by David Bell
“I don’t know what to say, Candy,” Bill said. “I’m just so sorry about Haley. My God. She was such a wonderful, beautiful young girl.”
“I asked where you were, where Summer was, and they told us. I couldn’t leave the hospital without coming up here and seeing her.” She gestured widely. “The police have been asking a lot of questions, of course, and Caleb was kind enough to come with me while I . . . It turns out I couldn’t really make an identification. I mean, Haley, her body . . . It’s in bad shape.” Her voice sounded on the edge of breaking, but she held it together, impressing Bill with her poise. “We’re going to the funeral home next.”
“Oh, my God,” Bill said. “I can’t imagine.”
“How is Summer?” Candy asked. “They didn’t say much to us except that she was critically injured.”
Bill tried to explain what he knew of Summer’s condition. He managed to talk about the collapsed lung, but the rest of the words jumbled in his brain, and he found himself verbally flailing until Candy placed her hand on his elbow.
“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s all too complicated.”
Bill felt calmed by seeing Candy’s familiar face. He had little in common with Haley’s family and didn’t really travel in the same circles they did, with the exception of attending the same events at the school and picking up and dropping the girls off at each other’s house. If it hadn’t been for the kids’ friendship—which started when they were in the first grade and never stopped—he wouldn’t know much about Candy at all. But Candy’s was the first friendly face he’d seen all morning, and he found the tension in his chest, the grinding of his back molars against each other, easing in her presence.
“Do you know anything about this, Candy?” Bill asked. “Do you know what the girls were doing or how they ended up out in that park? Or who might have tipped off the police?”
“I don’t know anything,” Candy said. “The police don’t sound like they know very much either. Nobody does. They said you thought they were coming to our house, but they never showed up. I was home. I would have seen them. Haley told me she was going to your house.”
“We have a lot of unanswered questions now,” Caleb, the pastor, said.
Bill gave him a quick look. “The police are hinting at all kinds of things.”
“Let’s not delve into these complicated matters in a time of grief,” Caleb said. “Candy has to go—”
“Candy, do you know something about these boys? Do you think they’re involved? Detective Hawkins was asking me about them.”
“It’s okay, Caleb,” she said. Her lip quivered for a long moment, and she lifted her hand to her chest while she suppressed a deep sob. Collected again, she turned to Bill. “The police have been asking me about everything, but I don’t know what I can tell them. Haley’s sex life.” She shivered. “All kinds of things. I mean, I’m no dummy. I know what kids do. But I can’t imagine who would do this.” She made a vague gesture in the direction of Summer’s room.
“I don’t know anything either,” Bill said, studying Candy’s face. He wanted her to say something, anything, to convince him none of it was real. Candy was a mother. She must know more than he did. “He was asking me about Clinton Fields and those other kids. Remember he beat that kid up a couple of years ago? Beat him up bad—”
But then Bill remembered himself. The woman standing before him had just lost her daughter. Lost. Gone forever. He dialed back on his own zealousness. He knew Candy was experiencing the same things he was experiencing. But multiplied to an infinite degree.
“I’m sorry, Candy,” he said. “I shouldn’t be pushing about these things. Haley was a wonderful girl. She and Summer . . . They were such good friends. My God . . . since first grade. All those trips to the mall, the sleepovers. Girl Scouts . . .”
“They were great friends, yes.”
“Maybe . . .” He didn’t know if completing the thought would bring any comfort to anyone. But Candy gave him an expectant look, so he finished by saying, “Well, at least they weren’t alone. They were together when this happened.”
Candy considered the statement for a moment, her face distant, her eyes red with grief. “That is a good thought.”
A young nurse with long red hair tied in a ponytail emerged from Summer’s room and approached Bill. She told him that he could go back in and sit with his daughter whenever he wanted, that she was resting comfortably and breathing normally.
“I should get back inside there,” Bill said. “I don’t want her to be alone.”
“Of course.” She looked at Caleb. “I think I have to be the one to call Rich.” Bill knew Rich was Haley’s father. Candy’s voice held steady. “He’s going to be shocked. I don’t know what other word to use.”
Bill looked to the pastor for help and, finding none, said, “Can you tell Rich . . . tell him how sorry I am? I don’t know what else to say right now.”
But Candy’s eyes drifted past Bill in the direction of Summer’s room. Bill looked back, expecting to see something, but there was nothing going on. Nothing he could see.
“What is it?” he asked.
“We were wondering about something,” Candy said, looking over at Caleb.
“We were wondering if we could step inside and pray for Summer,” Caleb said.
“I don’t . . .”
Candy reached out and took Bill’s hand. Her skin felt hot, almost feverish. “I know you haven’t been attending a church, not since Julia died.” She looked over at Caleb as though seeking encouragement. “We thought maybe prayers would help right now as Summer heals.”
Bill looked down to where their hands were joined, felt the pressure she exerted against his skin. It seemed like a form of pleading, a way of begging Bill to let them into Summer’s room. And while he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the religious display, he also couldn’t say no to a mother who had just lost her daughter in such a horrible way.
“Okay,” Bill said. “Sure.”
Candy squeezed even harder. “Good. I think you’ll see God can do a lot of good in Summer’s life. It’s never too late for that to happen.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
The three of them entered Summer’s room. Bill made sure he went in first, and he checked her left side where the chest tube had been inserted. The tube remained in place, its rubber length snaking out from under her hospital gown and reaching a portable machine by the side of the bed. Summer’s gown was mostly back in place over her chest, so Bill waved Candy and the pastor forward.
Candy gasped when she saw Summer. Bill remembered Candy’s comment from moments before about not being able to identify Haley’s body due to the damage inflicted. He shuddered.
The pastor moved to the left side of the bed, his face solemn, and Candy moved next to him. Bill stayed on the other side—across Summer’s body and opposite them—and watched as they both bowed their heads and closed their eyes.
Bill and Julia had been married in the Catholic Church. They’d both attended their whole lives, and when Summer was born, they raised her in the church as well. Baptism, First Communion, Sunday school. They did it all. He could summon the feel of the heavy wooden pews, the sickeningly sweet aroma of incense. Bill never would have described himself as a man of great faith or a true believer, but he liked the structure the church provided in his life, the sense that there were boundaries and end lines and a promise of order amid the chaos.
Candy leaned close. “Oh, Summer, you sweet girl. I’m so sorry, baby.”
Summer’s lips moved. One side of her mouth turned down in an agitated frown.
“It’s okay, Summer. I know you’re in there.”
She made the face again, even more agitated. Candy smiled without showing her teeth.
“Father above,” Caleb said. “We come to you today . . .”
Bill kept his eyes open, watching his daught
er. When Julia died suddenly and unexpectedly, Bill couldn’t summon any desire to set foot inside a church again. Something disappeared inside of him that day, like dry ground sucking down a puddle of water. He bristled at the cruelty of some unseen being who ruled the universe and randomly struck down his wife at such a young age. But Julia’s death also led to an intense questioning of himself. Bill couldn’t see a path forward—not through any church, at least—that would allow him to forgive himself for not being there when Julia died. Instead, he lived with the image of Julia falling off the ladder to the kitchen floor—alone, scared, and in pain as she suffered her fatal injury. And Bill wasn’t even the first to find her. Summer came home from school and found her dead mother on the cold linoleum like a beached fish.
“We ask this all in the name of Jesus, who saves us. Amen.”
“Amen,” Candy said.
A silence settled over the room, the gentle hisses and beeps of the machines the only noises as both of them looked at Bill. He ignored their appraisal and kept his mouth shut, refusing to join in the amen chorus.
Candy looked wounded by Bill’s silence, and he wished he’d gone along, wished he’d done whatever he could for the grieving woman in the room. She stepped forward and bent down, placing her hand on Summer’s arm and giving it a gentle squeeze.
“We’re praying for you, Summer. We’re all behind you, honey.”
A moment passed, and rather than making the frowning face, Summer’s lips parted and smacked together a few times. Bill moved closer, watching, fearing that something was wrong, but the girl continued to work her lips that way for about ten seconds as though trying to form a word. An “M” sound or an “O.” When that effort failed, she simply emitted a very low and brief groan. And then silence.
Candy smiled, her body still bent toward the bed. “We know you’re in there,” she said. “We hear you.”
“She did that earlier when I was talking to her,” Bill said, fully aware that the movement of Summer’s lips as Candy spoke outpaced anything she had done at the sound of Bill’s voice. But maybe she felt better, more energetic, with a reinflated lung.
The same red-haired nurse slipped through the door, her shoes making no sound, as though she walked on air. “We might want to limit our visits,” she said. “Immediate family only and not too long.”
“We were just going,” Caleb said, offering the calming, pastoral smile.
“We’ll come back and see you, Summer,” Candy said.
And again the same movement of Summer’s lips, although briefer and with less energy.
• • •
When the three of them were out in the hall, Bill kept his distance as Candy started to lean in for a hug.
“I felt something in there, Bill,” she said. “I felt . . . I don’t know.”
“What did you mean by saying it’s not too late for God to come into Summer’s life?” he asked.
Candy didn’t answer, so Caleb said, “It’s been an extremely long morning for everyone.” He placed his hand on the small of Candy’s back and tried to gently guide her away from Bill and the entrance to Summer’s room.
“Are you saying if Summer went to church on a regular basis, this wouldn’t have happened to her?” Bill asked, stopping them. “Both of our daughters were out there. They both were hurt.”
Candy moved away from Caleb’s touch and faced Bill. Her eyes were filled with tears, and Bill saw deep lines etched at the corners of her mouth. “You know as well as I do that Haley worshipped Summer. She did everything Summer did. The clothes, the hair, the music. Summer was the leader, the dominant one.”
“Summer is strong-willed,” Bill said. “That’s a good quality.”
“I remember the time they stole that tube of lipstick from Walgreens. Haley came home, and she told me, ‘Mom, Summer pushed me into doing it.’”
“You’re talking about the lipstick they stole when they were twelve?”
“And the missed curfews lately. The back talk. That’s not my daughter. Summer strolls into my house and talks to me like I’m her peer, like we’re both adults. She’s fifteen going on thirty-five.”
“She’s mature,” Bill said. “She’s an only child.”
“Haley was just so . . . good-natured.” Candy’s face crumpled with grief. “Who do you think followed who . . . whatever they were doing?”
Bill wanted to say more, but he didn’t as Caleb led Candy away.
• • •
When Bill turned around, the red-haired nurse stood in his way. She held a small bottle, something Bill didn’t recognize. She seemed to want to say something to him but didn’t. He couldn’t identify the source of the expectant look on her face.
“Were we talking too loud?” Bill asked. He realized his hands were clenched into fists in the aftermath of his exchange with Candy, and it required a conscious effort to relax them. His heart thumped, and he knew if he’d been at home, he would have thrown something in frustration.
“No,” the nurse said. “Not at all. I just wanted to tell you I’m going in to take care of something with Summer. Something quick.”
“She’s okay?”
“There’s no problem.” The nurse again looked like she wanted to say more. Her eyes almost appeared mischievous, like she possessed a secret. “Why don’t you come in and I’ll show you?”
Bill followed her through the door and watched as she gently moved the covers down Summer’s body. Bill held his hand out. “Wait. What is this?”
“It’s okay,” she said, and continued on. The covers now down, she took great care lifting Summer’s gown. Bill felt like he shouldn’t be looking, but the nurse nodded to Summer’s stomach.
First he saw the bruise. About the size of an orange, or someone’s fist, it sat just above her belly button. And his daughter looked even thinner than he remembered. Had she been losing weight? Dieting? Or just getting taller and losing her baby fat?
Then he saw what the nurse must have wanted him to notice.
“What’s that?” he asked, although he knew. A half-inch-wide hoop was stuck into the soft flesh, the skin around the post red and tender. “Who did that to her?”
“Somebody who didn’t know to sterilize first,” the nurse said. “We’re pumping her full of antibiotics through the IV, but I thought I’d give it a cleaning as well.”
“She didn’t have that—” But Bill stopped himself. How did he know what she’d done to her body? He hadn’t seen his daughter naked since she was three. And the piercing fit with her recent defiant, rebellious attitude. She probably would have loved to see the look on Bill’s face when he discovered it.
He also remembered Hawkins’s questions about her sex life. She was fifteen, living on the border between girl and woman.
“I guess I don’t know much of anything,” Bill said, somewhat defeated.
The nurse nodded as she worked, applying a solution to a piece of gauze. She carefully wiped the red skin around the piercing, her thin fingers as gentle and steady as a surgeon’s.
“I figure I just did Summer a favor,” she said while she worked. “When she wakes up, you’ll be so happy to see her, you won’t care about a little thing like a piercing she got without your permission. It’s not a big deal to have one. Some of us got them in college.” She chuckled softly.
Bill sensed that he was being manipulated, that just like Hawkins saying the collapsed lung wasn’t as bad as it seemed, the nurse was not so subtly reminding him of his priorities.
He didn’t need to be reminded, even though the sight of the piercing made his skin crawl. Not knowing how much Summer could hear or understand, he moved to the head of the bed and leaned down close.
“I don’t care about the piercing,” he said. “All I care about is your getting better.”
Summer started moving her lips, again as if she wanted to form a word. Bill l
ooked to the nurse, who shrugged lightly, the bottle of alcohol and the swab still in her hand.
“Do you want to say something, Summer? It’s Dad.”
And the puckering grew more rapid, accompanied by a low clucking sound in her mouth, the intensity of the movement increasing. Her head twitched once, to the left and then back to the right.
“Did you want to say something to me?” Bill asked. “Do you want something from me?”
Bill leaned in even closer. And he heard the word she seemed to be saying.
“No. No. No. No. No. No.”
CHAPTER NINE
Near noon the next day, a gentle touch on his shoulder brought him awake.
He lurched forward in the seat, having dozed off.
“Summer?”
Reality landed on him again. He saw the hospital bed before him, the tubes, and heard the beeping. His daughter’s body under the covers, little changed in the past day.
“I’m sorry,” a voice said.
He looked up, his head foggy with sleep. A familiar and welcome face smiled down at him. Paige.
“You’re here,” he said, standing up.
“I thought about not waking you.”
“I’m glad you did.” He reached out and took his sister into his arms, pulling her close and gripping her as tightly as he would a life preserver. “You’re a sight for sore eyes.”
They stepped back, taking each other in. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come sooner.”
“It’s okay. You have a family, a life.” He gestured at the room, the bed. Summer’s unconscious form. “I’m glad to have the support.”
“I’m here.” Paige wiped tears from her cheeks. “I’m sorry for all of this. I can’t believe . . .” She left the thought unfinished, but Bill understood.
“It looks terrible,” he said. “She looks terrible.” Bill remembered Summer’s slight reactions from the day before, both when he spoke to her and when Candy did. He reminded himself to lower his voice so she didn’t hear him talking about her condition in such bleak terms, even if the terms were perfectly appropriate. “Let’s talk in the hallway.”