Cajun Justice(17)

“You seem very confident you’ll pass my evaluation,” she said.

“My colleague, who just left sweating bullets, said you are really good. I’m trusting his confidence in your skills.”

She smiled, obviously pleased at the compliment. “Your accent—I’ve been trying to place it as you speak. I’m pretty sure it’s from the South, but I’m not quite sure where.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Cain said. “Thank God for Mississippi.”

She put her pen to her mouth, still thinking.

“How about, ‘We’re not all drunk Cajuns’?”

“Louisiana?” She grinned and wagged her pen at him.

“You got it, doctor.”

“I must confess that I haven’t visited yet, but it’s on my list,” she said. “The food, the music, and the people all seem so interesting. How long has your family been there?”

“Several generations, for sure. I’ve never done any type of research, but I know my ancestors came from Nova Scotia in the late seventeen hundreds.”

“I find family history and their dynamics fascinating—from a social and clinical perspective. Where we are born shapes so much of our lives.”

Cain laughed. “Well then, I can’t wait to hear your analysis on this one. The story goes that my mother was at home making one of her delicious chicken and sausage gumbos when her water broke. My aunt Elmer Lee was at the house, too. They jumped—well, waddled is probably more accurate—into the pickup and rushed to get my pops, who was out inspecting a nearby sugarcane field. In hindsight, my mother and aunt should have just gone straight to the hospital. But I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I popped out right there in the cane field. A field hand experienced in delivering farm animals served as my momma’s makeshift ob-gyn. A few moments later, my sister came out, too.”

“That’s an incredible story. So, you’re a twin, then?”

“Yes. My sister is Bonnie.”

“That doesn’t sound very Cajun. Right?”

“My dad has a weird obsession with everything having to be symbolic, especially when it comes to names. Since sugarcane is sweet, he wanted something that represented sweetness. Bonbon is the French word for candy. So he came up with Bonnie, and we called her Bonbon when she was a child. And Cain is for sugarcane, though my very Catholic mother chose the biblical spelling. And of course they named our younger brother Seth.”

“Like the biblical story?”

“Yes. But there’s no rivalry between us.”

“Are you close to your brother?”

“My sister and I are the closest, of course. It comes from being twins. If she stubs her toe, I can feel it. If she is in some type of danger, I can sense it.” I can’t believe how open I’ve been with this shrink. “I’m normally a much more private person, and here I’ve been just flapping my jaws.”

“No, not at all. You’re a great storyteller,” she noted.

He looked around the room for a second before asking, “So, am I cleared to report back to duty?”

She laughed softly. “Not so fast. We’re getting closer, but we still have some work to do.”

“What else do you wanna know, doc?”

Dr. Spencer put down her pen and looked directly at him. “Tell me about your nightmares.”





Chapter 16



Cain’s heart thumped in his chest. He could feel the rush of blood expanding his veins and arteries. Even if the psychologist was dangerously good at her job, there was no way she could know about the nightmares that plagued him. Cain had never shared them with anyone except Bonnie.

Stall for time! Stall her! His session was scheduled for only an hour, and he figured he could run down the clock. “Doctor, could you please repeat the question?”

“Nightmares, Cain. Tell me about yours.”

“Um.” He fumbled for an answer.

“Everyone has them,” she said with a clinical demeanor.

He let out a huge sigh of relief. She doesn’t know. She’s just fishing. “I don’t have any.”

“Ah, come on, Cain. Even tough guys have nightmares,” she replied. “It’s just the unconscious talking to us. We can learn from it.”

Don’t trust her! his mind shouted. Talk about something safe—an old nightmare. “When I was a pilot in the navy, I’d sometimes dream that I was flying over the ocean. It would start getting pitch-black and I wouldn’t be able to see the horizon. The stars would be reflecting off the water and my instruments would become too blurry for me to read. I’d lose all reference to up and down. Alarms would start sounding in the cockpit and then my propellers would stop spinning. Everything would go quiet. The silence was eerie. All I would hear was my team pleading, ‘Hurricane, save us.’ But I couldn’t see anything—I was flying in the blind.”

“What would happen?” Dr. Spencer asked.

“I’d crash. The plunge into the ocean was always violent enough to jar me awake.”

“That’s scary, indeed,” she said. “I can’t imagine being in such a terrifying situation. But nightmares teach us something about ourselves.”

Cain remained silent for a beat. “This nightmare pushed me to become better. I read more books, trained harder, and flew more missions. I trained for emergencies until they ceased to be emergencies. Making sure my crew felt safe with me was my obsession.”