3:00 a.m.
Maggie tried to sit up and look around, but it hurt too much. Somewhere close by, she thought she heard the mumbling of voices.
“Hello?” The word was unintelligible even to her own ears. She might not have spoken it aloud at all. Neve didn’t move. No one came to look inside the car. Maggie’s cheeks felt hot and she wiggled the fingers on both her hands to make sure she still could.
Anxiety tightened her stomach into a ball. For a minute, she thought she might throw up. She sensed the urge at the back of her throat, the upheaval of everything inside her needing to find a way out. She tried to draw a full breath, tried to find some oxygen inside the broken car. The feeling passed, after a minute. She swallowed and forced her eyes to focus.
Everything hurt: her neck, her back, her bottom lip where she’d bit it upon impact. Her shoulders. Her wrists. Even her ankles, which she suspected she’d sprained by trying to press two imaginary brake pedals through the floor. Worst of all was the immense pain that ricocheted inside her skull. It grew with every passing second, turning the edges of her world fuzzy and taking away all color, so that everything appeared beige and brown.
Beside her, Neve made a sound and moved her head. Summer-squash strands of hair fell across her cheeks.
“Neve?”
This time the young woman moaned. Her eyelids twitched. Her hands moved in the direction of her belly, like small starfish seeking the waves.
Oh, no. The baby.
Maggie scrabbled at the key still in the ignition. She reached for the door handle. Then the window crank. Anything to get out of the car and find some help. But her fingers felt heavy, thick, ineffective. She pushed at the door. It didn’t budge. Then she saw that her side of the car was wedged against one of the bus stop supports. The hood of the car, accordioned toward the windshield, blocked her view of anything else. She looked at the passenger side door: damaged as well, bent at the hinges and split from end to end. Ragged edges gaped open, exposing the vein-like wires underneath. Glass lay scattered across their laps, the floor, and the dashboard. Maggie reached up to scratch her temple and found shards of it in her hair.
Someone knocked on the roof of the car.
“Hey. You in there. You okay?” A face appeared at her broken window, that of a kid Maggie placed in his early twenties. He wore a red and yellow striped shirt with an alligator sewn onto one pocket. Its tail was loose, she noticed. The guy’s right cheek was bruised and puffy, and an open gash on his chin oozed blood. Red-rimmed eyes squinted down at her. His breath, thick with liquor, caught her off-guard.
You son of a bitch
, she wanted to say.
You ran that light. You’re drunk
.
You’re…
But her lips wouldn’t work.
“Lady?” This time he reached a hand inside the window and touched her on the shoulder. “You in shock or something?”
“Call the police,” she whispered. “Call 911.”
He nodded. “My buddy already did.”
Your buddy?
For the first time, Maggie saw another guy sitting on the curb a few feet away. His skin looked gray-green, and as she stared at him, he pitched forward. Head between his knees, he retched.
The face at Maggie’s window disappeared.
“Hey, Rog, hang in there.” Striped shirt jogged back to the curb and squatted beside his friend.
Sharp pain continued to radiate in both of Maggie’s temples and stars speckled her vision. Her eyes closed, and all of a sudden she felt one hundred years old. The two men on the sidewalk, the fractured car around her, a silent Neve beside her, all disappeared. Traffic whined somewhere in the distance but it was as if everything were removed a degree or two. Nearby voices became cartoon bubbles in her head.
It’s funny where the mind goes
, Maggie thought as she floated in the blackness.
Straight back to the moments you’ve never really left behind
. Beyond Jack. Beyond college. Back to the moment that started it all, to the turn in the path that separated Maggie from everyone else. Memories came flooding in minute by minute, slippery things with tails that closed in on her and made her see. Made her realize. Made her remember all the things she’d wanted so much to forget.
Instead of a Boston city sidewalk, instead of a mess of mangled metal, she saw him again: ten-year old Dillon, tickling her in the den. Thirteen-year-old Dillon, stealing her training bra out of the laundry and showing it to his friends. Sixteen-year-old Dillon, giving her rides to school when she didn’t want to take the bus. Seventeen-year-old Dillon, standing in her doorway with bloody fists and trying to explain how he’d defended her honor.
It was ironic, really, that she’d come to Boston in the midst of one heartache and found another. She’d thought she was seeking a favor from a stepbrother, but maybe she was really seeking forgiveness from him.
That’s where the healing needs to begin
, she realized in her fog.
Not with Jack. With Dillon.
All the anguish, all the years of blame, all the ways she’d tried to find someone else to fasten her heartache on, it came down to this. This understanding that you couldn’t go back and fix things or change things. You couldn’t hold your breath or hide under the covers. The sun always rode its white horse over the horizon, announcing another morning. Mistakes might be your fault or someone else’s, but at the end of it all, blame only drove a wedge between the people who meant the most to you. So you could live with your anger, you could hold on with cramped fingers to the pain that devastated you or you could muddle on and do the best with what the new hours brought.
A disease. An operation. A new love. A new job. An ailing mother. A broken heart. A ball. A chance to try again.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she tried to say aloud, but it felt as though the words only ran through her mind.
It wasn’t Dillon’s fault, what happened that night
.
I blamed him for not protecting me, but I shouldn’t have. He didn’t know.
“It wasn’t his fault,” she said again.
She heard a chuckle, a deep, jolly sound that seemed out of place considering the time of night and the circumstance. “Well, why don’t we leave that up to the police to decide? Try not to move.”
Maggie started anyway, and her shoulders spasmed against the seat. She didn’t recognize the voice or the hands moving about her face and neck. “What—”
“You’ve been involved in a car accident.”
She tried to swim back up from the mess of dreams that fuzzed her brain. The hands went away for a minute and shadows moved outside the car window. Her gaze swept the sidewalk. Striped shirt and his friend had vanished. In their place stood a paunchy middle-aged guy and a young, thin woman. Both wore some sort of dark-colored uniform with a collection of equipment belted to their waists.
EMTs
, Maggie thought after a minute, thinking of the television show she watched on Tuesday nights.
Emergency Medical Something-or-Other.
She furrowed her brow.
Technicians
. The word came to her after a minute of thinking.
As if each one of her senses were taking its time coming back into the conscious world, she heard more voices and a siren whining somewhere close by. Her peripheral vision widened, and Maggie became aware of an emergency vehicle parked just beyond her wrecked Honda. Past that, a police car. No, two. She realized that her seatbelt still pinned her down, and she fumbled with the clasp to release it.
“Neve!”
“Is that your name? Or your passenger’s?” The EMT appeared again in her window. He seemed kind, Maggie thought, and she liked the way he smiled at her, without panic or concern in his eyes. As if they had just met on a sunny street and were exchanging pleasantries.
“It’s hers.”
“Can you tell me your name?”
“It’s Maggie. Maggie Doyle.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
Of course she did. And she’d tell him all about it, over coffee sometime after he got her out of the mashed piece of metal. But that wasn’t the important thing. There was something else she needed to say, something else the kind-faced man needed to know. She reached for his wrist. Fine black hairs tickled her fingertips.
“Neve’s pregnant.”
At that, the man’s expression did change. Bushy gray eyebrows rose. “I’ll be right back. Don’t move.”
Maggie watched him trot over to the young female EMT with a sort of limp in his gait, as if one leg were shorter than the other. He jabbed his thumb toward the car while the woman fumbled for the radio at her hip. A police officer approached them both and pulled out a notebook and a stubby pencil. Maggie wondered if she should get out of the car, try and clear up some of the confusion about the accident. Only thing was, an enormous heaviness had begun to press her into the seat, and she couldn’t quite feel her feet anymore.
I
should have them call someone
, she thought.
Someone needs to know what happened. Eden? Jack? Who would tell her mother
?
The world inside Maggie’s head began to tilt again, and pain coursed through her. For a minute she thought it might eat her up, swallow her and replace her with a giant open wound that pulsed against the sky. She felt herself spinning toward some kind of tunnel, and though she could see the black, she couldn’t avoid it. She tried to reach for something to slow her descent. She tried to grip the edge of the cliff she felt herself balancing upon, but her fingertips flicked against air and found nothing. Panic grew inside her chest, fighting like an injured bird and fluttering under her skin. She wanted to stay awake. She needed to.
She couldn’t.
Maggie slipped away.
4:00 a.m.
Jack sat in the Navigator. One hand ran over and over the steering wheel, as if in memorizing the stitching, it might open some kind of portal that would tell him what he was supposed to do.
Go after her and find her. Tell her it doesn’t matter. Tell her the only thing you care about is being with her.
Let her go, for now. Call her tomorrow, or even next week, after she’s had time to work everything out. After you have.
The bodiless voices sat on opposite shoulders and chattered back and forth inside Jack’s head. Part of him, the part that made his skin ache with want, the part that remembered how Mags had once filled up his life, wanted to listen to that first voice. The other part wanted to give her space to breathe, step back and analyze the consequences. After all, he wasn’t twenty-two any longer. He had a company to run, a mangled engagement, a fractured family still trying to pick up the pieces after his mother’s death. He couldn’t jump headlong into the past to chase a memory that had changed shape and color.
Be honest
, he told himself.
She was right. Ten years is a long time. You both were different people back then
. Maggie today wasn’t the Maggie he’d known in college. She was someone different, someone with a secret he never suspected. Jack shivered, suddenly cold. What if they had nothing left between them but history? You couldn’t build a future on the shaky legs of something that had dusted over. Could you?
Weary, he rested his forehead on the steering wheel. He knew that tomorrow, half the conversations in the city would feature The Breakup of Jack and Paige. People would yap over brunch and whisper in church pews. They would buy their lattes on Monday morning and hurry to work a few minutes early just to rehash the details.
Sour regret coated his mouth.
You let Mags walk out of your life back in Vegas, and the next thing you knew, an entire decade had swept by. You want that to happen again?
Jack sat up. Wind buffeted the vehicle, squealing through the vents. The bottom line was, he couldn’t let her go. Analysis, consequences, a plan, a way out—he shrugged off everything he’d learned in business school. Some things, the important things, you couldn’t fit to the rules. You had to simply feel your way along and hope that intuition told you that you were doing the right thing.
He floored the gas and yanked the truck back into traffic. How long had he sat there? Ten minutes? Thirty? A siren-red Corvette swerved around him, its horn sounding. He braked and let it pass. Then Jack took the first turn he could, negotiating the side streets he knew by heart and hoping they’d take him where he needed to go.
*
Maggie felt cold. Too cold. Like her fingers and toes were icing over and moving through the zone of painful freezing to sheer numbness. She tried to open her eyes, but she every time she did, all she saw was Neve beside her. Or the EMTs outside her window. Once, she thought she caught a glimpse of a police officer bellowing and waving his arms around. From where she sat, he looked like a cartoon character, a man with huge arms that hung from his shoulders like slabs of beef. She watched him, curious, as he talked to someone beyond her view. She imagined he was telling the person to back off, to give everyone some space, the way the rescue personnel always did on television. But she couldn’t imagine who he might be talking to. Who would be standing out in the rain staring at a car wreck, when they could be sleeping safe at home?
No one,
she thought.
Just silly me, caught up in another mess I can’t get myself out of.
*
Jack squinted through the windshield as he headed toward the highway. What the hell? Looked like some kind of wreck up ahead, a couple of cars t-boned against the sidewalk. Emergency lights turned the sky red and blue, and two cops stood in the middle of the street. Great. Just what he needed. Another accident to slow him down. He’d already passed two.
Having no choice, he ground to a stop as the traffic neared the line of flares. A white sedan, covered with rust and missing a license plate, had apparently crushed a small blue car. The vehicles sat wedged together, half-collapsed into one of those small glass-and-metal bus stops. From what Jack could see, the passenger side and the hood of the blue car had buckled in. The white car spewed steam, its nose broken and bent. He smelled burning rubber.
Jack drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, his patience a too-tight violin string stretched thin. Emergency personnel buzzed about the cars, taking stock. Apart from the wreck stood two young guys, disheveled and white-faced. Wide-eyed, they talked to the police and gestured at the blinking stoplight above them. Probably out hitting the bars and trying to make it home before one or both of them lost their dinner, Jack guessed. Another cruiser arrived. Paramedics moved around the blue car, which looked like it had gotten the brunt of the crash. He wondered how the hell they were going to get anyone out of it.
A baby-faced officer trotted back and forth between the wreck and the flares. He spoke to a couple of medics and pointed back toward the traffic. A fire truck arrived next, squeezing past the stopped cars and pulling onto the curb.
Busy night for Boston’s finest
, Jack thought.
After a long ten minutes, the officer began to wave the cars on. Jack inched the Navigator forward, waiting as the yellow sports car in front of him curved a wide path around some broken glass. The officer directed them in an s-pattern, trying to keep one side of the street clear. Jack could see the highway entrance up in front of him, less than a half-mile away.
Just a couple more minutes
.
Then I can find her. I hope
.
Why he looked back at that moment, Jack never understood. He had no reason to hesitate, no reason to look any longer at someone else’s misery. He hated rubberneckers, as a general rule. So why did he glance over his shoulder at the twisted car? If he was superstitious, he would have chalked it up to karma, to the universe pointing him in the right direction. But levelheaded Jack couldn’t accept that. So he explained it to himself later as simple coincidence, figuring that at four in the morning, most other people were home sleeping. Who else would be on the road, in that particular spot, a few hundred yards from the interstate?
He ignored the other possibility tunneled deep inside his heart: when part of you, the other half of you, lay trapped inside a broken shell of a car, you knew it somewhere inside your gut. It was as simple as that.
“Holy shit.” Jack slammed on the brakes and stared. Under the streetlight, the license plate of the blue car beamed bright white.
D-D-S-G-N.
Jack threw the SUV into park and leapt from the seat. He stumbled as he hit the ground.
It can’t be Mags. It can’t
. The world couldn’t be that cruel. He winced as his ankle turned. Who was he kidding? Of course it could. Look at what had happened to his mother at the age of fifty-three. There wasn’t any justice, not when it came to death. Or rather, there was perfect justice. Any person, at any given moment, could be stolen away. It was as simple as that.
He caught his balance and kept moving. He needed to see for himself. Maybe it wasn’t Maggie behind the wheel. Maybe someone else had taken her car and crashed it while she waited nearby, whole and healthy. Jack forced one foot in front of the other. He needed to stop the terrible suspicion crawling up his spine.
As he neared the wreck, he dodged through emergency vehicles and wound his way through flares. Closer. A few more feet. No one seemed to notice him. Good. Jack took another few steps toward the crushed bus stop and the car that didn’t belong inside it. From here he could see the spider-webbed windows and the hood like a crumpled tissue, used up and tossed away with other pieces of trash along the sidewalk. He could spy, beneath the fractured glass, the faces of two women in the vehicle’s front seats. One wore green, the other brown. Blood covered both their faces.
Jack stopped. Despite the angst inside him, he couldn’t move one more step. He knew who sat in that car. Beyond any doubt, he knew. Perspiration dribbled down his spine. Still he stared. Shouts came from behind him, and seconds later, a rough hand grabbed his arm. The next thing he knew, a cop’s grizzled face was staring him down.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get back into your vehicle. Now.” The burly man breathed a sour odor into Jack’s face.
“Hang on. You don’t understand.”
The cop let go and crossed his beefy arms, blocking Jack’s view. “Mister, we’ve got a serious accident here. I don’t care who you are, if you’re the Queen of England or from the goddamned press. You need to stay back and let the medics do their job. One person gets out of their car, everyone thinks it’s a show.”
“I know her,” Jack interrupted, trying to see around the man’s massive shoulders. It looked as though the firemen were setting up the Jaws of Life.
Jesus Christ, this is bad. Really bad
.
The man. “Excuse me?”
Jack raised his hand and pointed. His wrist shook a little and he fought to steady it. “The driver of that car. I know her. She’s…”
She’s what, you idiot? Your girlfriend? Your ex-wife? The person you plan on spending the rest of your life with?
“She’s a friend of mine,” he said. “Please. I was—” He knew how unbelievable his next words would sound and hoped the cop would cut him some slack. “I was looking for her. I was following her. We had a fight, and…I wanted to talk to her.” He stuck out his chin and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’m not leaving.” He stood his ground, hoping that the three-hundred pound man standing in front of him would understand.
“You’re that Major guy, aren’t you?” The cop peered down at him. “Seen you in the papers once in a while.” He harrumphed. “Well, move your goddamned truck out of the middle of the road. And stand over there, if you’ve got to stay.” He gestured to an area of sidewalk twenty feet away. “I mean it. Don’t you goddamned get in the middle of things.”
Jack ducked his head and hurried to pull the Navigator out of the way.
Yeah, I’ll get the truck out of the road
.
But I can’t make any promises about staying out of the way. Not when it’s Mags we’re talking about.
Minutes later, Jack watched from the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets. He paced, keeping his distance, until the cop stopped eyeing him and wandered off behind his cruiser. Jack wrapped his fingers around his cell phone. He thought of people he could call, people who might help him out. Lee Peters? He was chief in one of the precincts downtown. Or Teena Rae, the admitting nurse over at the hospital? He needed a plan. He needed to take action. He needed to bundle Maggie up in his efficiency and rescue her the way he rescued companies and failing mergers and disgruntled VPs. He couldn’t just stand on the corner and wait.
I’ve got to see her. Somehow, I’ve got to let her know I’m here.
But that wasn’t going to happen. At the instant the rescue team pulled Maggie from the driver’s seat, her chalky face and the awkward way her legs flopped down stopped Jack from moving any closer. A nervous whistle left his lips. He dodged behind a telephone pole.
“All right, get this one going,” he heard one of the medics say, and a minute later she was lifted into the back of an ambulance. Jack lost sight of her. His attention shifted back to the car, where an unconscious Neve was being lifted onto an identical stretcher. An EMT knelt beside the unconscious young woman, taking vital signs and saying something to the man beside her. In a flash, the two of them pushed the stretcher into the second waiting ambulance. Jack took a few steps closer and tried to eavesdrop, not caring who saw him anymore. He caught pieces of the medics’ conversation, and his skin went cold.
“This one’s in worse condition.”
“Yep. Broken pelvis, maybe. Right leg doesn’t look good either.”
Jesus, no.
“She was pregnant, the driver said.”
Was
pregnant?
“She’ll be lucky if…”
The ambulance doors slammed shut.