Riptide by Dawn Lee McKenna

hurried past Georgia as she came back into the room. They heard Sky’s door slam down the hall.
    Maggie swallowed hard, then looked at Gray. “Help me, Daddy,” she said softly.
    Gray put his arm around Maggie’s neck and pulled her to him, buried his face in her hair and kissed her head. It almost broke her, and she straightened up, as Georgia sat down on the coffee table and picked up one of Maggie’s feet.
    “Oh, my Lord,” Georgia said.
    Maggie reached down with her right hand and gently took her mother’s hand away as she retracted her foot. Georgia snatched at her hand and turned it palm up. “Look at your hand!”
    There was one fairly deep, jagged slice across Maggie’s palm, surrounded by several small scratches, from the splintered wood of David’s shattered hull. Georgia held onto Maggie’s hand as she flipped open the first aid kit.
    “No, Mom,” Maggie said quietly, pulling her hand back.  
    Georgia grabbed the hand back and looked kindly, but firmly, at her daughter. “Will you be more useful to your children with a raging infection, Margaret Anne?”
    Maggie looked away and swallowed, but she didn’t take her hand back. It didn’t seem right for her to have such minor wounds attended to. It didn’t seem fair for her to have wounds that would heal.
    Georgia had cleaned, treated, and wrapped a strip of gauze around Maggie’s palm, and had just finished applying antibiotic cream to Maggie’s feet when Kyle stirred, then sat up.
    “Mom,” he said, only half awake.
    Maggie stood up and took his hand. “C’mon, buddy. Let’s get you to bed.”
    Kyle stood, swaying just a bit, then Maggie followed him into the hall. He turned left instead of right, pulled back the covers, and crawled into Maggie’s bed, on the far side. He was still wearing his cargo shorts and a Third Day tee shirt. Maggie pulled the covers up over him, then went back out to the hall. Gray and Georgia were right there, heading for Kyle’s room.
    “We’re going to sleep in Kyle’s room,” Gray said quietly. “You need to try to get some rest.”
    “Wake us up if you need anything,” Georgia said.
    Maggie nodded, then turned and went back into her room.
    She crawled under the covers with Kyle, who was already asleep again. She reached out and ran her fingers through his bangs, but his likeness to his father, as he laid on David’s old side of the bed, was more than she could handle. She turned toward the door, and Coco jumped up, settled at the end of the bed, and rested her chin on Maggie’s feet with a sigh.
    A few hours later, Maggie still hadn’t slept. Sky appeared in her doorway without a sound. Maggie strained to see her face in the dark.
    “I didn’t mean it,” Sky finally said, and there was a trembling in her voice. “I don’t know why I said that.”
    Maggie pulled the covers down, and Sky crawled in beside her, curled her back into Maggie. Maggie put her arm around her and breathed deeply.
    Sky fell asleep within a few minutes, but Maggie never did. She blinked several thousand times, but never closed her eyes, and never shed a tear.
    Ever since the rape, Maggie had been able to compartmentalize feelings that were just too much for her to handle. She could push them down, push them back, make them wait for another time.
    Intellectually, she knew that it was considered unhealthy, a symptom of damage.   She considered it a bonus, some kind of recompense for the occasional nightmares and flashbacks, this ability to protect herself.   She refused to call it PTSD, to give Gregory Boudreaux anything more than he had already taken. And right now, she was as grateful for it as she could imagine being.

    When the sky finally began to lighten outside Maggie’s bedroom window, she carefully climbed out of bed and went to the bathroom. She could hear her father snoring faintly through Kyle’s open door.
    After using the restroom, Maggie went to the kitchen and made a pot of coffee, more out of habit than