The Solitude of Passion (50 page)

“We need to talk.” I drag him out the door, not waiting for an answer.

We head down the hall and behind a brick wall leading toward a staircase.

“What the hell is going on?” My hands tremble uncontrollably. I can hardly hold onto his fingertips.

“Nothing.” His jaw clenches. Max cuts a look out the blackened window and his eyes go dark as if God himself turned the light out in his soul. “By the time I got to him, he was already being worked on.” He grits it through his teeth, his eyes glossing with tears.

“You know something.” It comes out breathy, disbelieving that he would hold anything back from me. “He’s not going to make it is he? Was he—
is
he gone? Are they trying to revive him?” The world slows to a crawl. The walls warble in and out, and my voice comes back to me as a demonic echo. I spin around and try to run, find him, break into the room they’ve locked him away in and speak to him—kiss him one last time.

Max pulls me in by the waist and smooths my hair back as if he were comforting a child.

“No, Lee. I swear he’s going to live.” Max exhales hot into my hair. “He was conscious when the ambulance left. They had the wound taped up to stop the bleeding.”

I pull back and examine him. His eye twitches, his jaw pops as I inspect him.

“You’re acting strange. You know something.” I try to pull my arms from his stranglehold but Max is holding on for dear life. “I can read you like a book, and you’re not telling me everything. Did you see something?”

His gaze shifts to the floor. Max shakes his head, but his cheeks light up like flames refuting his actions.

“Who would do this to Mitch? Where was he?”

“Old road, south of the riverbed.”

“That’s practically abandoned.” My heart throbs in my throat like a fish out of water. “You don’t think he ran into a drug deal, do you? Or maybe—”

I take in a breath that never ceases. I forget how to breathe altogether. The dim hall fades to cold, grey steel.

“
You
—” I try to jab him with my finger, but it wags in the air like a stranger to my body.

Max bears into me. He doesn’t even bother to deny it.

“You
bastard
.” My hands slap over his chest as I try to push him away, but it comes out weak. Max restrains me by the wrists with no real effort.

“I swear to you. I had nothing to do with this.”

“That’s because you had your moron of a brother do
this
. You think your hands are squeaky clean, but I can see the blood on them thick as gloves—Mitch’s blood.” I spit in his face. “I fucking hate you, Max Shepherd. I
hate
you!” I scream it out for everyone to hear, and mean every last word.

Two hours slog by slow and meandering like a glacier drift. Max sits stoically by my side as though he wanted to be there, as though he cared, but he can’t fool me. He’d just as easily sit next to Mitch’s casket—dig his grave if we let him. I’m an idiot to have trusted him. I let the wolf in my life, and now Mitch is going to pay with his.

A surgeon enters briskly, half masked, dressed in powder blue from head to toe.

“He’s going to be all right.” His silver eyes crease into a smile as he gives the news. “There was a clean exit—no vital organs were harmed. It narrowly missed the scapula, but he’s pretty banged up. It took a lot to stop the bleeding.”

“Where is he?” Everything in me exhales with relief. Mitch is alive.

“In recovery. You can visit, one at a time.”

I don’t wait for him to finish, just speed past him on my way to sweet, gorgeous Mitch who I’ve tortured endlessly since he’s come back.

A nurse leads me to a man lying on a gurney with wires and tubes hanging out of his every part, and in no way does he resemble my precious husband.

It takes my breath away to see him like this. I’m horrified at what I’ve caused. I lean in toward him and pat his forehead with my fingertips. He’s bloated, his eyes glossed over with a thin seam of liquid.

“Mitch.” I take his hand, and I swear his fingers move. “Can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can hear me.”

Slight pressure builds around my fingers. Real or imagined I can’t tell, but I run with it.

“Mitch, I’m so sorry I brought this plague into our lives. I swear I never thought…” I let the words hang there. I don’t know how to finish the sentence. I could have never known. I would never have even dreamed Max would do something like this.

Max comes up and lands a hand on my shoulder. I hope he heard every word.

“I swear to you”—he whispers heavy in my ear—“I had nothing to do with this.” Max leans in and inspects Mitch. His lips tremble from the sight, and he crumbles.

Max pushes in close to his ear. “I will find the bastards that did this. And I promise you, I will kill them myself.”

My knees quiver with the heft of our new reality.

I place my hand over Max’s cheek and wipe away his tears.

I can read Max like a book. These are real tears. Max didn’t do this. He couldn’t have.

Could he?

Mitch

It takes several minutes of pleading with my body for my eyes to peel open. Long slow blinks, that’s all I get. I can make out Mom and Colt in a blur, then Max with Lee tucked under his arm.

I try to wipe my forehead, but my arm is secured, tied down to the bed and I’m wrapped like a mummy from the neck down. For a brief moment I’m reminded of a torture technique they used back home. I think I just called China home.

My eyes stay open long enough to process this isn’t the guest room back at the house. I try to sit up and my body won’t follow orders.

That’s right.
Eat this
turned out to be a bullet with my name on it. The convict with the golden tooth grins at me from inside my eyelids. It all comes to me with perfect clarity.

A strange dream comes back to me—a beautiful dream of Lee in a windblown wheat field. She promised if I woke up she’d leave Max—tell him right there and then.

I give a placid smile over at her. Too bad you can’t play back dreams—show them to people. I’d love for Lee to see how bad she wanted me—how she demanded that I live and blamed this whole nightmare on Max.

“Don’t strain yourself,” Mom says, laying the cool of her hand over my forehead. It feels so damn good. It forces me to close my eyes in appreciation.

“Are you in pain?” Lee’s voice.

I shake my head and blink up at her. Her face is swollen and blotchy around her eyes but her beauty shines through, and a knot the size of a softball swells in my throat.

“Hey, buddy.” Max pats my hand. “They’ve got you on Dilaudid. It’s ten times stronger than morphine—makes heroin look like baby aspirin.”

“Nice,” I manage. My voice sounds as though I’ve been sucking on gravel.

Colton crops up, and for a second I think it’s me looking down on myself. “When you’re up for it, the police want to swing by. They said they’ll check in with you tomorrow.”

Max shifts into Lee. He looks uncomfortable—
guilty
. Who else would want to blow a hole through my heart? I press my lips together. I’ll have to invite Max to the big meet and greet with the cops, see if he wants to offer up any info or maybe just turn himself in and save us all the effort.

The nurse asks everyone to leave, says I need my rest. One by one they say goodbye, but Lee stays, inspiring Max to linger by the door and listen.

“I love you,” she whispers through a broken smile. Two long black tracks mark where her tears have been.

“I know.” Still can’t get the words out.

“If you died, I would die.” It comes out as a fact. She looks dazed, unsteady.

I close my eyes trying to escape this nightmare. “Don’t say that.”

“It’s true. I can’t do this earth thing without you. I thought I could, but I was wrong.” She swallows a laugh. “The nurse said I could spend the night.”

“No. Be with the kids. Come back, though.” I offer a lame smile. Everything feels off, and for the first time I notice I’m able to track the scenery with my eyes and have it linger with an optical echo. “Go and kiss Stella and Eli for me. Tell them I love them.”

“I’ll be back”—she leans in and presses her lips to mine, hot and wet—“first thing in the morning.” She drifts to the door and blows me a kiss. “I love you deeper than the ocean, Mitch Townsend.”

My heart soars—makes me forget all about pain and bullets.

That night I dream in parchment—stacks and stacks of paper—white, red, blue, pink, yellow, brown. People with dark carpets of hair bustling around me like a river of humanity, folding paper—writing—prison bars. Someone calls my name, and I turn around. It’s Gao. He holds his hand out to me—tells me to come back. He’s got one more thing for me—wants to show me something, then I wake up.

A sharp pain ignites in my groin and my lids fly open. A heavy boned nurse has her hands over my crotch. She’s either trying to make sure I have a very good morning or my balls are about to get knifed off.

“Catheter is backlogged.” She doesn’t bother looking up at me. She might as well be talking about someone else entirely. “I’ve done it without waking a patient before.” She yanks at my dick like it’s a nozzle of some broken down appliance.

“Shit!” That fucking hurts. Burns like hell, too. She twists it like a cork and extracts the air bladder, holding it up for me to see with a victorious smile.

“We’ll get you to go on your own today.” She jots this down in my chart as though it were pertinent information. It’s nice to see my overpriced insurance money hard at work—tracking my bodily functions, jotting them down with the same intensity as a scientific equation.

That dream comes back to me. Gao—China. Maybe if I did go back, on my own terms, I could finally get out from under this black cloud I’ve been living under. People go to different countries all the time and they come back no worse for wear. Maybe if I go and come right back I can start feeling a little more in control of my life. It’s as if all those years hijacked so much more than my time, they took my sanity and put it under house arrest. Maybe I can flip the switch. Go over and come back—let the big guy show me it was all a part of the grand design, and I don’t have to fear an entire country.

Mom walks through the door and gives a little wave. I’m a little disappointed it’s not Lee, but then she’s got Stella and Eli to contend with, not to mention Max who’d put up a minefield to stop her from getting to me—or more accurately a firing squad pointed in my direction.

“How you doing?” She presses her cool cheek against my forehead and I feel all of six again. Mom smells like a sweet memory, some floral perfume I recognize from an entire lifetime ago.

“Better.”

“You look better. Doctor said it missed your vital organs. He said you must really have important things to do here.” She gives a stifled laugh. “Isn’t that the truth?” Her eyes sparkle. She can’t stop smiling.

I feel bad looking over her shoulder. Waiting for Lee to show, but I know she’ll be here.

“I had a strange dream about China.” It unnerved me—hell, it rattled me.

Her face darkens. “It’s over, hon. You’re safe.” Her eyes drift down toward my scars as if she were reliving the torment right along with me.

“I know. But what if there was something I was supposed to finish?”

“Like? The housing project?”

“I don’t know. Something. Maybe a lesson I didn’t learn the first time.”

My mother shudders. Her entire body sags in defeat.

“I’ve had this tugging since I got back—since I left—that something was…I don’t know.” Really I just want to know I didn’t waste five years—that something so damn meaningful took place but I forgot to notice. The egomaniac in me wants to think I made some vital difference—that if I came back on my own terms Lee and I wouldn’t be such a fucking mess anymore.

“What’s going on with Lee?” She tries to change the subject but lands us from one frying pan to the next.

“Things aren’t clicking. Like it or not, it looks like it’s Max’s time to shine.”

She shakes her head. “I can’t image how you feel and how overwhelming this all must be for you.” She plucks a tissue from her purse and blows her nose.