Flashback (14 page)

They were burning the dead villagers. He had never seen anything so utterly horrible in his life.

Screams echoed from the edges of the forest where the surviving villagers had taken refuge, and he gradually became aware that his own shouting had never ceased. His shouting was a scream, too.

Everything became suddenly, intensely hot, and Dana bolted stark upright in her bed, wetness trickling off her entire body, the echoes of her own horrified screams still reverberating through her room and the dark, silent house. Still in the grip of the horrible scene she had just dreamt, she scrambled out of bed and lurched for the bathroom, her hand clamped over her shaking mouth. There she was wretchedly sick, the vivid memory of the sights and the smells making her retch painfully. Her hands were shaking and she was hiccupping in deep, dry sobs. Something burst into the bathroom and her mother switched on the light, sleepy, confused, asking in a ragged voice, “Dana? Oh, honey, are you all right?”

She didn’t bother to answer, stumbling back to her room and throwing on her bathrobe as fast as her two shaking, weak hands would let her. It was not very quick. Then, stumbling from the shock of the nightmare, the rude awakening, and her own sick reaction, she made her way to the head of the stairs and crept down them, hanging on to the banister. Her limbs were shaking so.

Her mother followed her to the head of the stairs, asking in a fear-sharpened voice, “Dana? Answer me! Dana, are you all right?”

Dana never turned, intent on one thing only.

She was out of the door and into the night, half falling down the porch steps, and then something large and hard came out of the black and still night, wrapping two strong arms roughly around her quaking body so tightly she couldn’t breathe, and the shock of the bodily impact, along with the utter and immense comfort of the knowledge of just who it was that held her made Dana really cry noisily. She tried to talk to him through her tears, unintelligibly.

David was holding her, soothing her, brushing the hair off of her hot forehead as he muttered into her ear things that she never really deciphered. She just clutched at him and shook as she tried to tell him about her horror and the terrible images that still clung like sticky cobwebs to her mind.

“I know. I know. Hush, I know.” He repeated monotonous wording in a half croon until it sank into her mind.

Then a strange voice, also male, impinged on her consciousness as someone nearby said deeply, “Dear Heaven, it really is true.”

Dana had her face buried in the bare warmth of David’s heaving chest, her salty tears wetting them both, making her cheek slide along the silky hardness of his collarbone. She felt his hand at the back of her head as he held her against him, his face against her hair, her ribs aching from the pressure of his arms crushing her.

He said finally, “Come on. Let’s go inside. Come on, Dana. We’ll go in and just sit on the couch a while, until you’re feeling better. That’s it, just put one foot in front of the other and move your legs. It’s not so hard, is it?”

He was more than half supporting her, though she was able to lift her streaked face away from his shoulder as they slowly walked up the porch steps into the now-lit house, her worried mother standing by the front door and the strange man following behind. She was beginning to calm down now, but only as she felt the reverberations of David’s own internal upheaval begin to subside. He had his arm tightly around her slim shoulders. She felt him heave a great sigh as if he were straining under a huge load.

Dana sank down to the couch as her legs gave way, and she drew the edges of her bathrobe together self-consciously as the strange man looked at her thoughtfully. She returned his stare almost defiantly. He was older than David, somewhere in his forties, and his greying hair was black at the back. His face was heavily lined, and his eyes, as she looked closer seemed full of compassion.

Someone sat down beside her: David. She didn’t turn her head. Denise, understandably bewildered at the unexpected entrance of not one, but two men and one of them a stranger, came into the room and closed the door behind her. Dana’s eyes went to her, and she asked her daughter for the fourth time, quietly now, “Are you going to be all right, dear?”

It was a very, very tired one, but it was a smile nevertheless, and as she smiled at her mother, she nodded. She watched as Denise moved to a seat and sank into it, belting her own robe firmly about her thickening waist.

Then the stranger spoke, and Dana looked at him instead. “You are Dana?” he asked her pleasantly, as if being awakened out of a sound sleep at two thirty in the morning was an everyday occurrence for him, and so indeed it seemed since he was the only one of the four of them who was more or less dressed. Then Dana looked down at his feet, randomly, and found that he was barefoot like the rest of them, which for some reason made her feel slightly more at ease.

She nodded silently, her face in the warmth of the golden living-room light pale, and her features wary, tense. Strain was etched on her face, shown in her pinched skin and huge, dilated eyes that seemed just a shade too bright. Her hand tightened convulsively at the throat of her robe.

David said quietly, “I’d like for you both to meet a friend of mine, Peter Cartwright. This is Dana’s mother, Denise Haslow.”

Dana bent her head as she heard her mother murmur some sort of greeting, and the man’s pleasant reply. She found herself trying to grope out with her mind in order to somehow read this stranger’s character, and to her own discomfort found that she couldn’t. This man was to her about as readable as a brick wall. She withdrew into herself almost physically, eyes shuttered, legs close together and shoulders hunched.

Then David was speaking again. “You had the nightmare too.” It was a statement of fact and no question, but she found herself nodding in affirmation anyway. Her eyes slid up and she found Peter Cartwright’s keen gaze on her. She slid her gaze evasively back to the floor and she patiently started to count the threads in the coarse carpet shag at her feet. She wondered why this man was making her feel so self-conscious. “Peter,” David was saying to her mother, “is staying with me for a while and had a bit of a rude awakening, as I know you did. Please forgive me for that.”

“Good Heavens!” Denise expostulated. “It’s not your fault, David! After all, none of this would have happened if Dana—” She faltered as Dana threw up her head and glared at her quite pointedly, then glanced at Peter. Dana didn’t know why she even bothered. She had the awful feeling it was too late. She looked unwillingly at David, fully aware that he had seen her rather obvious hint and half-afraid that he would be offended or angry at it.

But David was looking at her very hard and very seriously, as if trying to convey something to her without words, and as this dawned on her and as she futilely tried to make-believe that everything was all right, he was saying something that made her whiten at the betrayal of confidence. It was a sinking, terrible feeling, and becoming familiar. It was how she’d felt when she had heard of Mrs. Cessler’s betrayal.

“I’ve taken the liberty of telling Peter something about the nature of what you and I are—experiencing right at the moment,” he said quietly. “He’d like to help us try to work out our—”

“What did you tell him?” she burst out, feeling utterly naked and alone.

He hesitated. “Quite a bit,” he finally admitted, and jerked slightly as she flashed out her accusation.

“Liar! You told him everything, didn’t you? Don’t think I don’t know it! How could you do this to me? I
trusted you
!” And everyone started to talk at once, which was more than she could handle. The easy tears welled up and she stared at the blurred, still image of the man who sat so close to her. There was a world of condemnation and hurt in her eyes. “It wasn’t yours to tell!” she whispered shakily, and jumped up to run out of the room. She pelted down the hall and bolted into the first haven she came to, which happened to be her father’s study.

Rapid, heavy footsteps followed her, and she searched hopelessly for a lock that had never been there, feeling terribly invaded. They stopped abruptly, and she could distinguish two low, intense voices, arguing, one of them Peter’s, one David’s. She sagged against the door, so very tired and so very tense, and she heard something harsh in David’s voice. Then someone walked away from the other side, and she drew in a deep, unsteady breath.

It had been David walking away. And footsteps were continuing to stop just outside her door. She unconsciously braced her shoulder against the wood and winced as it was her sore one. She then collapsed at the innocuous sound of his voice, sounding utterly normal as it penetrated the wood barrier.

“Dana, I know that you’re feeling betrayed by David’s actions, but I’d like to assure you that he did only what he thought would be healthy for both you and him.” The older man paused. She remained silent, not rejecting his overtures and not acknowledging them either. He continued, his voice utterly calm and pleasant, and in spite of herself she found that she was relaxing. “I was in ’Nam when David was. That was how we met. He was, as you already know, a helicopter pilot, and I was a doctor just out of medical school. Please, may I come in and talk with you?”

She hesitated and very nearly said no. She was so close to saying no that she had her mouth open and her lips forming the small word. But even as she was preparing in her mind that negative response, she found her hands coming out and slowly turning the knob and opening the door. She peered around the edge of it at the older man, her face wary, ready to bolt again at the slightest provocation. He didn’t move but merely smiled at her, so very kindly and gently that she found herself moving back from the door and he came into the room, shutting the door behind him.

“I’d like to tell you a little bit about David, if I may?” Peter said, cocking an inquisitive eyebrow at her. It was probably the best thing he ever could have said to her, and she found herself nodding almost immediately. She watched as he settled himself against the old oak desk and smilingly invited her to sit down in the comfortable seat in front of him. She complied, rubbing at her temples at a slight nagging pain there, and listened patiently as he started to talk. “David has always been a very strong personality. He’s determined, aggressive, and forceful when he chooses to be. When we were in ’Nam, I can remember his baffled rage at the whole chaotic upheaval there, the guerrilla warfare, the killing of innocent villagers by both sides…” She flinched violently, but he didn’t seem to notice as he continued, “…everything about ’Nam was an intense, bizarre experience that young men barely out of boyhood were thrust into, and were expected to be killers. David was the kind of person that had a very great respect for human life, and the terrible waste of it in ’Nam was something utterly alien to his personality.

“Oh, ’Nam was something that David hadn’t been prepared for. None of us had been. None of us really knew what to expect, what was going on. The government said that we were to go and fight for justice, and so we all went, with one idea or another of what it would be like. Many of the kids had been raised on John Wayne movies, and they had envisioned themselves becoming great heroes. David and I were, in our different professions, only interested in trying to prevent the loss of human life, futilely so, sometimes, in the middle of a crazy world and a half understood war. And no matter how many we could congratulate ourselves on saving, there were still so many who died.

“So you can see perhaps, through what I’m trying to tell you and through your own experiences with David, just what had happened to him in that relatively brief time overseas. Futility, rage, horror, all of those feelings were thrust upon him, so to speak. David is a survivor, and one of his survival tactics in ’Nam had been a peculiar ability to block himself up tightly in what I term a ‘little black box’. He kept his emotions on a very tight rein; he simply refused to let go of his control and lose touch with reality, like many of the kids did. He held on grimly to both himself and the reality of himself. I really think it was one of the main things that got him through the nightmare. But now he’s left holding on, with old feelings that should have been let out as soon as it was safe to do so, and they are now spilling out, intense and frightening. Dana, I’d like to thank you, because you are the reason for David finally coming out and saying that he needed to talk to someone about ’Nam, to let it out and finally exorcise the ghost. You frightened him into it, and if it hadn’t been for you, he might have held all of it in until it destroyed him. When it was just himself who was suffering, he was able to keep it in and stay silent; we are always willing to damage ourselves more than any other. And what you’ve done is to make him ready to save himself, in order to save another.”

Dana looked down at her hands. With her head bent and her chestnut hair falling forward, the curve of her neck seemed very fragile and her fingers, though tightly clasped, trembled.

Peter said quietly, very kindly, “And I think it’s time we called tonight quits, for it is very late. I just couldn’t let you go tonight without trying just a little to get you to see David’s dilemma, and why he chose to tell me perhaps more than was comfortable for you.”

She cleared her throat and said, “You’re a psychiatrist, aren’t you?”

A slight hesitation and then softly, “Yes, I am. I hope that doesn’t frighten you away from me. I’d like to talk to you some more, perhaps tomorrow, if you wouldn’t mind.”

She took a deep breath, held it, and slowly eased it out, giving in to the release of tension. “I think I’d like that.”