Blindsided (18 page)

With a sickening certainty, Nate knew he’d crossed that invisible line between caring and love. There was no other reason for his desire dig into a subject she clearly would rather have ignored. He had written this whole thing off as one of his impulsive moves, a way to get a girl he liked to stick around for a week and get around his own rules at the same time. But the truth was much scarier. He wanted to know about her, wanted her for longer than a week and knew that to help her long term, he had to find out what was going on. She would run again if he didn’t.

Oh, Christ, he thought, what have I done? Momentarily dumbstruck by this realization, Nate got lost in his own thoughts. There was real fear welling in him now. He had thought that caring for her was hard, but this scared the shit out of him. He’d never heard about this particularly weak feeling being in love had given him. He needed to help her, needed to make things right for her, and sometimes, that wouldn’t be possible. Fuck. He was going to shake Maddy and Bill when he saw them.

He forced himself to focus, first taking in the trees, the sunlight, the singing birds. Good. Now on her. She was in front of him, her ass wiggling as she walked, agilely picking her way over rocks and tree roots. There was another thing to love about her. She wasn’t so girlie she hated to go into the woods. He’d had girlfriends who refused to get out of high heels. But this was not helping him focus. He nearly screamed with frustration.

Where to start? Her job. If that wasn’t why she cried in the night, there was at least something weird going on there. She was on some sort of enforced sabbatical and then there was this odd Australian Incident thing. Maybe that was it. Maybe she was attacked by kangaroos or something. It was a place to start.

He took a deep breath and asked, “Why did you become a travel writer?”

“Why did you become a rock star?” she asked, turning the attention back to him.

She kept walking, didn’t break stride, but he could see her shoulders begin to tighten. Should he back off, or keep going? Instinct told him to press on, no matter how hard it might be. Maddy always said if you don’t want to talk about something, you probably need to. Not that he had taken that advice, but it seemed sound, in theory.

“I was good at music and not much interested in anything else. We got lucky. That’s really it,” he answered.

Okay, it was a tad simplistic, but that was the basic idea. But he wasn’t the one who woke up in the middle of the night crying. He didn’t have to talk about the bullshit from his past.

He opened his mouth to ask again when she blurted out, “You’re really trying to ask me why I’m always tired, and what the Australian Incident is, aren’t you?”

She used her hands to make quotes around Australian Incident. Nate lengthened his stride to keep up with her suddenly increased pace. So much for his attempt at subtlety, Nate thought.

He grabbed her arm and turned her to face him. She looked down. Jesus, what the hell was going on? Time to lay his cards on the table.

“That’s pretty much it, yeah. And there’s the fact that you wake up crying every night. I want to know why, Chelsea. It scares the crap out of me,” he said.

He tilted put his finger under her chin and tilted her head up so she had to look at him. Her face had the same panicked look he’d seen before and he folded her into him.

“It’ll be okay,” he said.

He had no idea if that was true, but he was bound and determined to make it okay, not matter what it took.

When she finally looked up at him the trust he saw there nearly knocked him over. He loved her, and suddenly that wasn’t so scary anymore. He just hoped like hell he deserved that trust.

###

Chelsea was used to telling stories. She made her living telling stories. But the stories she told were well thought out, practiced many times before they were ever heard. When wistful airplane seatmates asked why she had become a travel writer she had a breezy, simple answer: To get away from her mother. It usually got a laugh and neatly ended the discussion.

“I became a travel writer because I wanted to get away from my mother,” she said slowly, out of habit.

But she wanted to give Nate more than the pat, lighthearted answer she gave everyone else. Yes, her mother was part of it, her love of writing and traveling another part. But other travel writers didn’t work as compulsively she did, and they certainly didn’t have Australian Incidents. She was known in the field for her fierce drive that bordered on insanity. She had only discovered the reason for that drive in the past few months and had yet to tell anyone.

Exhaustion seeped into her muscles and Chelsea sank down onto a nearby rock. She felt suddenly unable to either stand or speak. Nate sat next to her and for a few moments, they sat in silence, taking in the surroundings.

The sun shone through the hole in the canopy of the trees, making the pine needles on the ground glow with coppery light. Particles drifted down from the trees, golden and shining in the sunlight. The place felt enchanted, magical. Maybe she could leave it all here, and when she left, she wouldn’t have to run.

“This is going to be jumbled up,” Chelsea said a few moments later. “I’ve never told anyone this, and I think I’ve just barely worked it out for myself, just recently, after the Australian Incident.” Chelsea saw the look of confusion in Nate’s eyes. “It’s my mother’s term, not mine,” she said with a sigh. “Maybe I’ll start there and work backwards.”

Chelsea thought back, trying to find an appropriate starting place, somewhere that made sense. Her memories were so jumbled and pieces were missing. The only thing from that time she had a firm grasp on was how she had felt. Her mind had been so drained, that only the sensory input had lasted, but maybe that was enough. Chelsea let the images and feelings flood back to her and just let her memories flow unhindered and hoped that Nate would understand.

###

Chelsea’s head throbbed and ached as the pilot flew her to Alice Springs, gateway to the Outback. He banked the small plane and Chelsea’s stomach and nervous system reacted violently to the pitch. Closing her eyes, Chelsea tried to focus on what the man was saying, ignoring the heaving of her stomach and the cold sheen of sweat that slicked her skin. Her habit was to catch a few hours of sleep in transit and she had been counting on closing her eyes and resting, but it was just her and the pilot. The noisy two seater was hardly conducive to napping.

Swallowing hard, she opened one eye and rummaged in her bag for a piece of fruit, an energy bar, anything to keep the blackness that had appeared at the edges of her vision from encroaching any further. Breathing was hard, but she took a deep breath anyway, forcing the air into her lungs by a sheer force of will. Her hand closed on a pack of dried apricots.

She swallowed several fistfuls, barely chewing the sweet, sticky fruit. It wasn’t until she felt them enter her empty stomach that she thought about how long it had been since she’d eaten. Had it been in Borneo? It hadn’t been the night before, in Sydney. Last night she had been too wired on caffeine to eat anything, too busy writing up the last three stories before she left civilization again.

A little more rummaging produced a bottle of water and Chelsea took several sips, trying desperately to get the words coming out of the pilot’s mouth to make sense. His accent was thick, the engine loud, but she was quickly finding those were the least of her problems. The words were making it through the noise and into her ears, but she couldn’t seem to make the individual words form sentences or coherent thoughts.

Her notebook, she needed her notebook. For a moment, her mind blanked and Chelsea felt a terrifying blankness grip her. She had no idea where to look for her ever present notebook. When she finally came back to herself and pulled it out of her front pocket, she noticed her hand was shaking badly. The plane, she thought, it’s just the vibrations of the plane.

But writing down the words of the pilot didn’t help them make sense. Her words were scribbles, stark black lines scrawling nonsense across the white page.
Red dirt, distant mountains, plane loud.
Those were the only snippets she could read.

Finally, after what seemed to be an interminable amount of time, yet also in the blink of an eye, Chelsea was on the ground. The plane was fast disappearing into the deep blue sky, leaving her and her guide, Marcus, alone for their drive and hike into the bush.

The jeep ride was no more restful than the plane and soon Chelsea was struggling to keep up with Marcus’s fast hiking pace. Chelsea tried to keep her focus, writing notes in her notebook and asking questions. She became more and more confused as the conversation and the landscape seemed to skip, pieces of it going missing. Knowing it would make her seem like a weak American woman but past caring, Chelsea opened her mouth to ask Marcus to slow down. Before the words got out of her mouth, the darkness on the periphery of her vision won.

Sounds coming from far away broke into Chelsea’s consciousness. Clattering metal, the quiet, wet swish of a mop, a ringing phone. What were these noises doing here, in the Australian bush? Tree branches cracking under the weight of unseen animals, the cries of strange birds, even a woman screeching about dingoes eating her baby, those were the sounds Chelsea had expected and prepared for. Who had a phone out here?

Deciding she must be dreaming, Chelsea rolled over in her sleeping bag, only to feel a sharp pain in her right arm that immediately shoved her brain into wakefulness. Instinctively, her body returned to its previous position, alleviating the pain in her arm as her eyes flew open. Her brain so expected her eyes to feed her images of a dying fire and a biting animal that it took her a few moments to process the actual sights.

A white room, filled with flowers, a television showing what appeared to be a soap opera, a window covered in blinds that were ineffective against the bright sunlight. Chelsea inspected her arm for any signs of trauma from the pain she had felt and found its source. An IV tube ran from the vein in the crook of her arm to a bag suspended above her head. Huh? Her shock had made her sit up in her bed, an adjustable one made with white sheets and protected by rails. Suddenly her head felt light and she sank back onto the bed. What in the world was going on?

Chelsea looked around the room for some clue of how she had gotten from the bush to a hospital room. She replayed what she remembered, but the last thing that came to her was leaving Alice Springs in a jeep, then hiking, then nothing.

Or not quite nothing, she realized as she sat in the bright room, squinting her eyes at the blank wall, trying to project her memories onto it to see what they held. The sensation of moving came back to her again and again, of being lifted and carried in someone’s arms, then laid on a something flat and soft. She remembered bumps, loud grinding noises. A dingy hallway with a small window on one end.

Exhausted, Chelsea lay back on her bed, her head aching from the exertion of sorting through memories made up only of senses, rather than thoughts. She had given up trying to recall more when the memory of a voice shot through her, making her muscles go stiff. It came over a phone held to her ear by an unseen hand, a voice shrill and unmistakable. Oh god, her mother was here, she knew it.

She was about to make a run for it, had begun marshalling her strength and contemplating the ramifications of tearing out the IV herself when a flash of pink in the hallway told her it was too late.

“My daughter needs to be bathed every day, young lady. What do you think I’m paying you people for?”

The voice echoed in the hallway outside Chelsea’s room. Squeezing her eyes shut, Chelsea quickly decided to go the “pretending to be asleep” route. She didn’t know how she had wound up here, but she knew she couldn’t handle what was about to come.

###

“After that, my mother just took over,” Chelsea said, still staring off into space.

She didn’t see the trees, nor the sunlight which had changed while she told her story. Her mind hadn’t made the leap from Sydney yet, from the hospital and the helplessness.

It felt odd to relive the experience like that, through her emotions and the feelings. She had no idea if it had made sense or not. Nate had had the good sense not to interrupt her during her reverie, though at some point he had pulled her against his chest and she lay snuggled against him. She glanced at him and saw that he looked concerned, but not confused.

“Did you work like that all the time?” he asked, “Not eating, not sleeping. No wonder you’re exhausted.”

“I did. For six years. I told you I wasn’t home very often,” she said wryly.

Wrapped in his arms, she felt more at home than she had in those six years. It was unsettling, to say the least. Yet she couldn’t quite pull herself away physically or otherwise.

“Yeah. I was severely dehydrated, my kidneys and liver were about to shut down from an electrolyte imbalance, and I was exhausted. So the doctor in Sydney said I had to rest even after I was released. Unfortunately, my mother showed up. The hospital called Tony, since he’s listed as my emergency contact, and she happened to be visiting and overheard him.

“You’ve experienced Annabelle. She just took over and I ended up spending a month in Sedona at some hippie dippy spa. I had to go to group relaxation classes everyday. Can I just tell you that there is nothing relaxing about visualizing yourself in a cloud when you’re surrounded by a bunch of type A lawyers and bankers trying desperately to be the best relaxers?” Chelsea said with a laugh. Nate smiled, but it was weak.

“I would have preferred renting a cottage by the beach in Australia and resting on my own, but I was too weak to argue with my mother. Not that I ever really talk back to her, at least until the other day,” she said with a shrug.