Chapter Thirty-One
LUKE KNELT in front of Max. He pried his hands from his ears. “You can look now, brother. It’s over.”
Max’s own heart stilled. For a moment, he misunderstood. It’s over. He’s dead. He’s gone. Then the steady beep of the cardiac monitor reached his ears, the shrill, maddening noise that represented his whole damn world.
Jed was alive.
Max scrambled to his feet. The room was almost deserted. Only Luke, Glenn, and a single nurse remained.
Luke grasped his shoulders. “Each river has its course, but they all come together in the end.”
The words were cryptic, but he was gone before Max had any chance of deciphering them.
Max staggered to the bed. He took Jed’s hand and ran his gaze over him. He half expected to see great craters burned in his body from the defibrillator, but there was nothing. In fact, Jed didn’t look any different at all. “What happened?”
It was a rhetorical question, spoken aloud by accident, but Glenn let out a weary sigh in answer. “Motherfucker died on us.” He pressed his fist to the marbled skin of Jed’s scarred shoulder. “How many times we gonna do this, kid? I’m getting too old for this shit.”
He collapsed into a chair. Max didn’t have to look to know he’d put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. What else was there to do? After the devastating tale behind the incident that had decimated Jed’s whole team, any normal person would do the same.
Max had never been normal. He felt drained, and heartbroken for what Jed had been through before he’d ever had the chance to know him, but he remained on his feet, tracing Jed’s bruised eyelids with his thumb and the paperlike skin below, the skin that had become so pale and thin it was almost translucent. It bothered him that Jed’s eyelids looked so tired and sore, and he wondered if there was anything he could do to soothe them.
Glenn shifted in his chair, watching Max through hooded eyes. “He’s always needed someone like you.”
Max lowered the blanket covering Jed’s torso and considered removing his pillow. Jed didn’t seem to like pillows. “Hmm?”
“Someone who knows what he needs. He’s not so good at telling folk.”
It was a theory Max had heard several times over in one form or another, and he smiled a reluctant, rueful smile. “I didn’t know about this. I didn’t know anything. We’ve lived together since November, and I didn’t have a bloody clue.”
“Don’t blame yourself for that.” Glenn got up and stretched his arms over his head. “Keeping himself hidden was his baseline from the start. It’s a hard habit to break.”
Max knew that sentiment all too well. “Thank you for telling us what happened to you all that day. I think it will help Dan to know.”
“But not you?”
“Some days.” Max followed a vein in Jed’s wrist all the way to where it disappeared into his shoulder. “Then some days I don’t want to know anything. I just want him to be happy.”
Glenn didn’t answer. As had become his habit throughout the day, he’d drifted to the foot of the bed and picked up Jed’s chart. He flipped through it, going right back to the first page. After a while, he let out his trademark low whistle. “Man, he’s lost some weight. Says here he’d started putting it back on. I can’t believe that shit.”
Max thought back yet again to Paul’s stack of storytelling photographs. “He showed me a picture of you and him in the desert. He was heavier then, a stone or two, I reckon.”
“A stone? That’s, like, Brit speak for ten pounds, right?”
“More like fifteen.”
Glenn grinned before he sobered. “That’s a hell of a lot. Is that how you knew me? From a photograph? I didn’t know Jed had any.”
“They were Paul’s. His wife gave them to him. Actually, he seemed to think some of them were yours.”
“Sounds about right.” Glenn shook his head. “Paul was like that… always had to see something with his own eyes to believe it. Jed keeps everything in that bigass brain of his.”
“What about you?”
“Bit of both. There’s a lot of things I’d rather forget.”
Max thought of the bloodshed behind another set of photographs. Jed had once told him that he’d met Glenn right at the beginning of his military career. He wondered if they’d fought in Somalia together, wondered if the murdered aid worker had been Glenn’s lover.
Somehow, it didn’t seem the right time to ask.
“How long was he sick before you found out what it was?”
“Hmm? Oh, you mean the gastroparesis?” Max nodded, and Glenn went on, “Not long. He….”
The door opened and Dan appeared, his eyes rimmed with red and his face drawn. “Everything okay in here?”
“Come see for yourself.”
Dan shook his head, ignoring Glenn’s gentle encouragement. His hands twitched at his sides, and Max could see he was agitated.
“You all right?”
Dan shook his head again. “I need to find something to break or I’m gonna lose my shit. I was supposed to drive him home today. How the fuck did it come to this?”
Glenn spoke again, his tone low and soothing. “Nothing about something like this makes sense, dude. You look beat. You should get some rest.”
Max agreed. Dan had been at the hospital for… he didn’t even know how long. Too long. “Dan, go back to Carla’s and get some sleep. I’ll call you if anything happens.”
Dan scrubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah, I think I will. The others are headed back there anyway. Dad’s gone to pick up Flo. You’ll call us if anything happens?”
“Someone will,” Max promised.
Dan stared hard at Jed for a moment longer before he turned on his heel and walked away.
Max let out a shaky breath as the door closed behind him. He loved Dan like a brother, and his anguish was almost as hard to take as his own. His tired brain was beginning to scatter. Sooner or later, he was going to have to give in and get some sleep himself.
Glenn leaned against the bed rail. “I know how he feels. We had two weeks left on our tour before it all went to Hell. Paul, Raffi, Jed… they were all getting out. It didn’t have to be this way.”
“Jed was getting out?”
“Yeah. He hadn’t admitted it out loud, but we both knew he couldn’t go on. I don’t know if he would’ve left the Army completely, but he was done with frontline combat.” Glenn let out a heavy sigh. “It didn’t have to be this way,” he said again. “It was over, we were coming home… he was coming home.”
Max felt stunned. He shouldn’t have, but a sickening sense of ironic injustice rushed over him. The world was so damn unfair. He trailed a cautious fingertip over the hard planes of Jed’s abdomen, the abdomen that sheltered the cause of this whole mess. “I can’t believe he managed to hide this out in the field.”
Glenn sighed. “He didn’t hide it as well as he wanted to. The others knew something was wrong. We’re trained to be observant, to see things people don’t want us to see. Trouble was, we’re also trained to conceal—to blend into the shadows and disappear. In the end, I think they all figured he’d finally had enough.”
“Finally?”
“It was a long tour, for Jed more than most. He gave a lot of his leave to Paul.”
“Does the rest of your team know he’s sick now?”
“Not yet. If he doesn’t wake his ass up soon, I’ll need to make some calls.”
Soon. The word struck a chord with Max. “You think he’s going to make it, don’t you?” Glenn’s eyes flickered, and Max knew he was right. “What makes you so sure?”
“Same reasons as you I’d imagine, though I guess we came to believe them in different ways.”
Max gestured for him to elaborate. He wasn’t sharp enough to talk in riddles.
Glenn shrugged. “I guess I figure he’s had his chance to check out, and he chose to live. Jed’s a stubborn fucker. I don’t think he’ll change his mind now.”
“You really believe that?”
“I do. Don’t you?”
MAX SLUMPED forward and put his head on his arms. It was late, well after midnight, and after a day of being surrounded by the grief and worry of so many others, he was finally alone with his own.
Of course, he wasn’t really alone. Jed was there, but despite being bolstered by Glenn’s philosophical confidence, now, with the ghostlike nurses and beeping machines for company, Max’s faith was beginning to fade.
He eyed the slim stack of crumpled envelopes Glenn had left before he’d driven Luke and Saja back to the cabin in Jed’s truck to get some sleep. Letters. Jed’s letters to Nick, Dan, and Hector and Anna. There was even one for Belle, though not Tess. Jed must’ve written them before she was born.
Glenn said he’d left them for Jed to burn, so sure was he that he didn’t need them anymore, but Max wasn’t quite there yet, because even without the cardiac arrest, Jed’s condition hadn’t improved… his chance of survival hadn’t changed at all.
Max wanted to tear the letters to shreds, to obliterate them like they’d never existed, but he didn’t. The unthinkable had edged too close to reality to take that chance. He closed his eyes and pictured Jed scribbling the letters in some tented base camp on the other side of the world. Surrounded by death and violence, Max wondered if he’d ever imagined he’d fight his ultimate battle for life in a hospital in Oregon.
It felt good to rest his eyes. He let the invasive noise of the machines wash over him and reached out with his mind, straining every sense. Sometimes, when they were together at home in bed, he found himself dreaming of Jed, even though he was right there next to him. Most times he couldn’t remember the dreams, but sometimes he could, and what he found was a fantasy that was pretty much his reality. He dreamed of rainy days in front of the fire, of long summer evenings by the water. He dreamed of their present and the future he craved so badly.
He dreamed of a life that was so fucking possible, if only Jed could fight his way back.
Max opened his eyes with a sigh. He was surprised he’d been left at the hospital alone. Until that moment he’d passed Jed’s truck keys over to Glenn, someone had always been there, standing guard in the corridor if not by the bed. He figured Glenn didn’t know he was too much of a basket case to be left on his own, and Max hadn’t been about to tell him.
He got up and walked to the window. It was smaller than the window of Jed’s room downstairs, as though the shrinking window represented Jed’s fading chances of recovery. Max stared hard through the glass at the black night. It was raining, and the sound of the fat drops hitting the glass took him back in time to an evening spent a few days before Christmas….
Max strung the last pale puff of popcorn on the brown garden string and tied a knot in the end. He tossed the homemade, biodegradable garland on the coffee table with the others and sat back, stretching his stiff shoulder muscles.
Most years, he didn’t know why he bothered decorating the cabin. It wasn’t like anyone ever saw it. The kids stopped by, but only for an hour or so, and on evenings like these, when the dark night was ravaged by a bitter winter storm, the recollection of their bright eager smiles was hard to find.
Movement on the couch reminded Max he wasn’t alone. He glanced over his shoulder as Jed stirred. “Hey, sleepyhead.”
Jed sat up with care. “Damn, did I fall asleep on you again?”
“Yup. You sure like your afternoon naps. Must be your age.”
Jed shot him a look that would’ve been sour if not for the warm glint in his eyes. He stretched his arms above his head and yawned.
Max stared at him.
Jed caught him and frowned. “What?”
“Um, nothing.” Max tripped over his words. Something was off, but what… “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you yawn before.”
“You’re counting my yawns?”
Max shook his head. It wasn’t coming out the way he wanted it to, but he was sure he was right. “I haven’t, have I? I’ve never heard you yawn, cough, or sneeze. Why is that?”
Jed laughed… laughed a low but real belly laugh that warmed the whole room. “How come you don’t notice there’s a hole in the roof, but you notice that?”
MAX CAME back into the present with a fond smile. Jed had deflected the question with graceful ease, but one night a month or so later, he’d alluded to the fact that he’d been well drilled in the art of utter silence.
He was silent now too. Too bloody silent.
Max let himself be drawn back to the bed. Up until now, he’d resisted the urge to talk to Jed about anything other than the occasional whispered plea for him to get better. Most of the time there were others around—conversations for Jed to grumble about if he could in fact hear them—and when there weren’t, Max often found he had little to say.
Now, though, his mind swelled with all the things Jed didn’t know about, all the things he’d missed out on: Nick and Kim’s shotgun wedding, the magical births of his nieces. All at once, Max felt the need to tell Jed all about them.
He didn’t know how long he’d been talking when his voice cracked. The strangled sob caught him by surprise. For a while now, he’d felt too tired and numb to give in to the debilitating pain in his chest.
He clamped his hand over his mouth and took some deep breaths. No. Jed doesn’t need to hear that. But even as Max thought it, the sense that it wasn’t entirely true crept over him. Perhaps he was wrong… perhaps Jed did need to feel his pain… perhaps he needed reminding what he was leaving behind.
Max felt the faith he was clinging to dim as he stroked Jed’s cheek with the pad of his thumb. “You know I love you, right? It’s okay if you’ve had enough. I can’t even tell you how much I’ll miss you… how much I already miss you… ah, fuck, this isn’t coming out right.”
He gave up and covered his mouth again. Was that what he wanted to say to Jed? That it was all right for him to give up and die?
God, no.
Dr. Greene entered the room. He’d been in and out throughout the day, but this time he was accompanied by Dr. Howarth. They ran through their usual routine. Max watched them with muted interest. Much of what they did was a mystery to him. He jumped a little when Dr. Howarth appeared at his side.
“Holding firm, eh? Let’s see what the dawn brings us.”
The doctors left before Max could formulate an answer. Instead, he found himself scrutinizing Jed more closely than he had before. He looked the same—still, pale, clinging to life by a thread, but Max sensed something. Something, something, something. But what?
Perhaps it was his own hysterical exhaustion. Max couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so long without sleep, but the harder he stared at Jed, the more he felt it. Felt the glimmer of emotion he’d fought back while Glenn had been there. Hope? It had been so long, he wasn’t quite sure.
Max slumped in the chair by Jed’s side. His body gave in to fatigue, but even as his head hit the mattress and sleep washed over him, the crackle of energy flowing through his tired brain was undeniable.
Something had changed.