The Best of Me

  But Jared didn't answer again, and neither did Frank. When both calls went to voice mail, she felt the pit in her stomach become a wide and bottomless chasm. She was suddenly certain that the car accident was serious, far worse than Jared had let on. She wasn't sure how she knew, but the idea wouldn't leave her.

  She dropped her phone on the passenger seat and slammed her foot down on the accelerator, racing up to within inches of the car in front of her. Whoever was driving finally made room, and she blew past without a sidelong nod.

  19

  In the dream, Dawson was back on the rig, just as the series of explosions began to rock the platform, but this time everything was silent and the events unfolded in slow motion. He watched the sudden rupture of the storage tank, followed by flames that leapt outward and skyward; he traced the blackened smoke as it formed into sluggish, mushroomlike shapes. He saw the shimmery ripple of shock waves move across the deck, unhurriedly felling everything in its path, tearing posts and machinery from their housings. Men were hurled overboard as other explosions followed, every twitch of their arms plainly visible. The fire began to consume the deck in a ponderous, dreamlike way. All around him, everything was slowly being destroyed.

  But he remained rooted in place, immune to the shock waves and the flying debris that magically veered around him. Straight ahead, near the crane, he saw a man emerge from an oily cloud of smoke, but like Dawson, he was immune to the ongoing devastation. For an instant, the smoke seemed to cling to him before being pulled away like a curtain. Dawson gasped as he glimpsed the dark-haired man in the blue windbreaker.

  The stranger stopped moving, his features indistinct through the shimmering distance. Dawson wanted to call out to him, but no sound came to his lips; he wanted to get closer, but his feet seemed glued in place. Instead, they simply stared at each other across the rig, and despite the distance Dawson thought he felt the beginnings of recognition.

  Dawson woke up then, blinking at his surroundings as adrenaline surged through his system. He was in the hotel in New Bern, right on the river, and though he knew it had been only a dream, he felt a chill run through him. Sitting up, he swung his feet toward the floor.

  The clock showed that he'd slept for over an hour. Outside, the sun was almost down and the colors in his hotel room were muted.

  Dreamlike...

  Dawson stood and glanced around, spotting his wallet and keys near the TV. Seeing them jogged his memory about something else, and striding across the room he riffled through the pockets of the suit he'd been wearing. He checked them again to make sure he wasn't mistaken, then quickly rummaged through his bag. Finally, he grabbed his wallet and keys and hurried downstairs to the parking lot.

  He searched every inch of the rental car, working methodically through the glove compartment, the trunk, between the seats, the floor. But he was already beginning to recall what had happened earlier that day.

  He'd set Tuck's letter on the workbench after reading it. Amanda's mother had walked by and he'd turned his attention to Amanda on the porch, and he'd forgotten to retrieve the letter.

  It must still be on the workbench. He could leave it, of course... except that he couldn't imagine doing that. It was the last letter that Tuck had written to him, his final gift, and Dawson wanted to take it home.

  He knew that Ted and Abee would be scouring the town to find him, but nonetheless he found himself driving across the bridge, on his way back to Oriental. He'd be there in forty minutes.

  After taking a deep breath to steel himself, Alan Bonner entered the Tidewater, noting an even smaller crowd than he'd expected. There were a couple of guys at the bar and a few toward the rear playing pool; only one of the tables was occupied, by a couple that was counting out cash and appeared to be leaving any minute. Nothing like Saturday night, or even Friday night for that matter. With the jukebox playing in the back and the television near the cash register on, the place seemed almost cozy.

  Candy was wiping down the bar, and she smiled at him before waving with the towel. She was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, with her hair in a ponytail, and though she wasn't quite as dolled up as usual, she was still prettier than anyone else in town. The butterflies in his stomach began to flutter as he wondered whether she'd agree to have dinner with him.

  He stood straighter, thinking, No excuses. He'd take a seat at the bar, just be his normal self, and gradually work the conversation to the point where he could ask her out. He reminded himself that she'd definitely been flirting with him, and while she might be a flirt by nature, he was sure there'd been more to it than that. He could tell. He knew it, and with a deep breath, he started toward the bar.

  Amanda burst through the door of Duke University Hospital's emergency room, staring wildly at the crowd of patients and families. She'd continued to call Jared and Frank over and over, but neither of them had answered. Finally, she'd phoned Lynn in frantic desperation. Her daughter was still at Lake Norman, a few hours away. Lynn had broken down at the news and promised to be there as quickly as she could.

  Standing inside the doorway, Amanda scanned the room, hoping to find Jared. She prayed that her worries had been for nothing. Then, to her bewilderment, she spotted Frank at the far end of the room. He stood and began walking toward her, appearing less injured than she'd assumed he would be. She peered over his shoulder, trying to locate her son. But Jared was nowhere to be seen.

  "Where's Jared?" she demanded when Frank reached her side. "Are you okay? What happened? What's going on?"

  She was still barking out questions when Frank took her arm and led her back outside.

  "Jared's been admitted," he said. Despite the hours that had passed since he'd been at the club, his words were still slurred. She could tell he was trying to sound sober, but the sour smell of booze saturated his breath and his sweat. "I don't know what's going on. No one seems to know anything. But the nurse said something about a cardiologist."

  His words only amplified the anxiety coursing through her. "Why? What's wrong?"

  "I don't know."

  "Is Jared going to be okay?"

  "He seemed fine when we got here."

  "Then why is he seeing a cardiologist?"

  "I don't know."

  "He said you were covered in blood."

  Frank touched the swollen bridge of his nose, where a black-and-blue crescent surrounded a small cut. "I banged my nose pretty good, but they were able to stop the bleeding. It's no big deal. I'll be fine."

  "Why didn't you answer your phone? I called a hundred times!"

  "My phone is still in the car..."

  But Amanda had stopped listening as the weight of everything Frank had said sank in. Jared had been admitted. Her son was the one who was hurt. Her son, not her husband. Jared. Her firstborn...

  Feeling like she'd been punched in the stomach and suddenly sickened by the sight of Frank, she marched past him, heading straight for the nurse behind the admitting desk. Doing her best to control her rising hysteria, she demanded to know what was going on with her son.

  The nurse had few answers, repeating only what Frank had already told her. Drunk Frank, she thought again, unable to stem the tide of rage. She slapped both hands down on the desk, startling everyone in the waiting room.

  "I need to know what's going on with my son!" she cried. "I want some answers now!"

  Problems with her car, Abee thought. That's what had been bothering him about his earlier conversation with Candy. Because if her car was having problems, then how had she gotten to work? And why hadn't she asked him if he could drive her to work, or back home?

  Had someone else driven her? Like the guy in the Tidewater?

  She wouldn't have been that stupid. Of course, he could call her to find out, but there was a better way to get to the bottom of this. Irvin's wasn't very far from the small house where she lived, so he might as well swing by to check if her car was there. Because if it was there, it meant that someone had driven her, and then they'd definitely hav
e something important to talk about, wouldn't they?

  He tossed a few bills onto the table and motioned for Ted to follow. Ted hadn't talked much during the dinner, but Abee had the sense he was doing a little better, despite his poor appetite.

  "Where we going?" Ted asked.

  "I want to check something out," Abee answered.

  Candy's place was located just a few minutes away, toward the end of a sparsely inhabited street. The house was a ramshackle bungalow, fronted with aluminum siding and hemmed in by overgrown bushes. It wasn't much, but Candy didn't seem to care, and she hadn't done much to make it any homier.

  As Abee pulled into the drive, he saw that her car was missing. Maybe she'd got it working, he reasoned, but while he sat in the truck and stared at the house, he noticed that something wasn't quite right. Something was missing, so to speak, and it took a few minutes before he figured out what it was.

  The Buddha statue was missing, the one she kept in the front window, framed by a gap in the bushes. Her good luck charm, she'd called it, and there was no reason she should have moved it. Unless...

  He opened the door of the truck and got out. When Ted glanced over at him, he shook his head. "I'll be back in a minute."

  Abee pushed past the overgrown bushes and climbed onto the porch. Peering through the front window, he saw that the statue was definitely gone. The rest of the place looked the same. Of course, that didn't mean much, since he knew it had come furnished. But the missing Buddha bothered him.

  Abee worked his way around the house, peering in the windows, though curtains blocked most of the views. He couldn't make out much.

  Finally tiring of his efforts, he simply kicked in the back door, just like Ted had done at Tuck's house.

  He stepped inside, wondering what the hell Candy might be up to.

  Just as she had every fifteen minutes since she'd arrived, Amanda approached the nurses' station to ask if they had any further information. The nurse responded patiently that she had already given Amanda all the information she had: Jared had been admitted, he was being seen by a cardiologist, and the doctor knew they were waiting. As soon as she learned anything, Amanda would be the first to know. There was compassion in her voice as she said it, and Amanda nodded her thanks before turning away.

  Even with the reality of her surroundings, she still couldn't make sense of what she was doing here or how any of this had happened. Though Frank and the nurse had tried to explain it to her, their words meant nothing in the here and now. She didn't want Frank or the nurse to tell her what was going on, she wanted to talk to Jared. She needed to see Jared, she needed to hear his voice to know that he was okay and when Frank had tried to put a comforting hand on her back, she'd jerked away as if scalded.

  Because it was his fault that Jared was here in the first place. If he hadn't been drinking, Jared would have stayed at home, or been out with a girl, or at a friend's house. Jared would never have been anywhere near that intersection, would never have ended up in the hospital. He'd just been trying to help. He was being the responsible one.

  But Frank...

  She couldn't bear to look at him. It was all she could do not to scream at him.

  The clock on the wall seemed to be keeping time in slow motion.

  Finally, after an eternity, she heard the door that led to the patients' rooms swing open, and she turned to see a doctor emerge wearing surgical scrubs. She watched as he approached the duty nurse, who nodded and pointed in her direction. Amanda was paralyzed with trepidation as the doctor came toward her. She searched his face for a sign of what he might say. His expression gave nothing away.

  She stood, Frank following her lead. "I'm Doctor Mills," he said, and he signaled them to follow him through a set of double doors that led to another corridor. When the doors closed behind them, Dr. Mills turned to face them. Despite the gray in his hair, she could see that he was probably younger than her.

  It would take more than one conversation for her to fully absorb what he told them, but this much she grasped: Jared, while appearing fine, had been injured by the blunt impact of the smashed car door. The attending physician had detected a trauma-induced heart murmur, and they'd taken him in for evaluation. While there, Jared's condition had deteriorated markedly and rapidly. The doctor went on to mention words like cyanosis and told them that a transvenous pacemaker had been inserted, but that Jared's heart capacity kept diminishing. The doctor suspected that the tricuspid valve had ruptured, that her son needed valve replacement surgery. Jared was already on bypass, he explained, but they now needed permission to perform heart surgery. Without surgery, he told them bluntly, their son was going to die.

  Jared was going to die.

  She reached for the wall to keep from falling down as the doctor glanced from her to Frank and back again.

  "I need you to sign the consent form," Dr. Mills said. In that instant, Amanda knew that he'd also smelled the booze on Frank's breath. She began to hate her husband then, truly hate him. Moving as though in a dream, she deliberately and carefully signed her name on the form with a hand that barely seemed her own.

  Dr. Mills led them to another part of the hospital and left them in an empty waiting room. Her mind was numb with shock.

  Jared needed surgery, or he would die.

  He couldn't die. Jared was only nineteen years old. He had his whole life in front of him.

  Closing her eyes, she sank into a chair, trying and failing to make sense of the world crumbling around her.

  Candy didn't need this. Not tonight.

  The young guy at the end of the bar, Alan or Alvin or whatever his name was, was practically panting to ask her out. Even worse, business was so slow tonight, she probably wouldn't make enough to fill her car with gas. Great. Just great.

  "Hey, Candy?" It was the young guy again, leaning over the bar like a needy puppy. "Can I have another beer, please?"

  She forced a smile as she popped the top off a bottle and walked it down to him. As she neared the end of the bar, he called out a question, but headlights suddenly flashed on the door, either from a passing car or someone pulling into the lot, and she found herself glancing toward the entrance. Waiting.

  When no one came in, she heaved a sigh of relief.

  "Candy?"

  His voice brought him back to her. He pushed his shiny black hair off his forehead.

  "I'm sorry. What?"

  "I asked how your day's been going so far."

  "Peachy," she answered with a sigh. "Just peachy."

  Frank sat in a chair across from her, still slightly swaying, his gaze unfocused. Amanda did her best to pretend he wasn't there.

  Other than that, she couldn't concentrate on anything except her fear and thoughts of Jared. In the silence of the room, entire years of her son's life were magically compressed. She remembered how small he'd felt when she'd held him in her arms in his first weeks of life. She remembered combing his hair and packing a sandwich in a Jurassic Park lunch box on his first day of kindergarten. She recalled his nervousness before his first middle school dance; the way he drank milk from the carton, no matter how many times she'd asked him not to. Every now and then, she'd be startled from her memories by the sounds of the hospital and remember where she was and what was happening. And then the dread would take hold of her once again.

  Before he'd left, the doctor had told them the surgery might take hours, might even last until midnight, but she wondered whether someone would give them an update before then. She wanted to know what was happening. She wanted someone to explain it to her in a way she'd understand, but what she really wanted was for someone to hold her and promise that her little boy--even if he was now almost a man--was going to be okay.

  Abee stood in Candy's bedroom, his lips forming a tight line as he took it all in.

  Her closet was empty. Her drawers were empty. The damn bathroom vanity was empty.

  No wonder she hadn't answered the phone earlier. Candy had been busy packing her things. And
when she had finally answered the phone? Why, she must have forgotten to mention anything about her little plans to leave town.

  But no one left Abee Cole. No one.

  And what if it was because of that new boyfriend of hers? What if they planned to run off together?

  The idea was enough to make him bolt out the shattered back door. Rounding the house, he hurried to the truck, knowing he had to get to the Tidewater now.

  Candy and her little boy were going to learn a lesson tonight. Both of them. The kind of lesson neither was likely to forget.

  20

  The night was as dark as any Dawson could remember. No moon, only endless black above, punctuated by the faint flicker of stars.

  He was getting close to Oriental now and couldn't escape the feeling that he was somehow making a mistake by returning. He'd have to pass through the town to reach Tuck's, and he knew his cousins could be waiting for him anywhere.

  Up ahead, beyond the curve where his life had changed forever, Dawson noticed the glow of Oriental's lights, rising beyond the tree line. If he was going to change his mind, he needed to do it now.

  Unconsciously, he eased his foot off the pedal, and it was then, as the car slowed down, that Dawson felt suddenly that he was being watched.

  Abee squeezed the wheel tight as the truck roared through town, tires squealing. He took a hard left into the parking lot of the Tidewater, sending the truck skidding as he slammed on the brakes in a handicapped spot. For the first time since smashing up the Stingray, even Ted was showing signs of life, the anticipation of violence heavy in the truck.

  The truck had barely come to a halt before Abee leapt out, Ted close behind. Abee couldn't get his mind around the fact that Candy had been lying to him. She'd obviously been planning her little escape for some time and believed that he wouldn't find out. It was time to teach her just who made the rules around here. Because you see, Candy, it sure as hell ain't you.

  As he stormed toward the entrance, Abee noticed that Candy's Mustang convertible wasn't in the lot, which meant she'd probably parked it somewhere else. At some guy's house, both of them probably laughing behind Abee's back. He could just hear Candy laughing at what a fool Abee was, and the thought made him want to blast through the door, aim the gun in the direction of the bar, and just start pulling the trigger.