Where Angels Tread (3 page)

Shane was still stewing over his encounter with the beautiful Heidi Griffin the next day, and every time he thought about the conversation, he wanted to drop right through the center of the earth. Why couldn’t he have said something suave? At the very least, he could have done something that didn’t make him want to die right then and there, right on the floor of the police station.

The funny thing, Shane thought bitterly, was that he never used to have problems impressing pretty women. Truth be told, women would flock to him; for years, he had his pick of any girl in town. These days, they must have sensed the weight of sorrow hanging around him like a wool coat; he had only been out with a woman a handful of times in the past few years, and even then it never progressed past the first date. He sensed that Cherie, a nice girl his sister Jaime had introduced him to a few months ago, was interested in going out a second time, but he just didn’t have the energy to pick up the phone and call her again. He remembered clearly the brokenhearted look on his mother’s face when Jaime angrily confronted him after hearing from Cherie. “Snap out of it,” Jaime had said, pointing a disapproving finger into his chest. “You’re being a martyr, and that doesn’t look good on anyone.”

“That’s enough, Jaime,” his mother Michelle had said quietly, which was enough to make her daughter drop her finger in shame.

“I didn’t mean that,” Jaime whispered quietly, pulling her big brother into a hug. “I’m just worried about you, Shane. We want you to be happy, and you’re not. You shouldn’t be alone all the time. It’s not good for you.”

The problem, Shane knew, was that he no longer deserved to be happy. How could he, when he had taken from someone the most precious thing on earth—life. And the worst part was that he never even knew the man’s name. He could have asked, or sought out the information on his own; in fact, the police report was sitting in the files right next to his desk. It would have taken all of two minutes to reread the events of that night. But he couldn’t bring himself to know the identity of his victim. Without that, Shane could pretend that it never even happened. That he didn’t make that one, fatal mistake. Or at least, he could try to pretend. Because apparently that wasn’t working out for him too well.

Standing in front of his parents’ home, he steeled himself to go inside. Sunday dinners at the Kensington house were a tradition, a weekly gathering where the Irish-Italian family could reconnect and find out what was going on in everyone’s lives. From a young age, Shane’s parents instilled in him a strong belief that there were only two things in life worth fighting for: family and love. His mother and father, and both sets of grandparents before them, were shining examples of what it meant to find your soul mate, the one person you chose to walk beside you through life. It was the running joke among the eight Kensington children that, up to this point, none of them had found the same kind of love they witnessed in their parents’ relationship. But they were confident that it was out there, somewhere.

They had always been an incredibly close family. Robert Kensington, the family patriarch, was a self-made man with ruddy cheeks, blond hair, and a strong, muscular frame who built his carpentry business from the ground up, starting his career in the garage of his parents’ home and ending up as the owner of the most successful custom furniture company in Central California. As a child, Shane loved to visit his father’s studio and inhale the heady aroma of the fresh wood Robert used to build his creations. Robert was a man of few words, but when he did speak, he always said something worth listening to.

Michelle Kensington, Shane’s mother, was a tiny dark-haired woman whose intelligence, gentleness, and firm belief that any problem could be solved with a dish of spaghetti garnered her the admiration and love of everyone who met her. She always treated her children with respect, which made her one of Shane’s closest confidantes, and he suspected that his younger siblings all felt the same way. Michelle had a gift for patience and an ear for listening; Shane could always count on going to her for advice when he most needed it.

His stomach growling with the promise of his mother’s home cooking, Shane pushed open the front door and was greeted by the chattering voices of several of his sisters, who were bustling around the dining room setting the table for dinner. Michelle stood over a simmering pot on the stovetop, wiping beads of sweat from her brow and blowing on a spoonful of sauce to cool it down before tasting it. Robert sat slightly removed from the action, rocking back and forth in his favorite recliner and surveying his family with a smile on his face.

“Shane!” Lacey cried out when she saw him, and flung herself into her brother’s arms. He planted a kiss on the top of her head and stood back to admire her. Lacey, the baby of the family, was a dreamer. She left home right out of high school to move to Los Angeles and pursue her dreams of acting; so far, she had only received bit parts in a couple of television shows, but with her fresh, pretty face and bubbling energy, Shane was certain that it was only a matter of time before she became a star.

“How’s the Hollywood life?” he teased.

She tossed her head and batted her eyes jokingly. “Oh, you know, the usual. Poolside parties, lunch with the stars, a new script every other day.” She giggled. “Or, maybe it’s more like my agent sending me on twenty auditions a week while I sit in my studio apartment and cross my fingers that someone, anyone, wants to hire me.”

“They will, Lace,” Jaime said, standing on her toes to kiss her brother on the cheek. “And when you’re rich and famous, remember that you promised me a guest house on your property with full access to the tennis courts and hot tub.” Lacey’s opposite in every way, Jaime, the first Kensington girl, was a go-getter and an academic. Growing up, she was never without a book in her hand, her nose buried in its pages, endearingly unaware of her surroundings. She earned a PhD in English from Stanford University and taught at colleges all over the world. Recently she returned home to Santa Ynez and opened up a small but successful book editing company.

“Sure, Jaime, no problem,” Lacey teased. “As long as you clean the house and take care of the gardens.”

Shane laughed; listening to his sisters’ banter almost always put him in a good mood. He walked into the kitchen to greet his mother, who offered him a sample of the piping hot tomato sauce. “Here. Taste.” As he licked the spoon clean, she peered at him with a concerned eye. “You’ve gotten far too skinny, Shane. I’m going to send you home today with one of the cherry pies I made yesterday and you’re under strict orders to eat the whole thing yourself.”

Shane wrapped his arms around his mother. “I think I can manage that,” he said.

She patted his cheek gently. “How are you doing?” Shane caught the hint of sadness in her voice; he knew that she had been worried about him lately, but tried her best not to show it.

He shrugged and dipped the spoon into the pot once more. “I’m fine. Keeping busy, I guess. They still have me mostly on desk duty, so it’s a little boring.”

Robert caught the tail end of the conversation as he strolled into the room and pecked his wife on the cheek. “Any chance of getting back in the cruiser sometime soon? That’s the whole reason you became a cop, Shane.”

Shane studied a smudge of mud on the top of his tennis shoe. “Chief doesn’t think I’m ready yet.”

Sensing that his oldest son didn’t want to provide any further details, Robert nodded and patted Shane on the back. “You’ll get there,” he said. “It just takes time.”

“It’s been more than three years,” Shane burst out, unable to hide his emotion anymore. He realized in horror that his eyes were wet with tears; he turned away from his parents to compose himself. When he turned back around, he saw them exchanging knowing glances.

“What?” he said, a little more roughly than he had intended. These days, his emotions were always simmering beneath the surface, ready to boil over at a moment’s notice. That, in a nutshell, he knew, was why Chief Palen hadn’t let him back in the squad car. But what the chief didn’t know was that Shane desperately craved the feeling he got when he sat behind the wheel at the start of his shift, the sound of the radio when it crackled to life, the pounding in his heart as he switched on his sirens and sped off to protect his community. It was his life’s blood, his purpose.

“Your father and I were discussing this the other day,” his mother began gently, and Shane could see that her hands had tightened ever so slightly on the handle of the wooden spoon she was still holding. “And we think that maybe you stopped seeing Dr. Holmby, your therapist, a little too early. Maybe you should schedule another appointment with him? The police department offered to cover the cost.”

“No,” Shane said, his cheeks burning crimson as he noticed for the first time Lacey and Jaime standing frozen in the doorway. “He only made things worse.”

“Shane,” his father chimed in, “I really think it’s worth a shot. Maybe it’s been long enough since it all happened that you’ll be able to see things with a fresh perspective.” Robert’s ice blue eyes, which many of his children had inherited, were clouded over with worry.

Shane took a step backward from the four pairs of eyes that were now watching him. Pitying him. Or was it something else? Judgment, perhaps.

The room became blurred at the edges, and Shane stumbled over his feet in his haste to retreat, back to the solitude of his own house. “Where are you going?” he heard his mother call after him as he barreled through the living room and out the front door, his eyes firmly planted on his car parked in the driveway.

As he fumbled around in his pocket for his keys, he heard heavy footsteps approaching him. He looked up to find his father standing beside him, his weathered face lined with concern. Robert placed both hands on his son’s shoulders, forcing Shane to look him in the eyes. “It’s not your fault,” he whispered, so quietly that Shane could barely hear him over the rustling of the wind through the trees. “You have to forgive yourself.”

A lump burned in Shane’s throat, filling up his airwaves so that he could barely breathe. This time, he let the tears fall, hard and fast on the concrete. He felt the weight of his mistake lodging in his stomach, expanding so that it filled his whole body. Shane shook his head roughly and tore his eyes away from his father’s, then brushed the tears on his cheeks away brusquely.

“I can’t,” he said, unlocking his car door and putting one foot inside. “And I never will.”

“I need a blood transfusion. Stat!” Heidi could barely hear Dr. Conway’s shouted instructions in the chaos of the emergency room. “Hurry! She’s losing a lot of blood.” Heidi sprinted to the refrigerated case where the hospital stored its bags of donated blood and plasma and pulled out a bag labeled Type O, the universal donor. On nights like tonight when they didn’t know the patient’s blood type, O donors were a godsend.

“Her vitals are dipping!” Josie, the other emergency nurse on duty, called into the swell of voices. Her mind on autopilot, Heidi hooked the blood to a catheter inserted into the patient’s arm and watched as the crimson liquid pulsated down the tube. She took a step back from the operating table and wiped her sweat-soaked brow with the back of her hand. She had hoped for a quiet shift, having tossed and turned fitfully all night, willing sleep to come. It never did.

What she hadn’t counted on was her patient, a 17 year old girl named Megan, deciding to test out her new driver’s license by going for a spin around the block. The girl, who had been texting one of her friends, drove her car at full speed into a light pole. As she thought of the shell-shocked expression on Megan’s parents’ faces when they arrived at the hospital, Heidi leaned over and stroked the girl’s long brown hair, which was matted with blood. “Come on, baby,” she whispered, praying that Megan could somehow hear her. “You can pull through this.”

As the blood coursed through Megan’s veins, Heidi was relieved to see a hint of color returning to the girl’s pale cheeks. A good sign, she knew. She glanced at the vital sign monitors in the corner of the room and saw that Megan’s heart rate, which had been falling dramatically since Heidi wheeled her into the emergency room, slowly began returning to normal.

Heidi leaned back against the wall as the operating room nurses rushed in to wheel Megan into surgery. “Do you think she’ll be okay?” she whispered to Josie as Megan’s head disappeared around the corner. Josie had been an emergency room nurse for the past fifteen years, and Heidi considered her both a mentor and a friend.

“Let’s put it this way,” Josie said, peeling off her gloves and lathering her hands and forearms with soap, “I’ve seen patients recover from worse than that. What we don’t know, and won’t know for a while, is whether she’s going to sustain any long term damage. Her head wound is pretty bad.”

“What kind of damage?” As a rookie nurse, Heidi had been horrified when Megan arrived in the ambulance. She was, in Heidi’s opinion, far too young to endure so much. She couldn’t help but imagine Zachary’s broken body being wheeled into the same emergency room, a thought that made her own blood run cold. Heidi made a mental note to remind herself to sit down with Zachary for a serious conversation on the dangers of texting and driving. Even though he was years away from receiving his license, she wanted to instill the fear of God in him while he was still young enough to listen. She knew that once he was a teenager, all hope was lost.