Kathleen Creighton - One More Knight

“How do you know?” Dobrina demanded. “He tell you that?”

“Look,” Charly began in an airless croak, “I don’t-”

Her son rounded on her then, jerking away from Dobrina’s restraining hand. “Well, I don’t want you here, okay? So you can just go back to wherever you came from. You are not needed here, understand? You are not welcome here. So you can just…go. Right now. Go on, get out of here. Leave us alone!”

I don’t want you here. The words were like a wind in her ears, drowning out even the sound of her own pain. She could see Dobrina’s lips moving, knew her own throat must be forming words in reply, but she heard nothing.

Go…now. Cold as she was, numb as she was, somehow she found a way to make her body obey. Just as she had twenty years before, Charly left her son, walked away from him down a hospital corridor and did not look back.

“So that’s about the size of it,” Troy said into the phone. He gave a half-embarrassed chuckle and lowered his voice even though there wasn’t anybody around him to hear it. “I’m tellin’ you, little brother, I’m startin’ to feel like maybe I’ve bit off more’n I can chew.”

“Well, now, that’s a new one,” said Jimmy Joe.

“I mean it. I used to think I could handle myself in just about any situation, you know? But this…ah, hell, I think I’m outta my league here, man.” He let his breath out in a hiss of frustration and ran a hand over his hair. “I don’t know what the hell’s goin’ on.”

“Goin’ on? With what? Who? You mean-”

“I mean with her -Charly.”

“Ah.”

“She’s got…stuff goin’ on here. She’s havin’ a pretty hard time with it-I don’t just mean her dad havin’ this heart attack, either. I’m pretty sure it’s more complicated than that. Anyway, I’d like to help her, you know? Only she won’t tell me much about what’s goin’ on, and I…well, hell, you know how it is. I don’t want to be stickin’ my nose in where it doesn’t belong, but…”

“Uh-huh,” said Jimmy Joe. And then for a few minutes there was silence, while all sorts of things flew back and forth along the wires unspoken, the way they do sometimes between guys who are close to one another but unaccustomed to expressing their deepest feelings in words.

Then there was a little throat-clearing sound, and Jimmy Joe said, “I ever tell you how I came to meet Mirabella?”

“I heard the story,” said Troy cautiously. “Picked her up in your truck, right? Somewhere out in the Texas Panhandle in a blizzard? Delivered her baby on Christmas Day and made the national news.”

His brother chuckled. “Well, there was a little bit more to it than that.” He paused. “See, I’d run into her before all that happened, over in New Mexico. I noticed her right away-hard not to, you know, pregnant as she was, and lookin’ like she does. Anyway, I kept wonderin’ about her-what she was doin’ out there like that, pregnant and all alone, so close to Christmas. The more I thought about it, the more it didn’t make sense to me. And the more it bothered me. But I was like you-I didn’t think it was any of my business, didn’t think it was my place to ask.”

“Uh-huh,” said Troy, listening intently now.

“Well, then, of course, the more I got involved with her, the more I wanted to know about her. And I kept tellin’ myself it still wasn’t any of my business. And then somewhere along the way I came to a point where…”

He paused, and Troy prompted, “Yeah?”

“I knew it was my business,” said Jimmy Joe.

“Ah,.” And there was another of those silences, vibrant with unvoiced truths and revelations. Presently Troy let out a breath and said gruffly, “So, how do you know?” He coughed. “When you’ve reached that point, I mean.”

His brother’s chuckle was one he’d never heard before-gentle, contented and wise. “You’ll know.”

After that there wasn’t much Troy could do but say his goodbyes and sign off, feeling not a whole lot less frustrated than when he’d dialed. He was just hanging up the phone when he saw Charly coming down the hallway. He shoved his calling card back in his billfold and started toward her, still jabbing with it at his hip pocket. Took a couple of steps, got close enough to get a good look at her face and stopped, while his insides turned to ice water.

“Bad news?” he asked softly.

“What?” Her eyes lost their glaze and focused on him. “Oh, no, no, it’s okay, he’s asleep. No point in staying. Let’s go, okay?” Her voice sounded breathy but with a little catch in it, as if, he thought, she’d been running with the hounds of hell on her tai.

As tuned to her as he was, it took him a beat longer than it should have to notice the two people down at the end of the corridor by the ICU, the place Charly had just come from. But he still had a lot of his SEAL reflexes, and when a distant movement flicked at his peripheral vision, he glanced that way first, then focused in a little harder. He could see it was the housekeeper-Dobrina, was it?-standing in the entrance to the waiting area. But who was the guy with her? A young guy, real young. Hardly more than a kid.

“Who’s that?” he asked, keeping it as casual as he could.

Charly didn’t even look, just hunched her shoulders and muttered, “Nobody. Let’s just go, okay?” She sounded as if her jaws had been wired together.

Which was about the way Troy felt, too. There was a red-hot poker of tension shooting up through his neck muscles, right between his jaws and into his temples. He kept having to remind himself to unclench his teeth.

“Where would you like to go?” he asked politely when they were outside in the soft purple dusk, with the breeze lifting their hair and offering up in return the summer smells of honeysuckle and rain, and the music of frogs and bugs and night birds.

Halfway across the concrete apron where the ambulances parked to unload their passengers, she suddenly halted, swaying up on her toes with the abruptness of it.

“I don’t know,” she breathed on a long exhalation, lifting her face to the sky so that her hair brushed the upper part of her back. He didn’t want to notice the way it slithered across the bare skin above that little black top she was wearing, but he did. And it made his stomach curl, “I don’t care. I just want to get away from this place. I hate hospitals.” He noticed then that her eyes were closed.

He didn’t think about what he did then-maybe it was just a kind of self-preservation thing, because it had become too damn hard to look at her, seeing all the little telltale signs that told him how bad she must be hurting. The way her mouth didn’t move quite right, twisting when she wanted it to smile; the way she kept grabbing those quick, shallow breaths, like a child trying not to cry; the way she hid her eyes from him, as if even in the purple twilight they might give away more than she wanted them to. Then again it could have been from motives as pure as the instinct to comfort another human in need, or as impure as his own need to answer that curling in his belly with some kind of action. What did it matter?

In the end probably not at all.

He stepped up behind her and brushed the powdery soft skin of her upper arms with his palms. When she shivered, he slipped his arms around her and pulled her against him with a sigh, not realizing until he’d done it how much he’d been longing to.

“Don’t know anybody who doesn’t,” he murmured, slurring his words against her hair, “hate hospitals…”

She didn’t answer with words, but moved against him in a subtle way and tilted her head to one side in unspoken invitation. He didn’t need to be asked twice, though he did pause for a moment before taking her up on it to enjoy the view from where he stood, letting his eyes feast on snowy slopes and sweetly rounded hills…disappearing into black silk not quite soon enough to hide their rosy seashell crests. And with his hands where they were, it was so easy to turn his palms up and cradle them both and thus encourage them even more fully into his sight. And then to explore with his thumbs those hard little peaks, through the covering of silk that shielded them from all other eyes but his.