But Josh straightened and glared at me with eyes that already knew far too much. He looked older than he had only a dozen days earlier, and with all that had happened, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. He pointed at me with his splinted hand. “Stop treating me like a kid. My mom is an addict. She’s in a rehab center. I almost drowned. My dad faked his death and now he’s really dead, and he died saving me. If my father wrote that paper, I should be able to read it.”
His voice choked a few times along the way, but that last sentence was firm.
And he was right. “Okay.”
We moved into the living room. Josh and Landon sat together on the couch. I handed Josh the letter and stood to one side, watching his face as he read.
He stared at the page long after he must have finished. Slow tears rolled down his face. I reached toward him to give him a hug, but he pulled away in a jerking movement. He handed the sheet of paper to Landon for him to read it.
I went to the kitchen and found some tissues, handed Josh one and took a few for myself.
Damn you, Sawyer. Suicide or unintended drowning, dead or simply skilled at creating another disappearance—the details didn’t matter. He’d run away yet again. Abandoned his son for a second time.
I wanted to sit down with Sawyer and talk with him. I wanted to tell him that despite his mistakes, I understood. I wanted to tell him there were reasons to stay. I’d believed all those years he was truly gone, but now that I’d found him alive, I didn’t want him gone again.
I swallowed a lump of bitter impatience. Come off it, Bryn. Move on. That story had finished long ago.
Josh sat, no longer crying, staring out the window, Tellico curled at his feet.
Landon set down the paper. “A sad letter. He sounds haunted.”
An understatement. Restless, I went back to the kitchen and put some water on the stove. Dug out teabags. Isn’t that what you were supposed to do in a crisis? Brew some tea? I waited for the water to come to a boil, trying to give Josh time to pull himself together. I carried two steaming mugs back to the couch and handed one to each of them. Landon nodded his thanks.
Josh’s eyes were red, and he was still sniffling.
“Sorry, no coffee. But I put in double honey.”
“That won’t help.”
“You’re right. But it won’t hurt.”
He gave me a small tight smile, as if it was a betrayal that leaked out despite himself. He set the mug aside without trying it. “He wanted to die.”
“Yes.”
“Even if I hadn’t taken that kayak. Gotten trapped. He’d still be dead now?”
I hesitated, unsure how much of my uncertainty about Sawyer’s fate I should share. “I think he would be gone now, regardless of what you’d done.”
Josh closed his eyes for a long moment.
Landon reached over and squeezed Josh’s shoulder. “None of this is your fault. None of it. He had already made up his mind—the letter makes that clear—and it looks like when the opportunity came on the river, he took it.”
Josh’s face crumpled, he folded inward, and his tears started to flow in earnest.
My heart twisted. I could find no words of comfort. I sat on the couch, wrapped my arms around him, and held on tight. He clung to me for long minutes, his fingers digging in hard, as if their fierce grip would keep him from slipping away into the unknown. I tried to send him calmness and support, wishing I had more of it to offer, and his breathing gradually slowed to match mine.
He gave a long shuddering sigh. “It’s not fair. I find my dad, and he’s a thief and a liar. I want to get to know him, and I want to scream at him, and I’ll never get the chance to do either one.”
I wanted to change things for him. Protect him somehow from all of it. But it was far too late for that. “You’re right. It’s not fair.”
He pulled back and looked at me, his face red and blotchy. “It sucks.” He thought for a moment and grasped at the one thing we had some control over. “We need to go see Mom. I was supposed to take care of her, and we can’t even find her. That’s not fair either.”
“It’s not your job to take care of your mother.”
He shook his head, defiant. “If I don’t, no one else will.”
Nothing in his life so far had led him to believe Del could take care of herself, that was for sure. “We’ll finish things here, and then we’ll go to this rehab center and find out what the story is. Fair enough?”
My voice sounded calm and steady, but my heart was going triple time. Landon, Sawyer, Del, Josh—my head churned—my feelings tumbled—it was all too much at once.
Josh nodded, but Landon gave him a worried glance before turning to me. “If it will help, I can go with you.”
“Yes. Please. I’d like to have you there.” I was dreading this visit. I could have gone out to look for Del the day before, when Josh was still in the hospital, but I’d avoided it. The luxury of having someone to back me up was too great an opportunity to pass up. “Let me pull things together in Sawyer’s office, and then we can drive back into town.”
I went to the desk to repack Del’s belongings, and Landon came with me. I stowed away the full pill bottles. “I wish I knew what to do with this stuff. The sensible thing would be to turn it all over to the police, but I don’t want to be the cause of Del getting arrested or landing in jail. Hopefully, I’ll know what to do after I see her.”
“You’ve got some way of reaching Carl?”
“I’m supposed to call him tomorrow morning to meet his revised deadline. At least he has no clue where we are at the moment, and that’s been a relief.”
I zipped closed the last compartment on Del’s pocketbook. “Del first. Then we can deal with Carl. Let’s head out.”
I grabbed the pocketbook, the folder of information, and the garbage. I flipped off all the lights. The house had felt lived-in when we arrived, but after reading Sawyer’s letter, it looked sad and abandoned. We headed outside. The front door closed behind us with a solid thunk that resonated in my chest. I was leaving Sawyer’s house, but it felt like it was Sawyer himself I was leaving behind.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Josh
We drove down the mountain from Dad’s place, through the town’s streets, and up the other side of the valley to get to the rehab center where Mom was living. I expected either a hospital or a prison and dreaded seeing her there, but it turned out to be a big mansion with long wings of windows and one of those driveways that swoop right in front of the door. It sat high up on the mountainside, looking down toward Aspen.
Lots of flowers grew everywhere, shining in bright colors and smelling like one of Mom’s perfumes. Two big wooden doors were in the front of the building, like something a butler would open in the movies. Everything was fancy, peaceful, and quiet, but none of it made me feel any better.
We left Tellico in the truck with the windows down and climbed up the long front stairs. No butler—we just opened the door and went right in. Bryn talked to a lady at a desk in front, then we waited in big chairs that were crowded with little pillows. After a while Bryn went back into an office, and Landon and I waited.
“You okay?” he asked.
I was getting tired of that question. I nodded because what could I say? I just wanted to see Mom and find out when I could take her home. Everything would be better when we got back to the apartment. We’d be back to our own schedule and our own food, and maybe Carl would leave her alone and maybe her boss at Kroger would even let her come back to work. Things would all go back the way they used to be.
We waited and waited. No TV or anything, just quiet, with men and women down the hall talking in soft voices so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. My arm itched under my splint, my head hurt, and I spun Mom’s bracelet around and around on my wrist. A bracelet for luck. I needed all the luck I could get.
Bryn finally came back, but she sat down to wait some more. “She’s here. They’re bringing her up so we c
an talk to her in private. It took a while because the director called the police to confirm Sawyer’s death. Fortunately, Sawyer had put my name on a list authorizing medical information, or who knows what we would have had to do to see her.”
Landon reached over and took her hand, and Bryn let him hold it without even seeming to notice. “How is she?” he asked. It was the question I’d been afraid to ask out loud.
Bryn frowned. “I’m not sure. He just focused on who we were; what right we had to see her. Said the doctor would meet us to discuss specifics.”
We sat. Not quite so long this time, and then a woman wearing bright yellow scrubs came in. “Dr. Wilson will be available shortly. Follow me.”
She led us to a room that looked like someone’s living room on a TV show, with a fireplace and a couch and a coffee table. At the far end of the room, Mom was sitting in a big cushy armchair. She looked way better than I expected. Not bruised or wrapped in bandages or with crutches or anything.
I ran toward her.
“Mom.” It came out with a jerk, sounding like I’d tripped over something, because closer up I could tell something was seriously off.
This was Mom and not-Mom. She wore a thick blue robe and blue slippers, but that wasn’t the problem. She looked way too skinny and her face wasn’t quite the right color, but that wasn’t it either. It was her eyes. They were looking right at me, but they didn’t seem to see me standing there.
“Hello.” Her voice sounded rusty, and it was like she was saying hello to a stranger. A gasp came from Bryn behind me, but I didn’t try to turn around and look.
“Mom, it’s me. Josh. We found you, but it was really hard, and Dad wasn’t really dead, but now he is, and …” I thought she could probably hear me, but that nothing look on her face didn’t change.
I stopped talking and sat down on the soft carpet at her feet, the way Tellico always did when he knew I needed help. I reached up and took her hand, which was cold and sort of floppy. She let me hold it, but she didn’t squeeze back. Her fingers rested on the stiff lanyard bracelet on my wrist, but she didn’t seem to notice that either. “It’s okay, Mom. I’m right here.”
I was there. But she wasn’t.
I tried to breathe slow, the air as thick as syrup. My chest hurt bad like I was back in the river again, pinned down, unable to move, and trying not to drown. Trapped. But this time no one was there to rescue me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bryn
I stared at the fixed, static face of my sister and clutched Landon’s arm, too dismayed to move any farther into the room. “My god. I thought I knew what to expect, but this …”
I kept my voice down, but Josh was so focused on his mother, he would have been oblivious to anything short of an explosion. I had no worries Del might overhear—she didn’t look capable of paying attention to anything going on around her.
The memories I’d held close to my heart for years rushed in, the images I took out and revisited on a regular basis. Del, stealing my favorite sweater in middle school and cutting it into postage stamp–sized pieces that she scattered around my bedroom. Del, spreading lies about me in high school, claiming I cheated on tests to get my good grades. Del, blaming me whenever my parents noticed cash missing from their wallets. Most of all, Del and the too-smug look on her face as she coolly informed me she’d slept with my fiancé and gotten pregnant as a result.
But Josh had brought other memories to the surface—that day of the tea party; Del and the care she took with that scrawny cat. And standing in that rehab center, looking at what was left of my sister, another memory pushed the others aside.
I was ten and Del was eight when our elementary school sponsored a fall fund-raising event at a park just outside town. There were games and food and carnival rides that should have kept us entertained, but the biggest attraction was a broad stream that ran through one edge of the park. The older kids dared each other to cross using widely spaced rocks as stepstones, and we younger ones gathered on shore to cheer the friends who succeeded and laugh at those who got soaked.
I hung back, analyzing the best path across, taking careful note of the boulders that rocked unsteadily, debating whether I dared to join in and give it a try.
Del didn’t hesitate, moving quickly to the edge of the stream before I could stop her. She was a foot shorter than anyone else who had tried to cross, but she jumped from one rock to the next with a cat’s grace, landing surefooted on even the most unstable stones. In the middle of the stream, where the current was deep and the leap was long, she threw her arms wide and stretched for the landing. In that instant, her face intent and her hair flying, she was suspended in mid-air above the water and haloed by sunlight. In that instant, years before she discovered boys and drugs and the knack of lying to get her own way, Del was totally, awesomely, breathtakingly alive.
My sister.
This empty husk of a person who sat so still in her robe in front of me bore no resemblance to that joyous child. A scalding pain radiated through my belly and left me gasping, the loss eating into my core like acid. It caught me off guard. No matter how bad things had gotten between us, a small unacknowledged part of me must have harbored a hope of reclaiming some version of sisterhood. A hope that now seemed absurdly naïve.
I stood there, shaking, and a woman with a stethoscope hanging around her neck came in behind us. She glanced at Josh, then gestured me toward the door. Landon and I followed her into the hallway, where I could look back and see Josh, still kneeling beside his mother. He hadn’t been present when Sawyer described the full seriousness of Del’s condition, and now that I’d seen her, I regretted not preparing him better for what he found here. I’d doubted Sawyer’s honesty. Hadn’t believed in the extent of this damage.
“What happened to her?” My voice sounded shriller than I liked. Sawyer had said drugs, but this …
Landon slipped his arm around my waist, and I leaned into him, more off balance from this visit than from anything else that had happened in the past crazy week.
The doctor held out a hand for each of us to shake. “I’m Dr. Wilson.” She was tiny and birdlike, with sharp, quick movements and a doctor-in-a-hurry attitude that implied we were taking up valuable time. “You’re Ms. Whitman’s sister?”
I nodded, and she turned to Landon. “And you are?”
“A friend of the family.” Landon’s arm tightened around me.
Dr. Wilson nodded. “I’m sorry I didn’t get the opportunity to talk to you before you saw her. Did she recognize you at all? Or show any response to her son?”
“No. Nothing. She said hello, but she didn’t even look at us.”
She frowned and tapped a quick note into the iPad she carried. “I had hoped seeing people she knew would reach her. But even her son …” She shook her head.
For a moment she seemed genuinely saddened by the situation, but that was nothing compared to my horror. I’d come to Colorado prepared to lecture. Prepared to spew out anger and recriminations. Possibly prepared to swoop in and fix whatever problem existed. This was far worse than anything I’d imagined.
The doctor reorganized her face, banishing any sympathy, and became briskly professional again. “You asked what happened. The short version is that Ms. Whitman lost consciousness and stopped breathing. Her husband attempted to revive her with CPR, but it wasn’t until an ambulance arrived and Narcan was administered that respiration resumed. Her blood tests showed high concentrations of fentanyl, cocaine, and alcohol, and that combination severely depresses the respiratory system. Despite aggressive therapy, she stopped breathing twice after admission that first night and had to be resuscitated each time.”
She sounded like she was reading aloud, but she hadn’t consulted her notes. “Unfortunately, loss of oxygen like this can cause significant brain damage, and in the days that followed her admission, it became clear that had happened in your sister’s case.”
I looked back again at Josh. He was still clinging
to Del’s hand, but his head had dropped forward to rest against her knee. She gazed across the room without the smallest flicker of emotion in her expression.
Dr. Wilson cleared her throat and went on. “Ms. Whitman was transferred here at her husband’s request following her initial hospital treatment.”
“What’s the prognosis?” I didn’t want to face the answer, but I had to know.
The doctor frowned. “Difficult to say. Brain injury is hard to predict, and we can sometimes see gradual improvement over time.” My hopes soared, and she must have seen it in my face, because she hurried to squash my optimism. “With this level of severity, however, I have to be very cautious. It’s possible her condition as she is now is the best we can expect.”
Alive but not living.
Dr. Wilson cleared her throat again, and I tried to focus on her words. “She’s very compliant and easy to work with, but she takes no initiative in even the smallest tasks and is almost completely nonverbal. Her caregivers dress her, feed her, remind her of bathroom needs. She often becomes confused at night, wandering the halls when she was permitted to do so. We’ve had to place her in a secure ward.”
“You’re saying she could need this level of care … forever?”
“I’m sorry.”
Forever. The word looped in my head. No Del to fuss at. No Del to take home. No Del to get into trouble anymore. Worst of all, no Del to take care of Josh. I buried my head in Landon’s shoulder, trying to keep from losing it, and he pulled me in for a long hug.
When I finally straightened, I was somewhat surprised to find Dr. Wilson still standing there, scrolling through her iPad screen.
Forever brought with it some all too real practical considerations. I looked around at the thick carpet, the tasteful paintings, the ornate light fixtures. The entire facility reeked of money and lots of it. Doctors, nurses, caregiving attendants. Secure wards, drawing rooms, immaculate gardens. I couldn’t even imagine how much all this cost, but it was way out of Del’s budget. And mine.
Over the Falls Page 24