Five Days Grace (36 page)

"I like looking at you," she said.

"Scars and all?"

"Scars and all," she insisted.

"How about I promise I'll take my clothes off for you anytime you want."

"But you won't always be with me. I'll need something to remember you by."

"Please, not that."

They ended up sitting on the dock as the sun kept sinking lower in the sky, Grace snapping more photos here and there. She got quiet for a while, and then finally started talking.

"I started thinking about what happened to you when the helicopter crashed, and you wanting to make sense of it, needing to, and please understand, I'm not in any way trying to compare what happened to me with what you went through—"

"Wait. Something happened, and you almost died?" He felt a flash of panic and fear just thinking about it.

"No. Not me. I was never in any kind of danger like that." She shrugged, staring across the water. "Well, I guess I could have been. But I wasn't. That's what I'm trying to tell you. My story. Everyone I love has been through so much, and I've always had this... unbelievably perfect life. I've always thought I was just lucky, but that would mean bad things happening to other people was some kind of bad luck. And it can't be that. I don't believe that. Do you?"

"Honestly, I don't know what to believe anymore, Grace. Tell me what almost happened to you."

"I'm not my parents' biological child. Did I tell you that?"

"No."

"Well, I'm not. Zach and Emma aren't, either. It's not something I've ever tried to hide. It's just... I don't really think about it. Not until someone or some specific thing brings it up. It's just who I am. It's always been that way. I've been theirs since just before my first birthday. They're the only parents I've ever known, and they're wonderful, the best parents anybody could have, and I've had a wonderful life."

"I'm glad, honey. I am," he said.

"And I don't feel like this is some other life I'm living. A lot of adopted kids do, but I don't. This is my life. The real one. The one I was meant to have. I know that. The first year was the aberration."

"Okay. So, how is it that you needed a new home and new parents before you were a year old, Grace?"

"Our biological father was abusive. He beat up our biological mother."

"Oh." And then...
God.
"Did he hurt you?"

"No. He hit Emma once. Zach was old enough to remember it. It's his first real memory. Can you imagine? You're two years old, and your biological father is hitting your sister and your mother?" She shook her head. "After that, our birth mother took us and left. She was pregnant with me at the time, so I never lived a day with him, never even met him until three and a half years ago, when he got out of prison."

"Prison? She had him put in prison? Good for her. She got that part right—"

"No. Not then. When I was almost a year old, she got really sick and scared she wouldn't be able to take care of us any longer. So she risked going back to her hometown to try to find someone who'd take us in. He found her instead, beat her up and left her for dead in a ditch on the side of the road. She was in the hospital, unconscious for a couple of weeks and died a few months later."

Aidan was scared to ask, but did. "And where were you all this time?"

"She left us in a motel. It was supposed to be for a couple of hours, but it ended up being three days. Emma was eleven. Zach was five."

"Jesus, Grace."

"Like I said, I might as well have missed the whole thing. I don't remember, and even if I did, I probably felt perfectly safe. I was with Zach and Emma. Emma's always been as motherly to me as sisterly. Someone found us eventually. A social worker took us to Mom and Dad's, and for me, life was golden. It was right before Christmas, an honest-to-goodness Christmas miracle."

"They couldn't have children?"

She shook her head. "Mom was pregnant once. She and Dad were young, hadn't been married long. There was ice on the road, and their car slid into an intersection. Mom ended up needing a hysterectomy to keep her from bleeding to death. The baby didn't live a day. It was a girl."

"God, that's a horrible story."

"It was, but they got through it, stayed together. Nothing else they tried to have children worked. They were ready to give up when the three of us showed up on their doorstep."

And then he remembered. "You're the baby in the basket on the doorstep on Christmas Eve? I remember now. Tommy did tell me once."

She smiled. "There was no basket, and it was twelve days before Christmas, but, yes, that's my story. I was so lucky, and I don't know why. I've never been able to figure it out, and I've tried, Aidan. I've really tried."

"Grace, no one should have to live through what they all did."

"I know. But they did. Emma had years of it, of being so scared. Zach's earliest memories are of chaos and screaming, fists flying and bruises and blood. Mom and Dad had to bury their first child, and I got none of it. Nothing. It's like someone snatched me out of a hell on earth and gave me this perfect existence for so long."

"Good for you," he insisted. "I want that for you, every good thing I can imagine, everything you want. Take it and be happy. Life's too hard for too many people. And if you have to measure your misery against anyone else's, you buried a husband, Grace. Buried him when you were so young. Most people would say that's hard enough for anyone."

"But I know now that I didn't really love him, and we weren't happy together. It's tragic for him, but not for me. Not like it would be for me to lose... someone I really loved. The love of my life."

She looked right at him when she said it, and his heart was suddenly going a mile a minute.

Don't say anything, he told himself. Not a word. Not about loving her. Not yet.

He didn't have the right. His life was a damned mess, and she was... everything he could ever want in a woman, everything he could ever hope to have, and he wasn't going to mess this up by scaring her or rushing her. She was too important to him to risk that.

As far as he was concerned, it was a miracle she was even here and wanted him.

"So," she said finally, "I thought about you, feeling guilty about surviving when so many others didn't, and wanting to make some sense of it, to understand. And I thought... I've tried to do that my whole life and never managed to. I'm afraid you won't, either, Aidan, because I don't think there are any real answers to questions like that."

"Ahh, honey, it's not the same thing."

"It's the same question. The same unanswerable question."

"But you didn't do anything wrong."

"Neither did you," she said.

"God, Grace, I wish that was true. I just don't know."

"You were out there doing your job. Those people who came to rescue you were doing theirs. That's it."

"It might have been a trap. I might have led them right into a trap. I was following someone, following a weapons pipeline, and... Maybe I gave myself away somehow. Maybe they used me to set that trap, and I led our guys right into it."

She looked so sad. What the hell was he doing dragging her into this mess that was his life? This ugly situation?

Finally, she said, "Did everyone else do everything perfectly that day?"

He shook his head. "I don't know. There's an investigation. It's not done yet. I gave them a statement. They'll go back and look over the whole mission. The plans. The orders. The radio communications." Including him practically incoherent and begging them not to come back for him, to let him die, which was going to do wonders for his career.

"And you're afraid they'll blame you somehow?"

"No, I'm not afraid of that. I'm afraid I am to blame."

"It's a war, Aidan. The people on the other side are trying to kill you. That's what happens. People killing each other."

She didn't say anything else for the longest time, just sat there looking at him, looking so sad and kind, it was breaking his heart.

"I don't know," he said finally. "I just don't, and I don't know how to live with that. I'm trying, but I don't know how. I'm trying because I want to be with you. I want a life with you, and I'm not going to do that if I'm some kind of damned mess. I'm not going to drag you down into something like that with me, so I'm really trying to figure it out. I talked to my shrink yesterday morning and told him I was ready. I've been talking to him since I came to in the hospital, but only because I had to. But I'm really trying now, Grace. I told him I'd do whatever it takes to deal with this. Because I want that life, the one with you."

"I want that, too," she said, tears in her eyes.

"And you should know, I didn't before. I really didn't care if I lived or died. I'm not sure if I made that absolutely clear to you before."

"You said that you didn't actually try to hurt yourself."

He nodded. "Because I didn't care enough about living or dying to make the effort. I didn't care about anything. It was like I was... not really here. Not really alive. Or like I was, but I was behind this invisible barrier. There were people around, and I could hear them, see them. I talked to them when they demanded it. But there was a distance between me and them, like they were all so far away, and I just hurt. I kept drifting back to the crash, hearing it, seeing it, smelling it, and I thought I always would. You deserve to know that. I should have made it clear a long time ago. I'm sorry."

"God, Aidan." She started crying then, really crying, looking like it had just broken her heart to hear that, and it scared her so much.

"But I am not in that place anymore," he said. "I swear to you, I'm not. I'm better now. I'm stronger. I'm getting back to being the person I've always been. If I didn't think I could do that, Grace, I wouldn't be here with you like this. I wouldn't do that to you. I swear."

He held her for a while, as she cried. The dog got up from his spot out on the deck and came over to them, worried about Grace.

They sat there with the sun going down, that beautiful sky, the pretty color in the trees. It was like another world here, one all their own, and Aidan marveled at how he'd come to be in this place at this time with her. How an off-hand mention of his brother once stashing a battered woman here had come back to him when he'd needed a place to hide out.

And what had happened next? She'd walked into his life and changed everything. It was so easy to imagine he could have died on that mountain in Afghanistan and never met her.

But he'd survived, and now she was here, and life was so much better. He believed he was meant to be here with her, that it was as fated as her being plucked out of that hellacious life she could have led and brought to the one she'd had instead, where her arrival was considered a miracle.

A miracle to Aidan, too, showing up now, being who she was, believing in him, needing him, wanting him, loving him. Because that's what she'd done. They hadn't said the words, and he wouldn't let himself now. But he loved her, loved her more than he would have thought it was possible to love anyone, and she acted like a woman who loved him, loved him fiercely, enough to fight for him and hang onto him, even when she was afraid.

What an incredible turn his life had taken.

It was still enough to make his head spin, how it had all happened, how his life was shit one minute, and now it seemed not just worth living, but amazing.

"Grace, I'm going to be okay, I swear."

She lifted her head from his shoulder and nodded through her tears, so beautiful and trying to be so brave and strong for him. "I'm counting on that. I'm holding you to it."

"You do that, baby."

"And you remember what you said to me. I don't understand why I missed all that bad stuff in my life, and it doesn't seem right or fair to me, either. But anybody I've ever tried to talk to about it has said the same thing you did. That no one deserves that kind of crap. You didn't deserve to die on that mountain, and neither did all of those other people. It's just what happened, what we have to deal with."

"I'm trying," he said. "Trying to find any way I can to deal with it."

"Well, I think if any one of those guys was sitting here with you right now, he'd say what you said to me. That he doesn't know why things happened the way they did, either. Luck? Fate? Or something we'll never understand? All you can do is just take it—take whatever good things you've been given and be happy. I believe they'd want that for you, every good thing imaginable."

He closed his eyes. Would he say that to all those guys if they'd survived and he hadn't? He liked to think he would have. He hoped there was a place, at the end of this one, where everything made sense, and no one was angry or sad or lost. That it was perfect. That people looked back over their lives and said,
Oh, that's why that happened. I get it now, and it all worked out in the end. I ended up just where I was supposed to be, and it's all okay. It's just fine.
That there were no regrets. No anger. Nothing but acceptance and peace and pure love.

If he were in a place like that, he wouldn't want anything but good things for everybody, right? He could be generous and kind and know everything was fine. It was just more difficult for those of us still here, in this world that had things that hurt and didn't make sense and made us feel angry or lost.
Right?