Accidental Happiness (3 page)

“Don’t just stand there!” The pleading wail brought me around, but my efforts had no order. What
could
I do? My mind ran through what had happened. How it had happened. How could I fix it? Indecision became another kind of paralysis.

“Help us!!” Reese Melrose screamed again. “What the fuck are you standing there for? Somebody call for help!”

I turned, nearly fell, frantic to get my cell phone from the cabin below, but then saw Lane, who had shown up on the dock like a vision. She wore pajamas with no housecoat, her gray-blond hair in short disarray.

“I’m calling,” she said, more to me than the wailing woman and child.

“When did you get here?” I asked, watching her dial her cell phone.

She didn’t answer me. I don’t think she even heard me; but I looked around, saw people standing on the balconies of the marina condos along the shore. A handful of people, no one I recognized, made their way over from the other docks. Everyone, it seemed, had come out for the commotion.

“We have an emergency,” Lane was saying into the phone, her voice loud, urgent. “At 1720 Creekside Road. At the marina. C dock. A little girl is bleeding. A gunshot, I think.”

Lane paused, listening. “Is she breathing?” She leaned over, asked Reese Melrose.

“Yes,” she answered, breathless. “Yes, she’s breathing. They’re little, though, short breaths.”

Reese was crying, sobbing as she spoke. Then after the words, her sounds fell again to loud, arcing moans. It was the sound of fear. My mother had made that sound as she stood over Elise. I’d made it when they told me about Ben. I knelt to touch Reese, put my arm around her, then pulled back, knew at once it wasn’t my place. In one way or another I’d allowed it to happen, all of it—Elise, Benjamin, and now another one. The single shot rang in my ears. So I sat near her, but still apart. We both shivered as if chilled, but the air pressed in around us, thick and warm.

“What do we do until they get here?” Lane asked the person on the phone, then turned to us. “Don’t move her, they say.” She paused, listened. “Make sure her head is supported and that nothing is obstructing her airway. Check her mouth for vomit or blood. Anything that would hamper her breathing.”

Reese had gone quiet, looked to Lane for instruction, and did as she was told. She felt around in the child’s mouth. The girl gagged as the fingers poked around.

“That’s good,” I said to no one; muttering, feeling like an idiot.

The water in the inlet was glassy calm. I saw Derek coming down from the security station, a tall figure in jeans and no shirt. He had towels in his hand and I figured he’d been down before and had run back up to get them.

“Where’s she hit?” I asked, urgent now. And when Reese looked up, her face mirroring my panic, I continued in calmer tones. “Where’s she bleeding?”

“Here . . . here . . . here . . .” she told me. The mantra came in short bursts. Her hand held a piece of cloth, pressed it against the girl’s shoulder, high on the right, away from the heart, not near her head.

“Okay, okay,” I said, mostly to myself, then I struggled to remember high school biology, the diagrams of the body and the major arteries.
Dear God, don’t let it be bad.

My muscles went weak and everything fell silent. The calls had been made. Waiting was all we had left. Reese looked at me and we regarded each other with uneasy glances. I looked at her closely, realized she wore only a camisole. The white cloth in her hand was a blouse.

Derek leaned over from the dock and handed me the towels. His sense of purpose made him older, more capable than I’d ever imagined him to be, and I felt a wash of gratitude. Reese took the towels from me, pressed them against the child’s shoulder. The girl made sounds, small whines cut through and through by sobs that sounded like hiccups. That, more than anything, brought the crisis into bright focus. A child had been shot. I had done this to a little girl.

“Everything will be okay,” I offered, not knowing if that was true at all. The skin of my cheeks had gone flush and numb. Through and through my very center, pervasive dread rode the low buzz of fear.

Reese was crying, sweating, covered with the child’s blood. But it was more than that. She looked wet all over, clothes soaked through.

“What happened? Why are you here?” I asked, careful to keep my voice a question, not an indictment. In the odd calm of waiting, the inquiry seemed irrelevant, so before she answered, I moved ahead. “Reese? You are Reese, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” she said in barely a whisper, thick with sobs. “We came back to find Benjamin. Where’s Ben?”

Why here? Even if he
was
still alive, he wouldn’t be on the boat. “He’s . . .” I began, didn’t know how to answer. I felt an absurd fear that she’d come to reclaim him, felt it almost as if it could happen. But it couldn’t happen. She would never see him again, any more than I would. The thought reached me and I waited for sorrow to drive me hard, back into bent grief, but it didn’t. Blunt fear, it seemed, overrode all other emotions. At most, a small blessing.

“He’s not here, Reese,” I managed finally. “I tried to reach you . . .” The loss of Benjamin, so very raw, mixed with the sight of the bleeding girl. “It’s been several months . . .”

Police sirens followed by an EMT van took the moment from me and I felt grateful. The urgent rush to care for the child would give me time to fashion words for Reese Melrose. Time to prepare for the answers she would give to my questions. First among them,
why
was she here? The second,
who
was this child?

“Where is she?” One of the paramedics barked out the question as a team of three or four came through the security gate, then down the dock.

My boat rocked wildly as they stepped aboard the blood-smeared deck, further violating the surface with black-soled boots. I stepped out onto the dock to give them room to work. Derek and Lane stood on either side of me, stayed close as if standing guard. I glanced at Derek, realized again how solid he seemed to me all of a sudden. A different person in a crisis. I felt a slight ease, just having him there.

Reese moved back against the stern railing and gave over the care of the girl. Her eyes found mine and I felt a necessary alliance. Of a world full of people, only the two of us could answer questions that would set our lives back in order.

Then under the light of the paramedics I saw the little girl clearly for the first time, the dark mass of blood covering her shoulder. My fault. All my fault. But what the hell were they doing on my boat? I lived there, for God’s sake. What had they expected I would do, frightened in the middle of the night by strangers?

As they worked, a policeman approached me. He moved slowly, evoking deliberate calm.

“I need to talk with you about what happened,” he said. I listened for anything accusing in his tone, but heard nothing but the statement, plain and simple.

As the EMTs continued their job, I told Officer Hanlon everything I could recall, which wasn’t much. He made notes, said that would be enough for the moment.

“We’ll get the mother’s statement . . . Is she the mother?”

“I guess . . .” Was she? Could Reese Melrose really have a child that old?

“Well,” he said, closing his notebook, “we’ll sort it all out. I don’t think it will get complicated unless she plans to press charges of any sort.” He nodded toward Reese. “And even so . . .” He put up his hands as if to say,
She came onto your boat.
For anyone upholding the law near the coast, unlawful boarding of a vessel meant serious business.

But I wasn’t worried about charges, anyway. I couldn’t think of anything except how small the girl looked, how much blood there was everywhere.

The men lifted the child onto the stretcher, secured every part of her to the cot. Reese bent over them, frantic with questions. One of the EMTs stood up, spoke with her softly, and Reese stopped, stepped off the boat, and came to where I stood.

“She’s stable,” Reese said. “They’ve got the bleeding under control. They’re taking her to the hospital now, and he says it’ll be better if I follow them, give myself a chance to calm down.” She was talking to me, but still watching the men maneuver the stretcher off the boat. “Do you think you could drive me?” She turned to me, nearly pleading. The fear in her voice pulled at me, devastated me with her simple request. “I’m not sure I should get behind a wheel,” she finished. The admission carried such defeat.

“Sure,” I told her. She looked one nerve shy of hysterical. “Let me get my keys.” My boat had finally emptied, save Georgie, who had resumed her barking. I stepped back on board to get my stuff, and realized I still wore pajamas. My blouse from the day before lay on the floor along with my pocketbook, so I grabbed the whole pile, pulled the shirt on over my sleep camisole.

When I came out, I saw Reese in the distance following the men with the girl. I followed too, my flip-flops slapping loudly against the heels of my feet. People still watched from the condo balconies overlooking the inlet, everyone staring in the direction of my dock.

“That blue one,” they would say tomorrow and the day after, all the while pointing to my boat. “That blue yacht there,” they would explain to those who had missed it. “That’s where that little girl got shot.” My legs felt weak and I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry because I’d panicked, shot a small child, and because I wished Ben was around to help me sort this out.

The urgency, the ambulance . . . It all brought back the day I found out Benjamin was gone, and three months’ worth of healing went null and void. I wasn’t healed. I’d made no progress. I felt damaged beyond repair. I looked at the men carrying the girl and I wished I could be the one lying on the stretcher, not a small child who couldn’t possibly be at fault for anything.

“Where is it?” Reese Melrose was screaming the question at me as I approached the parking lot. She stood, waited for me to catch up. “Hurry! Which one is your car?”

“Over there.” I pointed. “The old brown Volvo.”

She sprinted toward my car, her wet skirt clinging limp around her legs. As I ran, I glanced over at the marina, the gathering of masts sprouting like bamboo from the inlet. All around the boats, the still water looked too calm for the crisis at hand.

In the absurd quiet of the idling car, the two of us waited for the ambulance to leave. Benjamin’s two wives, bound by events I couldn’t begin to comprehend.

Why is she here?
The question came to me again and, with it, another irrational flash of jealousy skimmed my conscious mind. I pushed the feeling down again, deemed it ridiculous—but the irony remained.

“Do you want air-conditioning?” I asked.

She shook her head no, glared at me as if I was crazy to be concerned with something so ordinary.

I pushed the button that rolled down the windows, allowed myself the small pleasure of sea smells and balmy air as I prayed silent, repetitious phrases in my head. At the marina, I saw Lane walking with Derek. She carried Georgie in her arms, and I felt guilty for not having thought to ask her to look out for the dog.

“Do you have a cigarette?” Reese asked.

“No.” I shook my head, and she let it go at that.

The only comforts I found, at least in those moments of waiting, were born out of the crisis itself. Emergency lights, police and ambulance, cast colors over the water, and the loveliness seemed somehow a response. Pulsing yellows, blues, and reds stained the white moonlight across the inlet, skipped fast over the calm waters of a windless night.

The hospital was twenty-five minutes away in traffic, less in the dark hours of the morning. We drove in wild excess of the posted limits, moving fast through the shelter of trees that lined the two-lane highway. Low-hanging willows reached near, but the unyielding body of ancient oaks worried me more. A whisper of error meant disaster on the narrow road. Even with my best efforts, the flashing lights grew distant on the road ahead.

“Do you know where the hospital is?” Reese leaned forward, as if headlong momentum could propel us, shorten their lead.

“I know it better than I want to,” I said, then regretted saying it. I didn’t want to talk about Benjamin, not yet. But she just nodded, didn’t ask why.

“I’m getting blood on your car.” She held her arms up to keep from touching anything. Thin bracelets, a dozen or so, jangled on her wrist. She reminded me of some entertainer. Deeply theatrical. Artfully genuine.

“It’s okay,” I said. We existed inside a warped world where the etiquette of bloodstained leather provided distraction, if nothing else. “Don’t worry about it. There’s an old blanket in the backseat you can put around yourself. You’re wet and you look cold. I’ll clean up the car later.”

“Thanks,” she said, reaching back to find the comforter. She wrapped herself in it. “I’m just worried about Angel.” Her voice stayed far away. “She’s really little.”

“It’s good, what the EMTs said about her vital signs.” I watched the road ahead.

“They said that she was stable,” she corrected me. “A lot can happen. She lost a lot of blood.”

“She’s going to be okay.” I took the liberty of keeping the glass half full. But then again, it wasn’t my kid. “She’ll be fine.”

The disrepair of familiar shacks and churches along the way gave them the look of abandonment. Absent the usual complement of people milling about, the communities became shoddy and exposed. I felt a kindred soul with the empty yards, dark windows. Before the moment that I fired the gun, the weeks had come and gone. I hadn’t realized how numb I’d become. Not a bad place considering the alternatives. But the night’s events had slammed me back into the worst of my reality, and then some.

“How did this happen?” Reese asked. Her voice was suddenly hard, as if she’d just identified me as the source of her misery.

“What do you mean?

“Tonight. Jesus, were you just sitting there with a pistol? What the hell were you doing?”

My gut was to go on the defensive.

“What was
I
doing? I live on that boat. People don’t just
drop
by for a visit at three o’clock in the morning.”