Home Fires (27 page)

Thomas Devlin encircled Anne with his arms. His love for her was plain. And the way Anne looked at Thomas Devlin left Matt with no doubt that her heart was overflowing. Matt stared, boring the image into his brain. He was so intent on committing the picture to memory, he almost didn't notice that Anne was looking in his direction.

Staring at him.

Alarmed, at first. She looked worried, as if she feared that Matt would interrupt the scene. Their eyes locked, and the longer she watched, the more her fear melted away. His mouth twitched in a half smile, and she smiled back. Good work, kid, he thought. You saved her.

Now, noticing that Anne was looking into the crowd, Thomas Devlin followed her gaze. No smiles here. Matt stared, expressionless, his eyes narrowing just perceptibly. Thomas Devlin didn't look away, and he didn't loosen his grip on Anne.

“Take care of her, you bastard,” Matt said, not possibly loud enough for anyone to hear. But Thomas Devlin nodded. As if he knew exactly what Matt meant, as if he were prepared to lay down his life for her. Matt let himself nod back.

A flurry of activity. The cops clearing the road, bullhorns bleating that it was time to leave. They'd gotten Maggie strapped in safely. Sirens beeping, people running to their cars. Thomas Devlin kissing Anne, saying something. A quick glance at Matt. Easing himself away, then lifting one end of Maggie's stretcher. A kid who could only be Devlin's son lifting the other.

Overhead the
pop pop pop
of helicopter rotors.
Pop pop pop
. Coming in loud and fast.

“I'm sorry, sir, you'll have to move. We need to load the girl into
LifeStar,
” said the polite young police officer who had initially let Matt and the Vincents past the yellow lines.

“I'm her uncle,” Matt said, holding Anne's gaze with his eyes.

“Still, sir. Please.”

Matt nodded, saluting Anne. She tipped her head back, raising her hand.

“Okay, officer,” he said. “Good job.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Even as the helicopter hovered overhead, Matt whispered to the woman who had been his wife, “I love you.”

And then he left.

Chapter 23

M
aggie stayed in the hospital for three weeks. She had four operations for a broken jaw, a fractured right lower leg and ankle, a fractured right wrist, and minor plastic surgery for the cuts on her face.

She had her jaw wired shut. Stainless-steel wire holding her jawbone in place. They fed her chalky milkshakes through a straw, and it was nearly impossible to talk.

She wore a long leg cast on her right leg, up to her thigh. Her leg had been so stiff in anticipation of the impact, her right foot instinctively pushing down the imaginary brake, that her foot and ankle had gotten mangled. Both bones in her lower leg, the tibia and fibula, had shattered. The surgeons had implanted stainless-steel screws for at least six weeks, probably eight.

In her right wrist she had a colles's fracture. Although Maggie couldn't remember, the doctors told her that when she saw the crash coming, she had probably thrust out her right hand to brace herself. As her palm smashed the dashboard her wrist became a train wreck: an “S” deformation up to her elbow.

Maggie wore a long arm cast, up to her shoulder.

She had a contused kidney, which sounded scary but which actually meant “bruised.” But it meant having tons of uncomfortable tests and IV pylograms, where doctors shot dye into her body and by magic it bypassed all her other organs and went straight to her kidneys.

Her parents practically lived at the hospital. Well, not exactly, but they had rented a room with long-term rates at the Howard Johnson in Kenmore Square. Every day Maggie's mother would tear a sheet off the calendar on Maggie's wall, to show how fast the time was passing.

Her parents had gone home to the island for the funerals. At first they told Maggie they were taking care of business matters, but when Maggie scowled, turning her head away to glower at the wall, they admitted the truth.

“We thought it would upset you,” her mother said. “That you won't be able to be there.”

Maggie nodded, starting to cry. She had to keep her emotions under control, to keep from forcing her jaw open. You can't cry hard and keep it inside, Maggie was learning. But the thought of Vanessa, Kurt, and Eugene in their coffins, being buried in the ground on this beautiful sunny day, was too much for her to stand.

The memories came pouring in, and her chest started heaving so hard, she was rocking the bed. All she wanted to do was scream. Just scream! For the fact that she had listened to Vanessa drown, unable to do one thing to stop it. Her mother tried to hold her, to calm her down, but Maggie was out of control. She was weeping and thrashing, screaming inside, and she was going to explode.

Her mother ran for the nurse, and suddenly the nurse was rushing in with a syringe, and she stuck it into the spongy orange thing on the IV machine, and the cold drug ran straight into Maggie's veins and made her forget.

When her parents returned to the hospital that night, they looked pale and tired, but they didn't tell Maggie anything about the funerals. And Maggie didn't ask.

Her mom had had to call and cancel all the reservations for June and early July at Fitzgibbons'. That part made Maggie really sad, and although she didn't speak—couldn't, really—she must have shown her mom with her eyes.

“Honey, being with you is more important. We only have one daughter. Daddy and I are staying right here until we take you home.”

When she went home, the doctors told Maggie she would need a wheelchair for a while. Maggie didn't care; she wanted to get out of this place that smelled like ammonia. Ned wrote letters, and he called. Even though she couldn't really talk, she loved hearing his voice. He had taken some medical books out of the library so he could read about her injuries, and he would explain certain things to her that the doctors had left out.

Anne visited on her Tuesdays off, and for some reason, that was when Maggie would feel saddest. She would think about her friends, what had happened. She would remember being with Anne in that black water, and they both would start to cry. Quiet tears, though. Not an explosion, like before. Just both of them sad.

The odd part was, Anne never talked on her visits. Everyone else seemed to think that because Maggie couldn't speak, they should talk twice as much. Her parents, even Ned, proved they had amazing talents of small talk, of making conversation about things you had never thought possible. But Anne just sat there, reading or holding Maggie's hand, as if she had decided to save her words for a time when Maggie could come back with some of her own.

Maggie's parents spent every day at her bedside. Her father would occasionally get a scowl on his beardy face and have to excuse himself, but her mother was there all the time. Maggie's mother had the strongest look of love and concern in her eyes. Maggie could feel it seeping straight into her bones, as if directed by hypodermic infusion.

Maggie had been too hurt to apologize to her mother right away. But after a while, when her painkillers began to wear off and the truth of her feelings poked through, she let her left hand stray across the woven white blanket to her mother's.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Gabrielle had been dozing. Startled, she wakened at Maggie's touch.

“Hello,” Gabrielle said.

Maggie gestured that she wanted a pen.

Although Maggie was right-handed, she did her best with her left hand.

I'm sorry,
she wrote in squiggly scrawl,
for going in the car when I was grounded. If I hadn't, this might never have happened. They might still be alive.

Her mother took a long time reading the note, and then she looked straight at Maggie.

“What happened to them is not your fault. Do you understand me? Yes, you used poor judgment by getting in that car. But you are
in no way
responsible for their deaths. I know you're sad, honey.”

Maggie nodded.

“When Dr. Scheer takes the wires out, we're going to find someone for you to talk to. A good psychologist, to help you make sense of everything. Ned's father recommended someone. . . .”

Maggie nodded, then closed her eyes. She was really awfully tired.

One day her parents arrived with Cheshire-cat grins on their faces. They looked ecstatic, and just seeing them made Maggie's eyes start smiling. Her father did a corny little wiggle across the floor, waving an envelope in the air, sitting on the edge of her bed.

What's that? Maggie asked, tossing her chin.

“Your SAT scores,” her father said.

“Your father said we shouldn't open your mail,” her mother said, “and I said that I absolutely agreed as a matter of principle, but in this case we didn't want to show you if the news was bad.”

Did that mean she had done well? Maggie's eyes darted from her mother to her father. Her father had made a cage around her with his arms, and he was looking at her so seriously, as if he was honestly seeing her, that Maggie had to wonder whether this was the genuine Steven B. Vincent. He opened the envelope, placed the paper on her blanket, where she could clearly read the results:

650 Verbal, 600 Math.

“Maggie, I am so proud of you,” her father said. “I have to admit, I didn't expect this. You really showed me something.”

Maggie gazed up at him quizzically.

“No father was ever happier to have a daughter, and in my eyes, I guess you could do no wrong. So, while maybe I've erred in turning a blind eye to some of your shenanigans, I've also failed to notice your successes.”

Maggie couldn't believe he was actually saying this. She just stared at his eyes, wanting to hear more.

“Those other poor parents,” he said, “they don't have a second chance to pay attention. That's what I think of. How lucky I am to have this chance. To tell you that you make me proud. I'm popping my buttons.”

He patted his big belly, and even though her eyes were wet with tears, Maggie let out a giggle.

“Hey!” he said. “No comments about my blubber. Remember what you used to say when you were a little thing?”

Maggie nodded.

“You'd say, ‘Daddy, you're just right with a little left over.'”

“She also used to call you ‘El Plumpo,'” Gabrielle reminded them gently.

“She can call me whatever she wants,” her father said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. Maggie worked her left hand out from under the blanket and slung it around his neck, to hold him close a minute longer. The accident had taught her a few things, too.

T
HOMAS
Devlin convinced Anne to take a week off from work, and in those seven days they came to acknowledge what they had known all along. That they had fallen in love, they wanted to be together.

In his years of being alone, Thomas had sometimes glanced through the personal columns, amused by the sameness of the ads:
If you like long walks on the beach, drinking wine by the fire, listening to music, quiet drives through the country
. . .

Yet, in the week Anne had taken off, those were exactly the things they did. Nothing fancy, nothing extreme. They hardly even talked, as if the most important things could only be sensed.

They made love. One night when the almanac predicted a wild meteor shower in the northern sky, they drove out to Cape Amelia. That side of the island was mainly a nature sanctuary and some old abandoned potato fields, uninhabited except for osprey, foxes, deer, and one old coyote.

That coyote was the only one left on the island. Once there had been an entire pack, but through the hard winters their numbers had dwindled to two. And right after the last bad snowstorm, the town crew found the body of this guy's mate, frozen stiff in a snowbank just down the field. The night of the meteor shower, Thomas and Anne heard his howl. It was piercing and empty, somehow elegiac, and it made Anne move closer to Thomas in the truck.

“He won't last another winter,” Thomas said.

“Poor old guy,” Anne said, scanning the field for him.

“Let's not think about the coyote,” Thomas said.

“No, nothing sad tonight. Shooting stars'll be just perfect.”

“I hope it's clear enough,” Thomas said, bending low over the steering wheel to look at the sky. The air was warm, and the atmosphere was slightly murky with haze.

“You know what?” Anne asked. “I don't care if we don't see even one.”

Thomas slid his arm around Anne's shoulders, and the next thing he knew, he was caressing her breast. Then she was reaching down to stroke him, right through his jeans. Unbuckling his belt while he drove, undoing his zipper, slipping her small, cool hand in through the front of his boxers, and making him stiff.

They parked at the edge of the bluff, their headlights catching the silver crests of breaking waves. Thomas's breath seemed to be coming from somewhere in the vicinity of his collarbone as Anne reached up to kiss him.

“Shall we get out of the truck?” she asked so throatily that at first Thomas thought she was teasing him. But no, she was just as affected as he was. Ned had left an old beach blanket in the truck, and Anne shook it out, spread it on the dry, whiskery grass.

There wasn't much of a moon, but what there was illuminated Anne's breasts, the pale curve of her waist, the gleam of her dark hair. Thomas Devlin was lying on his back, having his shirt slowly unbuttoned by this woman he loved so much, and he thought he'd burst with the joy of it. He let out a yell so plaintive that the coyote answered in kind.

“Lovesick,” he explained to Anne, pulling her down to him.

“Poor coyote. All alone.”

“No, I was talking about myself,” Thomas said, smiling as she kissed him, sliding her beautiful, full breasts against his chest.

“Good,” she whispered in his ear. “That's what I like to hear.”

“You'll be hearing it plenty,” Thomas whispered back. And then turned his attention to the matter at hand.

O
N
a muggy July afternoon, with distant thunder rumbling toward the island, Gabrielle mixed a pitcher of lemonade in the kitchen. Low drumrolls sounded an ominous message. The air was moist and heavy, the sky colorless. But Gabrielle sang. To her the day was brilliant and fine, breezy, exquisite: Maggie was home.

Heading for the herb garden with a tray of lemonade and fresh gingersnaps, Gabrielle listened to the music of Maggie's voice. The wires had come out of her jaw two days ago, and she talked all the time, making up for three weeks of silence.

Her tone was low, sometimes sorrowful. She would talk about her injuries, or, with obvious wonder, about how amazing it had been to be rescued. But she never mentioned her friends, and she hadn't ever told Gabrielle and Steve about Kurt's head. That detail they had learned from Anne and Thomas.

When Gabrielle had heard it, she had wondered how Maggie could stay sane. It gave Gabrielle nightmares and kept her awake long into the night, the image of her daughter trapped in a sunken car with
that,
and she truly wondered how Maggie could have withstood it, how she could carry the memory with her through life.

Victims of certain horrors deal with things differently than other people, Dr. Struan said. She was the psychologist Thomas had recommended, and Gabrielle would be taking Maggie to Boston every Friday morning to see her. The tendency to block certain memories, Dr. Struan said, can be necessary in the early days, but with therapy and the support of family, the worst can be faced.