Iain Read online

  Putting the two gifts on his bed, he dressed slowly and grabbed his wheelchair, knowing that, in his mind, it was a cop-out, but everybody else would say, You have to save your energy for another day. Then he headed down for his lunch. As soon as he got into line, Dennis was there.

  “Robin was looking for you earlier,” Dennis said. “She has already gone back to work now though.”

  “I had a rough morning,” Iain admitted. He looked at the food and sighed. “It all looks so good. But I don’t have too much strength or energy to eat.”

  “You can always have one plate now, and, if you need more, you can come back,” he said. “What can I get you?”

  Today was Chinese day because he saw noodles and stir-fry and ribs maybe, but how did that work? Still, he went for the ribs and a big plate of stir-fry.

  Dennis nodded with a big grin. “Now I approve of these choices,” he said. “They might seem like they don’t go together, but you’ve got something for the soul and something for the body here.”

  Iain looked at him in surprise. “I kind of like the way you separated those.”

  “Separated and yet joined together,” Dennis said. He handed him the full plate. “You need a hand?”

  “No,” Iain said. “I’ll be fine.” And moving slower than normal, he headed his wheelchair over to the closest empty table. There, he put down his plate and dug in. He was halfway through the vegetables when he realized he’d left the ribs on the plate for later. His body did need the nutrition.

  Dennis arrived soon afterward with a large glass of water and a glass of milk. “I don’t think you’re getting too much calcium these days,” he said. “So you can get that down.”

  “Not a problem,” he said. “I do like my milk. And I guess, if I’m not eating yogurt or cheese, milk is the easiest way to calcium, isn’t it?”

  “Any reason you don’t like cheese or yogurt?”

  “I like them both,” he said. “I just don’t tend to eat very much of them.”

  “You might want to think about changing that,” he said. “I get that you’re building muscle and nerves and trying to regain your strength, but your bones also have taken a huge beating.”

  “Well, I don’t have a problem drinking milk,” he said. He picked it up and had a big gulp. He really loved the taste as it slipped down his throat.

  “We can add one to your meal every time now,” Dennis said.

  “That would be good,” he said, and Dennis disappeared at that. Iain finished off his vegetables and tucked into his ribs. By the time he was done, he pushed his plate back ever-so-slightly and just relaxed. The drive had been to get here before the lunch hour closed, and, now that he’d accomplished that, he could feel the fatigue setting in. Particularly with a full belly.

  He had appointments this afternoon—not with Shane, thank God—but with one of the doctors and maybe his psychologist? That would never be an appointment he looked forward to. But still, it was something he couldn’t get out of. He slowly made his way back to his room, picked up the notebook, smiled, and realized he hadn’t had a chance to say thank-you but tucked it into the pocket on the side of his wheelchair along with the pen. Then he grabbed his iPad and checked his schedule. With that on his lap, he headed toward the office where he was expected.

  As he wheeled in, Dr. Broker looked up, smiled, and said, “How is Iain today?”

  “Tired, sore, partially wondering why I’m still here,” he said.

  The doctor looked at him in surprise; then he glanced down at his paper file and flipped through a few pages and said, “Tell me about it.”

  Just like a dam had been broken, Iain explained how he’d come for this new beginning, and yet, when there was no progress and still wasn’t any progress, he now realized that he needed to make peace with what he had and move on from there. So, it felt like he needed to cut short his time at Hathaway House.

  “And yet everybody else seems to think you’re making great progress,” the doctor said, sitting back and playing with the pen in his hand.

  Iain’s eyes studied the pen as it twirled around and around.

  “But I’m not seeing the progress,” he said quietly.

  “What are you seeing?”

  “Somebody who needs to face the reality of his situation,” he said. “Realize that this is it. I need to accept what I am and go on from here.”

  “And what are you?”

  And this was just one of the reasons why Iain hated coming to these visits. The constant questions, the constant searching, the constant looking for answers and realizing that the answers he had were not necessarily the same answers everybody else had. “A disabled man who needs to find a way to lead a fulfilling life.”

  “Okay,” the doctor said. “And what do you say about everybody else having seen progress?”

  “All I see is pain,” he said. “Every session with Shane hurts.”

  “He can ease it back,” the doctor said quietly. “We don’t want you in so much pain that it becomes a problem.”

  “It’s not,” he said, “but it does feel very much like I don’t need to work that hard.”

  “So, if it’s not hurting too bad, and you’re still attending all his sessions, and he’s seeing progress, what do you think the problem is? Or is it a case of you can’t see what’s right in front of you?”

  Iain snorted at that. “That’s quite possible,” he said. “Do we ever?”

  The doctor smiled. “Sometimes we don’t see very clearly at all,” he said. “It’s interesting that I have such positive reports from everybody but you.”

  “I don’t know about that,” he said. “I did have somebody mention that maybe I had a bit of an inflexible attitude.”

  At that, the doctor’s eyebrows rose, and the corner of his mouth twitched. “And do you think so?”

  “I didn’t think so,” he said, “but maybe. Maybe I just had it locked in my head that the surgery would be the be-all and end-all and put me back on my feet. When I realized that it would only partially put me back on my feet and that both my legs were still weak and that I was still suffering, then I just locked down on that.”

  “What will you do to ease that?”

  He just gave him a flat stare. “I have no idea.”

  The doctor nodded slowly. “Do you have a journal?”

  He stared at him in surprise. “Somebody just gave me a notebook and a pen to do something along those lines.”

  “Maybe instead of judging yourself, just open up your mind and open up to a page and see what comes up? See how you feel about your whole situation. See if you really feel like this. See if this is a blockage or if this is something you’re trying to avoid.”

  He frowned. “What could I possibly be trying to avoid by doing better?”

  “Success,” the doctor said bluntly. “So many people sabotage their own world in order to avoid becoming a success. Success is scary.”

  “Success would be to get my body back,” Iain said harshly. “How is it I could possibly be afraid of that?”

  The doctor looked him straight in the eye and said, “And that’s what I want you to tell me when you come back here next week.” With that, his phone rang on the desk. He picked it up and answered it.

  Iain didn’t even hear the conversation. He slowly wheeled himself back out and headed to his room. That was just another one of the reasons he hated these conversations. Nothing was ever clear; nothing was ever laid out. He was very much a person who, if he was told two plus two made four, then it made four.

  But this kind of mental crap just seemed like an endless gamut of right and wrong answers, and it was a minefield. He didn’t want to walk a minefield anymore; he wanted to know that what he was doing was right and correct and would lead exactly where he wanted it to. The trouble was, he no longer knew where that was.

  Before he came here, he’d been all about making that last surgery a success. And when it hadn’t been, he’d come here thinking that this would be the answ
er. But he quickly realized it wasn’t the answer either. This is just who he was, where he was, and what he had to get used to. So, what the hell did the doctor mean?

  Confused, irritated, and frustrated, Iain made his way to his room and realized that, with all the appointments he had had this afternoon, it was already four o’clock. He wanted desperately to have a swim, but he was edgy and didn’t want to be around people.

  By the time he made his way to the bed, he crashed and stared at the window. Was he afraid of success? Was being a failure more comfortable? What a horrible thought. What did being a failure mean? In a place like this, he got a lot of attention, he got a lot of help, he got a lot of assistance, and he got a lot of service from others. Was he such a poor human being that he was more concerned about receiving attention than doing things on his own?

  He was used to being severely independent. What had happened to that? And was it success or really the fear of failure again? Because what if he was a success and then failed at that too? When he heard the words in his mind, he winced. He slowly picked up the journal, looked at it, groaned, then reached for the pen and started writing.

  Chapter 10

  Several days later, when she kept looking out for Iain but never saw him, Robin realized just what an omega-size problem she had with him. A part of her felt lost without him here, without seeing him on a regular basis, without even just touching base and moving along that pathway of friendship and knowing that they were both together and caring about each other. No doubt she cared about him. She cared about his recovery. She cared about the life that he was leading, whether it was messed up right now or not.

  By the following Friday, she was once again looking at her weekend and wondering if she should go into town and spend a day there as a break. At two o’clock in the afternoon after a particularly rough day, she’d come up to grab five minutes and a cup of coffee and a bite to eat. She had missed lunch. Dennis, when he’d seen her, had shaken his head and tsked, then had brought her a huge sandwich. It was lovely. Every vegetable she could possibly imagine being slapped between two slices of bread. Protein was in there too. She thought it was ham or maybe roast beef but also peppers and onions and lettuce and tomatoes and cucumbers and pickles, and it just went on. She smiled as she munched her way through it. It was a sandwich to make her soul smile.

  When Dennis appeared a few minutes later, holding a pot of tea in his hand to deliver to a table beside her, she looked at the tea in surprise. “I never thought of having a pot of tea here.”

  He looked at her. “I’ve got lots of little pots,” he said. “Any time you want a pot of tea here or to take to your office or back home, you just let me know.”

  “I hate to disturb you.”

  “Ah, ah, ah,” he said. “None of that. We already went over that once. If you want something when I’m not here, the cupboard underneath the coffeepot has a few teapots just for that purpose.”

  She smiled, nodded, and said, “Fine, maybe I’ll take a pot back with me.”

  “You do that,” he said.

  And just like that, he was gone again.

  She wondered if she could do the job that he did and still have the same attitude. It was a job that offered so much pleasure to so many people, and yet much of the world looked down on it. They’d say he was just bussing tables or whatever derogatory term that people could slap on him at the time. And yet something was almost spiritual about what he did. She didn’t even mean it in a necessarily religious way but didn’t know how else to describe it.

  It’s as if he passed out joy and advice freely, and everybody felt better that they had seen him that day. Kind of like the way she felt when she saw Iain. The trouble was now, she hadn’t seen him in days, not since she’d given him the journal. She had received no response from him, no acknowledgment, nothing. He hadn’t sought her out nor had he found a way to thank her over the phone, if he even knew how to find her. But then he could have called the veterinarian clinic at any time.

  Depressed, she finished off her sandwich, pushed her chair back, and stood. She carried the dirty dishes to the waiting trolley and headed down the back stairs to see the horse called Appie and the llama named Lovely. Both of them raced over to visit. She scratched the big horse and the beautiful little llama, enjoying the chance to connect with them.

  When she looked across the hill, she could see one of the men lying in the tall grass. He was beside Hoppers. Hoppers was free? She frowned as she watched, but the rabbit didn’t appear to be bothered about going anywhere. A lot of fresh green grass surrounded him, and he was nibbling and nudging his way over each blade. Stan must have let Hoppers go outside with this man in order for Hoppers to be here, and that surprised her too. Stan didn’t do that lightly. She wandered closer and then recognized Iain.

  He looked at her, smiled, and said, “There you are.”

  She reached out a hand, palm up, and said, “I’ve been here all along.”

  “Nope,” he said, an odd note to his tone. “I came down to find you, but you weren’t there.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I missed lunch, so I went to grab a bite of something to get through the afternoon.”

  “I bet Dennis didn’t let you get away with that without making you something special, did he?”

  She laughed. “Absolutely not. Our Dennis is so very special.”

  “He cares,” Iain said simply. “I’ve come to understand that that’s all it is. He cares. He comes from the heart.”

  She sat down beside him, watching as Hoppers meandered another few inches over. “Stan let you bring Hoppers out?”

  “I think he asked me to bring him out specifically,” Iain said drily. “Apparently you’re still looking for a pen for this guy.”

  “We’d love to leave him loose, but he’s just as likely to end up on the road and get hit by a car than anything.”

  “He’s pretty big for a predator to take on, which would be the normal danger we’d expect of a rabbit.”

  “Yep, but anything big enough that could take him down would get several good meals out of him,” she admitted.

  He just grinned, reached down, and gently rubbed Hoppers’s back. Hoppers didn’t seem to mind in the least. “I never had a rabbit as a pet,” he said. “Never really considered it.”

  “And would you now?”

  “I’m not so sure,” he said. “But he’s definitely peaceful to be around. Again, kind of like Dennis. They come from joy.”

  She loved that. “I hope you wrote that down in your journal.”

  “What, that Hoppers comes from joy?” he asked, laughing.

  “I think that we should strive to come from joy,” she said quietly. “If I end up learning that lesson before I die, I’ll consider this life one well-lived.”

  “Hadn’t thought about that,” he said. He looked over at Lovely and Appie, the llama and the horse wandering toward them and said, “They all do though, don’t they?”

  “They do. They’re full of forgiveness. They’re full of joy. They’re full of just being who they are,” she said. “I have to admit, I’m jealous.”

  “Why? What part of you isn’t good enough?” he asked with a sideways look.

  “The insecure, scared-to-brave-the-whole-new-world me,” she said. She hopped to her feet and dusted the dirt off her butt. “As much as I’d like to stay here and talk, I’m expected to work this afternoon.”

  “I took the afternoon off,” he said. “I just thought maybe you’d meet me at the pool at say four o’clock or whenever you’re done.”

  She hesitated, looked at him, looked at the pool, and then nodded. “It’s a date.” And she disappeared back inside.

  Iain watched her go, a smile playing on his lips. Hardly a date but, hey, he’d take what kind of a date facsimile this could be anyway. He should have thanked her for the journal but hadn’t. He’d have to remember to do so when she came back out. He was feeling kind of odd and spacey himself.

  Once he’d started wri
ting in the journal, it seemed like he couldn’t stop. Now he’d covered pages and pages. He didn’t know if that was good or bad, but it was something that he seemed unable to change. Finally he got up, his thoughts heavy, and looked down at Hoppers. Iain was wondering what to do about the rabbit, when Stan called out to him. He looked over, and Stan walked toward him. “I’ll bring him back to his hutch.”

  “It seems like such a shame,” he said. “It’s a perfect pasture for him.”

  “I know, but he’s not exactly house-trained, and he won’t stay close by without a fence of some kind. And we don’t want to put him in with the horses either.”

  “Right. Gotta keep him safe,” he said. He watched as Stan crouched and picked up Hoppers. Hoppers made absolutely no effort to get away and instead cuddled into Stan’s neck. Iain grinned. “You’re really blessed to be doing the work you do.”

  “I am,” he said. “I think that’s one of the joys of being in this world. We get to make choices. I’m happy to say I made a good choice.” With that, he headed back inside.

  And that left Iain wondering if everybody in this place was full of those heavy New Age comments. Because of all the choices he’d made, he’d been absolutely ecstatic with his. To go into the navy and making it into the SEALs had been his best day. But now? Now he had a whole pile of new choices. None of which he felt qualified for. Or none involved where his joy of being in this world was, like Stan talked about. And that brought Iain back around to the doctor’s question about whether Iain was afraid of being a success.

  Maybe the question really was if he was afraid of being a failure.

  Slowly, his heart heavy, he made his way back to his room on his crutches, and, as soon as he sat on his bed, he reached for the journal and started writing again. And again, the words just flowed. Some of it didn’t make any sense and didn’t seem to matter as his hand flew across the page. He realized he would run out of pages before too many days had gone by. He made a concerted effort to write neater, smaller, only to give it up because it seemed to impinge on his ability to let the words flow. The deluge was everything from his childhood to the problems he’d had in the navy to waking up in the hospital. None of it was very important alone—barring the event leading to the hospital—but all of it mattered.