Excerpt from
Taking a Chance
by Lindsay McKenna
Ram watched the family dynamic as the observer he was. Mary, the mother, was a Yaqui Indian. Diego, the father, was Mexican, and they’d had two beautiful daughters, Cara and Ali.
He remained a shadow in the background while Diego drove their extended-cab truck back to their one-story, pink stucco home in southern Tucson, near the Pascua Yaqui reservation. Tucson was built upon the sprawling Sonoran Desert, dotted with saguaros and other types of cacti. Farther to the south, near the Mexican border, were rugged volcanic mountain ranges. The city boasted a large metropolis that was home to a healthy mix of Caucasians, Hispanics, and other ethnicities, drawn to the area by thriving business and a major university.
The family lived in a simple, but well-loved home. Every inch was well cared for. The six-foot adobe wall built around the home’s one-acre lot matched the color of the desert. The pink stucco house sported a Spanish red-tile roof and a spacious yard, half of which featured a big garden out in the back. Palo verde desert trees with their namesake green bark, provided shade from the hot sun overhead. The yard was well taken care of and showed pride of ownership.
Night-blooming cereus cacti were in each corner and Ram imagined the hand-sized white or pink blossoms were magnificent when they bloomed for one night of the year.
His heart was centered on Ali, however. He knew her well from years of working with her in their SEAL team in Afghanistan under Chief Wyatt Lockwood’s leadership. They had worked well together on ops, even though they had tangled on a personal level.
He amended that thought. She knew he was walled up and unable to emotionally trust anyone, and hated not being able to connect with him, so they’d ended up sniping at one another, instead. At the time, she had wanted more from him than he could give her—or anyone else. She hadn’t known that he’d barely survived a painful, lonely childhood.
Now, as Ram looked around, the simple beauty of the large, two-thousand-square-foot house struck him. As they entered the residence, he admired its airy, brightly lit, open quality. The windows were large beneath a cathedral style roof, and the rooms were light and bright.
He was also looking at it through the eyes of an operator. Where were the possible places an enemy could penetrate, in case he needed to get Cara out of the house and to safety?
He hung back, watching Mary take her younger daughter down a red-tiled hall to her bedroom on the right. Ali had followed and Diego had gone into the kitchen to make everyone coffee. Ram thought about his own upbringing—his father was a pimp who owned a broken-down, old hotel in Nogales, Mexico, and his mother was a white prostitute with a drug addiction. They had come together and produced Ram, then settled into the hotel his father used as a brothel. Ram had grown up there, and when he was old enough to realize his shameful family roots, he was so humiliated he never spoke of his so-called family to anyone. As Ram grew older, he discovered that his father had never married his mother. He was just a “mistake” that had happened one night.
Ali’s family, however, was like a storybook version he’d always dreamed of having. Here, both daughters were wanted from the time they were born. The warmth between Diego and Mary was genuine—Ram had rarely seen genuine affection between men and women at the hotel where he’d grown up. Several of the prostitutes, however, took him under their wing when they saw his mother had no interest in Ram. Starved for affection themselves, they would hug, kiss, and make a fuss over him.
When he wasn’t with his substitute moms, Ram was assigned a room to live in alone. He ate in the kitchen with Joshua and Sophia, their cooks, who spoiled him with little pieces of dessert they weren’t supposed to give anyone but his father.
Ram pulled himself out of the past when he saw Ali come out of Cara’s room, her face dark with worry. He remained in the living room, holding her gaze as she walked over to him. Reaching out, he touched her slumped shoulders.
“How are you doing?” he asked, observing that she was close to tears. Ali wasn’t one to cry. In fact, he’d never seen her cry in the years he’d worked with her. Despite his instinct to hug her, Ram forced himself to remove his hand from her shoulders. They had both agreed to try and start over with one another, to establish a new relationship—one that was aware of their old habit of sniping at one another, and replace it with more patience and understanding.
Wiping her eyes, she gave him an apologetic look. “She’s not good. She’s a mess, Ram, just like you said she’d be. I have this awful gut feeling that more happened to her than she’s telling us. Mama’s with her right now, holding her, because she’s sobbing her heart out.”
“Mary is the right person to be with her right now, Ali.” Ram said. “Look, this is going to be really hard on all of you, every day, for a while. There’ll be no let-up, no relief for any of you, and no safe place you can get away from it, either.”
Ali lifted her chin, staring up at him. “You sound like you’ve seen this before, Ram.”
He wasn’t going there. Ram had never spoken of his past, his childhood, to anyone—ever. “Let’s just say I’ve seen it happen before.” He cupped his hand around her elbow, drawing her over to a lavender, velour couch, urging her to sit down with him. He left a foot of space between them as he sat next to her.
“My poor parents,” she murmured, keeping her voice low. “I know they aren’t equipped to handle something like this.”
“Home is the best place for her, though.” Ram said reassuringly. “It represents safety to Cara. It’s where she’ll heal best.” Just as the closet where he had made his bed and slept at night was his safe place in that hotel. It was small, dark, and enclosed and Ram felt protected in there. It was the only place where he felt that way while growing up. “Cara probably feels safer in her bedroom, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, she does,” Ali said, wiping her eyes again. “She’s got a ton of stuffed animals in there. As a kid, at night, she’d love it when Mama tucked her in with her big, fuzzy bear. Cara loves that bear, even to this day. The poor thing is just about hairless, it’s been held and loved so much over the years.”
“She’ll probably hole up in there for the next few weeks because it represents safety to her, so don’t be surprised.”
“God, Ram, I know I wouldn’t react this way. I’d want to establish a fixed routine that I liked to anchor me. I wouldn’t hide myself away.”
He heard the pain and confusion in her voice. Again, he fought against reaching out and holding her close. Ram knew it would probably shock the hell out of her if he did that. Theirs had not been a warm, intimate relationship—just the opposite: it had been contentious, challenging, even angry and confrontational at times. He hoped that the kiss they had shared on the op to rescue Cara and the German women, was creating more trusting opportunities for them to heal their past—and get on with a future he wanted with her. It seemed like a far-off vision and something he was sure probably would not ever come true—but he had to try. And he had to try and pace himself with Ali because of all the stress on her right now. He could see how she was scrambling to deal with her sister’s psychological state and support her bewildered, anxious parents—ignoring her own suffering in the meantime.
Ram silently promised her that he’d be there for her. Ali had no one. Now, they had a fragile, tentative relationship budding between them. Until then, they had been out of touch for three years.
“Ali, you have a lot of inner strength. Sure, you’ve seen the underside of life in your job, but you’ve got survivor genes in your blood. When you went through something challenging you rose to the occasion and became stronger. Cara is different. She’s just the opposite of you.” He tried to give her a look he hoped was sympathetic. Ram wasn’t good at revealing his true emotions, but he knew Ali needed some gentleness right now.
“You’re right about that, Ram. Every time something challenged me, I took it head on and I got stronger because of it.”
She sat there, resting her elbows on her knees, hands clasped between them, frowning. “Mama and Papa are not helicopter parents, Ram. They never were. It’s just . . . ” her voice fell to a helpless tone, “Cara never had a shell, never showed any strength, and I have no explanation for it.”
“Not everyone is born strong when they enter this world of ours, Ali. She’s one of those who didn’t. I think your parents did the best they could to strengthen her and help her stand on her own two feet. She did go to college here in Tucson, she got a degree, and she’s out working in the world. That shows she’s got the basics skills to survive. Before this, she didn’t hide in her home, avoid getting a job, and just live off your parents. In her own way, she did the best she could.”
Morosely, Ali whispered, “Yes. I guess I want her to have my internal strength to deal with this trauma, and I just don’t feel it in her.”
“She’ll gather it at her own speed and time,” Ram counseled. “I know when you get knocked down like this it takes time to get back up.”
Ali gave him a quizzical look. “How do YOU know all of this?”
Ram could see how much anguish she carried in her for her sister. “Because I was raised in a hell no one wants to be dropped into,” he admitted heavily. “In a sense, I know what Cara is going through. I know what it takes to pull yourself up by the bootstraps when no one is there for you. At least Cara has the three of you, and you have no idea how much support that is giving her right now. You’re feeding her strength and continuity to grab at the hands you’re holding out to her. Just give her time, Ali. Give her space. Be there when she wants you, let her cry in your arms, and let her talk it out. But it’s going to be on her timetable, not yours. That’s what your challenge is.” He held her tear-filled gaze. “You want her to get better faster because that way she won’t have to suffer so much pain for such a long time. You all want to shorten her time, the duration of the pain she has to flail through and come out the other side of.”
Sniffing, Ali studied him in the filling silence between them. “I know so little about you, Ram.”
He heard the tremble in her voice, saw sympathy come to her eyes for him. Before the truce they’d had a few days ago, he’d have walled himself up to not feel anything close to sympathy for his personal struggle. Now, he tried to change it because he desperately wanted to be emotionally available for Ali in order to help her. If he walled up like he usually did, she’d feel rebuffed and he couldn’t help her at all. Knowing that humans felt nurtured and safe when another human opened themselves up to them, he tried his best to do it for Ali, right now. She deserved help in this and Ram knew he could give it to her if he had the strength and the guts to do it.
He’d never done this for anyone—not even himself—he’d been a harsh taskmaster with himself in order to survive. Looking into her luminous golden eyes with a sheen of tears across them, watching her struggle not to cry for her sister, it became a little easier to remain vulnerable with her at this moment. “In time, I hope to share more with you, Ali. But our focus has to be on Cara, being guides of a sort to her, to help her negotiate her trauma. We can’t do it for her, but we can understand it and more important, feel where she’s at, discover her pace on her healing journey she has to undertake.”
He saw Ali lick her lower lip. It was something she did when she was grappling with something important. There was no question she fiercely loved her sister. His job, as he saw it, was to get Ali to understand the speed of how Cara was going to heal. And it wasn’t going to be on Ali’s timetable and that’s what she had to grapple with first. He could see her thinking about his words, see her responding to him remaining open to her for the first time. There was confusion in her expression, trying to reset herself to him because this was a new path for them both.
She scrubbed her face with her hands. Lifting her chin, she met his placid gaze. “Thanks for sharing that with me. It helps me see Cara in a new light, a different one. You’re right, Ram. We all heal at our own pace.”
His mouth crooked more in a grimace. “Yeah, and it’s not a smooth, straight road, either. It’s full of twists, turns, and sometimes falling back on itself, and you feel like despite whatever steps forward that you made one day, you’re back at square one again.”
“I get that. I’ve seen it in myself.” She rubbed her hands down the thighs of her jeans. “I need to reset myself to Cara’s speed.”
He gave her what he hoped was a tender look. “Yes. You’re the right person to do this and I know you can. Your mother and father play different roles with Cara and they’re going to struggle just as much as you are to understand their daughter’s trauma.”
She tilted her head, her voice low with so many feelings. “I never knew until just now how wise and good you are at assessing others, Ram. I wish . . . I wish I knew this side of you so long ago when we worked together.”