Beyond Summer

by Lisa Wingate

  I looked back at the picture. That was where I knew him from. The commercials. Hey, that’s Paul Lambert. The Postman, Cody’d said, when he caught one of the ads during some fishing show. Dadgum, he got old. Man, I remember when my dad thought the Postman was gonna win the Super Bowl single-handed. He was a beast, big-time. Guess that’s where you end up after six consecutive losing seasons and a knee injury—wearing a Superman suit and hocking houses.

  I didn’t think a thing about it at the time, but now the story seemed like it mattered. Grabbing the stack of printer papers, I flipped through them, looking for the second page, but it wasn’t there.

  I found it under the sofa, mounded over a toy police car. Snatching the paper, I held it to the light.

  . . . now wish to question Lambert in regard to his involvement with Rosburten and his personal financial stake in the floundering theme park. At the time of Lambert’s disappearance, his Highland Park home, valued at over $4 million, was in the final stages of foreclosure. Prior to recent events, Lambert, years past his football career, remained a darling of Dallas events and charity gatherings. Along with daughter Tamara, Lambert won last year’s Celebrity Scramble Golf Tournament, but apparently, for Lambert, the good life turned sour. Currently, he is suspected of having fled the country. Sources at the DA’s office declined further comment. . . .

  I set down the paper, my head reeling. Tamara . . . Tam . . . Tam Lambert. Paul Lambert wasn’t out of the country; he was right across the street from my house. All this time, I thought Tam was like me. I thought we were friends, but she was lying about everything. Even when the questions about Householders came up, she never said a word. She never told me her father was involved. How could she keep that secret, especially after the visit to the mission, after we talked about the families who’d lost their houses? How could she sit there and quietly listen while I blabbered on about Householders?

  Why would she do that? Why wouldn’t she tell me who she was? Why wouldn’t she say something?

  Because she knew. Because she knew the truth about Householders. She’d been pretending the whole time—pretending to be just like us, pretending to be interested in the reading class, pretending to be my friend. She was using us the same way she was using Red Bird Lane. This was a place to hide out—the last spot anyone would think to look for her and her family. She was a rich girl, Daddy’s little princess, slummin’ in the low-rent district until Daddy figured out how to buy his way out of his problems, like rich people always did. They didn’t have a clue what it was like for the rest of us, how it’d feel to lose your house and have no place left to go. For them, there was always a soft spot to land.

  The truth tasted hot and sour in my throat. I wanted to walk across the street right now, even though it wasn’t even five thirty in the morning. I wanted to pound on the door, grab Tam, Barbie, and Paul, “the Postman,” and make them tell me what they knew. Until I’d pulled the article from under the couch, Householders’d been just some giant in the fog, huge and greedy and hard to make out. Now Householders was living right across the street. Now it had a face, and a name.

  I stood up and crossed the room, my legs stiff as ax handles. Little sparks of light swirled in front of my eyes as I yanked open the door and reached for the key to unlock the burglar bars. I stopped without turning it, stood with my fingers wrapped around the bars, squeezing tighter and tighter. The twisted metal felt cool under my palm, sharp and hard. I laid my forehead against the bars, let my eyes close for a minute as the morning dew dripped onto my skin. I’d stood up too quick. That was all it was.

  My stomach cramped and gurgled up my throat. Something wasn’t right. Something didn’t feel . . .

  There was a sound outside, a rustle in the bushes, then mulch crunching in the flower bed. A muffled cough drifted on the air.

  Someone was out there.

  Backing away from the door, I pushed it silently closed, turned the lock, stood with my heart hammering and my hand pushed against the wood. What now? What next? Was someone trying to break into the boys’ bedroom?

  Grabbing the phone, I moved silently down the hall, listening for the normal sounds, for anything that didn’t belong. Benji was moving in his sleep, making the bedsprings squeak, whispering to the people in his dreams. Sssshhh, I thought. Ssshhhh. Ahead, the glow from the porch lights shone through the boys’ bedroom, into the hall. A shadow moved in the corner of the light, then backed away. Who was there?

  A weapon. I needed something to protect the boys if an intruder was already in the house.

  My mind spun, floundered, hesitated. Cody’s guns. I could get one of Cody’s guns. But the guns were hidden on the top shelf of the closet, secured with trigger guards, unloaded. The baseball bat was in the front room. There wasn’t time. I had to think of something quick. Think. Think of something.

  Rushing into our bedroom, I tripped over the rug and landed against the bed. Something metal slid underneath. Cody’s golf club—the old pitching wedge he used for knocking the heads off dandelions in the yard. Grabbing it, I stood up. My head reeled, and I reached for the dresser, steadied myself. Moving through the darkness, I tried to shake off another shower of floating sparks. I had to get to the boys’ room.

  Blood pounded in my ears. Above the noise, I heard Benji whispering, then the light groan of a loose floorboard, the click of something springing loose—the window lock? I ran the last few feet, burst from the darkness of the hall into the boys’ room.

  Kneeling in the window seat in his pajamas, Benji gasped, then jerked upright, his hands letting go of the wooden frame, leaving the window open several inches. In the dim light, his eyes were round and black and afraid—not afraid of what was outside. Afraid of me.

  “Benji, what are you . . .” My gaze went past him to a movement outside, a swirl of gray hair, a face that was just a shadow, a hand yanking back through the torn corner of the screen, leaving something behind. “Wha . . . Sesay?” Swallowing the bomb blast of adrenaline inside me, I crossed the room. “What are you do . . .” I stopped a few feet from the window seat, my eyes adjusting until I could make out the items on the sill. A book, a stuffed bunny from Benji’s Easter basket last year. Something was dangling from Benji’s hand—a piece of red string. A carved rabbit lay huddled in his palm like it was hiding.

  I’d never seen it before. It hadn’t been anywhere in the house before this moment.

  This one was larger than the others. . . .

  “It was you!” I exploded. Shaking the golf club at the shadow person in the window, I yanked Benji away, spun him around, and dropped him on the bed, out of reach.

  “Mamaaa!” he sobbed. In the other bed, Ty jerked in his sleep and started to awaken.

  “Be quiet! Don’t move!” I hissed, turning toward the window again. Lights whirled around my head as I raised the club and shook it. My voice felt far away. “It was you all along! Stalking our house, spying on us, giving things to my kids. Sneaking around our yard like a . . . like a . . . a . . .” I lowered the club, gripped the wall. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. “You can’t . . . You’re not supposed to be here; do you hear me? I’m calling the police. Don’t you ever come back here. You stay away from my kids. You stay away from my . . . my . . .” I felt myself sinking, falling, felt something stab inside me, a white-hot searing pain. Suddenly there was no air in the room. I couldn’t breathe. Everything was spinning. I gripped the wall tighter, gasped, heard air leave my mouth in a soft cry. Pain shot through me as my head collided with the window seat, and then I felt myself drifting, leaving the room, then coming back, then leaving the room again.

  I heard voices but they seemed far away—too far off to bother with. I closed my eyes tighter and tried not to listen. I was so tired. My body felt like someone had filled it with lead.

  Foggy realities came and went, swam in my mind like pieces of a movie playing out of focus—sharp pain, Benjamin yelling my name . . . Tam was there, and Elsie. “Don’t worry, hon. The pa
ramedics are here,” Elsie said, and stroked my hair.

  “She’s in here!” I heard Tam’s voice, and then Ty crying. He was on the bed, Sesay holding his hand.

  There was a paramedic—a man with soft brown eyes. He lowered a mask over my face. My boys, I tried to say. I can’t leave my boys.

  Something stabbed me in the stomach again, and I heard a sharp cry, felt it inside my head.

  Then the quiet swelled and swallowed me, peaceful, painless, dark. It seemed like a long time before the voices came back. They were louder now. They were asking me to wake up. They were calling my name. Calling me over and over and over. I wanted to tell them to stop.

  I opened my eyes, and everything spun. A room. A hospital room. The kind with just a curtain around it. A recovery room. White and stainless steel. I could hear other people nearby.

  “Hey, there. Welcome back.” Tam leaned close. I dimly felt her holding my hand, rubbing it between hers.

  I closed my eyes again, too out of it to care.

  “Come on, now. Wake up,” a deeper voice insisted. I blinked once, twice, three times, making out the image of a nurse. “Come on, now. Come on, Shasta. It’s all over, hon. It’s okay. You need to wake up for me now.”

  I nodded slowly, tried to say, I’m awake, but my lips dragged on my teeth and my throat felt like someone had packed it in cotton. “What happened?” came out a little better—well enough that the nurse understood, or else she guessed.

  “You had a close call.” Her voice was sympathetic, kind yet clinical. “Your doctor will be here in a little while.”

  An ache tugged somewhere deep inside me. I remembered the pain earlier, the way it was sharp and sudden. “The baby?” I whispered. My throat tightened around the words.

  “Ssshhh,” Tam whispered.

  “The doctor’ll be here in a little while,” the nurse promised again. They looked at each other over the top of me, their mouths sad, narrow, grim.

  Tears pushed into my eyes. “I need . . . I need to. . . .” The sentence cracked open. I swallowed the ragged edges of it. “. . . to know.”

  The nurse’s nostrils flared and contracted. She took my other hand, her fingers a sticky latex cage. “The pregnancy was ectopic, sweetie. Tubal? You might have heard it said that way before. Dr. Naduna was able to take care of it laparoscopically. You’re very fortunate to have been brought in when you were. You came close to a rupture of the Fallopian tube, and those can be fatal. You’ll have some soreness for a few days, but you’re going to be as good as new. Dr. Naduna can answer any other questions you might have.”

  Tam’s head tilted to one side. She touched my shoulder, massaging in the bad news.

  “But the baby,” I whispered, trying to sort things out in my mind. Nothing made sense.

  The nurse rubbed my fingers between her latex hands. “I know it’s hard. I can send a counselor in, if you want.”

  “The baby,” I whispered again. My daughter. My baby girl. Brenna. In my mind, she already had a name.

  The nurse’s face blurred, her eyes and nose running together behind a sea of moisture. “Honey, the pregnancy wasn’t viable. It never was. A tubal pregnancy doesn’t have room to develop. It’s just a . . . mistake nature makes sometimes. In cases when it’s caught early, it’s likely not to adversely affect fertility in the future. . . .”

  I closed my eyes, tried to shut out her words, felt tears drip down my cheeks, heard someone pull a Kleenex from a box, felt it touch my cheek.

  Brenna, my daughter. Our baby girl.

  Just a mistake nature makes sometimes . . .

  I cried until the darkness swallowed me again, until my mind was quiet. When I woke, someone was sitting by the bed. My throat hurt, and she offered me a sip of water from a cup on the nightstand. I lay there thinking, remembering, hearing the nurse’s words all over again until my vision cleared, and I saw who was sitting with me.

  “Dell?” I whispered, wondering if I was dreaming or if she was really there. Homesickness crashed over me. Seeing her made me think of my brother, and Mama. Did they know what’d happened last night? Was Mama here? I looked around the room, but Dell and I were alone.

  “Hey.” Smiling, she touched my cheek with the backs of her fingers. “I just got here. Your friend stepped out.”

  “The . . . boys?” I croaked, still trying to string together more than two words at a time.

  Dell set the cup back on the table, her dark, silky hair falling over her shoulder and brushing the sheet. She was still beautiful. She looked more grown-up than I remembered. “Benji and Ty are at home. Your neighbors are watching them. When I got to your house, they told me what had happened.” Her lips pursed and trembled. “I’m sorry I didn’t come on straight from the airport yesterday. I could’ve been there last night. You had a close call.”

  I swallowed hard, nodded, blinked. My eyelids felt like sandpaper. Mama wasn’t here. If she was here, she’d’ve either been with the boys or in the room with me. She wouldn’t let Dell or anybody else take charge.

  “The doctor came by. He said they’d discharge you around two. We need a phone number to get in touch with Cody, all right? He should be here with you.” She gave me a concerned look that let me know Tam had told her I was keeping the pregnancy a secret.

  My mind raced ahead, clumsy and sluggish, tripping over itself. Maybe it was better that this had happened while Cody was gone.

  Nobody would ever have to know. . . .

  I wished Dell didn’t know either. . . .

  Would she be willing to keep the secret?

  I swallowed hard, croaked out, “I don’t want to call Cody. I don’t want to call anybody.”

  Dell’s eyes went wide—dark circles surrounded by white until her eyebrows came down over them. Her head tilted to one side. “We have to call him, Shasta. He needs to know.”

  “I’m fine. The nurse said it’s . . . no big deal.” I swallowed hard, no big deal burning on the way down.

  “Shas,” Dell said softly, stroking my hair in a way that reminded me of Mama. I wanted my mother so bad it hurt. I wanted Mama to promise me that everything would be all right. “You can’t keep it a secret.” She fussed with the sheet, and I noticed there was a ring on her finger—an engagement ring.

  I grabbed the chance to change the subject to something less painful. I didn’t want to talk about the baby, or Cody, or what’d happened. I couldn’t. “Is that what I think it is?” I pointed to the ring, and Dell nodded. All of a sudden, her visit and my brother’s traveling to Juilliard to help her with her project made sense. He wasn’t there to help her with a project—he was giving her a ring. She was headed to Oklahoma after her conference so they could tell everyone they were engaged. She’d probably planned to spring the news on me when she came to my house. I’d screwed that up along with everything else.

  Dell’s lips twitched, like she thought it’d be wrong to look too happy right now. I stared at the ring and tried to smile, and had the fleeting thought that, when Cody saw that ring, he’d feel bad. He’d always wanted to buy me a ring like that one. “It’s really pretty,” I choked out. “When did you guys decide?”

  Dell stared at her hand, her face glowing. “A couple months ago, when Jace flew up for our spring concert. We wanted to keep it a secret until I could come down, so we could tell Jace’s kids first.”

  “They’ll be thrilled out of their minds.” Who wouldn’t be? For a stepmother, my niece and nephew were getting a girl who did everything right—college, dating, marriage, maybe a baby or two sometime in the future. All in the right order. Completely unlike Aunt Shasta’s screwed-up life.

  At that moment I hated Dell, my future sister-in-law, even though I loved her.

  But I knew it wasn’t her I hated; it was myself. I couldn’t do anything the way it was supposed to be done. Now I couldn’t even get pregnant right.

  I let my head sink against the pillow. “Give Willie and Autumn a kiss for me when you see them.” My voice was scratch
y, the words warped by the lump in my throat. “Tell my brother I said he did a good job.”

  Dell’s smile fell flat. “Shasta, your mom and Jace are probably on their way here by now.” She shot a guilty look at the door, like she expected my mother to show up any minute.

  The pulse monitor did a rapid-fire leap. The fog burned from my mind and a desperate feeling replaced it. “Mama knows what happened?” Suddenly, everything was crashing down at once, and I couldn’t stop it.

  Dell’s forehead knotted. “I had to call somebody. Your neighbors didn’t have any phone numbers for your family. They’d left messages trying to track Cody down through the police department, but it’s a big place, and only the night shift people were there. I thought your mom or Jace might know a faster way of getting in touch with Cody.”

  A fresh batch of tears stung my eyes. “Tell them not to come. I don’t want them here.”

  Dell’s mouth hung open. “Shasta, why in the world not?”

  The tangle of emotions inside me broke loose and threads ran everywhere. “It’s just . . . the house is . . . Everything is . . . It’s wrong. I messed up everything. I don’t want Mama to see the house the way it is, and the . . . the plaster’s all cracked in the boys’ room. . . and the pictures are on the . . . on the floor. . . . and I didn’t get the quilts . . . on the red wall. I don’t want everyone to see it . . . to see it like . . . this way. I don’t want them to see my house like this, and . . .” I threw my hands over my face. I wasn’t making any sense.

  Dell slipped her arms around me, her head resting over mine. “Shasta, they don’t care what your house looks like. They just want to be here for you.” I heard Tam come back into the room and ask what was wrong. Dell’s chin moved as she mouthed something. I didn’t want to guess what they might be saying without saying anything. I was too tired to care. My mind and body and soul were worn to the core.

  I couldn’t do anything but close my eyes and mourn for the baby girl who was real whether the doctors called her viable or not. I couldn’t imagine why, when we were in danger of losing everything else, God would take her away from us, too. I’d always been taught to believe that He had a plan, that He knew what was best, that everything worked out for our good.