it.”
“And maybe we’ve just been gone too much to remember how to be us,” he snapped. There was steel in those words. Resolve that she was so intimately familiar with. “We haven’t had that. There’s been no you and me. We’ve both been working our asses off since the war started. We don’t know how long this damn thing is going to go on. We don’t know when it’s going to end, when we’ll finally get to be a normal family again. But we damn sure won’t get that chance if we just cut sling load because the first time we’re together again after almost two years, things don’t fall magically back into place.”
She shifted in her seat, his words hitting her at center mass, dead in the heart.
“I wish I had a better answer for you.” Shame and fear laced those words. “But I don’t. I’m sorry. But that’s the best I’ve got to give.”
He shook his head, the muscle in his jaw tensing. He looked at her then, his eyes furious and dark. “That’s not good enough, Sam. Our family deserves better.”
Patrick stopped at the gas station in Saber Falls, needing to fill up the rental car and a badly needed jolt of a ridiculously good cup of coffee to warm his blood. He’d come home with Sam in the past and the best cup of coffee north of Bangor was clearly the Green Mountain Coffee served there.
He always forgot to order some to take with him.
Maybe he’d remember this time, especially if this was going to be his last time here.
He sighed heavily, needing to clear space in his lungs for…oh, oxygen. Breathing was fundamental, but he couldn’t do that with this elephant of sadness sitting on his chest.
He was not going to spend this entire trip sulking like a kicked puppy.
He knew Sam. He could figure this out, right? They’d been through rougher things before.
“Hey, Patrick, how’s it going?”
He turned from the coffee to see Finn Rierson step into the gas station, followed by his cousin Garrett, the local sheriff. Sam always made it a point to see the Rierson boys every time they came home. The first time, Patrick had been mildly jealous, curious about these men that Sam had insisted on meeting at the Whistling River Pub.
But then he’d met them, and they were both damn hard to be jealous of.
They were good dudes. Friends from high school that Sam had refused to let go of even as life and the war and the Army kept her away from home for longer and longer periods.
And over time, they’d become his friends, too, so that he no longer felt like an awkward third wheel but part of the memories they shared every time they got together.
“I didn’t know you were coming home,” Garrett said. As though Saber Falls was as much his home as Sam’s.
He supposed it was.
“It was an unexpected trip. Sam…really needed to come home after the year she’s had.”
“Yeah. The whole town was devastated when we lost Mel.” Finn’s voice was edgy and raw, the grief still sharp. A shadow crossed Finn’s face and Patrick knew he was looking at a sadness that would never leave the other man. Mel and Finn…they’d been a thing, despite the war, despite the distance. And now she was gone, like so many others.
Finn took a step toward the coffee. Patrick only knew the fear of waiting for a lover to return from war, not the loss.
“I can’t imagine what he’s gone through,” Garrett said quietly. “It was bad enough when I had to bury my parents and Derrick didn’t come home.”
Patrick frowned. “When did your folks die?”
“Last year. Right after Fourth of July.”
“Ah hell, man, I’m really sorry.” He’d only met Garrett’s parents in passing but Joan and Ken Rierson had struck him as good people. “Derrick didn’t come home?”
He’d never met Garrett’s brother but had heard enough stories to know the prodigal son was missed.
“Said he couldn’t get leave out of Iraq. Something about his unit not letting him go. That doesn’t sound right.”
“It happens. It all depends on the commander and what’s going on at the time and how many people are already gone.”
Finn sipped his coffee as he rejoined them. “I’ve got to get going. I’ve got a meeting over in Dover,” Finn said. “It’s good to see you, Patrick.”
Patrick cleared his throat roughly. “You, too.” He waited until Finn stepped out of the gas station and into the cold, the door shutting with a jingle behind him. “How’s he holding up?”
“As good as he can, I guess. He stays busy.” Garrett shrugged, and that was the end of the conversation. “Anyway, you and Sam should come out to the house. I’ve got some ice cleared off. You guys can skate on the pond.”
“I’ll ask her.” He dumped cream—real cream—into his coffee. “She’s been having a rough time of things since she’s been home.”
Garrett twisted the lid off his stainless steel thermos and reached for the darkest blend. “That doesn’t sound like Sam. She’s always so damn…fierce.”
“Tell me about it.” It felt strange to talk about this. He hadn’t told anyone at work about things going to shit after Sam had gotten home. The couple of guys he’d been close to had their own stuff going on.
He’d just tried to muscle through. Until Sam had left him.
He looked up from his coffee to find Garrett watching him. “Something you want to talk about?”
Patrick tested his coffee, buying time. “Sam left me.”
Garrett said nothing for a moment, focusing on twisting the lid back on his thermos. “So is this the last Christmas home or is this the surprise ‘I’m here to fight for my woman’ visit.”
Patrick laughed bitterly. “You have been watching too many Lifetime movies, my friend.”
Garrett grinned. “I have to go check on Mrs. Poole once a week. We sit for an hour, and I have to watch whatever’s on while she tells me the entire plot, backstory, and spoilers.”
“Dude, are you like even a real person? You sit with old ladies? Next thing you’ll tell me you brake for squirrels or something.”
“So? What’s wrong with that?”
Patrick smiled. “Nothing. Nothing at all. And to answer your question, this is the ‘I’m not letting her go without a fight’ visit.”
“She didn’t know you were coming, did she?”
“Nope.”
“And?”
“And we made it about six minutes before she tried to tell me that Natalie wasn’t mine, and that we were over.” They paid for their coffee and stepped out into the bitter cold morning. “Dear god, how do you people live in this kind of cold?”
“Where are you from originally?”
“Florida.”
“Meh, you’d get used to it if you were here long enough.”
Patrick shrugged. It wasn’t like he was going to get a chance to get used to it. Not if Sam had her way and they were really over.
“She’s not, you know,” Garrett said after a moment. “Legally, Natalie isn’t yours.”
Patrick looked over at Garrett. “I’ve known you for a long time, and that is the single most fucked up thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
“I’m a cop, Patrick. I deal with this shit all the time. It doesn’t matter that you were there from the beginning. It doesn’t matter that Nat calls you Daddy. Legally, you don’t have a leg to stand on.”
“I’ve got powers of attorney naming me her guardian when Sam deployed.” But he felt his certainty slip away. He knew the law. Hell, he was a damn lawyer.
But Only a foolish lawyer has himself as a client wasn’t a cliché for nothing.
“Damn it, Sam,” he muttered.
Garrett gripped his shoulder. “You’re going to try to fight a custody case for a little girl that has neither your name nor your blood in a region of the country that notoriously does not consider taking children away from their mothers for even the worst transgressions.”
Patrick’s mouth fell open. “I don’t want to take her away from Sam. I just want to be part of her life. Sam’s a good mom. She’s just…”
“What?”
Patrick paused. “I wish I knew. It’s like only part of her came home from the war.” He sipped his coffee. The shock of heat burned against his partially frozen lips. “She’s there, but she’s not. It’s like she’s a shadow.”
Garrett scoffed quietly. “I wish I didn’t get that. The one time I’ve seen Derrick since the war started, he was definitely not in the moment.”
“How is he?”
“I don’t know. He’s gone into complete radio silence since last year. I kind of went off on him for not coming home for the funeral, and well, we haven’t talked since.”
“I’m sorry.”
Garrett shrugged. “I can’t live my brother’s life for him.”
There was more there, but now wasn’t the time or the place.
Patrick sighed after a long moment. “The war’s fucked up everyone’s life, hasn’t it?”
Garrett snorted quietly. “Wars tend to do that, don’t they?”
Patrick said nothing for a long moment. “Yeah, I guess they do.”