Breach, p.11
Breach, page 11
“Oh, down in that room.” It slipped out before Marleigh could catch it. She pressed two fingers to her lips.
“It gets worse,” Trish said. “I made him get it and put it on.”
Marleigh’s stomach flipped.
“He was never allowed to touch it or smell it or anything after Dad died. She didn’t display the flag or his shadowbox, back then. So Jace has his uniform on and he’s mixing up the lines with things Dad would say, ‘semper fi and hoo-rah and shoulder down,’ and then mom walked in. At first, she froze and got this dreamy smile. Then she snapped out of it.” Trish was talking faster and faster. She kneaded the toes of her left foot with her right.
“You don’t have to tell me,” Marleigh said. She wanted Trish to stop.
“She picked him up and threw him on the bed, hard. She was yanking at the buttons and the collar, trying to get everything off Jace. I tried to get in between them. She shoved me against the wall and I hit my head hard. ‘Do you think this is funny?’ she screamed, and ‘Don’t you ever touch his things. You’re not like him. You can’t touch his things.’ But she was scratching Jace, had him pinned down with her knees. He couldn’t breathe.”
The thought of this happening to Jace turned a key in Marleigh’s insides. How could his mother be so cruel and him turn out so good? She wished she were back at the diner. Trish’s voice was high and pitchy. Her nose was running.
“Jace tried to get up, and she smacked him so hard his nose bled. Bad. I told her to stop, that it was my fault. My idea. She said something about being a man and pushed him off the bed onto the floor. Always gets nosebleeds, she said. I don’t remember him having one before that.”
Marleigh didn’t know what to say. She hoped Trish was finished. She felt sick to her stomach, feverish. Before this trip, all Jace had said was that his mother was pretty torn up by his father’s death and that he’d been closer with his aunt and uncle. Marleigh wouldn’t have wanted to relive it, either. Maybe that’s why he never told her. He was very good at acting like none of this had ever happened. It felt like a betrayal, hearing this story from Trish.
“Nothing I ever did set her off like the sight of Jace. I called Donna the next day after school and asked her if he could come over and play. He never really came home. I packed his stuff for Donna, but he never told anyone that it was my fault or why she had beaten him up. I don’t think Donna or Ed know all the details to this day. He always wants to protect everyone.”
Marleigh nodded, at a loss for words. Jace’s backstory was worse than hers. What a competition to win. The sweet, happy Jace she knew didn’t fit with the horrible stories of his childhood, but this description certainly did. Thank God he escaped, she thought. Thank God he got away. Maybe those women were reliving it all because they were stuck out here in a small town and they couldn’t avoid constant reminders of the past. Look at what Jace had already accomplished. A tour in Afghanistan. Jump school. EOD school. He was already so far ahead of his parents. The bullshit in both their pasts didn’t have a chance at catching them cold.
···
Jace came into the bar half an hour before she was scheduled to punch out. She had already begun slicing lemons and limes for tomorrow as the bar had started to empty. Unusually worn out, Marleigh felt off and unsteady on her feet and was ready to clock out. She told him that she saw Trish earlier in the day. He asked for a Bud and shook his head. “She called me. Trish is a little too into her emotions sometimes, a little dramatic.” His face closed off when he talked about his childhood, his features smoothed and hardened to stone, even the dimple faded into his skin. Is this how he’d looked in the dark, telling that awful story?
“Okay,” Marleigh said, popping the cap off his beer and throwing it away. “Still, I wish you’d told me.” As she slid the bottle across the bar, she kept her hand around the belly of the beer until he met her eyes.
“I’m sorry, Mar. I’ve worked hard to forget that shit, leave it behind me. I barely think about it anymore.”
“I get it.” No one should be forced to relive abuse like that, but she was confused, a little dizzy. One moment she felt as thought she’d known Jace her entire life, but there was so much she didn’t know.
“I trust you, baby. Trish can get things a little twisted, though. And she’s always more worried about other people than keeping her own life together.” He took a long drink. “Damn that’s good. Before my sister settled down here, she used to teach on the reservation. Used to drive Mom crazy,” he said.
“An Indian reservation?”
“Yeah. Pine Ridge, the Sioux reservation. She’s always been obsessed with other peoples’ problems.”
“That sounds like Trish,” Marleigh said. Were Jace and Trish and Ed and Donna really as kind and as good as they seemed? She was starting to believe so, however impossible.
The last time Marleigh had really thought about Native Americans was in social studies as a child. She remembered her thick textbook, the heading “A Trail of Tears,” and an inset painting and two paragraphs. Other than that, it was all Powhatan, Pocahontas, Jamestown. She was close to a reservation, a place where the people who’d first walked this wild, huge place had been parceled and bundled together. Her belly hurt, just like it did in social studies in elementary school. That’s why she’d stopped thinking about it.
“Why’d it bother your mom?”
“Because she was sure Trish would get taken by some Indians.” He rolled his eyes. “She swore they were after white girls.”
Marleigh nodded. Sounded awfully similar to her own parents and their condescending, racist attitudes toward the Black and Brown kids who once kept the gym afloat.
“The rez isn’t the safest place for women after dark,” he said.
“What place is?” Marleigh asked, wondering about the women who lived there day and night.
He leaned across the bar and pulled her close. “Anywhere you’re with me.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss his neck. She believed him.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
On Marleigh’s first day off, Jace woke her in the dark by kissing her bare shoulder. It tickled. “Good morning. Today I’ll show you the bluff that put the bluff in Scottsbluff.” He was so damn chipper in the morning. “We need to get there for sunrise.”
She hadn’t shaken the queasiness, going on a week now, and would have liked to spend the morning in bed. But Jace’s energy was contagious, and he insisted they get outside before the mid-June heat warmed the day. Marleigh threw on shorts and a T-shirt and pulled her hair back with an elastic. She munched on Saltines from Donna’s pantry to settle her stomach. The bumpy county road ride to the highway didn’t help.
Jace twiddled his fingers on the steering wheel and shifted in his seat. Marleigh had seen the sandstone bluff almost every day she had spent in the area. The natural formation was visible from every part of Scottsbluff as well as most of Mitchell, which was twenty-five miles away. It was startling in so much flat land. It looked like an ancient serpent winding its way through the plains. When they parked, Jace took a golf club out of his truck bed. She gave him a look.
“In case we see a snake. I can shoo it off the trail.” Marleigh tensed. “It’s still pretty cool out this morning, so we shouldn’t see any.”
He handed her a flashlight and walked a step in front of her, golf club extended. The path was longer than Marleigh expected—and steeper. Jace had no problem finding it in the dark. The trail cut through the rock in places to form tunnels. They entered each one, proceeding through pitch black and emerging to warming sky.
As the sky glowed and the sun prepared to break the horizon, they reached the top. Scottsbluff looked like an actual city from this height, and she could see for tens of miles. Since they were on a plateau and the highest point around, Marleigh had a 360-degree view. She didn’t know where to look first. Green irrigated squares, bisecting roads, fences, livestock, streams, the whole world was below her feet. The sky was afire—burgundy and orange and pink and purple. She thought only sunset on water could be so beautiful. She was wrong.
Jace coughed. She turned and found him on one knee, a small box in his hand. He had that big dopey grin. His hand holding the box shook.
“Will you marry me?”
“Are you crazy?”
“Maybe. Marry me, Marleigh. Like you said, we’ll take care of each other.”
She looked down at the simple gold band glinting in the sunlight. “That’s just for now,” Jace said. “I want you to pick out the diamond you want when we go back.”
Back, right. Norfolk and them meeting felt like a decade ago, a lifetime and half of a continent away. She’d not planned on being married at twenty-three, but she hadn’t planned on Jace, either. They were more than hot for each other. Since Pops died, they hadn’t spent a full day apart. Marleigh had never had a best friend. She’d never trusted anyone enough to let them know her or burrow into her heart. She’d never wanted to risk herself for anyone. Until Jace. The fact that merely a look from him lit her up like neon was just a Megaball bonus. Jace felt more like her home than any place she had ever lived.
“Yes.”
He stood and picked her up and swung her around.
“Just you wait and see!”
They sat together, feet dangling off the cliff as the sun edged up into the sky, warming the rock and sand beneath them. She couldn’t stop smiling. Jace held her hand. He ran his thumb over and over the band he’d just put on her finger. She rested her head on his shoulder and looked at the world below them. They could build a good life together. They had already started. She had been too busy enjoying it to notice. She felt limitless with Jace by her side.
“Goddamn I love you, Marleigh!”
···
When they walked down, Jace’s golf club swung lazily at his side. Marleigh held Jace’s hand with the one that wore his ring, and the held the flashlight in the other. Every third or fourth step one of them stopped to nuzzle or embrace the other one. She had awoken to her most perfect day.
They didn’t hear the warning rattle as they entered the tunnel cut through the stone. A rattlesnake coiled tight at the other end, a car length from them. Jace threw the golf club at it. The snake spooked and slithered away. Marleigh’s heart throbbed in her throat.
“Where is it?”
“We won’t see it again, just a lazy rattler. Hardly Unhcegila.”
She gagged, spit and bile on the dusty ground. “Un-what?”
“Never mind. A Lakota Sioux myth.” Jace collected his club and waved her on. “He’s long gone,” he said. “How’s that for an exciting story?”
Marleigh smiled, but black dots bloomed across her vision. Her knees felt noodley. “I love you, Jace. I’m sorry. I think I have the flu.”
“And a stop at doc-in-a-box. What a day!” His smile was unbreakable.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Jace pulled his truck into a small strip mall in Scottsbluff. Marleigh saw the red cross painted on the white wall of the urgent care office. “In the Navy, we call this place the ‘I and O.’”
Marleigh looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror. Definitely pale, maybe even a little yellow. “What does that even mean?”
“Itch and odor clinic.”
“That’s disgusting,” she said. Her mouth felt overstuffed with her tongue and too wet.
“Sorry, poorly timed raunchy squid humor. I just want you to feel better, baby.”
“Me too. Later, I want you to tell me about that myth. The snake one.”
Marleigh signed herself into the clinic and they took their seats in the nearly empty waiting room. An elderly woman with a walker and oxygen tank, and a white-haired man, his shoulders permanently slouched, sat in the chairs directly in front of the check-in area. The couple held hands. Their skin was spotted and thick with dark veins.
Jace placed his palm across her forehead. “A little clammy,” he said, “but I don’t think you’re feverish.”
His concern was so sweet. She could tell it made him physically uncomfortable to not make her feel better. “I’m sure it’s nothing.” She spun the gold band around her finger. “I’m so sorry to ruin such a great day.”
He squeezed her hand in his. “Nope. That’s impossible. You make every day better. And no day could be better than today. You said ‘yes.’” His voice rose, directed to the old couple at the front of the room and the women at the check-in desks. “Holy shit, she said yes! Can you believe it?”
Marleigh felt the color rise in her face. “Shh, Jace.” But she couldn’t help but smile. She rested her head on his shoulder, and he sidled his body even closer to her.
“I hoped you would. I thought just maybe you would say yes. But part of me wondered if you’d just laugh in my face. Especially after Guylene and all of that.”
“Of course not, Jace. And look, it’s like a little preview of in sickness and in health.”
“This shoulder, my body. You can use it up. Lean on it, lay on me. Anywhere and always.”
A door swung open and a nurse stepped through. “Marleigh Mulcahy?”
Jace stood with her and held onto her fingertips as she stood releasing them only when she walked through the doorway. She could picture him out there, pacing, flipping through old PEOPLE magazines, restless until he knew she was okay. No one had ever loved her like that.
In a small, windowless room, Marleigh wore an examination robe that was a hundred sizes too big for her and a pair of socks with rubber on the bottom. A towel made of nubby paper draped across her legs. She needed Jace. Why was the nurse taking so long to bring him back? She needed the solid heft of him next to her to remind her that she was real, that they were real, that this was really happening.
“Where is she?” Jace’s voice, nervous and strained, but close by. She smeared her hands across her wet eyelashes and got herself together.
“Mr. Holt, please come with me.”
“Is she okay?”
“Yes, she’s right back here. Just follow me.”
His smile spread wide across his face when he saw her. He’d lost the nervous mask. Now it was Marleigh’s time to panic. Maybe she had ruined the day.
“Hi, Mar. Your color looks a little better, pink almost. Have you been crying?”
She couldn’t fool him. Her chin quivered and she nodded.
“Marleigh, girl. What’s going on?”
“Not the flu after all,” Marleigh said with an unsure smile. How he reacted to this news would change everything.
Jace looked from Marleigh to the nurse. The nurse looked at a technician seated in the corner of the room on top of a whirly chair. Then they all turned to Marleigh.
“It looks like we’re pregnant?” Her voice got all high on the last word.
“Pregnant! A kid! Our kid? Oh my God! Are you serious? Is she serious? You guys wouldn’t shit me about this, right?” He buried his nose in Marleigh’s hair.
“The pregnancy test came back positive. It’s a standard procedure,” the tech in the corner said.
“It might be too early, but they said we could try and listen for a heartbeat.”
Marleigh gripped his hand with hers. “I didn’t want to listen without you. Is this okay? Are you good with this?”
“Of course, let’s try. Oh my God. Marleigh!”
She inched the gown up and looked down at her stomach. She certainly didn’t look pregnant. The nurse squeezed a tube of jelly all over Marleigh’s stomach. Marleigh found Jace’s fingertips with her own. The tech slipped on plastic gloves and touched a microphone-looking thing to her skin.
“Breathe,” Marleigh whispered. Jace hadn’t taken a breath beside her, he was so still.
At first, all they could hear was sloshing and gurgling. And then whump whump whump. Jace pressed two finger to Marleigh’s neck to get a pulse.
“That’s so much faster than yours,” he said.
“Is that . . . ?” Marleigh looked up at him. His mouth hung open, just a bit, in wonder. His eyes shone and his hand clutched her tight.
“That’s your baby,” the tech said.
“There’s another heartbeat in you, Mar.”
“Holy shit, Jace.” She smiled and fat tears squeezed out the corners of her eyes. As she wiped them away, the ring he gave her that day glinted in the fluorescent light. The happiness was so profound it was painful.
“Holy shit is right. I can’t decide if I should cry or smile. I want to shout and dance and put my fist through a wall and stomp and shoot off fireworks and turn a goddamn cartwheel.”
The nurse smiled. “That sounds about right. Congratulations, you two.”
After Marleigh dressed, the nurse pressed a thick jar of prenatal vitamins into her hands. “It’s still early. Maybe six weeks, so anything can still happen. But make sure you take these every day.”
“I’ll make sure,” Jace told them both. “I’m going to take care of you, Mar. No harm is ever going to come to you or our kid.”
···
All the way back to Ed and Donna’s, Jace drummed his fingers on the truck’s steering wheel and sang along with the country songs, howling “Carrying Your Love With Me.” At the end of the chorus, he squeezed Marleigh’s knee.
“I bet George Strait can hear you wailing your heart out, wherever he is,” Marleigh said. He lost his volume button when he was worked up.
“You’re incredible, Mar, you know that? You’ve changed my life in one day. My whole life!”
“I think this,” she said, pointing to her abdomen, “was a joint effort. And we’ve changed all of our lives.” Three lives changed in one day. Jace’s, her own, and that miraculous whump whump whumping life growing inside of her.
“What a day! How are you feeling? What do you need?”
