Feeding the Fire

by Amy Waeschle

  “She didn’t wanna press charges,” Mike said. Zach thought he saw Mike’s shoulders drop. “And now, she’s in the hospital.”

  The woman in the bathrobe and the kid with the injured shoulder flashed into his mind. Where was the boy in all this?

  “I wish I could do more to help track Evan,” Mike said, his lips tight. “But there’s no case. He’s an adult, and so far, hasn’t popped.”

  “I know,” Zach said easily—it was a topic they had covered several times before. A sudden idea formed in Zach’s mind. “How do I get an interview with this kid?”

  Mike frowned. “Shit, Zach, why?”

  “I met him once. Maybe he’ll talk to a friendly face.”

  “He’ll eat you alive, Zach,” Mike said.

  Zach heard the rumble of a truck downshifting out on the highway. “Maybe,” he said, meeting Mike’s steely gaze.

  Mike seemed to consider this, though he couldn’t hide his doubtful expression. He was trying to be supportive, but Zach knew that he was waiting for Evan to wash up from rock bottom like so many other addicts.

  “I’m talking five minutes, Mike.”

  “You won’t get near him until he’s out of protective custody.”

  Zach went to the grocery bag on the porch and pulled out two apples. He tossed one to Mike, who caught it one-handed. “When will that be?”

  “A day, probably,” Mike said, rubbing the apple’s skin on his sleeve. “Maybe two.”

  Zach let out the breath he was holding. “Okay. Will you let me know?” He peeled the sticker off the apple and took a bite.

  “All right,” Mike replied, his voice guarded. “You sure you want to get involved like this?” he said. “You may not like what you hear. And this Garrett . . . he won’t be the same kid that graduated from rehab.”

  Zach tasted another bite, the cold juice quenching his sudden thirst. “I’m sure,” Zach replied.

  Zach finished caulking the windows inside the unfinished kitchen and because of the fading light, decided to call it a day. After storing his tools, he reached into the cooler for a bottle of ginger beer, and spotted the pickles.

  Standing in the middle of the open space, staring out the big window overlooking the deep green forest, he indulged in a quick fantasy of Dana here next to him: cooking alongside him, laughing with him, her hand tugging him close for a kiss.

  Drawn as if by a magnet, he strolled to their future bedroom, where he kept a picture of the two of them tacked to the wall, a selfie taken on top of Mount Walker. In it, Dana’s tan cheeks glowed and her beautiful eyes sparkled. Zach’s grin showed the simple joy he’d felt that day. He pressed the corners of the photo down to keep them adhered. Sipping his drink, he gazed around the room, imagining an easy chair in the corner with his jeans slung over the back, Dana’s summer dresses in the closet, fragrant from her perfume. At the farmer’s market last summer, he had bought a headboard woven with birch branches for their bed and pictured it made up with a plump white comforter and pillows, a simple, comfortable nest for the two of them to be together. His heart fluttered into his stomach at the thought of her here with him, but slowly, the feeling faded and his heart slunk away once more.

  Should he tell her about Garrett? The question had been bounding around in his head since Mike had pulled out of his driveway.

  If he told her, she would demand to see Garrett in jail. No. Zach shook his head hard to clear the sudden image of Dana alone with a kid like that. A kid who would try to manipulate her for his own gain.

  But if he didn’t tell Dana, and Garrett gave up something useful, would she forgive him for keeping it a secret?

  The futility of it all stirred his simmering emotions into a quick fury. He looked around his creation, feeling every minute of the hustle he’d put into it. And for what? So that Dana could turn him away?

  He yanked back his arm and threw the bottle of ginger beer against the wall. It exploded, golden soda misting the air and leaving a dark stain on the drywall.

  Zach took one last look at the photo tacked to the wall, then made quick strides back to the kitchen. He needed to get out—though to go where he didn’t know. He grabbed his keys and stormed out of the house.

  Inside his truck, his cell phone lit up with a voicemail. He ignored it—he didn’t want to talk to anyone—until he saw who it was from.

  Zach coasted to a stop in front of Dana’s house and hurried up the driveway.

  He let himself in. “Dana?” he called out.

  He found her sitting on the kitchen floor with her back to the cupboards, a tub of half-eaten ice cream in her lap. The eyes that turned to him were rimmed with red. Her long dark hair hung loose and scraggly.

  His senses went on high alert, and he approached slowly, taking in all the clues.

  “Hey,” he said softly, lowering to a squat.

  “Hi,” she said in a shaky voice. Her eyes leaked a fresh trickle of tears.

  “Where’s Jessie?” he asked, remembering her barely recognizable voice on his voicemail recording: Something’s up with mom. I don’t know what’s wrong.

  “Huh?” She blinked at him.

  “Jessie, is she home?” he asked again, his voice the calm, steady one he used on his most serious patients.

  “I don’t . . . know,” she said.

  Zach quickly prioritized Dana. Then he’d locate Jessie, make sure she was okay.

  Carefully, he removed the ice cream tub from Dana’s lap and the spoon from her hand, then slid in next to her.

  Dana closed her eyes and her face contorted in pain.

  “It’s okay,” he said, brushing the hair from her forehead.

  Dana let out a silent sob, her thin frame bucking against the cupboard.

  “Tell me what happened,” he said, and wrapped her into his arms.

  She took a breath and let it out, her lungs chattering. “It was a baby,” she said. “He died, or would have . . . ” she inhaled a huge breath.

  Zach waited, telling himself to be patient.

  “I was there,” she continued. “In the produce section.” She swallowed. “At Costco. A woman started yelling. I ran over and . . . ” Dana paused and he heard her short, quick pants. She leaned back from him, her trembling lips closing in a firm line.

  “Her baby. He was blue, Zach,” she groaned, her voice gritty.

  “Oh, God, Dana.” He reached for her hand.

  “It looked like choking. So I grabbed him and . . . ” She disappeared into a memory, her eyes closing and her lips clenching hard as she worked her way through it.

  Zach held her hand and waited.

  Her shaking fingers swiped at her reddened cheeks. “I did back blows and it came out. It was a peanut,” she said, her face clenched in agony. “Who in their right mind feeds a peanut to a baby?”

  Zach sat silent to take it all in. “Wow,” he finally said, drawing in a slow breath. He imagined the baby laid over her arm and her expression sharp, focused. It was what made her good at her job, she was cool under pressure, could think clearly when things went sideways. But since the trouble with Evan, her ability to bounce back had disappeared. He considered about how she would feel after such an incident. Spent. Isolated. “Why didn’t you call me?” He intentionally left out that Jessie had called him, afraid it would only compound her distress. He could bring it up later, when she was more steady.

  Dana’s gaze lowered to her lap. “I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she said. Her eyes brimmed with tears again.

  Zach shut his eyes, cursing silently. “Why would you think that?” he said, trying hard to keep from sounding angry. “We’ve always been there for each other.”

  “I know,” she sobbed, though it was clear that she hadn’t believed this.

  Zach held her for a long time, feeling her narrow shoulders compress in his embrace. Her warmth connecting with his felt surreal, like a dream he was slowly remembering.

  “When I had that baby in my arms, all I could think of was Evan . . . ”
She broke down again.

  “Babies and kids are hard calls,” he said, stroking her hair. “You know that.” He wondered if this was what held her back from finishing her nursing degree. Elder care was safer. As a nurse, she would have to deal with sick kids, kids who might die, kids who had done nothing to deserve their fate. Zach knew it was harder to compartmentalize those calls. Every response brought an adrenaline rush that carried through to the interventions: running the IV, pushing drugs, performing CPR, transporting to the E.R. with the doctor on the line barking instructions. But after it was over, there was the emotional catch-up. When you second-guessed yourself. When you wished it had been someone else trying to keep a patient alive. But with children their hope and frailty haunted you long after you followed up with the E.R., long after they went home and forgot all about you.

  Like the boy with the burn scars in The Grove.

  You needed a way to process it or it would ruin you. He’d seen it wreck relationships, change people. Half the guys in his department were divorced, some had sleep problems, most drank too much, smoked, etc. From the evidence, Dana’s coping mechanism today had been a carton of ice cream. The other night, it was the pills. Obviously, neither were working.

  “When Evan was six weeks old, I woke up to him screaming,” she said in a harsh whisper. “It was a cry I didn’t know he could make.” Her eyes flashed his way but they were blank.

  Zach slowly sat back, feeling the shift in her mood. He felt it behind his navel—a kind of slow, inward pull, threatening to tug him back, away. A feeling of dread. He fought it, tried to stay with her as her eyes crinkled in anguish.

  She took a slow, shallow breath. “He was hurt.”

  The pulling sensation tucked deeper, hooking the back of his pelvis.

  “And I went in there and Leif was . . . ” She gasped for a breath.

  He squeezed her hand.

  “The look on his face,” Dana said, shaking her head once, hard. “And his hands, they looked . . . clenched. As if I had stopped him from . . . ”

  In one blink, Zach pictured a man bent over a crib, shaking what was inside. He blinked again and the image was gone.

  “I picked him up and held him. Leif just looked at me, like I was the one who had hurt him.”

  “Was Evan okay?”

  “I think I was too in shock to know what to do. After Evan calmed down, I searched everywhere for signs of what had happened, but he looked fine,” she finished, wiping her cheeks again. “I think I was really a mess. At the time, I thought it was normal to . . . feel like I did. But now, looking back . . . and from what I learned in nursing school . . . ” She closed her eyes, inhaled a long breath, as if to gather courage. “I mean, I loved Evan instantly, even though I didn’t really feel prepared to be a mom, not yet. God, I was so young.” A sob broke from her lips and her body curled inward as the tears filled her eyes.

  Zach sat still, listening to the hum of the refrigerator. “What do you mean, a mess?”

  Her clasped hands in her lap fidgeted, and she wouldn’t look at him. “Evan was hard—harder than anything I’ve ever done.” She sniffed, and picked at her ragged thumbnail. “He cried all the time. I had trouble feeding him. It was like no matter what I did, he hated it.”

  Zach tried to make sense of this. Dana and Evan had always had a complicated relationship. This could explain why, but he wasn’t sure he had all the pieces.

  “The next day, I wasn’t even sure Leif had done anything. What if it was me?” Her eyes pleaded with him for forgiveness. “What if I had it mixed up and I was the one who had hurt him?”

  “Why would you think that?” Zach said.

  “I hadn’t had a solid nights’ sleep since the day we left the hospital. I remember while feeding him, while trying to get him to sleep. You know the only way he’d fall asleep was if I put on my clogs and walked up and down the hallway? It drove Leif nuts—the clunking. Those shoes are loud. He had to get earplugs.”

  “I felt like I was going crazy.” She seemed to get lost in a memory for a moment. “Even though I wasn’t sure about what happened with Leif, I couldn’t let him be alone with Evan. Then Leif left for the fishing season. I thought I’d be relieved to be alone like that, but six months is a long time. Everything just got worse.” She crossed her arms and her gaze moved to the ceiling. “Evan got really sick, and I was out of my mind. I wondered if Leif had done something to cause it. Or if it was me—had I done it?”

  “You would never have hurt Evan,” Zach said, unsettled.

  “I wish I had your confidence,” she said ruefully. “I used to think about walking out of the house and never coming back. I used to think about shaking him, just to see if he’d stop crying.” Her face twisted in anguish. “And I would wonder if I had actually done something like that. Or if it was Leif and I was just picturing it,” she said, her lips shaking. She wrapped her hand over her jaw.

  “Things got better by the time Evan was a year old, and it started to all feel like a bad dream.” She shifted her legs. “I started feeling horrible for all those times I had ignored his cries, or thought about walking away just so I could sleep. I tried to make it up to him. To be there for him whenever he needed me. And when it turned out that he was very bright, I made sure he had the best of everything, the best teachers, extra classes and tutors.”

  Zach sighed as it all came into perspective.

  “I thought everything was fine, that our lives were on track. When I got pregnant with Jessie, I told myself that it would be different. That Evan had just been a hard baby. That I had only imagined Leif hurting him.” Dana’s eyes tightened and another tear slipped down her cheek.

  Zach took her hand in his and stroked her delicate fingernails, the smooth pink surface like a baby shell, trying to understand.

  “I was wrong.”

  Chapter 19

  Jessie

  Jessie heard the knock on her door. “L.T? It’s me,” Zach’s voice said.

  “Come in,” she said from her bed where she had been reading her most recent Rin Tin Tin find.

  “How was Cam’s?” he asked, grabbing her desk chair and spinning it around so he could straddle it facing her.

  “Greta made chocolate cake,” she said, flipping a page.

  “Sounds delicious.”

  She felt his pause but didn’t look up.

  “Thanks for calling me,” he said.

  “You didn’t answer,” Jessie said. She could feel the hardness of her voice grinding against her throat.

  She watched his feet adjust on the carpet. “I was at the house. I got the caulking done. You willing to help me finish the siding on the north exterior? It’s easy and fast work with four hands.”

  Jessie flipped another page, scanning images that didn’t register. “Maybe.”

  “Your mom had kind of a rough day,” he said after a long pause.

  “Because of a stupid trip to Costco?” Jessie said, her fingers gripping the edge of the book. “I came home and she didn’t even see me.”

  “A baby almost died.”

  Jessie finally looked up. “What?”

  “Your mom saved him.”

  “At Costco,” Jessie said, not understanding.

  Zach shared the heroic details of her mother swooping in and saving the day.

  “That’s why she’s on the floor eating everything in sight? You saw the butter wrappers, right?”

  Zach looked away—a sure tell that he hadn’t.

  “I mean, it’s cool that she helped, that she did that, but why isn’t she, like, happy,” Jessie said, slamming her head back against her wall.

  Zach sighed. “It’s not that easy for her.”

  “Those pills aren’t hers,” Jessie said, blinking at her ceiling. “You know that, right?”

  She could sense Zach’s body going still. “What? Wait, how do you . . . ”

  “I was going to throw them out,” she said, wishing she could shout, to let it all out. “But I looked because I th
ought the doctor wasn’t going to give her more.” Jessie wrapped her arms around her, as if to keep everything from exploding. “Who the hell is Annabelle St. Clair?” she asked, leveling her gaze on his worried brown eyes.

  “I don’t know,” Zach said.

  “Well, did you ask her?”

  Zach shook his head.

  “I saved it, if you want it. It’s in my drawer,” she said, nodding to her desk.

  Zach stood and she watched him walk slowly to her desk, slide open the drawer. He scooped up the bottle, then watched his shoulders drop.

  “See what happens when you leave?” she blurted, pulling her knees up.

  Zach spun, and his expression killed her: sadness, pain, guilt.

  Jessie looked away and heard Zach’s footsteps walking out of her room.

  The next morning, Zach was up and gone before her. Jessie made her breakfast and ate alone, wondering if her mom would come out in time to say anything about what happened. She didn’t.

  Jessie left the house, closing the screen door quietly, and headed up the hill to meet Cam. The egg baby jiggled in her pocket. They had agreed on a schedule: she would keep her overnight if Cam took her after Health. They’d switch like that until the end of the project on Thursday, which couldn’t come soon enough. A sudden panic gripped her—was there egg baby homework due today? With everything that had happened the night before, she had forgotten to check. Maybe during homework time in Algebra, she could review her Health assignment notes from Friday to make sure she hadn’t missed anything. Ugh. Algebra—there was a quiz today, her first one. Her nervous stomach clenched.

  Jessie checked her watch again, wondering where Cam could be. She knew if he was late his dad drove him, but it was past the time for that. She abandoned her post and hurried up the hill, her mind reviewing her math facts.

  She entered the high school commons and continued down the noisy hall, swerving around groups of kids. Lockers slammed, laughter sounded, the hubbub of conversation filled the crowded space. At last she stepped into Darnell’s quiet classroom and slid into her cold, smooth seat. Still four minutes before the bell. There was a bathroom at this end of the building, down at the far end. If she hurried, she could make it there and back before the bell so she left her backpack at her seat and re-entered the throng. It was like being a fish, she thought. Swimming against the current.