The Best of Me (38 page)

Amanda burst through the door of Duke University Hospital’s emergency room, staring wildly at the crowd of patients and families. She’d continued to call Jared and Frank over and over, but neither of them had answered. Finally, she’d phoned Lynn in frantic desperation. Her daughter was still at Lake Norman, a few hours away. Lynn had broken down at the news and promised to be there as quickly as she could.

Standing inside the doorway, Amanda scanned the room, hoping to find Jared. She prayed that her worries had been for
nothing. Then, to her bewilderment, she spotted Frank at the far end of the room. He stood and began walking toward her, appearing less injured than she’d assumed he would be. She peered over his shoulder, trying to locate her son. But Jared was nowhere to be seen.

“Where’s Jared?” she demanded when Frank reached her side. “Are you okay? What happened? What’s going on?”

She was still barking out questions when Frank took her arm and led her back outside.

“Jared’s been admitted,” he said. Despite the hours that had passed since he’d been at the club, his words were still slurred. She could tell he was trying to sound sober, but the sour smell of booze saturated his breath and his sweat. “I don’t know what’s going on. No one seems to know anything. But the nurse said something about a cardiologist.”

His words only amplified the anxiety coursing through her. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is Jared going to be okay?”

“He seemed fine when we got here.”

“Then why is he seeing a cardiologist?”

“I don’t know.”

“He said you were covered in blood.”

Frank touched the swollen bridge of his nose, where a black-and-blue crescent surrounded a small cut. “I banged my nose pretty good, but they were able to stop the bleeding. It’s no big deal. I’ll be fine.”

“Why didn’t you answer your phone? I called a hundred times!”

“My phone is still in the car…”

But Amanda had stopped listening as the weight of everything Frank had said sank in. Jared had been admitted. Her son was the one who was hurt. Her son, not her husband. Jared. Her firstborn…

Feeling like she’d been punched in the stomach and suddenly sickened by the sight of Frank, she marched past him, heading
straight for the nurse behind the admitting desk. Doing her best to control her rising hysteria, she demanded to know what was going on with her son.

The nurse had few answers, repeating only what Frank had already told her.
Drunk Frank
, she thought again, unable to stem the tide of rage. She slapped both hands down on the desk, startling everyone in the waiting room.

“I need to know what’s going on with my son!” she cried. “I want some answers
now
!”

Problems with her car,
Abee thought. That’s what had been bothering him about his earlier conversation with Candy. Because if her car was having problems, then how had she gotten to work? And why hadn’t she asked him if he could drive her to work, or back home?

Had someone else driven her? Like the guy in the Tidewater?

She wouldn’t have been that stupid. Of course, he could call her to find out, but there was a better way to get to the bottom of this. Irvin’s wasn’t very far from the small house where she lived, so he might as well swing by to check if her car was there. Because if it was there, it meant that someone had driven her, and then they’d definitely have something important to talk about, wouldn’t they?

He tossed a few bills onto the table and motioned for Ted to follow. Ted hadn’t talked much during the dinner, but Abee had the sense he was doing a little better, despite his poor appetite.

“Where we going?” Ted asked.

“I want to check something out,” Abee answered.

Candy’s place was located just a few minutes away, toward the end of a sparsely inhabited street. The house was a ramshackle bungalow, fronted with aluminum siding and hemmed in by overgrown bushes. It wasn’t much, but Candy didn’t seem to care, and she hadn’t done much to make it any homier.

As Abee pulled into the drive, he saw that her car was missing. Maybe she’d got it working, he reasoned, but while he sat in the truck and stared at the house, he noticed that something wasn’t quite right. Something was missing, so to speak, and it took a few minutes before he figured out what it was.

The Buddha statue was missing, the one she kept in the front window, framed by a gap in the bushes. Her good luck charm, she’d called it, and there was no reason she should have moved it. Unless…

He opened the door of the truck and got out. When Ted glanced over at him, he shook his head. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

Abee pushed past the overgrown bushes and climbed onto the porch. Peering through the front window, he saw that the statue was definitely gone. The rest of the place looked the same. Of course, that didn’t mean much, since he knew it had come furnished. But the missing Buddha bothered him.

Abee worked his way around the house, peering in the windows, though curtains blocked most of the views. He couldn’t make out much.

Finally tiring of his efforts, he simply kicked in the back door, just like Ted had done at Tuck’s house.

He stepped inside, wondering what the hell Candy might be up to.

Just as she had every fifteen minutes since she’d arrived, Amanda approached the nurses’ station to ask if they had any further information. The nurse responded patiently that she had already given Amanda all the information she had: Jared had been admitted, he was being seen by a cardiologist, and the doctor knew they were waiting. As soon as she learned anything, Amanda would be the first to know. There was compassion in her voice as she said it, and Amanda nodded her thanks before turning away.

Even with the reality of her surroundings, she still couldn’t make sense of what she was doing here or how any of this had happened. Though Frank and the nurse had tried to explain it to her, their words meant nothing in the here and now. She didn’t want Frank or the nurse to tell her what was going on, she wanted to talk to
Jared
. She needed to see Jared, she needed to hear his voice to know that he was okay and when Frank had tried to put a comforting hand on her back, she’d jerked away as if scalded.

Because it was his fault that Jared was here in the first place. If he hadn’t been drinking, Jared would have stayed at home, or been out with a girl, or at a friend’s house. Jared would never have been anywhere near that intersection, would never have ended up in the hospital. He’d just been trying to help. He was being the responsible one.

But Frank…

She couldn’t bear to look at him. It was all she could do not to scream at him.

The clock on the wall seemed to be keeping time in slow motion.

Finally, after an eternity, she heard the door that led to the patients’ rooms swing open, and she turned to see a doctor emerge wearing surgical scrubs. She watched as he approached the duty nurse, who nodded and pointed in her direction. Amanda was paralyzed with trepidation as the doctor came toward her. She searched his face for a sign of what he might say. His expression gave nothing away.

She stood, Frank following her lead. “I’m Doctor Mills,” he said, and he signaled them to follow him through a set of double doors that led to another corridor. When the doors closed behind them, Dr. Mills turned to face them. Despite the gray in his hair, she could see that he was probably younger than her.

It would take more than one conversation for her to fully absorb what he told them, but this much she grasped: Jared, while appearing fine, had been injured by the blunt impact of
the smashed car door. The attending physician had detected a trauma-induced heart murmur, and they’d taken him in for evaluation. While there, Jared’s condition had deteriorated markedly and rapidly. The doctor went on to mention words like
cyanosis
and told them that a transvenous pacemaker had been inserted, but that Jared’s heart capacity kept diminishing. The doctor suspected that the tricuspid valve had ruptured, that her son needed valve replacement surgery. Jared was already on bypass, he explained, but they now needed permission to perform heart surgery. Without surgery, he told them bluntly, their son was going to die.

Jared was going to die.

She reached for the wall to keep from falling down as the doctor glanced from her to Frank and back again.

“I need you to sign the consent form,” Dr. Mills said. In that instant, Amanda knew that he’d also smelled the booze on Frank’s breath. She began to hate her husband then, truly
hate
him. Moving as though in a dream, she deliberately and carefully signed her name on the form with a hand that barely seemed her own.

Dr. Mills led them to another part of the hospital and left them in an empty waiting room. Her mind was numb with shock.

Jared needed surgery, or he would die.

He couldn’t die. Jared was only nineteen years old. He had his whole life in front of him.

Closing her eyes, she sank into a chair, trying and failing to make sense of the world crumbling around her.

Candy didn’t need this. Not tonight.

The young guy at the end of the bar, Alan or Alvin or whatever his name was, was practically panting to ask her out. Even worse, business was so slow tonight, she probably wouldn’t make enough to fill her car with gas. Great. Just great.

“Hey, Candy?” It was the young guy again, leaning over the bar like a needy puppy. “Can I have another beer, please?”

She forced a smile as she popped the top off a bottle and walked it down to him. As she neared the end of the bar, he called out a question, but headlights suddenly flashed on the door, either from a passing car or someone pulling into the lot, and she found herself glancing toward the entrance. Waiting.

When no one came in, she heaved a sigh of relief.

“Candy?”

His voice brought him back to her. He pushed his shiny black hair off his forehead.

“I’m sorry. What?”

“I asked how your day’s been going so far.”

“Peachy,” she answered with a sigh. “Just peachy.”