Deliver Her: A Novel (14 page)

MEG

The bin’s contents were disorganized, but there, on the floor of Alex’s room with Jack, Meg knew exactly what she was looking at: all the notes she’d ever tucked inside her daughter’s lunch since seventh grade. Napkins, Post-its, sheets from the bakery block notes they got every Christmas.

There were hundreds. Alex must have saved every single one.

They started when Alex reached puberty. Meg had done everything to prepare her daughter: the talks, the products, an entire shelf in the hall closet stocked with supplies. One day Alex came home from a soccer match paler than usual, a look on her twelve-year-old face Meg couldn’t quite read.

“You OK, honey?” She pressed a hand to Alex’s forehead.

Her period had arrived during the game, she said.

Meg played it cool. “Everything’s on the middle shelf. Let me know if I can help.”

Alex walked away from her and into young adulthood, Meg already feeling as though her daughter would need her less.

It was totally ridiculous, and yet it drove her to do something to maintain the connection between them. So each night as she made lunches, she found some scrap of paper to write on and tucked it into Alex’s.

She rifled through them now, groaning at the lameness of some. The acrostic of her daughter’s name:
A—amazing! L—loving! E—excellent! X—Xtraordinary!
Cheerleading before a test:
Good luck on your geography quiz. Put us on the map!
Every one of them signed
(heart sign) Mom
.

The task grew more painful after the accident; anything Meg wrote seemed trite. She wrote them anyway on the days Alex took lunch. Often it was their only communication of the day.

She had wondered what Alex thought of the notes. In five years, she had never said a word about them. But here they all were, moving Meg to tears. They must have moved Alex as well; if not, why had she kept them?

Meg sat back on her heels, letting the notes fall back into the bin, a paper chain from mother to daughter.

Confronted with Alex’s unexpected sentimentality, doubt prickled Meg’s arms. Had she made a terrible mistake sending Alex away? For months, she’d tried to crack Alex’s shell of grief. She’d given up on talking to Alex about The Birches after only that one heated conversation on the promenade. Should she have tried again? Maybe the Alex who hung on to her mother’s lunch notes might have eventually come around to the idea of a fresh start.

Meg snapped the lid on the bin. What had she done?

CARL

Eyelashes brushing cold nylon, Carl awoke to find himself splayed over the air bag. Woozy, he fought toward consciousness, pressing himself upright, registering first a persistent throb over one eye, then needles of sleet spilling through the jagged opening overhead. Beneath him, the air bag had already begun to deflate, its surface powdery under his fingers.

The girl.

“Alex.” A maelstrom of wind and sleet swallowed any response. The rearview mirror revealed only darkness. Craning his neck, he swept the backseat behind him as far as he could reach, feeling nothing. Alex had been buckled in; he had a clear memory of verifying the child locks at their last stop. But, of course, the locks would disengage when the air bag deployed.

Wincing, he reached under the air bag and unbuckled his seat belt, and with enormous effort swung his stiff body toward his door to investigate.

Behind him, the back door gaped open. Alex was gone.

The sudden movement dizzied him. He took a moment to catch his breath.
Carolyn.
With difficulty, he turned toward her. The jagged edges of roof overhead made it clear her side had borne the brunt of the impact. “Carolyn,” he called. She detested her first name. He never used it when they were on duty; he was unsure why he did so now.

“Carolyn. Can you hear me?” He hit the visor light. Its wan yellow glow illuminated the unnatural angle of Carolyn’s head, her eyes closed and her hand resting in a lapful of broken glass.

He swallowed. Carolyn needed help. The girl was alive, out there somewhere. She could send help, if she could make it far enough to do so. But once on her own, would that be her priority? He couldn’t be certain.

There were several variables: the length of time he’d been unconscious, the point at which (and in what condition) Alex had exited the car, the options presented to the newly freed teen. He checked his watch through blurred vision: 4:45. He’d been out for about an hour, which gave Alex a decent head start—providing she wasn’t injured or in shock. He wasn’t a religious man, but he offered an immediate intention for her safety. He would do whatever it took to find her. Straining, he pushed open his own door and stood, taking a few deep breaths before sliding into the backseat next to Carolyn, pressing two fingers into her limp wrist, willing a flutter, a reflex, any sign of life.

Getting no response, he brushed his partner’s hair aside to get to her carotid artery, where the body’s pulse was strongest. Below trembling fingers, he thought he detected a faint uneven beat.

The next moments would be critical. If there was a pulse, there might still be time. The necessary supplies were in the trunk. He patted her neck and slid away. “Hold on, Carolyn. I’m coming right back.” After feeling his way to the trunk, he located a tarp and a flashlight. Beyond the car, the beam illuminated the dense evergreen wall that had slowed the vehicle’s trajectory. On Carolyn’s side, Carl gaped at the devastation wrought by the animal: the mangled car door, the roof above it ripped from its frame.

Back on the driver’s side, he laid the tarp on the ground outside Alex’s door, standing the flashlight up like a makeshift candelabra and sliding next to his partner again. From her clammy skin, he couldn’t summon the fluttering he felt a few moments ago.

He palpated her neck. “Please, Carolyn. Hold on.” In the visor’s glow, her flag pin winked at him.

Carl sat back, mulling over the choices. Medics knew never to move accident victims, especially when there was a threat of internal injuries. But he also knew that in the absence of a pulse, he had to attempt CPR, which required laying her flat. He released her shoulder belt; untethered, Carolyn slumped toward him. Supporting her back, he maneuvered her along the backseat and onto the tarp, an effort that drenched him in sweat despite the cold. Beside her, the upturned torch cast ghoulish shadows on the sleet-heavy branches overhead.

Kneeling over her, he removed her glasses and set them on the seat above. Having cleared her mouth and airway, he began the compression sequences he’d done a hundred times, pressing on her chest, shutting off the thought of any internal damage beneath his hands, the pain he might be inflicting.
One, two, three, release. One, two, three, release.

Carl sat back, imploring her chest to rise. Nothing. He repeated the compressions.
Please, Carolyn. Don’t give up.
He lost count of the repetitions, oblivious to the sleet soaking them both and to his raging temple. He had not once regretted this decision to hire her. Until now, when the job had put her life in danger.

He had warned Carolyn about the long, unpredictable days. Across from him in the diner that day, her chin had been resolute. “I know I can do a great job for you. And also I need the money.
We
need the money.”

That muddled things; he couldn’t leave Jimbo’s family in need. He offered financial assistance. When she refused, he let her ride along on a couple of transports, a trial run for both. Carolyn was an astute observer, taking notes, peppering guides with questions after the drop-off. Soon after, they made things official.

One, two, three, release. One, two, three, release.
He pictured Jamie’s freckled face. He had taken her mother away so often. And he would bring her back this time, as always. After everything the little girl had been through, she needed her mother.
Jamie, I’m trying.

One, two, three, release.
Carl thought of Jimbo, who, after leaving the service, turned down a chance to partner with him in Begin Again. He liked the precinct just fine, he said. Turned out there was a reason for that. He’d met “the one,” his burly fingers curled in air quotes: Carolyn Lawler, a twentysomething working the dispatch desk. Carl had been honored to stand up for him at their wedding in 1991.

Eleven years later, he was back at his friend’s side in church, a pallbearer alongside Jimbo’s fellow officers. After the funeral, Carl swore to Murphy she could always count on him.
You can count on me now.
He leaned on her chest one more time. He would not leave her to die in this frigid grave.
One, two, three, release.

It was getting darker. Carl reached over Carolyn and shifted the flashlight closer. Had he imagined it, or had her chest swelled ever so slightly? Encouraged, he resumed compressions. After a few more sets, he was certain Carolyn was responding. He sat back, watching the steady rise and fall of his partner’s chest. The dashboard clock measured the passage of five minutes, then ten, of Carolyn breathing on her own. Carl’s respiration matching hers. With great care, he lifted Carolyn and laid her on the backseat, wiping her damp face with his handkerchief.

Squatting next to the car, Carl considered the next step. In Carolyn’s fragile condition, it would be foolhardy for him to risk transporting her. And he could never manage the steep climb out of the gulley with her. On the other hand, hypothermia would set in quickly in these extreme conditions.

He made a snap decision. Although it pained him to leave her, Carolyn’s best chance for survival was to remain here, somewhat sheltered from the elements. He could move faster without her to summon help. From the trunk, he found a stadium blanket and tucked it around her. He then removed his own coat and laid it over the blanket.

As a final gesture, he retrieved the tarp and tossed it over Carolyn’s side of the damaged car, securing it along the jagged roof. Leaving the girl’s duffel in the trunk, he stuffed Carolyn’s purse into his backpack, only to yank it out again and dig for her driver’s license. On a gas receipt, he scribbled his name and cell number and wrapped it around her license, tucking both into Carolyn’s coat pocket for identification, should help arrive before he returned.

Checking Carolyn one more time, he switched off the visor light and shut the car door gently. Overhead, a sudden gust bent the tree canopy, lashing his face with sleet.

Walking away from the car, Carl took stock of his own injuries for the first time. His lips were salty from his own blood. After touching the bump over his eye, his fingers came away sticky. He couldn’t remember the impact, only his futile attempt to right the car after the animal’s initial slam, steering into the skid as he’d been trained to do, brakes useless on the skating rink of a road. Perhaps the rest would come to him later. For now, he had to keep moving, focus on seeking help for Carolyn, hopefully finding Alex in the process, as soon as possible.

He could only guess at the direction the girl had gone. The storm had dropped a premature curtain of darkness over the White Mountains. He cast the light in a wide circle over the ground. At first he saw only the car’s erratic tracks in the mud, ending in an angry
Z
. Then, dropping to his heels, he caught the faint suggestion of prints in the tracks—following the wobbly trail for a few hundred feet until it slammed him into a steep hillside, where the footsteps disappeared.

Puzzled, Carl cast the flare on the face of the incline, pocked with random indentations and scrapings. Then it dawned on him: She had turned and taken the hill backward. The girl had better instincts than the mother gave her credit for.

Hoisting his backpack, he followed the scrapings, ignoring his head’s pounding. Grabbing overhead limbs for support, he made his way up the hill, berating himself for this turn of events. He had known to watch for moose. How many warning signs with the moose silhouette had he passed?

And yet it had happened. Today, trying to make up for lost time, for lost work, had he taken the curve too quickly? The decision could cost him dearly: two lives entrusted to him, the business he had so carefully constructed over twenty years.

At the top of the hill finally, he stepped over the guardrail onto the Kancamagus Highway. The girl’s wits had gotten her this far. Here, however, the flash-frozen landscape obscured any further clue. A choice now: Head north or south? To his right, the road climbed higher and deeper into the White Mountain forest. They must have been farther up that hill when they’d left the road, which would explain the wayward car tracks. He remembered the small store they passed only moments before that had caught Carolyn’s attention.

Would Alex have remembered? She’d barely grunted when his partner pointed out the pastel gas tanks. But the girl had already proved herself to be resourceful. He hoped she had the sense to seek shelter from the storm. Her light clothing wouldn’t protect her for long.

He decided to head downhill toward the store. The adrenaline that fueled him was beginning to fade, replaced by a damp chill that amplified his body’s aches. He paused a moment, knowing he needed to remember this spot so he could come back for Carolyn. Sitting on the guardrail, he glanced around for a means of marking the location.

That’s when he noticed the slash of violet dangling beneath the guardrail, sodden with sleet.

MEG

Jack was killing her.

Carl hadn’t called. Shana hadn’t responded. And downstairs, her son now posed in the doorway, strumming his father’s prized Fender bass.

“Are you kidding me?” she said. “You know Daddy’s rules.” It was as though the boy were dreaming up stunts to distract her from her worry. She detached him from the cherished instrument.

“But I want to be in a band like Daddy.”

“You can, if you keep practicing your clarinet.”

“Clarinet’s not cool. Name one band with a clarinet player.”

“You know I can’t.”

Even at seven, Jack’s grasp of music eclipsed hers. He danced around now, rocking an imaginary guitar, adding the throbbing bass line himself.

When the time came a few years ago to sign Jack up for music lessons, Jacob had lobbied for guitar or drums. “As I recall, you thought it was pretty hot when I played for you downstairs,” he said, sidling up to Meg at the kitchen sink and strumming an imaginary guitar the way Jack was right now. A witness to the moment, horrified thirteen-year-old Alex made an exaggerated gagging sound and exited.

“It was the hormones,” Meg had deadpanned.

Tonight, she called a halt to Jack’s air-guitar concert, threatening to withhold his video games if he touched Jacob’s instruments again.

“OK. But you better tell Alex, too. She’s in Daddy’s stuff all the time.”

She squatted down to her son’s level. “She is?”

“Yup. She has some of his records in her room. She plays the same song every night. Something about rain. It’s
really
long.” Jack rolled his eyes.

A long song about rain didn’t ring a bell, but then again, she was more talk radio than Pandora. “OK. I’ll talk to her.”

Meg carried the guitar down to the basement and set it back in its stand.

Hormones.
She had to smile. Hormones definitely played a part back then, when their entire future was pinned on the secondhand crib and changing table in the freshly painted bedroom upstairs.

Meg’s mother had thought she was crazy. And she probably had been, a little, when she placed all her faith in the bassist whose lazy grin she succumbed to that night at the Tiki Bar. She’d been dragged there after work by fellow nurses determined to help her move on once and for all from her ex, a med student who decamped to Australia for his studies. Meg lost track of the number of rounds; drinks were sloshed on the crowded dance floor. As they spun near the band, the bass player’s gaze warmed her back. She hung behind to chat while the band packed up. When she went to look for her girlfriends, they had disappeared. She didn’t try very hard to find them.

The next morning, Meg clung to her side of the bed, appalled at her own behavior. Type A oncology nurses didn’t go around picking up stray musicians. To put the humiliating experience behind her, she threw herself into her work. Which was an excellent coping strategy, until she threw
up
at work.

At first, Meg didn’t want Jacob’s help with the baby. She wasn’t even going to tell him. Melissa said she had to. With her sister waiting in the car, Meg tracked him to a dive bar in Mamaroneck, where Jacob did the most surprising thing: he swore to take care of the three of them. After that, Meg couldn’t shake him. He trailed her like a puppy, showing up at the hospital at the end of her shift, at her parents’ house, outside her OB-GYN’s office.

He even charmed Melissa, no mean feat. To demonstrate his commitment after Alex was born, Jacob dialed down Objects in Mirror to weekend gigs so he could frame houses alongside his father. Walter Carmody kept the contracts coming, and from the father and son’s skilled hands emerged beautiful, affordable, working-class homes that dotted this side of Westchester County—including theirs.
The house that Walter and Jacob built,
Meg thought, surveying the finished basement.

Meg and Jacob had built something, too. From that regrettable one-night stand, they cobbled together a life—a life Jacob claimed no longer suited him. It made no sense to her that a man committed to both business and family could allow both to slip through his fingers.

But leaning against Meg at the kitchen sink those few years ago, Jacob had been right about one thing: the musician thing
was
a turn-on. She walked around his old practice area now to make sure Jack hadn’t disturbed anything else. There was fresh sheet music on one of the stands.
Was
Jacob playing again?

Maybe that’s where all Jacob’s insanity was coming from, she mused—midlife regret over abandoning his band before it reached its zenith. Objects in Mirror had never been more than a very popular bar band, but a musician could dream. Anyone could. Maybe once Alex was settled, she would encourage him to have the band practice here again. She’d fire up the slow cooker with pulled pork for them like she used to.

Passing the bar, Meg couldn’t help but swat the offending pillow. What if she hadn’t stopped down here after the house party? What if Alex had come home that night brimming with remorse instead of attitude? What if her daughter had allowed Meg to pick her up from wherever she had been last night instead of ignoring her?

What if. What if. Over the past few months, her life had become a constant cycle of Monday-morning quarterbacking in which she reexamined her nursing, her partnering, her parenting.

Especially her parenting. If someone had told her the one thing, the secret sauce that would reconnect her with her daughter, she gladly would’ve done it. Anything to once again have cozy nights on the couch, swirling pretzel rods into Häagen-Dazs. And girl talk at the nail salon, Meg’s staid Winkin’ Pink and Alex’s Black Orchid setting under whirring fans. One day Alex dared Meg to try Phospho-licious, a neon yellow that lit up her fingertips. Meg agreed, thinking her patients would get a kick out of it.

Alex had been particularly chatty that day, confessing to crushing on a boy on the school bus. Like two schoolgirls, they plotted ways Alex could strike up a conversation. Alex’s victorious thumbs-up coming off the bus a few days later had elated Meg.

These days, it took more than ice cream or nail polish to woo Alex, especially when fashion dictated that the studiously neglected nail, somber and chipped, was more on-trend.

And yet, there were those notes.

Hand on the basement banister, Meg sighed. Alex had looked her straight in the eye the other night when she denied the pills were hers. And Jacob believed her. Meg herself
had
been very emotional that evening. Once again, she second-guessed herself: Had she jumped the gun with this transport?

If only answers could magically appear, like the fortunes dispensed by the palm reader at Alex’s party. For now, Meg would settle for any sign the day had unfolded exactly as Carl had promised.