Lindsay McKenna - A Man Alone

His mind moved swiftly to thoughts of Paige Black. Instantly, his stomach unknotted. When Thane closed his eyes and pictured her soft, oval face, her skin that sunset-gold color that belied her mixed heritage, the thick, long folds of shining black hair that emphasized her high-cheekboned face, his heart settled a little. The panic he felt began to ease, too. In high school, Paige had been a shadow. Everyone had teased her and her two older sisters about being shy little rabbits. Oh, it wasn’t right that they had been treated like that, but Thane knew why it had happened. The Navajo people too often suffered from prejudice, and since Paige and her sisters were part Navajo, they had been branded by the white kids.

Sighing, he realized that during his high school years, he’d always been more than a little aware of Paige’s quiet, unobtrusive presence. He’d been too fearful to approach her, afraid she’d reject him outright because he was an Anglo. Not that he’d ever made fun of her. No, Thane’s prejudice didn’t run in that direction. Her large, liquid eyes had always reminded him of a beautiful, graceful deer, and he’d never forgotten them. He’d wondered, from time to time, what had happened to her. Well, now he’d find out because of fate. His life…his leg were being entrusted to her care.

She must have gone on to Yavapai College to become a registered nurse, he mused. He knew it was a nice little college with a satellite in Cottonwood, which was only thirty minutes away from Sedona. He was glad she’d made something of herself. In a way, he was surprised, because Paige had always been passive and shy. Four years of college required a lot of persistence. Somewhere beneath that quiet, graceful demeanor, she had a backbone of steel, and that made him grin with pleasure.

The Blacks had a small ranch, he recalled, a struggling one where they raised sheep to produce wool for their large extended family, most of whom still lived on the reservation. The Black family was renowned for their Navajo rugs, which were sold for very high prices around the world. Those rugs brought money so the whole family could survive. But a Navajo family was large and extended, and the money never went far enough. Everyone had made fun of Paige’s parents having a ranch off the res. But conditions in the Sedona area were perfect for raising sheep. Back then, it wasn’t accepted that Navajo could survive off their reservation. But the Blacks had, out of pure guts and perseverance. Thane respected the hard-working family for that. They worked twelve hours a day, a hardscrabble existence, but they had succeeded.

What did Paige look like now? Thane wondered. Life had taken them in very different directions. He’d gone on to Annapolis at age eighteen and into a career as a marine officer. He had wanted to follow the illustrious footsteps of his father, who had been a Marine Corps general.

Scowling, Thane remembered how his mother had divorced his father when Thane was only twelve years old. She’d wanted to go back to her family’s ranch to raise him. She’d wanted a steady place for him to grow up and become a young man rather than be shunted like a Ping-Pong ball from one Marine Corps base to another every two years. Bitterly, Thane recalled the nasty divorce and the judge making a decision that, yes, he would go to Arizona to live with his mother until he was eighteen.

Thane had always hated that decision. Hated his mother for divorcing his larger-than-life father. Thane felt once more the white-hot grief of being separated from his dad, whom he adored and took after in every way. He hated the years spent at the cattle ranch because he had only been able to see his father once a year—if he was lucky. His dad had been overseas for three of those painful years of separation, and during that time Thane never saw him at all. It left a big wound in him, a lot of anger toward his mother. She had no right to do what she’d done. Thane could never understand her reasons or her dreams. Or her.

But then, he reminded himself bitterly, he didn’t exactly have a great track record when it came to understanding women, anyway. Too many of them reminded him of his mother in one way or another, and that scored the still-open and bleeding wound deep within him.

Home…I’m going home. What a hell of a fix. What was he going to do? His mother was fifty-eight years old now. He hadn’t seen her in ten years. Then, two years ago, his father had died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Thane had seen her at his funeral in Washington, D.C. and had spoken stiltedly to her. She had pleaded with him to settle their differences and be a family once again, but he’d steadfastly refused. His father had died a lieutenant general in the Marine Corps, a man widely respected and well loved by those in his command. Thane tried to mirror him in every way. He’d loved his father deeply. And seeing his mother at the funeral only exacerbated his grief over his father’s passing.

“Damn….” he rasped.

The word echoed weakly around the silent room.

Only the fact that Paige Black would take care of his needs on a daily basis made going home anywhere near palatable. Thane felt like he had been thrown from the skillet into the fire. And yet his only objective while riding this emotional maelstrom was saving his leg and getting the hell out of his mother’s house as soon as possible, going back to work as a marine. Above all, he wanted his old job back. And one way or another, he was going to accomplish it. Nothing else mattered. Nothing.

Thane spent his time on the Perseus jet that flew him back toward the States writing letters of condolence to the wives and families of the men he’d lost on the mission. It was a task demanded of him because he was the officer in charge of the Recon team. Even if it hadn’t of been, he’d have written. These men were his friends; they were like younger brothers to him. His handwriting was shaky and his eyes filled with tears again and again, until he was done. Sometime after that, with his hands folded over the last letter he’d written, he fell into an exhausted sleep.

At some point, someone gently removed the heartfelt letters from beneath his hands, which rested on his blanketed stomach. It might have been Jenny, the trauma physician, or Morgan himself. Thane wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter. Both were from the military and he knew they understood.

When he awoke, they were within an hour of their destination. Morgan was up in front, speaking on a phone, at a makeshift desk with papers surrounding him. The rear of the Lear jet had been revamped to make it easy for patients like Thane, who lay on a gurney with tubes hanging out of him, to ride with relative ease. Pain had awakened him. Jenny, who was in her mid-thirties, with short red hair and sparkling green eyes, adjusted the IV drip to give him more painkiller to ease his discomfort.

As soon as she did, Thane lapsed once more into a deep, almost comalike sleep. He was sure his need to sleep was due to many things: his injuries, the trauma of the surgery, his escalating emotions and grief over the loss of his men, his concern over what these losses were doing to the families, among other things. And, beneath it all, lay something he didn’t look at very closely: the fact that he was going home to a mother who was more a stranger to him than a parent. And to a house he’d hated growing up in because he’d considered it a prison. The weight of all those emotions raged through him, unchecked.

The next time Thane woke up, he found himself in a pale pink room. It took him a few minutes to realize that he was in a hospital—more than likely Red Rock Hospital, in Sedona, Arizona. It was a far cry from the Cusco hospital. This room was cheery in comparison, with fuschia venetian blinds, green plants hanging near the window and several paintings of flowers and landscapes. His leg was suspended, once again, with a set of pulleys and he noticed he wore a pair of light blue pajamas. The bed covering was a deep fuschia color and matched the venetian blinds. To his left was a huge set of windows, and he could see he was on the ground floor. There were shiny-leafed pyracantha bushes along the bottom edge of the window. Beyond that, he saw the gorgeous spires and buttes of Sedona.