Surge (St. Martin Family Saga: Emergency Responders) Book 3: St. Martin Family Saga: Emergency Responders (12 page)

“I can’t do this anymore … I don’t want to do it anymore.” He vigorously rubbed his fingers through his hair. “You have an apartment much nicer than this one. I think you should go to it.”

“I-I don’t want to go. I love you. Every decision I’ve made for the last two years has been made with you in mind.” She choked through her staccato breathing. “My every move has been calculated so that on day we can take a dazzling bite out of life. You work so hard all the time and I want you to accomplish your goals, your dreams. But most of all I want you to be happy because you’ve made me happier than I’d ever imagined being. I thought I was in your dreams, your goals, your future.” She frantically shook her head. “No! I know for a fact I was in your dreams. You can’t feign a love like ours. All our emotion, our love and need is greater than any one bad or negative moment. You’ve always said you need my love and happiness to help you find your own. One can’t exist without the other.”

He did need her around to feel happy and content. Without her he’d succumb to the darkness and suffer bone-crippling nightmares. She alone kept his demons away and now she’d be gone.

She whispered and choked, “You said you’d stand by me forever.”

The room became eerily quiet. She looked down at her clasped hands. “You wanted to be married so badly you were grumpy for two weeks after the wedding.” Her gaze found his. “Has that all changed for you?”

No, Bug. It hasn’t. I love you and this is killing me. I’d rather be dead than to try to figure out how to survive without you.

His eyes narrowed and his brow curled in pain. He would sacrifice his wants and needs for her to have a shot at a full and complete life—a life with all her brothers, and her parents’ support of love and encouragement. There was no room for him in that picture.

He looked at her shoulder because he could never bear to see the pain he caused reflected in her eyes. “It’s changed for me.” He pointed from her to himself. “This is just taking too much energy. It’s become difficult.”

“If this is all true then why won’t you look me in the eye when you say it?”

His eyes closed tightly and his jaw locked. His teeth might shatter but he didn’t care. Time hung in the air. When he finally opened his eyes he knew his expression was banked, lost, hollow. “It is all true. We’re holding each other back. This isn’t healthy. You can go do all the things you want, like culinary school, without me here to keep you down.”

“I don’t believe you.” She gasped and her eyes pleaded with him and demanded the truth.

What could he tell her? What would she believe? He’d have to hurt her, but didn’t want to. Only it wasn’t to hurt her, it was to help her and give her the future she deserved. He inhaled deeply. “Given everything that’s happened—the secrets, New Orleans, your accident, my parents’ death—I think it would be better if we broke up. A clean break can mean a fresh start. You’re not good for me. I need something … different.”

“Jackson.” Huge salty bullets streamed down her face. She looked down at her hands clenched tight. “Don’t do this,” she whispered.

“I won’t return until I know you’ve gone.”

“Jackson, our future is weeping because you’re about to erase it.”

“It can’t cry because I’ve already deleted it.”

His hand hovered in the air before her, reaching, but then it dropped and he shook his head and turned to make his exit.

Oh, God. He wanted to turn back around and pull her tightly to him.

Don’t turn around.

Let her go.

Don’t turn around.

Don’t hold her back, set her free.

But I need her to survive.

Don’t turn around.

Bug, stop me, reach out and stop me.

If she stopped him from walking out the door he’d cave.

His hand rested on the cold steel doorknob. He waited a beat, hoping she would stop him or that he would be too weak and stop himself. Instead he growled in his throat and then gasped, almost sobbed, as he opened the door and walked slowly through it, listening for her footsteps. The only thing that could be heard was a huge gaping vacuum of silence. It was so vast he could hear his own heartbeat.

He opened the car door, every action so painful it was almost impossible to move. He felt the pull of gravity deep in his bones. He folded into his car and landed heavily in the seat. With every imaginable regret he’d had in his life permeating the atmosphere, he slowly inserted the key into the ignition and started the car. His throat burned and tears flowed freely down his cheeks. After he shifted the car into reverse he backed out and drove away. In the rearview mirror he saw her flailing her arms, screaming his name. And then she fell to her knees.

His fingers tensed around the steering wheel.

Let her go.

He watched as the image of her on her knees in the street became smaller and smaller in the mirror.

Choking out a cough he said, “Oh, Bug. I’m dying.”

His foot punched the accelerator.

He felt as he had the day his parents had passed. The world had become dark, cold, and impossible to navigate.

Chapter 12

Numbness settled into
Clara’s limbs. She knew she needed to get out of the street, but she couldn’t move. A car behind her stopped. She heard the commotion, but everything slowed to a crawl. A hand on her shoulder startled her and she looked up into the face of Mr. Porter.

“Clara? Are you hurt?”

“Yes!” She wailed and gasped. The look of worry on his face sobered her. “No, not physically anyway.” She put her hand to the ground to push herself up.

“Can I help you with anything?”

“No, Mr. Porter, but thank you.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“No, I’m not sure at all. Jackson just broke up with me.”

His brow curled into a pronounced frown. “That’s not something I would have ever expected. He seemed so gone on you.” He stared at her with a quizzical look on his face. “I’m sure it’s just temporary.”

“I don’t know … it sure seemed final.” She shuddered.

She walked toward the door. “See you around Mr. Porter.”

Standing in the foyer she wrapped her arms around herself and rubbed her arms. On the console table by the door sat an electronic frame that cycled through images of them.

She cried as she watched two years of their life play in loops on a five by seven square. They had so many memories to bury. One of him in a red sweater she’d knitted him. The right sleeve protruded past his fingertips and the left ended at his elbow. One of her with frosting on her face from a cupcake he’d dabbed on her nose. There was the one they took together at the Baton Rouge State Fair on the ferris wheel, their heads together. He’d taken some candid photos of her too. He liked catching her just waking up or when she was yawning, eating, or laughing uncontrollably. She’d done the same. There was a shot of him in his paramedic uniform just home from an eighteen-hour day. He’d been so exhausted. Another one of him in nothing but hospital scrub bottoms looking like sex personified. Another scrolled by of him in a lab coat with a stethoscope draped around his neck.

She wanted the frame, but knew it would rip her heart out to play it. Plus to remove anything from the apartment seemed sacrilegious. There was no way to separate any of it. The items couldn’t be divided because they’d discovered and explored them together. Everything they owned existed because they were together. To remove any one item would be too much like admitting they were done and she couldn’t force herself to do it.

She could only manage to gather some of her clothes, her laptop, and the fluted pie dish he’d given her. She also grabbed a few of his worn T-shirts and his pillow. She wanted his scent all around her until it faded away.

Car loaded with the items, she attempted to back out, but an imaginary tether connected her to the space. Her foot wouldn’t cooperate and allow her hit the gas because once she left this place it would formally be over.

“Cracker Jack.” Tears streamed down her face.

She dug around in her school bag and removed a post-it note. She wrote an important message she needed Jackson to read before he went into his apartment.

≈

Jackson pulled into the complex. Immediately he saw that her car was gone. He didn’t want it to be true. He’d half thought she wouldn’t leave, but she’d believed the lies he’d told her about needing more. He’d hate himself to the grave for the hurt he’d caused her.

At the door he pulled off a post it.

Code Jackson.

He removed a pen from his pocket and wrote
Code Clara
beneath her print. He stuck the sticky note on the foyer table. Tears fell for the past and the future that had been erased.

She should forget him and it should be easy. He was too old, too poor, and too shattered to be with her. Given her tendency to be introverted, she easily fell beside him and they rocked to a rhythm set by the tune of their hearts. But she needed to find her own rhythm, a young pulsing beat that would love eternally.

The apartment was just as he’d left it. His heart seized in his chest when his gaze landed on the electronic frame. A picture of Clara running through the halls at the hospital was currently displayed. He kicked the door shut behind him and took the frame off the base. He walked to the couch and plopped down, his limbs numb. His blood slowly pulsed through his body as silence surrounded him.

A new set of pixels molded into a picture of Clara on her stomach, legs bent behind her, smiling under a beach hat at the apartment pool. A cracked sob escaped his chest.

To say he couldn’t live without her was modest. Without her he’d surely suffer. Death was preferable to the torture he’d endure without her light in his life.

After an hour had passed he realized his body was in a state of shock at the loss.

Two hours.

The clock screamed the time. He’d been home for …

Three hours.

Provocative shades of orange and red mocked him into a lull between sleep and alertness. The sun slowly set.

Why did his parents die? He’d asked himself that question a million times. One decision had changed the course of all their lives. Dad had won flying lessons at a fundraising event he’d almost not attended. Mom had been sick the night of the event, but she’d told Dad to go to the event without her. He recalled Dad not wanting to leave, but then Jackson had told him he’d take care of her. He scrubbed his face with his hand. If Dad had stayed home, he never would have won the tickets that led to their eventual death.

When he’d made love to Clara the first time he’d found the answer to his destiny. If he lost her, they died for nothing.

Four hours.

Dusk was a time he’d always hated. He’d sit and wait for his parents to return from work. He was alone, like he was now. Eventually he’d realized they were never coming to take him from this darkness.

Five hours.

Just as Bug was never coming back now.

He yelled. For how long he didn’t know. A knock at the door interrupted his plummet into the burning hot center of the earth.

He opened the door.

“Oh, hey, Mr. Porter.”

“Hey, kiddo.” He rubbed his bulbous nose. “Looks like you’ve joined an underground fighting ring. Thought you might want some company. I’ve got a pizza coming. Not on my diet I know, but I always say if we give up what we love we may as well be dead.”

Mr. Porter nervously chuckled and turned toward the sounds of a car motor. “Oh, there’s the boy now.”

Mr. Porter was wise and had known great pain as he’d struggled, along with his wife, as she lost her battle with cancer. He’d spent one of his lives and was back to live out the second without the woman he loved. Jackson wondered how many lives the guy had.

Mr. Porter met the pizza guy at the car. Soon he stood before Jackson holding a hot sausage pizza in the air.

They sat on the couch and ate while watching sports news. Three pieces of pie later Mr. Porter spoke about the weather.

“If Camille were around she’d be gearing up to plant her bulbs in the ground.” He cleared his throat. “I may have to give it a go myself and see if I can get them to grow in her little garden on the patio. She loved caladiums.”

He wiped his face with a napkin. “I saw Clara this morning.” Mr. Porter didn’t look at Jackson as he spoke, but stared at the TV. “Seemed pretty upset. Said you’d broken up with her. For what it’s worth, when I watch you two together, it reminds me of Camille and me, when we were much younger of course. I loved her fervidly and was just glad she let me.

“How do you survive without her?” Jackson’s voice cracked.

“She’s all around me. I even find myself speaking aloud to her. If I’m lucky I’ll have a dream-filled sleep. We’re together again only she’s not sick. In the dreams we’re just doing mundane things like folding laundry, but the love and laughter we share make the task full of passion.” He scrubbed his face and sighed. “Some days are easier than others.”

“I’m sorry for your loss.” Jackson knew Clara had taken several meals over to Mr. Porter’s apartment after his wife had passed.

“My great love is gone, yours isn’t. Whatever it is that’s keeping you apart isn’t greater than the love you have for one another. You cling to that and it just may give you something to hold onto as you make your way through the shifting sand.”

Jackson nodded. The old coot was crazy. He went to the fridge and retrieved two beers, handing one to Mr. Porter on his way back to the couch.

Jackson remembered closing the door behind Mr. Porter. He didn’t remember much after that. He was sprawled on his stomach across the couch, drool leaked from his lips and created a puddle beneath his cheek. Early morning light from the window pierced his skull. He groaned and rolled to a sitting position. Five empty beer bottles cluttered the floor around him. The clock read seven o’clock. Damn, he was late for work.

He quickly showered and changed clothes. At least he hoped he was late for work. Clay may have had him terminated. He stuffed a change of clothes for the hospital in his backpack and gathered his keys, locking the door behind him.

Sitting behind the wheel of his Honda, he turned the key in the ignition. Nothing. He pulled out the key and then tried again. “Perfect!” The Honda had been eating through batteries lately. A buddy had told him he needed a new alternator, but he had neither the time nor the money for such a luxury.

He hopped on his bicycle. Given the hour he’d probably get to the station faster by bike than car anyway. As he pedaled he thought about Clara. She always hated when he took his bike over the bridge that crossed the Mississippi River. He missed her fretting over him and squeezing him tight before he set off on his bike ride. Thoughts of
shifting sand
and
clinging to a great love
made their way through his brain and he wondered where they’d come from. His great love was gone. And now he was completely alone with no love, no family, no Bug. Hell, he hadn’t even had time for friends. He was closer to Clay and Augie than he was to anyone except Clara. He’d lost them all when he’d lost her.

On the bridge traffic moved swiftly and more than once he felt a car crowd him as it passed. He could have sworn a Buick had connected with the right pedal on his bike, but maybe it was just the wind and noise. After all, he hadn’t crashed. Recalling last week’s wreck he refocused and rode defensively.

He was relieved to be pulling his bike into the station bay. He rolled it to a stop and looked up only to lock eyes with Clay. They both froze and then squared off. Jackson lamenting loss in his corner, and Clay pawing like a bull in his. Jackson had no strength left in him to fight. He hoped they could speak civilly, but if Clay wanted to attack him, Jackson wouldn’t put up a fight. He’d actually welcome the pain. His body had been numb since he’d watched Clara fall to her knees as he’d driven away.

Jackson held his palms in the air surrender style. “We broke up.”

“That doesn’t make any of this okay.”

“You’re right, it doesn’t.” Jackson looked off to the side before bringing his gaze back to Clay. “I can’t tell you how sorry I am, but I do love her, more than my own life. I would have died trying to make her happy.”

Clay crossed his arms across his broad chest. “Spare me the details. And that’s bullshit. If you loved her and wanted to keep her happy you would have never touched her.”

“I wanted to marry her.”

Clay’s enormous deep laugh filled the space. “Over my dead body.”

Jackson swallowed the thick rope of saliva in his mouth. There was nothing he could say that would make Clay understand why he needed Clara. “Do I still have a job here?”

“I can’t fire you for raping my sister.”

Jackson grimaced. “It wasn’t like that.”

“It was exactly fucking like that.” Clay’s yell was so loud it hurt Jackson’s ears and he wanted to cover them, but he fought the instinct. “Just stay out of my fucking way.”

Clay turned and walked out, leaving Jackson standing between the trucks. Firemen and paramedics currently on duty had come out to the garage to see what caused the commotion. Jackson glanced around, but nobody would make eye contact or even speak to him.

He spent the morning of his shift inspecting gear and completing inventory of the rig.

Around one-thirty a call came through of an explosion at one of the refineries. Jackson hopped onto the fire truck and Clay drove the crew to the site. It was strange to Jackson that he felt an innate need to be near Clay. The man hated him, but Jackson felt closer to Clara by being near Clay. He could also hope that one day his supplemental family would once again acknowledge him.

The fire had long been put out. Jackson and Clay worked side by side treating workers with minor burns and smoke inhalation. They worked as a duo with efficiency afforded by years of emergency experience together. After the last victim had been treated, they worked diligently to clear the area of all bio-hazardous material.

Jackson loaded the last red trash bag into the truck while Clay stowed equipment next to him. “Clay, I need to ask you something.”

“If it’s about work, go ahead.”

It wasn’t, but Jackson chose to ignore the warning in his tone. “Has anyone been over to check on her since yesterday?”