White Lies (10 page)

           
 
She stepped outside, feeling the need to
escape, though she wasn't certain exactly what she was escaping from. It was
Steve, and yet it was something else, something inside her that was growing
more and more powerful. It scared her; she didn't want it, yet she was helpless
to stop it. She had never responded to him like that before, not even in the
first wild, heady days of their marriage. It's just the situation, she told
herself, trying to find comfort in the thought. It was just her tendency to
throw herself wholly into something, concentrating on it too intensely, that
made her feel like this. But comfort eluded her and despair welled in her
heart, because analyzing her emotions didn't change them. God help her, she was
falling in love with him again, with even less reason than she'd had the first
time. For most of the past three weeks he'd been little more than a mummy,
incapable of movement or speech, yet she had felt drawn to him, tied to him;
and loving him now was much more dangerous than it had been before. He was a
different, stronger, harder man. Even when he'd been unconscious, she had felt
his fierce inner power, and her need to know what had happened to him to cause
that change was so strong it almost hurt.

           
 
A nurse, the one who had first noticed Steve's
unconscious reaction to Jay's presence, stopped beside her. "How is he? He
refused his pain medication this morning."

           
 
"He's asleep now. He tires very
easily."

           
 
The nurse nodded, her bright blue eyes meeting
Jay's darker ones. "He has the most incredible constitution I've ever
seen. He's still in a great deal of pain, but he just seems to ignore it.
Normally it would be at least another week before we began tapering off the
pain medication." Admiration filled her voice. "Did the coffee upset
his stomach?"

           
 
Jay had to laugh. "No. He was rather smug
about it."

           
 
"He was certainly determined to get that
coffee. Maybe we can start him on a soft diet tomorrow, so he can begin
regaining his strength."

           
 
"Do you know when he'll be transferred
out of intensive care?"

           
 
"I really don't know. Major Lunning will
have to make that decision." The nurse smiled as she took her leave,
returning to the central station. Jay walked to the visitors' lounge to buy a
soft drink, and she took advantage of the room's emptiness to give herself some
much-needed privacy. She was filled with a vague uneasiness, and she couldn't
pinpoint the reason. Or reasons, she thought. Part of it was Steve, of course,
and her own unruly emotional response to him. She didn't want to love him
again, but she didn't know how to fight it, only that she had to. She could not
love him again. It was too risky. She knew that, fiercely told herself over and
over that she wouldn't allow it to happen, even as she acknowledged that it
might already be too late. The other part of her uneasiness was also tied to
Steve, but she wasn't certain why. That aggravating sense of having missed
something kept nagging at her, something that she should have seen but hadn't.
Perhaps Steve sensed it too, judging by all the questions he'd asked; he didn't
quite trust Frank, though she supposed that was to be expected, given Steve's
situation. But Jay knew that she would trust Frank with her life, and with
Steve's. So why did she keep feeling that she should know more than she did?
Was Steve in danger because of what he had witnessed? Had Steve actually been
involved in the deal? She would have had to be naive not to realize that the
vast majority of the facts had been kept from her, but she didn't expect Frank
to spout out everything he knew. No, it wasn't that. It was something that she
should have seen, something that was obvious, and she'd missed it entirely. It
was some little detail that didn't fit, and until she could pinpoint what it
was, she wouldn't be able to get rid of that nagging uneasiness. Steve was
taken out of intensive care two days later and moved to a private room, and the
navy guards shifted location. The new room had a television, something the ICU
room had lacked, and Steve insisted on listening to every news program he
could, as if he were searching for clues that would tie all the missing pieces
together for him again. The problem was that he seemed to be interested in all
the world situations and could discuss the politics of others nations as easily
as domestic issues. That disturbed Jay; Steve had never been particularly
political, and the depth of his current knowledge revealed that he had become
deeply involved. Given that, it became more likely that he had also been more
involved in the situation that had nearly killed him than perhaps even Frank knew.
Or perhaps Frank did know, after all. He had had several long, private
conversations with Steve, but Steve remained guarded. Only with Jay did he lose
his wariness. His various injuries kept him bed-bound much longer than he
should have been, but he wasn't able to negotiate with crutches due to his
burned hands. His physical inactivity ate at him, eroding his patience and good
humor. He quickly decided which television shows he liked, discarding all game
shows and soap operas, but even the ones he liked lacked something, since so
much of the action was visual. Merely being able to listen frustrated him, and
soon he wanted the set on only for the news. Jay did everything she could think
of to entertain him; he liked it when she read the newspaper to him, but for
the most part he just wanted to talk.

           
 
"Tell me what you look like," he
said one morning.

           
 
The demand flustered her. It was oddly
embarrassing to be asked to describe oneself. "Well, I have brown
hair," she began hesitantly.

           
 
"What shade of brown? Reddish?
Gold?"

           
 
"Gold, I guess, but on the dark side.
Honey-colored."

           
 
"Is it long?"

           
 
"No. It's almost to my shoulders, and
very straight."

           
 
"What color are your eyes?"

           
 
"Blue."

           
 
"Come on," he chided after a minute
when she didn't add anything. "How tall are you?"

           
 
"Medium. Five-six."

           
 
"How tall am I? Did we fit together
well?"

           
 
The thought made her throat tighten.
"You're six feet, and yes, we did dance well together."

           
 
He turned his bandaged eyes toward her.
"I wasn't talking about dancing, but so what? When I get out of these
casts, let's go dancing again. Maybe I haven't forgotten how."

           
 
She didn't know if she could stand being in
his arms again, not with her responses running wild every time she heard his
harsh, cracked voice. But he was waiting for her to answer, so she said
lightly, "It's a date." He lifted his hands. "The bandages come
off tomorrow. Next week I have the final surgery on my eyes. The casts come off
in two weeks. Give me a month to build up my strength. By then the bandages
should be off my eyes, and we'll do the town."

           
 
"You're only giving yourself a month to
get your strength back? Isn't that a little ambitious?"

           
 
"I've done it before," he said, then
went very still. Jay held her breath as she watched him, but after a minute he
swore softly. "Damn it, I know things, but I can't remember them. I know
what foods I like, I know the name of every head of state of every nation
mentioned in the news, I can even recalj what they look like, but I don't know
my own face. I know who won the last World Series, but not where I was when it
was played. I know the smell of the canals in Venice, but I can't remember ever
being there." He paused a minute, then said very quietly,

           
 
"Sometimes I want to take this place
apart with my bare hands."

           
 
"Major Lunning told you what to
expect," Jay said, still shaken by what he'd said. How deeply had he
involved himself in the gray world Frank had hinted at?

           
 
She was very much afraid that Steve was no
longer an adventurer, but a player.

           
 
"Stop feeling sorry for yourself. He said
your memory would probably come back in dribbles."

           
 
A slow grin touched his lips, deepening the
lines that bracketed his mouth and drawing her helpless, fascinated gaze. His
lips seemed firmer, fuller, as if they were still slightly swollen, or perhaps
it was because his face was thinner and older. "Sorry," he said.
"I'll have to watch that." His wry humor, especially when he had good
reason to occasionally feel sorry for himself, only reminded her again of his
hard inner strength and was one more blow against the shaky guard she had set
up around her heart. She had to laugh at him, just as she had years before, but
there was a difference now. Before, Steve had used humor as a wall to hide
behind; now the wall was gone, and she could see the real man.

           
 
She was with him the next morning when the
bandages came off his burned hands for good. She had been in there before when
the bandages were changed, so she had seen the raw blisters on his palms and
fingers when they had looked much worse than they did now. Patches of reddened
skin were still visible all the way to his elbows, but his hands had caught the
worst of it. Now that the danger of infection was past, the new, tender skin
would heal faster without the bandages, but his hands would be too painful for
him to use them much for a while. When she compared how he looked now to the
way he had looked the first time she had seen him, hooked to all those machines
and monitors, with so many tubes running into his body, it seemed nothing short
of a miracle. It had been only four weeks, but he had been little more than a
vegetable then, and now he exerted the force of his personality over everyone
who entered his room, even the doctors. His face had been swollen and bruised
before; now the hard line of his jaw and the precise cut of his lips fascinated
her. She knew that plastic surgeons had rebuilt his shattered face, and she
wondered about the changes she would see when the bandages were completely gone
and she was able to truly see him for the first time. His jaw was a little
different, a little squarer, leaner, but that was to be expected, since he had
lost so much weight after he'd been injured. His beard seemed darker, because
he was so pale. She was very well acquainted with his jaw and beard, since she
had to shave him every morning. The nurses had done it until he became
conscious and made it known he wanted Jay to shave him, and no one else.

           
 
He no longer had a thick swath of gauze
wrapped around his skull. There was a big, jagged white scar that ran
diagonally from the top of his head, at a point directly above his right ear,
to the back and left of his skull, but his hair was already longer than that of
the average military recruit in boot camp, and it was beginning to cover the
scar. The new hair was dark and glossy, having never been exposed to the sun.
His eyes were still covered with bandages, but though the gauze pads and
wrapping were much smaller now than they had been before, the upper bridge of
his nose and the curve of his cheekbones were still covered. The bandages
tantalized her; she wanted to see his new face, to judge for herself how well
the plastic surgeon had done his job. She wanted to be able to apply his
identity to his face, to look into his dark eyes and see all the things she'd
looked for in their marriage and hadn't been able to find.

           
 
"Your hands are tender," the doctor
who'd been caring for Steve's burns said as he cut away the last of the
bandages and signaled for a nurse to clean them.

           
 
"Be careful with them until all this new
skin has toughened. They're stiff right now, but use them, exercise them. You
don't have any tendon or ligament damage, so in time you'll have full use of
them again."

           
 
Slowly, painfully, Steve flexed his fingers,
wincing as he did so. He waited until the doctor and nurses had left the room,
then said, "Jay?"

           
 
"I'm here."

           
 
"How do they look?"

           
 
"Red," she answered honestly.

           
 
He flexed them again, then cautiously rubbed
the fingers of his right hand over his left one, then reversed the procedure.
"It feels strange," he said, smiling a little. "They're damned
tender, like he said, but the skin feels as smooth as a baby's butt. I don't
have any calluses now." The smile faded abruptly, replaced with a frown.
"I had callused hands." Again he explored his hands, as if trying to
find something familiar in the touch, slowly rubbing his fingertips together.
She laughed softly. "One summer, you played so much sandlot baseball that
your hands were as tough as leather. You had calluses on your calluses."
He still looked thoughtful; then his mood changed and he said, "Come sit
by me, on the bed."