Three Days on Mimosa Lane (A Seasons of the Heart Novel)

by Anna DeStefano

  Please…

  Cade had to be okay.

  He had to be.

  It was ripping open again, the place inside Sam that had been tied in knots for twelve years, forever seeping toxic memories and panic and loss. And in that place where she’d felt this helpless once before, she found her senses growing deadly calm. Because experience told her that she couldn’t let the terror have her. Not yet.

  We couldn’t let our kids down… She remembered telling the Times reporter.

  Just as she had to stay in the moment now. Panic and adrenaline would be her allies for a while. She could feel their familiar bite seeping through her, focusing her. For as long as she was needed today, she could do anything, handle anything, fight back against anything, as long as she kept going. Just as she had at Ground Zero. Otherwise people—children—were going to die. And this time one of those kids could be her son.

  “You shot him, man!” Cade yelled. He was somewhere to her left, his voice shaking with a young man’s fury and a little boy’s tears.

  She crawled closer. She scanned the part of the cafeteria where his class had been sitting. She saw Cade on the floor. He was crouching beneath the table he and Sally and Troy and Nate had been sitting at.

  “Why’d ya shoot him?” Cade demanded.

  “He shoved my face in my food!” Troy screamed.

  Sam was just a table away and crawling like a bug—hugging the ground and inching toward the threat waiting to squash her, her son, and the other kids.

  “So you shot him?” Cade yelled back.

  “Shut up!”

  Sally screamed.

  Sam couldn’t see why. She couldn’t breathe. The desperation that had fed her so far was already wearing off. Her arms and legs were beginning to tremble. She couldn’t exactly feel them yet, but the numbness was gone, enough for her to know that she soon wouldn’t have the strength to get to her feet. She had to end this before that happened. No other adult was close enough to stop Troy.

  “Put the gun down,” Nate said next. “You’re scaring Sally and everybody, and Bubba’s hurt bad.”

  “I told him to leave me alone.” Troy wasn’t screaming anymore. He sounded like he was hyperventilating and struggling to understand what had happened, just like the rest of the kids. “You heard me. I told you I was going to make him leave me alone. ‘Don’t come home until you’ve settled this once and for all,’ my dad said. And I did. I settled it.”

  “With a gun?” Sally sobbed, her words barely words at all.

  Sam was at the edge of the table where all the kids but Troy were huddled together. She could see that her son had put his body between Sally’s and the horrible-looking pistol that the Wilmington boy held.

  “Put it down, Troy,” Sally said. “Please.” She was clinging to Cade, shaking so hard her words were slurred. “Stop being so stupid.”

  “I’m not stupid.” Troy turned his gun on Sally—which meant he was aiming it right at Cade.

  “Whoa!” Nate was kneeling beside someone. Oh, God. A boy was on the ground, bleeding. Badly. “Okay. You’re not stupid. Leave her alone, man. No one else here is after you. You wanted Bubba off your ass. I think he’s dead. You… You killed him,” Nate said, wiping at his eyes. “He’s dead. Are you happy now?”

  “D-dead?” Troy stuttered, while Sally cried harder and the racket around them continued—the sound of everyone else running away. “Are you sure?” he squeaked out. “I didn’t mean… I mean, I didn’t want to—”

  “Kill him?” Cade was crying, too, her son whom Sam had heard upset only a few times in his life, and never, ever this afraid. “You shot him. You stood right there and shot him. What did you think was going to happen?”

  “I didn’t know it would hurt him so bad.” Each word Troy said sounded both sorry and defiant. He kept the awful gun aimed at Cade and Sally, no matter how shocked he clearly was by what he’d done. “You don’t know. You don’t know what it’s like when my dad’s after me. So shut up. Just shut up talking to me like we’re still friends, or you care how much crap lands on me every day I go home and I haven’t made Bubba stop. Just shut up!”

  “Put it down, man.” Nate stood up and away from Bubba, putting himself between the gun and the other kids who were now only an arm’s length from Sam.

  “Shut up!” Troy raged.

  “It’s over. Bubba’s over.” Nate raised both his hands. They were trembling. He glanced back at Cade and Sally, tears streaming down his face no matter how calm he sounded. His attention snagged on Sam next, his eyes widening as she slithered another inch closer, and then he was silently pleading with her to do something, anything, to make all of this go away. “Your dad will stop pounding on you now. Put the gun down. It’s just us. Your friends. It’s okay. It’s over.”

  “Friends…? Over?” Troy cried harder, the horrible thing he’d done destroying him right in front of them. The gun wobbled in his hand. “I didn’t mean to shoot him. I just wanted to scare him. But they won’t believe that. They’re coming. I know what’s going to happen. They’ll have guns, and they won’t believe what he did to me. Bubba deserved it, but I’ll be the one in trouble. What will my dad do now?”

  “Don’t shoot us, too.” Sally clutched at Cade’s shoulders, the two of them still behind Nate.

  “I don’t want to,” Troy whispered. “I never wanted to.”

  “Then don’t.” Cade glanced Sam’s way, too, finally seeing her as she somehow managed to stand behind Troy, gripping a chair for support. “Don’t shoot us, and we won’t let anyone blame you.”

  “Like you care,” Troy sneered through his tears.

  “Put the stupid gun back in your backpack.” Nate stepped closer.

  “Don’t call me stupid.” Troy’s voice dropped to something low and deadly. He was calmer now. Too calm.

  “Then stop acting stupid.” Nate sounded out of his mind with panic and fear now. All the kids were. As brave as everyone was being, they weren’t equipped to handle this. How could they be? And sooner or later someone was going to say the wrong thing and set Troy off again.

  “Shut up, man.” Troy wrapped his other hand around the gun.

  From opposite sides of Troy, Nate and Sam both inched closer.

  Troy lifted the gun higher, aiming it at Nate’s chest. He was going to shoot.

  “No!” Sam screamed, tackling him from behind.

  The gun went off with a deafening explosion. She landed hard, with Troy yelling beneath her.

  “Mom!” Cade yelled.

  “Nate!” Sally screamed.

  The ringing from the gun firing so close to Sam’s head streaked pain through her ears, making it impossible to hear anything else. All she knew for certain was that they were on the ground, she and Troy, her arms wrapped around the squirming kid, holding tight because that was all she could manage.

  Where was the gun? If she let go, Troy might shoot again. Would he shoot anyway?

  Was Cade hit?

  Nate?

  Sally?

  The darkness wouldn’t answer her—the darkness behind her closed eyelids, flashing like a strobe light with images of smoke and flames and tall, majestic buildings flying apart and falling. Lives ending. An innocent world was dying around her, while the most vulnerable of lives were depending on her to make everything safe again.

  She had to keep moving. She had to take care of the kids. She had to keep Troy and his gun down. But the memories she fought daily to control were seething. The anxiety they fed was taking over, shaking through her, making her weak.

  Let’s go home, Brian had said, that morning after 9/11, once he’d finally found her in Queens and the last of her students had been claimed by their families. It’s all going to be okay.

  Only she couldn’t forget the sound of the towers falling, while she and her colleagues had watched it on TV, wondering whether their building was next. Or the utter desolation of walking through the clouds of dust and grime coating the city and everyone’s hearts.<
br />
  Atlanta will be our fresh start, her husband had promised a year later, when they’d been talking about packing up their almost one-year-old and leaving forever. Once we’re away from New York, your nerves will settle down and everything will be better.

  Only it hadn’t been. It never had been, no matter what they’d done or how they’d tried to make life be again what they’d dreamed it could be. And now…

  Troy was still trying to get away. She lost her hold on him. Her arms weren’t her own any longer. Footsteps scrambled toward them, appearing from every direction. Troy was yanked to his feet. She could hear him now, crying and screaming.

  “Secure him and the weapon,” a gruff voice commanded. “Get the paramedics in here for the kids. The ones who aren’t shot, get them to the team outside… We’re in lockdown. I want a target search for other shooters. Weapons. Booby traps. Get me the layout of the building and a master key. Ma’am, are you okay?”

  “Cade,” she croaked. The ones who aren’t shot… “Is Cade okay?”

  “Are you hurt, ma’am?”

  Hands cradled her skull. The man knelt beside her. A knee, a navy pant leg, filled her fuzzy vision. His fingers found a sensitive spot near the base of her skull.

  “Ah!” she cried.

  “You’re bleeding, ma’am,” he said. “You’ve hit your head. Can you talk to me? Can you tell me your name?”

  “Sam Perry,” a familiar voice answered. Another pair of knees skidded to a halt beside her, covered in pink with frolicking frogs hopping all over them. “Her name’s Sam. I’m the school nurse. Let me check her and the boys who’ve been shot.”

  Boys? More than one… Sam hadn’t been fast enough. She hadn’t stopped Troy in time.

  The activity around them intensified. More voices and noise and bodies were coming and going. Sam couldn’t keep up. Her swimming vision refused to make sense of any of it. She kept trying to collect her thoughts, to keep them focused on the only thing that mattered now…

  “Cade?” she whispered.

  Or maybe the words weren’t coming out at all. That must be why no one was answering her. It had to be. The reason no one was telling her what had happened couldn’t be that Cade was hurt or dead. It just couldn’t be.

  She was screaming his name now. Silently. She couldn’t stop screaming for him.

  Cade!

  “Can you hear me, Sam?” Mallory asked. “Brian’s on the way. Pete called him. Let me take a closer look at your head. Are you hurt anywhere else? Sam? Sam…”

  Chapter Four

  “Sam?” Brian whispered to his unconscious wife, worried that the sound of his voice alone might break her. Or him. “Sweetheart, can you hear me? It’s okay. Cade’s fine. You got to him in time. He’s down the hall getting checked out, but there’s not a scratch on him. Not like…”

  Brian bit off the impulse to talk about Bubba and Nate. Or to tell his wife about his shock at Pete Lombard’s call—another damn doomsday call on Brian’s fucking cell—telling him that his life was disintegrating. And this time he could have lost both his boy and his wife.

  Relax, son, his dad had said on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, when Brian had confided that Sam wasn’t improving, she’d ditched her therapist, she wasn’t going back to teaching, she was terrified of something happening to their infant son, and Brian was thinking about taking the job offer he’d just received from an Atlanta architecture firm that didn’t do his kind of work. But moving might be what he and Sam both needed to make a fresh start. Have a little faith, Brian. Give it time and things will get better. The worst is behind you. Stay positive, and time will fix everything.

  Everything but the reality of Sam’s fear that nothing was safe or certain any longer. Her ever-present anticipation of another explosion, another tragic loss, had taken Brian’s wife away from him, from herself. Maybe forever. What she’d been through had changed the kind of mother their boys would have. It had changed things about their lives that Brian rarely let himself dwell on. Looking to the future was what his family had needed from him for more than a decade.

  He’d made the move south to help Sam. He’d given up his seniority at his Manhattan job, busting his ass again to pay his dues in yet another firm that had never quite fit him, when his dream since college had been to run his own shop. He’d shouldered the bulk of the parenting Cade and Joshua needed outside of the home. He’d stayed positive that everything would work out and he and Sam would eventually move forward the way they’d planned, even as the boys grew older and began to notice that their mom was different. He’d kept fighting, and so had Sam, and things had finally, finally been coming together for them…

  Then a part of him had died when he’d answered Pete’s call about the shooting at Chandler. Brian would look back on that moment forever and swear that his heart hadn’t beaten again, that he hadn’t taken a full breath until he’d arrived at the school and found his family.

  Pete, a fire and rescue paramedic and first responder, had been on duty and was en route to the school. He’d had no details to share other than that an emergency call had come in about multiple shots fired, and multiple victims. Brian had dropped to his knees on his office carpet, his face in his hands. Then he’d raced out the door and driven to the school like a man possessed, oblivious to whatever traffic laws and lights and signs he passed, until he’d driven up to find every police and emergency vehicle in town converged on the elementary school parking lot, lights swirling like the midway of a demented carnival.

  An EMT had been wheeling a stretcher out of the front of the school. Relief had almost dropped Brian to the ground again when he’d realized it was Nate Turner on top, not one of his own boys. Cade’s best friend had been unconscious and bleeding from a gunshot wound in his shoulder. His mother, Beverly, had been hysterical, jogging alongside the stretcher in an altered state Brian knew all too well. And at that moment, he’d wanted to turn tail and run. The cowardly compulsion to escape had nearly sent him sprinting back to his car. He’d never forget the shame of it.

  He hadn’t wanted to face whatever was waiting inside the school. But he’d shoved down the panic, hearing his father’s voice again. Relax, Brian… Have a little faith. He had a wife and children, a family and a future that he’d fight anything and anyone to keep. So he’d sprinted past the ring of ambulances in front of the school, scanning the crowd of emergency responders and parents and teachers and kids, looking for a familiar face. Someone had finally mentioned that his youngest son’s class was out back, near the track where the kids took PE.

  “When Joshie ran up to me,” he told his wife, “I couldn’t turn him loose. Holding him felt like holding all of you. No one was telling me anything about you and Cade yet…”

  Brian smoothed Sam’s bangs away from her face, willing his voice to sound confident and strong, the way she needed him to be, while his entire body felt like it was crumbling. Everything but his fingers. Sam deserved only the gentlest of touches. She’d proved all over again just how brave and flat-out astonishing a human being she was. She’d run toward gunfire, toward a freaked-out kid, to save their son and his friends. Brian caressed his wife’s bruised cheek.

  “The police had evacuated the school,” he said. “The cell lines were on overload. I couldn’t get through to anyone the whole drive over. But Joshua had asked people. He told me right away that you and Cade were both fine. Then Ms. Hemmings took us to Cade, where he and Sally were talking to the police. That’s when an EMT told us you’d been transported here. As a low-priority victim, thank God…”

  His rambling ground to a halt. His voice failed him as thoughts of everything that could have happened took over.

  How long had it taken after 9/11 before he could close his eyes and not see terrifying images of what might have been—his wife of only two years buried beneath tons of rubble? And each time, as the panic raced closer, he’d whispered, Thank God, over and over, until the nightmare faded, eventually for good.

  But the
fear and the hate had remained, somewhere deep and greedy inside him. Fear of the next time. Hate for the next stranger who’d take it upon himself to destroy Brian’s peaceful world. He gazed down at Sam, whose eyes were still closed. It didn’t matter whether she could hear him. He had to keep talking.

  As long as he kept telling Sam that they could make it through this disaster, too, maybe he could believe himself that his wife would come back from yet another emotional spiral.

  “Thank God you stopped Troy from doing even more damage. Thank God you were there to protect Cade.” She’d saved Cade and Nate and Sally and countless other kids Troy could have turned on next. Just as she’d set aside her own well-being to be there for her students in New York. But at what cost? “You… You’re amazing, sweetheart. It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay. Please come back to me. Please…”

  He cleared his throat. He had to stop this. Sam and his boys deserved better than him falling apart when she’d found a way to be so brave.

  “Wake up, sweetheart.” He kissed her uninjured cheek, willing her eyes to open so he wouldn’t feel so god-awful alone. “I’m here. You’re here. Cade and Joshua are safe. Mallory and Pete and Julia and Walter are hanging out with them until you’re awake. I’m right here for you, just like before. You can do this, Sam. Come back to me again. It’s all going to be okay.”

  …going to be okay.

  Sam swam toward her husband’s voice, his promise, his insistence that they could both keep going.

  “Everyone’s waiting for you to wake up,” Brian said. “I think all of Chandlerville is in the lounge down the hall, wanting to hear that you’re fine and to tell you how proud they are of you. All of Mimosa Lane is here, for sure, not just our neighbors on the cul-de-sac. You’re a hero, Sam. The way you helped Ms. Hemmings and then the kids, even though Troy was still… I’m so proud of y—”

  “Stop,” she croaked.