“You’re lucky to be alive right now, Petty Officer DeBolt.”
“And you’re lucky I’m not well enough to get up and walk away.”
“You will be soon. For your own sake, I hope you don’t. I hope you’ll stay a bit longer.”
“How caring,” he said, his sarcasm falling to crassness. Realizing he’d crossed a line, he sighed and rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right. When you’ve been a nurse as long as I have, you avoid taking things personally — force of habit.”
Those last words, the tone and intonation, clicked in DeBolt’s dented brain like a light switch. Force of habit. “You…,” he said tentatively, “you were there in the hospital. You put the needle in my arm.” He shivered inwardly, remembering the glacial sensation of the drug crawling through his body.
She didn’t answer right away. “Yes, I administered a special narcotic — it’s what saved you, Trey. There are other things that must remain unsaid for now, until your recovery is more complete. But please … please trust me when I say that I only want what’s best for you.”
DeBolt searched her open gaze, her earnest expression. And he did trust her.
4
DeBolt was soon walking with confidence around the cottage and porch, and days later he set out toward the rocky beachhead. The next weeks were full of rehabilitation, the intensity increasing and pain lessening until it was something near exercise. The nurse performed rudimentary tests: an eye chart on the far wall, whispered hearing evaluations, all of which DeBolt passed, or so he guessed because they were not repeated. She brought him clothes, ill fitting and — he was sure — purchased from a secondhand store. He thanked her for all of it.
The quandary of time was settled when she bought him a watch, a cheap Timex that promised but failed to glow in the dark. It was accurate enough, though, and DeBolt found strange exhilaration in keeping a schedule. Wake at 6:00 A.M. Soft run on the beach, three miles back and forth over the same quarter-mile stretch of rock-strewn sand. Breakfast at 7:10 A.M. Rest until 8:15 A.M. The running he hated — always had — and with obvious reluctance she allowed him to swim. He took to the water gratefully, but complained the cold was intolerable, and she managed to procure a used neoprene wet suit, two sizes too large, that made the daily plunge bearable. Each day brought advances and, rare setbacks aside, DeBolt progressed in but one direction. The headaches lessened, and so correspondingly did his need for pain medication. New examinations were introduced — memory games, mathematical puzzles, cognitive exercises. She assured him in every case that he performed well.
Yet as the patient was improving, he sensed a notable decline in his caregiver. She seemed increasingly withdrawn and distant, more so each time he pressed her for an explanation of how he’d ended up in a beach house in New England after the frozen Bering Sea. Her descending mood was more apparent each day, relentless and foreboding. One morning, as she counted his push-ups on the beach, he spotted a young girl far in the distance. She was eight, perhaps ten years old, prancing barefoot through tide pools with a net and a bucket. As she neared the edge of the rock outcropping where she was gathering creatures, DeBolt recognized a shift in the sea beyond — a strong rip current funneling offshore. He said they should warn the girl to stay clear of the water. Chandler responded by immediately ushering him shoreward.
DeBolt complied at first, but then stopped halfway to the cottage, fixed and immovable — his first resistance to any of her instructions.
“Tell me one thing,” he said. “Besides you, does anyone know where I am?”
“No.”
“I’m in the service. A soldier who doesn’t report his whereabouts is considered AWOL. That’s a crime under military law.”
“I understand. Soon I’ll explain everything … I promise.”
After considering it for some time, he turned and went inside.
That night she sat on the porch with a glass and a full bottle. She emptied both in silence, and sometime near midnight went unsteadily to her room. He heard her bed creak once, then nothing.
The weather was taking its first turn to winter. Before sunset, DeBolt had watched banks of slate-gray cloud whipping in fast and low, and he noticed that the ubiquitous flocks of seagulls had disappeared. The forest began to groan under a pulsating wind, and waves thundered ashore in a continuous pronouncement, absent the punctuating gaps of receding stillness.
Unable to sleep, DeBolt pulled a dog-eared novel from a bookshelf and went to the trundle bed, more inviting now that the monitors and IV pole had been pushed aside. As he crossed the room he looked through the open bedroom door and saw Chandler splayed awkwardly across her bed. He paused, studied her for a moment, then entered the room hesitantly. Her hair was stiff and matted, folded to one side, and her nightdress crumpled — completely still, she looked like a long-forgotten doll on a child’s closet shelf. He doubted she had moved since passing out. DeBolt guessed she might be attractive if she wanted to be, yet her focus on his recovery was so absolute, so single-minded, it seemed to preclude even her own upkeep. Not for the first time, he wondered what was driving her.
Her blanket had slipped to the floor, and he retrieved it and covered her. Other than a slight tremor in one hand, she didn’t move. He turned back to the main room, and near the doorway his eye was caught by a file folder on the highboy dresser. It was plain manila stock, and on the title tag DeBolt saw his own name written in pencil, sloppy block letters that were unsettlingly familiar. It was his copy of his Coast Guard medical records — a folder that should have been in his apartment in Alaska.
How the hell did that get here?
It occurred to DeBolt then that for all the diagnostic tests Chandler had performed, she’d never once taken a note. When he’d last seen the folder it had held perhaps fifty pages of military-grade paperwork. Now it looked exceedingly thin, and one page edged out from a corner. The positioning of the file on the dresser could not have been more obvious. He also noted that beneath his name someone had added in black ink, META PROJECT, and below that, OPTION BRAVO.
His eyes went to Chandler, then back to the folder. He picked it up and found but two sheets of paper inside. He had never seen either. On top was a printout of a news article from the Alaska Dispatch News, a four-paragraph summary of the crash of a Coast Guard MH-60 in the Bering Sea six weeks earlier. Again he saw META PROJECT and OPTION BRAVO scrawled in a hurried hand that was not his own. He read the article once, took a deep breath, then read it again. His eyes settled on one sentence in the second paragraph.
Confirmed to be killed in the accident were aircraft commander Lt. Anthony Morgan, copilot LTJG Thomas Adams, AN Michael Schull, and rescue swimmer PO2 Trey DeBolt.
He stared at it for a full minute. Confirmed to be killed …
With gauged caution, he lifted the printed page to see what was beneath. The second paper was of thicker bond, and carried a stamp and signatures, everything about it implying official weight. It was a death certificate issued by the state of Alaska. There were a few lines of legalese, and in the center two fields of information that finalized the shock:
Name of Deceased: Trey Adam DeBolt
Cause of death: blunt trauma to head/aircraft accident
5
DeBolt did not sleep like the dead man he supposedly was. In recent nights he’d stirred frequently as bolts of light and dark, post-traumatic he was sure, coursed through his beaten head. Now he lay awake trying only for control, some logic to replace the encroaching madness. The accident, the severe injuries, a hospital stay he barely remembered. Chandler bringing him here, caring for him, isolating him. Her self-destructive behavior. There was simply no solution — every way DeBolt painted the facts, something seemed wrong, a wayward stroke of color that clashed with the rest. In the end, he drew but one conclusion. His time here was drawing to an end.