by Tami Hoag
Hannah glared at him. “Stop it!”
He paid no attention to her, his anger directed for the moment at Mitch and Megan. “You're too busy fucking each other to worry about my son—”
“Paul, for God's sake!”
“What's the matter, Hannah?” he demanded, rounding on her, his fingers tightening on the grip of the poker. “Did I offend your sensibilities?”
“You offended everyone.”
“I don't care. They screwed up and my son has to pay the price—”
“He's my son, too—”
“Really? Is that why you left him on the street to be kidnapped and murdered?” he shouted, flinging the poker sideways. It hit the wall with a resounding crack and fell to the floor.
Hannah could barely draw the breath to respond. He could have run the poker through her and not hurt her as badly. “You bastard!” she said, her voice a trembling whisper.
“Paul!” Mitch barked, clamping a hand down on his shoulder, his anger making the grip punishing. “Let's go into your study,” he said through his teeth.
Grimacing, Paul twisted away from him. “So you can lecture me again on how I should give my wife my support?” he sneered. “I don't think so. I'm not interested in anything you have to say.”
“Tough.” Mitch grabbed him again and steered him off in the direction of his office.
Hannah didn't watch them go. Struggling to keep hold of her control, she crossed the room, picked up the fireplace poker, and put it back in its stand. Her hands were shaking so badly, she couldn't remember them ever having been steady enough to hold a scalpel.
“Well,” she said, wiping her palms on her jeans, “that was ugly.”
“Hannah—” Megan started to say.
“The worst part of it is, it's true. It's my fault.”
“No. You were late. That shouldn't have cost you Josh.”
“But it did.”
“Because of the man who chose to take him. You had no control over his decision.”
“No,” she murmured. “And now I have control of nothing. Because of that one moment in time, my life is flying apart. If I had made it out of the hospital before Kathleen rounded that corner to call me back in, Josh would be here. I would be picking him up from hockey today. Josh would be complaining about having to go to religion class at seven.
“One moment. A handful of seconds. A heartbeat.” Staring at the fire, she snapped her fingers. “That much time and that car accident would never have happened. I wouldn't have been called back into the ER, and Josh wouldn't have been left all alone, and we wouldn't be standing here now, feeling awkward because my husband blames me . . .”
She let the thoughts trail off. There was no going back in time, only forward into uncertainty. Drained, she sank down into a chair and curled her legs beneath her. The muffled sound of angry voices came from behind the closed door of Paul's study.
Hannah picked at a dried scab of blue paint on the knee of her jeans. “I'd like to go back and find that moment when Paul changed, too,” she whispered. “He used to be so different. We used to be so happy.”
Megan didn't know how to respond. She had never been much for sharing confidences with other women. Her lack of skill with relationships gave her no expertise to draw upon for sage wisdom. She turned to the one thing she knew. “When did you start to notice a change in him?”
“Oh, I don't know.” Hannah shrugged. “It was so subtle. In little ways, years ago, I suppose. A year or so after we moved here.”
After she had begun to establish herself at the hospital and in the community. Moving here had been Paul's idea, and she often wondered what he had imagined in his heart of hearts. She wondered if he had seen himself as becoming the fixture in the community she had become, becoming someone well known and well liked and well respected. In their early days together he had confided he wanted to be somebody, somebody other than the bookworm son of a blue-collar family. Had he thought he would become someone different here, someone outgoing and gregarious, when he didn't have those qualities in him? She hated to think it was jealousy that had driven this wedge between them and poisoned the love they had shared. It seemed such a pointless emotion, nothing that belonged between people who had pledged to respect and support each other.
“And he's been withdrawing more recently?” Megan asked.
“He resents the time I spend at the hospital since I was promoted to head of the ER.”
“What about his schedule? He was working that night.”
“It's nearly tax season. He'll be putting in a lot of nights.”
“Does he normally ignore his answering machine when you call him at the office at night?”
Hannah sat up a little straighter, her eyes narrowing, something in her chest tightening. “Why are you asking me these questions?”
Megan gave her what she hoped was a convincing sheepish look. “I'm a cop; it's what I do best.”
“You can't possibly think Paul had something to do with this.”
“No, no, of course not. It's just routine,” Megan lied. “We need to know where everyone was—you know, before the lawyers get ahold of the case. They're fanatics for detail. Mother Teresa would need an alibi if she were here. When we catch this guy, his lawyer will probably try to pin it on someone else. He'll try to prove his client was somewhere else at six o'clock this morning. If he's sleazy enough, he'll ask where you were at six o'clock this morning, and where Paul was.”
Hannah blinked at her, her face carefully blank. “I don't know where Paul was. He was gone when I woke up. He said he went out on his own, just driving around town, looking . . . I'm sure that's what he did,” she said, sounding as if she were trying to convince herself as much as Megan.
“I'm sure you're right,” Megan agreed. She was filing everything about this scene in her memory—the facts, Hannah's tone of voice, her expression, the tension that hovered around her like static electricity. “I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I just want you to understand how this works, why we have to ask some of these questions. What I really wanted to ask was if any names had come to you—people who might have a grudge against you or Paul. A dissatisfied patient, a disgruntled client, that sort of person.”
“You've already interviewed everyone we know,” Hannah said. “I honestly can't think of any patients who would have felt driven to such horrible lengths. Most of what we see in a small hospital like ours are cases that are either easily curable or instantly fatal. Most critical cases—accident victims and so on—are flown directly to HCMC. Patients with serious illnesses are referred to larger hospitals as well.”
“But you must lose a few here.”
“A few.” Her mouth curved in sad memory. “I remember when I worked in the Cities we used to call little rural hospitals like Deer Lake tag 'em and bag 'em joints. We do the best we can, but we don't have the equipment or the staff of a large hospital. People here understand that.”
“Maybe,” Megan murmured, making a mental note to stop by Deer Lake Community Hospital to feel out the staff in the ER herself.
“As far as Paul's clients go, there are a few who squawk every year about what they have to pay in taxes, but that's hardly his fault.”
“No big catastrophic audits, people sent to prison, that kind of thing?”
“No.” Hannah pushed herself up out of the chair, the nervous restlessness never allowing her more than a few minutes of stillness, regardless of fatigue. “I'm going to make some tea. Would you like some? It's so cold—”
And Josh was out there somewhere without his coat.
Outside the big picture window, night had fallen, cold and black as an anvil.
“Do you think he's alive?” she whispered, staring out at the darkness into which Josh had disappeared eight long days before.
Megan rose to stand beside her. A little over a week ago everyone in town would have said Hannah had it all—the career, the family, the house on the lake. Half the town had looked on her as an icon of
modern womanhood. Now she was just a woman, shattered and vulnerable, clinging to a thread of hope as thin as a hair.
“He's alive until someone proves to me he isn't,” Megan said. “That's what I believe. That's what you need to believe, too.”
The door to Paul's office swung open. He stormed out and left the house through the door that led to the garage. Mitch emerged from the study, his face grim and drawn with lines of fatigue.
“I don't know how to get through to him,” he muttered as he walked into the family room.
“Neither do I,” Hannah confessed. “Should we start a support group?”
Mitch mustered half a smile for her stab at humor. He took her hands in his and gave them a squeeze. Her fingers were as cold as death. “I'm sorry, Hannah. I'm so sorry for all of this. I wish there were something more I could do.”
“I know you guys are doing all you can. It's not your fault.”
“It's not yours, either.” He pulled her into his arms and gave her a hug. “Hang in there, honey.”
Hannah walked them to the door and saw them out into the frigid night. On her way back through the family room she stopped for a moment and listened to the silence. Their “watcher,” as she referred to the agent assigned to the house, had gone for dinner when Mitch and Megan had arrived, and had yet to return. She had asked for and received a reprieve from the tag team companions sent from the neighborhood and the far-flung reaches of the missing children's organization. The house was quiet, calm, the tension gone.
She wondered where Paul was, wondered how long she would have until he returned and the hostilities resumed. She wondered how long the rift between them would take to heal. A week, a month, a year. She wondered if they would have Josh back before it happened. She wondered if she really wanted it to heal.
In her mind she saw his jacket lying tangled in the reeds at Ryan's Bay.
As the fear and dread and guilt began another cycle inside her, she went up the stairs and down the hall to Lily's room. Lily would give her comfort and love, unconditional, nonjudgmental, no questions asked.
The sound of a low, soft voice inside the room brought Hannah up short in the hall. The door was ajar, soft light spilling out onto the carpet like a moonbeam. She peered in through the crack and saw Father Tom sitting in the old white wicker rocking chair, Lily on his lap, his arms looped around her to hold the storybook he was reading.
Any stranger would have imagined they were father and daughter. Tom in his sweatshirt and rumpled corduroy trousers, the lamplight striking a starburst off the gold frames of his glasses. Lily in a purple fleece sleeper, her cheeks pink, her big eyes heavy-lidded; drowsy and content to listen to the adventures of Winnie-the-Pooh and his pals.
Something stirred inside Hannah, something she didn't dare name, something that came with an aftertaste of disappointment and shame.
She slipped into the room before the feeling could drive her back. Tom was a friend and she needed a friend, that was all there was to it—no complications, nothing to engender regret. He finished the story and closed the book, and both he and Lily looked up at her expectantly.
“Hi, Mama,” Lily said sweetly, tilting her head and waving.
“Hi, Lily-bug. Everyone's gone.” She bent down to take her daughter into her arms. Lily snuggled into her mother's embrace, laying her head on Hannah's shoulder.
“Paul, too?” Tom said, raising his brows. He stood up and made a halfhearted attempt to brush the wrinkles out of his pants.
“I don't know where he went.” Hannah turned away, not wanting to see the sympathy in his eyes, tired of people feeling sorry for her.
“I heard the fight,” he said softly. “I'm sure he didn't mean it. He's just lashing out. Of course, that doesn't make it hurt any less, I know—”
She shook her head. “It doesn't matter.”
“It does,” Tom insisted. “He should be able to see this isn't your fault, or if not that, forgive you at least.”
“Why should Paul forgive me when I can't forgive myself?”
“Hannah . . .”
“It's true,” she said, restlessly walking around the cozy bedroom with its soft pink walls and Beatrix Potter details. “I've relived that night a thousand times. If only I'd done this. If only I hadn't done that. It always comes down to the same thing: I'm Josh's mother. He relied on me and I let him down. I don't know if anyone should pardon me from that sin.”
“God forgives you.”
The statement was so guileless, it struck Hannah as being almost childlike in its faith. She turned to him, wishing he could answer her questions, knowing he couldn't.
“Then why does He keep punishing me this way?” she asked, pain swelling inside her. “What have I done to deserve this? What has Josh done or Paul? I don't understand.”
“I don't know,” he whispered hoarsely. He didn't understand it any better than she did, and that was his sin, he supposed—one of many—not trusting that God knew best. How could this be best for anyone? Why should Hannah suffer when she gave so much to so many people? He couldn't understand or accept it or keep himself from feeling anger toward the God to whom he had devoted his own life. He felt betrayed as Hannah felt betrayed. And he felt guilty because of it, and angry because of the guilt, and rebellious because of the limitations put on him by his station, and frightened by what he thought that might drive him to. The emotions spiraled down and down.
“It hurts so much!” Hannah said in a tortured whisper. She squeezed her eyes closed and hugged Lily tight, rocking her back and forth.
Without hesitation, Tom put his arms around her and drew her close. She was in pain; he would comfort her. If there were consequences to pay later, he would pay them. He coaxed Hannah's head to his shoulder and stroked her hair and shushed her.
“I know it hurts, honey,” he whispered. “I wish there was something I could do to stop it. I'd do anything to help you. I'd give anything to take this all away.”
Hannah let herself cry on his shoulder. She took the comfort he offered. It felt so good to be held. He was solid and strong and warm. Tender. Feeling what she felt. Wanting to take her pain away. All the things her husband should have been and wasn't.
She slipped one arm around his waist and squeezed him tight as another flood of tears came—not for Josh, but for herself and for the torn fabric of the life that had once seemed so perfect. A dream, shattered and swept away. She wondered if it had ever been real.
Tom murmured to her. He touched her hair, her cheek, as careful as if she were made of spun sugar. His lips brushed against her temple. She raised her face and felt the warmth of his breath. She opened her eyes and met his gaze and saw the reflection of the tumult of her own emotions—need, longing, pain, guilt.
The moment caught and held, stretched between what they wanted and who they were, between what was right and what was required. Revelation and fear held them breathless.
It was Lily who broke the spell. Protesting being sandwiched between adults, she pushed at her mother's shoulder in irritation and said, “Mama, down!”
Tom stepped back, Hannah dropped her gaze to the floor.
“It's bedtime, Lily,” she said softly, turning around to place her daughter in her crib.
Lily frowned at her. “No.”
“Yes.”
“Where Josh?” she demanded, standing up at the railing. “Me want Josh.”
Hannah brushed Lily's fine gold hair back and bent to kiss her forehead. “Me, too, sweetheart.”
Tom stepped around to the end of the crib, curling his hands around the corner posts, too aware that he preferred the feel of Hannah in his arms. He couldn't bring himself to admit that was a mistake. Instead of trying, he changed the subject.
“Can I make a suggestion?” he said. “Do an interview.”
Hannah looked up at him, puzzled. “What?”
“I know everyone is clamoring for an exclusive with you, and I know you don't want to do it, but I think it would be good for yo
u. Pick the show with the biggest ratings and go on. Tell America what you told me—how you feel, how difficult it is to deal with the guilt, what you believe you did wrong, what you would change if you could have that night back.”
Hannah shot him a look. “I thought confession was sacrosanct.”
“Think of it as penance if you want. The point is that maybe by doing this you'll make someone else think twice. You can't have that night back, but you might be able to prevent someone else from having to go through this hell.”
Hannah looked down at her daughter, who now lay curled on her side on flannel sheets printed with images of Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck. She would give her own life to protect this precious little one. Such was the bond between mother and child. If she could help another mother, save another child, would that serve as payment for the mistakes she had made?
“I'll think about it.” She looked up at Father Tom, at his strong, handsome face and his kind blue eyes. Her heart beat a little too hard. “Thank you. I—a—”
The words didn't form, which was probably just as well. Better for him not to know what she was feeling; it would only make things difficult, and she didn't want to lose his friendship.
“Thanks.”
He nodded and moved away from the crib, sliding his hands into his pockets. “I should go. And you should try to rest.”
“I'll try.”
“Promise?” he asked, raising his brows at her as she walked him to the bedroom door.
Her mouth curved. “I promise to try.”
“I'll take what I can get. You stay here with Lily; I can find my own way out. You know where to find me if you need me.”
She nodded and he turned away before he could say something they would both regret. She didn't have to know the depth of his feelings; only that he cared and was there for her. The rest couldn't matter.
Outside, the night was so cold it seemed that anything touched would shatter. Like a heart. He dismissed the analogy as foolhardy and tried to concentrate on something priestly as he coaxed his truck to start. Lines from the Lord's Prayer scrolled through his head. Lead us not into temptation . . . deliver us from evil . . .