“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that when Andy started talking, I realized I don’t really know much about you. Just that you’re from Asheville and you’re amazing in bed.”
She laughed a little, brushing a hand across her eyes. I kissed her shoulder through the blanket. Smelled the oranges in her hair.
“You’re right.” She sighed. “I don’t think Andy ever saw me before that time at your uncle’s house,” she said, “but I haven’t been totally straight with you about me. I just don’t like talking about myself. My life has kind of sucked.”
I moved the blanket off her shoulder and kissed her skin. “Tell me,” I said.
She let out a long breath. “I don’t get along with my parents at all,” she said. “They divorced when I was little and they just…My father was Mr. Tough Guy. I was this major disappointment to him. He wanted me to hunt and fish and I wanted to paint and do my nails.” She raised a bare foot out in front of her, and the moonlight landed on her dark toenails. “And my mother was—is—mentally ill. A real fruitcake, so it was like my brother and I raised ourselves.”
She had a brother? Man, I really knew nothing about her.
“And here’s the thing, Keith. Don’t be mad. I’m afraid you’ll hear this the wrong way and be mad.”
“What?”
“I love my brother a lot. He was in his chemistry class last year when some kids played around with a bunch of chemicals and started this explosion. My brother got badly burned, so I understand about living with the…the scars and everything. And when I saw you in the grocery store, I wanted to…I just wanted to make you feel good.”
I stood up, so pissed off all of a sudden, I couldn’t stand it.
“So what’s this been, Jen?” I shouted. “A series of mercy fucks?”
Her eyes were huge and shiny. “Not at all!” she said. “No, no, no! At first, I just wanted to help you. I understood what you were going through. But once we got together and I got to know you…I really care about you, Keith.” She reached for my hand and pulled me back onto the step again. “I’m in love with you. That’s the honest-to-God truth.” She put part of the blanket over my shoulders so our arms were touching. She was shivering and I took her hand. Held it between mine. I felt kind of humiliated, but it made sense that there’d been some good reason for her to come on to me in the store the way she did. Maybe it wasn’t such a terrible reason. I reminded her of her brother. Someone she cared about.
“I wish you’d told me the truth right from the start,” I said. “I don’t get why you didn’t.”
“I was afraid you’d think exactly what you just thought. That I wanted to be with you out of pity.”
I turned her head toward me and kissed her lips. “We have a lot of shit in common,” I said.
“Right,” she agreed. “And now you get why I hate Maggie Lockwood, too,” she said. “I hate anybody who plays with fire.”
Chapter Sixty-Four
Sara
Life Sentence
October 2007
“IT COULD HAVE BEEN SO MUCH WORSE,” GUNNAR STEPHENSEN said the first time he worked with Keith at the physical-therapy clinic in Jacksonville.
If I heard those words one more time, I was going to hit whoever said them.
I watched Keith squeeze his eyes shut in pain as Gunnar stretched his left arm straight. He didn’t make a sound, although the tears that forced their way between his eyelids and down his cheeks said it all. I felt his pain—a searing, ripping agony—in my own arm. It could have been so much worse. Yes, it was true that Keith was alive when others had died. And it was true that he would “recover,” if you didn’t count the physical and emotional scars, but that didn’t make his current suffering any easier to bear.
He’d spent three months in the burn unit in Chapel Hill, then another two months in a rehab facility. Finally, I had him home with me, but he’d be spending plenty of time in the physical-therapy clinic.
“Now, once I’ve finished assessing him,” Gunnar said, “I’ll show you how to help him with these exercises at home. But you’ll be bringing him here every day for a couple of months.”
I nodded. I’d been warned to expect that. I would take him wherever he needed to go for as long as was necessary.
“It’s absolutely critical that you don’t skip a day at this point,” Gunnar said. “He misses a day, he loses a week of progress.”
Keith opened his eyes. “I can’t take this every damn day,” he said.
“Hurts like a bitch, doesn’t it,” Gunnar said.
“How would you know?” Keith practically barked at the poor man.
“Keith,” I scolded him, though I was thinking the same thing. Keith was a very angry boy, and I wasn’t sure if he’d been that way all along or if his anger had been magnified by the fire. It had certainly magnified my anger. I was filled with a hatred and fury I’d never known before. That was one reason I started taking the memoir class with Dawn, because she said it would help to write my feelings down. It helped her deal with her anger toward Ben, she’d said. It wasn’t working for me, though, in spite of the fact that I wrote like a madwoman. I wrote nearly every spare minute of the day. Sometimes, I’d feel a smidgen of peace start to work its way into my heart, but then I’d catch a glimpse of my bandaged, scarred and aching son and that peace would vanish.
“After a couple months,” Gunnar continued, “we can cut it back to a few days a week, as long as he’s doing the exercises faithfully at home. Of course, you need to keep up with the compression bandages and scar massage.” He looked at me. “I can tell you’ve been doing a great job with that. Not much in the way of adhesions in this arm at all. Work on his hand, though. Especially right here.” He rubbed the skin between Keith’s index finger and thumb.
“Shit!” Keith shouted. “Not so hard.”
“Sorry, Keith,” Gunnar said. “It’s gotta be hard to do the job.”
“How often should he be doing the stretches?” I asked.
“As often as possible,” Gunnar said. “You can’t do them too much.”
On our way back from Jacksonville, I pulled into the parking lot of the Food Lion.
“Why are we stopping here?” Keith asked. He was slumped in the front seat, the unbandaged part of his forehead furrowed with pain from the PT session.
“I need to pick up a few things,” I said as I unbuckled my seat belt. “Do you want to come in with me?”
“No way,” Keith said. He wasn’t ready to be seen with those compression bandages on his arms and face.
“Okay. I’ll be back in a jiff.”
Inside the store, I grabbed a cart and starting filling it with things I knew Keith loved. His favorite cereal. Tangerines. Oreos. I was reaching for a carton of Ben & Jerry’s when I heard a voice behind me.
“Sara.”
I closed my eyes. I could have kept on walking. Just ignored her. I never thought it would be possible to live on Topsail Island and be able to avoid someone, but I’d managed to avoid Laurel since Maggie went to prison, and that had been for the best. Maybe Laurel’d been trying to avoid me as well, so that between the two of us, we’d never been at the same place at the same time. It was bound to happen at some point, but why did it have to be a day when I had Keith in the car and just wanted to get home and take care of him?
I sighed, turning around. “Laurel,” I said.
She looked as wrung out as I felt.
“I…I can’t tell you how many times I’ve picked up the phone to call you,” she said.
I was glad she hadn’t called. I wouldn’t have been ready to speak to her. I wasn’t sure I could speak to her even now.
“How’s Keith?” she asked. “Marcus told me he can come home soon.”
I knew Laurel and Marcus were finally together, and I felt no joy at all for them. Once again, she had everything she wanted. “He came home yesterday,” I said.
“Oh, I’m so glad!”
“He has a long road ahead of him,” I
said sharply. “PT every day. Compression bandages. Scars you’d never want to see on a child you gave birth to.”
“Oh, Sara. God. I’m so sorry.” She reached out to touch my arm, then seemed to think better of it. A wise decision. “Will you let me help?” she asked. “Any way I can. Financially. Or taking him to appointments or running errands for you. Anything.”
“I don’t want your help,” I said. “Your daughter gets out of her prison in eleven months.” One lousy year! That’s all she got. “My son’s in his prison for the rest of his life.”
“They are…they’re half siblings,” Laurel said.
I felt like smacking her. “They have the same father,” I said. “That’s all they’ve ever had in common.”
“They’re young, though, Sara. Maybe someday…in spite of everything…maybe their relationship will be important to them.”
“I doubt Keith will ever want to be related to her, frankly. Even if he wasn’t one of her victims, she burned down a church full of kids!”
“I know. And she’s paying for it.”
“Oh, good Lord, Laurel!” I said. “A year in prison with all of her skin intact and her life ahead of her.” Little Miss Perfect. I couldn’t believe Maggie was the same girl I’d taken care of when she was a child. I’d even felt sorry for her when Laurel lavished ninety percent of her time and attention on Andy. The truth was, everything had been handed to Maggie on a silver platter. Even her prison sentence.
“She made a terrible mistake,” Laurel said.
“I can’t talk to you.” I pushed my cart past her, pushed it all the way down the aisle to the rear of the store, where I hurried inside the restroom. I locked the door and leaned against it, biting back tears.
I’d been at Maggie’s sentencing, along with family members of the other victims and people from Drury Memorial. I watched Maggie’s shrewd, callous lawyer twist the facts to get some of the charges dismissed and others reduced, so that Maggie would spend only one tiny fraction of her life behind bars. Some people yelled in outrage. Many cried. I just gritted my teeth. I was used to Laurel winning while I lost. I’d had years of practice at it that the other families didn’t have. I would still be working at Jabeen’s when I was eighty, while Laurel would be taking trips around the world with her scar-free kids and grandkids.
Two weeks after that run-in with Laurel, I woke up with the flu from hell. Groggy and feverish, I turned off my alarm clock and fell back to sleep and only woke up again when Keith knocked on my bedroom door.
“Mom?” he said. “It’s almost time to leave. Are you up or what?”
I tried to roll over to check my clock, but the aching in my back and head took my breath away.
“What time is it?” I managed to whisper.
“What?” He opened the door a crack, then all the way. “Whoa. You sick?”
I shut my eyes. “Don’t come in here,” I said, although with all the massaging I’d done of his scars and all the hands-on stretching of his arms, I knew he was already well exposed to whatever I had. That’s all he needed.
He stood in the doorway. “I’ll skip PT today,” he said. “No big thing.”
“Uh-uh,” I said. “I’m getting up. You know what Gunnar said about skipping.”
“Gunnar’s full of it.”
“Go on and get ready. I’ll be out in a minute.”
My body ached as I got out of bed and walked into the bathroom. I took my temperature as I sat on the toilet. One hundred and two. I managed to swallow two aspirin before the room started spinning. I headed back to bed, moving the waste can next to the nightstand in case I got sick. I couldn’t possibly drive Keith anywhere.
I reached for the phone and dialed Dawn’s number, but got her voice mail. I stared at the phone a long, long time before I punched in the number I hadn’t called in months.
“Hello?” Laurel answered right away, and I wondered if my number had come up on her caller ID.
I shut my eyes and pressed my aching head into the pillow. “Hi, Laurel,” I said. “Did you mean what you said about helping me any way you could?”
Chapter Sixty-Five
Maggie
I WAS ON THE DEBATE TEAM IN HIGH SCHOOL. MR. FARMER took me aside one day and said I could be anything I wanted to be, but he’d love to see me go into politics or law because I could always make my case without getting flustered. I was always so calm, he said. My swim coach said the same thing, that I might not be the best swimmer on the team but I never choked at a meet.
I was never really all that calm, though. I was just good at faking it. Since the fire, I couldn’t even do that. Now, I sat in my car in front of the New Drury Memorial Church—that was actually on its sign, New Drury Memorial—and shook all over. I had to find the courage to come out of hiding, Dr. Jakes had said, and I knew he was right, as usual. Keith was the person I most wanted to hide from, but after Keith came Reverend Bill, who was probably in the church right at that moment. Even before the fire, he’d made me uncomfortable. He never smiled and he was weird and he hated my family. Now, when I knew he had to hate me more than he’d ever hated anyone, I was going to have to face him.
I got out of my car slowly, like invisible arms were trying to keep me inside. I shut the door quietly because I felt paranoid. Maybe Reverend Bill was watching me from inside the church. The windows were stained glass, though, so he probably couldn’t see me even if he was looking. I tried the front doors of the church, but they were locked and I felt relieved. I tried, right? Nobody home. But I could already hear what Dr. Jakes would say if I told him I gave up that easily. So I walked along the sidewalk that circled the brick building until I came to a door at the rear. I turned the knob, hoping that door would also be locked, but it opened easily. Didn’t even squeak on its hinges.
I was in a hallway, a men’s room on my left, a ladies’ room on my right. On the wall next to the ladies’ room was a photograph of the old church. It caught me by surprise and I looked away from it quickly, but I could still see the pretty little whitewashed building in my mind. I remembered the pine straw around it, how it crunched beneath my feet as I poured the fuel. I remembered thinking that pine straw would catch quickly and what a great fire it would make for Ben to fight. Damn. I really, truly couldn’t stand myself sometimes.
I wanted to turn around and leave, but I saw the partially open door next to the men’s room and read the wall plaque next to it: Reverend William Jesperson. I’d come this far. I had to do it.
There was a window in the door and I could vaguely make out Reverend Bill’s reflection in the glass. I knocked softly.
“Come in.”
Ugh. I remembered that voice. I forced myself to walk inside.
He looked up from his desk. If he was surprised to see me, he didn’t show it, but he leaned back in his chair and put down the pen he’d been holding.
“Miss Lockwood,” he said.
“Can I talk to you?” I asked. My voice came out high-pitched, like a little girl’s.
He motioned to a wooden chair and I sat down, resting my hands flat on my lap.
“I’m here because I wanted to tell you I’m sorry for what I did,” I said.
“It’s about time,” he said. “You got out of prison when?”
“Five weeks ago.”
“Five weeks and this is the first time you’ve come to me,” he said. “And all those months in prison, I didn’t hear a thing from you, either, did I?”
“No, sir.” He wasn’t going to make this easy on me. Why should he?
“What are you doing now?”
“You mean…” I didn’t know if he meant right that minute or what. “I’m doing…I’ve been doing community service at Brier Glen Hospital.” I couldn’t tell him I might never be able to work there again. I just couldn’t.
“Three hundred hours,” he said. He had my sentence memorized.
“Yes.”
“You think three hundred hours is enough?” he asked. “You think that year
in prison was enough for what you did?”
“No, Reverend. I know it’s not.”
He picked up his pen again and leaned over the notepad on his desk, ignoring me. His long face had taken on a ruddy color and all of a sudden I felt his fury at me. It radiated out of him, like a force in the room. I didn’t blame him for it. He was an unlikable man, but I’d hurt him and his church in a terrible way.
“I’m sorry,” I said again as I stood up. He wasn’t going to say anything else, so I started for the door.
“Feel better now?” he asked suddenly.
“What?” I stopped and looked at him and instantly wished I hadn’t. I could have handled seeing a typical ugly Reverend Bill sneer on his face or even the red-faced fury, but his eyes were damp, his lips quivering. That I couldn’t take.
“Who was that apology supposed to help?” he asked. “Me, or you?”
I turned my hands palms up in a helpless gesture. “Both, I think. It’s…I really meant it, if that’s what you’re asking.” I couldn’t take this. Couldn’t take seeing Reverend Bill look human for a change.
He returned to his writing, and I had the feeling he wanted to hide that naked sadness in his face. “You can do community service here, you know,” he said, his pen moving.
“What…what do you mean?”
He didn’t look up. Kept writing, writing, writing. “We still have a lot to do to the interior of the church,” he said. “We sponsor a food program on the mainland and run a day care in Hampstead. I could go on and on. We do more for the community than you could ever guess. There’s plenty you could do.”
Oh my God. Work for him? Never.
“Okay,” I said. “Thanks for letting me know.”
I nearly ran back to my car. I wanted to get away from the church and away from him. I didn’t want to think about his quivering mouth, or about his question: Who was that apology supposed to help? I knew the answer. My apology had been sincere and totally heartfelt, but I’d finally gotten around to making it in order to help myself.
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