Authors: Katia Lief
“Always have your cell phone charged and turned on and always carry it with you.”
Nod.
“Never travel alone.”
Nod.
“Don’t walk down empty streets; keep among people even if it means going out of your way.”
Nod.
“Do not answer the landline.”
Nod.
“Do not answer the door.”
Nod.
“Make sure the alarm system is always armed. Do you remember the code?”
Nod.
“OK?”
“Are you finished, Mom?”
I’d had to refrain from asking if he’d really heard any of it and later, after he’d left for school with Rich, the thought crossed my mind that he could get so fed up with all this that he might run away. He was that age. He wanted new freedoms, not new restrictions.
“Nat? Sweetie! I’m home.”
The house was eerily quiet without Mitzi and Ahab darting around whenever someone came in. I wished I had been here to make some noise when Nat got home from school so he didn’t have to hear this lonely silence. The stillness.
“Nat?”
He wasn’t anywhere downstairs in the living room, kitchen, bathroom or yard. Nor was he anywhere upstairs.
“Nat!”
I went back downstairs. As I took my cell phone out of my purse my hand bumped into the gun: hard, cold metal. Immediately I worried that I might not
have
properly engaged the safety so I took it out and looked it over. It felt heavy in my hand though it was light compared with other guns; Gary had had us pick up a rifle, a shotgun and two other models of handguns so we could feel the difference. Mine – Angela’s – was the lightest by far and I had felt a certain borrowed pride in that.
The safety was on. I put the gun back in my purse.
I speed-dialled Nat’s cell phone and listened to it ring as I walked into the kitchen, filled a glass with ice and poured over it the leftover coffee from that morning’s pot. The ice made cracking noises when the lukewarm coffee spilled onto it. I stirred in some milk as Nat’s voicemail picked up. Left a message. Dialed again. Listened to more unanswered ringing.
Carrying my iced coffee in the hallway connecting the kitchen with the front hall, nearing the foot of the stairs that led upstairs to our bedrooms, I began to hear an echo. Another phone was ringing somewhere else in the house. I stood still and listened a moment before realizing that the other rings exactly matched the ones at my ear.
I let it ring. Followed the sound into Nat’s bedroom. There, on the corner of his messy desk, was his cell phone … ringing with my call.
My first reaction was anger: he had forgotten it again, after I’d practically begged him not to. And
on
top of that the battery was about to run out. Why couldn’t he take responsibility for a simple phone?
Then worry sank in.
Where was he?
Maybe he’d forgotten the alarm code. Maybe, seeing that I wasn’t home yet, Rich had taken him somewhere to wait. Of course that was it. They were bonding and had gone out for some special treat.
Or maybe Joe had gotten in again. Maybe he had taken Nat knowing
that
would get my attention like nothing else
.
No: the alarm had been on when I came home. You didn’t kidnap a child and rearm the alarm system on your way out. Did you? Would
Joe?
To prove that he had already learned our code?
I tried to stop my hand from shaking as I dialed Rich’s cell and left a message asking him to call me. Then I called the school to find out if anyone knew if Nat Mayhew had made alternate after-school plans, but it was a large school with almost a thousand students and none of the office ladies even knew who he was, and his teacher had left for the day. Next, I called Karen, Henry’s mother.
“Nat and Henry just got here. They’re making sundaes … I hope that’s OK.”
“It’s fine.” I tried but failed to soften the edge in my voice.
“Darcy, do you want him to come home?”
“No, it’s OK. He just didn’t tell me he was going
with
Henry today so I was a little worried.”
A little worried;
it was the understatement of the year.
“I’m sorry. They’ve had it planned since yesterday.”
“He must have forgotten to mention it. Really, it’s OK, Karen. I’m just glad to know he’s there.”
“We’ll drop him off at about five thirty on our way to Park Slope. We’re taking Bill’s cousin out for dinner for her birthday, to Belleville. Have you tried it?”
“Not yet, but I hear it’s good.”
“I’ll let you know. See you at five thirty.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it. Tell him I called, OK?”
His expression that morning over breakfast: weary, annoyed. Had he deliberately not told me about his plans? Or had he told me, either yesterday or this morning, and was I too preoccupied to hear him?
But he was safe. That was what mattered. I took three extended breaths, drawing the air deep into my lungs, holding it, letting it go. Felt calmer. Took my iced coffee into my bedroom, set it on the dresser and opened my closet. It was deep, built both for clothing and storage; the closet was an unusual and welcome feature in these typically closet-less brownstones. Our suitcases, a large one with a smaller one nested inside, were at the far back. I had to weed through a chaos of shoes, boots and fallen hangers to get to them. After dragging them out, I
kicked
all the stuff back into the closet and splayed both suitcases open atop my bed.
I decided to pack Nat’s things first but had hardly gotten started before the phone rang with the kind of call no one would expect to receive twice in a lifetime.
CHAPTER 12
“HELLO?” A WOMAN
. For a split second I thought:
Courtney
. But soon realized that I didn’t recognize the voice.
“Yes?”
“Did you just try to reach Richard Stuart on his cell phone?”
“Who is this?”
“Teresa. I’m a nurse at Long Island College Hospital. The message sounded like you were close to him so I thought I should call.”
“Is Rich in the
hospital
?”
“He’s been injured. Are you his wife?”
“No. He’s divorced. I’m a close friend. Injured how?”
“Do you know if he has any family I could call?”
“They all live in Montana. What happened?”
She hesitated but finally told me: “There must have been a gas leak in his home. The EMS guys said it blew up when he opened the door.”
“Blew up?”
“Any movement triggers it. He’s pretty badly burned.”
“But he’s alive?”
“Yes. He’s still in the ER but they’re transferring him to the ICU in a few minutes. They’ll be sending him over to the Burn Unit at Kings County as soon as a bed frees up.”
I flew the five blocks to the hospital.
They were still working on him when I arrived so I sat in the fourth-floor waiting room until a nurse appeared, a young woman with dyed-blonde hair pulled into a tight ponytail, lithe and sprite in her white pantsuit and rubber-soled shoes. She took a guess that I was the friend Teresa from ER must have said would be coming, asked my name, introduced herself as Sally and led me down the hall to Rich’s room.
They had mummified him, covered almost all of him in white gauze, elevated both his legs and both his arms, covered him in a bubble of plastic into which oxygen was pumped through a tube. About half his face – a lopsided area revealing both eyes and most of his nose – was the only uncovered part of him, and if not for that I wouldn’t have believed
it
was him. I didn’t
want
to believe it was him. My beautiful man, his tender skin. My fingertips retained a sensory memory of it: the suede-like quality of him as I ran my hands over his body. What was beneath the bandages? In my imagination I could see and feel and smell the raw melted skin. I had seen burn victims after recovery, surgery and healing: the hard casing of skin, its lumps and rivulets and discolorations as if water had dripped over sand. The skin lost flexibility and sensitivity and became something people either winced at or studiously ignored. And I remembered now – as I walked over to Rich, my eyes filling with tears, wiping them away – I remembered one night after Hugo died when I drank too much wine and indulged myself in the kind of wishful thinking that only left you more depressed afterwards. I allowed myself to imagine what he would have looked like had he survived the crash. The police had described it as a fireball. “Instant death,” the cop had said, as if to reassure me that Hugo hadn’t suffered, or suffered too much, or for very long. I remembered wishing he had survived that fireball and had pictured his face a melted orb of skin whose eyes I recognized as my beloved’s. I had wanted him back, even like that. I had
wanted
him. How, I wondered, looking at Rich now, had a small area of his face been spared? What other parts of him were whole beneath the wrapping? Or had he been
otherwise
incinerated except for this small window into what he used to be?
“Can he see us?” I asked.
“He’s heavily sedated.”
“Is he sleeping with his eyes open?”
“Possibly. He’s in shock. He was burned over about forty percent of his body, which believe it or not isn’t too bad, considering the blast he took. His arms and legs are elevated to keep pressure off his skin.”
“How was he when they brought him in?”
“I wasn’t in the ER but usually they’re unconscious when they take that kind of burn.”
“So it was a real explosion.”
“I heard the whole house was incinerated. Gas leaks are like that – they’re bad. I heard the gas company and fire department are already over there investigating.”
“Do they think arson?”
“I’m not sure what they call it when it’s a gas explosion. Tampering, I think. Something like that.”
Joe
. Had he done this? Had he tried to actually kill Rich? Eliminate a rival? The thought ripped through me in a twisted, jagged braid of helplessness and rage.
“Can I use my cell phone out in the hall?”
“Sure, but you’ve got to walk all the way to the end by the window to get a signal. And please
remember
to turn it off if you come back to see him again.”
“I will.”
“Try to keep the visit to fifteen minutes, tops, and keep it low key, OK?”
It was a strange thing to say. Rich was unconscious, wrapped like he’d been prepared for burial in an ancient sarcophagus. Did she think I’d throw a party?
At the far end of the hall I stood by a window overlooking the rooftops and church spires of Cobble Hill and phoned Jess.
“This is good,” he said.
“No, Jess, it’s not.”
An embarrassed pause, and then: “I don’t know what I was thinking. Your friend OK?”
“They say he will be.”
“Attempted murder will put your guy away for a very long time. I’m on it, Darcy, you know that.”
“He’s not
mine
—”
“Sorry. I didn’t meant that, either. My head’s spinning – kids have been with my mom all day and she’s been calling me every five minutes. But that’s not a problem.
You
have a problem and we’re going to take care of it, OK?”
“Thanks, Jess.”
I turned off my cell phone and returned to Rich’s side, pulling up a chair to sit near him. Fifteen
minutes
came and went. I stayed and no one complained. I watched Rich breathe in and breathe out. He was alive. At one point I whispered, “I’m here, I love you,” just in case he was conscious and could hear. But I didn’t think he was or could. Still, he was alive. He would live. When he healed they would unwrap his bandages and we would take it from there.
Obviously now Nat and I couldn’t go away. Not yet. (Though didn’t we need to more than ever?) I would have to break the news to him and hoped he would understand but something told me he’d be relieved. He had a new best friend and a school he seemed to like. Our lives had almost settled in, but for Joe.
At five fifteen I blew Rich a kiss and left him sleeping with his eyes still open. I wanted to be home when Nat was dropped off. In the elevator down to the lobby I turned my cell phone back on and once it had booted up I saw that I had a message.
Was that Nat’s new number? I still hadn’t memorized it but it started with the same prefix as his. I played the message.
It wasn’t a call; it was a video. From YouTube. A tiny movie began to play itself out on the screen.
The images were dark, fuzzy. It was impossible to focus on them as I walked through the noisy hospital lobby. I found a seat on a bench by the wall
beneath
a poster of a beach. A beach: what did that have to do with an urban hospital? It took a minute but I figured out how to replay the video and watched it again.
A car traveled steadily along a road. A camera had captured the back of the car as it drove without stopping. A few times the lens jerked and it was clear that the car was somewhere remote, passing trees and open spaces. In the far distance the sky looked vast. But mostly the lens stayed tight on the car. A single driver. A man? The car was a compact hybrid, white – I recognized it because our old car on the Vineyard had been the same model, even color, and there weren’t too many of them around.
The car drove. And then there was turmoil. Sudden turmoil, as the car swerved off the road and appeared to crash into a tree. It was hard to tell because the camera suddenly blacked out. I replayed it again and again and again until I knew exactly what I was watching.
Hugo’s death
.
It was our car in the video. Hugo driving. In the rear window a rolled-up paper moved back and forth with the car’s momentum. I hadn’t thought of it until now: Nat’s science poster had been sent home from school and had sat in that spot for two weeks; I’d kept forgetting to bring it in the house. There it was rolling back and forth in the rear window, back and
forth
while the driver, a man, drove on a country road. And then swerved very suddenly. And then crashed. Suddenly.
My pulse throbbed in my ears as I was pulled back into the riptide of Hugo’s death. That devouring ocean of his loss. Wave after wave of it, crashing through me.