Moonlight on Butternut Lake (6 page)

“Let me see those hands,” Heather said now, and Mila, surprised, held her hands out for her. Heather held them lightly and examined them, “Just what I thought,” she said, after a moment.

“What?”

“Those are nurse's hands,” Heather said, with a gentle smile, letting go of them.

“They are?” Mila said, fascinated, looking down at them.

“Absolutely.” And then, after a pause, she asked, “Do you like science, Mila?”

Mila, looking up from her hands, nodded enthusiastically.

“Good, because you'll need science to go to nursing school.”

Mila thought of something then. “I like science,” she said, “but I hate spelling. I'm terrible at it.”

“Spelling, huh? Well, nurses need to know how to spell, too,” Heather said.

“They do?” Mila said, feeling deflated.

“Uh-huh. But if spelling's a problem for you, I have an idea. Do you have a test every week?” Heather asked.

“Every Friday,” Mila said.

“Well, then, why don't you come down to my office on Thursdays, at lunchtime, and we'll review your spelling words together. I'll have to get permission from Mrs. Williams first, but that shouldn't be a problem. And, of course, if I have a sick student here, we'll have to reschedule. I don't imagine that'll happen very often, though. The students at this school seem remarkably healthy. So what do you say? Thursdays, at lunchtime, right here?”

“I say yes,” Mila said. A whole lunch period with Heather, every Thursday? Mila could hardly believe her luck.

“Good,” Heather said, and she seemed as pleased as Mila. They talked some more, until Mila's mom got there, and by then Mila knew it was late. Late enough for Heather to have called her husband and told him to have dinner without her. But Heather didn't seem annoyed with her mom. She just gave her instructions about how to take care of Mila. Not in a bossy way, though. In a nice way.

“Is that woman really the school nurse?” Mila's mother asked her, as their old car rattled out of the almost empty school parking lot that night.

“Yep,” Mila said, thinking that cherry Popsicles were now her favorite food in the whole world.

T
wo years later, on a balmy spring afternoon, Mila came sailing through the door of Heather's office. Heather was already sitting at the little table in the corner, unpacking her lunch.

“Sorry I'm late,” Mila said. “I was waiting for Ms. Collins to
give back the spelling tests.” Mila was in the fifth grade now, but she still had lunch with Heather every Thursday, and she still had a spelling test every Friday.

“How'd you do?” Heather asked, as Mila sat down across the table from her.

“One hundred percent,” Mila said, handing the test to Heather with a little flourish.

“Very impressive,” Heather said, looking it over. “I guess Ms. Collins doesn't believe in gold stars, huh?”

Mila shook her head. “She said fifth graders are too old for gold stars.”

“Well, she may have a point there,” Heather said, taking the rest of her lunch out of an insulated lunch bag. “Would you settle for a homemade brownie instead?”

And Mila, taking a peanut butter and jelly sandwich out of a brown paper bag, flashed a smile at her. “Only if I can still have a cherry Popsicle,” she said.

“Oh, definitely,” Heather assured her, nibbling on a carrot stick.

Then, as they ate their lunches, Heather updated Mila on the various kinds of illnesses and injuries that had come through her office over the past week, and Mila talked about her life at home. Or rather, Heather asked her questions about it, and Mila answered them. It wasn't Mila's favorite topic of conversation.

“So how does your mother like her new job?” Heather asked.

“She says it's all right,” Mila said. Her mom was cocktail waitressing at a new bar now, one where she hoped she'd get better tips. But so far, the tips had been just okay, and the bartender, her mom said, was a total jerk.

“And what about Mrs. Rogers?” Heather asked. “How are you two getting along?”

Mila frowned. Mrs. Rogers was the neighbor her mother paid to babysit Mila when she was working. “Mrs. Rogers,” she told Heather now, “is the worst babysitter on the planet.”

“Why do you say that?” Heather asked, peeling the foil lid off a yogurt container.

“Well, for one thing, she doesn't
do
anything,” Mila complained. “She just sits on our couch and watches TV. And she's so old, she's practically deaf, so she has to turn the volume up all the way. When I go to bed, I have to put my pillow over my head to fall asleep.”

“And what does your mom say about that?”

Mila shrugged. “She says Mrs. Rogers is all she can afford. She doesn't charge a lot, I guess, just to sit there and watch TV.”

“Well, I guess it's better than having no one there at all,” Heather said. “I mean, at least you won't be alone in an emergency.”

“Ha,” Mila said. “A whole army of zombies could march through our living room and Mrs. Rogers wouldn't even notice.” She thought, but didn't add, that her mom might not notice either. She was either working, or she was sleeping. And on those rare occasions she was at home, and awake, she was complaining. Complaining about her customers being lousy tippers, or their landlord raising the rent, or their car needing a new carburetor. Mila knew it wasn't easy for her mom, but still, she couldn't help but wish that they could do something fun together every once in a while.

“Mila?” Heather said now, putting what was left of her lunch away. “There's something I need to talk to you about.”

“Okay,” Mila said, warily. She was old enough by now to know that conversations that started that way usually ended with bad news.

“Honey, I don't know exactly how to say this. I've known it for a couple of weeks now, but I was waiting for the right time to tell you. And then I realized that there wasn't going to be a right time.”

“What is it?” Mila asked, and the peanut butter and jelly sandwich she had just eaten felt like a brick in her stomach.

“Mila, my husband and I are moving to Nebraska, where his family's from.”

Mila blinked. For a moment, she thought she'd misunderstood her. But Heather went on.

“Rob's parents, who own a farm, are getting older, Mila. They can't do all the work by themselves anymore, and Rob and I are going to need to help them.”

“How soon?” Mila whispered.

“At the end of this school year,” Heather said, reaching out across the table and taking Mila's hands in hers.

Mila, though, turned her face away and looked at the office's wall. She was trying not to cry. But when Heather slid out of her chair, and came around to Mila's side of the table, and knelt down beside her, Mila felt a tear slide down her cheek.

“Stay here,” Mila said softly. “Please. Or, if you leave, take me with you.”

“Oh, honey,” Heather said, hugging her gently. “I can't do either of those things. I have to go. My husband's parents need us. And if I took you with me, your mom would miss you, Mila.”

Mila wiped away another tear with the back of her hand and Heather brought her a box of Kleenex.

“It's okay to cry,” she said to Mila, and for a while that was what Mila did. She cried, quietly, and Heather rubbed her back and said soft, soothing things to her.

And when her crying finally stopped, Heather brought her a
wet paper towel to wipe her face with. “You know, Mila,” she said. “I feel a little bit like crying too,” she confessed.

“You do?” Mila asked, surprised.

Heather nodded. “This is my favorite part of my workweek, having lunch in my office with you. When my husband told me he thought we needed to move, the first thing I thought was, ‘But what will Mila do without me?' And then I realized that that was silly, and that Mila would do just fine without me.”

But Mila shook her head. “No, she won't. I mean, no,
I
won't.”

“Yes, you will,” Heather said, smiling. “And do you know why, Mila? Because you have a dream. You want to become a nurse. And as long as you don't lose sight of that dream, you'll be fine. You'll be better than fine, actually.”

Heather continued, “Besides, you don't have to do it alone. I'm still going to be a part of your life, Mila. Even if I can't have lunch with you every Thursday.”

“How will you be a part of my life?” Mila asked, forgetting her misery long enough to be curious.

“We'll write to each other,” Heather said simply.

But Mila looked at her blankly.

“We'll write
letters
to each other,” Heather clarified. And then, “You have written someone a letter before, haven't you, Mila?”

But Mila shook her head. “I don't have anyone to write to,” she said. And it was true. Her mother's parents were dead, and she'd never known her father or her father's family.

“Oh, Mila,” Heather said, her blue eyes dancing with excitement. “You're going to love writing letters. And, more important, you're going to love
reading
letters. My grandfather and I used to write to each other when I was growing up, and to this day, I cannot open my mailbox without feeling a little bit of excitement.”

Mila looked at her skeptically. “Is getting a letter that exciting?”

“It is when it comes from someone who's important to you,” Heather said. And then, “Mila, promise me you'll write to me every week?”

“I promise,” Mila said automatically. Heather had never asked her to promise anything before, and this, at least, was something Mila knew she could do, even if she couldn't necessarily do it very well.

“Good,” Heather said, beaming at her. “And I promise I'll write you back as soon as I get your letter. And, Mila? I don't know if you'll still have spelling tests in middle school, but if you do, can you send me copies of them, please?”

“Okay,” Mila said, slowly warming to the letter-writing idea. “And I can send you other stuff, too.”

And she did. She sent her lots of stuff. After Heather moved away, at the end of the school year, Mila sent her a steady stream of letters, not to mention report cards, school pictures, essays, drawings, and even, as it turned out, the occasional spelling test. And Heather always sent back long, newsy letters. Letters about her life on the family farm she and her husband had taken over from his parents, and about her job as a nurse at a clinic in a nearby town. In those letters, she assured Mila that nothing interesting ever happened in rural Nebraska, but to Mila, Heather's letters were fascinating, especially when she wrote about her work at the clinic.

Mila saved every single letter and reread each one many times. At first, she tied them all together with a red ribbon she had bought expressly for that purpose. But soon, there were too many of them for the ribbon to fit around, so she put the letters in a shoebox instead. And when they outgrew that, she moved
them to a file box. And every time Mila and her mother moved during those years—and they moved a lot—Mila dragged the box along with her.

She needed those letters. Those were hard years for her mom, and for Mila, too. Her mom had trouble keeping a job, and Mila soon understood why. When she did work, she wasn't just serving cocktails, she was drinking them, too. And as soon as the manager or the bartender found out, she would get fired. Her jobs, and her tips, kept getting worse, and so did the apartments they moved into. Still, she pieced together a living, of sorts, and Mila helped out whenever she could, first babysitting, and then, as she got older, waiting tables, usually at some little dive of a restaurant where the management wasn't too concerned about her being old enough to waitress legally, and where the customers, in turn, weren't too concerned about the quality of the food.

But through all this, Mila remained focused on becoming a nurse. And when she was in high school, and her mother started inviting friends over for loud, raucous parties that lasted far into the night, Mila locked her bedroom door, stuffed cotton in her ears, and studied until she was too tired to concentrate, then crawled into bed, clamped a pillow over her head, and fell into a fitful sleep.

She wrote to Heather faithfully, though, always careful to put a positive spin on her life, even when she knew from the worried tone of Heather's letters back to her that Heather understood more than she told her. Still, Heather's letters kept coming, week after week, and year after year, and the box Mila put them in kept getting heavier, until, until recently. . . . But she wouldn't think about that now, she decided. She
couldn't
think about that now. She would be strong, she told herself. And she would stay strong. Even if she could only do it for one minute at a time. She
glanced back at the clock on her bedside table now. It was twelve fifteen. She would study for fifteen more minutes, she decided. She reached back into the drawer, took the study guide out, and flipped it open again. Then she bent over it, and, returning to the problem where she'd left off, she shut the rest of the world out. At twelve thirty, though, she stopped. There was something else she needed to do. Something that was going to give her much more satisfaction than getting a sample problem right.

M
ila got up from the desk, walked over to the dresser, took the ring box out of the bottom drawer, and then took the ring out of the box. She left the bedroom with the ring, padding softly down the hallway and stopping outside Reid's bedroom door. There was a faint yellow band of light visible beneath his door, but there were no sounds coming from his room. She waited there a minute before walking quietly to the kitchen, where, following Lonnie's instructions, she disabled the alarm she'd already set. Then she walked out of the kitchen, through the living room, and to the sliding glass door that led onto the deck. She unlocked it and opened it, slowly. She hesitated there, wondering if she should turn on the deck lights, but she decided not to. Some things, she thought, were best done under the cover of night. So she crossed the unlit deck to the set of steps Lonnie had pointed out to her that afternoon, and she started down them. As soon as she did, though, the night seemed to envelop her, and she felt suddenly defenseless in its bigness, and its darkness. Still, she kept going, climbing carefully down the stone steps, whose
whiteness glowed faintly in the light of a thin crescent moon, and whose roughness felt cool beneath her bare feet.

When she reached the bottom step, she paused. The dock was much longer than she'd expected it to be. It jutted out, impossibly far, over the black, glassy surface of the lake. Did it have to be so long? she wondered anxiously. She'd always had a fear of deep water, and she knew that by the time she reached her destination, at the dock's end, the lake's depth would be well over her head. But she squeezed the ring in her hand to give herself courage, and when she felt it digging into her palm, she pressed on, careful to stay in the center of the dock, and careful, too, to stop a respectful distance from its end. And as she stood there, her bare toes gripping the smooth pine planks beneath them, she turned and looked back up at the cabin. It looked undisturbed, its outline only slightly blacker than the already black sky behind it.
Good,
she thought. She had the night to herself, and in more ways than one. She turned back to face the lake again, and, because she felt something was required of her now, something that would somehow mark this moment for the solemn thing it was, she gave a small, silent speech.

Brandon, I don't know if it will ever be possible to legally end our marriage, especially if legally ending it means that you'll know where I am. But the fact that somewhere there will be a piece of paper that says we're still married isn't important to me. What's important to me is that our real marriage ends tonight. For good, and forever. And another thing, Brandon. Even if you were to eventually find me here, I'll die before I'll ever let you hurt me again. That's a promise to you, and it's a promise to me, too.

And with that, she threw the ring into the lake, threw it as
hard as she could, so hard, in fact, that she stumbled backward a little with the effort. But she caught herself and listened as the ring landed in the lake with a small
plink
. She pictured it, then, falling through the dark water, bumping gently against the lake bottom, and settling there on the sand or the silt or among the weeds. Would anyone ever find it? she wondered. She doubted it. As she was considering that question, though, the wind suddenly picked up, stirring the pine trees on the bluff behind her, ruffling the surface of the black water, and sending little waves slapping against the dock's pilings. She shivered and turned to go back up to the cabin. But as she climbed the steps, she imagined that she felt physically lighter without her wedding ring to weigh her down.

R
eid shifted restlessly in his wheelchair and wondered, not for the first time, if his hearing was somehow more sensitive now than it had been before the accident. How else, really, to explain the fact that tonight, as he sat in a shadowy corner of his bedroom, he could hear every one of the cabin's after-dark sounds with near perfect clarity: every creak of the rafters, every rattle of the windows, every sigh of the wind in the chimney? Then again, he thought, maybe it wasn't his hearing that had changed since the accident, maybe it was him. Maybe he heard these sounds because he wanted to hear them, wanted to be reassured by their comforting familiarity. After all, these little creaks and sighs were the only things keeping him company during these otherwise desolate nights.

Tonight, though, tonight had been different. Tonight there'd been something new to listen to. Because unlike his other home health aides, Mila hadn't gone to sleep early or, as in Mrs. Everson's case, passed out early. No, she'd been on the move. She'd
left her room about an hour ago, around twelve thirty, pausing first outside his bedroom door, where she'd stood and listened to him—listened to him listening to her—before she'd gone to the kitchen and turned off the alarm.
Is she leaving already,
he'd thought? And he'd felt a little surge of hope. But then he'd remembered the ultimatum Allie had given him at Pearl's that afternoon, and his joy had been tempered somewhat.

In any case, Mila hadn't left. Or rather, she
had
left, but she hadn't gone out the front door, and driven away, as he'd initially thought she might. Instead, she'd gone out the back door, the door that led to the deck and to the steps down to the dock. She'd stayed outside for about five minutes, and then she'd come back in, locked the sliding glass door, reset the alarm, and retreated back to her bedroom.

What had she done outside? he wondered now, absently turning his wheelchair first one way and then the other. Had she plotted her escape, by powerboat instead of by wheelchair-accessible van? Or had she looked at the stars? Or gone for a quick dip in the lake? He considered, and then rejected, each of these possibilities. He didn't know her very well, of course; he knew her only as well as you could know someone you'd had only two conversations with, and, in his case, they'd been two very
tense
conversations. But he couldn't picture her racing a stolen powerboat into the night, any more than he could picture her leisurely backstroking through the dark water. No, she was not a reckless person, and not a frivolous one, either, he decided. She was the opposite, in fact, of those things. She was cautious, careful, and watchful.

But . . . but she was something else, too, he realized with surprise. He'd noticed it that afternoon at Pearl's, when he'd made the remark about her stealing from her former patients, and he'd
noticed it again this evening, here in his bedroom, when he'd initially refused to hand over his prescription medications to her. Both times he'd seen something in her eyes that was like a tiny flicker of light.
Of life,
he realized. And it had transformed not just her eyes, but the rest of her too. Transformed her from someone who was ordinary, if attractive looking, into someone who was . . . who was what? Well, who was anything
but
ordinary looking.

Reid, it's official,
he thought now, giving his wheelchair an impatient spin.
You've lost your mind.
Completely and totally lost it. Because why else would you be expending so much mental energy on some woman, some
girl,
really, who just happens to be passing through your life? Some girl who won't be with you any longer than the other two home health aides were. And he sighed, knowing it was true. Knowing that she'd quit, the way the others had quit, and knowing, too, that he'd be shipped back to the rehab center, just as Allie had promised he would be.

He glanced bleakly at the clock on the bedside table. It was 2:00
A.M.
now, time to begin the arduous nightly ritual of using his crutches to lever himself out of his wheelchair and into his hospital bed. Walker had watched him do it, once, and swore he'd never watch him do it again. It was too terrifying, he'd said. Reid didn't find it terrifying, though, so much as tiring. Exhausting, really. And pointless. Because what was the point of getting into bed if he didn't want to sleep? If he wanted, in fact, to stay awake, staying awake being the only way to ensure he didn't dream? Still, night after night, he went through these same motions. He got into bed, he turned out the light, and he lay in the darkness. Some habits, apparently, died hard. But maybe, he thought, brightening momentarily, maybe tonight would be different. Maybe he wouldn't sleep. Or maybe he
would
sleep but he wouldn't dream. If you could call what he did dreaming.

Because his dreams were too real to be dreams. They were . . . they were virtual re-creations of the accident and its aftermath. There was no other way to describe them. And it wasn't simply that his dreams got all the details right—the feel of the steering wheel digging into his chest, the taste of blood in his mouth, the smell of motor oil leaking out of his car's engine—it was that his dreams got
everything else
right, too, the shock, the confusion, the claustrophobia, the pain, and even, sometimes, the despair. It was there, all of it, in his dreams. But most of all, the pain was there. He would never have imagined it was possible to feel pain in a dream. But he felt it, a pain so intense, and emanating from so many different parts of his body, that it seemed to defy logic. He couldn't catalogue this pain, couldn't organize it, couldn't describe it even. Except, maybe, the pain in his left leg. There the pain ranged, at any given moment, from excruciating to unbearable. But most of the time, it was just unbearable.

The dream he dreaded the most was the one where he was calling for help. In this dream, it was late afternoon on his third day in the car. He knew it was late afternoon because he could see through the shattered glass of his windshield that the shadows of the pine trees were lengthening and darkening. Soon, it would be evening, and, after that, nighttime. And nighttime was the worst time in the car. It was the coldest time, for one, for while it had been an unusually mild spring, and while he'd been wearing a jacket when he'd gotten into the accident, the nights trapped in the car were cold enough to make him shiver, uncontrollably, thereby wasting what little energy he had left, energy he desperately needed if he was going to get himself out of this alive.

But nighttime was also the time when he came closest to running out of hope. By the third afternoon in the car, he'd realized
that no one was coming for him. Obviously, there'd been no guardrail on the road, which meant, in all likelihood, that there was no sign of his car going off the road, either. Getting out of the wreckage himself wasn't a possibility; his car had literally collapsed in on him, and he barely had room to fill his lungs with air, let alone move his arms and legs. Besides, even in the unlikely event that he found a way to work himself free of the wreckage and crawl out of it, he knew he wouldn't get far dragging what was obviously a broken leg over uneven terrain.

His cell phone wasn't any use to him either. Typically, he kept it in the car's drink holder, but the accident had thrown it into the backseat, out of reach, where it had buzzed, uselessly, with phone calls, e-mails, and texts for a couple of days until its battery had died. That meant that if he called for help, he'd have to do it the old-fashioned way—he'd have to shout for it. There was a problem with this, too, though. Because while he could occasionally hear the faint hum of a car or a truck going by on the road above him, it was far enough above him—around sixty feet, in his estimation—that it was unlikely anyone passing by on it would hear his calls for help. It was more likely, he thought, that he could attract the attention of someone on foot, a hiker, maybe, or a bird-watcher, though given the steepness of the terrain, and the thickness of the foliage, it was hard to imagine even the most intrepid outdoorsman or -woman wandering through the area where his car had landed.

Still, he had called for help. He'd called for it in real life, and he called for it in his dreams, too. He didn't do it because he thought anyone would actually hear him. He did it because he knew he wouldn't survive another night, and as tempting as it was sometimes to slip into unconsciousness one final time, he didn't want to go down without a fight. Not then, and not later,
either. In his dreams. He looked warily at his bed and wheeled himself over to it, his motions slow and reluctant. The optimism he'd felt earlier was gone. There were no good nights anymore. There were only bad nights and less bad nights. And tonight would probably be the first kind of night.

A
t the same time that Reid, who'd finally gotten into bed, was trying to stay awake, Mila was trying to fall asleep. It wasn't easy. The vigilance that she'd worked so hard to maintain all day refused to relax itself now, and it was hours before she fell, exhausted, into an uneasy sleep. It wasn't long, though, before something tugged at her consciousness. She resisted it, but it tugged again, harder this time. It was a sound, she realized, opening her eyes onto the darkness of her room. A very strange sound. She sat up in bed, her body tense, her ears straining to hear it again. But there was nothing. Only silence. Could it have been . . . could it have been Brandon? she wondered, a cold, prickly sensation spreading all over her. Could he have found her already and broken into the cabin? But, no, if he had, he would have set off the alarm. And besides, the sound she'd heard hadn't been human. It had been, well . . .
animal
. Which made sense, really, when you considered that there was a whole forest outside her bedroom window.

She started to get out of bed then, to look out the window, but she heard the sound again, and she stopped, and sat perfectly still, listening to it. It wasn't coming from outside the cabin. It was coming from
inside
the cabin. From right down the hall from her room. “
Reid,
” she whispered, understanding, and she slipped out of bed, opened the bedroom door, and stood on its threshold. The sound stopped, then started again almost immediately. So
this
was what Walker had tried to warn her about
after he'd picked her up at the bus stop that afternoon.
This
was one of Reid's nightmares. No wonder she'd mistaken his screams for an animal; they had a feral, wild, not-quite-human quality to them. She shivered in her thin cotton nightgown and considered returning to the tempting warmth of her bed.