She hustled down the stairs. In the silence of the little room I looked at Eddy for a long moment, then flicked at his cheek gently with my fingers. “Wake up, Eddy,” I said. “Hey. Coffee.”
His breath sputtered, but his eyes stayed closed. Neither of the Vogels would challenge Candy, that much I was sure about. They were old-school New Englanders, reticent and respectful of their neighbors’ privacy. Get Scooter, I thought, but I couldn’t be sure he would stand up to Candy; if she chased him off, I would just lose time. What I needed was someone strong enough both to defy Candy and help me get help for Eddy. I looked out the window toward the mountains. I could think of nothing to do but one thing.
* * *
Without a word to Candy, I lifted TJ from the high chair and slipped out of the house, pulling away quickly in Elias’s Jeep. Gravel crackled like popcorn beneath the tires, and I knew she would hear me, but at least I could keep her guessing about where I was going. It was a burst of luck that the Jeep was even there; Cade had been using it to commute to work ever since he wrecked the Saturn, leaving me carless, but he had taken Leela down to Concord in his father’s truck because there were so many crafts to carry. From the backseat came the gentle sounds of TJ playing with the rattles that hung from the bar of his infant car seat. Knowing he was safe with me calmed my nerves, but only very slightly.
The road wound east through the dark summer woods. The farther I drove, the narrower it grew, until my tires seemed barely to straddle the asphalt while skimming the dust on either side. At long last Randy’s house came into view along the side of the road, the stacked stone rising like a fortress above the green hill of the lawn.
Lucia answered the door, flanked by a pair of her younger children. When I explained to her that Eddy was ill, she simply nodded, instructed her nearest teenage daughter to watch the little ones and hitched her purse to her shoulder. I recognized her truck, the green pickup with mud above its tire wells, from when she had dropped off the plate of cookies months before. She stayed close in my rearview mirror the whole way back to Frasier.
Candy stood at the storm door, defiant. Her long, wavy hair expanded across the breadth of her shoulders, thick as a plank. Before Lucia was five steps from her car, Candy shouted across the yard, “You’re not coming in here.”
Lucia said nothing. Over her shoulder was the strap of a blue duffel bag she had retrieved from the backseat of her truck. She trekked steadily across the soft yard to the porch and climbed its four stairs. Then she stopped and looked at Candy.
“Not in here,” Candy repeated. “Turn right around and go back where you came from.”
“One Christian woman to another,” said Lucia, “if you’ll please let me in, Candy.”
“No chance of that.”
The boys had gathered behind her. Matthew craned his neck to peer over the arm she used to block the doorway, while John came closer, nestling his head against the bulk of her hip. Mark watched from the other side of the doorway, wearing his green army helmet with the crack in it. I could hear the faint clatter of the objects on his belt hitting one another.
“I never did you a wrong,” said Lucia.
“Randy did.”
“Well, I’m not Randy. Come on, now. This isn’t about him. This is about your father.”
Candy’s gaze drifted over Lucia’s shoulder. She was watching, I knew, for Dodge. Then she closed the door in Lucia’s face.
Lucia and I looked at each other. “I live here, too,” I said.
“So let me in.”
Almost fearfully, I jammed my key in the door and pushed it open. My gaze darted around—I was half expecting to see Candy standing there with a shotgun. Instead I heard the water running in the kitchen, and the normal sounds of the boys horsing around near their mother. Candy was pretending she had nothing to do with Lucia and her intrusion. Willfully oblivious.
I set TJ against my shoulder, and Lucia followed me up the stairs. A line formed between her eyebrows as soon as she saw Eddy. She set her bag at the end of the bed, like a country doctor, and gave him a quick examination with her eyes and hands. “How long has he been asleep?”
“Since around seven last night.”
She pulled back the covers and felt around on the mattress. “Dry.”
“That’s good, right? That he still has control of his bladder and all.”
Her head gave a slight shake. “No. It’s kidney failure.” She braced her hands beneath his arms and looked to me to grab his ankles. As I did, I saw the fabric of her skirt pull tight across her belly and realized she was pregnant.
“No,” I said. “You can’t carry him.”
“I carry wood every day. Don’t concern yourself about it.”
I hesitated, then looked toward the steep and narrow stairs. For one long, uneasy moment I tried to accept her reassurance, but all I could think about was the moment I’d come across the plastic hospital-issue bag with my clothes in it from the night TJ was born, the fabric dark and stiffened with blood. One slip of Lucia’s foot could end in a calamity I couldn’t bear. “No way,” I repeated. “If you have a phone, we should call an ambulance.”
“No time for that. Go get Scooter.” I raised an eyebrow, and she said, “Well, he lives right over there. He’ll help, Jill. This isn’t the time for petty loyalties. He’ll know that.”
“All right. Can you handle Candy if she comes in?”
“Of course I can handle Candy. Candy isn’t anything.”
I passed TJ over to her. As she shifted him to her hip with her capable hands, I ran down the stairs and out the door toward the Vogels’ farm. Scooter lived in the walk-out basement, one with a door that was never locked because this was Frasier. My pulse pounded in my ears as I raced across the gray asphalt road and through the overgrown grass, past Sara Vogel’s neat vegetable patch with its pie tins rattling on stakes and strings, to Scooter’s rain-beaten basement door.
Without a knock, I pushed it open and shouted his name. He looked up from where he lay on a battered sofa, playing Atari games on a television three times his age. A few words about Eddy’s state were all I said, and in an instant he had shoved his feet into his boots and was rushing past me out the door, flying across the lawn in his untied boots and unbelted jeans. By the time I arrived back on our property I could hear Candy shouting from inside, and Scooter was shuffling out the front door with Dad over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. Lucia followed close behind, TJ on her hip.
“Sorry,” said Scooter, edging toward the porch stairs. “Tried to wait for you, but Candy was making a scene. Which car?”
Lucia opened the rear door of her truck, and I helped ease Eddy onto the seat. “I hope he’s all right,” said Scooter. “Poor old dude.”
“Say a prayer,” said Lucia. She passed me TJ and climbed into the cab of her truck, gunning the engine.
“Wait,” I said. “I need the diaper bag. It’s just inside the front door.”
Scooter shook his head. “Stay here and I’ll go with her. I know all his information. You call Cade, get him to come to the hospital.”
His idea made more sense than mine. I couldn’t give proper attention to Eddy’s needs with a baby in my arms, and there was no chance I would leave TJ with an unstable Candy. I stepped back and Scooter climbed into the passenger seat, barely pulling the door closed before Lucia backed out of the driveway.
From inside I heard Candy yelling at one of her boys. I took a deep, shaky breath, then loaded my son back into the Jeep. I could call Cade from the U-Store-It office and give him the news about his dad, then stay there for a while until Candy had a chance to calm down. No way was I about to go back inside. She frightened me now.
Chapter 29
Leela
When the Vogel girl first started coming around, I didn’t pay her too much mind. She knew Candy from church, and I wasn’t all that keen on that church of theirs. I go with her now, but mainly to get out of this house for a bit, since I never did learn how to drive, and
being inside all the time gives me cabin fever something fierce. And I like to sing. I keep the songs going in my head while the pastor is talking, so that way I can get through the whole service.
That Vogel girl—her name was Lindsay—she was younger than Candy by a couple of years, and unmarried. Despite that they were friends, and I felt torn about that situation. On the one hand I remembered what it felt like to be a childless woman in a room full of mothers, how they elbowed me out without even knowing they were doing it, and so it was kind of Candy to reach out to her in friendship. But on the other hand this was Candy, and something in me hated for that vulnerable, sheltered Vogel girl to get wrapped up in my daughter. Sometimes they’d be talking at the table, the way Lucia and I used to, and I’d picture Candy standing at that rabbit hutch with her back to me, the suppressor on the .22 reducing each shot to a distant firework. Maybe I thought if I was cool to Lindsay, she’d soon enough be safely on her way.
It was the season when both of my sons went away and then came back. Cade went off to college that fall, and Elias had been away at basic training and infantry school. It had taken him an extra month. He had written to me that he got “recycled,” which is the army way of saying you couldn’t do enough push-ups or run fast enough, so they make you train all over again. But when he walked in that door after all of that—more than four months after last I saw him—he looked ever so much better. Hardly had any stomach on him at all, and his arms looked strong. It was like I could finally exhale—after all those years of reassuring him he was just fine the way God had made him, finally God had granted him a reprieve from being a butterball.
As soon as Cade got home, too, the two of them went out together to meet some old friends down at the quarry. I guess they had a snowball fight, because when they got back both of those ninnies were covered in snow, with big splotches of it on their backs. I made them turn right around at the door and come in through the back porch. Once they shook off their coats and wraps, they came inside laughing, with hands and cheeks rose-red from the cold. Candy and Lindsay were sitting at the table with their coffee, and Candy jumped right up to pour some for the boys. She poured lots of sugar and milk in Eli’s, the way he liked it, and he reached for that mug like he was holding his hands up to a campfire. Even though he looked like a soldier now, I could still so easily see the little boy in him. He’d rather have a cup of cocoa and we both knew it, but he was a man now and it would be coffee for him.
Candy was bustling around the coffee machine, and when I looked at Lindsay I saw she was staring right at Elias, smiling in this shy, surprised way. She was a plain-looking girl, with a heart-shaped face and hair that had never been cut, and she wore those smocky flowered dresses like Candy and the other church women. Elias didn’t seem to notice. He was still bantering with Cade, the two of them joking over who had gotten in the best shots of the snowball fight. Lindsay Vogel was his same age, had lived up the road all his life, but her family had homeschooled her and so he hardly knew her at all. When I saw the look she was giving him I thought about Piper, with her straightened hair and model figure, her made-up eyes, and I thought Lindsay might as well march that notion right back out of her head as fast as it had come in.
Candy turned around with the coffeepot and opened her mouth to ask her friend if she wanted more, but stopped before a word came out. She looked from Lindsay to Elias and back again. Then, with a noisy clatter, she set the pot down and called her children over to say hello to their uncles. John was just a baby, pushing his cereal pieces around on the high-chair tray, but the other two came barreling over and threw themselves at their uncles’ knees. Lindsay took a lemon cookie from the plate at the center of the table and waved it in front of John’s face, playing with him a little before she let him have it. I went upstairs after that, and so that’s the way I remember seeing Lindsay Vogel: waving that cookie around for my grandbaby, maybe—or maybe not—putting on a show for Elias of how nice she was with babies. And she was a nice girl, even if she never would have been his sort of girl. Anyone could look upon Elias then and see that now he was turning into the type of man who might be able to get a Piper Larsen to give him a second or a third look. And Lindsay—well, she only had three days left in this world. So whether or not she caught Eli’s eye didn’t really matter anyway.
Because it was three days after that when all the kids in town—the mostly grown ones included—went down to the quarry for their after-Christmas hockey game. For as long as I could remember it had been like a reunion, when the college and moved-away kids would get together just for a few hours and play like they had in years gone by. I stayed home with John, but Candy brought Mark and Matthew down to watch Cade and Eli play. The quarry lake was so big that all the girls usually brought their figure skates, and they’d amuse themselves that way when they got tired of watching hockey. When my boys got back that day, Cade was so generous in his praise of his brother, bragging about how well Elias was skating and how he’d made two goals. Elias brushed it off, but I knew he was proud. His confidence was like a bud popping out on a tree. It was still fragile, but I believed it would grow. I wondered if Piper was home from school, and if he would see her before he shipped out on the first of January.
It was hours before Candy came home. She didn’t have any kind of cellular phone, and as night fell I started to get worried. So did Dodge. He left the house and started driving around town, asking people if they had seen her or the boys. And it was on that drive that he learned what had happened—that during the last hockey game of the day, one of the girls who was off figure skating had cracked through the ice where it was thinnest beneath the overhanging trees, and the others hadn’t been able to get her out. As soon as I heard that, I knew it had been Lindsay Vogel. She had been so sheltered, kept away from socializing with the other town kids so much, that she didn’t know the quarry ice very well. I guess they all thought she was old enough to know what she was doing, so nobody noticed when she got into trouble. By the time they managed to pull her out, she was gone. Candy was the only one who saw her go through, the one who called to everybody else for help. She told me her boys hadn’t seen any of it, that she’d kept them and the other little children away while the other young people tried to get her out. I suppose that’s a mercy, that they never saw such an awful thing. For all that Candy seems calloused up against brutality, at least she didn’t let them see that.
Chapter 30
Jill
Lucia was right. Eddy was in renal failure, and the afternoon turned into a mad scramble to get Cade down to the hospital to make decisions on behalf of his mother, whom Dodge was bringing back from Concord. His father would need dialysis, and even if he got well enough to be released, coming home wasn’t a viable option for the immediate future. Cade didn’t know what to do about that, and so, like so many other things these days, he could only patch up a temporary solution: to set up Leela in a motel adjacent to the hospital so she could come and go easily for the duration. He got home at 11:00 p.m., exhausted both physically and mentally. But the next morning, once he came in after the chores were done and found Candy cooking up breakfast as if everything were normal, he tore into her.
“What the hell were you thinking?” he barked at her. “He almost died up there in his own goddamn bed with his own daughter right there. You don’t have the two brain cells’ worth of common sense it would take to see how sick he was?”
“Maybe I would have if she hadn’t gone dancing off to bring over Lucia. You want to talk about sense—and you never had the sense to tell her we don’t deal with those people?”
“You don’t deal with those people. I couldn’t care less. And Jill did the right thing. I’d much rather bring Randy and his whole damn militia to my door than let Dad just keel over and die. Jesus.”
Candy shrugged loosely and plated a scrambled egg. “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.”
The corner of Cade’s lip curled upward. “So courageous of you to make th
at decision on behalf of somebody else.”
Casually Candy pointed her spatula in my direction. “Ask your wife about the decision she made for us. Now Dad’s stuck in a hospital, probably all delirious and saying whatever pops into his mind. There’s some things around here you better hope he doesn’t start talking about.”
“That’s ridiculous,” Cade said. But Dodge didn’t agree, and whatever he said to Cade about it later seemed to convince him, as well. From that night onward they instituted a system of nighttime watch shifts, switching off every few hours and bringing in Scooter to take a shift as well, imagining the government was about to swoop in over some unregistered guns. At any hour of the night, when I woke to nurse TJ, I could hear their slow, heavy-booted footsteps creaking the hardwood floors, walking the inside perimeter. Cade kept Elias’s gun holstered on his belt all the time now when he was home. The only time he took it off was when he lay down with TJ, and then he would set it on the fireplace mantel, never more than a few paces away.
A few days into this arrangement, I awoke to the clunk of Cade’s gun against the nightstand, followed by the soft, rumpled sound of clothes dropping to the floor. I squinted awake: the clock read 2:00 a.m. Cade climbed in beneath the covers and ran his hand up against my belly. “Hey, you,” he said with affection, and rolled me onto my back. Despite the late hour he was buzzing with energy. The estrangement I felt from him in my heart should have made it easier to push him away at times like this, but instead it only made it harder. In spite of everything, I still yearned to be close to him, to feel once again the kind of intimacy we had shared in the beginning and store it away as a memory. Soon I would be gone, and who knew how long it would be before I would feel that human touch again, or feel even that tenuous sense of connection? Each time with him now the thought would flutter through my mind—this could be the last time—and for a few minutes everything I had grown to resent and disdain and even fear about him seemed to fall away, leaving only the beauty of him, which was the one sure thing he had held on to.
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