Loving Jessie (27 page)

“Please, Matt. We’ve been building something special. Something wonderful. Don’t let this ruin it.”

He sighed, suddenly aware of every one of his thirty-eight years, of the dull throbbing in his shoulder that never seemed to completely disappear, of the matching throb in his temples, of the fact that he’d gotten almost no sleep the night before.

“Give it time, Jessie. Give
me
time.”

She looked up at him, her eyes all big and dark and scared, and he wanted nothing more in the world than to pull her out of her chair and into his arms and tell her
that everything was going to be all right, but he couldn’t do that. Not yet.

“I’m sorry, Matt,” she whispered.

“Yeah. Me too.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair again. Normal, he thought. What they needed now was something normal, even if it was all smoke and mirrors. A baby, he thought, looking at her. He was going to be a father. They should be celebrating, making plans, picking out names. He forced what he hoped would be a reassuring smile. “We’ll work things out, Jess.”

He hoped it wasn’t a lie.

One lesson Matt’s childhood had taught him was that the ability to pretend is inborn. His parents had built their lives on the pretense that they were an average couple, living an average life. He and Gabe had picked up on the illusion, pretending that their parents weren’t abusive alcoholics, pretending that they had a normal, happy home. Now, here he was, playing pretend again, living life on the surface, careful not to look too deep, careful not to rock the precarious balance he and Jessie had achieved.

The weather stayed cold and drizzly, preventing him from doing any photographic work in the rose gardens. He was glad to have an excuse to spend his days at Gabe’s, working either on the house or the old Chevy. He supposed that, at some point, he should start thinking about coming up with a real job or commit to putting together a book of his own work, but, for the moment, he was grateful to have something to occupy his time, something besides wondering what the hell he was going to do about his marriage, not to mention his relationship with his best friend.

He hadn’t seen Reilly in almost a week, not since the night he’d walked in on him and Jessie together. It was
funny. Before he came home, it had been five years since they’d spent any time together, and he couldn’t honestly say he’d given a lot of thought to whether or not he’d missed Reilly. But since he’d come back, they’d gotten into the habit of getting together a couple of times a week for lunch, or sometimes just a beer at a sports bar. It was irritating to find that, while he still had random urges to rearrange Reilly’s dental work, he also missed him.

There were moments when he found himself wishing he could go back in time and just not walk into the kitchen and see them together. Maybe a flat tire on the way home, or a minor earthquake disrupting traffic for a crucial few minutes. Anything so he wouldn’t have the image of the two of them in his head. Blissful ignorance was sounding better all the time.

The dream started the way it always did, with him standing in the middle of the ancient road, eyes skimming over the rubble that lined it, marking the spaces that had once been doors and windows in the ravaged walls. The light was so clear, so oddly pure as it poured over the destruction. There was something almost beautiful about the lights and shadows, and he could suddenly feel his camera in his hand, feel the familiar weight of it around his neck. He lifted it to his face, sighting through the lens, finger pressing the shutter release.

The metallic click seemed to echo off the broken walls, making him realize how silent everything had been. As if it had been a signal, he could suddenly hear voices, men laughing, a woman’s frightened pleas. He kept the camera where it was, finger working the shutter automatically as he watched the scene unfold through the lens.

They dragged her out into the street, and he thought
she looked so young and so frightened, but it was a distant thought. He was an observer here, not a participant. Couldn’t get involved. Mustn’t get involved. Not his job. Not his place. They had seen him now. One of the men pointed in his direction, and though they seemed to ignore him after that, he saw that familiar bit of tension that said they were now aware of the camera, aware of him. And the girl was looking at him with a plea in her dark eyes. But he wasn’t there. Not really. Didn’t she realize that?

One of the soldiers laughed and wound his fingers in the girl’s dark hair, pulling her head back so that the camera saw her clearly. Just the camera. He didn’t see her. Couldn’t see her. Wouldn’t see her.

“Matt? Matt, wake up.”

Someone was calling his name, shaking him, and Matt came awake, sitting bolt upright in bed, his heart pounding so hard that the beat of his own pulse nearly deafened him.

“It’s all right, Matt. It was just a dream.” Jessie’s hand was on his arm, and he reached for it, fingers tightening over hers in a quick, convulsive movement.

“Sorry.” His voice rasped in his throat. “Sorry I woke you.” He was here, he reminded himself. He was home. But he could feel the dream, the memory, pressing against him in the darkness.

“It’s okay.” Jessie reached out and snapped on the bedside lamp, pushing the darkness back, pulling him the rest of the way into the here and now. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Sometimes it helps,” Jessie said, stroking her fingers gently up and down his arm.

“It won’t help,” he said flatly.

“Is this the same dream you’ve been having?”

The quiet question jerked his head toward her. She was watching him, her eyes dark with worry, face sleep-flushed and hair tousled. It was the first time he’d looked at her—
really
looked at her—since that night in the kitchen over a week ago, he realized with a little shock. He’d avoided looking at her, afraid of what he might—or might not—read in her eyes. But now he was looking at her, seeing the concern—the love, dammit—in her eyes, feeling it in the way her fingers stroked his arm.

“I don’t know what you’re—”

Jessie made an exasperated little noise, cutting off his automatic denial. “I’m not an idiot, Matt. I know you’ve been having nightmares off and on ever since we got married. Is it the same dream every time?”

He started to shake his head, caught her eye and nodded reluctantly. “Yeah, but it’s nothing.” He didn’t want to talk to her about this, didn’t want to talk to anyone about it. “I’m sorry I’ve been disturbing you. Maybe I should sleep somewhere else.” He shifted a little, as if to get out of bed, but Jessie’s fingers dug into his arm.

“Don’t be an idiot,” she snapped, her eyes flashing with quick temper. “We’ve got enough problems without you wrapping yourself up in your manly pride and going off to sleep on a sofa somewhere.”

She sounded so exasperated, so… Jessie, that he almost smiled. He nodded instead. She was right. He didn’t need a marriage counselor to tell him that sleeping in separate beds would not be a good thing at this point. They didn’t need more distance between them. They needed to find a way past the distance that was already there.
He
needed to find a way past it.

“So, are you dreaming about going to school naked or about being chased by a giant pink and purple lawn mower that’s being driven by a reindeer wearing a tutu?”

Matt couldn’t prevent the snort of laughter. He realized he was still holding her hand pressed to his arm, and he eased his hold, his fingers curving around hers, his thumb rubbing over the back of her hand. He’d missed this, he thought, missed touching her. “Are those my only two options?”

“They seem like the most likely possibilities.” Jessie brought up her other hand to brush the hair back from his forehead, her touch cool and gentle. “Talk to me, Matt. Tell me about the dream.”

He closed his eyes, savoring the quiet touch. He wasn’t going to tell her about it, of course. He’d never told anyone about the dreams.

“It’s not really a dream, it’s a memory,” he heard himself say.

“Of what?”

He opened his eyes again, trying to banish the image of that rubble-strewn street, those dark, terrified eyes.

“Matt?” Jessie touched her fingertips to the puckered scar on his shoulder. The light touch startled him, made him look at her. “Is it about this? You’ve never really talked about what happened. About how you got shot.” She lifted her eyes to his face, a curious mixture of concern and determination. “Talk to me, Matt.”

And he did.

It wasn’t as hard as he’d expected it to be. Once he got started, the words spilled out as if they’d been there, waiting behind some internal barrier in his mind. He told her more than he had to, about the need to maintain a distance without losing sight of the subject, about trying to see without feeling too much. About his last assignment, how he and the other members of the team had been given rooms in a concrete-block hotel that looked
like something out of a 1950s documentary on prison reform.

“We’d been there a few days, and we had an afternoon off. Most of the crew settled in for a poker game, but I decided to go out on my own.”

Matt had drawn one knee up and looped his arms loosely around it. His eyes were focused on the window, as if watching the raindrops slide down the dark glass, but Jessie knew he was seeing another time, another place, images she’d seen only in photographs and flickering across a television screen.

“We’d been shown a map and told what parts of the city to avoid for our own safety.” His mouth twisted in a cynical smile. “And to keep us from seeing things the government didn’t want showing up on the news. Most of the fighting had died out, but there were still pockets of resistance. I wasn’t in the market to play hero, so I stayed in the areas they’d said were safe. Not that any place was safe, really. Just walking across a street, you were risking a broken ankle from slipping on broken concrete or falling in a hole left when a shell hit.

“The weird thing about wars and natural disasters is that life just keeps going on. The old marketplace had been hit, but the people had just moved it over a hundred yards or so, and they were trading for what food there was and haggling over turnips and cabbages, using broken slabs of concrete as tables. I’ve seen it before, but it’s always…sort of surreal, the way life just keeps moving along. Babies are born, children play in the rubble.” He closed his eyes, remembering. “God, I can’t tell you what it feels like, standing there with a whole town in ruins around you and hearing kids laughing.”

Jessie rubbed her hand up and down his arm, offering silent comfort.

After a moment he opened his eyes and shook himself a little. “I took some pictures of the marketplace and then wandered away from the main part of town. I was still staying within the areas we’d been told were safe. I wasn’t that far from the market when four soldiers dragged a woman—a girl—out of an alley. There were other people around, but they just sort of melted away when they saw the soldiers. They didn’t see me at first. I was snapping pictures, not even really thinking about it. Not thinking about the girl or what she must be thinking or feeling, just taking the damned pictures.”

“That’s what you were there to do, Matt,” Jessie said, curling her fingers around his forearm and squeezing. He didn’t seem to hear her.

“They were harassing her, shoving her around a little. I didn’t speak the language, but I had the impression they were asking her questions. I don’t know if they thought she was a rebel or just thought she was a woman alone and easy prey. They weren’t really hurting her, just scaring her. I didn’t like it, but one of the big rules in journalism is that you don’t interfere. It’s our own personal fucking Prime Directive. And they weren’t hurting her, dammit.”

“I believe you.” Jessie shifted position, moved closer, offering the wordless comfort of another body.

“I don’t know what they had planned, but one of them saw me. He pointed and said something to the others, and they all looked in my direction.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “
She
looked at me. Not like she expected anything. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen, but her eyes were a thousand years old. No hope in them. No expectation. No nothing.” He shook his head, remembering. “I still had the damned camera up to my eye, watching the whole scene through the lens, snapping
pictures. Not even thinking about it. The soldiers looked at me for a minute, and then one of them pulled out a gun and just…shot her in the head.”

“Oh, Matt.” Jessie slid her arms around his shoulders, pressing her face against his upper arm. “How horrible.”

“I shouted something. I don’t know what. I think I started toward them. I’m not sure. Maybe they thought I was going to attack them. Maybe I
was
going to attack them. I don’t know.” He bent his head forward, resting his forehead on his knee, and Jessie hugged him tighter, as if she could absorb his pain, make it her own.

“I don’t remember much after that. Blood. I remember lots of blood and people shouting. Someone picked up my camera and put it on the stretcher with me, and I remember telling them to move it because I didn’t want to get blood on it. Next thing I’m real clear on was being in the hospital and some nurse telling me how lucky I was to be alive.”

“That’s enough to give anyone nightmares, Matt.” Jessie turned her face, resting her cheek against the taut muscles of his arm. “You were shot. You could have died.”

“It isn’t that.” He spoke without lifting his head from his knee. “I can’t shake the idea that it was my fault they killed her.”

“What?” Startled, Jessie pulled back and stared at him. “How could it possibly have been your fault?”

“If I hadn’t been there, if they hadn’t seen the camera, maybe they wouldn’t have shot her.”

“That’s ridiculous. Seeing the camera would have made them
less
likely to shoot her, if anything.”

Matt shook his head. “People change when they’re in front of a camera, Jess. Even if they try to pretend it’s not there, you can tell that they know exactly where it is.
One of the big ironies about being in the news business is that we’re supposed to report what’s happening without having any effect, but just the fact that we’re there changes everything. Maybe they saw themselves on the cover of
Time
. Maybe, if I hadn’t been there, if I hadn’t been taking pictures, they would just have roughed her up a little and then let her go.”