A Love Like Ours (16 page)

“No.”

“What I’ve been discovering is that it’s not so much that God provides the medicine that heals. Rather, He
is
the medicine.”

Silence fell over the three of them.

“I best be going.” Jake started to move.

“Not so fast, mister.” She waved him back into his seat. “I’ve talked about myself twice as long as I should have, and I haven’t heard anything about you.” She resettled her pink glasses. “You’ve been through hardship, too.”

“Yes.” Karen had been handed a tragedy and had dealt with it courageously. He’d been handed one, and he’d withdrawn from life.

“An IED explosion took the lives of three of your men and caused your injuries.” She said it with confident ease, as if she were saying to him that the day was sunny.

He lowered his brows. No one talked to him about the IED. They’d tried to, at the beginning, and he’d told them all to go to hell.

“What happened when you came home from the war?”

What happened? He’d been granted the one thing he’d wanted most—a return to his family and Holley, Texas—only to discover he didn’t want it after all. He’d been surrounded by friendly, concerned people who had no idea what he’d gone through or what war was. He’d missed his squad the way a person missed a leg that had been amputated. He hadn’t wanted to be around anyone, yet he’d been out of practice at living alone.

Those early months back home had been so bad for him, his mental chaos so powerful that he’d wanted to go back to the desert, the adrenaline he’d never feel again, and the life he’d known. “I don’t want to talk about it.” He spoke low, his voice scratchy. His pulse made a thrumming noise in his ears.

“Did you go to the VA for treatment?” She asked the question calmly, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Once you were home?”

“Yes.”

“And they diagnosed you with PTSD?”

It still had the power to strip him naked and humiliate him, the acronym PTSD. He’d hoped the doctors would tell him he had anything else, a terminal sickness, even. PTSD had a stigma. It meant he was non-hacker.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t need to. Karen knew the answer. “Did they prescribe antidepressants?”

Silence.

“I’m guessing they did. You didn’t take them?”

Inwardly he swore. He eyed the distance to the door. It was none of her business what he’d been prescribed or whether he’d taken the pills.

“Do you go to therapy?” She tipped her head. “No? Therapy can help. You know, I treat a few vets with PTSD. Would you consider coming and seeing me at the church where I work?”

“I’m sorry, no.” He pushed to his feet.

“If you won’t come to my office, then you have to come back here and talk to me and Mollie again.” She, too, stood. “Do you remember how Lyndie has always believed that Mollie has a healing effect on animals and people?” she asked.

Now that she’d jogged his memory, he nodded. “I do remember.” And now he understood why, when he’d asked Lyndie what he could do for her, she’d told him he could visit her sister. Lyndie hoped to heal him. Like one of her injured chicks or birds.

“Well.” Karen smiled. “It could be that Lyndie’s right.”

Dark disbelief shifted through him. It insulted him, the realization that Lyndie viewed him the way she would a cat with a broken leg. He was a successful trainer with an impressive stable, numerous employees, and the respect of people from New York to California. He made a great deal of money. He took part in the lives of his family. He drove his body to the height of its capability for physical strength.

But she’d known—of course she’d known, just like everyone else knew—that he was wrecked inside. So the woman with the tender heart had decided to help him.

She didn’t recognize what he recognized about himself. Over the past eight years, his mental and physical scars had driven themselves too deep, had grown too hard.

He could not be cured.

“There is no cure for PTSD.” Karen opened a bag of chips that Lyndie had just bought from the store, then tipped them in Lyndie’s direction.

Lyndie helped herself to a handful and studied her mom. Once Jake had gone, the two of them had relocated to the patio table on the deck with the chips and icy cans of grapefruit-flavored sparkling water.

“No cure,” Lyndie said. “Really?” It went against her nature. Resignation came harder to her than passionate belief in something, no matter how far-fetched that something might be.

“Jake can’t un-see the things he’s seen or un-experience the things he’s experienced.”

“But he can move past them.”

“He can learn to live with them,” Karen corrected, scooping chips into her cupped palm. “He can improve, he can use coping strategies. The degree of recovery is as individual as the person. There are Vietnam vets still struggling with post-traumatic stress.”

“What are the symptoms?”

“The classic symptoms are rage, nightmares, substance abuse. Let’s see . . . survivor’s guilt, hyper-vigilance, insomnia, emotional numbness. Have you seen evidence of any of those in Jake?”

“The emotional numbness? I haven’t noticed any of the rest—wait. He flinches sometimes at sudden sounds. Is that hyper-vigilant?”

Karen nodded. “No evidence of substance abuse?”

“No.” She nibbled on a chip, tasting the crisp tang of salt.

“It’s good that he’s kept himself from addictions. They only complicate everything else.”

Lyndie selected another bent and crinkled chip. “I’m assuming that people who suffer from PTSD abuse substances because they’re trying to escape from their thoughts?”

“And feelings. When these guys are at war, they’re exposed to horrible things. They stuff them down and either pretend they never happened or that they don’t care that they happened, simply so they can continue doing their jobs. There’s not much room for regret or grief when you’re a serviceman on a tour of duty.”

“I understand.”

“Eventually, though, they have to deal with what happened to them. Because it
did
happen, and it’s still there. It was only stuffed down.”

Lyndie swept the crumbs from her palms, then set her grapefruit water on her lap, cradling it with both hands. Mom and Dad’s neighbor must be going at it again with his smoker, because the scent of roasting meat tipped the breeze. Sun spiced the nearby trees, their leaves riffling sweetly.

There was joy and peace to experience in this life. She didn’t want Jake to be stripped of joy and peace because he’d volunteered to serve his country.

When he’d asked her what he could do for her last night, Lyndie had seized her opportunity. She’d asked him to visit Mollie, and she’d asked to spend time with him each day trackside, something she planned to put into practice tomorrow. “Did you ask him to meet you at the church so that you could counsel him?” Lyndie asked.

“I did. He said no.”

She wrinkled her nose. Tall, Dark, and
Brooding
. “He’s stubborn.”

“Since he won’t come to the church, I told him that he needs to come back here, to visit Mollie and me.”

“I’ll do my best to get him back here.”

“Easter’s just four days away. Since we’ve been invited to lunch at Meg and Bo’s, I’ll probably have a chance to talk to him again there. Those eyes . . .”

“I know,” Lyndie said, with heartfelt understanding. A bleak and unholy light inhabited Jake’s eyes. It was more than enough to cause an old lady to have a heart attack, a young girl to run from him in fear, and a thirty-year-old with a dreamer’s heart to want to love him so much and so relentlessly that he’d have no choice but to come back to life.

T
he dirt road snaked into land marked with rocks and scrubby vegetation.
Jake had grown familiar with this stretch, as they all had.
He combed the scene, hunting for anything off or wrong, no matter how small.
His main mission today, and every day in Iraq, was to get his squad home safely.

In the far distance, he could make out two Bedouin men wearing checked head scarves and long white robes. The waves
of heat rising from the earth distorted their image.

A few hungry-looking dogs ran past the Humvee as
they slowed to enter the town of flat-topped houses
nearest the base. Men squatted outdoors, some drinking tea, others
smoking. Irrigation canals bordered the street. A couple of kids
hurried toward their vehicle, shouting, “Mister!” in accented English, holding
out their hands in hopes of candy.

Jake’s fellow Marines waved to the kids but didn’t stop. They
were headed farther into the desert this afternoon, to the next village. The buildings fell away.

Rob Panzetti elbowed Justin Scott’s shins. “What were you reading back there
at camp?”

“
The Principles of Psychology,”
Scott answered from his elevated position in the machine gun turret.

“It
looked old,” Panzetti said.

“It was written in 1890
.”

“What?” Dan Barnes, the one they called Boots, leaned
in from the backseat. “1890? What can a book that
old have to do with anything nowadays?” They went over
a hole and the teenager’s helmet slipped down in front.

“Tighten your helmet,” Jake instructed.

“It has
plenty to do with today,” Scott answered calmly. “I’m
going to get a degree in psychology when I get home.”

“What about you, Boots?” Panzetti spared a quick
glance at the kid. “What are you going to do
when you grow up?
”

“Well, I ain’t gonna
get a degree in psychology. I’m glad to be
done with school.” His Texas accent reminded Jake of Sonic
and barbecued brisket. “What I wanna do when I get
home is marry my girlfriend. I might go to work
for her dad someday.”

A lot of the guys had girlfriends back home. Some of them had a hard
time thinking about anything else and worried all the time about receiving a Dear John letter in the mail. It
had always amused Jake, seeing how soft his highly trained Marines could act over women—

A flash of white cut into Jake’s vision. Their vehicle went airborne, ripping apart
. Roaring noise.

Unstoppable power threw Jake through the air.
He wheeled his arms and legs, trying to get himself upright. Before he could, he landed with a bone-jarring
crush in a ravine.

He wheezed and bent his arms into his body. Instinctively, he rolled toward the dirt in
reaction to the agony in his ribs. His cheek throbbed
and pain cut into his thigh and his side.

My God. What . . . What had happened? His ears were ringing.
He could hear nothing except that ringing and the frantic panting of his own breath. They’d been driving. . . .

He squinted at the sky and saw smoke rising from flames.

An explosion. They must have been in an explosion.

His men. He pushed himself to his knees, then staggered
upright. His men. Where were his men? He ran with
limping, uneven strides.

Through a cloud of smoke and dust,
he saw the remains of his vehicle tilted into a crater. The front had been blasted away, and the rest
lay black and smoldering. Flesh and blood splattered the scene.

A daisy chain of IEDs must have detonated, because he could see evidence of more explosions in a line stretching back along the road. The other vehicles in the convoy
had maintained proper distance, so the next one had been damaged, but not badly. Marines were pouring out, moving in
his direction.

Oh, God. He scanned the view for
Panzetti, Scott, or Boots. No sign of them.

He neared the vehicle, lifting his arm to shield his mouth and nose. It only made it worse. He glanced down at
his sleeve and saw that it was covered in dirt and streaked with black. All of him was.

Through the flames, he could finally make out what had been the backseat. And Boots . . . Dan Barnes was still there. Metal had
bent around him, trapping him. If he hadn’t been
killed instantly, the fire had done it right after.

“No,” Jake rasped, wanting to look away but unable to
. Boots was an eighteen-year-old kid. He’d been
Jake’s to protect. Sickening fury and confusion and despair
circled within Jake. It should have been him dead and
burned. Not the kid.

He stumbled back. “Panzetti!” he
screamed, but he could barely hear his own hoarse voice.

Two of the Marines in his squad ran in his direction. “Make sure someone’s called Medical,” he yelled to
them.

They hesitated, nodded, and turned back to follow his order. Jake ran down the road, his attention cutting
left and right, searching. He couldn’t breathe right
through the liquid in his lungs. He continued to run.
Saw nothing.

Where were Panzetti and Scott?

Jake bolted upright in bed with a gasp.

The inside of his bedroom surrounded him. Dim and quiet. Far less real to him than the moments he’d just been living inside his nightmare. Fighting for breath, he screwed shut his eyes to avoid the sight of his bottom corner dresser drawer.

Unlike the kind of nightmares other people had, he couldn’t tell himself his wasn’t real. How bitterly he wished it wasn’t real. His soul would burn in hell because it
was
real. It had happened.

But it’s not happening now
, he told himself.
That was years ago. You’re in Holley
.

His breathing grew even more shallow. Panic tightened his throat.

He saw her then, sitting on her stool in her studio. She was clean and sweet and so pretty he almost couldn’t bear it. She had her hair up. Her dog was snoring on his lap. And she was painting innocent things that had no darkness in them at all.

Slowly, the mess of Jake’s mind began to steady.

“Are you planning to stand there in silence the whole time?” Jake asked Lyndie later that morning.

“I was under the impression that you didn’t like conversation.” She’d finished exercising her horses and arrived at Jake’s position near Lone Star’s track ten minutes prior. He’d agreed to let her shadow him for a short period each day, and she intended to make him follow through. She wasn’t sure, though, of his preferences. Not wanting to disturb him, she’d been standing quietly to the side and a little behind him.

Below his black Stetson, he looked at her out of the corners of his eyes. He appeared to be somewhat . . . entertained by her. “I like conversation more than I like you standing there watching me without saying anything.”

“Duly noted.” She moved up, directly next to him. “As it happens, I like conversation more than standing there watching you, too.”

He angled his chin toward Firewheel, one of his young colts. “Look.” Firewheel had spooked at something. It took the horse a moment to regain himself and settle back into his stride. “He’s not learning as quickly as he should.”

“And he seems to spook at the same things over and over.”

“That bush he just passed must look like a mountain lion to him,” Jake said dryly. “It bothers him day after day.”

“Maybe Firewheel has an imagination like mine. To me that bush looks like a hunched-over dragon.”

One edge of his lips ticked up. “You’d make a bad racehorse.”

She laughed. After her fall, things between her and Jake had softened in some hard-to-define but integral way. Praise God! His extreme reserve had cracked. He trusted her enough now to talk with her, to show up at her apartment unannounced, to visit Mollie. They were, perhaps, becoming friends for the second time in their lives. It hadn’t been easy to get to this point with him. That she’d managed it, that he’d let her, was a present more valuable than gold.

Surreptitiously, she skimmed a peek down the firm, uncompromising line of his profile. The sight reminded her once again of a scarred pirate, surveying his domain. If you liked that sort of thing.

She—the girl who didn’t lose her head over men—did. Like it.

“If you were Firewheel’s trainer, what would you do to help him?” Jake asked.

“Is this a test? You already know what you’re going to do about Firewheel, right? You’re testing me to see if I come up with the same answer.”

“Maybe.”

For certain. “If I were Firewheel’s trainer, I’d put blinkers on him.” The nylon hood with cups for the eyes limited a horse’s vision to what was in front of him. In the case of Firewheel, the blinkers would likely calm him. “That’s what you’re going to do, isn’t it?”

“Nah.”

“What?” she asked, incredulous. “Of course it is.”

A span of quiet passed. “Of course it is.”

Lyndie grinned with self-satisfaction. “Mmm-hmm. I passed the test.”

“I wouldn’t get too bigheaded over it. The teenager that sells ice cream in the clubhouse would know to try blinkers on Firewheel.”

“Then give me a harder test.”

He looked at her then, a look of mixed caution and admiration. As if he both wanted and didn’t want to find her charming.

She returned his level regard. Something real and enticing passed between them.

“Did I tell you that I liked conversation?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I changed my mind.” The words were gruff, but there was a tiny shade of teasing in his expression that blunted them slightly.

“Too late.” So, Jake wasn’t very good at friendship yet. Still, he was trying. His stilted, unpracticed efforts at it warmed her far more than effusive affection from another person ever could have.

One of his riders brought his mount to a halt in front of Jake. “Hold up for a second,” Jake instructed him, then knelt near the filly’s front hooves. Jake ran his hand down the delicate bones of the filly’s leg, his strong fingers amazingly gentle and articulate.

Lyndie watched, swallowing back tenderness. Did he know just how much his treatment of his horses communicated about him? It revealed to Lyndie his deep kindness. Unfailing fairness and compassion. Intelligence. Dedication. He worked through the weekends and watched over his recuperating horses vigilantly.

You could tell a lot about a man by the way he treated animals, and Jake treated the animals under his care as finely as any animals could be treated.

If you liked that sort of thing.

Lyndie was returning Willow to the barn at Lone Star the next morning when she spotted Jake. He stood outside Silver Leaf’s stall with a short, dark-haired woman next to him.

Lyndie came to an abrupt halt. She needed to return Willow to his groom, yet all of a sudden she couldn’t get her feet to move because, with a plummeting sense of disappointment, she recognized the woman next to Jake.

Elizabeth Alvarez had been a jockey at Santa Anita during the years when Lyndie had been striving to make a go of her own jockey
career. At that time, they’d been the only two female jockeys at the track and so had shared a tiny, makeshift room off to the side of the main dressing room.