“Giving Glenn a hard time? I can’t work thosetwoout.”
“Somethinglikethat.”
I shot Pete a sideways look. He rarely lied to me, but his vagueness seemed forced. Unease prickled my skin like it had so many times recently. “Areyouokay?”
“Hmm?” Pete glanced up from the depths of his coffee cup. “Oh, yeah. Just don’t feel good this morning.It’llpass.”
He tapped his temple; his usual sign that the persistent headaches he’d been left with after the accident were bothering him—a signal that normally compelled me to leave him alone. Was he pissed at me for last night? I doubted it. Pissed off Pete was hard to miss, but I took my cue anyway. “There’s some Tylenol in thebathroom.”
“Iknow.”
Of course he did. Pete kept track of every pill in the apartment—he had to because of me. And I was the reason he only had crappy Tylenol to ease his pain. “I’mgonnago.”
“Gowhere?”
“Work, I guess. I don’t feel much like hanging around here onmyown.”
“Okay.”
Pete went back to his coffee cup. I wanted to scream, but I didn’t. I just kissed him and left himalone.
Again.
* * *
“So,these are all tattoos you’ve painted onto prostheticlimbs?”
I nodded at Jed and resisted the urge to curl my knees to my chest in the corner chair I’d commandeered. The psych department of the military hospital was nowhere near as creepy as my melodramatic imagination had feared—it wasn’t creepy at all—but I’d been agitated all day, and not even Jed’s quiet company was calming me down. “I painted some of them before they were claimed by patients, but I did a bunch of custom designs after that—loads, actually. I’m surprised I remembered each one when it came to painting them onto themural.”
Jed walked the length of the twelve-foot piece, apparently fascinated by the web of paint. Many of the designs had more color than I used on skin, but Jed wouldn’t know that. Or would he? He didn’t say much, but what he did was scarilyperceptive.
“We could use something like this back home,” Jed said. “A lot of my guys are amputees, and I know they misstheirink.”
“Yourguys?”
“I work at the VA inPortland.”
“What do you dothere?”
Jed glanced over his shoulder. “I’m a psychologist—a military one, if we’re splitting hairs, but we’re more than we know,right?”
“If yousayso.”
My non-answer seemed to amuse Jed, though I didn’t feel like he was laughing at me. He left the mural and dragged a chair over to mine. The way he sat down and studied me made me wonder how I’d never guessed he was a fuckingshrink.
“I wasn’t always a psychologist,” he said, like he’d read my damn mind. “And I hid from the Army for a long time after I got out. But Glenn talked me into doing something useful with the bullshit I’d tried toignore.”
“Yourinjuries?”
“Mainly, but other stuff too.” Jed got up again and went back to the mural. He pointed at a macabre battle scene I hadn’t thought twice about painting onto the plastic calf muscle of a young paratrooper. “I can’t interpret a conversation with a paintbrush, but I can listen. And soIdo.”
It fit. Now that I thought about it, everything about Jed reminded me of the therapist I’d seen after I’d had a complete nervous breakdown—the steady gaze and patient smile… the open silences that I, for some reason, felt compelled to fill. “It was Glenn who asked me to paint the prosthetics. If Pete hadn’t brought him home one night, I’d never have thought of it. I didn’t even know this hospitalwashere.”
“I like Pete,” Jed said. “He reminds me of myfriendPaul.”
“Inwhatway?”
“He’sreal.”
