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He shoved the phone back in his pocket, pulled the plug on the side of the barrel and inserted the sampling tube. He let it fill and then poured the wine into the glass. Swirled and inhaled the scent, getting notes of blackberry, tobacco and leather. Nice. He took a sip. Nope, not ready yet. Too cottony.
The door at the top of the stairs opened, and his youngest sister came waddling down the stairs. Her giant golden retriever, Blue, followed, making a beeline for Jack’s leg.
“Hello, you horny bastard,” he said. The dog smiled up at him, happy dope that he was.
“Hey, Jack,” Faith said.
“Hey. Should you be down here in your delicate condition?”
“I have at least seven weeks to go. Also, Goggy brought in half a ton of grapes the day she went into labor with Dad, and Pru drove the grape harvester the day Ned was born, so I think I can handle the stairs.” She handed him a foil-wrapped package. “Lemon cake from Mrs. Johnson. I was told not to eat any. It’s so unfair, you being her favorite.”
“I can’t help being perfect,” he said in a pale imitation of his usual back-and-forth with his sisters. The cake was still warm. He’d eat some later, maybe. Then again, his appetite hadn’t been so good.
Faith sat at the old wooden table. “Can I smell the wine, at least?”
He handed her the glass, and she took a deep sniff of the wine. “Oh, nice. Leather and plum. This’ll be great in a few months, don’t you think?”
“I do.”
She settled back in her chair and rested her hands on her bulging stomach. “So how are you doing these days, buddy?”
“Good. Fine.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep. Thanks.” He wasn’t about to burden her with tales of limp, lifeless teenagers. “I’m fine, Faithie.”
“Good. You know, we all love you, even if you’re a little prince.”
“Please. I’m head winemaker for our family dynasty. You, on the other hand, plant pretty flowers.” Faith was a landscape architect, and while he completely respected what she did, he wasn’t about to tell her. It would throw off his big-brother coolness.
“I’ll ignore that. So, Jack.”
“Yes, what’s-your-name?”
“You know Emmaline, right?”
“Sure.”
“She needs a date for her ex-fiancé’s wedding.”
“Okay.”
“It’s—wow, that was easy.” Her dog came over and sat next to her, putting his cinder-block-size head on her knee, and Faith scratched his ears. “It’s in California—that’s the thing. It’d be the whole weekend. Colleen’s going, too. She knew the bride in college.”
“No problem.” It was winter, things were slow and, man, it’d be fantastic to get out of town, somewhere warm where people didn’t want to ask what it was like to save those kids. “Who am I going with again?”
“Emmaline, dummy. The cop.”
“Right. Tell her yes.”
“Hooray! And here we thought you had no purpose in life.” Faith grinned. “Would you tell her, so this doesn’t feel so eighth grade?”
“But it is so eighth grade, Faithie. That’s what you love about it.”
“Just obey me, okay? I’m brewing you a nephew.” She stood up and rubbed her lower back. “You like her, right? I mean, you’ll be a good date and all that?”
“Sure. She’s the best right wing on the hockey team.”
“Women love to hear that kind of thing.”
“I’ll mention it, then.” He opened another barrel. “Anything else, whoever you are?”
“Yes. Will you be the baby’s godfather?”
He did a double take. “Sure. Thanks, Faith.” He went over and kissed her head. “I guess I figured it would be Jeremy. Or Tom.”
“Jeremy and Tom aren’t my beloved, much-worshiped older brothers.”
Jack smiled, and this time, it felt genuine. “Don’t think I’ve forgotten how you told Megan Delgado that I had roundworm.”
“Hey, I did you a favor,” she retorted.
“Did you? Because last time I looked, she was still incredibly gorgeous.”
“And speaking of gorgeous women—”
“Smooth.”
“I know. Speaking of gorgeous, I hear Hadley’s back in town.”
“Yep.”
“Is she looking to reconcile?” Faith asked.
“Yep.”
“You interested?”
“Nope.”
“Why now?” Faith asked. “Did she see the rescue coverage or something?”
“Yes.” He removed Blue from his leg. The dog looked a little blurry. That wasn’t a good sign.
“Jack, come on! I get enough one-word answers from Levi when he’s grumpy.”
“Uh, yeah. She saw something on the news and thought I might need her.”
“Do you?”
“Like I need roundworm.” His inner ear ached.
Faith smiled. “So you want Pru and Honor and me to go beat her up? We could bring Mrs. Johnson. She never liked her.”
“I’ll let you know.”
The water had been cold like he’d never felt before. Cold enough that his bones hurt.
“So this wedding comes at a great time, then,” Faith said.
Jack gave his head a little shake. “What wedding?”
“Jack! Jeesh! The wedding you just said you’d go to. Emmaline’s fiancé.”
“Right, right. I’ll stop by the station. Now get out of here and go plan your next garden. I have wine to check.” He paused. “Thanks for godfather. That means a lot, Faith. Tell Levi, okay?”
“I love you,” she said, giving him a hug.
“Love you, too.” She always smelled like vanilla cookies or something, his youngest sister, and Jack hugged her back, the blurry, floating feeling fading a little.
Faith pulled back. “Oh! The baby just kicked. He knows his uncle Jack is here.” She put his hand on her stomach, and Jack felt a strange, firm, wavelike motion.
His nephew. A little boy who’d dig in the dirt and play with trucks and learn to drive the harvester years before he could drive a car, and when he did drive a car, his uncle Jack would put the fear of God in him, and that kid would never, ever, ever drink and drive and crash—
He removed his hand and cleared his throat. “Got any names picked out yet?”
“No,” she sighed. “Levi says whatever I want is fine, which makes me insane.”
“Heartless bastard.”
“I know. It won’t be John...I’m saving that for you, so you can have John the Fifth. If you ever get married and produce the Holland grandchild. Not that Mrs. J. has been complaining about that or anything. Or Goggy. I was over at Rushing Creek today, and she said, ‘Oh, sure, it’s wonderful that you’re having a baby, Faith, but I want a Holland baby to carry on the family name.’”
“Let’s not forget my superior gene pool,” Jack said. He paused. “But if you want to name the little guy John, go ahead, Faith. Dad would love it.”
“Nope,” she said. “You’re John Noble Holland the Fourth. You get to have Number Five if you want. If you can trick some woman into marrying you, that is.” Then, realizing that perhaps his marital state was a sore subject with his ex-wife in town, she added, “Sorry.”
His heart was beating way, way too fast. “Don’t worry about it. Actually, do worry about it. Make me a cake or something, and I’ll forgive you. Now get out of here. I mean it.”
Because a flashback was coming, and Jack wanted to be alone when it hit.
* * *
ON THE DAY the car went into the lake, Jack had been waiting twenty years to save a life.
For twenty years, he’d never been in quite the right spot at quite the right moment. For twenty years, it seemed like he’d always been five minutes too late or five minutes too early, just missing the chance to help.
For twenty years, he’d had to live with the image of his youngest sister trapped in the crumpled wreck with their mother’s body, and for twenty years, he’d been waiting for the chance to make up for that. Not that the thought made sense—he’d been away in college when his mother had died, but the thought that his little sis had been alone, in shock, with no one to help for more than an hour...that his mother had had no one to hold her hand in her last moment...that no one had come to help for far too long... Of course it left a mark.
From that day on, Jack had been on alert. He joined the navy thinking he might try to become a SEAL, but Uncle Sam had other plans after seeing his test scores, so to the lab he went. It was fine; he still had to train, improved his swimming skills, get advanced scuba licenses—open water diving and specialized rescue, black water search, whatever he could.
But that feeling never went away, even after his service was done.
Every time a car raced past him on the highway at ninety miles an hour, every time he saw a motorcyclist tearing around town without a helmet, the pictures would unfold. The accident. The victims. What he would do, how he would help, how he’d make sure his own pickup truck was pulled safely off the road, how he’d call 911 as he ran, how he’d pull the driver from the car or out of the road and put pressure on the wounds until help came. He had a fire extinguisher in his car (didn’t everyone?) and a window-breaking tool on his key chain, as well as a hammer in the glove box. Flares. A first aid kit, a really good flashlight (batteries changed twice a year), a seat-belt cutter and a blanket.
In the summer if he was down at the lake, he’d count the kids in the water and check to make sure parents were alert and not too engrossed in their books or conversations or phone games. When the flight attendants went over safety procedures, Jack listened, then looked at his fellow passengers and noted who would need help should their plane land on the Hudson or in an Iowa cornfield.
As Honor said, a hobby was a hobby.
Jack put his training to work and became a volunteer rescue diver for the Manningsport Fire Department. He was certified for ice rescue and as a lifeguard. He was an EMT.
And still, he’d never saved a soul. Last spring, when his grandparents’ house had burned down, it was Honor who’d done the heroics; Jack’s house was way up on the ridge, about as far away from the Old House as you could get on Blue Heron land. By the time he’d gotten down there, Honor had already saved their grandmother’s life, with a little help from her fiancé.
But on January 12, Jack had gone down to the dock to take photos. He loved winter, loved the brilliant red sunsets at dusk and the cold wash of the Milky Way at midnight. From here, he could see the Crooked Lake to the east and all the way up to Blue Heron to the west. So around 4:30 p.m., he was taking photos of the fields where the snow and dormant vines stood in stark contrast to each other. The sky over Rose Ridge deepened, promising one of western New York’s famous sunsets. There might even be the aurora borealis later on.
At times like this, the power of the land spoke to him. It wasn’t just the fact that the Holland family had helped found this town, that his ancestors and grandparents and parents had worked this land. It was the area itself: the cold, deep lakes, the gorges and waterfalls, the fertile, rocky soil.
This kind of thing reminded him of how much he had. A family—three married sisters, a niece and a nephew and another on the way. His father and stepmother. A job he loved. His, uh...his cat. His health. All that good stuff.
It was just that lately, Jack had been feeling a little...unfinished.
After twenty years of being a widower, Dad had gotten married last spring. Which was great, because Mrs. Johnson was the world’s finest woman and had been like a surrogate mother since Jack’s mom had died. Pru and Carl had been together for nearly twenty-five years. Honor and Faith both married recently. Goggy and Pops had recently fallen in love after sixty-five cantankerous years of marriage, thanks to the fire.
Jack...Jack had gotten divorced after eight months of marriage.
And then he heard the car. Judging from the sound of the engine, it seemed as if the car was going at least sixty miles an hour in a thirty-five-mile-an-hour zone.
He turned away from the water and waited, oddly calm. The car would crash. How could it not, going that fast?
Then again, he’d had that same thought hundreds of times. Maybe thousands.
None of that ever happened, but the instinct—to watch over, pay attention, be alert, be ready—was a reflex. His rational brain knew how unlikely it was that what he feared and watched for would come to pass.
But he looked up the hill anyway. In another few seconds, he’d be able to see the car as it came down the curve on Lake Shore Road, thirty feet up the hill from Keuka.
Later, when people heard about the accident, how Jack of all people happened to be there at that exact moment, they said the usual things—everything happens for a reason, it was a miracle, God works in mysterious ways.
To Jack, however, it was more of a statistics thing. All these years not being there had to end eventually.
Almost automatically, he processed what might happen: the car swerving off the road as the driver tried to handle the curving road, the vehicle rolling over and over into Blue Heron’s chardonnay vines, which were closest to the road. Or the car would smash into the same telephone pole he himself had scraped when he was sixteen.
Worse, the car would hit the big maple at the base of the entrance to Blue Heron. The driver was a teenage boy, Jack guessed, because there was no one on earth who believed in his driving skill and immortality more than a teenage boy.
Hopefully, everyone in the car was wearing a seat belt. The windows would be closed, since it was January, so no one would be thrown from the car. Going that fast, though, even with air bags...
The engine screamed with a downshift as the hotdogging kid played with his life.
And here it was. The screech of brakes applied too late. Jack tensed for the crunch of metal as the car rolled or hit a tree, the subsequent, constant blare of a horn.
