Part 10 (1/2)

Sam shook his head. ”They didn't get to finish. I left. I couldn't take it anymore, being looked at through a microscope. Besides, they were getting all their questions answered, but n.o.body was answering mine.”

”What questions were those?”

”Well, dammit, Katie, what do you think?” He erupted suddenly, all pretense of indifference wiped from his features. ”I hadn't asked for this thing! I wanted to know when it was going to go away! And all those brilliant doctors and scientists would tell me was that my body's energy field had been altered, apparently as a result of the near-death experience. Well, h.e.l.l, I already knew that. I even knew why.”

Kate's brow creased. ”You did?”

”Sure,” he declared. ”If you think about it, it makes a crazy kind of sense. To come back from being dead, it was like I made my body stop bleeding and sort of turned it back on. And whatever the h.e.l.l I did over there to get back here stayed with me. All they did at the center was put a label on it. In their lingo, I' m what's known as a bona fide healer. I finally figured out that meant I'm stuck with this thing.” Gruffly, with that odd, half-embarra.s.sed catch in his voice, he conceded, ”So, okay. I can handle that. As long as I' ve got it, maybe I can do some good with it. But does that mean every time I see a sick person, or somebody who's hurt, I'm supposed to try to cure them?”

”Of course not,” she replied instantly. ”Even if you could heal all different kinds of things, you can't possibly cure all the sick and injured of the world. And n.o.body could expect you to.”

He shot her a cynical look. ”Oh, yeah? Tell that to the hundred or so people who knocked on my door between the time I got back to California and the time I left, four weeks later.”

She stared at him, stunned. ”Good Lord, Sam. Where did they come from?”

”Everywhere.” His arm swept the air in front of him. ”Just . . . everywhere.”

They'd reached a place where the track bent to the left. Straight ahead, a few yards into the woods, lay a casualty of Tuesday's storm-an old red maple, uprooted and stretched across the forest floor, its new leaves withered. When Sam left the track, headed for a look at the damage, Kate followed him, picking her way through the low-lying brush.

He stopped beside the fallen giant to lay a hand on the thick trunk. She came up beside him, tilting her head to look at the cloudy sky through the break in the green canopy the tree's demise had caused. A minute pa.s.sed in silence before he continued.

”Word got around about me,” he said. ”Before I knew it, I had parents bringing children with leukemia, blind people who hadn't seen the light of day in forty years, Vietnam vets paralyzed from the waist down . . . you name it, I saw it. Some of them were rich, some not so rich. Most wanted to pay me. They all wanted me to take away their pain and make their lives bearable. G.o.d, Katie, it was”-his control slipped, and he shuddered visibly-”it was awful. Some of them I helped, but a lot of them, I couldn't help. And they had a hard time understanding that. . . . h.e.l.l, so did I.”

He turned his head away as he murmured, ”It's not so easy, watching somebody hurt and not being able to help them.”

”Yes, I know,” Kate said quietly. Like it's not so easy watching you hurt, when I don't know if there's anything I can say or do that will help even a little.

As her gaze searched his profile, she had to fight to keep from reaching out to touch him. She wanted to let him know she understood at least some small part of his torment, but something told her that he wouldn't accept such a gesture. Sam was an incredibly strong-willed man. He'd had the guts and persistence to overcome pain and disability that would have crushed a lesser man's spirit. Granted, the circ.u.mstances he'd described were fantastic beyond her wildest imaginings; but that made it even more ridiculous to think about patting his shoulder and telling him that she sympathized with his predicament.

But what could she do for him? Was there anything?

Turning to lean a hip against the broad maple trunk, he crossed his arms over his chest as he spoke. ”Still, I helped enough of the people who came to me that more kept coming. And Marty Anderson had me at the hospital two days a week, working on patients. Then he started calling me, sometimes in the middle of the night, for emergencies. I didn't mind doing it for him-he'd done a lot for me. And I had the time, since I couldn't . . . Well, I had the time, but. . . .”

He trailed off, s.h.i.+fting his weight uncomfortably as he ran a hand through his hair, rumpling it. ”The thing is, this business can be pretty exhausting. It can wipe me out for days afterwards to work on somebody who's in really bad shape-like that guy last night. And even when they're not that bad off, I can't handle more than a couple of people in the same day. I guess that seems crazy, since all it looks like I 'm doing is putting my hands on somebody, but-”

”No, it doesn't seem crazy.” Kate boosted herself up to sit on the tree trunk. ”Energy is measurable. When it's gone, it's gone.”

”I'm only a man. I'm not G.o.d.”

”Of course not.”

”That was the worst-when people would come not to get me to cure them but to ask for my advice. Like I was some kind of preacher or guru or something.” He uttered a short laugh. ”The last straw was the guy from the local TV talk show who started badgering me to be on his show. h.e.l.l, if it wasn't so pathetic, it would almost be funny.”

He was silent for an instant, then bit out a violent curse. ”But it isn't funny. There's nothing funny about any of this. It's terrible to see people suffering and to suffer for them- and never be able to turn it off.” Shaking his head, he finished, ”Everybody else who knows calls this thing a gift. But from where I stand, most of the time it looks like a curse.”

”Oh, Sam,” she whispered. ”You don't really mean that, do you?”

He gave her a scowling glance, then looked away. Several seconds went by in silence until, gradually, the set of his jaw relaxed. When he returned his gaze to hers, the scowl was gone.

”No,” he said. ”I don't mean it. I'm not sorry I could help those people. And if I couldn't do this thing, the doctors who said I'd never walk again would've had the last word. I got back on my feet under my own steam-but just. I doubt I'd have made it five years before I ended up where they said I'd be-in a wheelchair, living on drugs. I can't pretend I wasn't d.a.m.ned glad when I figured out I could cure myself, too. It was harder working on myself-it didn't happen on the first try, all at once-but bit by bit, everything got to be right again. All I've got left to show for the crash are the scars and some missing parts I don't need.

And a wonderful gift that he looked upon as a curse. The thought ran through Kate's mind as she asked, ”Doesn't the good you've done for others-and for yourself-make the trouble you've put up with worth it?”

Sam shook his head. ”Katie, since I found out about this thing, I haven't had time to figure out what is and isn't worth it. The last week in California, I was living with the blinds pulled down, the lights out, and the phone off the hook. I'd lived in that house for ten years, and I had some pretty good friends in Mojave. I was trying to . . . well, to get back to work. But I couldn't stay there. I had to find a place where people would leave me alone. A place I could work things out in my own head.”

”So, you came up here to get away from sick people,” she noted, ”and, instead, you found one bleeding to death.”

He snorted. ”How about that.” Hooking his heel in the bark of the tree trunk, he levered himself up to sit beside her. ”Except I wasn't really trying to get away from sick people. I just wanted to go somewhere they wouldn't know it was me helping them. I'm not trying to hold out on anybody, Katie. I just need some peace.” Quietly, he added, ”And the first place I went looking for it was worse, in some ways, than what I' d left.”

”You didn't come straight here from California?”

”No, I went to Detroit to stay with Dad and Susan.” He heaved a sigh. ”There are a h.e.l.lova lot of sick people in a big city. More than I could ever cure. Just walking down the street was like running an obstacle course. I'd planned to stay in Detroit, but I wasn't there a week when I started reading the cla.s.sifieds, looking for a place up here.”

He paused, staring sightlessly into the woods, with a look of something that might have been sadness tightening his features. ”It wouldn't have worked, anyway, staying with Dad. He was glad to see me healthy. He came to the hospital right after the crash, and I think it about killed him to see me so messed up. But he's . . . narrow in his outlook, I guess you'd say. I couldn't have told him about this healing business. It wouldn't fit into anything he'd be able to accept.”

Or anything you can accept.

Slowly, the pieces were coming together. In trying to envision Sam and his father having this same talk . . . well, she couldn't imagine it, given what Sam had said about the older man. And Kate thought that might account for at least part of his discomfort with his awesome gift. The man who'd raised him was steeped in traditional notions about the things that made a man a man, and Carl Reese had pa.s.sed those notions on to his son. Men didn't cry. Men didn't admit to pain. And a real man was never afraid-or, if he was, he didn't show it. What experience, in that motherless household, had Sam had with being nurtured, or with gentleness? Very little, she imagined. Yet the gift he'd been given was inherently a nurturing one.

Sam was struggling to reconcile his healing gift with his macho image of manhood, trying to remain tough despite the torrent of intense emotion that poured from him every time he was compelled to touch and heal another human being. Emotions such as tenderness and compa.s.sion-those things she'd seen carved into his face the previous night. Emotions she was certain had always been there, inside him, but that he'd learned to deny. Well, he'd denied them so successfully that he didn't know how to cope with them when they refused to go away. They made him angry, embarra.s.sed; they caused him pain. And he didn't like it. So he was handling the battle inside him- the one between the ”real man” and the healer-by trying to relegate the latter to nuisance status. But it wasn't working.

”Anyway,” he went on, ”I'm planning to stay here until I've got some control over this thing. Which basically means learning how to make choices about who, when, where, and how often I help people. I know that must sound cold to you, but-”

”It doesn't sound cold at all.”

When his head turned and his startled gaze met hers, Kate added, ”I can't begin to imagine how I'd feel in your position, but I know any medical professional-or anybody in the business of helping people- makes choices all the time. If they don't, they get burned out pretty fast. You couldn't have kept going the way things were in California.”

She paused, then added, ”You made a choice last night, you know. You waited until I'd done everything I could do. Then you asked me if Ray c.o.o.ney was going to die.” Yes, he'd realized it, but the quick flash of wariness that touched his features said he wasn't sure of her reaction. ”Actually,” she continued, ”if I'd had enough Ringer's, you might not have had to do anything.” ”But you didn't,” he muttered. ”No, and if you hadn't been there, he'd be dead.” Holding his gaze, she added softly, ”I'm glad you were there, Sam.” He didn't look away. And he didn't shrug off her grat.i.tude. ”So am I,” he said. ”And I was glad you were there. Knowing you were doing all the right medical things helped me not to feel like it was all on me whether he lived or died.”

”Is that how it feels?”

”Sometimes.” He studied her closely. ”It felt that way standing in your living room the other night.” ”Last night, you mean, when you decided to go with me.” ”No. Tuesday night, when I brought you home after the storm, with your ankle busted.”

Nine.

”It was you,” Kate breathed, her mind flooding with the memory of Sam standing at the foot of her bed, removing the ice pack from her ankle to replace it with his hand. The image was blurry-she couldn't remember much of what either of them had said-yet she remembered his tenderness. She also remembered the incredible lightness, the sense of well-being, that had filled her. Until that moment, though, even after seeing him heal Ray c.o.o.ney and listening to his story, she hadn't made the connection between Sam and her injured ankle's recovery.

”I was on my way out the door,” he admitted. ”But then I thought about all the people who depend on you, and I couldn't handle wondering what might happen if you couldn't do your job.”

”You looked so . . . I thought you were mad at me. I see now. But, Sam”-she shook her head a little -”it might only have been a sprain. I'd hate to think you felt you had to-”

”It was broken.”

She stopped short, her lips parted. ”You could tell?”

He nodded, his gaze holding hers. ”But it wouldn't have mattered. I'd have done the same thing if it had only been sprained. You do a lot for other people, Katie, and I wanted to do something for you. Mostly, though, I think I did it for me. I didn't want you laid up with a broken ankle.” His gaze made a slow trip over her features. ”I wanted you here, like you are right now, with me.”