Hot Water (36 page)

Sinking into the chair beside him, I cupped my ears, trying to muffle the screeching echo still rattling my fillings. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

The direct line rang. He answered it, listened, then said, “Thank you,” and hung up.

“Tell me.” I wanted to throw up, needed to throw up, just to have an excuse to curl up alone in a bathroom stall, but instead I hung on to the arms of the vinyl chair, squeezing all my hope into their faux-leather padding.

“You can’t blame yourself,” he said in a tone meant to be kind.

I squeezed my eyes shut, blocking out the sight of his lips moving, letting the echo of the gunshot stampede through my brain.

“He’s dead.”

Four months later ...

The tug-of-war in my stomach was a tractor pull pitting an eighteen-wheeler against a Panzer tank. My blinding headache as I hunched over the steering wheel of the van and peered through the equally blinding rain didn’t help. Once we’d left the concrete tangle of highways surrounding D.C. and made it over the West Virginia border we were on two-lane switchbacked highways crossing through the Appalachians.

Home. The word filled me with dread—and yet also offered a tantalizing feeling of anticipation. Maybe this time....

When we were kids, we used to whine that Scotia, West Virginia, was the town where dreams went to die.

But I’d escaped.

I’d lived my dreams. Lost most of them. Except the most important one, the one sleeping in the backseat, his corduroy snores harmonizing with the beat of the windshield wipers.

David. Almost ten years old and going to meet his grandparents for the first time. Not to mention his first trip to the mountains. First time leaving D.C. since he was an infant in my arms.

Was I crawling back, a failure, a fool for returning to the town that had tried so hard to assassinate my dreams? Or was I really still just a kid myself, coming home at twenty-seven to be healed?

Lord, how I wanted it to be the latter, that Walton’s Thanksgiving special where John Boy reunites with his father and everyone ends up safe and sound, wrapped in a crazy quilt of love....

I passed the WELCOME TO SCOTIA, POPULATION 867 sign and noted the bullet holes that had blown out the center of every “o” and dotted every “i.” Nothing changed. Good-bye, Walton fantasy—hello, Scotia reality.

With all the finesse of a roundhouse punch, that reality hit home when I pulled up in front of my parents’ house and saw that the only light on was upstairs. Last week, when I’d called to let her know I was coming home, my mom had been so excited by the idea of getting to know her only grandchild that she’d insisted I stay with her and Dad instead of with my grandmother, as I’d planned.

She’d gushed about preparing a room for us to share, said it would be no problem to accommodate David, none at all. Of course, she’d also poured on the guilt about me keeping David from her for so long—as if it’d been my idea.

Goes to show how low I’d fallen that I’d taken her at face value. Of all people, I should have known better. Usually I’m the biggest skeptic in a crowd, too guarded, barricaded even, but she’d suckered me into trusting her. And stupid me, I’d told David about it.

“Is the ramp around back?” he asked, his voice still ragged from sleep. “If they don’t have it ready, I could use my crutches.”

David was so excited about making a good impression on his grandparents—he’d changed clothes three times before we left D.C. I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw that he had his face pressed against the window. A kid on Christmas Eve, searching the sky for Santa.

And I was about to give him a lump of coal. Courtesy of my folks, Frank and Edna Palladino.

“No crutches. Not in this rain and mud.”

“Mo-o-om.” He dragged it out to three syllables. “I can do it. You’re not going to carry me.” The horror!

“Let me run in first, see what’s going on.” See if I could salvage anything, protect him from having all his familial fantasies crushed.

I jumped from the van before he could protest and dashed through the rain to the front porch of the only home I’d ever known. The doorknob was icy cold. I stopped myself before turning it. Going on ten years since I left—should I knock first, like a stranger?

The doorbell echoed through the darkened downstairs. After a few minutes the hall light came on, and my father came tromping down the steps. He looked surprised to see me, but long experience told me he was faking it. Denial, our family’s drug of choice.

“Angela, what are you doing here?” He opened the door. He didn’t invite me inside but instead stood there filling the doorway with his broad shoulders, barricading the entrance.

“Did you forget we were coming today?” For David’s sake, I didn’t lash out the way I wanted. Instead, I played along with his delusions. “That’s okay, we can sort things out in the morning. Mom said she’d have the downstairs bedroom ready for us.” It was a tiny room, called the “maid’s room” back ninety years ago when the house had first been built, but it had its own bath and wouldn’t need a lot of work to accommodate David’s wheelchair.

“Well, see, we just didn’t realize how much work it would take. . . . ” He peered over my head to the van, trying to make out David’s face. But the windows had steamed up, and all you could see of David was a black blob bouncing in anticipation. “It’s just not fair to your mom, asking her to care for a crip——, a handicapped child. And not fair to you or David,” he added, as if he was doing us a favor.

As much as I’d have loved to punch him in the nose and take David away from this town, we had nowhere to go. If there was one thing I’d discovered in the years I’d spent away from Scotia, it was that as long as I had breath in my body, I’d do whatever it took to protect my child.

Didn’t matter if it meant facing down a grizzly with its tail caught in a hornets’ nest or groveling to my parents. David was my heart and soul—everything I did, I did for him, so he’d have a future better than any I’d ever dreamed of, so he’d have a present that was the best I could give him, so he’d never look upon his past with dread and anger and fear like I did.

I dug in for one last try. “Is Mom around?”

“She’s having one of her spells.” Pain shadowed his face as he shifted his weight from one leg to the other, still blocking the doorway.

It was Mom he was protecting. The “spells” started after my brother died, fifteen years ago. Our family secret. As if grief was something to be ashamed of. He stepped forward, forcing me to step back.

“Okay. I guess we’ll spend the night in the van.” I wasn’t serious, of course. But venting some of my anger made me feel a little better.

He actually nodded, his gaze not quite vacant—I gauged it as a two-thirds-of-the-six-pack-consumed stage. His own nightly trip into oblivion.

Then he got this wistful smile that made me remember swinging off a rope into a pond, his strong arms stretched open to catch me. A younger me, trusting him, making the leap.

“Does he have your eyes? Those green Costello eyes? You get that gypsy blood from your mom’s side of the family, that’s why you couldn’t stay put here.”

Memories unearthed themselves like zombies clawing their way out of a freshly dug grave. I held on to the door, the wood gouging my palm, and fought to bury them once more. I couldn’t “stay put” in Scotia because I’d been LifeFlighted out ten years ago, half-past dead. Me and David—although he hadn’t been born yet. That had been another rainy night.

“Try your gram. Edna said something to her about your coming back.” I noted that he didn’t say “coming home.”

With that, he turned and climbed back up the steps, turning the light off when he reached the top, leaving me standing just outside the threshold, in the dark.

A familiar dread and uncertainty roiled over me, making me feel off balance, unable to remember the life I’d built for myself as an adult, feeling dwarfed, diminished. Meaningless. Nothing.

I was definitely back home.

Copyright © 2011 by Erin Brockovich

Published by Vanguard Press

A Member of the Perseus Books Group

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information and inquiries, address Vanguard Press, 387 Park Avenue South, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10016, or call (800) 343-4499.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Brockovich, Erin.
Hot water / Erin Brockovich with CJ Lyons.
p.cm.

eISBN : 978-1-593-15685-5

1. Women environmentalists—Fiction. 2. Single mothers—Fiction. 3. Nuclear facilities—Accidents—Fiction. 4. Families—Fiction. I. Lyons, CJ, 1964–II. Title.

PS3602.R6325H69 2011
813’.6—dc22
2011020811

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