Deep in the Heart (27 page)

She turned to him, and the anguish in her eyes overtook his heart with the hard whack of a two-by-four across the chest. Her face contorted, and she closed her eyes, squeezing them to stop the pain, but it squeezed out tears instead. They rolled down her cheeks on the paths others had already made.

“
Maggie, what’s wrong?”

She didn’t answer. The words seemed to jam without ever making it to the air.

It was all he could think to do. “Hey. Shh. Come here.” He pulled her into his arms and vowed to hold her there until all the tears were vanquished.

Maggie knew she should pull away. It wasn’t right for her to be here in his arms, soaking in his strength as her grief poured out of her heart. But the truth was she needed him right now, more than she had ever needed anyone. The memories were too much for her to bear alone. They were too heavy, and too overwhelming.

So many nights spent thinking about the one that had changed hers forever. So many days spent trying not to think about it. With her head on his chest, she let her tear-blurred gaze drift out to that glow in the night sky beyond the trees, and the grief hit again. She pulled her hand to her mouth, trying to get her brain to stop thinking. The tears were going to drag her down until she might never get to the top of them again.

Still, gently, solidly he stood, just holding her and letting her grief run its course. Her thoughts bounced back and forth from present to past as waves of anguish gushed over her. It was a night, just like this one. Early spring. It was a party, just like that one. The social event of the season. The man. She’d never had a name for him—just the man. He’d partied, and then he left and changed her life forever.

Sorrow reached up and yanked a sob from her, and suddenly she couldn’t breathe. Thinking ceased, and feeling took over. And oh, the feelings she’d thought were buried so deep—anger, hurt, fear, grief, sorrow. The sorrow was the worst of them because it was the one that couldn’t be controlled. She had known that almost from the very beginning.

It was the one that would never let her go if she ever let it to the surface, and now it was here, dragging her down into its undercurrent, yanking at her with a grip that said it would never let her go. Another sob wrenched free, and Maggie had the horrible sensation that she was drowning in the grief. Her knees went weak beneath her, and the only reason she was still standing was because he was holding her up.

“
Shhh,” he said, and she realized he was stroking her hair. “Shhh.” His hand on her hair felt so good, so soothing. His arm around her felt like strength itself.

Every rational part of her said she should pull away that he was going to think she was a complete idiot, but her legs wouldn’t move and her body felt shaky and weak. Tired washed through her spirit, taking rational thought with it. She let her will melt into the fatigue. Life itself slipped away from her grasp, and she let go and watched it leave. They were gone. They were really gone, and they were never, ever coming back.

Her grief gave way to a blank numbness as she sniffed and wiped at the tears. She pulled in air in short little gasps and sniffs. Still, he didn’t let her go.

“
Come on,” he said softly, and she nodded, why she didn’t know. All she knew was that, here, with him, she was safe. He would take care of life while she was unable to. That was comforting although she couldn’t really put it all into words as to just why.

His arm never left her as he guided her out the door and down the hallway to the living room. Once there, he sat down with her on the couch. She leaned into him, her grief over-spilling its banks again. He didn’t question it, he just held her until this spasm too had past.

“
Do you know what I remember?” she asked, and it was as if she didn’t feel any need to start at the beginning.

“
What’s that?”

“
I remember waking up the next morning and wondering why they hadn’t come.” She shook her head. “I don’t even remember the night before. I’ve tried, but I really don’t remember them leaving. I was going to stay at a friend’s house, so it really wasn’t a big deal. But I remember waking up on that couch the next morning and wondering why I was still there and not in my bed.”

She let out a soft laugh. “It’s weird. I can still picture that room. Man, it’s like it was yesterday. It was yellow. Not like a bright yellow but a really pale, mustard yellow, and the curtains were white so there was this really intense kind of light everywhere. It’s weird because I thought for a moment I must be in Heaven, and then I realized I wasn’t.”

Her mind let the memories come freely. She felt no need to edit them. “I laid there for like the longest time trying to figure out why I wasn’t in my bed. I don’t know that I had ever not waked up in my bed, so it was weird, you know? And then I remembered they were supposed to come get me. They’d told me eleven or something like that. But here it was morning, and they still weren’t there to get me.”

She squinted into the memories, trying to pull them up, but they’d been buried so long, it was difficult. “I don’t know if I even knew something was wrong at that point or not. I just thought there must’ve been a mix up.” Her heart snagged on the next memory. “But when I walked into that kitchen, and Mrs. Davidson was sitting at that table.” She let out the memory in a slow exhale. “When she looked at me…” Maggie had to take a breath on the memory of the woman, her eyes red and tear-stained. That look. That one look had changed her life.

“
Everything happened so fast after that. There were all these people around, and everyone was talking all quiet. I really didn’t understand what was going on. Just that I was alone, and Mom and Dad weren’t there. And then even the other people left. They all left.” She stopped. Thoughts that had been there her whole life although she had never said them out loud came through her. “You know, I’ve always wondered what would’ve happened if he’d have left two minutes later. Just two minutes. Everything would’ve been so different.”

“
Your dad?” Keith asked, and the sound of his voice surprised her. She jerked her head up and then lowered it because she was having too much trouble dealing with the past to deal with the present too.

“
No.” In a strange way, she’d never thought about the fact that her parents could have left later. Somehow that had never occurred to her. They were right where they should’ve been. It was the other guy who shouldn’t have been there. “The guy that hit them.”

Keith absorbed that blow. For no real reason, he had never realized there was another driver involved. “It was his fault?”

On his chest, she nodded. “He was drunk.”

The breath he had been taking vanished. In its absence a hundred thousand pieces of things she had told him and things she hadn’t fell into place. He wanted to say something, but nothing would come. Her world had been ripped apart by someone else’s thoughtlessness, and in the next second the understanding of how many times that could have been him smashed into him. How many times had he told his friends he was perfectly fine to drive when the reality was he really wasn’t? How many bars had he left, never thinking of whose life was between him and home? Too many. That was for sure. “So do you know what happened?”

She was shaking a little, cold he suspected, so he reached over and pulled the little throw blanket from the couch edge. Gently he put it around her, the blanket sliding easily over the soft blue material of her robe. Once it was there, he slid his hand up and down her arm for reassurance that he was still there.

“
He ran a stop sign,” she said softly. “There were no skid marks at all. They were both killed instantly. It was just a mess of smashed metal when it was over—nothing recognizable at all.”

“
So you saw the car?”

Inexplicably she shook her head. “That’s what everybody said, but they never took me to see it.” Her voice sounded hollow as if there was no feeling beneath the memories. “It’s so weird. I’ve gone through that night a million times in my head. Sometimes I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I’d try to picture the accident. Who was where. How dark it was. The lights. The sounds. I don’t know. It’s like if I could find something that could’ve been changed, something that didn’t add up, it would bring them back like it never happened. Like if I could somehow find some evidence that God had overlooked that He would have to reverse His decision and let them come back.”

She exhaled at that thought. “Pretty stupid, huh?”

“
No. You’re just trying to make some sense out of something that doesn’t make any sense.”

The hollowness returned to her voice and her breathing. “He was supposed to get time.” She squinted into the memories. “Manslaughter something, but he paid his way out of it.”

Once again, Keith’s breathing snagged on the statement. “He walked away?”

She nodded. “Just like I did. Only I never got over it.” Her hand pulled the robe’s belt out slowly and then let it drop. “I wonder if he ever did.”

The story wound through Keith, pulling up memories as it went. “That’s why you drove Greg home.”

“
Huh?” Her head moved, and this time she sat up although she swayed with the movement.

Now, looking at her, sitting there, there was so much he wanted to say but no real way to say it all. “He told me about the other night. How you took him home.”

Her gaze dropped to the carpet. She tried to crush the feelings flooding through her face back down. “I didn’t want…” She put her hand to her nose to stop the tears.

Soft gentleness for the courage she showed in the face of such a struggle drifted through him. He reached over and laid his hand on her back. “I know.”

She looked back at him, and the tears overtook her again. “It’s just so unfair. I wish no other kid ever had to go through this. I wish I could make it so that every kid had a home and parents who cared. I hate it that any kid ever has to be afraid and alone. None of them deserve that.”

Keith watched her. “And neither did you.”

Her tongue drifted under her top lip as she fought the tears, but they were too strong. Her face crumpled into the pain again, and she gasped the breath in. Gently he reached over and pulled her back to his chest. She didn’t fight it, and for that he was glad. He wanted her to know he was here for her, that she could share her grief, and he would help her through it the best he could. Her cheek and hand rested on his chest, and he could feel her soft sobs.

He wanted with everything in him to say something that would make it better, but what could he say? What could anyone say? It had all been said in one, thoughtless, reckless act by someone he would never know.

“
Thank you,” she said softly.

He tilted his head to be able to see her. “For what?”

“
For listening. I’ve never told anyone that before.”

Gratefulness for her trust in him drifted through him. He hugged her tighter and kissed the top of her hair. “Hey, I’ll always be here for you no matter what.”

When Maggie woke up the next morning, her heart still hurt, but in a different way now. Now it was with the undeniable understanding that she wasn’t carrying this pain alone. And somehow, in some strange way, that helped. In the kitchen she found him making eggs and sausage with Peter perched on the cabinet.

“
Good morning,” she said, her happiness not a total façade although she did have a headache.

“
Morning.” Keith smiled at her and then grew serious. “How are you?”

“
Good.” She nodded. “I could use some aspirin though.”

“
Two aspirin coming up.” He reached into the cabinet above Peter. “’Scuse me, Mr. Ayer.”

Peter giggled as Keith leaned him to the side and grabbed the bottle. He produced the aspirin and handed them to her.

“
There’s orange juice in the refrigerator and milk on the table.”

She took the aspirins and grabbed a glass from the table to pour some milk. “How long have you been up?”

“
Since Peter knocked on my door at 6:15.” Keith reached over and tickled his fellow chef. “We got up and played Mario.”

“
Mario?” Maggie’s displeasure slid through her. “Before breakfast?”

“
Not our fault some people sleep all day. Huh, Peter?”

“
All day?” Maggie checked the clock. “It’s 7:30!”

“
Like I said.” Keith grinned at her wickedly. “If you’re not up at the crack of dawn, we’re wasting daylight as Ike would say.”

Maggie knew he hadn’t meant them to sting, but the words did anyway. She pulled her robe around her a little tighter. “Well, I’m going to go get ready and get Izzy up. Unless you need a woman’s help to finish this.”

“
A woman?” Keith asked Peter. “We don’t need no stinkin’ woman. Do we?”

Although she was sure Peter didn’t fully understand the comment, he grinned and shook his head anyway.

“
Fine,” she said, flouncing on the word, “but if you burn down the house, don’t come whining to me.”

“
How many times have we cooked eggs and never needed her help?” Keith asked Peter as Maggie walked to the hallway. “Now she thinks we’re going to burn the place down without her. Huh. Like we would do that.”

Maggie laughed. He was crazy.

It seemed Keith could spend hours with her, and no matter how many there had been, he always wanted just a few more. “Want to go eat?” he asked after church.