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* * *
JENNY BUCHANAN SAT on the pretty, plaid sofa in her living room, staring at the ceiling. She’d gotten the kids to bed a little while ago, and still hadn’t heard a peep from Adam. Her husband of six years had retreated to the guest room after the after-school fight. The guest room where he’d been sleeping since coming home from the hospital three months ago.
The guest room where he’d made it clear she wasn’t wanted. Or needed. Or even invited.
God, she hated that guest room. If she could, she’d set fire to it so she never had to deal with it again. Burning down part of the home she’d built with Adam wasn’t a solution to their current problems, though. As satisfying as it might be.
Her mother’s chattering voice continued through the phone line, but Jenny had stopped paying attention five minutes before. She wasn’t sure if the occasionally muttered uh-huhs and okays she offered were for the poor turnout for her mother’s annual Coats for Kids drive or for the fact that her father still hadn’t fixed the loose downspout on the side of their house. Either way, she didn’t really care.
It wasn’t even October yet. The first cold snap hadn’t hit southern Missouri. In fact, they had yet to see nightly temperatures drop under the seventy-degree mark. And, really, what was the big deal about a downspout that was only slightly off center? There were bigger problems in the world.
Terrorism, for one.
Her husband’s continued depression/anger/denial of the very real medical issues facing them since the tornado that nearly destroyed their town, for another. Not to mention the business issues. She and Adam had made big plans to turn Buchanan Cabinetry into Buchanan Fine Furnishings before the tornado hit; his parents had been mostly retired, splitting their time between Slippery Rock and Florida when they weren’t traveling the country in their RV. Since the tornado and Adam’s hospitalization, though, they’d moved home to Slippery Rock full-time and were now back to running the business. Straight into the ground.
The elder Buchanans had “mislaid” messages from the company suppliers, and when a furniture outlet in Springfield called to ask about a new partnership, they had refused to even consider the option. That was a partnership she and Adam had been working on for months, and his parents had killed the plan without even consulting her. Or Adam.
Adam’s response had been to shrug his shoulder, get a bottle of soda from the fridge and wheel himself back into the guest room, where he shut the door and turned on the television.
When she knocked on the door, trying to talk to him, he’d simply turned up the volume until she left him alone.
She didn’t know how to reach her husband. She hated her job.
She hated her life.
More than any of those things, she hated that she felt so helpless in this situation. “Mother, I’d like to talk about me, please,” she said, detesting the whining note that came into her voice. She wasn’t whining; she’d called for advice. But in typical Margery Hastings fashion, her mom had steamrolled right over Jenny’s needs and straight into her own.
Margery didn’t respond well to whining, though, so Jenny backtracked. “I don’t mean to belittle your problems, I’m sure Dad is just focused on work. You know, the bank was hit really hard by the tornado.”
“It isn’t as if they had to rebuild,” Margery said, her voice stiff with self-righteousness.
No, the bank hadn’t had to rebuild. They’d had to create loans for local businesses to rebuild, had dealt with construction companies that needed to expand to deal with the devastation, and had to explain to their corporate bosses why capital outlay had increased so much in a single quarter.
“What I meant was that I really do need your advice. I’m just not sure how to reach Adam. He’s...not the same man that he was before the tornado.” As frustrated with Pre-Tornado Adam as she’d gotten from time to time—she’d begun to refer to him as that—she would take that reckless, carefree, playful man over the dark, depressed man living in her home any day.
“Well, what did you expect, dear? He was in a devastating tornado, trapped in the rubble of a building for nearly a full day before help arrived. Now he’s dealing with a debilitating medical condition that is only barely under control—”
“You’re right, you’re right. I’m being too hard on him.”
“You aren’t being hard enough on him,” her mother said, and Jenny shook her head. She had to be hearing things, right?
“Mother, he’s having seizures because of a terrible head injury.”
“And you’re defending his continued ill behavior. I’m not sure why you expected anything different. He is one of those Buchanan boys. Neither of them took a single thing seriously when they were in school. I still don’t know why you had to marry him.”
Because she loved him, and she’d been eighteen and foolish enough to believe that no matter what they faced, love would be enough to get them through. She didn’t think she could love Adam out of this dark place, though.
She wasn’t even sure she wanted to try.
Jenny squeezed her eyes closed. God, she was a bitch to even think those words. Adam was her husband; of course she wanted to try to fix him. Fix their relationship. Fix their family.
“Well?” her mother said, sounding impatient.
“I married him because I loved him,” she said, and Margery pounced.
“See, right there. You loved him. Not you love him. Loved. Past tense. Jennifer Anne, there are times that you stand by your man, and there are times you have to be honest with yourself. This is one of those times.”
One of which times? Jenny didn’t know. She wanted to stand by Adam. She loved him—not past tense, but now. As frustrating as it had sometimes been to deal with him being the fun, friendly, never-disciplined-the-kids dad, she loved the man he had been. Sometime in the past few months, though, she had lost that man, and she didn’t know if he even existed any longer. It was as if the tornado stole the Adam she knew and replaced him with this angry robot of a man.
“I love him, Mother. Love. Present tense. Being frustrated at our situation isn’t a good reason to...to change that.” She couldn’t say the D word. She couldn’t. She didn’t want to divorce Adam. She wanted to wake him up. To bring him out of whatever place the tornado had left him, and move forward.
“Well, I’m not sure how I can help you, then. I just got in from bridge club, and need to have dinner ready for your father in fifteen minutes. Call me when you come to your senses,” she said, and the phone clicked off.
Jenny turned the receiver over and over in her hands. “That was a brilliant move, Jen—call dear old Mom for advice on one of her bridge days.” She replaced the receiver and went into the kitchen. She poured a cup of coffee into her favorite owl mug and sat at the counter, drumming her fingers on the granite countertop.
Frankie’s army men were strewn around the living room, despite her three warnings that morning for him to clean them up. Jenny sighed and crossed the room. She gathered up the little green men and tossed them into the basket at the end of the sofa. A stack of Garrett’s drawings were wedged under the couch and she pulled them out.
Garrett had drawn a picture of their house, with stick figures of Adam, Jenny, Frankie and himself standing before it. Jenny smiled. She and Adam appeared to be holding stick hands in the picture. She put the paper on the sofa, and froze. The next picture was the same house, but black clouds circled the roof and squiggly lines appeared to be attacking it. She swallowed hard.
The tornado. She would reassure Garrett that the storm wasn’t coming back.
Jenny flipped to another picture. This time no angry clouds buzzed the pretty yellow house her almost-six-year-old had drawn. Flowers popped up near the feet of the mom and the two kids in the picture, but a big black cloud was attacking another figure. A figure in a wheelchair. A figure with light brown hair and a frown on its face. A figure that was separated from the rest of the family and the house by a gaping black hole.
This wasn’t right. She’d thought she and Adam had been able to hide the rift between them, at least from the kids. She gathered the pictures and put them in a drawer in the kitchen island, and then leaned against the cool granite. Jenny pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
She had to fix this.
CHAPTER TWO
ADAM SAT IN the black wheelchair in the guest room of his home and stared out the window. From here he could see the still waters of Slippery Rock Lake, and he wanted to be there. In the water. Floating.
But he couldn’t float. He couldn’t go in the water. Couldn’t take a shower alone. He couldn’t do anything that a normal twenty-eight-year-old would do because the doctors didn’t know when the next seizure would hit. God forbid he’d drown in his own shower.
He was supposed to be grateful that the damned tornado didn’t kill him, but what kind of life was this? Trapped in a freaking wheelchair for the foreseeable future because his brain refused to work right.
Jenny knocked on the door. For the fifteenth time since he’d left the living room, repeating the all too familiar It will be okay that she seemed to have on permanent repeat in her mind.
“Do you want something for dinner?”
“No.”
She knocked again. “I made the boys grilled cheese and tomato soup.”
His stomach growled at the thought. He loved grilled cheese and tomato soup.
“I don’t want grilled cheese. I don’t want soup or bologna or a freaking rib eye from the Slippery Rock Grill that you’ve cut into small, little bites for me. I don’t want anything,” he said.
Or maybe yelled. He wasn’t sure anymore. He seemed to be yelling all the time, but then he actually said only about a hundred words a day. Most of the yelling was silent. Internal. Aimed at himself.
Because he’d been a complete fool, and if he’d just obeyed the warning sirens, none of this would be happening. He wouldn’t be in this wheelchair. He wouldn’t have a wife who looked at him with pity in her eyes. He’d be in his workshop right now, building something with wood and tools, something that would last for decades.
But he’d been a fool. He’d freaked out when those sirens started blaring, and instead of being a normal, healthy man, he was a head case in a wheelchair who couldn’t do anything that any other normal twenty-eight-year-old could do.
“Well, we have to leave for the doctor’s at ten in the morning, so... I’ll wake you before the kids go to school. Let me know if you need anything before then,” she said, and her kind, nurse-like voice made his skin crawl.
Jenny’s husky voice used to make him hot. All she’d had to do was throw her head back in laughter or say something completely ordinary like pass the salt and he had wanted her.
Wanted to kiss her, touch her. Do dirty, dirty things to and with her.
Now all he wanted was to be left alone, and she wouldn’t leave him alone. Why couldn’t she just leave him alone?
He didn’t answer, and she didn’t say anything more through the door that he refused to leave open, no matter how many times she or the kids opened it. He didn’t deserve an open door, and they deserved more than to have to deal with his brokenness because of an open door.
Adam blew out a breath. Sometimes he wished he could wheel himself down to the lake and just float away. He could borrow a boat—his friend James had one—or he could rent one of the marina boats. Set out from the marina and just flow. If Slippery Rock Lake actually led anywhere, maybe that was exactly what he would do. Man-made lakes didn’t lead anywhere, though, except right back to where a person started, and what was the point of that?
Adam twisted the top off his bottle of soda and drank. It was too sweet, and he didn’t really like it, but what did like have to do with anything? He finished the bottle and tossed the empty plastic into the wastebasket under the cherry desk he’d built two years before.
It was a good desk. Solidly built, but with enough design elements to also be visually appealing. There were hidden drawers, curved edges. He’d been tempted to create some kind of locking device, so that the hidden drawers would actually be inaccessible, but at the last minute decided that was a little too adventure movie-ish, and simply built them to blend into the desk itself.
A picture of Jenny and the kids sat on the desk and he picked it up, running his fingers over their faces. He’d failed them. He hadn’t kept up his end of the bargain. He was supposed to be their protector, their provider. He was neither, and despite that fact, despite knowing that they would be better off without him, he couldn’t seem to wheel himself away.
* * *
FOURTEEN HOURS AND a million more reasons to let his family go later, Adam was just as uncomfortable as he had been in the guest room of his home. He sat in the exam room of his doctor’s office, waiting. Jenny sat in the plastic-backed chair against the wall. He’d left the wheelchair in favor of sitting on the too-short bed thing in the office. The protective strip of paper on it crackled when he moved, so he did his best to remain still.
Jenny was checking her phone.
“Everything okay?” His voice sounded rough and unused. So, pretty much the new normal.
“Just checking in with your dad. We were supposed to ship the new cabinet fronts for the Wareham project in Joplin today.”
“Supposed to?” he asked, because supposed to made it sound as if the shipment didn’t happen.
Jenny sighed. “He decided to ship them with the countertops next week.” She put her phone into her purse. “I’ll call the project manager when we get done here, straighten it out.”
Adam didn’t say anything. What was there to say? He didn’t know anything about the Wareham project; maybe it made sense to ship the tops and fronts at the same time.
Jenny watched him for a long while, as if waiting for him to say something or do something more than sit on the edge of the exam table. Finally, she blew out a breath and took her phone from her bag again. While she tapped the keys, he watched the clock on the wall click off two minutes and twenty-five seconds. Then the doctor came in.
“Adam, Jenny, how are you both doing today?” Dr. Lambert wore gray pants and New Balance running shoes. Under his crisp, white lab coat, he wore a pink polo shirt. Adam didn’t answer his question.
“We’re fine. No seizures since our visit two weeks ago,” Jenny said, as if she spoke for him all the time.
“Sixteen days, if you want to be exact.” Because sixteen days sounded so much better than two weeks. Two was nothing. Sixteen, that sounded like progress, at least to Adam. Jenny raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
“Good, good.” Lambert made a notation on his tablet. “We’ll keep the same dosage, same meds for now. This could be the cocktail we’ve been looking for. Adam, how are you feeling?”
“Fine,” he said.
“No more headaches?”
Adam shook his head, not caring that it was a lie. The headaches were much better than they had been the first few days after he’d woken up in the hospital. Instead of pounding at his brain like a hammer, they were more of a dull throb. And instead of lasting all day, they were an hour or so at the most. Nothing he couldn’t deal with. Besides, his head shake seemed to make Jenny feel better. Her shoulders didn’t seem so stiff now.
“What about the vertigo?”
“Nothing.” Of course, it was hard to have vertigo when he spent 90 percent of his day either lying on the guest room bed or sitting in that damned chair. He leaned his head forward, and the floor seemed to yo-yo toward him. Adam gripped the edge of the table and closed his eyes. When he looked up, Jenny was tapping at her phone again and the doctor was making another notation in his chart. Good, neither of them had seen through the vertigo lie, either.
“Okay. Let’s see how things are looking, then,” the doctor said as he turned to face Adam.
He shone a light into Adam’s eyes. Looked in his ears. Listened to his lungs and his heart and his belly. Adam wondered what any of that had to do with his malfunctioning brain, but he didn’t ask. He didn’t want to know. The less he knew, the more he could pretend that this wasn’t really happening. That maybe he was still stuck in the rubble of the day care, waiting to be rescued from the worst dream of his life.
Finally, Dr. Lambert finished his examination. He sat on the wheeled stool while he made a few more notes on the tablet.
“I like what I’m seeing, Adam,” he said after a long moment. “I think we may be on the right medication track, and your vitals are definitely returning to normal. What’s going on with your knee? Still giving you trouble?”
“The rehab doc still thinks he’s going to require surgery to fix the knee, but they’ve talked about ultrasound therapy as a stopgap measure,” Jenny stated. “He said it might be enough to reattach the hamstring, which would be a good first step. Or it would be if he was actually going to the physical therapy appointments.” She shot Adam a look before he could offer another monosyllabic, false-positive reply. “They won’t approve surgery until you give us the all-clear on the epilepsy front.”
“I can walk, though—it’s just not as comfortable as it used to be.”
“Walking mostly comfortable is good. But those ligaments aren’t going to reattach themselves, Adam. Rehab will help, especially since I don’t feel confident approving the surgery just yet. We need to ensure the epilepsy is under control before we put you under the knife.”
Because if his brain freaked out during surgery, chances were the knee surgeon could do more harm than good, Adam supposed. He didn’t say that, though. He didn’t want Dr. Lambert to refer him to a head-shrinker as well as a rehab specialist.
“Have you given any more thought to a service dog?”
“Yes,” Jenny said.
“No,” Adam said at the same time. He stared at his wife for a moment.
She shook her head as if to say, “Fine, have it your way.”
“I don’t like the idea of having a big dog in the house. We have small children,” he said, and he knew even as he said the words that they were a reach. Having a service dog in the house wouldn’t be a danger to the kids. It wasn’t trained to find drugs or bombs, but to sense his messed-up brain waves or something. Adam still wasn’t positive what the service dog would do, other than be another reminder of his new inadequacies. That was enough to put a stop to the dog coming to their home.
Her home. Whatever.
“As long as the children understand the dog isn’t a pet, you have nothing to worry about. Even if they don’t quite understand it, it isn’t as if the dog will go on the attack. These are gentle dogs who are trained to meet your specific needs.”
“Well, I don’t need a dog.” Adam stood abruptly, but the floor did that yo-yo thing again and he quickly sat in the wheelchair.
Dr. Lambert pressed his mouth into a hard line. “Fine,” he said after a while. He motioned to the door, and they went into the hallway.
“Thank you, Dr. Lambert,” Jenny said, but Adam heard no actual thanks in her voice. There was annoyance, but not thanks. He supposed he was the reason for that.
“Kim at the front desk will schedule you back. Let’s go three full weeks this time, unless there is a seizure.” He walked beside Jenny while she pushed Adam in the wheelchair. “If there are any issues—” Adam knew what that meant: if the meds stopped working “—please call immediately.”
“We will.”
The doctor nodded. He paused for a moment, but didn’t say anything else, just turned on his heel and went down the hallway.
Jenny scheduled the appointment while Adam sat in the wheelchair. In the parking lot, she turned to him. “You didn’t have to be rude about the dog.”
“I don’t need a service dog. I’m not blind or deaf.”
“Service dogs aren’t just for the blind or deaf. Did you even read the literature?”
He’d put it in the nightstand drawer, and refused to open that drawer since putting the pamphlets there. “Of course I read the stupid flyers.” What was one more lie on the mountain of lies he’d been telling her since the accident?
“Then stop acting as if a service dog means you’re permanently—” She covered her mouth with her hand.
“Disabled? News flash, Jen, the doc thinks I am permanently disabled or he wouldn’t keep bringing it up.”
“Epilepsy isn’t the end of the world.”
“Well, it sure as hell isn’t normal, either,” he said. He got out of the wheelchair, slapped at it until it collapsed into a flat heap, and shoved it into the trunk of the Mustang convertible he’d restored his senior year in high school. The handles stuck out so that the trunk wouldn’t close. He shoved at it again, but no matter what he did, the stupid chair wouldn’t fit into the trunk.
Jenny pushed him aside. “Let me do it,” she grumbled. “If we had a family car, this wouldn’t be such a big deal.”
“We don’t need a family car just because I’m stuck in that stupid chair for another couple weeks.”
“Rehab might shorten those couple weeks,” she said. “There is no way to rehab epilepsy.”
She glared at him for a long moment then started around the car. Adam opened the passenger door, got in and slammed it shut. She slammed her door when she got in, too.
“We need a family car because we have a family,” she said, anger making her husky voice even huskier. It sent a thrill down Adam’s spine, which was ridiculous. He couldn’t walk without a wheelchair; there was no way he could make love to his wife the way he wanted to. “Two kids, all of their school stuff, Frankie is already playing football because he wants to be like you. We need a family car.”
“This car is important to me,” Adam said, crossing his arms over his chest.
“This car is impractical.”
“I restored it. It’s a classic.”
“Then we’ll just get a second car.”
“No.”
She glared at him again. “No?” she asked, her voice deceptively calm. Quiet.
“No.”
Jenny put the car in gear and drove out of the parking lot. She didn’t say anything until they pulled onto the highway leading to Slippery Rock. Adam glanced at her. Jaw set. Mouth in a hard line. Hands at ten and two on the steering wheel, knuckles white.
Adam started to apologize. He didn’t want to snap at Jenny. He didn’t want to fight with her. It was too hard to fight. He leaned his head against the rest and closed his eyes. He didn’t like fighting, not with Jenny. Not with anyone. He just wanted everything to go back to the way it had always been. The Mustang was the way things had been.
The Mustang meant everything would be okay again.
* * *
THEY DROVE IN silence until the big “Welcome to Slippery Rock” sign came into view. It had taken everything she had not to snap at Adam, not to react when he obviously wanted a reaction. A reason to fight. She wasn’t going to be that reason. He hated his diagnosis? Well, so did she, but according to some of the information she’d read online, keeping his world bland and ordinary could help to keep the seizures under control. Something about blood pressure spikes and endorphins, and it didn’t make a ton of sense to her, but then Jenny had never pretended to be interested in biology or any of the other sciences. She’d been too busy reading fiction books and daydreaming about Adam Buchanan.
She didn’t want to lose him now. She couldn’t let him keep walking all over her, though. She was done with that. Everything had been Adam’s way since they got married. They’d bought the fixer-upper he wanted, drove the car he’d restored, watched the TV shows and movies he liked best. Hell, she’d taken the job he wanted her to take—and fallen in love with the intricacies of it, true enough.
It never bothered her before the tornado that her life was so closely wrapped up in his. She didn’t mind being the one to discipline the kids or pay the bills or make the vacation plans he wanted or bring up the possibility of expanding Buchanan Cabinetry. But now she had the job, and the parenting, and the house upkeep, and she didn’t even have Fun Adam to run around with the kids in the backyard while she caught up on the laundry. Or, God, the man she loved to have take her in his arms and kiss her senseless.