Bed of Lies (30 page)

Jamie. So little. So vulnerable.
He couldn't stand thinking about Jamie living the way he and Emma must have, and yet, he couldn't quite see himself, either, as terribly vulnerable and only four years old.

He must have been bigger, he thought at first, tougher, more capable of taking care of himself, of shielding himself from it. Surely, he had. And Emma had been there, taking care of him, but still... Four? Jamie was what four looked like? What Zach had been, when all those bad things happened? It didn't seem possible.

"It all gets inside us somewhere," Emma said. "We carry it all around, whether we realize it or not. We can build defenses against it, like building a well inside us, dropping the emotions to the bottom and sealing it tight. But it's still there, and one day something happens to bring those issues back to the surface."

"And then what?"

"It all comes out. It's like poison. You don't want it inside you."

He nodded, working really hard to breathe right now. He'd been kind of hoping she could tell him how to stuff it back inside.
Poison,
she'd said. "It feels like that, and I don't know what to do with it, Em."

"That's all right. I do."

She sounded so calm, so accepting, he found the courage to confess, "I feel like I'm falling apart."

"It's just the walls coming down, Zach, letting you feel all those feelings you've been trying to hide from. And it's scary, but you'll get past it."

Next big, scary question. "So you don't think I'm crazy?"

"No, you're not crazy."

God,
he'd really needed to hear her say those words.

"So, you can fix me? You or someone like you?"

She looked perfectly calm and confident. "It's what shrinks do, Zach, help you deal with emotions like this."

He nodded, both comforted and dismayed, like a man who's been told the disease isn't fatal but the cure is really hideous. "I was afraid it would come down to that." How about that? He'd admitted that, too.

"There's nothing wrong with needing help," Emma said.

"It's just not a place I ever thought I'd end up."

"Me neither," she said.

He looked up at that and could not have been more surprised. "You, too?"

She nodded. "After the mess with that guy."

"I never knew," he said.

"Well, most people don't exactly take out an ad in the paper when they go into therapy." She sighed. "I probably should have told you, but it made me feel stupid and vulnerable, thinking I couldn't handle it on my own. I'd handled so many other things."

"Yeah. Exactly. I feel like I've handled things that were so much harder than this."

"It just means it's time to deal with it. That's all."

"So, this doesn't surprise you? I come over here and tell you I'm falling apart and I need a shrink, and... it's no big deal to you?"

"Did you think I'd be shocked?" she asked, grinning.

"There you go," he complained, trying desperately to make light of this, "with that damned question-to-answer-a-question again."

"Sorry. I'm not shocked, and I'm not nearly as worried as I was before you came home. It would be a big deal if you were determined to try to run from it. That's when people get into trouble—when they need help and don't get it, because they're scared or ashamed or just don't know there are people who can help."

Okay, he got to spill his guts in therapy. Maybe he could bring himself to tell the shrink everything he still hadn't said to anyone else. "I really hate this, Em. I don't even want to tell you what I thought might happen..."

"When you finally said those things out loud?" She smiled back at him. "It'll be all right. Promise."

Now he really wanted to be done with this conversation. He had the perfect diversion. "Mom mention that Gwen and I called it quits?"

"Finally." His sister grinned broadly. No surprise there, either.

"What is this?" he said, more loudly than he normally would have, feigning outrage. "Everyone knows more than I do about my own life?"

She just grinned some more.

"Women," he muttered. "What's a guy supposed to do with them?"

"You could probably address that in therapy, too, " she deadpanned.

He sat there, absolutely still for a moment, then realized she'd made a joke about him going into therapy. She wouldn't be able to joke about it if she were that worried about him.

A split second later, Zach laughed, and then he lunged at her, shoving her sideways in the grass, careful to grab on to her and roll her so that he hit the ground instead of her.

She landed on top of him and shrieked, "You rat!"

Emma grabbed a handful of leaves and threw them at him. He threw some right back, manhandling her some more until she was flat on her back on the ground, and they ended up wrestling, him trying to get at her ribs, because she was ticklish as hell.

She was giggling and still shrieking when he got her in a particularly tender spot, and it was after one of those shrieks that her husband came barreling around the house and into the backyard, yelling her name.

Zach saw Rye coming and held up his hands in surrender as Rye stopped short, a foot and a half away. "Sorry. It's just me."

Zach took his sister by the hand and tugged until she was sitting up on the ground beside him. They both laughed again, until they caught the thunderous look on Rye's face.

"Jesus, Zach. You took ten years off my life, and I really can't afford to lose time like that, now that we're having another baby." Emphasis on
another
baby. "What the hell were you doing?" Rye demanded, still breathing hard and glaring at Zach.

"It's all right," Emma said, brushing her hair out of her face and finding leaves tangled up in it. She started pulling them out.

"God, I thought someone had jumped you in the backyard or that something had happened with the baby."

"Nothing's going to happen to me or this baby," she said. "Zach tickled me, and you know what happens when someone does that. You do it, too."

Rye took another breath, calming down a bit. Zach knew nobody messed with Emma. Rye made sure of it. He came to stand beside his wife, gently moving her hands out of the way and freeing the last of the leaves from her hair.

The gentleness of his touch, the way he let his hand linger there, as if he'd stroked it through her hair a million times and wanted to do that very thing a million times more, suddenly seemed so intimate, Zach had to look away.

She was just fine, he reminded himself. No matter what she remembered of her time with George and Annie Greene and what emotional wounds had been inflicted, his sister was whole and surrounded by love.

Rye finished with her hair and then sat down on the ground beside her, pulling her against his side and glaring at Zach. "This is how you treat pregnant women?"

"Only ones who happen to be my sister," Zach said. "Sorry. I forget how loud she can be when she's riled." He leaned over and kissed her, trying to get back into her husband's good graces.

Rye shook his head and took a breath, then looked over at Emma. "And you couldn't wait for him to get home?"

"He'll behave now," she said, kissing her husband. "And if you really want to hurt him, you and Sam can gang up on him on the basketball court tomorrow. Rachel called earlier, and she said it's supposed to be nice and warm. She wants to get everybody together for a cookout."

"Whipping him on the court might make me feel better," Rye admitted.

"Oh, right. Like the two of you are going to hurt me?" Zach boasted. They shouldn't be able to. Even though they were both in great shape, he had more than twenty years on Rye and even more on Sam.

"You sit in a courtroom all day in a fancy suit, Zach. Makes a man soft and slow."

"We'll see who's getting soft," he bragged.

Rye's cell phone rang a moment later. With a warning to Zach to behave, Rye got up and took the call, walking toward the front of the house.

Zach got to his feet and then helped his sister up, taking a minute to fuss over the little bulge of her tummy. "I didn't hurt the little guy, did I?"

"No, and my little guy's a girl," she insisted.

"You know that for sure?"

She nodded. "Genetic testing. I'm thirty-seven now."

"Everything okay?"

"She's perfect."

"I meant with you. Rye sounded worried."

Emma sighed. "Well... this was something of a surprise. Things happen, you know?"

"Emma—"

"I did not make this happen on my own," she said, feigning outrage over a question he hadn't yet had a chance to ask. "I had help from my husband, and I assured him that if he's up to making babies at his advanced age, I'm pretty sure he'll be around to help me raise them."

"Oh," he said.

"You know how he gets. Every time I get pregnant, he starts running timelines in his head, grumbling about how old he'll be when the baby does this or that. And then once they arrive he forgets all about that and just turns into a great dad."

"You don't worry?" Zach asked.

"He's my husband, and we're going to have a new baby together," she said. "And we'll raise this baby together, the way we're raising all our children."

She looked serene when she said it, and triumphant, he thought. He wished he could borrow just a little bit of her faith and tuck it away inside.

She gave him a giant hug, and said, "I'm so glad you're home. Don't you dare go ducking my phone calls like that again."

"I won't," he promised.

Dana opened up the screen door and yelled. "Mom? Amy called to remind you of your three o'clock appointment. It's quarter till, now."

"Thanks, sweetheart. I'm coming." She turned back to Zach. "Walk me to the office?"

"Sure." He took that to mean she wasn't done with him. Or maybe she'd introduce him to her colleague Jane.

Time for Zach's adventures in therapy.

Great.

Chapter 14

Emma made sure the kids were settled, then she and Zach took off.

"I would have followed through and made the appointment with your friend, Em," he said as they walked.

"That's not why I asked you to come today."

"Then why?"

"You'll see."

They were still a block away from her office when he spotted Peter and Julie getting out of Julie's car, which was parked in front of Emma's office.

Zach stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and grumbled, "Do you and Mom tell each other everything?"

"Gotcha." Emma grinned. "Rachel didn't say a word about you and Julie. I guessed."

"Shit," he said. They drove him crazy, just knowing stuff like this about him. "What gave me away?"

"You wouldn't call us, Zach, no matter what we did or said. But when Julie needed help, you were on the phone to us right away."

"That's it? A couple of phone calls, and you've got me and Julie—" He broke off abruptly.

"You and Julie, what?"

"Never mind," he said.

"You knew they were coming, right? I mean, I wouldn't have had you come down here..."

"Yeah, I knew, and I hope you can do something with this kid," Zach said. But this was just great. He and Peter could be in therapy together. Then Zach realized something else he really should tell his sister, for Peter's sake. "Listen, the kid saw us together earlier today, and he was pretty upset."

Emma stopped where she was, still half a block away from her office. "What were you and Julie doing?"

If he remembered correctly, he was wishing he could strip her naked under that big old tree and have her right there.

"We were kissing," he said. Technically, it was true. Which sounded like something Julie would say. Zach started grinning.

"Must have been some kiss," Emma said.

"It was." And then he had to add, "Peter thinks we were involved in Memphis and that Julie came here to be with me, not because Peter needed her."