The Good Father

by Diane Chamberlain

  There were two fire trucks, a couple of cop cars and one ambulance in front of the charred shell of the small cottage that had been my home for the past eight years and would never be my home again. Right then, I didn’t care. I jumped out of my van and headed straight for the ambulance. Ridley Strub, a cop I’d known since we were in middle school together, showed up out of nowhere and grabbed my arm.

  “They took your mother to the hospital,” he said. “Bella’s in the ambulance. She’s going to be fine.”

  “Let me go!” I pulled away from him and ran to the open rear of the ambulance, jumping inside without waiting for an invitation.

  “Daddy!” Bella’s cry was muffled by an oxygen mask, but it was strong enough that I knew she was okay. I sat on the edge of the stretcher and pulled her into my arms.

  “You’re all right, baby.” My throat was so tight that baby came out like a whisper. I looked up at the EMT, a girl of about twenty. “She’s okay, right?”

  “She’s fine,” the girl said. “Just needed a little O2 as a precaution, but—”

  “Can we take the mask off?” I asked. I wanted to see her face. To check her all over for damage. I wanted to make sure the only thing she’d suffered was a scare. I noticed she had her stuffed lamb clutched tight in one arm, and on the floor of the ambulance I spotted her little pink purse. The two things she was never without.

  “I want it off, Daddy!” Bella picked at the edge of the plastic mask where it pressed against her cheek. She hiccupped like she always did when she cried.

  The paramedic leaned over and slipped the mask from Bella’s face. “We’ll leave the O2 monitor on her finger and see how she does,” she said.

  I smoothed my hands over my daughter’s brown hair. I could smell the smoke on her. “You’re okay,” I said. “You’re perfect.”

  She hiccupped again. “Nana fell down in the living room,” she said. “Smoke comed out of the windows.”

  “Came,” I said. “That must’ve been scary.” My mother fell? I remembered Ridley saying she was in the hospital. I looked at the EMT again. She was checking some monitor on the wall above the stretcher. “My mother,” I said. “Is she okay?”

  The EMT glanced toward the open doors and I didn’t miss the relief in her face when she saw Ridley climbing into the ambulance. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Need to see you a sec, Trav,” he said.

  “What?” I didn’t look up from Bella, who was clutching my hand like she’d never let it go.

  “Come outside with me,” he said.

  Mom. I didn’t want to go with him. I didn’t want to hear whatever he was going to tell me.

  “Go ahead,” the EMT said. “I’ll be here with Bella.”

  “Daddy!” Bella clung harder to my hand as I stood up, knocking the monitor off her finger. “Don’t go away!” She tried to scramble off the stretcher, but I held her by the shoulders and looked into her gray eyes.

  “You have to stay here and I’ll be right back,” I said. I knew she’d stay. She always did what I told her. Nearly always, anyway.

  “How many minutes?” she asked.

  “Five at the most,” I promised, glancing at my watch. I’d never once broken a promise to her. My father’d never broken a promise to me, and I remembered how that felt, knowing I could always trust him no matter what.

  I leaned down to hug her, kissing the top of her head. The smell of smoke just about seared my lungs.

  Outside the ambulance, Ridley led me to the corner of the lot next door, away from the fire trucks and all the tourists who’d gathered to watch somebody else’s disaster.

  “It’s about your mom,” he said. “Neighbor said she was outside hanging laundry when the fire started and it went up like a…just real fast. Your mom ran in for Bella and she was either overcome by smoke or maybe had a heart attack. Either way, she fell and—”

  “Is she okay?” I wanted him to get to the point.

  He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Trav. She didn’t make it.”

  “Didn’t make it?” I asked. The words weren’t getting through to me.

  “She died on the way to the hospital.” Ridley reached a hand toward my arm but didn’t touch me. Like he was just holding his hand there in case I started to keel over.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “Bella’s fine. How can Bella be fine and my mother’s dead?” My voice was getting loud and people turned to look at me.

  “Your mom saved her. They think she fell and Bella knew enough to get out of the house, but your mom was—”

  “Shit!” I pulled away from him. Looked at my watch. Four minutes. I headed back to the ambulance and climbed inside.

  “Daddy!” Bella said. “I want to go home!”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. “One thing at a time, Bell,” I said. “First we make sure your lungs are okay.” And then what? Then what? Where would we go? One look at the house and you knew everything we owned was gone. I closed my eyes, picturing my mother running into the house through smoke and flames to find Bella. Thank God she had, but God had done a half-assed job this time. I hoped my mother had been unconscious when she fell. I hoped she never had a clue she was dying. Please, God, no clue.

  “I want to go home!” Bella wailed again, her voice loud in the tiny space of the ambulance.

  I held her by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “Our house burned down, Bella,” I said. “We can’t go back. But we’ll go to another house. We have plenty of friends, right? Our friends will help us.”

  “Tyler?” she asked. Tyler was the five-year-old boy who lived a few houses down from us. Her innocence slayed me.

  “All our friends,” I said, hoping I wasn’t lying. We were going to need everyone.

  I saw something in her face I’d never seen before. How had it happened? She was two weeks shy of her fourth birthday, and overnight she seemed to have grown from my baby daughter to a miniature adult. In her face, I saw the girl she’d become. I saw Robin. There’d always been hints of her mother in her face—the way her eyes crinkled up when she laughed. The upturn at the edges of her lips so that she always looked happy. The rosy circles on her cheeks. But now, suddenly, there was more than a hint and it shook me up. I pulled her against my chest, full of love for the mother I’d lost that afternoon and for the little girl I would hold on to forever—and maybe, buried deep inside me where my anger couldn’t reach, for the teenage girl who’d long ago shut me out of her life.

  3

  Robin

  Beaufort, North Carolina

  James and I stood up when Dale walked into the waiting room. Dale always seemed to have a gravitational field around him and sure enough, the seven other people sitting in the room turned to look at him as he walked toward us. They would sail right through the air toward him if they hadn’t clutched the arms of their chairs. That was the sort of pull he had on people. He’d had it on me from the first moment I met him.

  Now, he smiled at me and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then shook his father’s hand as if he hadn’t seen him at home only a few short hours ago. “How’s she doing?” he asked quietly, looking from me to his father and back again.

  “Eight centimeters,” I said. “Your mom’s with her. Alissa’s miserable, but the nurse said she’s doing really well.”

  “Poor kid,” Dale said. He took my hand and the three of us sat down again in the row of chairs. Across from us, an older woman and man whispered to one another and pointed in our direction, and I knew they’d recognized us. I had only a second to wonder if they’d approach us before the woman got to her feet, ran her hand over her flawlessly styled silver hair and headed toward us.

  Her eyes were on James. “Mayor Hendricks.” She smiled, and James immediately stood up and took her hand in his.

  “Yes,” he said, “and you are…?”

  “Mary Wiley, just one of your constituents. We—” she looked over her shoulder at the man, most likely her husband “—we have such mixe
d feelings about your retirement,” she said. “The only good thing about it is that your son will take over.”

  Dale was already on his feet, already smiling that smile that made you feel special. I once thought that smile was only for me but soon came to realize it was for every single person he met. “Well, I hope that’s the case,” he said modestly. “Sounds like I can count on your vote.”

  “And the vote of everyone I know,” she said. “Really, it’s a given, isn’t it? I mean, Dina Pingry? She’s completely wrong.” She gave a little eye roll at the thought of Dale’s opposition, a woman who was a powerhouse Realtor in Beaufort. Of course, the people we hung out with were all Hendricks supporters, so it was sometimes easy to forget that Dina Pingry had her own fans and they were fanatical in their support. But James had been mayor of this small waterfront town for twenty years, and passing the torch to his thirty-three-year-old attorney son seemed like a done deal. To us, anyway.

  “It’s never a given, Mrs. Wiley,” Dale said. He was so good at remembering names! “I need every vote, so promise me you’ll get out there on election day.”

  “Oh, we work the polls,” she said, nodding toward her husband. “We never miss an election.” Her eyes finally fell on me, still in my seat between the two men. “You, dear, are going to have the wedding of the decade, aren’t you?”

  I didn’t stand, but I shook the hand she offered and gave her my own smile—the one I had quickly learned to put and keep on my face in public. It came pretty naturally to me. That was the thing Dale said first attracted him to me: I was always smiling. For me, it had been his gray eyes. When I saw those eyes, I suddenly understood the phrase Love at first sight. “I’m very lucky,” I said now, and Dale rested his hand on my shoulder.

  “I’m the lucky one,” he said.

  “Well, we’re waiting for our daughter to have her third.” The woman gestured toward the double doors that led to the labor rooms. “And I guess you’re waiting for Alissa…?” She didn’t finish her sentence, but raised her eyebrows to see if she was right. Of course she was. Alissa was the Hendricks’ barely seventeen-year-old daughter, my future sister-in-law and the poster child for Taking Responsibility for your Actions. The Hendricks had turned what might have been a scandalous event into an asset by publicly supporting their unwed pregnant daughter. This was a family that didn’t hide much, I’d discovered. Rather, they capitalized on the negative. To the outside world, their actions might have looked like complete support, but I was privy to their inside world, where all was not so rosy.

  “Mrs. Hendricks is with her,” James said to the woman. “Latest report is she’s doing very well.” He always called Mollie, his wife, Mrs. Hendricks in public. I’d asked Dale not to do the same to me after we were married. I’d actually wished I could keep my maiden name, Saville, but that wasn’t done in the world of the Hendricks family.

  “Well, now,” the woman said, “I’ll leave you three in peace. It’s the last peace you’ll have for a while with a baby around, I can tell you that.”

  “We’re looking forward to the chaos,” Dale said. “So nice meeting you, Mrs. Wiley.” He gave a little bow of his head and he and his father sat down again as the woman returned to her seat.

  I was tired and wished I could rest my head against Dale’s shoulder, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate it here in public. In public were words I heard all the time from one Hendricks or another. I was being trained to become one of them. I think they’d started grooming me from the moment I met them all two years earlier, when I’d applied for the job to assist with running their Taylor’s Creek Bed and Breakfast at the end of Front Street. It was a job I’d handled so well that I was now the manager. I’d met with all three of them in the living room of Hendricks House, their big, white, two-story home, which was right next door to the B and B and almost identical in its Queen Anne–style architecture. They told me later that they knew I was right for the job the moment I walked in, despite the fact that I was barely twenty and had zero experience at anything other than surviving. “You were much younger than we’d expected,” Mollie told me later, “but you were a people person, oozing self-confidence and full of enthusiasm. After the interview, you left the room and we all looked at each other and knew. I picked up the phone and canceled the other applicants we’d scheduled for interviews.”

  I’d wondered later if they knew then I would become one of them. If they’d wanted that. I thought so. It had been funny getting that glowing feedback. I was only beginning to know the real me. I was only starting to live. I was one year out from my heart transplant and still learning that I could trust my body, that I could climb a flight of stairs and walk a block and think about a future. If I wore a perpetual smile, that was why. I was alive and grateful for every second I’d been given. Now I was living that future. There were days, though, when it felt as though my life was no more in my control than it had been when I was sick. “Everyone feels that way,” my best friend, Joy, told me. “Totally normal.” I’d had so little experience with “normal” that I could only hope she was right.

  Mollie walked through the double doors into the waiting room. She wasn’t smiling and I suddenly felt afraid for Alissa. This time, I was the one to get to my feet. “Is everything okay?” I asked. I loved Alissa. She was so real. So down to earth. She was five years younger than me, but I felt as though we were kindred spirits—in ways only I truly understood.

  “She’s very close,” Mollie said, “but she wants you with her.” She looked at me. “You want to go in?”

  “Me?” From the start, the plan had been for Mollie to be in the delivery room with her daughter. “She wants you, honey.” Mollie sounded tired.

  Dale stood up and put his hand on the small of my back. “You okay with that?” he asked quietly. He was always protective of me. Sometimes I appreciated it. Other times it reminded me of my father, cutting me off from the world.

  “Sure,” I said. I was no stranger to hospitals, though a delivery room was unfamiliar territory. I hoped someday to have a career in medicine, though Dale said I’d never have to work if I didn’t want to. My only hesitation in being with Alissa was stepping into a role that had so clearly belonged to Mollie.

  “I’ll show you where,” Mollie said, and she led me through the waiting room and the double doors and into a hallway. She pointed toward a doorway. “Just hold her hand. Be there for her. She’s tired of me.” She gave me a smile that let me know she was a little bit hurt that Alissa wanted me with her rather than her mother.

  I heard Alissa the second I opened the door. She was halfway sitting up, panting hard, a look of intense concentration on her face, and I guessed she was in the middle of a contraction. “Robin!” she managed to say when she could catch her breath. Her face was red and sweaty, her forehead lined with pain.

  “I’m here, Ali,” I said. One of the nurses motioned toward a stool at the side of the bed and I sat down and took Alissa’s hand in both of mine. I wasn’t sure what to say. How are you feeling? seemed like a ridiculous question to ask. It was pretty clear how she was feeling, so I just repeated myself. “I’m here,” I said again. Someone handed me a damp, cool washcloth and I pressed it to her forehead. Tendrils of her auburn hair were plastered to her face and her brown eyes were bloodshot.

  “I couldn’t take one more minute of my mother.” She spoke through clenched teeth, then let out a long, loud groan. I watched the monitors on the other side of the bed. The baby’s heartbeat was so fast. Was it supposed to be that fast?

  “I think she’s okay with it,” I lied.

  “I hate her right now. I hate them. All of my stupid family. Except you.”

  “Shh,” I said, pulling the stool closer to her. I wondered if delivery room nurses had to keep things they heard confidential. I bet they heard all kinds of gossip in here. The last thing Dale needed was for the world to know all was not well with Beaufort’s first family.

  “Will should be with me,” Alissa whispered.
“That’s how it’s supposed to be. Not like this.”

  I was surprised. Will Stevenson was completely out of the picture and I’d thought she was finally okay with that. He’d created a mess the Hendricks family had needed to clean up, but now wasn’t the time to get into a big discussion with her about it. I’d never even met Will. Alissa had kept that relationship even from me, and I had to admit I was hurt when I found out about it. I’d thought we were closer than that. But she’d done me a favor. I didn’t want to feel as though I was keeping secrets from Dale—at least, no more than the secrets I was already keeping.

  She had another contraction and nearly broke my fingers as she squeezed them. The baby’s heartbeat slowed way down on the monitor and I glanced nervously at the nurses, trying to gauge if something was wrong, but no one except me seemed concerned.

  “This baby’s going to wreck my life!” Alissa nearly shouted when the contraction had ended.

  “Shh,” I said. It wasn’t the first time I’d heard her say that and it worried me. If Alissa had had her way, she’d be putting this baby up for adoption, but that would never have been acceptable to her parents. “You’re going to love her,” I said, as if I knew about these things. “Everything’s going to work out fine. You’ll see.”

  * * *

  An hour later, baby Hannah was born and I watched my future sister-in-law change from a screaming, fighting, panting warrior to a docile and beaten-down seventeen-year-old. The doctor rested the tiny infant on her belly, but Alissa didn’t touch her or look at her. Instead, she turned her head away, and I saw two of the nurses exchange a glance. I wanted to touch that baby myself. How could Alissa not want to?

  One of the nurses took Hannah to the side of the room to clean her up and I leaned my lips close to Alissa’s ear. “She’s beautiful, Ali,” I said. “Wait till you get a good look at her.” But Alissa wouldn’t even look at me, and as I wiped her face with the washcloth, I wasn’t sure if it was perspiration or tears I was cleaning away.