The Meridians (26 page)

***

27.

***

Lynette could see at once that Scott didn't believe her. And before she had a chance to really convince him, a crowd started to gather around them. One of the people who came over was Ruth, the woman whom Kevin had saved. She was holding her baby, and crying.

"I know I already told you this, but thank you. I'm so sorry about what I said about your son. If it hadn't been for him...." Her voice trailed off to nothing and she held out her baby as though the child was a punctuation mark that would make the sentence fragment she had just uttered make sense.

And to Lynette, the gesture
did
make sense. You saved my baby, said the gesture. Your Kevin saved my child.

Lynette was a mother herself, so understood completely. She nodded and smiled and touched Ruth on the shoulder. Ruth held her hand in her own, and Lynette was suddenly reminded of the many stories of Jesus she heard in church. She imagined that someone who had just been healed by the Savior might have held His hand that way.

"Don't," she said, pulling her hand away. "Don't thank me, just remember who it was that helped you." And of course by that she meant not that Ruth should remember that Kevin particularly was the person who came to her aid, but rather that she should remember that it was an autistic child, a special child, who had saved her. And so she should hold those children - all of them - as special in her own heart from this time forward.

A paramedic came over to the group, holding a medical kit. "I understand someone here was hurt," he said.

"Just me," said Scott. "Not much, just a -"

"Yeah, yeah, I get it," interrupted the paramedic with a good-natured smile. "You're tough, you're manly, you don't need medical aid, yadda yadda yadda. Just let me check you out, okay?"

Lynette grinned at the look of consternation that came over Scott's face. For some reason, when he was embarrassed he looked particularly attractive, and she noted that the scars on his face were becoming less and less noticeable to her. What she did notice were his eyes, which were so expressive. Sometimes angry, sometimes patient, but always kind, they were the eyes of a person she knew she could talk to.

They were the eyes of a person she could love.

She stepped back from that precipice almost immediately, telling herself to hold on, to put on the breaks, to reign in the horses. She had only met the man once or twice, and now....

"You were right, cowboy," said the paramedic, finishing looking at Scott's ear. "The ear isn't too bad, though you should probably have a plastic surgeon look at it just to make sure you avoid any scars."

Scott grimaced good-naturedly, the expression puckering the scars that crisscrossed his face like a white mask. "Do I look like I have a problem with scars?"

The paramedic grinned back, and Lynette noticed how well the two were getting along. Did Scott get along with everyone? she wondered. Or was there something in particular about people like Gil and the paramedic that Scott could connect with? For some reason she suspected that it was the latter, if for no other reason than the fact that she imagined that someone who had lost his entire family - not just a part of one, as she had - might have problems forming connections.

As soon as the paramedic moved away, she asked Scott about it. "You have a thing for paramedics?" she asked.

"No, why?" asked Scott.

"You just seemed to get along with him, like you knew him or something."

"No," he answered. "Didn't know him, but -"

"Yes?"

He hesitated, as though about to confide something to her. "I understand guys like him."

Lynette intentionally played dumb, knowing intuitively that to do so would elicit more information than simply accepting the answer Scott had just given her. "You understand him? He was speaking English, right? What was there to understand."

"No, just guys
like
him. Paramedics, and...."

Scott didn't finish the sentence; looked as though he suddenly
couldn't
finish it. Then Lynette realized: Gil was a deputy sheriff in the Ada County Sheriff's Department. And the paramedic....

"Which were you?" she asked.

"Excuse me?" said Scott.

"Were you a cop, or a firefighter, or what?"

"I thought it was your son who saw the future, not you who could read the past," said Scott with a grin.

Lynette didn't grin back, sensing her question was being avoided. She crossed her arms in front of her and said, "Which?"

Scott looked rueful for a moment, then answered, "Cop."

"Where? Boise? Did you work with Gil?"

"No. Los Angeles."

"You didn't tell me you lived in Los Angeles, too," she said, surprised.

"You didn't ask."

"Scott," she said, and swatted his arm in mock anger. "That's the kind of thing that friends tell each other."

"Ow, lady, don't hit, I've been wounded, see?" He pointed to his ear as though it was worthy of a purple heart or the Congressional Medal of Honor. Then he grew serious. "So we're friends, then?"

The question was delivered with such utter sincerity, with such a sense of import, that it stopped Lynette cold. After all, she barely knew this man. Sure, he had been helpful to her when she moved in, but being helpful was different than being a friend. But he was kind, and she could sense a deep and abiding goodness in him.

And Kevin had
hugged
him. That alone answered the question.

"Yes," she said. "We're definitely friends."

"Then," said Scott, "I think you should tell me the whole story."

"What whole story?" Lynette asked.

Scott sighed. "I wasn't the greatest cop in the entire world," he said. "But I was good enough to tell when someone wasn't telling me everything important. And you, missy, have been holding some things back since the first moment I met you."

Lynette opened her mouth to protest, then closed it again.
Could
she tell Scott about the gray man? Would he believe her? After all, it wasn't even certain that he believed her about Kevin and the fact that he had saved Ruth and her baby, though Lynette knew without a doubt that that was the case; could feel it in her bones as certainly as she could feel that Kevin was her son and that she loved him with all her heart.

Maybe not
all
of it
.
Maybe there's room for one more.

Stop it, Lynette.

To Scott, she finally answered simply, "You're right, I haven't told you everything."

"So?" Now it was his turn to cross his arms. "You gonna spill or what?"

She looked around. Though they were no longer the center of attention, there were still far too many people around for her to feel comfortable simply expelling the story of her life - at least, the story as far as it mattered - to a new friend.

"Not here," she said.

"Where then? When?"

She looked around again. A police cruiser had just pulled into the parking lot and was pulling to a stop next to the smoking remains of the truck and the Volvo. She pointed at it. "You tell me."

"What?" he said, looking befuddled.

"You were a cop, right?" she answered. "Are they going to 'take us downtown' or 'book us' or anything like I see on all those cop shows?"

"No," he said with a smile. He was so handsome when he smiled. "But we'll probably have to make a statement, and I don't know if they'll have us do it here or invite us to the station to do it."

"Oh, so you guys invite people places? I thought it was just handcuffs and guns."

Scott smiled again. "Oh, police invite people all the time. Just it's kind of like getting an invitation from deity. You should probably say yes, because the alternative isn't likely to be nearly as good as the invitation."

Lynette noted that he said "deity" instead of "God" or even "Buddha" or "Allah" or any kind of proper name that indicated he believed in a higher power and filed the fact away for future reference. She sensed there was a story there, too, and she wanted to hear it.

"So it's going to be a while before we can escape the clutches of the pigs," she said, grinning wickedly.

"Hey! Watch how you talk about the brothers!" said Scott in mock anger. Then he smiled once more, and once more the grin lit up his face like a candle from within. "Yeah, it'll probably be an hour or two before we're done here. I'll talk to the 'pig' on the scene, though. He probably knows Gil, so I suspect that Gil will be over there in a second telling him what happened and asking him to take your statement first, so that you can get Kevin home."

"Preferential treatment?" she said.

"Just don't want you getting mad and hitting anyone else," he said over-seriously, rubbing his arm where she had slapped him a few moments ago.

And he was right. Within a few moments an Officer Olacsi came over and asked her if he could ask her a few questions. She said yes, then turned to Scott quickly and said, "Tonight. My place for coffee."

"I don't drink coffee," he said with a twinkle in his eye. "And I'm not sure I remember where you live."

"Cocoa, then," she answered. "And I
know
you remember where I live."

"Sure of yourself aren't you?" he replied.

"Of course," she said with her best imitation of a model flicking her hair on a L'Oreal commercial. "I'm stunning."

"You are that," answered Scott, and suddenly she knew that he wasn't joking, and it was her turn to be embarrassed.

She turned quickly to Officer Olacsi and began walking away with him, then turned back at the last second and said, "Don't flake on me, Scott Cowley."

He held up both hands. "Wouldn't dream of it."

And she smiled again, and he smiled at her. This time, his smile was even nicer, and she wondered if it was because he was happy that
she
was smiling at
him
, too. She didn't know, but she liked the thought, and smiled even more widely.

Then she thought of the night to come, and the story she was going to tell, and wondered if Scott would believe any of it, and now her smile was gone, swallowed up not by a scarred face and blue eyes, but by an old man in a gray suit.

Would she tell Scott about the gray man? she wondered.

Would she ever tell
anyone
about the gray man?

A sudden wind, unseasonably chill for this time of year, whipped through the parking lot. She shivered, but not from the cold of the wind. She shivered from the cold of the color gray, and the expressionless eyes of a madman who had tried to kill her and her son.

Somehow, she knew that today was linked intrinsically to the events of her past.

Somehow, she knew that she would be seeing the gray man again.

And soon.

***

28.

***

Scott listened to Lynette's tale with an odd combination of belief and incredulity. He knew that she had to be speaking the truth, because in her stories of the ghostly gray man and his homicidal urges he heard echoes of his own past that resonated together too closely to be anything but compelling harmonies to the same music. In fact, he sensed at one point that he was believing too easily, at least in her mind. And he couldn't blame her for being suspicious of the easy way that he believed her tales of phantom bullets appearing in utero; of bright red balls - she brought them out and showed them to him - that disappeared and reappeared forty feet away without anyone apparently moving them; of the words "Witten was white" uttered over and over in the otherwise deathly silence of a toddler's sleep; and, most of all, of a gray-suited old man who was trying to kill her son.

So to allay her obvious fear that he was putting her on - and because their stories were clearly intertwined, he told his own version of the things that had happened. He told her of the deaths of his son and wife, and of Mr. Gray's attempt on his own life. He told her of John Doe, who had died and then reappeared eight years later, and of Mr. Gray's own reappearances, both ghostly and corporeal, but in all cases a Mr. Gray who was much older, and who claimed to have been a "ghost" for sixty years and more. He told her of the fact that their meeting had not been coincidental; that John Doe had told him to show up on the very night and time - and at the very address - when she was moving in. She told him everything, he knew, even the parts that were most painful to her, and he could not help but do the same in return.

At last, exhausted, they broke from the seriousness of their conversation, and for a time talked about nothing more nor less amazing than what it was to be a parent, a spouse, a part of a family. Scott's heart ached when he heard her speak of her love for Robbie, and ached still more when she spoke of her love for Kevin. And it was not that he thought his own spouse less important than his dead child; it was instead the fact that when she spoke of Kevin she spoke of a person still present, a member of her family who still lived and, as much as was possible, thrived, with her. Scott had no corresponding family member to be with him, so he twinged with the slightest hints of aching jealousy as she spoke of Kevin, of his good heart, of his typed communications that were the only and best way that he spoke to others.