Second Glance (17 page)

Meredith remembered that the clinic smelled like steel and mouthwash. That the chairs in the waiting area were filled with girls so young their distended bellies seemed impossible. That she had knotted the first two ties on the back of her dressing gown before she decided she could not go through with it.

What if being pregnant was not the colossal mistake she believed it was? What if the timing was not off, but terribly right—a wake-up call, a message? So what if her baby had no father. Meredith’s had left at age four, when her parents divorced, and she’d seen him only a handful of times while growing up. Yet she was living proof that you could do very well with only a mother, if you had the right one. If Meredith could not bring Luxe back alive, she at least had the opportunity to show her what she’d learned from her. She would make a safe haven for her daughter; she would feed her love.

When she dressed again and got her money back and walked outside the clinic, one of the protesters had flung a bucket of fake blood at her. It was the last straw—Meredith grabbed the man by his collar and shouted right in his face that she hadn’t gone through with it. She broke down sobbing in the stranger’s embrace.

They gave her cookies and hot chocolate from a thermos. They let her sit on a pile of blankets. The man who had doused her offered his own dry shirt. For that whole afternoon, Meredith was a hero.

Nearly a decade later, in her rearview mirror, Meredith assessed the picketers. She wished she had the balls to walk back and ask if any of them had ever made a choice that changed their future. She wished she could take them into her lab, where so many healthy embryos sat waiting. She wished she could explain to them that there were some sorts of lives that were not worth living. That it was not cruel to be the judge of that, but humane.

Then Meredith eased the car out of the parking spot and nosed it toward home, where she would find her daughter lying on the couch, dazed and lethargic from the antipsychotic meds. She wove dangerously in and out of rush-hour traffic. She cut off trucks. She pressed her foot to the gas pedal, doing 65 through a 30-mile-per-hour zone, as if sheer recklessness might convince her that after all these years, she still had what it took to save Lucy.

Ross sat in the emergency room, searching the faces of the scarred and the sick as they came through the automatic doors. Every time it was not Lia he relaxed by degrees. He had been here for two days, long enough to make friends with the triage staff and to ascertain that no one named Lia Beaumont, or for that matter, Jane Doe, had come through the hospital. That was what he was most worried about—the thought that she might hurt herself, or be hurt by her husband, before Ross had a chance to speak to her.

He wanted to tell her that he could not remember the shape of Aimee’s eyes. Maybe, at first, that didn’t seem like something she’d need to hear. But for eight years now, Ross could picture this as clearly as if Aimee were just inches away—the ovals tipped up at the ends, the cinnamon at the center, the lashes that cast shadows on her cheeks when she was sleeping. Since the night that Lia had put her lips up to his cheek and whispered in his ear, he could not envision Aimee’s face without it morphing into Lia’s.

He changed his clothes three times a day, and still he smelled roses.

He wanted to kiss her.

He
wanted
, period.

There was no happy ending here, Ross knew that. He would not break up Lia’s marriage; he would not put her in a position to choose. But he needed to know that she was all right. He needed to believe she wasn’t sitting somewhere in Comtosook right now with a blade balanced over her wrist.

Suddenly a woman rushed into the nurse’s desk dragging a child behind her like a pull toy. “I’m looking for a patient,” she demanded. “His name is Ross Wakeman.”

Ross’s head snapped up at the sound of Shelby’s voice. He called her name.

Ethan turned first, then his mother. “Ross!” She barreled toward him, face twisted in fear. Ethan, behind her, was wrapped in his daylight gear—swathed from head to toe to keep the sun from touching his skin. The parts of his face that Ross could see were mottled and raw.

Shelby glanced from Ross’s face to his arms. His wrists. “What’s the matter? How long have you been here? God, Ross, why didn’t you
call
me?”

Then she saw the cigarette burn he’d made on his forearm when he was with Lia. Blistered now and oozing, Shelby could not bring herself to touch it. Maybe it reminded her of Ethan. “Shel, I’m fine.”

“You’re in a hospital.”

“I know. I’ve been trying to find someone. I thought she might be hurt.”

“You’re hurt too.”

“That’s nothing. An accident.”

She didn’t believe him, that much was clear. But she said, “You’re all right? You’re sure?”

“Positive.”

“Excellent,” Shelby replied, and she slapped him as hard as she could across the face.

Watching Ross’s head snap back, and the proof of her hand rising on his skin, was the most satisfying moment Shelby had had in forty-eight hours, which was approximately how long her brother had been missing. She’d spent that time calling around everywhere, trying to find people who had seen him. But very few residents of Comtosook even knew him, much less could identify him by sight. She’d called the police station, and was patched through to a Detective Rochert, who said a missing person’s report couldn’t be filed until two full days had gone by. To that end, she had taken Ethan out in broad daylight, driving slowly through town and canvassing the diner and even demanding an audience with Rod van Vleet, who had been the last person to see Ross, at ten o’clock yesterday morning.

“Jeez, Shel,” Ross said, still smarting. “Nice to see you, too.”

“You son of a bitch.” Shelby narrowed her eyes. “Do you have any idea where I’ve been? After the usual places, that is, that I would have bothered to look for my brother, who disappeared without any trace or for that matter the courtesy to leave me something like a note telling me where he was going or when he’d be back?”

“We went under the highway,” Ethan piped in. “There was a dead seagull there. It was awesome.”

Shelby’s head was red with thoughts of succussion, the satisfying concept of shaking her brother so hard it caused him damage. “Yes, that’s right. Under the highway. You know, in case you’d decided to jump off the bridge there.”

“I told you before,” he said wearily. “I’m not going to kill myself.”

She grabbed his arm, near the burn. “Then what’s this?”

“A really inefficient way to go about committing suicide?”

Tears were coming now, and that made her even angrier. “I’m glad you think this is so funny,” Shelby said. “I guess I’m just an idiot, you know, to assume that the people I care about actually have some obligation to me—at least when it comes to letting me know they’re not lying dead in a ditch somewhere.” She swiped at her eyes. “I’m glad you’re not killing yourself, Ross, because you’re doing a goddamned good job of killing me instead.”

“The seagull?” Ethan said, tugging on Ross’s sleeve. “One of its eyes had been pecked out.”

“Stop worrying about me, will you? I never asked you to,” Ross said.

“You don’t get to make that choice.”

“Then why don’t you worry about someone who really needs it?”

“You don’t qualify?”

“Not as much as
you
do,” Ross shot back. “For God’s sake, Shel, you’re living like some kind of nocturnal animal. You’ve closed yourself off to everyone but Ethan. Not a single friend comes over to have coffee with you, at least not since I’ve been here. You haven’t had a date in . . . Christ, in the past ten years the Pope’s gotten more action than you have. You’re forty-two and you act like you’re sixty. You’re doing a really good job of killing yourself; you don’t need me to do it for you.”

She was not going to break down, not in the middle of the emergency room, not in front of Ross, especially not in front of Ethan. Fighting for control, she pressed her fists into her lap. “Are you finished?” she asked tightly.

Ross took his sister’s hand and waited until she looked up at him. “Shelby. I am not going to kill myself. I promise.”

“You promised before, Ross,” she whispered. “And it turned out you lied.”

Shelby had known, after Aimee’s death, that her brother was not coming back from the edge. She had seen the way he stopped sleeping, the way his clothes began to wear him instead of the other way around. She had seen him hold a conversation when he was not really present. So she had been the one to give him a psychiatrist’s name, to set up an appointment. That night at dinner, he reported that it had gone well; he’d even thanked her. When Shelby had found Ross bleeding days later, he had mouthed the words
I’m sorry
, before he passed out.

It turned out he’d never kept that appointment with the psychiatrist.

“You tell me,” she said, “why I’m supposed to believe you now.”

Ross looked off into the distance, his eyes fixed on a poster urging people to donate organs. He began to tell her a story, then, of a woman who had disappeared.
Frightened . . .
fragile . . . beautiful . . . curious:
Ross balanced adjective upon adjective to form a friable house of cards that might collapse at any moment; and suddenly this Lia Beaumont might have been standing between them, shaking and unsure.

One word snagged in Shelby’s mind. “Married?” she repeated.

“She’s terrified of him.”

“Ross—”

He shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said. Shelby knew he was lying; she just wasn’t certain if Ross realized it, too. “I’m worried about her. She has nowhere to go. She wants out, but she can’t find her way there. I think . . . I think she might try to kill herself.”

How do you like it?
she thought, but before she could speak she noticed her brother’s face. It was an expression she knew so well—one she had worn a thousand times, every time she looked up and saw the sun, or stared at Ethan’s seasoned, sleeping face. It was an expression she had seen Ross wear, after his suicide attempt. Sometimes, when you come up against a wall of reality, there simply is not a way to get around it.
He has fallen in love with her
, Shelby thought,
and that’s not
going to change a thing
.

Her voice rocked him gently. “Ross, you can’t save them all.”

He reared back as if Shelby had slapped him again. “Just once,” he said softly. “Just once would be nice.” Staggering to his feet, he ran out of the hospital and as far away from this memory as he could.

The sun swallowed his uncle up, like the fiery breath of a dragon, the moment he raced out of the sliding-glass doors. Ethan kicked the bottom of his chair, which made the whole row shake, since they were attached. His mother sat beside him, her face buried in her hands, like she did when they watched
Friday the 13th
and she couldn’t bear to see someone hacked into pieces. “What’s with Uncle Ross?” Ethan said. “If that lady isn’t in the hospital, isn’t that a good thing?”

His mother blinked. “You were listening.”

“Duh. I was, like, two feet away.”

His mother sighed, and Ethan knew she was doing the math in her head: how old he was, chronologically, multiplied by how old he was, emotionally, divided by some standard number for childhood innocence. “One time he tried to save someone’s life, and he wound up losing something very important to him.” She tightened her hold on his hand. “You know Uncle Ross was in a car accident with the woman he was going to marry. Ross was the person who was hurt the least, and he carried Aimee out of the car to the side of the road. But the other car, the one that hit them—there was a driver still stuck in there. He left Aimee while he went to see if that person was all right.”

“And she died,” Ethan breathed, the last puzzle piece fitting snug in his mind.

“Mmm-hmm. Aimee didn’t look that bad on the outside, which is why Uncle Ross thought it was okay to leave her alone for a second—but inside, her organs? They were bleeding badly. She was taken to the hospital, but the doctors couldn’t do anything.”

“Like me,” Ethan said simply. His mother turned her face away.

He swung his legs a little, made the row of seats move again. “Mom, would Aimee have gotten better if Uncle Ross had stayed with her?”

“No, honey.”

“Does
he
know that?”

“I think so.”

Ethan thought about this for a second. “But her dying— it wasn’t his fault.”

His mother stared at him the way she did every now and then, as if she were going to be given a pop quiz on his features. “Sometimes that doesn’t make a difference,” she said.

Lucy slept a lot. Sometimes she dreamed that she was sleeping, and she could see herself lying on the bed. Sometimes she dreamed that she was being chased, but her legs didn’t move fast enough anymore. Once, she imagined that a giant had eaten her, and she curled up right in a cavity in his back molar where she slept and slept and slept.

She still screamed in her sleep, but her throat was too tired to let it out.

Every now and then a voice would slice like a knife. Her mother, begging her to get up and eat a little something. Granny Ruby, remarking on how much better Lucy looked now, couldn’t everyone see the roses in her cheeks? She heard them from a distance. She had fallen down a well and was doing a backfloat, staring up at the sun.