Mary didn’t know what to do next. She stared into the piercing eyes of her attacker, racking her brain for an escape. The door behind him would be too obvious of a route, and no longer accessible with him kneeling in front of her on the stone cold ground. He ran one hand through his glassy, black hair, the other grasping tightly to his hand gun, the only thing keeping Mary silent and still. She realized as she stared, however, that the sharp edge to his face was not one of anger, but rather confusion, anxiety. She had found her escape.
***
Mary McCloud was reclining, safe and dry on her cushioned sofa in the small living room of her flat, savoring her typical, peaceful Saturday morning breakfast of eggs, toast, and bacon. It was her one day off from work, and even then, she never knew when the small pager clipped on the side of her purse would call her in for an emergency session.
Mary was a therapist, specializing in psychological trauma. Although her job took a lot of time and effort each week, Mary never let the stress of her patients affect her personal life. She still took the time, every Saturday, to get back into the pattern of the world. She would wake up, make herself a nice breakfast, bring her pager over to the coffee table, and sit on the couch in her silk pajamas, watching the news and Saturday morning cartoons.
This morning, however, Mary couldn’t focus on the comfort of being at home. All she could focus on was the feeling of loneliness. She wasn’t sure why loneliness consumed her on this perfectly ordinary morning. It had been four months since she left James at the airport, sending him off to his military training. She was adjusting just fine to him being gone, and even if he had been in town on this very morning, she wouldn’t have had contact with him, with the exception of a brief phone call. Saturday was her one day off, if not interrupted by her beeper, so they rarely planned anything together on the weekends. But for whatever reason, Mary felt uneasy. He stomach turned, effectively ending her breakfast time, as her mind went back to that goodbye.
***
“Mary, will you promise me something?” She nodded her head fiercely, unable to speak through the lump in her dry throat. James smirked and continued. “Promise me you’ll be careful while I’m gone. I know how passionate you are about your job, and your clients, but it’s a dangerous field. Some of these people have serious, psychological issues that you may not be able to fix. I know you want to be able to help them, but don’t go too far.” She opened her mouth to protest his insinuation of danger, but he stopped her.
“Mary, I’m serious. If someone gets even slightly violent with you, take it up with the police. I won’t be here to protect you, so I need to know you’ll be safe on your own.” James looked more fiercely into her eyes, took her hands and whispered, “I love you.”
It was the first time he had ever said those three words. Such a simple phrase is capable of holding so much more meaning, just by the timbre of one’s voice. James always spoke with such a strength and authority that the soft, sincere tone of this affirmation had made the tears in Mary’s eyes flow over, spilling onto his gray shirt as she crushed herself into his hard chest, wrapping her arms tightly around his waist, hiding her streaming face from his gaze. He had pulled her in even tighter, kissing her softly on the head. They stood just like that for a few minutes, in the middle of the crowded airport terminal.
When she could speak again, Mary whispered the only two words she could get out before the sobs broke through once more.
“I promise.”
***
The harsh ring of her beeper brought Mary out of her dazed remembrance. She sighed and walked back to her bedroom to dress for work.
As she took a quick shower, she began to wonder who had paged her. She knew it was work, because her patients were the only one who had the number to that particular beeper, but she was rarely ever called in this early on a Saturday. Her patients knew it was her day off and, being considerate, would try as long as they could to wait until Sunday to bother her with their issues, no matter how many times she tried to reassure them that it was not a bother at all.
So who was paging her now, then? Jessica, one of her most frequent clients, was honeymooning with her new husband and wouldn’t be back for weeks. The only other person who had a tendency to page Mary on her day off, calling an emergency session, was Logan.
When Logan was very young, he and his older brother, Marcus, had been repeatedly psychically and sexually abused by their Uncle, the only family they had after the tragic death of their parents when Logan was three. Uncle John was Logan and Marcus’ legal guardian. There was no escape from the abuse, and at the time, Logan was too young to understand what was going on. But Marcus knew.
The day Marcus turned eighteen, he snuck out of the house in the middle of the night, leaving twelve-year-old Logan, terrified, to fend for himself.
After about five more years of even harsher abuse without his brother there to suffer a portion of the beating, Logan began searching for help. The police quickly entered the scene when a more public display of his Uncle’s harshness was questioned by a concerned neighbor. Uncle John was taken in on Logan’s eighteenth birthday, a celebration of freedom for Logan. But while he was free from his Uncle, he wasn’t free from his past, so he found Mary.
Hostility toward his brother, Marcus, and a fear and disgust toward older men haunted Logan’s heart.
Mary remembered now, pulling her hair back into a sleek bun, that Logan had planned on going to see his brother yesterday evening. Mary had been working with Logan for five years now, and the resentment he had for Marcus was the first thing Logan had asked to work on. When he was a child, he loved his brother. It wasn’t a normal sibling love, it went deeper. Marcus was Logan’s safety, his shelter from the hand of his raging Uncle. When Marcus left, Logan felt along, forgotten, and most of all, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his brother had abandoned him and ruthlessly left him to endure his pain alone.
About a week ago, Logan experienced what Mary called emotional acceptance. He made a conscious decision to forgive Marcus, and move on. Through years of counseling, Logan was finally able to understand the grief Marcus must have gone through by leaving him.
When most patients experience this acceptance, it can take up to a couple months for them to feel comfortable enough with this new view of the one who hurt them before they actually speak to the person and forgive them with words, instead of just their heart. Logan, however, jumped ahead a few steps. Yesterday, he broke the news to Mary that he was planning on stopping by his brother’s house after their evening session. This news sparked concern from Mary. It could be unhealthy to confront the person head-on before you’ve truly believed and embraced your own emotional acceptance. But Logan said he was ready, and there was nothing Mary could do to stop him.
Was he the one who paged her? Logan always tried to wait until Sunday if he had an unexpected problem to discuss, and he would usually make it to Saturday afternoon before giving up and calling for an emergency session, but it was seven in the morning right now. What if something went wrong? What if he’s in danger?
Worried, Mary gave up on her makeup and grabbed her purse from the hook by the door, jogging down the stairs to her car in the car park below her apartment building.
When she reached her office, about ten miles from her apartment, she stepped out of her big, gray SUV and saw a tall man in a black hooded sweater standing outside her office door. She couldn’t see who it was, but she knew it wasn’t Logan.
“Hello,” she started, walking briskly toward the man who was still looking down at his feet. “May I help you with something, Sir?”
His face didn’t rise at her approach.
“I paged you,” he said curtly.
Mary walked further toward him, with more hesitation now, due to the harsh tone of his voice, remembering her promise to James. “Well, have I worked with you before?” she asked, still approaching slowly.
He stammered, unsure, his fingers twitching by his sweater pocket.
“If not,” she began again, “we’ll have to fit you in for tomorrow, when you can fill out the proper paperwork.”
His hand continued to twitch just outside of his pocket, and Mary could see, peeking under his hood, that his eyes shifted from her, to his hand, and back every few seconds.
“You know,” Mary said with a soft smile, seeing that he was obviously distraught, “let me see what I can do, okay?”
Mary turned to the door, pulling her office key out of her purse. She felt the man shift toward her when she turned, and she smiled to herself for making him feel more comfortable. After a harsh blow to her head, however, her smile fell, and everything went black.
***
Mary collapsed back on the cold, wet ground and caught a slight glimpse of her attacker just before the scene went dark. All she could feel was intense pain when she awoke, and all she could hear was the ringing in her ears from the shots that had just been fired. Mary gasped and tightly clamped her bloodied hand over the flesh wound on her inner thigh. Her eyes were open, but everything was hazy. She could see the man from her office standing over her, and she was vaguely aware of the change in surroundings.
She was indoors, but still on a stone, cold floor like the ground outside of her office. As she was leading the man inside, he had bludgeoned her on the head with a rusty pipe and, evidently, transported her to an old warehouse.
As the ringing in her ears faded, Mary realized that she and her attacker were not alone. Her assailant was speaking softly to another person across the room.
Mary couldn’t see who it was, only that it was another man, and that he was roped to a large metal pole and covered in splattered blood.
She cried out in anguish as the sharp pain from the bullet wound in her leg struck through her body again, bringing her consciousness to the attention of the man in black, her mysterious attacker.
He walked briskly toward her sprawled body and knelt down above her head, his eyes glaring menacingly into hers. His eyes darted about the room, shifting almost constantly.
Mary’s eyes twitched toward the door behind him, measuring her chances of running across the large room without collapsing from the pain in her leg. They didn’t look good. The man’s eyes shifted back to hers, and then followed her gaze to the door. After glaring back at her for a moment and catching her train of thought, he paced to the nearby metal table and grabbed his hand gun.
Being in the selfless line of work she was in, Mary couldn’t keep her thoughts away from the other person in the room for long. Who was he? Why was he here? Were there others? Blinking back the tears and sweat from her eyes, she strained to see if she recognized the man.
Even with him sitting, she could tell that he was tall and muscular. He had a hard face, very structured, but she couldn’t see much more because of the bandana around his mouth, quieting the screaming. He was shot too, once in the shoulder. She watched as a pang of agony writhed through his chest. He belted out a piercing screech that was barely concealed by the gag.
“Quiet, James!” the enemy yelled, darting to Mary’s side, kneeling over her again. “Do you want me to shoot her again?”
Terror struck Mary. Her heart sped and her breathing stopped all together. No, it couldn’t be her James. He was off for training. She sent him herself; she watched him walk down the runway, get on the plane, and fly out of sight. It couldn’t be him. Could it?
The man across the room muffled his painful cry after the threat from his foe, looking toward Mary with tears in his eyes. They weren’t just tears of pain, but of concern, terror. They were tears of love.
Mary’s breath caught in her throat. Her head spun and her stomach clenched. James was here. She didn’t know how that was possible. All she knew was that, somehow, her worst fear had become a reality – her career had put him in danger. The man outside her office, wanting to hurt her for whatever reason, was inflicting pain on James, and it was her fault. She had broken her promise.
She didn’t know what to do next, but she knew she had to do something. Once the initial shock of despair had left her system, all she could focus on was finding an escape for James.
The door behind her aggressor would be too obvious of a route, and no longer accessible with him kneeling in front of her. Mary gazed up at him, trying to discover a motive behind this attack. He ran one hand through his glossy, black hair, the other grasping tightly to his gun. She realized as she stared, however, that the sharp edge to his face was not one of anger, but rather confusion, anxiety. She observed the fretful way his eyes darted about, never resting on any object for more than a moment. She had found her escape.
“What’s your name?” Mary managed to ask, despite the pain in her leg conflicting her breathing.
He looked back at her, finally resting his gaze on her face. He was confused by her question, and didn’t know if he should answer, so he searched her eyes for a hidden motive.
As their gaze continued unbroken, Mary could see a glint of some emotion other than the ones she had already observed. He was heartbroken, in agony. With that suppressed sadness, she also saw something else. Recognition.
He hadn’t answered her question, but also hadn’t broken the eye-contact they had held for nearly a minute.
“It’s Marcus, right?” Mary asked skeptically, taking an educated guess. With him looking at her directly, she could see the roundness of his chin and the odd, gold flecks in his eyes that reminded her of his brother, Logan. She had never met Marcus, but by the shock on his face and the quick manner in which he turned away from her when she spoke his name, she knew she was right.
When Marcus turned away, Mary took a quick peek at James, still struggling to hold back cries of pain. Tears welled up in Mary’s eyes as she looked earnestly at his blood spotted face and forced a small, phony smile, in an effort to give him some form of hope in midst of the despair.
Marcus had now returned to pacing beside Mary’s contorted body, scratching his head with his free hand, the other still quivering and holding tightly to his gun. He hadn’t responded to Mary’s assumption of his identity, so she decided to try again.
She whispered, “Marcus?”
He stopped short, and turned to her, shame and anxiety starting to become the prominent expressions on his face.
“Marcus,” she started again, “did you see Logan yesterday?”
Anger flashed strong on his face and he walked briskly back to her, kneeling over her body and pressing his gun to her head. Mary gasped, and James protested with a loud, muffled moan.
“Logan’s gone!” Marcus yelled, spitting in her face and pressing the gun harder into her temple. “He’s gone because of you!”
Mary looked up at him with fear and confusion. She held her hands up in a sign of surrender.
“Marcus,” she started, calmly, “I’m trying to understand. What do you mean Logan is gone?”
Anguish again; she watched it flash across his face before he began the story. Everything was a daze of blurred memories as Marcus explained how he found his brother that morning, rope tied around his neck, hanging from his living room ceiling with a hastily scrawled, tear-stained apology note placed on the coffee table.
Logan had called Marcus the night before, telling him he had some things he needed to say, but he wanted to do it right. Logan asked if Marcus would mind meeting him for breakfast in the morning, but when Marcus arrived, he discovered that Logan’s way of “doing things right” was killing himself, so nobody else would have to live with the consequences of all of the bad decisions he had made in his pathetic life.
Mary listened as Marcus’ words became so filled with sobs and tears that she couldn’t understand him anymore. She didn’t want to understand. She didn’t want to hear how her patient had given up on life, how all of her years of counsel had never erased the suicidal urges he had lodged deep inside his subconscious.
After several minutes of deep sobs and an uncontrollable flow of tears, Marcus raised his head from his knees and looked back at Mary, not with anger and resentment this time, but rather with agonizing inquiry.
“What did you do to him?” he whispered, his voice still thick from holding back more sobs.
Tears spilled down Mary’s cheeks as she searched for the answer to that question. What could she have done? Logan had been making very rapid progress for months. Maybe it was too rapid. Maybe she had pushed him to move on sooner than he was capable of.
Mary’s eyes flooded with tears, blurring her vision to a cloud of lights and color. Endless sobs and screams of agony broke through her chest, causing sharp pains in her leg and numbing everywhere else. She was only vaguely aware of the sound of sirens coming from the distance, followed by a crash of a door being kicked in. Policemen and paramedics came to take them all away, but the dazed confusion never subsided.
She felt warm hands pulling her onto a gurney and wheeling her away. Through the ringing in her ears, she heard the distant reassuring voice of one of the paramedics.
“Mary McCloud? Everything is going to be alright. You’re safe now.”
But everything wasn’t alright. Logan was dead, Marcus was deeply scarred, and Mary was stuck in a rut of confusion, sorrow, and shame for whatever she must have done to push a man to end his life.
As she was raised into the back of the ambulance, the screaming stopped, the tears flowed on, and Mary sank into unconsciousness.
***
About two years later, Marcus was beginning to make progress in his therapy. He and Mary had spent much time together, dealing with the grieving loss of his brother, her patient, Logan Moss. They had a session every morning, including Saturdays and Holidays. It was a joint process, a humbling process that Mary had never experienced before.
Mary began to realize that she couldn’t solve everyone’s problems. She and Marcus worked together to process their pain and move on to acceptance. She helped him, and he helped her.
After the incident, James was able to help both of them as well. His strong sincerity was refreshing, and he often joined their morning sessions as a supportive friend, though he had never had the pleasure of knowing Logan, himself.
A few months after their hospitalization, Mary and James were both healing physically, and in addition to healing from the emotional scarring of losing a patient, Mary had to get a hold of her feelings for James.
When she saw James tied to that pole, the only thing that she could think about was losing him. She didn’t care how much pain she would have to endure. She was determined to get him out of that room, to bring him to safety. She never wanted to see any of her friends hurting, but she couldn’t bear to see the man she loved be in pain.
She told James about all of the emotions she went through in the hostage situation, and he admitted that all he could focus on was making her safe, as well.
A few months after that conversation, James invited Mary to take a trip back to the old, abandoned warehouse where the tragedy took place. It was there that he proposed to her, asking her to spend the rest of her life with him, and turning a place of painful memories into the joyful setting of a new beginning.
Mary never did discover what went wrong in Logan’s treatment, and that was something that would be with her for the rest of her life. Even if she never deciphered his breaking point, she would keep looking, searching for an answer to the fateful question she had been asked years ago, by a heartbroken young man who had just lost his only brother to suicide.
“What did you do to him?”