Page 76 of Warrior Security
“Where’s Lark, girl?”
Tova looked up at me with her goofy grin and then started sauntering toward the east pasture. Sure enough, Lark was there.
She was lying on her back in the grass beyond the paddock fence, arms at her sides, face turned up to a sky that was starting to go orange along the ridgeline. She didn’t have a clipboard or a phone or a list in her hand. There was no pen behind her ear, no half-finished chore pulling her toward the next one.
She was just lying there, flat on the ground, doing absolutely nothing.
I stood for a moment and watched her. In the weeks I’d been at Pawsitive, I could count on one hand the number of times I’d seen this woman be still. She was always reaching for the next task before the current one was finished, always filling silence with plans or jokes or updates on Frank’s ongoing campaign to eat himself into another weight class.
Stillness wasn’t something Lark did. It was something that happened to other people while she managed everything around them.
Tova and I walked the rest of the way over to her. She didn’t open her eyes until my shadow crossed her face.
“There you are,” I said.
“Here I am.” She squinted up at me. “I’m watching the sky change colors. I keep thinking I should get up and do something productive, and then it turns a slightly different shade of orange and I decide to stay for one more minute.”
“How many one-more-minutes are you up to?”
“Eleven.” She patted the grass beside her. “Want to stay for twelve?”
I lowered myself down next to her. The ground was cool, and the grass was tall enough to brush my forearms when I folded my hands behind my head. Tova circled once between us, found a spot that met her standards, and dropped with a huff. Her chin landed on her paws, and her eyes closed before the rest of her had fully stopped moving.
For a while, we didn’t talk. The sky kept doing what it was doing, the orange deepening into something closer to copper, the ridgeline going sharp and dark against it. A breeze moved through the pines along the south boundary and carried nothing with it except the sound of being a long way from anywhere.
The low-grade unease I’d been carrying for weeks was gone. The tire tracks, the cut fence, the shed door hanging open, all of it had been answered and put away. The back acreage was forty acres of grass and trees and a draw that ran east to west, and that was all it was.
“Clarence learned a new word today,” Lark said.
“From who?”
“Beckett. He was helping you check the back fences this afternoon, and Clarence was on the porch railing. Beckett stubbed his toe on the step and yelled ‘motherfucker’ about three feet from the parrot.”
“Don’t tell me. Clarence immediately repeated it.”
“Oh yes. Three times. With increasing conviction.” She turned her head toward me, and the fading light caught the scatter of freckles across her nose. “I now have a parrot who knows eighteen profanities and one of them is a compound word. Beckett owes me a therapy session and a written apology.”
I laughed. A real one, the kind that started in my chest and surprised me on the way out, and Lark grinned at the sound of it.
We lay there and let the evening settle around us. Tova’s breathing had gone slow and even between us, and the sky above was draining from copper into something deeper.
“Can I ask you something?” Lark said.
“You can ask me anything.”
“Last night.” She said it carefully, feeling for the edges of it. “During the operation. Did you have any problems out there like you were concerned about?”
She was asking about the PTSD. She wanted to know if it had come for me in the dark.
“It flickered,” I said. “One of the truck doors slammed, and the sound went wrong. For about half a second, the clearing wasn’t a clearing anymore. I was back in the military.”
“Did it last long?”
“It didn’t have a chance to take hold. Hunter was in my ear before it got there. Said my name, gave me something to do. By the time I responded, I was back.”
She was quiet, turning that over.
“That’s what I trained Tova to do,” she said. “Give someone an anchor. Something real to follow back when the trigger grips.”
