He was skinning a rabbit on the old picnic table by the smoker, and I started yelling at him as soon as I spotted him from the path.
“You didn’t tell Larry I was here!” I shouted. I came to stand across the table from him, not looking at the bloody mess between us. Not looking at the sharp blade in his hand. I put my hands on the table and leaned toward him, staring hard into his eyes. “Why didn’t you tell him? You know I need to get out of here. You know that!”
He looked unmoved, almost bored, by my outburst. “You been to see Lady Alice?” he asked.
“She told me you didn’t say anything to Larry.” I straightened up. “How could you do that to me?”
“Did too tell Larry,” he said. “And Lady Alice knows it. She was right there, tellin’ us where to move that big ol’ branch that wrecked her porch.”
“Then why am I still here? Why am I not on my way home?” My voice cracked with rage. “What the hell is going on?”
“Lady Alice said you changed your mind about goin’.”
“What?”
“Said you decided to stay till Simmee had the baby.”
I was speechless. I didn’t know who or what to believe. “She said you wanted me to stay till Simmee had the baby!”
“Oh, yeah?” He let out a short bark of a laugh. “Well sometimes people put their own ideas in other people’s mouths, now don’t they? Lady Alice…she’s a nice ol’ gal and all, but she don’t always tell the truth.”
“Tully, you knew I need to get out of here. I don’t care what Lady Alice said. You knew and you didn’t do a damn thing about it!”
He worked on the rabbit, his expression impassive. “Well, you bein’ so close to her and Simmee now…” He shrugged, glancing up at me. “I figured you had some girl talk and they knew more what you wanted than I did.”
I glared at him. “What about your boat?” I asked. “You said when Larry came by you’d ask him to find a replacement for your boat.”
“An’ I did.” He worked at the rabbit on the table while I kept my eyes locked on his face. “He’s gonna look around, he said. Get me a good price.”
“When?”
“He’ll find one when he finds one. Not like you can snap your fingers and make a boat appear.” He lifted his hand as if to snap his fingers, but his hand held the knife, and the blade caught a sliver of sunlight that made me blink.
He looked down at his messy work on the picnic table and I surveyed him in silence. So which one of them was telling the truth? Which one wanted me there to help deliver Simmee’s baby? I lowered myself to the end of the bench, confused and defeated, and I knew there was no way I could get that answer. What did it matter, anyway? I was stuck here regardless. I wanted to believe Lady Alice. I trusted her. Felt affection for her. Tully was keeping me here because he was afraid Lady Alice couldn’t manage Simmee’s birth alone. Maybe he was scared and just couldn’t admit it to me, so he had to blame Lady Alice. Tully wasn’t the sort of man to admit to his fear. I watched his face as he worked on the rabbit. His eyelashes were long and blond and fell in soft crescents on his cheeks—an almost feminine feature on a body that was otherwise one hundred percent male. They made him look suddenly vulnerable. He’s afraid, I thought. Afraid of losing Simmee. A tiny bit of my fury slipped away.
He looked up suddenly. “You still here?” he asked.
“The least you could have done was made sure Larry got in touch with my family.”
“I didn’t think of it,” he said. “We was busy, and besides, how would I know how to get him in touch with them? Don’t have no phone number or nothin’.”
“My husband and sister have to be worried sick.” My voice was quiet now. I’d given in. There was nothing I could do.
He set down his knife. “Then they’ll be damn glad when they find out you’re okay, Miss Maya,” he said. “Won’t that be a happy homecomin’ for y’all.”
I got to my feet. My shin stung a little. I’d barely noticed until now. I turned and walked toward the house. I’d never know the truth. The only thing I did know for certain was that I’d be the one delivering Simmee’s baby. And that, I hoped and prayed, would be a good thing.
37
Rebecca
THE CONTEMPORARY CHURCH WAS HUGE, YET THERE WASN’T enough room for all the people who were trying to crowd into the interfaith memorial service. Every major television network had crews and equipment along the aisles on either side of the sanctuary, and in Rebecca’s opinion, they were taking up more than their share of space, keeping out people who truly needed to be there. Only one of the major roads leading to the church was open. It was filled with broken asphalt and potholes, and buses and vans were backed up for miles. Many people had to get out of their vehicles and walk the rest of the way to the church, and the service began more than an hour late.
Rebecca, Adam and Dorothea sat in one of the reserved front pews. Janette’s parents and brother sat near them, along with the families of a police officer, two firefighters and several other prominent area residents who had been lost to the storms.
Despite the decongestant she’d taken, Rebecca’s head felt twice its normal size, and the voices of the minister, priest and rabbi came to her as if through layers of flannel. Yet she didn’t care. She wouldn’t have cared if her head fell clean off her shoulders. The numbness she’d felt when Maya had first disappeared was back, and she was glad. She tried to pay attention to the speakers, but they couldn’t break through the wall she’d built around herself, and she was barely aware of the weeping and sniffling coming from the pews behind her.
Adam suddenly touched her arm as he rose to his feet, and for a moment, she felt confused, forgetting that he was to speak. She watched him walk up the two broad marble steps to the altar. Behind the pulpit, he looked pale as he cleared his throat. He was clean shaven now and freshly showered, but like her, he still wore his DIDA uniform, since they had no other clothing with them. Besides, when the service was over, they planned to go directly back to work. They were working the same shift again, and she was glad.
Adam began speaking, and for the first time since the service began, Rebecca was able to absorb what was being said. He talked about Janette and the helicopter pilot. He had no notes, but he spoke about them easily, and she knew he’d found time to speak to their families to learn about those two lost lives.
Then he began talking about Maya, telling the people filling the pews about his wife. What a skillful, committed doctor she was. How much she loved children. She’d longed for children herself, he said, but maybe there was a reason she hadn’t been given any. Maybe she needed to spend her short time on earth helping as many children as possible. His voice grew stronger instead of weaker as he spoke, and Rebecca watched the color slowly return to his cheeks. With each word, each thread that connected him to her in their shared love of Maya, he grew more beautiful to her.
“She was afraid to come to Wilmington,” Adam said. “She preferred working in the safety of her office and the hospital. Working at a disaster site was far outside her comfort zone. But she overcame her fear to come down here. She showed us a courage we never knew she had, and her disappearance brought out in us a courage we never thought we’d need.”
Rebecca swallowed past the lump in her throat. For the first time in two weeks, she felt her heart expand. Emptiness was replaced by something close to acceptance. After Louisa’s death, Dorothea had delivered the eulogy to a church filled with the couple’s many friends, and she’d quoted a proverb: “Grief shared is half the grief.” Rebecca remembered those words now as she listened to her brother-in-law. Her family. She shut her eyes. Thank you, God, for Adam.
She opened her eyes as Adam continued speaking, but her thoughts had slipped to Brent. He’d called her again the night before, expressing sympathy over the termination of the search and asking her one more time to marry him. “Life is too short, Rebecca,” he’d pleaded. She tried to imagine Brent’s reaction if she had been the one in the he
licopter crash. She tried to picture him in the pulpit where Adam now stood, but it was impossible. He never would have volunteered to speak. He hated speaking even in professional venues, yet it wasn’t fair to judge him on his prowess as a speaker. She knew he loved her. Not the way Adam loved Maya, though. Had once loved Maya. Their problems had run deep, but that didn’t change Adam’s respect for her or the admiration that was coming through so clearly and tenderly in his words.
She didn’t want Brent. Not as her husband. Not even as her lover.
Adam left the pulpit and walked down the two marble steps. His gaze was on hers as he approached their pew. He gave her a smile both tired and resigned, and she saw that his cheeks were wet.
She reached toward him, one arm outstretched as he took his seat next to her. She wrapped her hands around his arm and leaned close to him.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and in her heart, grief dueled with hope, sorrow with possibility.
38
Maya
FOR THE FIRST TIME, I WAS GATHERING EGGS FROM THE CHICKEN coop with Simmee. During my time at Last Run Shelter, I’d allowed her to gather the eggs and tend to the chickens each morning, while I remained in bed, acting as though our breakfast food came from the supermarket. From the beginning, when I was needy and hurt, she’d taken care of me. Waited on me. In the last few days, though, I realized that I needed to reverse our roles. Simmee was tired, anxious and, I was quite certain, depressed. There was something leaden about her, and it worried me. I didn’t tell her about Larry showing up at Lady Alice’s or my confusion over why I was still there when everyone knew I was desperate to leave. I didn’t want Simmee caught in the middle of that mess. It was the last thing she needed.
So, bright and early that morning, right after Tully left the house with his fishing gear, I’d asked her to show me how to take care of the chickens.
“Ain’t no big science to it,” she’d said. We started gathering the eggs from the nesting boxes, and she told me how much feed to give the chickens and how often to fill their water dish. Neither of us said it, but we both knew what we were thinking: this would be my job for at least a couple of days after Simmee had the baby.
“I’ll cook,” I said, as we carried the eggs toward the house. I’d lit the coals in the grill before starting our work in the coop, so I knew they would be hot enough by now. Adam and I had a six-burner gas grill, and until the day before, I’d never cooked anything over charcoal in my life. Yesterday, though, I’d lit the fire and made it hot enough to boil a pot of water, into which I placed Simmee’s sewing scissors, a couple of lengths of twine and small squares of cloth I’d cut and planned to use as gauze. I wanted to be ready for the baby’s birth. When I looked in the bassinet to see what Simmee had in the way of bedding, I was surprised to find a large Easter basket. It was cheaply made of pink and purple plastic wicker, and it contained a small, green flannel blanket, a few neatly folded cloth diapers and a box of sanitary pads. When I questioned Simmee about the basket, she said she planned to use it to “cart the baby around.” I thought about the wearable baby carriers I’d researched for my own babies. When I got home, I would find a way to send her one of them.
There was an old mattress in the bassinet itself. It had been inserted into a pillowcase, but it was too soft to be safe for the baby, and I lay awake the night before, trying to think of things I could stuff into it to make it firmer. Lady Alice had cut one of her old quilts into swaddling blankets, and I thought a couple of them would do the trick.
I expected Simmee to start washing the eggs herself once we were in the kitchen, but she didn’t put up a fight when I told her to sit down and let me do it. She sank into one of the kitchen chairs, awkwardly, left hip first, then right, as if she were trying to sit on a few eggs herself without cracking them.
“I’ll come out with you when you’re ready to cook,” she said.
I smiled at her. “I can do it,” I said. “I’m not totally inept.”
“What’s inept?”
I couldn’t think of a single definition that wouldn’t involve even more complex words. “Useless,” I said. Close enough. “I’m not totally useless.”
Simmee sighed. “That’s how I feel these days,” she said. “Useless.”
“You’re saving your energy. That’s a good thing.”
I was cracking the fifth egg into the bowl when I heard her draw in a long breath. I turned to look at her. “Are you all right?”
She pressed her lips together, and at first I thought she was in pain. My hand held the empty egg shell above the bowl. “Simmee?”
“It was my fault my mama died,” she said.
I dropped the shell into the garbage pail. “Simmee,” I said, in the voice I might use to soothe a child who thought she’d seen a ghost, “how could it possibly be your fault?”
“I was all turned funny,” she said. “Lady Alice had trouble gettin’ me out at first, and I guess somethin’ tore open in my mama and she bled to death.”
I didn’t pick up the sixth egg. “Has anyone ever said it was your fault?” I asked.
“You ain’t got to be no genius to figure it out.” She pulled the sugar bowl close to her on the table and started toying with the spoon.
“The word ‘fault’ implies that a person actually did something to cause harm to someone else,” I said.
“What’s ‘implies’ mean?”
“I mean…you were a baby just trying to be born, Simmee.” I felt the knot in my chest. “You didn’t do anything intentional to hurt your mother.”
“Gran said Daddy was crazy in love with Mama.” She moved the spoon back and forth a few times in the sugar bowl. “He said he didn’t want nothin’ to do with the child that kilt her. That’s why he left.”
“Maybe he was so racked with grief that he wasn’t thinking straight,” I said charitably, working hard to keep the anger out of my voice. “Whatever his excuse for leaving, it wasn’t your fault.”
“He never got over it.” Simmee tilted her head up a little to look out the window. I followed her gaze, expecting to see Tully returning home early, but there was no one there. “He never come to see me or nothin’. Gran didn’t even know his whole name. He and Mama weren’t married.”
I couldn’t get a handle on the real fear behind her words. She and Tully weren’t married, either. Was she afraid she would die and Tully would blame the baby and desert him or her the way she’d been deserted?
“Tully would never do anything like that. And besides,” I added quickly, “you are not going to die.”
“You don’t know what it’s like comin’ up without a mama,” she said.
I didn’t understand the flood of emotion that washed over me. All I knew was that I was going to tell her. I knew it the moment she said those words. Maybe the moment she said it was her fault her mother had died. I’d never told a soul the truth about that night, and why I was going to tell Simmee, I couldn’t have said. A shared vulnerability, perhaps. An intimacy I couldn’t quite name.
I wiped the egg white off my fingers with the rag that hung from the drawer handle. Then I sat down kitty-corner from her at the table.
“My mother’s dead, too,” I said. “And my father. And it really is my fault that they died.”
Her eyes widened. “What do you mean?” she whispered as though someone might hear us.
“Do you remember the day we were at Lady Alice’s and we heard Tully shoot something in the distance? Remember how I freaked out?”
She nodded.
“That sound.” I shuddered, remembering the crack of gunfire as it echoed through the forest. “It made me remember things I don’t like remembering.”
“What kind of things?”
I folded my arms across my chest, hugging myself. Holding on tight.
“My sister—”
“Rebecca.”
“Yes. Rebecca.” I pictured Becca, not as she looked now, but as she had then. Her hair long and brown. Her body slender,
but curvy. Her clothes, a little too tight. “When she was eighteen, she had a boyfriend named Zed. He was…not a nice guy.” I hugged myself even tighter. “I was jealous of Rebecca. She was pretty and seemed so much more mature than me. I was…awkward, and I was only fourteen.”
“Same as me when I met Tully.”
I hadn’t thought of that. I tried to imagine Simmee as young and gullible as I had been. Thank God Tully had turned out to truly care about her. “Rebecca was so in love with Zed.” His name tasted like acid in my mouth. “You know how sometimes you can be drawn to the bad boys.”
Simmee looked at me blankly, and I realized she didn’t understand that attraction at all.
“Our parents said she couldn’t see him anymore. Becca fought with them…it was a big mess. I knew she was sneaking out to see him, but after a while, she stopped.”
“Were your parents mean?”
“No. No, not at all.” I suddenly pictured my parents. I so rarely allowed myself to think of them, but every once in a while they’d slink into my mind unbidden, frozen in time, only a few years older than I was now. I let go of my arms and rested my hands on the table, but they were shaking so hard that I curled them into fists and dropped them to my lap instead.
“One day, I was walking home from school and Zed pulled over and offered me a ride and I got in. He was so…” I shivered. My memory of him from that day—his dark hair, his smiling blue eyes—morphed suddenly into Zed wearing the ski mask. Nausea teased me. I pressed my hand to my forehead, resting my elbow on the table.
“You shouldn’t of got in.” Simmee was whispering again.
“You’re right. I shouldn’t have,” I whispered back, then found my voice to go on. “But I thought he was so…cute, and he told me I looked pretty. That was all it took. He said Rebecca was a coward for not going out with him any longer. That she let our parents say who she could or couldn’t see. Then he asked me out.”