He Came Back

Chapter 3

Chapter Three

Annie could hear the phone ringing inside the house as she closed the door of her small compact. She hurried as fast as a woman wearing pumps and a pencil skirt could. “I’m coming!” she called out as if whoever was on the phone could hear her.

She shoved the key in the lock and pushed open the door just as the phone stopped ringing, so she placed the paper shopping bag on the bench at the front entryway, tossing her keys and purse down beside it. When she reached for the phone, the screen flashed. There was a message.

She didn’t recognize the phone number, but then again, it did say Private caller. She hated those blocked numbers. It was probably some telemarketer or salesperson, anyway.

“Seriously, as if I have time for this,” she muttered as she dialed the voicemail password and waited. She pulled off her pumps and noticed a run in her pantyhose. Just great—another five bucks down the drain. She was tired after a day of putting out one fire after another at her day job in human resources, and the last thing she wanted was to run back out to the store to buy another pair of nylons. God, she hoped this wasn’t a telemarketer or someone else calling to tell her there was a problem. The fact was that she’d been dealing with dickheads all day, busy whining and complaining about everything and anything. The only thing she wanted was to come home, grab a glass of wine, and broil a chicken breast. She didn’t want to have to deal with one more challenge of any kind.

She waited for the prompt and then entered her password.

“This message is for Annie Green.” It was a deep male voice. “I tried calling you at your office, but you’d already left for the day. I’m a friend of your husband, Sean. If you could give me a call back at this number…” He rattled it off, and she had to fight the clawing fear that something had happened to Sean as she searched for a pen. In the end, she ended up dumping her purse upside down on the floor and found a blue pen and her checkbook. She listened to the message again and scribbled down the phone number across the front of a blank check, all the while fighting panic. All her worries were coming to mind. Had something happened to her husband?

“Oh, God, please don’t let anything happen to Sean, please…” She was trembling as she dialed the number, this time pacing the small boxlike living room with a sofa, a chair, and dark occasional tables. All their personal items, pictures and knickknacks she’d spent days boxing up for their move across the country to the Pacific Northwest, were piled off to the side against the wall.

The phone rang once and was answered by the same deep voice that had left the message.

“Hello?” she said. “My name is Annie. You just called about my husband, Sean.” She had to clear her throat roughly as she felt her chest tighten. Her head was still running through every scenario of the worst of the worst.

“Annie, thanks for calling right back. I’m a friend of your husband’s. My name is Zac.”

“Did something happen to Sean? Is he all right?” She wondered how weak her voice sounded, because to her she sounded so odd. She caught the run in her pantyhose again from the reflection in the hall mirror. Why was it such a big deal? She cradled the phone between her shoulder and ear and reached under her skirt to pull the hose down, hearing a rip as she pulled them off and stepped out of them.

“No, no, Annie. I didn’t mean to scare you. Sean is fine, so to speak.”

She gripped the wrecked nylons as if she needed them to be able to hear this man. “What do you mean, so to speak? Did something happen? He’s coming home next week. We’re moving. We’re done with the military. We’re moving to Seattle. I’ve already packed up everything.” She was rattling on and on.

“Annie, I don’t want to alarm you, but I felt it was necessary to call you and let you know that something’s happened.”

She was staring at herself in the mirror, pale and alone. Sean had been gone so long she couldn’t picture him behind her, as she always had done before when she looked in the mirror. “What do you mean, like an accident? When? Where is my husband?” She listened to a sigh on the other end.

“It was weeks ago—”

“Weeks?” she yelled into the phone, cutting the man off. Why in the hell hadn’t she been notified? She went over to the small desk and rifled through the letters there, but nothing had been sent to her, and no one had come to the door to notify her that something had happened to Sean. “The navy is supposed to notify me if something happens to my husband.”

“Annie, listen to me. Sean wasn’t hurt in a way that would require notification. That’s why I’m calling.”

She was really trying to understand what this man was saying, but he was talking in riddles. She also didn’t have a clue who he was. “Who did you say you were again, and which branch of the military are you with?” Maybe this was a hoax and this guy got off on jerking military wives around.

“I’m not with the military, Annie.”

“Then I don’t understand how you got this number. What is it you want?”

“Sean gave me this number. We’ve known each other for years. We lost touch for a while, but he called me out of the blue a week ago. He was rattled. Something had happened. All I can say is that I don’t know everything, and he can’t talk about it, but whatever happened, Sean isn’t the same.”

She didn’t know what to say. This was crazy. “That’s ridiculous. What are you saying?”

“I’m saying when Sean came back, he wasn’t the same, and when you see him, he won’t be the same. Sometimes men walk into things in a war that mess them up forever.”

“You’re wrong. I know Sean. He’s strong, and he never lets anything rattle him. When he gets back stateside, he’ll prove—”

“He’s already back. That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Zac said. She could hear him talking to someone in the background then, and there was a rustle as if he was passing the phone over.

“Annie,” Sean said in a voice that sounded so strange, so tired. But it was him.

“Sean, where are you? What’s going on?”

“Hey, baby, listen. Have you packed up everything?”

“Yes, movers are coming next week. Where are you? Oh my God, why didn’t you tell me you were back? When did you leave? Why didn’t you call me?” Her mind was racing, and she wanted to hammer him with questions, demand answers, the first being Why aren’t you here now with me?

He didn’t say anything for a moment. There was just dead air, and she wondered whether he was still there.

“Sean, Sean, are you still there?”

“Yeah, listen, um…” He cleared his throat, and the only thing that accomplished was to make her panic rise again. Where was her take-charge husband, the man who took care of everything, including her?

“Sean, talk to me. You’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry, Annie. I don’t mean to scare you. I’m getting our house ready here in Port Angeles. It’ll be fine.”

She didn’t understand any of this. It was as if she’d just stepped into a B movie. “No, Seattle, remember? We’re moving to Seattle.” What the hell was going on with him?

“Change of plans, Annie. A position came up here in Port Angeles with the coast guard, and I jumped at it. I already cancelled the lease for the house in Seattle and got us a sweet place here. You’ll love it.”

Oh no, this was not happening after all the hoops she’d had to jump through to get a position in Seattle with their sister office. It was a step down in the human resources department, but still a good job. “You can’t do that,” she said. “I have a job already lined up in Seattle. Port Angeles, what the hell am I going to do there? No, Sean, you talk to me. You don’t make decisions on the fly without talking to me first. This is a marriage. We talk, you listen to me, we discuss, we make plans.” She was breathing hard, so furious she was spitting. She wanted to pull him through the phone line. This wasn’t Sean. He’d never decided anything of this magnitude without talking with her. Even when he made decisions, she was always in the loop. Right now, she felt as if she’d been banished to the back forty.

She could hear him breathing on the other end. What the hell was he thinking? He sure in the hell hadn’t talked to her or even let her know he was back. No, this couldn’t be happening. Now they were moving to some place she’d never even been. She pressed her hand to her throat. “The movers are scheduled for Thursday—this Thursday, Sean,” she said. “In five days, they’ll be taking our things to Seattle.”

“Call them. Change it.”

Was he serious? She pulled the phone away and stared at it, wondering who she was talking to. There was a rustle in the background again.

“Annie, it’s Zac.”

“Zac,” she said. He was a stranger, but right now it seemed he was her only link to sanity. “Zac, are you telling me Sean expects us, me, to move to Port Angeles and just change plans, just like that?”

“Yeah, um, I’m not really sure about everything that’s going on, Annie, but I’ve got Sean here and we’ll sort it out. Do you need help making arrangements?”

Was he serious? What was this man going to do? She lifted her hand in the air, at a loss. As she took in the ruined nylons in her hand, she realized this wasn’t sane. “So I’m doing this alone? Sean isn’t coming home to help with the move,” she said, more for effect. She already understood from this f****d-up conversation that she had been tossed to the wolves.

“What do you need to do still?” Zac asked.

Now she couldn’t help feeling bad. This wasn’t on Zac, yet even she could hear the bitchiness in her voice. It should have been Sean getting the full effect from her, but Zac was a stranger, and she’d been raised better than that.

“Tomorrow is my last day at work, but Sean’s truck is still here, and my car… Then we were supposed to stop at his parents’ on the drive across the country. Has he even called his parents?”

“Sean hasn’t talked to anyone, Annie, just you now. Annie, listen, give me the name of the movers you hired. I’ll call them, get your car towed and make arrangements for Sean’s truck. You get a ticket to fly up here. I’ll get Sean to call his parents and let them know about the change of plans. He can do that much.”

“I was planning on driving. Both Sean and I were.” Change of plans was an understatement, but she realized that not driving across the country from Florida would be easier. “You’re right,” she said. “I’ll fly.” She rifled through the desk for the movers’ card and read the number off to Zac.

“Finish packing, and call me back when you know your flight,” he said.

She should have been talking to Sean, her husband, not a stranger. As she hung up, she realized that her husband’s friend, a man she didn’t know, was suddenly doing what Sean had always done. She found it extremely unsettling.