“You do realize we could lose our car insurance.”
It took her a moment, but when Libby realized Beck was making a joke about her speeding, she laughed, letting the lightness of the moment carry her past the grief that would still come at the thought of the children they could never have.
After they finished dinner and did the dishes, Libby thought they would drive the four-wheeler to the house site. But Beck had other ideas. She was hanging the dish towel over the oven-door handle when he came up behind her, encircling her with his arms.
She leaned against him. “What are you doing?”
“Thinking about something better for dessert than that fancy peach ice cream.” His breath stirred the fine hairs at her temple, raising a rash of warm, goosefleshed desire.
Libby turned in his embrace, and when he kissed her, she arched against him. It had been a while since they’d made love, long enough that the suspicion she’d believed she’d rid herself of years ago had returned, a demon that sat in a dark corner of her mind, and in unguarded moments, it would taunt her, asking: What if history is repeating itself? What if he’s cheating on you again? She hated having that voice in her head, hated the paranoia that gave life to her doubt. A marriage couldn’t work in an atmosphere of suspicion. Libby hadn’t needed the counselor they’d seen at the time of Beck’s betrayal to explain that to her. She hadn’t even needed the benefit of her own expertise in the field to know that taking Beck back meant her forgiveness of him had to be bone deep—soul deep—or it wouldn’t work.
That much was common sense.
She leaned back in his embrace, locking his gaze. “It’ll be dark soon—too dark to see the work they did getting ready for the slab pour tomorrow.”
“You said it was fine. That’s good enough.” He bent his head, kissing her again, sliding his hands up the bare lengths of her arms, making her shiver, making her ache with wanting him.
Together, they fumbled their way into the bedroom. They were like—not teenagers, but heated in the way of the much younger couple they’d once been, when their appetite for each other was fresh and . . . insatiable. The word darted through Libby’s mind, and it was ridiculous, but she wished she could stop time, hold on to this moment. Once out of their clothes, they lay down, facing each other. Libby ran her hand down Beck’s back and over the contour of his hip and buttock, warm and smooth beneath her palm.
She felt greedy with need, but he was in no mood to rush. His eyes were locked on hers as he trailed his fingertips along her hairline and cheek, tipping them from the edge of her jaw to the curve of her shoulder, the fullness of her breast, the dip of her waist. The rueful notion surfaced, as it often did now that she was in her fifties—soon to be sixty—that she’d gone soft. They both had, but she regretted more the changes in herself. It was useless. She knew that. And it wasn’t that she wanted to go back, to be again that feckless and often-silly, albeit slim, lithe girl Beck had married.
The girl he had met by accident when he found her sitting white-faced and shaken that day at the hospital, the day Helen had died.
People said three was a crowd, but when Libby and Ruth had met Helen at an SMU freshman mixer, they clicked. Somehow within minutes they’d been bent over laughing, finishing one another’s sentences. Within a short time, they were sharing a suite. Helen was the jokester, Ruth was her straight man, and Libby their audience. But the hilarity had ended on one awful day before Christmas break their junior year. Ruth, who to this day had never married, had been out with her current boyfriend, one in a long line, leaving Libby to play both roles, that of straight man and spectator. She’d been the one laughing when Helen, mugging for the camera—Libby was also filming—wound a string of twinkle lights loosely around her head, climbed onto a wobbly bar stool, and while holding a tape dispenser in one hand, reached across the top of the doorway with her other hand, lost her balance and fell, cracking her head on a desk corner. At first, she’d sworn she was fine, but when a fierce headache hours later was followed by nausea and rounds of vomiting, Libby overrode her objections and called an ambulance. Too late. Within hours of reaching the hospital, after suffering a massive stroke, Helen died.
Libby was leaning against the wall outside the triage room when Beck approached her. He’d come up from Houston to visit a client who’d had surgery, and passing Libby in the hallway, he’d thought she was the patient. When she said no and in a broken voice explained why she was there, he’d sat her down gently in the ER waiting room and brought her a paper cup filled with cool water. He found tissues, called Ruth, and stayed until she came. He’d supported them both then.
He was so steady and sure, so quietly brilliant and ordinarily happy, that she’d been astonished to hear, prior to meeting his parents in a Denny’s restaurant in downtown Houston, that they were avid consumers of welfare and food stamps and mostly survived on liquor and lottery tickets and pie in the sky. They had died within eleven months of each other, Beck’s father of cirrhosis and his mother of hepatitis, a few years after Libby and Beck married.
He touched her temple now. “Where are you?” he asked, and she smiled.
“Thinking how lucky I am,” she whispered.
Libby was dreaming, and in her dream she heard a coyote howl. She recognized the monotonous two-note song of crickets, the chirr of frogs, the whishing of the night wind. But there was another sound, one that didn’t seem to belong. It needled at her consciousness. But it was the light that woke her, that sent the dream scuttling behind a door in her mind. She rose on one elbow, blinking when the room was suddenly plunged into blackness again. She could barely make out the dresser’s edge, and except for the even draw of Beck’s breath to anchor her, she might have thought she was still asleep.
But now light flashed once more over the walls, dousing the room in an eerie glow. Heart tapping, she tossed aside the covers, getting up, but whatever the source was, it was gone by the time she reached the open window. Still, she could hear something in the distance. An engine? Libby glanced at Beck; he hadn’t moved. She didn’t want to wake him; he was exhausted. She thought of the recent vandalism that Sergeant Huckabee had mentioned and of Ricky Burrows, the guy on Augie’s crew whose truck door had been badly keyed here on her property.
Ricky had been pissed. He’d said he didn’t have any liability insurance on the truck and couldn’t afford to get the damage repaired. He’d looked after the cop, leaving in his shiny near-new squad car that day, and he’d said, “Fucking kids, my ass,” under his breath, but he’d meant her to hear, Libby thought. He’d kicked his truck tire. “I’ll be driving this piece of shit like this till I die.”
Libby had felt bad for him. He was a young guy, midtwenties to early thirties, maybe. Thin, with a wary, hurt look in his eyes, like a stray dog that had been abused. He’d come to Texas from Colorado, Augie had told her, looking to make a fresh start. He was a hard worker, down on his luck.
Likely going nowhere, Libby thought now. She bet the cop wouldn’t have been so cavalier that day if it had been her Lexus that had gotten keyed. It made her squirm inside. It made her think of words like entitlement and privilege. Maybe if she were to go to the Greeley police department and ask them, they would investigate the matter, since the police in Wyatt didn’t seem to care. Or maybe, if she asked him personally, Sergeant Huckabee would look into it.
When he’d stopped her, he’d given the impression that he was thorough and professional, that he did care. She thought of how he’d driven up behind her and lingered there after they’d both left the road’s shoulder. She hadn’t mentioned that to Beck because of how it had unnerved her. He’d gotten a radio call, obviously. That’s what Beck would say.
The light had disappeared; the room lay in near utter darkness. Libby went back to bed, crawling into it carefully so as not to wake Beck, spooning against him. He pulled her close, murmuring something, and she smiled, drifting. It was only in the subliminal regions of her brain that she registered it, what sounded like
a squeal, the same squeal the service gate made every time it was opened or shut.
Her last thought before sleep consumed her, though, was of those children, the ones who had been involved in that awful accident. She really was grateful to have been saved from that particular hell, at least. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like as a parent, getting that call in the middle of the night. But neither would she ever resolve the question of what was worse: losing a child or never having one.
5
Sandy’s parents returned to the ICU waiting area on the heels of the code-blue call, and they were there when the nurses burst through the ICU doors, three of them, racing alongside a gurney. One of the nurses rushed to where Sandy and her family were standing, rooted, terrified.
“Oh dear God,” Sandy heard someone say. Her mother, she thought.
Travis. It was Travis on the gurney. Something had happened to him, something worse . . . That was Sandy’s thought.
But no, the nurse stopped in front of her—KAREN, her name tag said—and her eyes were soft with pity, backed by the resignation that must go with her job. The delivery of bad news was inevitable in this place. Somebody had to do it. Sandy felt sorry for her.
“Jordan’s blood pressure,” Karen said. “It just suddenly nose-dived.”
Nose-dived. Sandy would remember that word. She would remember thinking it was what planes did, or stocks. A stock could take a nosedive. You could lose everything. She would remember hurrying beside the gurney bearing her son into an elevator. She would remember looking at him, her eyes fastened in horror on the only part of him that was visible: his head, his face—his swollen, disfigured, unrecognizable, precious, and once-beautiful face. She would remember Showalter, the two minutes’ worth of explanation he gave them in the surgical waiting area. She’d watched his mouth make the words, retaining only a few: blood in the gut, organ rupture, laceration. They would open Jordy, Showalter said.
Like a book, Sandy thought.
Emmett had been angry. “You said there was no sign of internal bleeding.”
Showalter had shrugged. Win some, lose some. He might have said it, for all Sandy knew.
It was midmorning now. Saturday? Sandy wasn’t sure. Hours had passed, or what felt like hours. “What is taking so long?” She spoke from where she stood, looking through the windowed door down the deserted corridor where they’d taken Jordy. “Why doesn’t someone tell us something?”
“Come and sit down.” Her mother patted the seat of the faux leather–upholstered chair beside her.
But Sandy couldn’t abandon her vigil to sit next to her mom, whose anguish, despite her aura of calm, was as palpable as Sandy’s own.
“Look, Emmett’s back. He’s brought coffee.”
Sandy turned as Emmett crossed the waiting area, bearing a small cardboard tray that held three paper cups. Steam rose from the rims. She didn’t want it, but she took the cup when he handed it to her, feeling the heat through its thin paper walls soak the cold palms of her hands. She met his gaze, but only for a moment. It was all she could stand; he looked so haggard, the fear she felt herself was so raw in his eyes. There was something else there, too, that she recognized—it was helplessness, and she knew how it felt, that they might lose their son, their child, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.
“I went by the ICU,” he said.
“How is Travis?” Sandy’s mom asked. “Any change?”
“No.” Emmett sat next to her. “They’re saying—Jenna says they keep telling her the same thing every hour: there’s no response, no brain activity.” He raised his cup, then lowered it without drinking.
Sandy resumed her post by the surgical-room doors. The image of her face, reflected in the glass, was as faint as that of a ghost’s. Her ears rang. Panic held her heart in its unyielding fist. Please please please. The word echoed through her brain as if begging were her last and only resort.
Her mother asked about Michelle. “Jenna said that right as they got her to the hospital, she had a stroke.”
“Yeah. Still in a coma, last we heard.” Emmett went on, saying even more useless things that didn’t matter, like the whole situation was god-awful and it shouldn’t have happened. As if that wasn’t already apparent, Sandy thought. She didn’t really care, wasn’t even really paying attention, not until he started in repeating the totally pointless what-ifs: “What if Michelle doesn’t make it? What if Travis—”
“Stop it!” Sandy wheeled, heedless when hot coffee sloshed over the rim of her cup, burning her fingers. “Stop awfulizing. I’m sick of it! It’s all bad enough.”
“We’ve got to face facts, babe.” Emmett’s look was resigned, bleak. “I’m trying to think, do we even know a lawyer? Jordy’s going to need representation, a good criminal attorney.”
Sandy stared at Emmett. If he lives. The words rose in her mind, but she pushed them down. She couldn’t say them, couldn’t let herself think them—not about Jordy, Travis, or Michelle.
“The cops in Wyatt had it in for Jordy even before this happened. God only knows what kind of charges they’ll lay on him now.”
“What do you mean, Emmett?” Sandy’s mother asked.
He looked contrite. He hadn’t meant to raise the issue, to spark her curiosity, because of where it would lead. Sandy could see the regret on his face. Her mother thought the world of Len Huckabee. The whole family—the entire town did. He’d done the hardest thing a cop ever had to do when he’d gone to Jenna’s door in San Antonio to tell her that her husband, his best friend and partner, had been shot and killed in the line of duty, trying to stop a couple of bank robbers—with Huck’s own gun. Jenna had blamed the crooks, but Huck had blamed himself, and ever since, he’d devoted himself to Jenna and Trav.
He was part of the family. That was how they thought about him. That was why Huck’s professional harassment of Jordy as a Wyatt police officer was so hard to understand. Jordy wouldn’t talk about it, and when Sandy and Emmett had questioned Huck, he’d acted as if he didn’t know what they were complaining about. Jordy broke the law, simple as that, Huck had said. You could have worse problems with him, trust me, he’d said.
“It’s nothing, Mom,” Sandy said now. “Huck’s given Jordy a hard time lately, stopping him for the least little thing.”
An elevator bell dinged faintly in the silence. The squeal of rubber soles approached and fell away. A voice over the PA system asked for a Dr. Van Zandt to come to the third-floor nurses’ station.
Emmett said, “Harvey saw Trav.”
Sandy set her coffee down untasted. “They let Daddy in?”
“Really?” Her mother’s surprise echoed Sandy’s own.
“Yeah, I guess because he’s Travis’s granddad. It was only for a minute. Harvey said it was hard. It shook him up.”
Sandy thought seeing her dad shook-up had shaken Emmett.
He took out his cell phone and held it, staring at it. “I’ve got to call Grant, see if he can cover for me.” Emmett looked up, blinking. “Man, I’m not sure I can talk about it.”
Without breaking apart, he meant. Sandy hadn’t even thought about work. She remembered she had two consultations, one today and one on Monday, that she’d have to cancel. And the koi-pond install. That was scheduled for Wednesday. She doubted this was going to be over by then. She didn’t have anyone to cover for her, really, other than Hector and his crew. They helped her with the installation of the gardens she designed, but she met with the home owners and drew up the plans. At least it was summer; the hottest part of the year was her slow time. It was different for Emmett. There wasn’t really a slow time in the oil industry.
“I guess Dad will have to put off retiring for a bit,” her mom said. “Not that he was that serious about it.”
Her mother wanted it more than her dad. She was ready to travel, do things other than work. Sandy didn’t blame her. She’d helped them sell their home in Wyatt and move into their patio home in a community for older folks, where la
wn-care and housekeeping services were provided if you wanted it. You could even have your meals brought in or walk to a centrally located restaurant if you didn’t feel like cooking. But her dad still came to the office in Wyatt a couple of times a week; he and Emmett would drive around and talk to customers together. Emmett missed him, though. He’d been used to running with her dad almost every day. They’d go as much as five miles, sometimes more. They’d competed in marathons together.
It had started when Emmett was in high school. Her dad had coached him on the side when he joined the track team. Even then no one had questioned the notion that Emmett would go to work for her dad after he got his business degree from the U of H. It was the motivation for hiring on as a roughneck, so he could learn the business from the ground up. It was Emmett’s nature to be thorough and methodical, to follow a plan. As long ago as their high school days, Emmett had talked about how important it was to do the grunt work. The shit work, he called it. He wasn’t too proud to get dirty, to work hard. He’d work till he dropped, if that’s what the job took. The guys he bossed now respected him; they looked up to him.
Jordy admired him, too, but he didn’t share his dad’s drive, his no-nonsense work ethic, or his sense of responsibility. They’d fought about it in May when the letter came from UT, advising Sandy and Emmett that Jordy was on scholastic probation. Jenna had gotten a letter, too, telling her Trav had made the dean’s list. Sandy had barely been able to offer congratulations. Emmett had yelled about the money Jordy was pissing down the drain, not to mention his future. He’d accused Jordy of being a slacker. Sandy thought Emmett was too hard on Jordy.
Emmett had dismissed her concern. “We’re throwing our hard-earned money down the drain while he wastes time,” he’d said.
Neither one of them had talked about the way in which Jordy might be wasting time; they hadn’t considered that his poor performance might be the result of excessive partying and drinking. Instead, Sandy had brought up the past.
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