Authors: Sandra Hill
Viking Heat (2 page)
Also, it hadn’t helped that she had curly red hair.
Bright
curly red hair. Think Orphan Annie but not so cute.
Bright
curly red hair. Think Orphan Annie but not so cute.
“I dare you” had been a common refrain around their house. And “I double-dog dare you” had been the worst challenge of all to a little girl trying to keep up with three young Rambos.
“I dare you to climb that tree,” her oldest brother Matt had challenged her. “The one outside the principal’s office.”
The jerks had even taken pictures of that incident and loved to bring them out on the most embarrassing occasions. Her hanging from the limb, Barbie underpants exposed, with Mr. Clemmons yelling up at her.
“I dare you to try this hair toner,” Jerry had suggested one day. “My girlfriend says it will give you gold highlights.”
Her hair had turned green. There were photos of that disaster, too.
“If you want to lose your butt,” Tom had suggested.
Who knew I even had a butt then?
“Why not try competitive weight lifting . . . you know, body building? I double-dog dare you.”
Who knew I even had a butt then?
“Why not try competitive weight lifting . . . you know, body building? I double-dog dare you.”
She did, and in the process gained some manly shoulders and lost most of her breasts.
No kidding! No boobs.
But she still had a butt.
No kidding! No boobs.
But she still had a butt.
They were still laughing over that one.
Well, two of them were.
While her brothers had excelled in sports from elementary school through college, she’d felt compelled to do the same. Therefore, she’d been an all-American tennis player, softball pitcher, basketball forward, and marathon runner. For every trophy they won, she earned two. She didn’t have to be a psychologist to understand the subliminal dynamics that had been going on there.
Despite all the teasing and competition, they had been the best brothers in the world. In fact, they pretty much raised her, even before their dad, an Army lifer, died when she was eighteen. Their mother had passed years earlier of cancer when Joy had been only eight.
Matt especially had been her anchor, filling in when their father had been away on duty billets around the world. Matt had been the one who’d explained menstruation to her and purchased her first pads. He’d been the one whose shoulder she cried on after being dumped by her first boyfriend. He’d been the one who told her about birth control and warned her about fast boys and their smooth lines, from experience, no doubt. He was the one she called first with good news or bad.
But she was getting ahead of herself.
Fast forward to her twenty-fifth year and the day that changed her life forever. And, yes, it was related to her brothers.
Oh, Brother, where art thou . . . ?She was an intern at the Meadows, a psychiatric clinic in rural Pennsylvania, about to finish up her last group therapy session of the day. With her master’s thesis completed and approved at nearby Penn State, she would be moving to New Haven in two weeks for doctoral studies at Yale.
The group today was one labeled Self Esteem: Only You Can Determine Your Worth. Although the facility included adults and children as young as five, on both an inpatient and outpatient basis, those here today were all young teenagers . . . three girls and one boy.
“So, Cindy, tell us how you’ve done this week.”
Cindy, a fifteen-year-old recovering anorexic, replied, “I gained two pounds.”
“Well, that’s good news.” Joy applauded, encouraging the others to follow suit. “But you don’t appear happy.”
“I’m getting fat.” Cindy sank down into her folding chair as only a teenager could and pressed out her lower lip, sulkily.
If only she could see herself as others did. Little more than a skeleton.
“What’s your total weight, honey?”
Cindy’s gaunt face bloomed pink. Reluctantly, she admitted, “Ninety-eight pounds.” When she’d been admitted two months ago, she’d been dying at an alarming eighty pounds.
“You know you can’t be discharged until you’re up to a hundred and ten? You’re five foot seven, for goodness’ sake. Even at that weight, you’ll still be slim.”
“I’ll look like a pig,” she disagreed.
“Remember my promise. If you get up to one hundred and two before I leave in two weeks, I’ll bring a makeup consultant in here to show you just how beautiful you are. I’ve seen her case of samples. Wow!”
Her face brightened. Was there ever a teenage girl who didn’t love makeup?
“I think you look good,” Andy Barlow said from Cindy’s other side. They were sitting in a small circle in her office.
Cindy flashed him a glare of disgust.
Which of course embarrassed Andy, who was one screwed-up sixteen-year-old. The product of sexual and physical abuse from a young age, he was addicted to cocaine and into tattoos, which covered most of his body.
“Cindy! You know better than that,” Joy chided.
“I’m sorry,” Cindy told Andy.
But, of course, the damage was done. Andy got up abruptly, knocking over his chair, and rushed from the room.
“I’m sorry,” Cindy repeated to the rest of them, tears brimming in her eyes.
Joy brought the other two girls into the discussion then. Alicia, a high school sophomore who continued to blame herself for being gang-raped at a party, and Larise, who was failing academically in senior high, despite having a very high IQ, no doubt due to some undisclosed home issues. She’d been caught cutting herself on more than one occasion.
Joy was concluding the counseling session when she glanced up and saw two of her brothers standing in the doorway.
“Jerry? Tom? What’s up? You told me you couldn’t make it for graduation.”
After the girls left the room, giggling at the sight of the good-looking visitors, they came in, shutting the door behind them, each giving her a big hug and a kiss.
She smiled, not having seen them in person for months. Her brothers did not smile back.
“What? What’s happened?” Fear suddenly riddled her body. Light-headed, she leaned against a chair. “It’s Matt, isn’t it?”
Jerry nodded and tried to take her hand.
She shoved the hand away.
“Tell me. Is he dead?”
Oh, God! Please don’t let him be dead.
Oh, God! Please don’t let him be dead.
“No,” Tom said. “He’s not dead.”
But he said it in a way that was not hopeful.
A sob escaped her throat before she even knew the details. She knew,
she just knew
it was going to be bad.
she just knew
it was going to be bad.
“His plane was shot down over Afghanistan. Chuck Wiley, his copilot, died on impact. Matt was taken prisoner. He . . .” Jerry’s voice broke, and his hazel eyes misted over with tears. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen any of her brothers cry.
Tom was in just as bad shape, she soon realized.
“And?”
“The pictures . . . Al-Qaeda has him, and Al Jazeera is showing pictures. Oh, honey, they’re bad.” Jerry opened his arms, and she went into them.
She didn’t ask for details. Her imagination was providing enough.
“They want us in D.C. . . . in case there’s news,” Tom told her a short time later. “We already went to your apartment and packed a bag for you.”
Later that night they got the news. Captain Matthew Nelson was dead.
Joy, screaming hysterically, was immediately given a sedative that knocked her out. Just before she surrendered to unconsciousness, she wondered how she was ever going to face a world without her big brother. How?
In the middle of the night, she awakened, disoriented. She was in one of the two bedrooms in their hotel suite. Her brothers must be asleep, finally. She’d heard conversations and doors opening and closing for hours as she’d awakened, then went back to sleep, over and over throughout the day and evening.
Groggily, she made her way to the bathroom where she rinsed out her mouth and took two aspirin. Slowly, she walked into the living room, which was empty.
As if drawn by a magnet, she made her way to a laptop sitting on the coffee table. Logging on, she came to the main news page of AOL. And there it was, an announcement of Matt’s death. A team of Navy SEALs had apparently gone in to rescue him, but they’d been too late.
The picture she saw broke her heart. Amidst a handful of armed men, crouched in a firing position . . . Navy SEALs, she assumed . . . was one particular SEAL carrying her brother. He wore a BDU uniform, and his face was cammied up, but through the black paint could be seen a single tear track stemming from haunted blue eyes.
She would never forget that poignant image.
And it would change her life forever.
I double-dog dare you . . .For the next two months, Joy succumbed to a mind-numbing grief, giving up her slot at Yale, rarely leaving her bed before noon. And she became obsessed with the picture of the Navy SEAL carrying her brother.
As a psychologist, she recognized all the signals. The grieving process was taking over her life. Academically, she was well-acquainted with all the counseling steps necessary for her to begin healing, but emotionally she was still not ready. Her brothers were probably just as grief-stricken, but they were back to work and managing to handle the stress. At least on the outside.
“What are you two doing here . . . again?” she asked when there was a knock on the door late one night.
“We’re here to intervene . . . I mean, we’re gonna do an intervention,” Tom said.
“Whew!” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Just how much booze did you consume before coming up with this lame idea?”
“It’s a kick-ass idea,” Jerry disagreed, blowing an equal waft of liquor breath her way.
Turns out their goofball version of an intervention involved Vodka Stingers, photo albums, and Matt’s hokey collection of country music CDs.
“I want to meet him,” she told her brothers finally.
“Who?” Jerry slurred.
“That SEAL,” she replied, taking out a computer printout of the TV photo.
Toby Keith was belting out “How Do You Like Me Now?” while Jerry and Tom studied the picture.
“Remember how Matt used to sing along with that song?” Tom reminded them.
“That, and ‘Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy,’” Jerry added.
“Yoo-hoo! Earth to bozos,” Joy said, waving the picture in front of her brothers. “I want to meet him.”
“I don’t know, squirt,” Jerry said. That’s what her brothers had always called her. Some oxymoron! “The SEALs don’t like any publicity.”
She shrugged. “I need to ask him some questions . . . and to thank him.”
“It’s not necessary. He was already given some medal,” Jerry said.
“I don’t care. You want me to straighten out? Fine. Set up a meeting so I can meet the guy, dammit.” She turned to Tom. “You know people who know people, Mr. Important Football Player. You can do it. I dare you.”
Tom said something Important Football Players should not, a clear sign to Joy that she had won this challenge.
Anchors aweigh, my dear, or some such nonsense . . .One week later, she, Jerry, and Tom were sitting in Commander MacLean’s office at the Naval Special Warfare training command center in Coronado, California. Apparently some high muckety-muck in the Navy was a football fan, and Tom was one of his favorite players. The admiral had pulled some strings.
“This is highly irregular,” the commander was continuing to argue, even after he’d sent for Lieutenant Luke Avenil, better known as Slick. Joy had learned on one of her Internet searches that all of the SEALs had nicknames, some more colorful than others, like Whiz, Shark, Easy, or Spider. “SEALs operate as teams,” the commander continued to complain. “No individual is responsible for the success or failure of a mission.”
“I know that. It’s just that I need to put a face and a voice to my brother’s rescuer,” she started to explain.
“With all due respect, ma’am, there was no rescue, just a recovery.”
She bristled. “His body wasn’t left behind. As far as I’m concerned, that’s a rescue. In any case, I was saying, I need to meet the man who carried my brother out of that hellhole. It will give me some closure.”
“No offense, Ms. Nelson, but giving civilians closure, or any other psychobabble, is not my responsibility.”
There was a sharp rap on the door.
“Enter,” the commander snapped.
In came a good-looking, dark-haired man in his mid to late thirties, wearing a camouflage uniform and heavy lace-up boots, his Navy SEAL trident pin, known as a Budweiser, gleaming on his shirt, along with a bunch of stripes and badges that probably had some significance. His dark hair was cut military short in a style known as a high and tight, and he was very buff. He stood at attention until “At ease!” was barked out by his superior officer.
“Lieutenant Avenil, these folks have asked to meet with you. Jerry and Tom Nelson, and their sister, Joy Nelson,” the commander said.
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