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“The guy died,” he said.
I nodded again.
“I’m sorry, My,” he said. “You didn’t need this tonight. I know you still feel like shit.” He glanced behind him as if he could see the interior of the restaurant instead of the peeling paint on the wall. Then he sat down on the floor across from me. The hall was narrow enough that, even leaning against the opposite wall, he was able to keep one hand on mine. God, I loved his touch! During the past week, I’d wondered if I’d ever feel him touch me again.
“The cops locked the door, because they want to talk to everyone who was here when it happened,” he said. “Especially you and Becca, since you were facing the shooter. But if you’re not up to it … I can tell them you’re only six days out from a miscarriage and to leave you alone. You could go into the police station instead of—”
“I’m okay,” I said. I’d be strong for him. I wanted his admiration, not his pity.
Adam turned his hand to lace our fingers together. “You know,” he said, “it was so crazy in there, that when you disappeared, I was afraid you’d been shot. I even looked under the table for you. It scared me.” His voice was heavy with emotion, and I knew he still loved me. Only then did I realize how much I’d come to doubt that love.
“I’m okay,” I said again, getting to my feet. “I can talk to them now.”
The ride home two hours later was quiet and dismal. We were talked out from the interviews with the police, and Brent, now stone-cold sober, drove.
He dropped Adam and me off in front of our house. We started walking up the curved sidewalk to our front door, but I turned as I heard a car door slam and saw Rebecca running toward us.
“Just want to talk to my sis a minute,” she said to Adam.
He nodded, pulling his keys from his pocket. “I’ll see you inside, My,” he said.
We’d left the outside lights on, and I could see the worry in Rebecca’s face. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I nodded. “Fine.” I looked toward my house, hoping the sight of the light-filled windows and overflowing planters by the front door would erase the image of bloody flan from my mind.
“I was afraid when we picked that restaurant that you wouldn’t want to go,” she said. “I know you don’t like going to that part of town. But it seemed great at first. We were having so much fun. And then this had to happen.” She shook her head. “It was terrible.”
“I’m okay,” I said.
Rebecca looked toward Brent’s car, then faced me again. “We haven’t had a chance to talk about the baby since I got back. I mean, you and me alone. Let’s make time before I end up on the road again, okay?”
I wasn’t thinking about the baby at that moment. I didn’t want thoughts of my baby—my son—to be connected in any way to this horrible night, but she was waiting for some response from me. “Okay,” I said. “I really …” I looked toward my house once more, thinking of Adam inside. “We have to figure out whether to try again.”
“Or adopt.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think Adam ever will.”
“What is his problem?” She sounded annoyed. “I want to pound some sense into that man’s head. ”
“No. Don’t. He and I have to figure it out. Okay?”
Rebecca ran a hand through her short hair, glancing again toward Brent’s car. “This is a terrible send-off for Brent,” she said, “but then, you get kind of used to the unexpected when you work for DIDA.” It was the wrong thing to say to me now that Adam had signed on as a volunteer, and she caught herself. “But nothing like this has ever happened in all the years I’ve worked for DIDA,” she said. “Really, Maya.”
I didn’t want to talk about DIDA. What I wanted to say was, Did tonight remind you of the night Mom and Daddy were killed? But I would never say those words. Our relationship was so complex. We were close in so many ways. Distant in others. If tonight had reminded her of that other night, I would never know.
“You get some sleep,” she said. “Do you have some Xanax lying around?”
“Somewhere,” I said.
She touched my cheek with the back of her fingers, the way a mother might touch her child. She was not usually tender, and I was moved by the gesture. Then she pulled me into a hug.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too.”
We stayed that way, holding on to each other, for close to a minute. No matter how tightly I held her against me though, I felt that long-ago night wedged between us like a solid wall of stone.
10
Rebecca
REBECCA SAT IN HER FAVORITE RED VELVET CHAIR AT Starbucks, shoes off, feet tucked beneath her, a double Americano on the table next to her. She was reading a book written by a guy who’d worked with the Red Cross after the quake in China. Even though she’d worked in China after the quake herself, she couldn’t concentrate on the book today. She was impatient and the coffee wasn’t helping.
The devastation from the earthquake in Ecuador was much worse than anyone had realized, and she was itching to go down there. Brent had been working thirty miles from the epicenter for a week now, and he’d finally managed to call her on a satellite phone the day before. “Tell Dot we need you here,” he’d said. They were extremely shorthanded, but Dorothea didn’t want her to go.
“Not until we see what these devils in the Atlantic have on their minds,” she said when Rebecca relayed Brent’s message.
The tropical storm that had been wallowing a good distance off the coast of Bermuda was now Hurricane Carmen. She barely deserved the name hurricane, in Rebecca’s opinion. She was nothing more than a puffy white amoeba on the weather map. No one seemed sure where she would make landfall—if she made landfall at all. Possibly South Carolina. Possibly farther north, along the Outer Banks. But the storm was so pathetic that evacuation was voluntary, and Rebecca knew that most people would stay to watch the waves swell and the wind howl and enjoy being as close as they could get to danger while remaining perfectly safe. Durham and the rest of the state were promised buckets of rain and a little wind, but so far, nothing more than that, and Rebecca couldn’t believe she was stuck in North Carolina because of potential rain. She had to admit, though, that Dot had a sixth sense about storms. Rebecca sometimes thought she had missed her calling and should have been a meteorologist. She wondered if, when it was her turn as DIDA’s director, she’d be able to determine who was needed when and where with Dorothea’s precision.
“It’s not just Carmen I’m concerned about,” Dorothea had said to her in her dining room-slash-office that morning. She’d pointed to the weather map on her computer. “See these two guys north of Haiti?” She ran her finger over two other amoebas. “I don’t trust them one bit.”
“Okay.” Rebecca had given in. “Whatever.” So now she was biding her time—working out at the gym, running, catching up on e-mail and helping Dorothea with DIDA’s mind-numbing administrative tasks.
She’d finally had a couple of hours alone with Maya the evening before. Over their Frapuccinos at this same Starbucks, they’d talked about the baby. They’d sat in the courtyard outside so Rebecca could smoke, and she’d loaded Maya up with advice: It was too soon to make a decision about trying again, she’d said. Maya needed to put the whole baby thing out of her mind for a while. She had to give Adam time to grieve before reintroducing the topic of adoption. Maybe by then he’d be ready.
Maya listened in that patient way she had, looking more at her mug of coffee than at Rebecca. And when Rebecca had offered every last bit of sisterly advice she could come up with, Maya leaned toward her.
“I know you have my best interest at heart, Bec,” she said, “but you can’t really understand how this feels.”
Rebecca didn’t know why the words hurt her so much, but they did. Maybe because they were the truth. She couldn’t understand. She was out of her league, and that was a feeling she loathed. She thought of telling Maya about that weird fantasy she’d had in Brent’s hotel room of holding the baby, that powerful sense of loss, but caught herself in time. Maya’s loss was real; hers was imagined.
“Well,” she’d said, “I want to understand.”
“It’s creating issues between Adam and me,” Maya said.
Rebecca frowned. What did she mean by “it”? Maya could be so vague. She had a way of talking around a subject instead of coming out and saying what she meant. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Because he won’t adopt or what?”
“Partly,” Maya said. “I haven’t told you a lot of this because I didn’t want you to worry, but ever since the first miscarriage, things haven’t been the same between us.”
She remembered that lunch she’d had with Adam a few weeks earlier when he talked about the Pollywog. How happy he’d looked. How she’d realized then that some of the joy had gone out of him in the last year or so.
She stubbed out her cigarette and leaned forward. “You two are solid, Maya,” she said. “All couples have their ups and downs.” She held her breath, waiting for Maya to tell her once again that she couldn’t understand since she’d never been married, but Maya only shrugged.
“I know,” she said. “But this just … this feels bad.”
Adam and Maya. Maya and Adam. Their personalities were entirely different—extroverted versus introverted, jocular versus serious—but together the two of them formed one whole, balanced human being. Rebecca couldn’t imagine Maya without Adam. She couldn’t imagine her own life without Adam in it as her brother-in-law.
“This is a phase,” she said. “You’ll get through it, honey. You can’t rush it. You can’t do anything about it. But—” she leaned forward again “—the thing you can do something about is work, and I think you’re working way too hard right now.” Work was a topic she could understand and she felt herself on safer ground. Maya was covering for one of her partners who was on vacation. Someone else could have covered for him—someone who hadn’t miscarried a couple of weeks ago.
“I need to stay busy,” Maya said. “You know how I am.”
She did know. Work had always been Maya’s way of coping. Even after their parents’ deaths, when their lives had been turned completely upside down, Maya threw herself into her schoolwork. Her teachers and the school counselor had been astounded. Maya had always been a good student, the type who didn’t have to study all that hard to do well, something Rebecca had envied since she’d had to cram to get the same grades. But after their parents’ deaths, Maya lost herself completely in her studies, graduating from high school in three years instead of four. Everyone talked about how amazing she was. No one paid much attention to the fact that Rebecca had sacrificed her own first year of college to play mother and father to her sister, or that she’d fought the system to keep Maya out of foster care or that she’d cooked and cleaned and done the laundry while Maya rose to the top of her class.
The thing that really changed about Maya after the murders, though, was her transformation from a happy-go-lucky kid into a girl afraid of her own shadow. Totally understandable. She’d been right in the line of fire. Who could go through something like that and remain unchanged?
Rebecca closed the book on the Chinese earthquake, giving up. She hadn’t absorbed a single word in the past fifteen minutes. Swallowing the last of her Americano, she got to her feet. She’d go for a run. Lose the negative memories.
She left the store and headed for her car, walking quickly as though she could leave the memories behind, but it wasn’t so easy. The whole time she and Maya had been talking the night before, Rebecca had been thinking about the shooting in the restaurant. She hated guns, hated treating gunshot victims, although she did it, wanting to save their lives with a desperation that went beyond the simple practice of medicine. Two decades had passed, yet she still saw her parents’ bloodied bodies in every shooting victim she treated.
The incident in the Brazilian restaurant had to remind Maya of that night. Rebecca had seen the panic in her eyes. She’d still been trembling later, when Rebecca hugged her good-night. They never talked about their parents’ murder. It was an agreed-upon, unspoken rule between them. Yet she knew that Maya had to blame her for that night.
Maybe even more than she blamed herself.
11
Maya
“Holy shit, Maya,” Adam called from the sofa in THE FAMILY ROOM. “COME LOOK AT THIS.”
I closed the dishwasher and walked into the family room. Outside the windows, the rain created a dark, undulating curtain so thick I couldn’t see the woods behind the house. It was eight o’clock, so I wasn’t sure how much of the darkness was encroaching nightfall and how much of it was the storm. Either way, it was the sort of weather that made me glad to be inside. Chauncey sat at the sliding glass door, looking discouraged.
Adam pointed toward the TV. “They’re in Wilmington,” he said. “They’re saying now it’s a category four.”
I sat down on the sofa next to him. On the screen, a newscaster dressed in a slicker and hood held on to a lamppost to keep from flying away. He was trying to shield his eyes against the wind and rain, shouting to be heard above the din. I squinted at the TV. “Is he … where is he?” I asked. Wilmington was less than three hours from us, and I loved the charm of the city on the Cape Fear River. “Is that the Riverwalk?”
“Right,” Adam said. “He’s near the Pilot House. Listen.”
“… not moving,” the reporter said. “Just sitting at the mouth of the Cape Fear. There’s no one out here on the downtown streets, but most people didn’t evacuate. Some were starting to, because the next storm, Erin, is expected to make a direct hit. And that’s a problem—” He slapped his hand on his hood to keep it on his head. “A big problem,” he said. “We’ve got people who were trying to leave and are now stuck on the roads because of flooding and downed trees. They tried to. you know … get out, but it’s just too late.” The reporter was getting blown all over the place. His knuckles were white where he clung to the pole. “You know the next named storm was Donald, but that one sort of just. fizzled, but the big … but Carmen. no one expected this. This … strength. And of course, no one expected her to make landfall here.” He fiddled with his earpiece. “Some people are trying to leave the area, like I said, but there’s already flooding on some of the major roads and many, if not most, of the minor roads. And I tell you … if this next storm, Erin, packs this kind of punch while people are here … unable to evacuate …” Something blew past his head and he ducked, then recovered. “If it packs this kind of punch,” he repeated, “we’re going to have a major catastrophe on our hands.”
Chauncey had moved to my side. He rested his big head on my knees and I massaged my fingertips into the short fur on his neck. “I hope there’s enough of a break between the storms that people can leave.” I glanced out the window, but now it truly was dark outside and I couldn’t see a thing. I’d been worried about the rain and wind in our own yard. I could still remember Hurricane Fran, which hit North Carolina shortly after I moved to the state. I was in medical school and sharing an apartment with Rebecca at the time, and I remembered trees lying helter-skelter everywhere. “How bad is it supposed to get here?” I asked Adam. “Did they say?”
He shook his head, putting his arm around my shoulders, and I felt relief well up inside me. Except for that moment in the hallway of the restaurant after the shooting, he’d shown me little affection since the miscarriage. I was trying not to read too much into it, trying not to be neurotic and insecure. I snuggled close to him. I wanted our intimacy back. I wanted to be able to talk to him. We used to talk so easily to one another. Now, though, the things that were on my mind didn’t feel safe to bring up, because they would make me sound small and pathetic and I knew he wanted me strong. Worse, I was angry with him for the way he was shutting me out. I’d rarely felt anger toward Adam before, and I didn’t know what to do with it. My hormones were still toying with me, and the things that were on my mind, the things I couldn’t get out of my mind were: my lost child, Adam’s ex-wife, laughing about having children after all, and the abortion I’d never told him about. Sometimes I thought to myself: just sit him down and say, Adam, please, I need to get all this out. Please just let me talk without telling me everything’s fine, not to worry. Please. But I didn’t. I was afraid, and I wasn’t even sure what it was that I feared.
The guy on the TV screen was growing repetitive, but he was still riveting to watch. “Dorothea was right,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“This is why she told Rebecca not to go to Ecuador. She had a feeling about these storms. So I guess Rebecca will be going to Wilmington or wherever the damage is the worst once they let up.”
“… didn’t really have a chance to board up along the coast,” the reporter was saying.
“I may go, too,” Adam said.
I lifted my head from his shoulder. “Really?”
He nodded. “If it turns out they need DIDA down there, this would be a good first assignment. You know … in our backyard. Better than Ecuador.”
“Definitely,” I said, but I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to be in DIDA, period. But he was right. I would be far more comfortable having him in North Carolina than South America.
“… has the meteorologists scratching their heads, because this storm—this cat four hurricane—just wasn’t supposed to go down like this.”
The TV showed a satellite image. The hurricane was a stunner, huge and round with a perfect blue eye. It sat at the mouth of the Cape Fear and the projected path drove it straight up the river. A meteorologist with long, glossy red hair moved onto the screen and was about to open her mouth when the TV went dark, along with every light in our house.
“Knew that was going to happen.” Adam stood up. “I’ll get the flashlights.”
“I already did,” I said, getting to my own feet. As soon as the rain had started that afternoon, I’d taken them from the cupboard where we kept the emergency supplies. “The weather radio’s there, too,” I said, feeling my way toward the kitchen. “And the candles. They’re all on the island.”
I heard the ominous cracking sound of a limb being torn from a tree and stopped in the doorway of the kitchen, waiting for the thud I knew was coming, hoping the limb didn’t hit the house. I heard the snapping of other branches as the limb fell and held my breath until it finally hit the earth. The whole house shook, and Chauncey began barking furiously, running around my legs, his tail thwacking against my thighs. It was going to be a long, long night.
I heard the sound of chain saws even before I opened my eyes in the morning. Adam was already up, and I stood at our bedroom window to survey the yard below. It didn’t look bad. Tree limbs and branches littered the lawn, but they were small and I knew we could drag them back into the woods without much trouble. I hoped the front yard had suffered no more damage than the back. The odd thing was, the world outside was still gray. Almost dark, as though the storm was not quite finished with us.
Adam poked his head in the bedroom. “No coffee,” he said, wrinkling his nose.
“Oh.” I wrinkled mine back at him. “Power’s still out?”
He nodded. “The yard’s good, though. The Scotts have a big one down across their driveway. I’m going to take my chain saw over there.”
“Okay.” I smiled. As long as no one had suffered any major damage from the storm, I knew the men in the neighborhood would enjoy the chance to play with their saws that morning. “I’ll start picking up the yard,” I said.
I dressed and went downstairs, dialing Rebecca on my cell as I walked.
“Hey,” she answered. “Any damage at your house?”
“Power’s out, but we’re good,” I said. “How about there?” The trees around Dorothea’s house were far smaller than ours.
“Nothing,” she said. “Couple of shingles off the roof. Have you turned on the TV?”
“Can’t,” I said.
“Oh, that’s right. Well, Wrightsville Beach is practically under water. And wait till you see Wilmington. The river’s flooding a bunch of the buildings on Front Street.”
“Oh, you’re kidding. We saw on the news that people couldn’t evacuate in time. Are there injuries? Will you be going?” Would Adam be going?
“Tons of people stranded,” she said. “It’s hard to say what’s going on because nobody can get in or out. But Erin is right behind. They expect her to hit tomorrow morning.”
“Already? Hit where? I thought Erin wasn’t due until.” I tried to remember what the predictions had been for the second storm.
“They thought Tuesday, but it suddenly started moving,” Rebecca said. I heard the excitement in her voice. My sister loved a great disaster. “It’s not as big because it’s not spending enough time over the water to gain strength, but it’s still a four, and the area just can’t handle another drop of rain.”
“I hope.” I pictured images from Katrina. “I just hope all the people are safe.”
“Me, too,” Rebecca said. “Is Adam there? Dot’s probably going to want both of us to go down there after Erin, unless she turns out to be nothing.”
“He’s somewhere in the neighborhood with his chain saw.”
Rebecca laughed. “The air’s buzzing here, too,” she said. “Okay, have him call me when he gets in. How are you doing?”
“I’d kill for a cup of coffee, but that’s not much to complain about.”
