Julia Spencer-Fleming - One Was a Soldier

“The chief knows?”

“Yeah.” His throat hurt. “If you want to lodge a complaint against me, he’ll take it. Hell, I don’t know.” He looked down at his sneakers. “If you can’t work beside me, you ought to go ahead and file. I got more experience. I can find another job easier than you can.” He turned toward the bar before he could embarrass himself.

“Eric?”

He watched a pair of young guys trying for a tall redhead at the bar. “Yeah?”

She paused. “It’ll be good to have you on the job again.” She passed him, headed for their table, her drink in one hand. She didn’t look back at him. Eric breathed in. It felt as if a strap around his chest had suddenly been loosened.

“You okay?” Kevin’s voice was low.

He rubbed his gut. “Yeah. Thanks.” He glanced to where Hadley was taking her seat. “She’s a good person.”

“Yeah. She is.”

Eric looked at Kevin. “She know how you feel about her?”

Kevin flushed but kept his eyes on Hadley. “We work together. We’re friends.”

“Listen.” Eric thought about Jennifer. He was going to have to go through all this again with her, and it was going to be harder, and take longer, and there was still no guarantee she’d ever forgive him and take him back. “A couple years ago I would’ve said good, keep it professional, but life’s too damn uncertain, man. Hard and uncertain.” He twisted his wedding ring. “You see something good, you go after it. Don’t let it get away.” At the table, MacAuley bent over Harlene and said something. The dispatcher shrieked with laughter. Noble Entwhistle looked puzzled. “’Cause in the end, that’s all we have. Each other.”

Tell me. Tell me. Tell me.

Parked outside Margy Van Alstyne’s driveway at midnight, Clare could still hear Russ’s voice. His words had dogged her as she said good-bye to the Stillmans, surrounded by investigators in their own home. They throbbed with her pulse as her arm was tied off and her blood syringed into glass tubes. They kept time with her footsteps as she visited shut-ins, ran errands, cleaned house, walked down the still, silent nave of St. Alban’s.

Tell me.

She kept promising herself later. After the communications committee meeting. After she took Morning Prayer. After her family arrived. After dinner at Margy’s house. After the rehearsal. Then Russ was kissing her, smiling as their lips parted, murmuring, “I’ll see you tomorrow,” laughing as Lyle hauled him away to some hunters’ bar.

She had run out of later. In her bedroom, she smoothed a hand over the white dress hanging from her closet door. From its velvet box, she took the ring she was supposed to give Russ tomorrow. She let it rest in her palm. Such a small thing to bind up so many promises. With all that I have, and with all that I am, I honor you, she would say. She closed her hand into a shaky fist. Some honor.

Her heart pounded. Her mouth was dry. She tried to slow her breathing down, name exactly what it was that scared her so.

If I tell him, he’ll be furious with me.

No. He’d be upset, and worried, and overprotective, but he wouldn’t be angry.

If I tell him, it will get out, and everybody will know what a failure I am as a priest.

That was closer to the bone. The thought of being exposed made her nauseous. She already had enough problems trying to live up to her position. Who wanted an addict for a priest?

Addict. She had never used that term before. She thought of all the ways she would describe herself. Priest. Pilot. Christian. Woman. Soldier. She wet her lips. “Hi, my name is Clare Fergusson and I’m a drug addict,” she whispered. The words tasted like bottle dregs and the hard plastic coating on pills.

If I tell him, I’ll have to stop.

That was the bottom of it. If she told him, she’d have to stop, and that scared her more than anything. Facing every day, every night without her chemical crutches-she didn’t know if she could do it.

Tomorrow, Julie McPartlin would say, I require and charge you both, here in the presence of God, that if either of you know any reason why you may not be united in marriage lawfully, and in accordance with God’s Word, you do now confess it.

So here she was, huddled in a dark, cold Jeep while her parents thought she was out on a pastoral emergency. She’d been waiting over an hour, expecting him back at his mother’s well before now, praying that none of the neighbors called in a suspicious vehicle to the cops. Both her fear-fueled adrenaline and her amphetamines had given out long ago, so it took a beat, then two, before she realized the headlights coming down Old Route 100 were slowing down. The turn signal winked on, and Russ’s truck bumped into his mother’s wide dirt drive.

Clare tumbled out of the Jeep, shaking herself to get the cramps out of her legs. He was crossing to the kitchen door. “Russ.” She kept her voice low, but he spun around like a gunslinger.

“What the-Clare?” He walked toward her, jamming his hands into his jacket pockets against the chill. “What are you doing here, you crazy woman?” He peered past her toward her car, tucked in beneath the dark hemlocks at the edge of his mother’s property. He shook his head. “Waiting outside in the cold.” He kissed her lightly. “It’s Saturday, you know. I’m not supposed to see you.”

“I need to talk to you.”

His face shifted. “Okay.” He glanced toward the house. An outdoor light cast a glow over the granite steps and green door. A single lamp lit one of the living room windows, but otherwise the place was dark. “Come inside. We can talk in the kitchen.”

She shook her head. “Not here.”

He looked at her closely. “My truck.” He opened the door for her and then walked around to his side. When he got in, the pickup leaned beneath his weight for a moment. His door shut with a solid thunk. He turned on the engine and adjusted the heaters so they would blow on her. The air was still warm from his ride home. He reversed out of the driveway and headed west into the mountains. They rumbled over the stony Hudson River. “Okay. What is it?”

Face-to-face, in the moment, she panicked. Her throat closed. “I don’t,” she started. She pressed her fist against the ache in her chest. “I don’t know-”

He held out one hand. “Hold on tight and tell me.”

She grasped his hand and squeezed her eyes shut. “I have a problem. I haven’t told you. I’ve been taking pills. Lots of pills. I’m addicted to amphetamines.”

He breathed out. “Hang on.” She heard the tick-tick-tick of the turn signal and then the pickup was turning, bumping along an unpaved road. Finally he stopped. The truck jerked as he hauled on the parking brake. “Love? Look at me.”

She cracked open her eyelids. They were surrounded by hemlock and pine. Russ’s face was outlined in the green-amber light of the dashboard. “Tell me,” he said.

“I started taking sleeping pills and stimulants in Iraq. I came back with a, with a problem.” Admitting it a second time wasn’t much easier. “I also had antibiotics that I used to treat myself with. And Percocet. For a while I was taking a lot of Percocet.”

Russ pressed his lips together and nodded.

“I was close to running out a couple weeks ago. I talked Trip into giving me a prescription for Ambien and Dexedrine. He told me I couldn’t drink while I was on the pills, and he said he was going to spring a surprise blood test on me to make sure I wasn’t mixing.”

Russ closed his eyes. “The blood test you were supposed to get the day we found out about Ellen Bain.”

“I told him I just needed to get through the wedding-” Russ made a noise, a kind of despairing discovery, and she grabbed his arms, digging her fingers into his jacket. “No. Not like that. It doesn’t have anything to do with you, it never had anything to do with you.”