The Perfect Husband - Lisa Gardner [39]
“All the time.”
“Get back up?”
“All the time.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what you were supposed to do.”
“Exactly. So you didn’t think about it. You didn’t say, ‘I hurt too much.’ Or ‘I’m afraid.’ Or ‘She’ll drop me again.’ You just got back up because you were supposed to.
“That’s what you do here, Angela. You swim and you keep swimming without a thought in your head because that’s what you have to do. And you do the push-ups and you jog and you do all the things beyond exhaustion because you have to. Then one day you’ll discover you’re in the zone and you don’t feel your legs anymore, you don’t feel your arms anymore. You exist just as motion. That’s the zone. Then you can do anything.”
She looked fascinated, she looked awed. He wasn’t comfortable with her looking at him like that. He was just telling her the facts, not revealing the laws of the universe.
People thought soldiers and jocks were brutish men. It wasn’t true. A lot of the Navy SEALs or Green Berets or Force Recon Marines looked more like accountants. Some of them were small enough to be nicknamed Mouse. Others were six four and so stringbean skinny they could barely walk through a strong wind. Extreme performance was not physical but mental. It was focus and concentration. It was finding that internal zone, where you could zero down the universe to one act, one motion, one goal. You could plow facedown through mud in the pouring rain because you were not thinking of the weight of your pack or the cold sting of the rain or the taste of the mud. You were not thinking of the two hours’ sleep you’d had last night or the twelve miles you’d run this morning or the two hundred push-ups and two hundred pull-ups you’d done the minute before. You thought only of the next inch you had to crawl and then the inch after that. The world became a simple place.
And for a moment you could do anything.
SpecWar superstuds were not Arnold Schwarzenegger. They were Buddhist monks.
And former Force Recon Marines like J.T. were the men who realized the zone couldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, training ended, combat ended, everything ended, and you were the same man you always were, lying on your bunk with the rage bunching your shoulders and the unrelenting memories racing through your mind.
Then you poured yourself a drink.
“I’ll do another lap,” Angela volunteered. Her eyes had narrowed. His pep talk must have worked, because she looked fierce.
“You do that.”
She pushed off with more force than grace. She didn’t have a swimsuit, so she wore an oversize T-shirt and shorts. The excess material created a lot of drag and quickly slowed her down. She slogged forward anyway.
Toward the end she faltered badly, and he thought he might have to drag her out by the scruff of her neck to keep her from drowning. Her flailing hands found the patio as he took the first step forward.
“No zone,” she gasped. “God, this is horrible!”
He sat on the edge of the pool beside her and stuck his feet in the water. “You want it to be simple. It’s not.”
“Oh, how the hell would you know! Look at you!” She waved her hand at him. “You probably catch rattlesnakes by hand. How hard has any of this ever been for you? How hard?”
“Not very,” he agreed calmly. “I was born for this shit.”
“I hate you.” She rested her forehead against the pool edge.
He let her feel sorry for herself for a minute. Why not? There was a world of difference between the two of them. The colonel was a mean, lean bastard and he’d passed his genes to his children. In contrast, Angela had a small, slight build and no natural hand-eye coordination. She would have to fight for every lap, war with every shot. Nobody said life was fair.
“Your daughter, she’s for real?”
Angela stiffened instantly, so he took that as a yes.
“Think about her, then. Don’t think about yourself, focus on her.”
“What do you think has gotten me this far?”
“Huh.” They sat in silence. “How old is she?”
Angela couldn’t seem to decide how much to tell him. “Four,” she said after a moment. “She’s four.”
“You have her someplace safe?”
“As