One Was a Soldier (23 page)

“I’ve been trying to reach her.” Hadley held up her phone. “I’ve been leaving her messages to keep her up to date. She’ll know everything as soon as she checks her cell.”

“Where in the hell is she? Why wasn’t she at the meet in the first place?”

“Eric.” Flynn moved in, close enough to drop his voice to a confidential hush. “I understand that you’re worried and scared for Jake, but you’re not going to help him or yourself by flying off the handle. Take a deep breath and let it go, man.”

Eric hooked his thumbs in his rig and spread his arms and chest. “Don’t try to talk me down, Kevin. I’ve been a cop twice as long as both of you put together. Don’t give me some bullshit line about how you understand me, because you don’t. You’re not a father.”

“Well, I’m a mother, and I can tell you that if you walk in there acting like Dirty Harry, you’re going to scare your son to death and probably get hospital security to escort your ass outside.”

“I’d like to see them try!”

“Luckily for them, there are two MKPD officers here to help them!”

Eric stepped toward her. “You think you can take me?”

“Cool it.” Kevin’s voice was sharp and unfamiliar. “Both of you. Eric, you’re in uniform. If you can’t pull it together and act like a professional, you’d better leave.”

“Or what?”

“Or I report you for duty code violation, and we’ll let the chief sort it out.” Eric glared up at Flynn, who glared right back. “I’ll do it. You know I will.”

“God.” Eric was the first to look away. “You’re such a fucking Boy Scout sometimes.” He glanced at Hadley. “Where is he?”

“Follow me.” At the nursing station, she asked, “Is Jake McCrea done with his X-rays?”

The nurse glanced at a large wall-mounted whiteboard. Names and numbers and treatments had been written and erased so many times the surface was a permanent gray smear. “Yup. He’s in bay four with the orthopedic surgeon.”

Through a gap in the limp blue curtains Hadley could see a glimpse of a white coat. “Jake?” she called out. “Your dad’s here, honey.”

She opened the curtain. The orthopedic surgeon, reassuringly middle-aged and gray-haired, was scratching notes on the back of a folder. He looked up. “Hi. Are you Jake’s mom?”

“No, she works with my dad—” Jake’s explanation was cut off by Eric’s loud voice.

“Oh, hell, no.” He jabbed a finger at the doctor. “You’re not touching my kid.”

“What?” The doctor and Hadley spoke at the same time.

“I’m sorry,” the doctor said. “Do I know you?”

“Don’t play dumb, Stillman. I’m not letting a guy who abandons his own daughter to bang his girlfriend treat my son.”

The doctor’s face turned a mottled red.

“Dad!” Jake sounded horrified. He struggled to sit up.

“Eric! Jesus Christ!” Hadley was torn between dragging Eric away and going to Jake.

McCrea yanked the curtain open. “I want somebody competent in here to treat my kid,” he roared toward the nursing station.

“Dr. Stillman?” The nurse spoke to the orthopedic surgeon, but he kept his eyes on McCrea.

The doctor turned toward the nurse. “Call security!”

“Lie down, honey.” Hadley pressed the flat of her hand against the middle of Jake’s chest. The boy was crying now, his face screwed into a twist of misery and mortification. “You’ll hurt yourself. Lie down.”

“You can’t throw me out! I’m his father! I know my goddamn rights!”

Hadley opened her mouth to call for Kevin, but he was already there, long legs eating up the floor, holding his badge up for the gathering crowd of nurses and doctors and technicians to see. He wrapped one arm around McCrea’s shoulder, turning him, saying something low and fast into his ear. Eric elbowed Flynn away. “Goddammit, I’m not the one being unreasonable here! I’m trying to protect my son and no one fucking appreciates that!”

Two white-shirted rent-a-cops bulldozed through the gawkers. The doctor jerked his thumb toward Eric. “Get this maniac out of the hospital and see that he stays out!” One of the guards unstrapped a restraint from his belt.

Eric’s hand went to his SIG SAUER .45.

Hadley reacted without thinking. She screamed, “Gun!” and tackled Eric.

They went down in a sprawl, Eric and Hadley and Flynn. Eric twisted, bucked, then gave up. He began to curse, quietly, steadily, and his voice had more heartbreak than anger in it now.

She looked at Flynn. They were restraining a brother officer. A man who had mentored them both. “Now what?”

He drove McCrea back to the station in the cruiser. Hadley waited with a tearful Jake and the white-faced orthopedist, who wrote note after note after note, undoubtedly working up a full-blown complaint against Eric. When Jennifer McCrea arrived, she took the news of her husband’s outburst with her lips pressed tightly together. “I’m sorry,” she told Hadley. “I don’t know what’s going on inside his head anymore. It scares me.”

Weary and just wanting to go home, Hadley still had to pick up Flynn. She drove to the station, parked, and let herself sink into a funk of could-have-should-have-would-have. The door opening startled her. So much for her ever-alert law enforcement instincts. Flynn hoisted himself into the passenger seat. “You mind driving back to the field? I’m wiped.”

She shifted into gear and backed out of the parking lot. “What did you do?”

He closed his eyes. “I wrote up a report of the entire incident. I showed it to him. Then I saved it without logging it in.”

“What? Christ, Flynn, he was ready to draw on that security guard!”

Flynn dragged a hand through his hair. It was getting overdue for a cut. “There was this brochure for a veterans support group—I saw it in the chief’s office Thursday. I gave it to Eric and told him to call them, or the VA Hospital, or that department’s therapist in Saratoga, and set up an appointment and get some help. Today.”

She signaled and turned onto Route 117. “Did he do it?”

“He signed up for the veterans group at the community center.”

“You’re sure?”

“I sat right there while he called.” He leaned forward and cranked the blower up. Cold air roared through the car. He collapsed backward again. “God. I don’t know. He’s a good cop.”

“He was.”

“He wasn’t like this before he went to Iraq.”

“I know, Flynn—but he went for his gun. In the emergency room. What if he loses it again with a suspect? Or at home, with Jennifer and Jake?”

Flynn crossed his arms over his chest. “You and I will keep an eye on him.” He looked out the window. They were out of the town, entering the rolling hills and pastures of Cossayuharie. “He went off to war for us. That’s what people say, isn’t it? They’re doing it for us? Don’t we at least owe him a chance to make it right?”

HELP US, WE PRAY, IN THE MIDST OF THINGS WE CANNOT UNDERSTAND, TO BELIEVE AND TRUST IN THE COMMUNION OF SAINTS …

—The Burial of the Dead: Rite One, The Book of Common Prayer

MONDAY, OCTOBER 3

This week, it was Will who was running late. Sarah looked at the round white clock hanging above the preschoolers’ construction-paper pumpkins and ghosts. It was already five past seven, and the rest of the group had been in their places for ten minutes, listening to the thuds of the basketball and the squeak of sneakers next door. Stillman scratched on his ancient PalmPilot with a stylus. Fergusson’s head was tilted back, and her eyes were half closed; evidently even her coffee wasn’t keeping her awake tonight. McCrea kept glancing at McNabb, frowning, then looking away, only to repeat the whole cycle again a minute later.

Sarah glanced around the circle. “Does anyone know if Will had any VA appointments? Maybe some difficulty with his ride?”

Fergusson roused herself. “His father brings him after dinner. It could be Chris was running late.”

“Okay. Well, I don’t want to waste any more time. Let’s get started, and he can catch up when he gets here.” Sarah looked at McNabb and Stillman. “Last week, Clare and Eric opened up about some of the ways they’re expressing their emotions or not expressing their emotions, as the case may be, and we all talked about some strategies for dealing with those difficult moments when the pain or the anger or the fear breaks through. I want to explore those healthy responses further, but first we need to go back to hear from Trip and Tally about their reasons for attending therapy. Trip, we didn’t have time to get to you last week. Will you start us off?”

“Well.” The doctor fidgeted in his metal chair. “I’ve been under a lot of stress since I came home. Some of it’s the usual—my practice, a surly teen in the house, my older daughter’s financial troubles. Some of it’s been new. A death in the family, problems with—” He clamped his mouth shut. After a moment, he said, “I’ve been having these migraines.”

A pager went off. Fergusson started. She put her paper coffee cup on the floor and dug into the pocket of her ankle-length black skirt. She pulled out her cell phone and read the display. “Excuse me.” She rose. “I have to take this.” She vanished into the hallway.

Stillman sat there. “Migraines,” Sarah prompted. The doctor touched his forehead. There was a small white scar threading across his skin into his bristle-brush gray hair. “I sustained a head injury when a clinic I was working at was blown up by insurgents.” He lapsed into silence.

When nothing else seemed forthcoming, Sarah asked, “Was this the forward response station you were posted to?”

“No. No, this was a civilian clinic. Part of the mission was to treat as many Iraqis as we could. We were supposed to have an actual, honest-to-God reinforced building with a generator and a sterile room, but that never materialized, so we had to make do in whatever facility we could set up shop in. We were in a local medical clinic school when this happened.” He rubbed his scar with his forefinger.

“Mortar fire?” Eric asked.

“Yeah. We had an escort, and marines patrolling the town, but they couldn’t be everywhere at once.”

“Where was this?” Tally asked.

“Haditha, in the Anbar. It was the closest population base to our FRS.”

The hall door opened. Clare strode in, fastening the top two buttons of her black shirt. Beneath the room’s fluorescent light, she looked sickly and washed-out. “That was Chris Ellis. They’re in the hospital. Will tried to kill himself.”

*   *   *

Surprisingly, Sarah and the others arrived before Clare. Tally had stood up, said, “Let’s go,” and gotten her jacket off the hooks on the wall. The men followed her without comment, as if it were simply expected they would all reconvene at the hospital. “Maybe we should wait,” Sarah said, but it was already too late. Nothing to do but get in her car and force herself to drive toward the ultimate verdict on her fitness as a therapist: a client’s suicide.

Attempted
suicide, she reminded herself in the ICU waiting room. The pills Will Ellis had swallowed by the handful had been pumped out of his stomach. Now they had to see if that would be enough. Through the archway leading to the hallway and nursing station, she heard a soft ding. The elevator opened. Sarah caught a glimpse of Clare Fergusson, a white collar around her neck, a long satin scarf-thing draped over her shoulders, a black leather box in her hand. The satin flapped around her knees as she strode up the hall and out of sight.

Tally, who had taken the chair kitty-corner to Sarah’s, leaned forward. “Was that Clare?”

“Yes.”

“Geez. I guess she really is a minister.” Tally leaned back. “You’d think if you put that much faith in God, you wouldn’t need to be in counseling.”

“No. Well. God’s not big into talk therapy.”

Stillman rounded the archway, his eyes on his PalmPilot, scratching something with his stylus at what looked like a hundred words a minute. He sank into the chair opposite McNabb.

“Did you find out anything?” Sarah asked. He didn’t look like the bearer of good tidings.

“His respiratory and circulatory systems are collapsing, and he’s experiencing serious bradycardia.”

“What’s that mean?”

Sarah was feeling desperate enough to be glad Tally asked the question, allowing her to look at least marginally competent.

“He’s got what we call combined drug intoxication. He apparently took all his painkillers, his antidepressants, a bottle of cough syrup, a whole lot of acetaminophen, and then washed it all down with booze. Simplified, his system is shutting down. His heart’s pumping too slow, his blood isn’t circulating, and his lungs aren’t working.” Stillman glanced at his PalmPilot. “He’s damaged his liver, too. How much, they won’t know until and unless he survives.” His face was bleak.

“God.” Tally sat for a minute. “Do you think he meant it to work? Or was he just, you know, crying for help?”

“He made a pretty credible attempt.” Stillman rubbed his knuckles hard against the scar on his forehead. “I can’t believe I didn’t see any warning signs.”

That same phrase was chasing itself around and around in Sarah’s head. “Why would you?”
Why didn’t I?

“I’m seeing him for his amputation follow-up. He’s doing PT at my practice.”

“And I was his therapist.” Sarah stood. Walked toward the archway. If she could, she would have stepped right out of her skin and kept on going. “If anybody should have recognized that he was potentially suicidal, it should have been me.”

“You guys are forgetting something.”

Sarah turned toward Tally, who spread her hands. “He’s a marine. You don’t think of it, because his legs are gone, but he’s still a marine. You know, the jarheads, they do what they gotta do. Maybe he just woke up this morning and realized his body was the enemy.” Tally rubbed her jeans over her thighs and knees, as if trying to feel what Will must have felt. “And you know, he knows what to do with an enemy.”

*   *   *

Eric left first; he had a wife and kid at home, after all, and had to be at work the next morning. Stillman was next, after several short conversations with Will’s red-eyed, lank-haired mother. Tally hung around, whether through curiosity or empathy Sarah didn’t know. Sarah couldn’t leave, couldn’t push herself forward to talk to the parents, couldn’t ask anyone, once Trip Stillman took off, what Will’s prognosis was. She was ready, if approached, to describe her impressions, show her notes, pass on anything that might be useful. She was ready, but she couldn’t bring herself to volunteer. Her thoughts and self-recriminations chased themselves around and around in her head like disease-raddled rats on a rusty wheel.