Broken Souls ... by Annay Dawson
Chapter 8
The smells wafting from the place made her think of small towns, playgrounds, and family gatherings.
“Wow,” Kari said when they walked in. The place was packed, “How long will it take to get a table?”
“Way too long if I hadn’t called ahead,” Jordan was tapping her finger to her head emphasizing how smart she had been and then turned to wave at someone, “Hey Doris, where do we sit?” Kari recognized Doris as the waitress that had helped her last night. Doris pointed toward the back corner, just out of sight of the door. Jordan moved in that direction avoiding menus, elbows and tables. They settled down in the two seats at the small table and watched the others standing around waiting. She could just barely see the people waiting at the door. Kari could see through the window that there were now more waiting outside on the porch for a seat and Kari was thankful that Jordan had called ahead. Kari wondered why she had made the reservation for two but didn't ask. Jordan didn't seem like the person to sit by herself for long. She was naturally social. They sat there for maybe five minutes just listening to the din in the room before Doris got back to them to take the order.
“Hey, good to see you back. The food must have been good last night,” it was obvious now that Doris remembered her from last night as well. “You must be working at the clinic if you’re hanging out with this one?”
“I’m Kari the new case manager on staff,” she stated as she took the menu that was offered.
“I don’t need one of those. I already know what I want Doris,” and Jordan waved the menu away, “Does Ed have some of that chicken pot pie made up today?”
“Sure does,” Doris smiled.
“That’s what I’m craving. Best pot pie anywhere on the east coast,” and Jordan added, “and a glass of ice tea.”
“Sounds good to me,” Kari had no doubt that everything was good in this place, the way it was packed suggested it. Glancing back at the menu she closed it purposefully. “I think I’ll have the same,” Kari handed the menu back, “If Jordan says it’s that good I'll have to trust her.”
“Oh honey, it’s that good,” Doris gave a nod of her head for assurance and then turned and walked away.
“Okay, now that that's done tell me all about yourself,” Jordan gave her full attention to Kari by propping her head on her hands, elbows on the table and suddenly the din fell away. With Jordan's full attention on her there was very little way out of this. After a few moments she settled on the amount she was willing to share.
“Not much to tell. Grew up and worked in Richmond all my life till now. Decided I needed a change so here I am,” Kari wasn’t willing to go into all the unpleasant details, especially those about Trevor, so she stuck with a general explanation.
“Wow, you are either super boring or super secretive and I am still trying to figure out which,” it was obvious that Jordan didn’t believe that Kari had told her all that she could but she wasn’t going to push too hard. At least not yet.
“Uhm,” and that was all Kari said before Jordan continued.
“No matter. I’ll find out which soon enough. As for me,” Kari smiled as Jordan continued, happy to have the spotlight off of her. She was about six years younger than Kari and her bubbly personality could support at least three people. Kari still hadn’t seen her with anything but a smile on her face, even the time she had come in and interviewed with Dr. McCoy. Kari couldn’t imagine anything getting her down or making her sad. Jordan wore her picture perfect blond hair in a short bouncy ponytail. Kari wasn’t sure how she wore it during non-work times that was still to be seen, but Kari imagined it might be a long bob cut. That was the only haircut that would match her personality. Jordan didn’t sit still when she talked either. She seemed to be in a constant state of motion with her hands doing half of the talking. She was the perfect receptionist for the clinic, bubbly personality, friendly, and Kari guessed if Jordan had her way she would become one of Kari’s good friends as well.
“I was born here in this little town of ten thousand or so, and went to school here. Boring right?” Kari was about to say something and Jordan waved her off, “Wrong. My pa was the sheriff and I got to ride along from the age of sixteen, or at least that’s what he tells me to tell people,” she stopped only to catch her breath and smile crookedly, “My mom would have had a cow if she had known but by that time they were divorced and she had no idea how I spent my time, too busy with her life you know. But pa always had time for me. It was by the time I was sixteen that mom had met the man of her dreams,” and Jordan put up her fingers to make imaginary quotation marks as she made a swoony-like face. “Yeah right, but who cared. She let me go live with pa full-time then and she ran off. No idea where she went and I really don’t care now. Pa was all I needed.
“Now you might wonder why I never left this little town and went off to college and such,” she took a breath when Doris came and set the iced teas down.
“Now Jordy don’t bore this poor woman to death or she might just fall asleep on the table and as you can see we need all the tables we can get this lunchtime,” Doris said it with a grin.
“Oh ha ha Doris. If she won’t tell me about her then she’s just going to have to deal with me doing all the talking.” Kari just watched the exchange and realized why Jordan had never left. This was home and not the kind where you say it’s home but the kind where you feel it in your bones and ache to get back to it when you leave. The people here are the people who care about you and what you do in life. It’s the place where even the little things seem to put your world back in balance. She was blessed to have found it, and Kari could see that Jordan understood how much it meant to have it.
“Careful of this one,” and Doris winked, “She’ll talk your ear off.”
“Very funny,” but then Jordan continued to talk and it didn’t seem that she stopped talking until the food got to the table. The food, chicken pot pie, was absolutely excellent as she had promised and they both went back to the clinic with full stomachs. Kari had a lot more to think about. With all that Jordan had been through in life already she shouldn’t be so cheerful but she was the picture of happiness.
By the time Kari finished up that afternoon she was tired and ready to head home. Still feeling full from lunch she decided to just go back to the apartment she had rented and scrounge for whatever she could find there. She was sure that she had a couple pieces of fruit or something. Walking up the stairs and through the door she felt a mixture of depression and indifference. This just wasn’t home. It was what it was, a cute little apartment in which she could and should start over again, and after the last two days she was discovering that it was both harder and easier than she had imagined. She may be in a new place, a new job, but the old her was still hanging around refusing to be exorcised.
Foraging through the cupboards she found a can of soup. Deciding it was as good as anything else she dumped it in a bowl to microwave it it. As she waited for the familiar ding she got a glass of water. Once it was all ready she settled down in the large chair in front of the television to watch a movie. The furniture was nothing special, it had come with the place, everything but the bed. That had worked for her as she had a small problem with the bed being part of the included furnishings. Flipping through the local channels she finally settled on the local independent station. The old movie had already started but that was okay, she knew it by heart. It was really just on for background noise. Taking a couple bites of soup she lost her desire to eat and set it down on the side table, leaning her head back.
Three hours later she woke up with the nearly full bowl of soup now cold on the side table. Rubbing her neck and looking at a television screen that had switched to some reality show that she hadn’t and didn’t want to see she knew it was time to go to bed. She unfolded herself from the chair and stretched flipping off the TV and taking her now cold bowl of soup back into the kitchen area. Dumping it down the sink she yawned and turned to go to bed. Living on your own there were very few dishes to do or things to take care of at the end of the day. As soon as she got to the bedroom door she knew she couldn’t crawl into that bed. She had decided to keep the bed, the bed she had shared with Trevor. It had been one of the few pieces of her previous life she had kept. Giving herself a silent nod she walked past the bed to the bathroom and brushed her teeth to get ready for bed.
Walking out of the bathroom she didn’t even glimpse at the bed. Grabbing the throw at the bottom of the bed she headed back into the living room. Making sure all the lights were off she sat down on the couch and sighed. She couldn’t spend tonight in that bed. With any luck, she thought as she drifted off to sleep, she would sleep dreamlessly, if not well.
Something woke her and she lay still. It was too early. The sun was not up and the day was nowhere near the beginning but here she was awake once again. Listening for a moment she determined that there was no one around, and at best it might have been a stray pinecone falling on the roof that startled her from her sleep. She sighed, at least this time she hadn’t had any dreams that she could remember. She knew that everyone dreamed each and every night but she also knew that not everyone remembered their nightly dreams. Today she could count herself in with the lucky ones that couldn’t remember what they had dreamt about. Glancing at her watch she noticed it was about five in the morning, about half an hour later than when she got up yesterday. It was probably about right considering that she had fallen asleep at about seven thirty last night to begin with. No matter, she decided. If she got up now she could be out the door in fifteen minutes and on a hike again. Rolling off the couch she headed for her closet.
Kari unknowingly smiled a bit. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to go on a hike, or, if she wanted to see that man again. After all she did like looking at him and he seemed to be a nice enough guy from all that she had learned yesterday. It was only yesterday wasn’t it? She frowned a bit, not sure whether or not to trust her judgments. Could he be that nice of a guy or was her guy-a-vision off. After all who would paint someone else’s house and chop wood for them if he wasn’t truly a nice guy. It also helped to explain the way he looked. He was obviously accustomed to hard work and probably liked it. He might work construction or maybe he was in some other manual labor field. It didn’t explain the swimming at five in the morning but everyone had their secret passions, she certainly had hers. And what was worse she didn’t understand why she was all that interested in him at all. She chalked it up to the fact that she was now involved with Daniel’s family and that must be it. All she knew, as she walked out the door, was that she hoped she would see him once again.
Holden jumped into the pond and consciously held his breath, as he knew, by experience, that the cold water would knock it right out of his lungs. Surfacing again he shook his head then began to sing the familiar tunes of the 80s that he learned from a friend of his on the team he had spent the last assignment with. He knew he wasn’t a very good singer but it didn’t matter, no one else was around and it brought him comfort and solace. He stopped singing for a moment as yesterday’s escapades flashed in his head. Yesterday had been a treat and he had had a peeping Tom, he had gotten to meet Kari. Kari, that’s what her name was, Kari. Simple, pretty name, for a complicated person he was pretty sure.
He had seen her at the cafe just the night before. Not too many new faces ever showed up in town and not only was she a new face she was a pretty face. One he definitely remembered. He thought about that sweater and how she looked in those trousers as she had walked out of the cafe, and he smiled. At that time he had had no clue that he would see her again, or that she would see so much of him. She had actually snuck up through the woods to watch him swim and listen to him sing, which was a little scary in itself. Okay, maybe she hadn't snuck up on him. The path there was pretty overgrown. Also the pond was off the beaten track and his singing may have made her think someone was dying. Holden laughed and began his song again as he stroked across the pool hoping for history to repeat itself.
Yesterday Holden had been careful not to scare her when he got out of the pond, but it was hard not to let her know that he knew she was looking. The light had been just new enough that the shadows hid the scar tissue on his torso, but it had been only gentlemanly to let her know that he was about to drop his drawers. It’d been a long time since someone had seen him in his birthday suit as well. It just let him know how long he’d been recovering and how much his guard was really down.
Usually in the field, even if he wasn't a solider, complacency could get you killed. He had watched it happen, written about it, tried to learn how and why the men who protected this country did what they did. Tried even harder to explain it to his readers. It was true that he wasn’t part of the elite branches he reported on but they had taken him in, let him write about them, and worked with him treating him with more respect than he expected. The special operations team he was embedded with relied on their ability to pick up on the little nuances in life and they made sure that he wasn’t going to be a liability, so he learned. A flinch, a small twitch could make the difference between being alive or dead.
Many years ago Holden had gotten a chance to take on the news assignments he had really wanted. Travel the world, uncover injustice and send back reports on what really mattered. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that he'd gotten a chance to become an embedded reporter with a special operations military unit. To get the assignment had been fantastic and then to be treated as part of the unit was an honor he had worked tirelessly for. He wasn’t allowed to go into every situation with them but he had managed to make his way into a lot of dicey situations. It was true, the risks were higher but he had loved his job and it had done wonders for his career. Not that he cared, it was more important that their stories got out, what he could tell of them, than to have his career soar.
He had loved it until about two months ago. Something had gone wrong within a matter of minutes. The unit had completed the mission and the helicopter had landed with him in it. It was supposed to be a simple extraction, one of the reasons he had been allowed to ride along. All were loaded in a matter of seconds and off they went smiling and doing a little well earned backslapping. All was good or so they thought. Moments later part of the helicopter exploded and burst into fire. Near chaos ensued as they all were shot back into mission, survival mode. It wasn’t pretty when it went down. A couple good men were killed almost instantly, friends, and that's when he’d lost his love for the job. In that one fiery crash he lost friends and himself. They had ruled the crash an accident, not pilot error, but there was more to it than that he had heard the chatter. No one was talking about it now, especially not to him. No matter what they said it didn’t matter to Holden. A lot had been lost that day.
He refocused on the now. The pond itself was quite large. It was at least fifteen acres and around 10 to twenty feet deep. It was spring fed keeping it from becoming stagnant and stale. The temperature of the natural spring-fed pond stayed constant at around sixty degrees. Cold for most people, but nearly perfect for him to do his work out in with his tender and recovering skin. Holden wasn’t sure why he kept checking the trees every time he turned around and lapped back toward the other side. Maybe he was hoping to see Kari standing there. She had been so frightened yesterday like a wild animal. He had treated her just like that as well. He had made sure to keep his hands down and his posture relaxed. Last thing he really wanted was her running panicked out of the forest yelling that some strange man was chasing her. If he was going chase her, and it was a thought, it wouldn’t be through a forest. That thought made him smile as he dunked under the water once again.
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