Catherine (33 page)

At the hospital, we were ushered into an empty exam room, a surreal place to be answering
questions about our relationship to the shooter and the victim and where the gun had
come from and what we were doing at the scene of the crime. The cop—a youngish guy
whose collar looked about a size too tight—took pages and pages of notes, and asked
us the same questions seventeen different ways. I wanted so badly to close my eyes
and shut out all the ugliness of the last few hours, to sink into sleep and maybe—please,
God—wake up and find it had all been a dream. But the
questions went on and on. I was starting to think the guy would never let us go when
he put his pen on the table, stared gloomily down at his notes, and looked back up
at us. “You can go out to the waiting room and find out how your friend is. We’ll
be in touch.”

The ER receptionist looked down her pointy nose while Coop tripped over his words
in his hurry to spit our story out. “You’re related to the patient?”

“We’re his kids,” I piped in. In a way, it was sort of true, wasn’t it?

She clicked a few buttons on her computer and waited an agonizingly long time for
news of Hence’s condition.

“Mr. Hence…” She squinted for a better look at the strange name. “Mr. Hence is still
in intensive care. According to this, he’s being stabilized.”

“Can we see him?” Cooper asked.

“Not until he’s out of the ICU. Have a seat right over there and we’ll call you when—”

“Is he going to be okay?” I interrupted. “He’s going to live, right?”

“I can’t answer that.” She didn’t even bother to say it nicely. “His doctors will
be out to speak with you when they’re ready.” That was all she would say.

The chairs in the waiting room were an awful shade of beige, and the magazines all
dated back to when I was in middle school. I tried sitting down, but I couldn’t seem
to keep myself from jumping up, pacing around the room, and returning to hover over
Coop. He’d sunk into a chair and sat there looking stunned.

“Can’t we do anything?” I asked. “Give blood or something?”
I’d never had to hang out in an emergency room before, and the place creeped me out.

Coop stared at the dingy carpet. If I felt this anxious about Hence, who I had barely
liked until a day ago, how must he feel? Hence was his boss, his friend, his hero,
and, in a way I’d never noticed until now, his family.

I made myself sit down beside Coop. I took his hand, trying to send warmth and hope
from my body into his. Holding hands seemed like the only useful thing I could do.

“Hence is tough.” I made myself sound more certain than I felt. “By the time they
let us see him, he’ll be yelling at the nurses. He’ll take one look at you and demand
to know what you’re doing here when there are amps to polish and toilets to plunge.”

Coop tried to laugh, but it came out more like a cough.

“How did you know all that stuff about elevating his legs and wrapping him in blankets?”

“My mom’s a nurse. She made me take first-aid classes as soon as I was old enough.
She said someday I’d be in a crisis and be glad I knew what to do.”

Thinking about mothers—anybody’s mother—hurt. I swallowed hard, linked my arm through
his, and rested my chin on his shoulder. “You were good. You jumped on that gun like
a superhero.”

He gave me a sad smile. “You were pretty cool and collected yourself.”

“Only in the sense that I didn’t throw up.” I took a deep breath, inhaling his Cooper-ness.
“Um, about those things Hence said…”

“Which things?”

“About the club… about you giving it to me. That’s just nuts. When he’s better, I’m
going to tell him how crazy it is. You should be the one to inherit The Underground.
When he dies of old age.”

Cooper kissed the top of my head. “He’s trying to undo the mistakes he made,” he said.
“We have to let him.”

That’s when we noticed the doctor walking toward us. Cooper jumped to his feet, and
I followed. In this new slow-motion world we’d fallen into, there was time for me
to say a quick, silent prayer—
Please let it be good news
—and time for me to realize from the grim look on the doctor’s face that my prayer
was too late, all before he opened his mouth to tell us how sorry he was.

Somehow Coop and I got through the next hour. Hence’s doctor tried to give us the
gruesome details—a shattered clavicle, a fragment of bone traveling to nick the brachial
artery—but all my focus was on staying vertical. I held on to Cooper’s arm—the one
solid-seeming thing in the room—and concentrated on taking deep breaths. Once I was
absolutely certain I wouldn’t faint, I felt the return of that cool, detached feeling
I’d had when Quentin’s gun was pointed at me. It allowed me to listen and speak, and
do things I’d never have thought myself capable of.

“Would you like to see him?” a nurse asked us. My normal reaction to that decidedly
not-normal question would have been to run screaming out into the night, but Coop
said yes, and how could I let him go through such a terrible thing alone? When he
walked into that hospital room, I was right behind him.

Seeing the body was not as horrifying as I would have thought. Though the face had
his strong nose, his full lips, his brows and two-day beard, the body in the bed seemed
much smaller than Hence had been, more like a wax figure of Hence than the man himself.

We stood there for a long time, not knowing what to do or say. Coop drew up a chair
beside the bed, so I did the same. In the oppressive quiet of that room, I could almost
hear the silent good-bye he was saying. I tried to think my own farewell to Hence,
but the words hardly made sense.
Thank you for loving my mother. Thank you for bringing me Coop. Thank you for your
songs.
The next thought that popped into my mind seemed more sensible, so I spoke it out
loud. “Thank you for saving our lives.”

Coop looked up, startled, like he’d forgotten I was there.

“Do you think he really meant it?” I asked. “About not wanting to live anymore? Wanting
to be with my mother?”

Coop thought a moment. “I do. I think he meant it.”

“Do you think he’s with her? Do you believe in all that?”

“I don’t know. Do you?”

“I’m not sure. But
she
did, I think. She went to church and lit candles when Hence was missing. She prayed
he was safe. She must have believed in
something
.”

“Maybe whatever we believe is what happens,” Coop said.

“Maybe.” It sounded as plausible as anything else.

We fell silent long enough for a hundred questions to crowd into my brain. “What should
we do now?”

“First we leave this room.”

“Are you ready?” I allowed myself a last glance at the figure in the bed.

“He’s not really here.” Cooper stood. “There’s no point in staying.”

After the police took us back to Quentin’s cabin, Cooper drove us home to Manhattan
through a darkness barely broken by streetlights. “I can make arrangements from The
Underground,” he said out of the blue.

“There’s nobody else to do it?” I asked. “No close friends?”

“He had friends,” Cooper said quietly. “Stan, and some others. But I’m the one who
has to… the one who should…”

“Right.” I fiddled with the climate-control buttons. “I can help.” Not that I knew
the first thing about arranging a funeral.

Then there was the other heavy, complicated business that surely would have to be
dealt with. Hence’s will. Returning to Coxsackie to retrieve the car he’d driven to
our rescue. Testifying at whatever hearing or trial would decide my uncle’s fate.
Would there be a search for my poor mother’s body? The idea made me shudder. I thought
of my father, not knowing and suddenly having to know that she really was dead. Would
I be the one to tell him? Again I felt weak. Exhausted.

“Chelsea.” Coop’s tone was gentle but grave. “You know what you need to do.”

“I do?”

Coop didn’t elaborate. He didn’t have to. For a minute or two I sat there feigning
ignorance, trying to ward off the future. I sighed and checked my phone. “There’s
no signal out here. I’ll call my dad as soon as we get to The Underground. He’s going
to be furious.” Even as I spoke that last bit, I knew it wasn’t the whole truth.

“I’m pretty sure he’ll be relieved to hear your voice. He might even forget to be
mad.”

“I’m going to have to tell him about my mother.” The threat of being grounded for
life was nothing beside the awfulness of having to deliver that news.

“He probably already knows,” Cooper said. “Don’t you think the police have called
him by now?”

He was right, of course. I grabbed his arm and the car swerved. “We have to find a
pay phone. Dad must be on his way down here to find me. What if we pass him on the
highway?”

“Check your cell again. The exit signs have been getting closer together. I think
we’re almost back to civilization.”

My phone had a few more bars. I took a deep breath and made the call to my father’s
phone. He answered on the first ring. “Chelsea?” In his familiar voice I heard a mix
of hope and fear. I pressed the phone so close to my face that it beeped.

“Dad?” Like a little kid, I said his name again and again. “Dad. Dad.” Without expecting
it, I was bawling, too out of control to even speak, but my dad held the line and
waited me out. After that, the conversation went as Coop had predicted. Dad wasn’t
mad; he didn’t scream and make threats. But he did make sure I knew what a scare I’d
given him. He said the police had been
searching for me, contacting practically everyone I knew at school, grilling Larissa
repeatedly. “I kept picturing you in trouble, needing me, and me not being there to
help you,” he said, sounding teary. By the time he apologized for making me use a
cheap, untrackable phone, I was feeling way worse than if he’d yelled at me.

“Don’t apologize, Dad.” Somehow I couldn’t speak the words above a whisper, but at
least I was saying them. “It’s all my fault. I never should have run away. I’m sorry.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “All that matters is that you’re safe.” His voice got
fainter. “Hold on,” he said. “I’ve got to go through a toll booth….” He explained
that I’d caught him rushing to Logan Airport; he’d been planning to talk his way onto
a flight to Albany or Westchester County or whichever airport would get him the closest
to Coxsackie.

“You should fly into New York City,” I told him.

“That’s where you are?”

“That’s where I’m going.” I gave him the address of The Underground.

“You’ll be safe until I get there?” As if I hadn’t spent the last few days without
him looking after me.

“I’ll be safe. I promise.” I looked over at Cooper, who was staring intently at the
road ahead. “I’m with a friend.”

“Promise me that you won’t disappear again. That once you get to that address, you’ll
stay put.”

I gave my word, and was saying good-bye when he stopped me.

“Wait. Chelsea. Just… well… what I’m trying to ask is, was I really such a terrible
father?” Though steady as always, his voice
sounded smaller than I’d ever heard it. “I left you alone too much, didn’t I? Is that
why you left?”

My heart twisted in my chest. “Of course not, Dad. You’re a good father—a wonderful
father. It’s just… I needed to find out about Mom.” Saying her name made me remember,
with a sudden sinking feeling, the important thing I needed to ask him. I struggled
for the right words. “They told you? About what happened to her?”

Dad sighed, as he always did when I mentioned Mom, but this time I couldn’t blame
him. “They said her brother confessed to… murdering her.”

I was crying again, too hard to speak.

“Oh, honey. I’m so sorry about all this. I was wrong not to tell you, not to be up-front
about her. I thought you’d be happier if you didn’t have to wonder about where she
was.”

“But what about you?” Had a small part of him believed she might be alive somewhere,
waiting to be found? “How are you?”

“I’m sad,” he said simply. “I’m just sad.”

“I know.” I was crying again. “Oh, Dad, I’m so, so sorry.”

Was he crying, too? His breathing on the other end of the phone was jagged, but his
voice sounded calm and controlled. I loved him for that—for how hard he was trying
to stay strong for me. Thinking of the things my mother had written about him, I couldn’t
wait to hug him and tell him how much I loved him. After all, didn’t he deserve someone
who
really
loved him, who hadn’t just been faking it?

I hung up knowing that before long I would be home in Marblehead. I thought of my
bed, with its polka-dotted comforter,
and of the warm glow of the Chinese paper lanterns hanging from my bedroom ceiling.
It was a strangely satisfying concept: my life, back to normal.

But then I thought of Coop. I glanced over and caught him in the act of looking away
from me, back to the road. Had he seen me smile at the thought of seeing my dad again?
Did he think I was happy to be going back to Massachusetts, so far from him? Might
he even be relieved to see me go?