The area was flooded with police lights when they carried me out. I blinked and closed my eyes. My head was pounding, and everything blurred. I could see tiny lights beneath my eyelids, even with my eyes closed. I felt arms around me and I held on without even knowing who was holding me. I was so tired. The urge to sleep was stronger than the lights in my eyes. Stronger than the voices in my ears. Stronger than the loud noise around me. I gave into it.
When I opened my eyes again, bright lights blinded me and I turned away. I forced them open again even though it felt like someone was stabbing my pupils with an ice pick. My head was pounding, I was so sore. I looked around. An IV was attached to my arm and a colorless fluid was being fed into my veins.
Things I had been thinking about even when unconscious made their way to the front of my mind. Nick killed his brother. Six years old, forced to take his little brother into the woods and drown him. What was Nick thinking at the time? Five years later? Did he tell anyone? Ever? Did he cry at night when he thought about it? Did he blame himself? Did his brother haunt him? I married a murderer. Maybe it wasn’t his fault but he was a murderer just the same. Cora and Harrison were right. I never knew my husband at all. I leaned over the side of the bed to throw up. Dry heaves. There was nothing in my stomach. I reached out and hit the nurses call button.
A woman in maroon scrubs came bounding into the room. She checked the IV bag and looked down at me.
“I see you’re awake. How do you feel?”
I moved my tongue around in my mouth. It was bone dry. “Water?” I mumbled.
“Not yet. You’re getting fluid from the IV. You were pretty dehydrated, and we have to flush some drugs from your system.” She leaned over and repositioned my pillows. “The doctor should be in to see you later on. If he says its okay, we’ll take out the IV and you can have some water by mouth, but not until then.” I closed my eyes against the light and tried to swallow. “You have someone who wants to see you. Okay?” I nodded and she left the room. A few minutes a cool hand was on my forehead.
“Hey, Mac.” Samantha was over me smiling. “You okay?” I nodded. Her hand brushed back my hair. “We were so scared. I was so afraid they wouldn’t find you.” Her hand went to her lips and she pulled at the bottom one. A habit she’d had so long I couldn’t remember the first time I’d seen her do it. She sat down in a chair near my bed.
“What happened?” I asked. My voice was a croak.
“They found you in the woods. You were in pretty bad shape.”
“Cora?” I tried to sit up.
“It’s okay.” She eased me back down. “They have Cora and Harrison. When you didn’t come back we went to the house. Cora tried to tell us you went to Harrisburg but we didn’t believe it, and we knew something had happened. We tried to tell the police but it took them a few days to finally take it seriously. They talked to Cora and she gave them the same story, that you took the train to Harrisburg,” she hesitated. Her eyes were glassy, almost teary. “Your jeep was at the train station but no one remembered anyone of your description getting on a train. The police went round and round but didn’t do too much. Finally they went back to the house and looked for you. But you weren’t there. That’s when they started to search the grounds…but they found you and that’s all that matters. The house is a mess. Police digging through everything. They found James’ body in the cemetery.” She pulled her lip a little more. “Dylan and I have your stuff so you don’t have to go back there again. Ever.”
“Nick.” I whispered. “Cora made Nick kill James when they were just children.”
Samantha looked at me hard. “I know. So horrible. Can you imagine what Nick’s life was like? How can anyone get past that?”
“They don’t.” my voice was just above a whisper. “They just drag other people into the horribleness. How long have I been here?” I tried to pick my head up off the pillow but it felt like it weighed a hundred pounds.
“This is day two. They found you yesterday.”
“Ginny?”
“She’ll be fine. They’d been drugging her. Harrison was. She probably had some senile dementia but he was giving her benadryl and vistaril. According to the doctor that’s the worst thing you can give someone with dementia. It kind of exacerbated the symptoms. Made her more confused.” She shook her head. “She’s in the hospital too, down the hall. They drugged her with sedatives pretty heavily over the past week.”
My eyes fluttered. “She’ll be all right?”
Samantha nodded. “She’s strong.” I was looking at her through tiny slits while we spoke. Samantha stood up. “Sleep. I’ll come back later.” She kissed my forehead and left the room.
I felt immeasurably better later that afternoon. I had slept. The IV came out. I was allowed water and Jello. I wasn’t so groggy. I stared at the dismal walls of the hospital room wondering how long I was going to be kept prisoner in this room. The door flew open and Samantha reappeared.
“Told you I’d be back. They’re letting you go in the morning. Things look good.” She maneuvered herself into the chair next to the bed and rested her crutches on the rail.
“Yeah, we’re a pair, aren’t we? My face feels like a balloon. Some vacation, huh?”
“Someone wants to see you. I told him I wanted to come in first,” she said softly.
“Dylan?” I wondered where he’d been.
“No. One minute.” She stood up and opened the door. My father walked in. He looked so old. He was only in his late fifties but could’ve passed for seventy. His face was drawn. His hair was almost completely white and he walked with a slight stoop, defeated by life. I looked at Samantha in confusion and anger. “I called him because I was afraid they wouldn’t find you.” Her voice was soft. “I’ll leave you alone.”
He walked to my bedside and sat down. His face was blank, stoic. Why’d he travel all the way down here? So he could look at me with dead eyes, the way he did at Nick’s funeral? My father died along with my mother, they just never buried him. They left his shell to walk around all these years like a zombie. He cleared his throat.
“I’m glad you’re okay. Samantha called me and I flew down a few days ago.” I nodded and looked away. I’d get Samantha for this later. He ran his hands through his hair. When had it turned so white? “It’s been hard for you these past few months?” He leaned in to catch my eye.
“Yes. It’s been hard.” I folded my arms in front of me.
“I was so worried…”
I looked at him. This was the man who had yet to cry over my mother’s death. The man who wouldn’t go into her room to see her before she died. The man who went back to work two weeks later like nothing had happened. Who took all of my mother’s things and threw them away, wiped away every trace of her from the house only days after her funeral. The man who wouldn’t let my brother or I so much as mention her name or he’d leave the room. The man who left me and my twelve year old brother without Christmases or birthdays. No family outings, no vacations. No food. Our next door neighbor would take me to the grocery store to get food for the house. I would ask my father for money and he would take out his money clip and leave it on the table and walk away. Stone cold dead.
“I thought I’d lost you.” His voice was weak. “My God.”
I looked at him. Were his eyes wet? He pinched at the bridge of his nose and looked down. Silence. Then he emitted a whining sound and I was momentarily confused. He burst like a dam and sobbed uncontrollably. Sixteen years of grief. He put his head on the side of my bed and wept. I kept my arms folded and watched him. I had needed him to do this so long ago when I was fourteen and he wouldn’t. He let me flounder on my own and it had caused me so much pain. I wanted to be so angry at him. All I had for so long was my anger. I wasn’t going to let go of it now.
“My God, I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. It was only when I thought I’d lost you…” he said. I finally unfolded my arms and patted his back with one hand. His words were punctuated by hiccupped sobs. He looked up and wiped his face. It was so tired and drawn. His hands were shaking. “So much time wasted. I don’t know why I couldn’t come to you before. I was only thinking about myself, I wasn’t thinking about you or your brother. When they couldn’t find you I just kept thinking about your mother’s grave, about having to put you right next to her. I couldn’t take losing you too. Losing your mother almost killed me.” He shook his head back and forth and let out some kind of sound I’d never heard before. Like something in his gut wrenching free. I put my arms around him and held him to me.
This was also the man who had raised me. He taught me how to tie my shoelaces, how to write my name. He took me to school on my first day of Kindergarten and wouldn’t leave me when I started to cry. He took me to the University with him every so often and let me sit in his big swivel chair even when he was left to do his work in a small chair in the corner. When I came home in tears after being teased unmercifully because I was skinny, gawky, and covered in freckles, with hair that stuck up all over, he hugged me and told me I was beautiful. Like my mother. I started to cry. More tears. I didn’t think I had anymore water in my body. “Maybe when we go back we can go to her grave?” he asked. He hadn’t gone to my mother’s grave since her funeral. I’d taken care of it all this time. “Put some flowers on it?”
“It’s winter, Dad.” The tears rolled down to my lips and I could taste the salt. I looked up at him. “Maybe a poinsettia. Mom always liked poinsettias.”
He nodded, “Okay, a poinsettia.” My heart was breaking and I didn’t think I could take anymore when my door opened again. Dylan hesitated, unsure about whether to come in or not.
My father stood up and tried to compose himself. “We’ll talk later.” He turned and left the room. My eyes followed him. He seemed to walk taller somehow, like a weight had been lifted. Dylan waited for him to leave and then came in and took a seat.
I wiped my eyes with the corner of my gown. “If you’re going to make me cry you might as well turn around now.”
He came in and sat down. “No more tears.” He wiped my face with his hand and then rubbed his fingers on my sheets. “I think you need to blow your nose.” I laughed and he handed me a tissue. “You look better. I was in earlier when you were sleeping and you looked like hell.”
“I was wondering where you were. I thought you’d abandoned me.”
“Nah, I knew you had to deal with family stuff,” he motioned to the door. “I figured that was more important.” We were both silent. “You couldn’t have just stayed with me like I asked you, could you?” he asked.
“Sorry. I needed to be away for a little bit.”
“Because of me?” He was standing over my bed.
I didn’t want to look at him so I looked at my hands, scrutinizing my fingernails. They were still ringed with blood. “Maybe a little.”
“No, maybe that’s it exactly. We need to talk.”
I swallowed and my throat felt like it was being burned by a blowtorch. “Okay.”
He sat by my bed. “About us.”
He seemed to be waiting for me to start. Why did I have to do the hard part? “You want to talk about us?” My head was pounding. I pushed my hair back and repositioned my pillows. I put the ball back in his court.
He chose his words carefully. “When I first met you in my office, I admit I was motivated mostly by the fact that my father didn’t want me to have anything to do with you. Anything that got him upset made me feel a little better, But then…”
“Then what?”
“Then I actually liked you but….” He took a deep breath. I glanced up at him. “But after we slept together you ran away from me for days…”
“I know.”
“And then you took off again a second time when I asked you not to. You don’t stay in one spot long and you don’t like to talk about things…”
He was right. I was just like my father. “I know.”
He laughed. “I’m glad you know. So what else do you know?”
I rolled my sheet between my fingers. “Look, the situation was crazy. I was looking for answers to my marriage and stumbled on you. I wanted it to just be fun, but it got all mixed up in my head.” I stared at the opposite wall. “So what now, Dylan?”
He stood and leaned his elbows on the bed rail. “It’s going to be really weird and boring without you here. I mean, no knocks on my door at all hours, no lists to go over, no mysteries to solve, little Miss Nancy Drew…and I don’t want things to end just because you’re leaving.” He took my chin and turned it so he was looking me in the eye. “So what are we going to do?”
“How many miles is it from here to Portland? Four hundred?”
“Yeah. But that could be a good thing.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because it gives us both a little room. We can take things as slowly as you want. No pressure.”
I nodded. ”We can take turns commuting? See where it goes?” I reached up and touched his hair. “You can come to Portland, I’ll take you around. You’ll love it. We can drive to Boston, maybe go to Cape Cod. I’ll come here; you can show me Chestnut Hill.” He laughed. “I just ask that you take the first five turns or so. I’ve seen enough of this place for a little while.” I rolled his hair around my index finger. “There’s just one thing I need to do if we’re going to take this any further.”
“And what’s that?”
“Do you think I could meet your mother?”
His face was serious. “My mother? Do you have any idea what you’re asking? Take your money and go back to Maine. Leave it alone.” I started laughing and pain in my side erupted, but I couldn’t help it. There was silence. He leaned over to kiss me but I turned my head. My lips felt as dry and rough as bark and I didn’t think my mouth tasted any better. He caught me on the side of my eyelid. “So when are you leaving?” he asked.
“That I don’t know. I hear they’re letting me go tomorrow morning. I’ll probably head back sometime tomorrow evening.”
“We’ll have most of the day together, then?”
I nodded. “I’m all yours.”