Esperanza (31 page)

The bullet that had turned her life inside out had pierced an artery in her right thigh and she nearly had bled to death before she made it to ER. During emergency surgery, she had flatlined. She still didn’t know how long she’d been dead. Not that it mattered. Nothing had happened—no tunnel of light, no celestial choirs, no reunions with the departed.

The femur bone in her right thigh had required steel pins and rods to restore. She now had so much metal in her leg that in an airport screening she probably would trigger alarms. Her limp remained noticeable, but improved daily. In fact, she felt better today than she had in weeks, and was sure that daily yoga helped, her compensation for physical therapy since her insurance coverage had run out. All she needed to return to work was a clean bill of
mental
health.

She wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to return to the Bureau, but her leave was nearly used up and she needed the income. Her boss had assured her she was first in line for any Bureau position that opened in the Keys, but such openings were rare. The Keys were a coveted location, more laid-back,
less bureaucratic bullshit. But until or if it happened, she would commute to Miami, two hours round trip if she didn’t drive at peak hours. Even though the prospect didn’t thrill her, what with the price of gas as high as it was, she had no great desire to move back to Miami. Couldn’t afford it, given all her bills. The town house she’d rented for seven years was now occupied by someone else and her mother had moved most of her belongings to storage.

“Hey, Tesso. What’s up?” Maddie strode into the kitchen dressed in her tank top and running shorts, carrying her shoes in her hand.

“Too early for much to be up. Where’re you running?”

“The beach. Two miles round trip. Want to come?”

Maddie reminded Tess of a frisky colt, all legs, with a lovely mane of thick red hair that came from her father’s side of the family. The rest of her was pure Livingston—dancing blue eyes, a mouth that perfectly reflected her moods, high cheekbones. Her pale complexion wasn’t genetic, she worked at it. No sunbathing. Many creams and sunblocks. A Nicole Kidman in the making. She was a fussy eater, too, a true vegan who ate only raw fruits, vegetables, tofu. A ruby stud flashed from her left nostril.

“You’d lose me after three yards,” Tess said.

“You’re underestimating yourself.” Maddie dropped her shoes, popped open the fridge, poured herself a tall glass of OJ. “You know how I was a year ago. I could barely walk thirty yards without getting winded. I was just your local fat girl, headed toward diabetes, reviled by fellow students, a laughingstock. If I can do it, so can you.”

A year ago, Madison wasn’t just the local fat girl. She had been living in North Carolina with her mother, Tess’s older sister, and her new husband, a man Maddie detested. She was nearly flunking out of school, had been arrested twice, was on a fast track to nowhere. So when Tess’s sister had called and asked their mother if she would take Madison for a few months, as though she were a stray desperately in need of a home, Lauren Livingston had driven to North Carolina and picked her up.

Madison took to the Keys the way a frog took to insects. Hungry for change, she had turned her life around and graduated from high school in December, six months earlier than her peers. She recently finished her first semester at the junior college and had been accepted to the University of Florida for the fall. The software company she and a friend had developed would be paying her bills. She wanted to be a vet.

“Okay, get Lauren and I’ll give it a shot.”

“I appreciate the fact that no one referred to me as ‘Nana,’ a word I’ve always detested.” Tess’s mother stood in the doorway, already decked out in her running clothes, her short, thick hair brushed back dramatically, a salt-and-pepper lion’s mane. Her sinewy body, as slender and compact as a shoot of bamboo, looked like that of a woman of forty. Daily runs, yoga, a moderate diet. She probably would outlive them all. She threw her arms out dramatically. “Now, I ask you, does Lauren Livingston look sixty-three?”

The chorus was unanimous. “No way!”

“You both will live to see another day. Now let’s get on with this run, ladies.”

The beach on which Tess’s mother lived was not really a beach in the way most people thought of Florida beaches. No endless white sands, just endless mounds of rocks, shells, seaweed. They ran at the water’s edge and every quarter of a mile crossed a dock that thrust out into the water, a boat of some kind tethered to it. After crossing one too many docks, Tess slowed to a walk and her mother fell into step beside her.

“You want company today, Slim?”

Slim
. How odd that her mother would refer to her by the nickname her dad always had used. Slim, from one of her favorite Bogie and Bacall movies,
Dark Passage
. The nickname made her uncomfortable, as though it carried an association that Tess couldn’t recall.

The question was a tactful way for her mother to ask if Tess needed emotional support for her appointment with the shrink. Oddly, it hadn’t occurred to her. Most of the time, she felt emotionally absent, as though her heart had been carved up and tossed to wolves. She didn’t say that to her mother, though. Lauren Livingston, ex-hippie, connoisseur of the best of the mind-altering drugs of the sixties, acid-tripping companion of Terrence McKenna in the summer of love, was now a mainstream nurse and might read something into those words.
Emotionally absent
. It sounded dangerous, like the description for a serial killer. But Tess knew something was missing inside. It was as if huge chunks of herself had gotten lost when she had flatlined.

“I’m fine, Mom. I’ve been driving for two weeks.”

“To and from yoga and the grocery store is a little different than a drive to Miami.”

“My leg took a hit, not my head.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I’m good, Mom. Really. Everyone treats me like I suffered brain trauma.”

“Well, you
did
flatline. I was talking to Doc about the kinds of questions the shrink might ask, and he felt pretty certain the flatline would come up.”

Tess disliked the idea of her mother discussing her with Doc Brian, her mother’s intermittent lover. “How would he know?”

“His background is psychiatric ER, that’s how. Possible brain trauma enters the equation. Do you remember anything from when you were in a coma or dead?”

Tess had lost count of how many times her mother had asked this question. Her answer never changed. “Nope. There isn’t anything, Mom. I died, that’s it. Then I started breathing again and my molecules swam back together and here I am.” Tess stooped down and swept up a piece of driftwood. She ran her fingers over the smooth bark, studying the swirls of patterns, spirals within spirals. The driftwood was more interesting than death, she thought.

“That sounds cynical, hon.”

“Yeah, I guess it is. But death isn’t an acid trip, Mom.”

“I’ll be sure to include that in my book about McKenna and Kesey and the gang.”

Her mother’s wild youth in the sixties.

Ahead of them, Madison stopped, hands on her hips. “Cheaters,” she shouted. “No walking allowed.”

“I can’t believe my own granddaughter is calling me a cheater,” Lauren said.

Tess smiled as her mother jogged on.

Tess’s Mazda 3 purred north on U.S. 1, headed toward the campus where Maddie and her software partner would be testing their newest product on a student focus group. Maddie fiddled with her hair, put on peace symbol earrings. “Lauren’s convinced something happened to you when you died, Tesso.”

“Why?”

“Probably because she’s been reading all these books about near-death experiences, Buddhism, reincarnation. Why does Lauren ask any of these questions? It’s just how she is.”

“Nothing happened to me. Or if it did, I can’t remember it.”

“You’re different now. You know that, right?”

“I am? How?”

“You really listen.”

“I didn’t before?”

“Not like now. When I say something to you now, I know you’re really hearing me. And there’re other things, like what you eat. You used to eat red meat, a lot of junk food, and drank tons of soda. You haven’t touched any of that since you woke up. You never took vitamins or practiced yoga. Then there’s Dan. Before you got shot, you were talking about moving in with him. Now you avoid his calls. You’re not the same person. And I think I like this Tess better.”

“So before I was Cruella De Vil. Now I’m Mother Teresa?”

Maddie snickered.

“Okay, scratch the Mother Teresa reference.”

“You’re just different, Tesso. From the instant you came out of that coma, there was something in your eyes that said everything had changed.”

Really? From the moment she had returned to the world, her dominant emotion was deep appreciation that she was alive.

She pulled up in front of the main building on campus and her niece swung her long legs out the door and pointed her index finger and thumb at Tess, like a gun. “Go show that shrink how Tesso rocks. I’ll get a ride home.”

The drive to Miami was fine for the first forty minutes, relaxing, slow, minimal traffic. Not many tourists in June. She stopped twice to snap pictures of wading birds that filled the shoals where the waves had receded. She counted six osprey nests, better than she expected, and caught sight of a pod of dolphins working their way out to sea.

A part of her desperately craved to lie low here in the Keys, to find a simpler, more satisfying life—tour guide, clerk, lifeguard, fisherwoman, dolphin trainer. The pay would suck, but so what? Let the hospital sue her. Let the insurance bastards come after her. Let the IRS garnish her wages. She didn’t own anything that could possibly make a dent in her medical bills.

But she couldn’t just shirk all responsibility. Even if she didn’t want to continue investigating homicides and drug deals and partnering with Dan Hernandez, her other options were limited. Private practice as a defense attorney with a firm in Miami or working for the Florida state attorney’s office. Neither appealed to her.

As U.S. 1 melted into the turnpike, traffic swelled and moved more quickly. She sat up straighter, both hands gripping the wheel as though she were some decrepit old woman with vision and reflex issues. Cars cut her off, whizzed past her, squeezed her out. Suddenly, it all came to a grinding, screeching conflagration of metal against metal, tires shrieking against hot pavement, glass shattering.

Tess swerved to the shoulder to avoid crashing into the car in front of her. She slammed on the brakes, the engine died, ticking impotently in the silence. For moments she gripped the steering wheel, heart hammering, eyes glued to the sunlit chaos in front of her. Three cars lay on their sides in a twisted, smoking heap of metal and broken glass, a fourth car lay on its roof in the grassy gulley that separated the north and south lanes. An SUV stood in the middle of the road, the driver’s door smashed in, windows shattered, tires flat, gnarled front fender on the ground in front of it.

Tess scrambled from her car, punched out 911 on her cell, spat out her approximate location to the emergency operator. “Five car pileup, northbound lane, definite injuries.”

Even as she said this, a teenage girl stumbled from the SUV, shrieking and sobbing,
“My mom, someone help my mom, please, oh God, help my mom
. . . ” Blood streamed down her face, she clutched her bloody left arm, and weaved toward the driver’s door and struggled to open it.

“I’ll get your mom,” Tess said gently, touching the girl’s shoulder. “But I’d like you to go sit down by the side of the road. An ambulance is on the way.”

“I’m a doctor,” said a man who hurried over, medical bag hanging from his shoulder, and immediately took charge of the girl.

Other people came forward to help and Tess suddenly found herself in charge. Two off-duty firemen with paramedical experience helped remove a child from the overturned car in the gulley, several women rescued injured children wandering around, a skinny guy in stained coveralls had tools to pry open crumpled doors and went to work on the SUV.

As soon as the door fell off, Tess got a close look at the woman inside, trapped against the seat by the airbag. She nearly vomited, the man beside her wrenched back. Large pieces of glass and metal protruded from the woman’s shoulder, arrows of glass stuck out of her right eyebrow, the left side of her face was torn open from her chin to her ear. Barely conscious, she somehow turned her head slightly, terrified eyes begging Tess to help her.

“Can’t . . . feel my legs,” she murmured. “My . . . daughter . . . where?”

“She’s fine,” Tess told her. “She got out. And we’re going to get you out of here.” To the man, she said, “You have a knife that will puncture the airbag?”

“Right here.”

Tess slipped her arm around the woman’s chest so she wouldn’t flop forward as the air rushed from the bag. The pressure eased, the woman sobbed, then passed out. The man said he’d get the doctor and sprinted off.

The airbag puddled in a bloody heap across the woman’s thighs, Tess’s hands and arms were slick with her blood, her clothes were stained with it. The stink of impending death suffused her nostrils. “You hold on, okay? The doc’s on the way, your daughter is fine, the—”

Suddenly, the woman was standing next to Tess, khaki Capri pants and turquoise blouse no longer torn and bloody, her pretty face clean, dark hair brushed back behind her ears. “It looks bad,” she said with strange detachment. “Do you think I’ll make it?”