The Island (25 page)

“Is this what you do?” he asked Shaw with a smile.

“Yeah.” Shaw laughed. “I just got back from blowing up the Burma railroad.”

“Hey, turns out we didn’t need to help out at all in the war,” Lee told him. “You guys had it covered.”

“Oh, we needed the help, I’ll admit,” Shaw told him. “And you were only three years late.”

Shaw gave as good as he got as well, and he liked the way it made Lee’s eyes light up. Letting him go would hurt.

Zev, who spent his time on deck smoking and doing crosswords, looked at Shaw curiously when he saw him with Lee. It was the same look he’d given Shaw several times back on the island:
What are you planning?

Shaw hadn’t had a plan back on the island, and he sure as hell didn’t have one now.

The final day on the HMAS
Stuart
was a flurry of activity for the crew. They scrubbed and swabbed and worked furiously. By the time they entered the harbor, the crew was lined up on the deck in brilliant white dress uniforms. Other boats sounded their horns in greeting, welcoming them home.

White, Shaw had always thought, was such an impractical color for a uniform of any sort. But they looked good as they entered the harbor.

Sydney Harbour was the most beautiful harbor in the world. Shaw had never seen anything to rival it. It was the world’s largest natural harbor. It glittered. Shaw felt an ache when he saw the familiar arch of the Harbour Bridge rising up in front of them and the Opera House gleaming like a shell on Bennelong Point. That was Sydney’s real triumph: postcard views from every angle.

Shaw looked at the sun gleaming off the bridge. He was home, he was alive, but he ached.

“It’s beautiful,” Lee said, leaning on the rail beside him.

“Yeah.” Shaw felt it again: regret. There would be no more quiet moments like these between them. He wondered if Lee had realized it. Every minute that brought them closer to the port pushed them further apart.

Shaw wanted to reach out for Lee. Couldn’t. He fixed his gaze on the sunlight gleaming on the water and let it blind him. He thought hard about not touching Lee. He shifted, and their shoulders bumped together, and that was it. That was probably the last time they would touch.

Don’t. Don’t
.

The sun burned the back of his neck as he stared at the water.

There were families waiting on the dock. Wives and husbands and children. And, Shaw saw, a fiery little redhead with an excited yellow Lab on a lead. Shaw smiled at that, even as he felt a tug of sadness. There was his life, waiting for him, and there was no room in it for Lee.

Lee shifted closer to him, nervous at all the people. “What happens now?”

“You’ll be okay,” Shaw said.

They didn’t have any luggage. They didn’t have anything except their borrowed clothes. They let the crew go first, down to the waiting smiles and tears and hugs.

Zev lit a cigarette on the gangway. “Where’s our next ride?”

Shaw could see it. Behind all the happy families there was a cluster of dark sedans and men in suits and sunglasses. None of them were smiling.

Lee tried to take his hand when they reached the dock, and Shaw shook his head.

He could hear Lee breathing heavily. He was terrified.

“Agent Shaw?” A cheap suit pushed an ID in his face. “John Meyers. United States Embassy.”

Shaw shook his hand.

“Mr. Anderson,” Meyers said. “Welcome to Sydney.”

Lee swallowed and nodded.

Meyers opened the car door. “Come with me, please.”

Lee looked at Shaw anxiously, and Shaw forced a smile. “Good luck, mate.”

“I want to stay with you,” Lee whispered. “Please.”

Shaw felt his chest constrict.
Oh Jesus, Lee, don’t. Not now.

“Please, Shaw,” Lee said. His green eyes were wide. His breath caught in his throat. “Please, can’t I stay with you?”

Shaw felt the disapproving gazes of the embassy officials turned on him. Disapproving and maybe disgusted. Should have seen how pitiful he was a week ago, Shaw wanted to tell them, but Lee didn’t deserve that.

“You’ll be okay,” Shaw told him firmly. He hated himself when Lee looked at him,
trusted
him, and nodded. Shaw kept his smile until Meyers had bundled Lee into the car and let it fade again as they drove away toward the main gates.

He wondered where they were taking him. Some hotel in the city, probably. He hoped they’d let him sleep, at least, and not attack him with questions immediately. Nine weeks ago, Lee had been with the DEA in Colombia. Now he wasn’t the same person anymore, and Shaw hoped they’d go easy on him.

Shaw frowned. Why was he even worrying about Lee anymore? He had his own problems. It was supposed to have been infiltration, not a bloodbath. However he looked at it, Shaw knew he’d fucked up. The intel alone he could have got from Guterman and the others was easily worth the cost of Lee’s life. The worst part was, he didn’t regret saving Lee. He just didn’t know how he was going to justify it to his bosses.

The night before, after
Spyforce
, Lee had found an old rerun of
I Love Lucy. Lucy, you’ve got some ’splainin to do!

Shaw knew that feeling.

“That kid’s got Stockholm Syndrome,” Zev announced, dropping his cigarette butt on the ground and standing on it. He looked at Shaw curiously. “Unless he doesn’t.”

“Shut up, Zev,” Shaw told him. What the hell was wrong with him? Why didn’t he want to let Lee go? He couldn’t keep him, couldn’t fix him, so why did he even want to try?

Zev clapped him on the back. “You’re an odd one, my friend.”

“How’s that?” Shaw asked as they pushed their way back through the small crowd toward Callie and Molly.

“You blew your operation to save that American,” Zev said. “You stood up to a room full of killers for that kid, outran armed security patrols, and escaped an island for him, but just now you didn’t tell Meyers to go and fuck himself.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure you’d back me this time.”

Zev clapped him on the back again. “It didn’t stop you before.”

Before, Shaw thought, was a different world with different rules: a world full of gods and monsters, life and death, judges and executioners. None of that worked here. It didn’t even feel real. Here, Shaw was a middle-grade public servant with a mortgage and a daily commute. He put the other side of him away when he was home. Callie hadn’t come to meet the man Shaw had been on the island.

Callie’s face lit up with a brilliant smile as Shaw approached. She tugged Molly forward to meet him. She flung her arms around Shaw’s neck and squeezed. Her hair tickled his face. “Welcome home.”

A wave of relief caught him.

“Thanks, Cal.” Shaw held her for a moment.

“You okay?” she murmured in his ear.

“Yeah.” Shaw released her and knelt down. He opened his arms, and they were suddenly full of dog; wriggling, squirming, tail thrashing, tongue everywhere, the whole package ready to burst with excitement. “Hey, Molly!”

This was good. This was right. He was home, his girls had come to meet him, and Lee would be okay. Shaw would shake this off, same as always.

He didn’t have to turn around and see if the dark sedan was still in sight. He didn’t have to think about Lee. He was home, he was covered in dog hair and slobber, and in that sea of happy reunions beside the dock, he had no right to want more.

Chapter Seventeen

Three months later

What’s the first thing you remember?

It was difficult to sleep without the sound of the ocean. The endless sigh, back and forth; white noise that drowned everything else, that swept it all away. The ocean and the moonlight and the unfamiliar stars. Strange that he’d slept so well there.

The sheets itched. They smelled of laundry powder.

There were no insects here, buzzing in the night. No breath of wind. No salt on his lips.

You shouldn’t miss the place where they ruined you.

It was the quiet moments Lee missed. Those moments when his body was racked with pain, those moments of fear and horror, all of them had left him open to the stillness afterwards. To the ocean and the night and to Shaw. He’d never slept as deeply anywhere as on that last week on the island, and that was fucked-up.

He couldn’t sleep now. He hadn’t been able to, not since getting back. Not at night. Now he lay awake and counted the hours until dawn, trying to relearn the rhythms of his childhood home.

His dad usually watched television until eleven. The third step creaked when he walked upstairs to bed. That third step had creaked forever. Lee remembered how he’d had to dodge it when he was sneaking out of the house as a teenager. Straight out into the night, breathless with exhilaration, because nothing scared him back then. Now he was a hostage to every nightmare in the world.

Except for those quite moments on the island. He’d had nothing to lose there, nothing left to fear. Nothing except a glimmering thread of hope, the sound of the ocean, and Shaw sleeping beside him. Now, every step he climbed toward recovery, he was afraid he had further to fall. He wouldn’t survive that again. He couldn’t.

And it was irrational. He knew that. It wasn’t going to happen to him again, but
something
would. What if his dad had a heart attack? He hadn’t been watching his cholesterol lately. What if his mom was in a car wreck? She never paid enough attention when she was driving. Tornados, disease, crime, and plain dumb luck: Lee was afraid of it all these days. Everything was so fucking fragile, and he felt it most acutely at night.

His scars hurt. The skin felt too tight across his back where his welts had healed. There was some muscle damage as well, and he had a list of exercises he was supposed to do and an appointment with a physical therapist every two weeks. Between that and the regular appointments with the psychiatrist and the psychologist, Lee felt he might as well be living in Minneapolis, he spent so much time driving there. Well, his dad drove. He always found some excuse to go into the city on the same day as Lee’s appointments. He’d even closed up the hardware store one morning, which was stupid. Lee didn’t need a chaperone.

His dad had asked him to come back and work in the store, like he had when he was a kid. Lee had refused. He wasn’t ready to face people yet. Not people who were his dad’s long-standing customers and who’d gone to Lee’s memorial service. Shit, no. He felt enough like a ghost already.

The day after he’d arrived home, he’d found a card shoved in the drawer of the bureau in the dining room. His parents must have missed it when they’d thrown the others away.
In deepest sympathy
. He’d felt a sick thrill when he’d opened it and hadn’t known whether to feel invincible or like an interloper. They’d mourned him. Not for long, but it didn’t matter. Coming back, he didn’t know if he was the answer to his parents’ prayers or their worst nightmare—a broken thing that had crawled out of a grave.

They kept finding excuses to touch him, as though they were assuring themselves he was really there. If he was, he didn’t feel it. He wanted to be better; he wanted to be healed. He was sick of feeling like a stranger in the house he’d grown up in.

What’s the first thing you remember?

The question was instinctive in him now, and he hated it. He should have been able to shed it now he’d left the island, now he no longer needed it, but it always came back to him at night.

Stop it. You’re home; you’re safe.

The psychiatrist had prescribed sleeping pills and antianxiety meds, and Lee still couldn’t sleep at night. He slept during the day instead, on the couch in front of the television, but not at night. Never at night. At night, he was watchful.

Lee looked at the patterns of shadow and moonlight on the ceiling. They were fading. It would be morning soon. The sunlight would creep in the window, and gradually the room would brighten, and at seven o’clock, he would hear Mr. Keller rattling past in his old truck, and then the day would begin.

He snaked his arm out from under the covers and squinted to read his watch. Five-thirty. An hour and a half to go, and then he could stop pretending he was sleeping and get out of bed.

“He’s sleeping so much,”
his mom had said on the phone to someone the day before.

Not true, Mom
. He got a couple of hours in during the day, and that was it. At night, he lay awake and tortured himself with his memories, but his parents didn’t know that.

“Come on, why are you torturing yourself?”
Shaw had asked him on the ship. Frigate. Whatever.

“Got no one else to do it for me now.”

That was fucked-up as well. Everything was fucked-up. His life and his parents’ lives. When was the last time his dad had kept the store open late like he used to? And his mom had quit her job. Just quit, like the past twenty-five years didn’t matter. She’d always talked of retiring. She’d mentioned it again at Christmas, but she’d talked about it like it was at some indeterminate, distant point in the future, because she loved teaching those kids. She’d done it so long that she was teaching her kids’ kids. She loved it. She always had, and now it was gone.

No more finger-painted pictures on the refrigerator:
I love you, Mrs. Anderson.

No more lopsided cookies or cupcakes with the frosting sliding off.
“I made this for you, Mrs. Anderson.”

No more shy trick-or-treaters on Halloween, peeking out from behind their masks.
“It’s
me
, Mrs. Anderson!”

And Lee had taken all of that away from her.

Lee had tried to ask them about money. The shop wasn’t doing great anyway, not with the chain store just a couple of miles away, and now his mom wasn’t earning. His dad had waved the question away.
“We’re doing fine, Lee. You concentrate on
you
, okay?”

Lee was sick of concentrating on himself. He’d lived in his head for eight fucking weeks on the island. He didn’t want to do it anymore. Sometimes he wished he could just go to sleep and never wake up.