Home Before Dark (8 page)

“I don't think so. One of them was taken to Brackenridge. I think—” She turned into the little nook of the pay phone and pressed herself against the wall, trying to disappear. “I'm afraid he's in bad shape, but nobody's talking. I'm scared for Lila. Afraid of how she'll cope when all this becomes real to her.”

“She'll be all right,” Jessie said. “We'll make it be all right.”

“Thanks, Jess. We'll be home as soon as we can.”

Luz hung up the phone, flashing on an image of her sister. What a shock it had been to see her walking up to the porch, a younger, more vivid version of Luz herself. Breaking into Jessie's own trademark thousand-watt smile, she had whirled into Edenville like a Technicolor tornado. Now she was in charge of Luz's boys.

Luz turned to scan the waiting area. She had brought Lila to the E.R. more than once, when she'd split her chin open falling from a rope swing, and when she'd broken her arm jumping off that barn roof. Wyatt had come in with a gash from a rusty nail one Sunday last year, and a few summers back, she'd driven herself here, not wanting to present that particular ailment to her hometown family practitioner.

Now the waiting area appeared chaotic, jammed with more and more people as time went on. When she recognized Mrs. Linden, the school counselor, she realized how big this was, growing bigger by the minute. There were six kids in the car. Six families, six mothers awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of the night. The effects of this would ripple outward like circles in water, radiating from a single dropped stone, getting larger and encompassing more and more each second.

People were crying, arguing, praying. The police were trying to question everyone. Nell Bridger collapsed into Mrs. Linden's arms, and something inside Luz curled up in horror. Nell had two sons, Travis and Dig. Which of them had been in the Jeep? Both?

She tried to navigate her way across the lobby to Nell, but her friend left quickly, leaning on the counselor. The noise rose in a crescendo of despair. Luz wanted to clap her hands over her ears to drown out the cacophony of fear and rage.

Into the streaming chaos walked her husband, worried eyes scanning the waiting area. Luz's heart rose when she saw him
coming toward her. They met in the middle of everything and she clung to him, her safe harbor in a storm of confusion.

She said nothing, for she feared that bitter accusations might come out. Often his work consumed him. His job was no mere nine-to-five occupation. He'd missed birthdays and first steps, swim meets and teacher conferences because he'd been in court or in session, racing against time to rescue someone from being executed. She was proud of the work he did but sometimes—God, sometimes—she wished for more of him. For all of him.

“Is she okay?” he murmured. “Can I see her?”

Luz clenched her hands into his shirt. Her knees liquified, and she nearly collapsed against him. “She's going to be fine.”

They embraced one more time and a flash went off. The media had arrived, hungry for anything that would sell papers or airtime. Grabbing Ian's hand, Luz wove through the crowd and into the hallway, then hurried on to the exam room.

Lila was sitting up in bed, sipping something from a plastic bottle. Her hair formed a ruby-toned nimbus around her head, and the cruel starkness of the overhead lights sucked all the color from her face. When she spied Ian, she cut her eyes away. “Daddy.”

“Hey, sweet thing.” Ian halted at the end of the bed and regarded her with a sort of restrained reverence that was almost fear. He didn't touch Lila other than to put his hand on the starched sheet covering her leg. Ian rarely touched Lila anymore; since puberty hit, he regarded her as some exotic creature that could be handled only by trained specialists. “You're sure she's all right,” he whispered to Luz.

“Yes. Stay with her.” Luz ached to be away from the hospital. She wanted to sweep her family out of the putty-colored halls, out of the exam room with all this frightening equipment for determining damage, life or death. “I'm going to
find someone to help us get the hell out of here.” She left him standing by the bed.

After the ordeal of coping with a premature infant, she knew how to handle the bureaucracy of a hospital. Her determination hardened to rudeness as she tracked down Dr. Martinez and informed him that if he failed to discharge Lila immediately, she intended to simply leave with her daughter. The doctor promised to see to it right away. Luz was always surprised when people found her intimidating. Yet her children made her fierce. They always did. They always had. From the first moment she laid eyes on Lila, Luz had been aggressively protective.

Armed with a sheaf of signed papers and forms, she marched into the exam room to give Ian the good news. While Dr. Martinez rattled off final instructions, he fitted Lila with a cervical collar, as a precaution. The high neck brace made her look like some sort of angry Egyptian goddess as she sat down, against her will, in the wheelchair for the ride to the parking lot.

The trouble started when they wheeled Lila out through the waiting room. Parents and relatives milled around, and clearly Lila was the first to leave. Some of the parents regarded her with yearning and veiled resentment. Her departure was a poignant reminder that their own children still remained.

As they approached the main door, a gray-faced, red-eyed woman approached. “I'm Cheryl Hayes. Heath Walker's mother.”

Heath Walker. Lila's first love. Keeping their hormone-charged passion in check was like stopping the tide. Heartthrob handsome, with his Texas drawl and devastating dark eyes, he had beguiled their daughter away in the night, sought to impress her with his driving, put her at unspeakable risk, nearly caused her to die.

“Lucinda Benning,” she said through a taut throat. “This is my husband, Ian.”

The woman didn't acknowledge the introduction. Instead she focused on Lila, who looked up at her solemnly. “Mrs. Hayes, is Heath all right?”

“Of course he's not all right. His injuries are minor, thank God, but he's out for the football season. He'll miss homecoming! This is your fault, young lady.” The accusation lashed like a whip. “Heath would never have gone out last night if you hadn't pressured him—”

“Just a damn minute,” Luz burst out. From the corner of her eye, she saw Lila flinch, but couldn't stop herself. “It was your son at the wheel. You're not blaming this—”

“Excuse us.” Ian cut her off with a smooth, quiet interjection and put his hand at the small of her back. “We've all got to get through this, Mrs. Hayes, but pointing the finger isn't going to help us or our kids. I wish you the best of luck with your son, ma'am.” That lawyerly magic shut her up for a few moments, long enough for them to make it to the door. He escorted Luz and Lila outside with brisk efficiency, but not before Luz felt her face catch fire with delayed fury. “How dare that woman say those things?”

“She's upset,” he explained. “People always try to find someone to blame when unthinkable things happen.”

“She's right,” Lila said, losing patience as a hospital orderly flipped the footrests of the wheelchair. She stepped over the metal footrests and got up to walk stiffly toward the parking lot. “I wanted Heath to launch the Jeep. It's one of my favorite things ever.”

Luz's gut turned to stone as she handed Ian her car keys. “You drive.”

He followed her to the car, holding the back door for Lila. Their daughter slid in, fastened her seat belt before either par
ent could remind her, wincing with hidden pain. She leaned back and closed her eyes.

“Heath was in the driver's seat,” Luz said, sliding into the passenger side. “His conduct was his decision and his responsibility.”

Lila yawned and sighed. Her lack of reaction to the situation was only a facade; Luz spotted the single tear that slid down her daughter's cheek and bled into the padded cuff of the cervical collar. She wore her attitude like body armor.

They drove away from the hospital in a terrible silence. Their daughter had just been involved in a trauma. She had not yet disclosed all that she had seen, heard, felt in those terrible moments. Her statement to the highway patrol consisted largely of
I don't remember
and whether or not that was the truth, Luz didn't know. What she did know was that she mothered by instinct and instinct told her that now, with the sunrise racing over the hills surrounding Edenville, was not the time for hard questions.

Ian lacked that maternal sensibility. He was a man, a lawyer and someone who was unflinchingly honest. “Things are going to change in a big way from now on,” he said, his shadowed jaw ticking.

“We'll talk about it when we get home, okay?” Luz's hand shook as she pushed her hair back. Then she turned toward the back seat to find Lila with her eyes closed and mouth slack, fast asleep.

Reaching out, she rested her hand on her daughter's. The landscape sped by in a smear of asphalt roads and heaved-up sandstone hills, tortilla-yellow grass and blue morning sky. Roadrunners darted in and out of the hawthorn bushes and livestock gathered around salt licks put out by the ranchers. Trucks and bumblebee-colored school buses rumbled past. Cars turned into strip centers with video stores and Laundro
mats. For folks who hadn't spent the past night having their lives rearranged, it was just another day in the hill country.

“Where were you last night?” she asked Ian.

“We had a late meeting with the appeals team and the unit warden working graveyard shift. We'd ordered pizza and lost track of time. Then I got your message, and had to wake Matlock up to fly me back. The tower was unmanned that time of night so he had to get some sort of clearance. I came as fast as humanly possible, Luz. You know that. But I've never been quick enough for you, have I?”

“What?” She looked at him with a frown. Where had that come from?

“Never mind. We're both exhausted. Who's staying with the boys?” Ian asked, switching gears.

“Well, who do you think?” Luz figured it should be obvious. “Jessie, of course.”

“I thought you might have called someone more—someone who knows the boys better.”

“Jessie's right there. And she's their aunt.”

“I guess.”

“But you're not comfortable with her being in charge.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror. “She's a flake. She's always been a flake. I'm not saying she'd harm the boys, but she might get…careless.”

“Give her a break, Ian. She's not the same person she was sixteen years ago. None of us are. And in a pinch, Jessie comes through. She always has.”

“Name one single time she came through for you.”

“She saved my life. I never told you that, did I?”

“Jessie?” He lifted one eyebrow. “How much coffee have you had?”

“It's true. It was during a winter freeze when we were kids. The stock ponds had frozen over. Folks said it was the first
time in fifty years the ice was thick enough to skate on. So of course we had to go check it out. It took a good hour to hike through the woods to Cutter's pond. We didn't have proper ice skates, but we managed to slide all day in our Keds. Jessie and I were the last to leave. All the other kids had to be home before dark but…well, you know my mother. She was more likely to tell us to be home by spring.”

Luz hitched up one leg to sit sideways, so she could watch Lila sleep. Her goal had always been to be the sort of mother Glenny Ryder had never been. Other kids went home to warm houses with lights glowing in the windows and a kettle of soup simmering on the stove. Luz and Jessie went home to mind-numbing hours of bad TV and cold cut sandwiches.

“It was getting pretty dark,” she continued, “but we wanted one more turn around the pond. Just one. I think it was the first time I ever beat Jessie in a race. But I fell wrong, skidded into a tree. My ankle wouldn't work, and my elbow bled like a fire hose. There was no way I could walk. The light faded, fast as a falling curtain. She built me a fire. I never knew until that day she could even build a fire, or that she always carried a pack of matches on her. She walked back to town to bring help. I'll never know how she found her way through the woods. She did the impossible and showed up in Edenville right when folks were turning on the six o'clock news. Everyone thought she was crying wolf, so she climbed into the sheriff's cruiser, started the engine and the emergency lights. I'll bet she would have driven straight into the woods if they hadn't agreed to go along. Jessie's strong when you test her. It's just that she's never been tested, not much, anyway.”

“Because you've always made the tough choices,” Ian muttered.

Luz's hackles lifted. “What?”

“You heard me.” He took a deep breath, visibly groping for
control. “I'm sorry, honey. But you've got to admit, you've been more than a sister to Jess.”

Reaching out with her hand, she brushed a stray lock of hair from her daughter's brow. What an adventure it was, being Lila's mother. Sixteen years ago, Luz had made a left turn in the middle of her life, and she was still heading down that unexpected road into uncharted territory.

Ian drove with negligent precision, his wrist draped over the top of the steering wheel as he negotiated the rippling hills and unexpected curves. He swerved to detour around the carcass of a deer, scattering the crows scavenging a meal.

“You doing okay, Mrs. B?”

She nodded, though a wave of exhaustion rolled over her, heavy as cane syrup.

“So what're we going to do about our resident juvenile delinquent?” he asked, direct and lawyerly. “I say we ground her for life.”

Luz nodded. House arrest. Still holding her daughter's hand, she vowed that everything would change from now on. She swore it. Things were going to be different. They were going to lay down the law.