Sarah had ended up spending a solid two weeks in the hospital after the shooting. One of her incisions had gotten infected three days after the surgery, and that had contributed to her extended stay.
While she was in the hospital, March 11th came and went. It wasn’t until the 14th that she realized that he hadn’t fulfilled something she had done every year for the previous seven years – she hadn’t called Piers de Klerk’s mother in South Africa on the 11th.
Piers de Klerk had been the first man – aside from her father – who Sarah had ever said, “I love you” too and meant it. Half an hour after she told him that, he was dead – a victim of the Madrid commuter train bombings of March 11th, 2004.
Sarah had gone to his funeral in Johannesburg, and met his mother for the first time there. After that, Sarah had called Francine de Klerk each year on March 11th. Even on her honeymoon, even when she was pregnant – she had always made sure to do it.
So when she realized on March 14th that she hadn’t done it, she was mortified. She begged the hospital to let her make an international call, and being Cedars-Sinai, they acceded to her request.
The phone rang several times before it was picked up. “Hello?” came the very sleepy voice of Francine de Klerk.
“Oh God, I’m so sorry, I forgot about the time difference,” Sarah said, not even saying who it was disturbing the sleep of the South African woman.
“Sarah?” Francine said, recognizing her voice. “Is that you?”
“Hi, Francine,” Sarah said in reply. “It’s me.”
“I was starting to get worried,” Francine de Klerk said. “When you didn’t call on the 11th, and there was no e-mail, no letter, nothing, I was afraid something had gone terribly wrong.”
“Well, I’m actually in the hospital,” Sarah replied.
Francine was shocked. “The hospital? It’s not another baby is it?”
Sarah was stricken. When she didn’t say anything for a moment, Francine softly said, “Sarah? Are you alright?”
“I’m sorry…” Sarah finally forced out. “A week ago… somebody broke into my house. They were going to kidnap my children… and they shot me. Chuck shot the intruder.”
“Oh my God!” Francine exclaimed. “Well, thank God you’re alright now!”
Sarah sighed heavily. “That’s the thing,” she said, trying her best not to break down in tears. “I was… I was…”
She couldn’t bring herself to say it. “You were what?” Francine asked.
Then she put two and two together. Sarah falling silent after the question about the baby, and then saying what she just had.
“Oh, no,” Francine de Klerk breathed. “Oh, Sarah. Oh, I am so sorry.”
“And I… I can’t have any more,” Sarah forced out, bursting into tears.
Ten thousand miles away from Sarah, Francine de Klerk put her free hand to her face. “Oh, you poor girl,” she said. “I can’t believe…”
Sarah didn’t say anything for a while, she just cried. Finally, she composed herself, and said, “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to call you just to break down.”
“Don’t apologize,” Francine replied. “That… that’s something a woman should never have to suffer. And I’m sure it’s only a small comfort if any, but you can always talk to me about it… I know what it’s like to lose a child.”
“I know,” Sarah sniffed. “You… you’re the first person that I’ve actually told… my husband’s been the one who had to tell everybody else. I think he’s almost as devastated as I am.”
“Just remember that he’s there, Sarah. I’m sure he loves you, and I’m sure your children love you.”
After Sarah got out of the hospital, she had to undergo two months of physical therapy. When the bullet nicked her spine, it had, just as Dr. Wathen said, caused nerve shock that disrupted her nervous system in her lower body.
Essentially, she had to relearn how to walk. Fortunately, she had been in such good shape beforehand that a sort of “muscle memory” had helped that process along – although her muscles themselves suffered greatly during essentially two months of inactivity, and she seemed to shrink before Chuck’s very eyes.
He began to worry about Sarah. On top of the muscle atrophy, she hadn’t been eating very much. She seemed unhappy much of the time – between what the shooting had caused and her inability to be active, she appeared to be spiraling into depression.
The thing was, Chuck had too much on his plate. He had overcommitted himself, and he hadn’t left the time to take care of his wife. He had spent the last two months creating Studio City Consulting Services, Inc., and putting the company together. He had brought in and interviewed John Casey, Carina Hansen, Rachel Harrison, Bryce Larkin, Mitch Tucker, and Will Williamson. He had told them all that if they came to work for SCCS, they would have to resign their government positions and essentially take private sector jobs.
He had brought both Ellie and Devin onboard, with the promise that they would be able to establish their own private practice within the SCCS building – something that didn’t actually exist yet. Against Sam Tyler’s judgment, Chuck had decided to bring in Morgan as well, saying that Morgan was actually the king of organization and administration, and that a company like this was going to need it.
Weapons had been purchased, equipment acquired. Casey’s Lear 35J was essentially “drafted”, and the US government provided a Dassault Falcon 7X, much like the plane that had ferried Sarah around the world years before, the only existing model of the Sukhoi S-21 supersonic business jet, and a Sikorsky S-70 Black Hawk helicopter. On May 17th, Chuck was at home working on acquiring vehicles when he noticed something wrong.
Sarah seemed to have lost interest in her own children. Chuck realized that it had probably happened a while before, but he’d been so busy that he hadn’t even noticed. However, he did notice when they climbed up on the couch and wanted to hug Mama, and she listlessly embraced them, and then turned away.
His realization was compounded that night when she came out of the shower. He didn’t realize just how much weight she had lost, but she was as thin as a bone. He could clearly see her ribs, and the musculature he had once admired so much was wasting away to practically nothing.
Chuck didn’t say anything that night. When she crawled into bed, he wordlessly curled up behind her and wrapped her in his arms. She cried herself to sleep that night, as she had so many before.
The next morning, he called her father. “Sarah’s not doing well,” he told Mark Reynolds. “She’s lost a lot of weight, and I think she might be developing clinical depression.”
He could hear his father-in-law sigh at the other end. “I was afraid that that would happen,” Reynolds said. “You know, it killed her mother. You can’t let it happen to her.”
“Not a chance in hell, sir.”
Chuck drove Sarah down to Beverly Hills that day, under the pretext of visiting the Beverly Center. However, when he turned right off of San Vicente into Cedars-Sinai instead of left into the mall, she turned and looked at him.
“Why are we here?”
Chuck didn’t say anything, just continued driving, turning left into a parking structure.
“Chuck. Why are we here?” Sarah demanded.
He pulled the Dodge station wagon into a parking spot and put it into park, then turned to face her.
“Pull down the mirror and look at yourself,” he instructed.
She looked at him quizzically, but did so, pulling down the visor and opening the mirror.
“It’s me,” she said. “What’s going on?”
Chuck sighed, then reached into his pocket and withdrew his wallet. Opening it, he pulled out a picture of Sarah that he had had since the first month he’d known her. “This is you five years ago,” he said. “Hold it up next to the mirror and look again.”
Sarah did so – and involuntarily gasped. “Oh my God.”
Her face had thinned considerably. Her cheeks were sunken and hollow. Eyes bloodshot. Hair thin and brittle.
She looked down at her body. “What have I done to myself?”
“That’s why we’re here,” Chuck replied. “You have an appointment in fifteen minutes to see Dr. Wathen. I’ll stay with you, but you have to do this. For Lisa’s sake, for John’s sake, for my sake, but most of all, for your own. You can’t go on living the way you have been.”
Sarah nodded numbly. Chuck got out of the car, then went around and opened her door for her. She got out, and walked into the building with her.
An hour and fifteen minutes later, they were still in Dr. Wathen’s office. He had measured her height, her weight, and taken her blood pressure and temperature. He had run a battery of different tests. Now, he had a very worried look on his face.
“Mrs. Bartowski,” he began, and then stopped. He sighed. “You are in very poor health. Your organs have all recovered quite well from the shooting and surgery. The nerves in your legs have regained approximately 97 percent of electrical capacity.
“However, your bone density is terrible. You are clearly malnourished. You are fatigued. Under no circumstances should somebody who stands five foot nine inches tall EVER weigh one hundred two pounds.”
Sarah’s face was a picture of shock as she registered everything Dr. Wathen was telling her. “Mrs. Bartowski, what has your diet consisted of lately?”
“Well, it, um…” Her face took on a look of curiosity. “I really don’t know.”
“That’s what I was afraid of,” he said. “I’m going to refer you to a nutritionist and a psychiatrist. You need somebody to get your body healthy again, and it’s pretty clear to me that you need somebody to get your mind healthy again.”
The nutritionist placed Sarah on a high protein, high carbohydrate, absolutely zero caffeine diet. She had protested that, saying that she needed coffee. The nutritionist told her in very kind, very clinical terms to get over it.
After about two weeks on recommended base foods, Chuck had cooked Sarah a high protein, high carbohydrate meal of the type she had often craved when she was pregnant with the twins. A rather sizable New York strip steak, cooked medium rare, was accompanied by a gigantic baked potato and corn on the cob. When Chuck set it in front of her, the scents set off a rush of saliva and a stab of hunger, and yet she didn’t seem to have an appetite.
She pushed the food around her plate, nibbling at the corn, but not much else. Finally, Chuck slammed his silverware down on the table, and said, “Okay, look. I am not just going to sit here and watch while you do nothing with your life. If you’re going to act like a small child… well, I’m gonna treat you like a small child.”
“I BEG your pardon?” she asked angrily. She started to stand up.
“Oh, SIT DOWN,” Chuck snapped. “Your personal behavior has barely improved in the last two weeks. I’ve been in those psychotherapy sessions – I’ve heard what the doctor tells you! You aren’t doing what you need to!”
Sarah tried to laugh off what Chuck was saying. “Don’t forget, I still know over a hundred ways to kill you.”
“Yeah, and I doubt if you have the physical strength to utilize a goddamn one of them,” Chuck replied angrily. “I sit here, I watch as you waste away. You don’t want to interact with your own children. That’s why I took you to the hospital. That’s why Dr. Wathen referred you to those specialists. But I will be damned if I’m gonna let you do to yourself what your mother did to herself.”
Sarah’s head snapped up and she looked at Chuck, fire blazing in her eyes. “How DARE you!”
“How dare I?!” Chuck responded. “How DARE YOU! You are CONSTANTLY SURROUNDED by people who love you, and yet you close yourself off! You lock yourself away in your mind, and you won’t let anybody near you! I feel more distant from you now than I did when you were my CIA handler!”
That last phrase hit Sarah like a physical blow. She felt almost as if she couldn’t breathe for a moment. When she finally spoke, she heard the voice of scared, teenaged Beth Reynolds – not her voice, not the one she was used to.
“Is that how you really feel, Chuck?”
He sighed in exasperation. “Yes… no… dammit, Sarah, I love you. I’ve loved you for years. I will never stop loving you. You mean so much to me, which is why the way you’ve been acting makes me so goddamn angry.”
She felt a tear roll down her cheek. “I’m sorry…”
The words were so soft that Chuck could barely hear them. He reached out his hand and wiped the tear from her face, then leaned in and embraced her, touching his forehead to hers. “Don’t be sorry,” he whispered. “Be Sarah.”
She looked up into his eyes. “What do I do?”
He smiled slightly and leaned back a little. “You can start by eating your dinner.”
“I don’t know, Chuck, I just don’t seem to have the appetite.”
Chuck’s smile faded again. Picking up Sarah’s fork and knife, he cut off a half dozen bite sized chunks of steak. “I told you that I would treat you like a child, if I had to,” he said.
A slight smile reappeared on his lips. “Now open up the hangar, and let the airplane in,” he ordered.
Sarah began to smile as well. “The airplane?”
“Come on, the airplane wants to come home!”
John and Lisa were watching the whole thing. “Voom voom, Mama!” John called out.
Sarah laughed, and Chuck snuck the chunk of steak into her mouth. Surprised, she bit down… and then felt her appetite bloom like a sunflower as the juices ran through her mouth.
“Ohhhh…” she moaned, almost orgasmically, as she ate the chunk of steak. “What the hell was I thinking?”
She grabbed the fork and knife out of Chuck’s hands, and began to eat voraciously. Five minutes later, her plate was clean.
“Holy shit,” Chuck breathed. “That might be a new speed record!”
“Hoey shit!” Lisa exclaimed, laughing.
“No no!” Chuck shouted. “We don’t say that word!”
“Shit shit!” John laughed.
“God da- I mean, rats,” Chuck spat.
Sarah smiled. “Okay. I’m gonna try to change back to the way things were. But I’m gonna need your help.”
“I know,” Chuck replied. “And I’m going to be a more attentive husband. I should have realized what was going on a long time ago.”
“It seems like you’ve been really busy, though,” Sarah said. “Speaking of which, what have you been up to?”
Chuck looked at her pensively. “I was going to wait till you were in better health, but I might as well tell you.”
He sat and explained all about Director Tyler and Senator Graham commissioning SCCS. He told her about its formation, about who he had recruited. He told her about the equipment he’d acquired so far.
“So all I need now is a building, and one last individual,” Chuck finished. “A highly trained expert who is proficient in combat and undercover operations. Somebody who was once called the CIA’s own James Bond.”
He looked into Sarah’s eyes with an intense burning in his own. “This is your chance, Sarah,” he said. “This is your chance to be deep cover operative and mother, all at the same time.”
Chuck paused. “But I need you healthy. I need to you commit yourself to our family again. I need you to commit yourself to me. Can you do that?”
Sarah took a deep breath, and blew it out again, then slowly nodded. “Three years ago, I said that I would stick with you as long as we lived,” she said softly. “I’m not gonna back out on that now.”
Chuck smiled. “I never for one moment thought you would.”
