The characters below are from the genius of JE, not me.
Jenny (JenRar) thank you for so freely giving of your time and knowledge to help me work on this story as the beta.
Chapter 10 – A Blast from the Past
I guess it's true that muscle weighs more than fat, because the moment Manny managed to stand, pull the newly opened robe closed at the front, put his arm around my shoulder, and lean into me, I started to struggle to bear his weight. I was about to tell him I didn't think this would work, but when I looked at him, he was obviously struggling to manage the pain that the movement caused, and the thin layer of sweat that popped out on his forehead along with the fact his bottom lip had disappeared between his teeth caused me to keep my mouth shut.
I grabbed the hand gripping my shoulder and put my other arm around his waist. Of course, that took both of my hands, and I smiled when I realized it felt strange to talk without having the option of making any hand gestures.
I nodded toward the chair I'd been sitting in, which was only five feet away, and said, "Let's try to make it to the chair and then get you settled back down for awhile."
He nodded but didn't release his lip long enough to say anything.
"Are you sure you're up for this?" I asked, ready to help him get back in bed if that was what he needed.
Manny must have noticed what I was considering, because he swallowed twice and then relaxed his face. "Pain is just weakness leaving the body," he said in what had to be the lamest self-motivation speech I'd ever heard.
"What?" I couldn't stop myself from asking. "Tell me you never considered a second career as a greeting card writer."
He glared at me and said, "Let's move." I guess he wasn't a fan of sarcasm.
When I was in high school, I briefly considered nursing as a possible career choice. My mother had suggested it, but I'd decided against it because I wasn't a big fan of the sight of blood and I hated doctors, so I couldn't see a career that forced me to work with them all day. Now, as I attempted to assist Manny to move a few feet, I realized I'd made the right call. Health care workers, especially good ones, were obviously an undervalued group of professionals. It was hard to keep quiet and not give him an easy out. My head knew he needed to do this in order to get better, but my heart just broke with every move he made because I could see the pain on his face. By the time we reached our target, I was biting my lip to keep from making a sound, and he was looking like he'd just run a marathon.
It took nearly as long to get him turned around and settled into the chair as it had to walk the distance from the bed, but once he was settled with his leg elevated, I could see that he looked pale, but good. The physical exertion was obvious, but he had a look in his eyes that appeared to be a spark of life that had been missing when he was stuck in that bed. I hadn't noticed it at the time, but seeing the contrast, I knew that allowing him to push himself and move to the chair was the right thing to do.
Some of that victorious expression faded when he saw me settling his IV pole and catheter bag, but I refused to let him focus on the negative.
"When do I lose the bag?" he asked, glaring at it as though his gaze alone would make it go up in flames.
I shrugged. "That's a Bobby question, and he isn't here. Cal said he couldn't come by tonight in order to keep RangeMan covered that they had nothing to do with you leaving the hospital. Apparently, the government feels you are their property until you've been officially debriefed, and they are beginning to monitor the guys at the office a little more closely."
That statement got me a dry laugh, but he didn't explain if it was being called their property or the fact that the guys were having to live with hall monitors that amused him. "You can take it out," he suggested, proving just how desperate he was to be rid of it.
"Once you prove you can get to the can, I'll be glad to Google ripping plastic tubing from a guy's penis and try it out the first time on you."
My words had the desired effect on him, as he went from moderately pale to nearly green. A slight nod was all I got for a response. His eyes closed, and I wondered for a few minutes if he was going to fall asleep on me, but when he popped them open, he looked strangely better. It was like he'd done some kind of weird meditation that took away the discomfort of moving.
Trusting that he wasn't going to fall out of the chair if I stepped away, I moved to his hospital bed and changed the sheets. While I was working, I chatted about nothing in particular, and when I finished and checked on Manny, he was fiddling with the robe, trying to keep everything covered but struggling.
"Where did you get this robe?" he asked, giving up trying to keep it together and just holding it in place.
"It belonged to Nagypapa," I told him, hoping the idea of wearing a dead guy's clothes wouldn't weird him out too much.
"You've talked about him a lot. Do you have a picture?" he surprised me by asking.
I thought about pictures. I knew they used to keep all kinds of photos around and had to struggle to remember where they were. I went to the hall closet and pulled out some old shoe boxes that I knew contained their memories. It only took a little digging before I came up with a suitable photo of the people who had lived in this house happily for so long.
I handed it to him, and he glanced at it before blinking and squinting, as though the picture wasn't in focus. I looked over his shoulder to be sure it was still clear to me and then began to wonder if we had overtaxed his system by making him move. Something about the picture was bothering him, which would make no sense.
I tried getting his attention by saying his name, but he was still focused on the old picture. "Are you okay?"
Manny finally shook his head and lifted the picture to give it back to me, before pulling it back for a final look.
"What's going on? Why are you acting so strange?" I finally blurted out, not sure what to make of his reaction.
"I've seen him," he admitted, giving me the picture. "I've had a couple of really out there dreams, and he was in both of them."
I looked at the picture again, and sighed as I remembered how much I'd adored them. "Grandma Mazur used to say that they would always be in this house and she couldn't sell it because it would be selling her parents off to strangers, but she couldn't live here because their memory wouldn't give her any peace."
"You mean your crazy grandmother thought her parents were haunting this house?" He sounded unconvinced.
"She never said it like that, but I'll admit that being here has given me some strange dreams starring them, too, so I don't think I'd just call her crazy because she thought her parents were somehow tied to this house." I found myself defending the sanity of a woman I had regularly thought was off her rocker.
"I was calling her crazy because she has a thing for dressing like a high school girl and feeling us up every time one of the guys is near her," he explained, quickly taking the wind out of my argumentative sails. "I was going to blame it on the drugs you kept pumping into me, but I've never had trouble with hallucinations before, so them being tied to this house isn't such a stretch for me."
"You mean, the whole…ghost thing doesn't…freak you out?" I couldn't figure out how to ask it without just putting it out there and risking him calling me crazy along with Grandma Mazur.
"I've never been one that demanded an explanation for everything. And to think that our lives just end when we die is kind of depressing. I mean, I've lost people that were important to me and then later felt like they were still around somehow to help me when I needed it," he explained, not looking me in the eye.
"Who?" I asked, wishing he would open up to me a little.
Whatever the yellow wall across the room was showing him must have been helpful, because he didn't take his eyes off of it as he spoke. "My sister was killed four years ago by Hernandez, and there have been many times since she died that I thought I could hear her voice or just feel her guiding me when I was in a difficult situation."
"How do you know Hernandez killed her?" I asked, unable to stop myself.
Manny found the strength to stop staring at the wall and turned his attention to me instead. Once I saw the look on his face, failing to conceal the pain his memory was causing, I regretted asking the question and forcing him to relive something that hurt him this much.
"My sister was older than me, but she was naive and trusting so I'd always felt the need to watch over her. She fell for this international businessman who showered her with gifts and attention every time he was in New York, and she believed everything he told her – that she was the only woman for him and he hated the time they spent apart as much as she did," he began explaining, his eyes falling back to the lemon wall. "I didn't trust him at all, even though I'd never met him. At first, she said it was just some kind of super macho brother response."
I couldn't help but think of Cal, who'd come all the way over here to threaten to beat up Manny for being mean to me. I could see his sister's point.
"But I knew there was something wrong with a guy that was never available to meet her family and refused to give her a way to reach him when he was home. She only had his number for his American apartment."
When he said that, I agreed with Manny that it sounded like her boyfriend was hiding something.
"So I did what any well trained Ranger would do, and I set up surveillance in her apartment to get pictures of her mystery man so that I could find out who he was. I had to pass off the ID to Hector when I was called into the wind for a mission with Ranger. We had to go to Colombia to play the part of cousins in a family interested in bringing drugs to the streets of Trenton and who were shopping for a supplier. I met Hernandez the first time there as a part of our mission. I hated the guy from the first moment I saw him, but I played my role, and we left with enough information to take down the Jimenez family, who had been the largest supplier to date from Colombia to America. They also seemed to be the supplier to the Hernandez export business, so by doing our job well, we made Mateo's life a little harder, at least temporarily. Once the feds got the intel we'd gathered, they pulled us out but kept our personas intact in case we had to do it again."
I couldn't figure out why he was giving me all this information. I was pretty sure he was breaking all kinds of confidentiality rules and tried to hang onto every word so that I could keep up without putting all the names and dates in my memory so that I wouldn't remember this conversation after he finished.
"When I got back from the mission, Hector called me into his office and gave me a folder on my sister's boyfriend. He'd reviewed the tapes I hadn't had a chance to look at and was able to do a basic search to get me some starting information. When I opened the folder that night, I nearly choked on my beer. The picture of the man holding my sister in her home was none other than Mateo Hernandez, and when I looked closer at the enlarged version of the photo, I saw a picture of my sister and me framed on her end table, which meant Hernandez would have been able to make the connection that the guy I had pretended to be was related to his American mistress."
Oh man, I could see so many different ways for this to turn ugly, but I kept my mouth shut, not wanting to force him to relive any of it if he didn't want to.
"I called my sister that night and convinced her to meet me the next weekend at a park where we liked to hike together. I figured it would give us privacy for what was a really difficult conversation. I brought the file Hector had pulled together, and then as we hiked, I told her who her boyfriend really was and how I knew the information Hector had pulled together was true."
He stopped talking for a minute, but then his jaw tightened down before he started again. I knew whatever was about to come out was what he considered to be the hard part and he was gearing himself up for it.
"At first, she was furious at me for spying on her, but once I finished explaining who he was, she was mad at herself for falling for a guy that was everything she fought against. My sister worked at a drug addiction facility, helping people get clean and stay that way. The idea that she was accepting gifts from a man who supplied her patients' drugs was more than she could handle. She came back to Trenton with me and took a week off just to get her head around what had happened. We talked about how she had to break things off with Hernandez, and I even got her to agree to a new security system in her apartment so that when she insisted on going back to her life, I could still keep an eye on her."
Manny had to stop and clear his voice before continuing. "She called me a few times every day after she returned to New York. She called the number she had for Hernandez and broke up with him by leaving him a message. His extended silence gave her a false sense of security that she'd managed to get out of that mistake easily. I wasn't nearly as confident as she was and begged her to move to Trenton or to at least continue with the extra security measures we'd used to keep her safe. But after a month with no contact, my stubborn sister ditched her trackers and went out to a night club for fun without letting me know. The next morning, I called her and couldn't get an answer. I waited for a few hours until I couldn't stand the silence anymore, and then I got in my truck and drove down."
He stopped suddenly and rubbed his eyes with his thumbs and index fingers. "I saw her car as soon as I pulled into her complex parking lot, and I knew something was terribly wrong. When I approached, I saw her slumped over in the back seat. She'd been shot execution style, and there was a yellow rose sitting on her chest. The yellow rose was part of the Hernandez logo, and even though the police would have said it was circumstantial at best, I couldn't come up with anything concrete to tie him to the murder, other than my gut. I gave all the information to Ranger, and he offered to help me track down Mateo and settle the score, but I refused. Somehow, I thought I was a big enough badass to exact the revenge for my sister's death myself. And for the next four years, I tried and failed to get close enough to him to put a bullet in his head like he did my sister."
Shit, listening to this story made so many things more clear. He got pissed at me for being impulsive and for not taking my safety seriously. He was really irritated at Cal for daring to stand up for me in the role of a brother, and he was pissed at Ranger for intentionally putting me in danger by having me insert myself into Manny's life. In light of what happened to his sister, all of it made sense now.
"This time, when Ranger and I were tapped to reprise our drug lord personas, we went back in easily picking up characters we'd played several times over the last few years. I figured there was no way I'd get in and out without crossing paths with Mateo again. The family we were dealing with was new but somehow tied to the Hernandez dynasty. I had made peace with the fact that I probably wouldn't make it out alive, but I was determined to take Mateo out with me. When I got to my car, I saw a yellow rose on the steering wheel, along with a note. That fucker had the balls to tell me that he'd never forgotten that I had caused him to lose his favorite toy. I dropped the flower and took off, knowing that somebody like Hernandez wouldn't have left the flower as a token of his appreciation for the game of cat and mouse. He never did anything without a purpose, and it hit me that he wanted me to stay at the car and focused on the note long enough for his device to detonate. I knew his love affair with bombs, so I ran like hell and got far enough away to keep from dying, but…"
Manny looked down at the effects of the explosion. He'd kept his life, but it had come at a cost.
"You kept from dying," I repeated, wanting to get him back in that frame of thinking. "This will heal," I reminded him.
"Maybe." He sounded doubtful at best, but conceded, "Mostly."
"What was her name?" I asked, not sure if it was a mistake or not to bring him back to his sister's memory.
"Elaina," he replied. "I called her Laney."
I smiled at the fact that none of the guys at RangeMan seemed to be capable of calling people by their given names. I wondered how offended our parents would be at the amount of time they spent picking the perfect name for us, just to have our friends toss it out and call us something else entirely.
I remembered the dream I'd had last night, where Nagypapa was trying to convince Manny to stop trying to get revenge for the life that had been lost, as she would not have wanted that. "The dream…"
"What dream?" Manny asked, obviously hearing my half-baked thought.
I explained what strange thing my subconscious had given me for entertainment and how I'd heard a conversation between him and my great-grandfather.
When I finished talking, he rubbed his neck with his good hand and said, "Shit."
That wasn't exactly the reaction I'd been expecting, so I looked at him pointedly and waited for him to explain the expletive.
"I had the exact same dream, except after I had a conversation with the guy from the picture where he tried to talk me out of living for revenge, I came back to the garden where I'd been and listened to you talk to an old woman about how I hated you." He paused and then turned to look at me better. "I don't, you know…hate you."
"At first I thought it was just irritation at the situation, but then when it continued, I started to take it personally. I think I understand a little better now," I told him, trying to let him off the hook.
"Good," he replied, and then added. "Maybe you could explain it to me sometime."
I decided to end all the heavy emotional shit and lightly smacked his shoulder. Manny rubbed it, probably out of habit more than pain inflicted by my pitiful smack, but when he moved his hands, his robe gaped open. I couldn't help but notice. When I realized I was basically staring at his private parts, I turned red and had to take a step away.
Manny saw my face and then looked down at his crotch. It surprised me that he didn't instantly cover it up. It was more like he was having a staring contest with the eye trying to peek out from the gap in the material. Finally, he lost by looking away first and then looked up at me and said, "I think, until I'm in pants of some sort, I'm going to need something other than a robe."
I quickly walked to the couch, lifted the multicolored afghan, and then handed it to him. "I'm going to get you some broth and jello while you get a handle on things out here."
As I walked away, I realized if Lester had heard that sentence, he would have accused me of instructing Manny to masturbate. Fortunately, Manny said nothing and began moving the blanket around to get himself covered up.
A few hours later, we retraced the path from the chair back to the bed. He didn't look any worse for wear from the excursion, which was encouraging. After I was convinced he was comfortable, I offered him pain meds, which he refused. I decided to try trusting him at first and didn't push the issue. Obviously he had a thing against them, and after hearing what his sister had done for a living, I didn't want to keep drugging him against his will, so I told him to let me know if he changed his mind and gave up pushing it anymore.
We turned the television on for a little background noise, and it didn't take long before he fell asleep, breathing deeply enough that I had no doubts he was out. Even knowing I didn't need to stay awake and watch over him, I was reluctant to go to sleep while I was in charge of him. So I stayed awake by thinking about how to make a homemade holster for the Glock I'd given him earlier. I remembered the workshop in the basement that used to be Nagypapa's, so I decided that it wouldn't hurt anything if I went down there and snooped around for a while. I'd be directly below Manny's bed, so I'd hear any movement, giving me the incentive to let him out of my sight for a little while.
I went downstairs and felt like I was turning back the clock with every step I touched. Coming down to the workshop was a special treat that had to be earned, and I remembered the time I spent down her as being like going on a great adventure. My mother hated it because I usually came back upstairs dirty, but she loved her grandparents and never fussed at them for allowing it.
When I made it to the bottom of the stairs and flipped the switch, I was shocked to see the light bulb come on. I'd figured after all this time, it would have been useless. I moved slowly until I realized the basement was as clean as the rest of the house, so I didn't need to hold my hand out in front of my face to keep from walking into any spiderwebs or other strange or disgusting things that happened in old abandoned houses.
Most of the tools were still hanging on the pegboard wall, and his bench was still there, as well, with a large piece of wood and several smaller pieces sitting there, as though waiting for him to come back and pick up his project where he left off.
I ran my hands over the wood and felt how smooth it was. He'd sanded this down already, or it would have been rough. Realizing that as much fun as it was to stay on memory lane remembering the good times down here, I knew I wasn't capable of making Manny a gun holster from wood, so I needed to move on. I did find a belt and some other materials that I thought we could use to make a holder for the gun and attach it to his cast. Satisfied that this was all I could do at the moment. I gathered the things and made my way back to the stairs. Taking one last glance back over my shoulder, I briefly saw a man standing at the wood with his hand rubbing the top exactly as mine had.
Words Nagypapa had said to me when he'd trusted me with my own sandpaper filled my head. "Don't push, or you wear down the wood into weak places. You just have to move smoothly, evenly, and wait for it to tell you when it's ready for more."
I probably should have been frightened that my mind was snapping enough for me to hear voices and now my eyes were compromised enough to actually see at least a shell of the man that I remembered, but after the talk with Manny about his sister, I wasn't frightened at all.
I guess the instructions could apply to more than wood working. If I'd pushed Manny at any point, he might have bucked the pressure and shut down, but by waiting him out, he'd told me what he could. I had no idea why guys thought women were so confusing. From where I was standing, the male gender was a hell of a lot more confusing than women were. How was I supposed to know when to push and when to back off?
I needed help. Even though the task of caring for one of the guys sounded so simple, I knew I was out of my league. Just knowing my great grandparents were still here to watch over me no longer made me question my sanity; it brought with it a measure of comfort.
And right now, a little comfort seemed like exactly what I needed most.