The Best of Me

  Now, aside from finalizing details of Tuck's estate--and handling the situation with the Stingray--his role in all of this was over. Considering all that had happened, including the arrests of both Ted and Abee Cole, he felt fortunate that his name had not been dragged into any of the conversations he'd overheard at Irvin's. And like the good lawyer he was, he had volunteered nothing.

  Still, the entire situation troubled him more deeply than he let on. He'd even gone so far as to make some unorthodox calls during the past couple of days, putting him squarely outside his comfort zone.

  Turning away from the car, he scanned the workbench, hunting for the work order, hoping it included the phone number of the Stingray's owner. He found it on the clipboard, and a quick perusal gave him all the information he needed. He was setting the clipboard back onto the bench when he spotted something familiar.

  He picked it up, knowing he'd seen it before, and examined it for a moment. He considered the ramifications before reaching into his pocket for his cell phone. He scrolled through his contact list, found the name, and hit CALL.

  On the other end, the phone began to ring.

  Amanda had spent most of the past two days at the hospital with Jared, and she was actually looking forward to sleeping in her own bed later that night. Not only was the chair next to his bed incredibly uncomfortable, but Jared himself had urged her to leave.

  "I need some time alone," he'd told her.

  While she sat in the small terraced garden enjoying a bit of fresh air, Jared was upstairs meeting with the psychologist for the first time, much to her relief. Physically, she knew he was making excellent progress. Emotionally, however, was another matter. Though she wanted to think their conversation had opened the door at least a crack to a new way of thinking about his condition, Jared was suffering from the sense that years had been stolen from his life. He wanted what he'd had before, a perfectly healthy body and a relatively uncomplicated future, but that was no longer possible. He was on immunosuppressants so his body wouldn't reject the new heart, and since those made him prone to infection, he was taking high doses of antibiotics as well, and a diuretic had been prescribed to prevent fluid retention. And though he'd be released the following week, he would have to attend regular appointments at the outpatient clinic to monitor his progress for at least a year. He would also be required to undergo supervised physiotherapy and was told that he'd be placed on a restrictive diet. All that in addition to talking with the psychologist on a weekly basis.

  The road ahead would be challenging for the entire family, but where there had once been nothing but despair, Amanda now felt hope. Jared was stronger than he thought he was. It would take time, but he'd find a way to get through all this. In the past two days, she'd noticed flashes of his strength, even if he hadn't been aware of it himself. And the psychologist, she knew, would help him as well.

  Frank and her mom had been shuttling Annette to and from the hospital; Lynn had been driving here on her own. Amanda knew she hadn't been spending as much time with her girls as she should. They were struggling, too, but what choice did she have?

  Tonight, she decided, she'd pick up a pizza on the way home. Afterward, maybe they'd watch a movie together. It wasn't much, but right now it was all she could really do. Once Jared got out of the hospital, things would start getting back to normal again. She should call her mother to tell her of her plans...

  Digging into her purse, she pulled out her phone and noticed a number on the screen she didn't recognize. Her voice-mail icon was blinking as well.

  Curious, she called up voice mail and put the phone to her ear, listening as Morgan Tanner's slow drawl came through, asking her to call when she had the chance.

  She dialed the number. Tanner picked up immediately.

  "Thank you for returning my call," he said, with the same cordial formality he had shown when Amanda and Dawson had met with him. "Before I get started, please know that I'm sorry to call at such a difficult time for you."

  She blinked in confusion, wondering how he'd known. "Thank you... but Jared is doing much better. We're very relieved."

  Tanner was silent, as if trying to interpret what she'd just said. "Well, then... I was calling because I went to Tuck's house earlier this morning and while I was examining the car--"

  "Oh, that's right," Amanda interrupted. "I meant to tell you about that. Dawson finished repairing it before he left. It should be ready to go."

  Again, Tanner took a few seconds before going on. "My point is, I found the letter that Tuck had written to Dawson," he continued. "He must have left it here, and I wasn't sure whether you wanted me to forward it to you."

  Amanda moved the phone to her other ear, wondering why he was calling her. "It was Dawson's," she said. "You should probably send it to him, shouldn't you?"

  She heard him exhale on the other end. "I take it you haven't heard what happened," he said slowly. "On Sunday night? At the Tidewater?"

  "What happened?" Amanda frowned, now utterly confused.

  "I hate to have to tell you this over the phone. Would it be possible for you to come by my office this evening? Or tomorrow morning?"

  "No," she said. "I'm back in Durham. What's going on? What happened?"

  "I really think this should be done in person."

  "That's not going to be possible," she said with a trace of impatience. "Just tell me what's going on. What happened at the Tidewater? And why can't you just send the letter to Dawson?"

  Tanner hesitated before he finally cleared his throat. "There was an... altercation at the bar. The place was pretty much torn apart, and numerous shots were fired. Ted and Abee Cole were arrested, and a young man named Alan Bonner was seriously injured. Bonner is still in the hospital, but from what I could learn, he's going to be okay."

  Hearing the names, one after the other, made the blood pound in her temples. She knew, of course, the name that linked them all. Her voice was almost a whisper.

  "Was Dawson there?"

  "Yes," Morgan Tanner answered.

  "What happened?"

  "From what I was able to gather, Ted and Abee Cole were assaulting Alan Bonner when Dawson suddenly entered the bar. At which point, Ted and Abee Cole went after him instead." Tanner paused. "You have to understand that the official police report has yet to be released--"

  "Is Dawson okay?" she demanded. "That's all I want to know."

  She could hear Tanner breathing on the other end. "Dawson was helping Alan Bonner out of the bar when Ted managed to fire off a last round. Dawson was shot."

  Amanda felt every muscle in her body tense, bracing for what she already knew was coming. These words, like so many in the past few days, seemed impossible to comprehend.

  "It... he was shot in the head. He had no chance, Amanda. He was brain-dead by the time he reached the hospital."

  Even as Tanner spoke, Amanda could feel her grip loosening on the phone. It clattered to the ground. She stared at it, lying in the gravel, before finally reaching down to punch the OFF button.

  Dawson. Not Dawson. He couldn't be dead.

  But she heard again what Tanner had told her. He'd gone to the Tidewater. Ted and Abee were there. He'd saved Alan Bonner and now he was gone.

  A life for a life, she thought. God's cruel trick.

  She suddenly flashed on the image of the two of them holding hands and wandering in a field of wildflowers. And when the tears finally came, she wept for Dawson, and for all of the days they would never know together. Until perhaps, like Tuck and Clara, their ashes somehow found each other in a sunny field, far away from the beaten path of ordinary lives.

  Epilogue

  Two years later

  Amanda slipped two pans of lasagna into the refrigerator, before peering into the oven to check on the cake. Though Jared wouldn't turn twenty-one for another couple of months, she'd come to think of June 23 as a kind of second birthday for him. On this day two years ago, he'd received a new heart; on that day he'd been given a second chance
at life. If that wasn't worth celebrating, she wasn't sure that anything was.

  She was alone in the house. Frank was at work, Annette hadn't yet returned from a slumber party at her friend's house, and Lynn was working her summer job at the Gap. Meanwhile, Jared planned to enjoy one of his last free days before his internship at a capital management firm began, by playing softball with a group of friends. Amanda had warned him that it was going to be hot out there and made him promise to drink lots of water.

  "I'll be careful," he'd assured her before leaving for the softball field. These days, Jared--maybe because he was maturing, or maybe because of all that had happened to him--seemed to understand that worry went hand in hand with motherhood.

  He hadn't always been so tolerant. In the aftermath of the accident, everything seemed to rub him the wrong way. If she looked at him with concern, he claimed she was suffocating him; if she tried to start a conversation, he often snapped at her. She understood the reasons behind his ill temper; his recovery was painful, and the drugs he took often made him nauseated. Muscles that had once been strong began to atrophy despite physiotherapy, underscoring his sense of helplessness. His emotional recovery was complicated by the fact that unlike many transplant patients, who'd been waiting and hoping for a chance to add years to their lives, Jared couldn't help feeling that years of his life had been taken away. He sometimes lashed out at friends when they came to see him, and Melody, the girl he'd been so interested in that fateful weekend, informed him a few weeks after the accident that she was dating someone else. Visibly depressed, Jared decided to take the year off from school.

  It was a long and sometimes discouraging road, but with the help of his therapist, Jared gradually began to rebound. The therapist also suggested that Frank and Amanda meet with her regularly to talk about Jared's challenges, and how they could best respond to and support him. Given their own marital history, it was sometimes hard for them to set aside their own conflicts in order to provide Jared with the security and encouragement he needed; but in the end, their love for their son came before everything else. They did what they could to support Jared as he moved steadily through periods of grief, loss, and rage to get to a point where he finally began to accept his new circumstances.

  Early last summer, he'd signed up for an economics class at the local community college, and to Amanda and Frank's enormous pride and relief he announced soon thereafter that he'd decided to re-enroll full-time at Davidson in the fall. Later that same week he'd mentioned over dinner, in an almost offhand way, that he'd read about a man who'd lived thirty-one years after his heart transplant. Since medicine was improving every year, he figured he'd be able to live even longer.

  Once he was back in school, his spirits continued to lift. After consulting with his doctors, he took up running, working up to the point where he now ran six miles a day. He started going to the gym three or four times a week, gradually regaining the physique he'd once had. Fascinated by the course he had taken in the summer, he decided to focus on economics when he returned to Davidson. Within weeks of returning to school, he met another prospective economics major, a girl named Lauren. The two of them had fallen head over heels in love, and they'd even begun to talk about getting married after they graduated. For the past two weeks, they'd been on a mission trip to Haiti, sponsored by her church.

  Aside from diligently taking his medications and abstaining from alcohol, Jared, for the most part, now lived the life of an ordinary twenty-one-year-old. Even so, he didn't begrudge his mother's desire to bake him a cake to celebrate the transplant. After two years, he'd finally reached the point where, despite everything, he considered himself lucky.

  There was, however, a recent twist in Jared's thinking that Amanda wasn't sure how to handle. A few evenings ago, while she'd been loading dishes into the dishwasher, Jared had joined her in the kitchen, stopping to lean against the counter.

  "Hey, Mom? Are you going to do that charity thing for Duke this fall?"

  In the past, he'd always referred to her fund-raising luncheons as things. For obvious reasons, since the accident, she hadn't hosted the event, nor had she been volunteering at the hospital. Amanda nodded. "Yes. They asked me to take over as the chairperson again."

  "Because they botched it the last couple of years without you, right? That's what Lauren's mom said."

  "They didn't botch the events. They just didn't go as well as planned."

  "I'm glad you're doing it again. For Bea, I mean."

  She smiled. "Me, too."

  "The hospital likes it, too, right? Because you're raising money?"

  She reached for a towel and dried her hands, studying him. "Why are you suddenly so interested?"

  Jared absently scratched at his scar through his T-shirt. "I was hoping that you could use your contacts at the hospital to find something out for me," he said. "It's something I've been wondering about."

  With the cake cooling on the counter, Amanda stepped out onto the back porch and inspected the lawn. Despite the automatic sprinklers that Frank had installed last year, the grass was dying in spots as the roots withered away. Before he'd gone to work this morning, she'd seen him standing over one of the dull brown patches, his face grim. In the past couple of years, Frank had become fanatical about the lawn. Unlike most of the neighbors, Frank insisted on doing his own mowing, telling anyone who asked that it helped him relax after a day spent filling cavities and shaping crowns at the office. Though she supposed there was some truth in that, there was also something compulsive about his habits. Rain or shine, he mowed every other day, making checkerboard patterns in the lawn.

  Despite her initial skepticism, Frank hadn't had a single beer or even a sip of wine since the day of the accident. At the hospital, he'd sworn he was stopping for good, and to his credit, he'd kept his vow. After two years, she no longer expected him to slip back into his old ways at any moment, and that was a big part of the reason things between them had improved. It wasn't a perfect relationship by any means, but it wasn't as terrible as it once had been, either. In the days and weeks following the accident, arguments between them had been an almost nightly occurrence. Pain and guilt and anger had sharpened their words into blades, and they often lashed out at each other. Frank slept in the guest room for months, and in the mornings, eye contact between them was rare.

  As difficult as those months had been, Amanda could never bring herself to take the final step of filing for divorce. Given Jared's fragile emotional state, she couldn't imagine traumatizing him any further. What she didn't realize was that her resolve to keep the family intact wasn't having the intended effect. A few months after Jared came home from the hospital, Frank was talking to Jared in the living room when Amanda walked in. As had become the pattern by then, Frank got up and left the room. Jared watched him go before turning to his mom.

  "It wasn't his fault," Jared said to her. "I was the one driving."

  "I know."

  "Then stop blaming him," he said.

  Ironically, it was Jared's psychologist who ultimately convinced her and Frank to seek counseling for their troubled relationship. The tension at home was affecting Jared's recovery, she pointed out, and if they truly cared about helping their son, they should consider seeking couples counseling themselves. Without a stable home environment, Jared would have difficulty accepting and coping with his new circumstances.

  Amanda and Frank drove in separate cars to their first appointment with the counselor, who Jared's psychologist had referred them to. Their first session degenerated into the kind of argument they'd been having for months. By the second session they were actually able to talk without raising their voices. And at the counselor's gentle but firm urging, Frank began attending AA meetings as well, much to Amanda's relief. In the beginning, he went five nights a week, but lately it was down to one, and three months ago Frank had become a sponsor. He met regularly for breakfast with a thirty-four-year-old recently divorced banker who, unlike Frank, had been unable to achieve so
briety. Until then Amanda had not allowed herself to believe that Frank was actually going to be successful in the long term.

  There was no question that Jared and the girls had benefited from the improved atmosphere at home. There had even been moments recently when Amanda considered it a new beginning for her and Frank. When they talked these days, the past was seldom front and center; now they were able to laugh occasionally in each other's company. Every Friday, they went on a date--another recommendation of the couples counselor--and while it still felt stilted at times, both of them knew it was important. They were, in many ways, getting to know each other again, for the first time in years.

  There was something satisfying in that, but Amanda knew that theirs would never be a passionate marriage. Frank wasn't, nor ever had been, wired that way, and it didn't bother her. After all, she had known the kind of love that was worth risking everything for, the kind of love that was as rare as a glimpse of heaven.

  Two years. Two years had elapsed since her weekend with Dawson Cole; two long years since the day Morgan Tanner had called to tell her that he'd passed away.

  She kept the letters, along with Tuck and Clara's photograph and the four-leaf clover, stashed in the bottom of her pajama drawer, a place where Frank would never look. Every now and then, when the ache she felt at his loss was especially strong, she'd pull those items out. She'd reread the letters and twirl the four-leaf clover between her fingers, wondering who they'd truly been to each other that weekend. They were in love, but they hadn't been lovers; they were friends and yet also strangers after so many years. But their passion had been real, as undeniable as the ground she stood on.

  Last year, a couple of days after the anniversary of Dawson's death, she'd made a trip to Oriental. Turning in at the town cemetery, she'd hiked out to the very edge of the property, where a small rise overlooked a copse of leafy trees. It was here that Dawson's remains were buried, far from the Coles, and even farther from the plots of the Bennetts and the Colliers. As she stood over the simple headstone, gazing at the freshly cut lilies that someone had laid there, she imagined that if by some twist of fate she was buried in the Collier plot of this very same cemetery, their souls would eventually find each other--just as they had in life, not once but twice.