The Ninth Step (30 page)

Her face warmed. She said, “I couldn’t believe it, that you were there, right when I-- I was never so glad to see--to see anyone--” Livie closed her eyes and fresh tears collected under her eyelids. She tried to say how much it meant to her, how much Charlie meant to her.

He shuffled his feet. A second or two ticked by and Livie knew she had embarrassed him and she was sorry for it, but then he said, “You mean the world to me, too, Livie, gal,” and she was glad she had spoken.

She didn’t let his gaze go. “Is Cotton--? Was I too late?” She asked Charlie because she knew she could count on him to answer.

“He’s here; he’s in surgery. It’s bad, I can’t lie. They won’t know for a while.” His gaze was gentle.

She looked down at her hands, asked about the baby again. And she was reassured again. She lifted the sheet, saw the hospital gown and said, “Where are my clothes? I want to go home.”

“What clothes? You were hardly wearing any when you came in.” Kat smiled, but her eyes were serious. Her eyes were filled with consternation, the fading vestiges of panic-induced anger. She gripped Livie’s hand as if only her mouth could express relief.

“I had to use my shirt--”

“It’s ruined,” Kat said. “So are those old cargo shorts you had on. You’ll never get the blood out. At least now you’ll have to throw them away.”

“It doesn’t matter about your clothes anyway,” their mother said, “We’re spending the night. Kat and Charlie are going home, but you and I are staying here. They want to keep an eye on you just to be safe.”

Livie didn’t argue; she was too tired. She finished off the broth when they brought it and the Jello and when they took her to a room, she said goodnight to Kat and Charlie, but her mom, as promised, came with her and kept watch and Livie was grateful. She didn’t want to be alone.

At first she dozed and woke later when the nurse came to take her vitals and remove the IV.

“Does it mean I can go home?”

“In the morning once your OB has seen you.” The nurse--Charlene, according to her nametag--smiled. She wondered if she could get Livie or her mother anything.

“We’re fine, I think.” Gus glanced at Livie who agreed.

With the IV out, she was free to turn on her side. Charlene had left the door ajar and a broken bar of light dashed the floor and the bed and fell across her mother’s knees where she had them drawn up into the seat of a weathered-looking recliner. “Is that comfortable?” Livie asked. “Want to get in here with me?” She raised the coverlet.

Her mother said no, but she came and sat on the bed’s edge. She brushed Livie’s hair back from her temples in that familiar soothing way and Livie closed her eyes. She said her mother ought to go home, that she was fine by herself, which was a total lie and her mother knew it. She didn’t budge. And when Livie asked, “Have you heard anything?”

Her mother took Livie’s meaning immediately and answered that Cotton was in intensive care. “The doctor says the next twenty-four hours are critical.”

“He saved my life, Mom.”

“So the police said.”

“You talked to them?”

“They were here earlier and wanted to question you. I told them they’d have to wait.”

Livie asked about Wes and her mother said he was in jail, that he had needed sedation. “He’s obviously not right in his mind or at least, he wasn’t.”

“What about Nikki?”

“Charlie said a neighbor took her.” Gus tsked her tongue. “That’s the tragedy. To think that little girl lost her mother and now she may lose her father too. For what? Why he or Cotton couldn’t have let the police handle it, why none of you could wait--”

“Cotton wanted to tell them himself, Mom. He wanted to face them and take responsibility in person for what he’d done.”

“Sugar, if you want me to be impressed with that, to forgive him, or that man Wes Latimer, it might be awhile.”

#

It was in the deepest pocket of the night that she climbed from the hospital bed. She glanced at her mother and could just make out her sleeping form in the recliner. She was covered in a blanket and snoring softly. Livie thought Charlene must have brought the blanket.

In the bathroom, she found a papery robe hanging on the door hook and slipping it on, she padded as quietly as her hospital garb would let her into the corridor. She stood blinking a moment in the sudden light and then walked quickly down the hall and took the elevator to the ICU. The nurse’s station there was deserted and the policeman posted outside Cotton’s cubicle was dozing. At least Livie thought he was until he caught her arm.

“You can’t go in there,” he said. His voice was gravely with sleep. He got to his feet, wiping his mouth, working his tongue over his teeth.

“How is he?”

“Still breathing--barely.”

“I was there when he was shot. I just-- If I could just have a minute.”
Please. . . .
Livie held the officer’s gaze, willing him.

He gave a curt nod. She would never know why.

Chapter 24

He assumed she was pure drug-induced fantasy when he opened his eyes and saw her beside his bed. He thought he had died. He imagined asking her:
Am I dead
? But no, if that were true, he’d not be seeing this, what was surely a vision of an angel.

Livie
. He tried to make her name, but his mouth was dry, concreted shut. He could only hold her with his gaze. She found a cotton swab coated with something smooth and brushed it over his lips. He blinked and his eyelids were salt, they were fire. She put her hand over his, bent her head to his ear. “Thank you for saving me, for saving my baby,” she whispered. “I couldn’t say it before.”

She seemed to rest her forehead against him a moment; she seemed to be thinking, considering, and he rested with her, drifting on her warmth, filling himself with the dream of her scent. Honeysuckle, he wanted to say, significant of the bonds of love. He wanted to remind her, to show her he hadn’t forgotten.

She straightened. Her eyes were swimmy and she gestured at them ruefully.  “I can’t seem to stop the waterworks.” She managed a smile. “They say it’s hormones, that it’ll pass.”

He tried to lift his hand, to say it was okay.

Seeing his effort, she touched her throat. “Tube,” she said. “You can’t talk. You shouldn’t anyway.”

She waited. He waited with her. “You’re a good man, Cotton,” she whispered finally. “You did a wrong thing once, but not this time.”

Another longer space of time passed, or it seemed longer to him, and then he felt her touch his temple. She placed her hand on his chest. “You always had a good heart,” she said. “You just lost it for a while.”

He closed his eyes and when he opened them again, she was gone. Was it minutes later? Hours? Days? He didn’t know, but the air was fragrant, redolent with the presence of roses. Dark pink roses. Their petals were strewn everywhere, on his pillow, his bed, the floor. He struggled to think, to recall and now he had it.

For gratitude, he thought. Dark pink roses were the symbol for gratitude.

#

He fooled everyone including himself and lived. Nix heard the story on the news and came to see him in jail once he was released from the hospital. Over the next month, a deal was negotiated that netted Cotton an eighteen-month sentence. The legal process might have been more prolonged and requiring of more than Nix’s skill as a civil attorney if Cotton hadn’t waived his right to a trial and pleaded no contest to charges of vehicular manslaughter and fleeing the state to avoid prosecution. Nix said it didn’t hurt either that Cotton had nearly died from the gunshot wound Wes Latimer inflicted on him.

“Of course, I’m speaking figuratively. I know you suffered one hell of lot of pain.” Nix grinned. “But that’s what got the court’s sympathy, my friend.” He kept Cotton’s gaze through the Plexiglas barrier that separated them. “You dodged the bullet, the legal bullet that is.”

Cotton smiled. “Thanks to you.”

Nix wanted to know how he felt.

“Okay,” Cotton said. “Still shell shocked, I guess. Scared, too. I can’t lie. Being locked up is no waltz in the park.” He ran his fingertip along the counter top, said he’d had another letter from Nikki.

“Really. So, how is she? She get over being pissed at her dad, yet?”

“I think so. At least she said they’re okay.” It was the second of two letters Cotton had gotten from her in the six weeks he’d been incarcerated and she’d written this time that she and Wes were seeing a counselor. They were working through a lot of garbage together, she said. Sometimes Trevor came home and went with them. She wrote that she wanted to come and see Cotton, but her dad wasn’t “there yet” was how she’d worded it. In her first letter to him, she had written how sorry she was for what her dad had done; she had said she was angry at him.
He just went bonkers
, she’d said.
He doesn’t even remember . . . he says he was insane . .
.  The judge had agreed and granted Wes a probated sentence. Cotton had hoped the charges against Wes would be dismissed. At a meeting with the DA, he’d asked if it wasn’t possible. Nix had tossed him a look. He’d said later Cotton should be glad, at least Wes was free, Nikki wouldn’t land in foster care.

He said it again now. “She’s got her dad and that’s a good thing.”

“Yeah, but if I hadn’t gone there, if I’d taken Sonny’s advice, Livie’s advice, and turned myself in--”

“But you didn’t and it worked out. Maybe for the best.”

Cotton snorted.

“How do you know it isn’t? How do you know what people have to go through, what their path is? Huh? Yours being a case in point. One day you’re a jerk, next day you’re a hero.”

“Is your philosophy like your legal advice? Do you charge by the hour?”

“What? Like you could pay?”

Cotton grinned and shook his head.

Nix said, “Look, it’s not as if you asked Livie to follow you. You didn’t ask her to put herself in harm’s way.”

“Doesn’t make me a hero,” Cotton said.

“You took a bullet for her, man. She’s alive because of you.”

Cotton shrugged. Everyone who spoke of what he’d done in these terms seemed to think his actions were somehow noteworthy, as if shielding Livie from Wes, from the bullet he’d fired had been a matter of conscious thought, of making a choice, but it was nothing so complicated. He’d only done what he had to do to keep Livie safe. He said that now to Nix. He said, “It was nothing, really.”

They sat in easy silence a while. Cotton listened to Nix breathe. He thought how much it meant to him, that sound--his friend’s breath. And Nix’s visits, that he would come to see Cotton in here, this hard place. That he would refuse not to believe in Cotton’s future. Cotton couldn’t tell Nix what their friendship meant to him. He wanted to, but when he tried, his throat closed.

“Did I tell you, I thought I saw her once in the hospital,” Cotton said instead.

“Livie?”

“Yeah. I would have thought I was dead, but I figured if that was right, I’d have been looking at the devil.”

“Well, actually, you did see her. The duty cop let her in. He figured you were a goner anyway so why not? I wouldn’t go making a lot out of it, though, if I was you,” Nix advised.

Cotton said he wouldn’t, that he knew better.

“Look, you’ll do your time, you’ll get out, you know? Probably in under a year if you keep your nose clean in here. You’ll be free, you’ll have made your amends. That’s what you wanted, why you came back, isn’t it?”

Cotton said it was, but somehow he knew it wasn’t going to be that simple. The making of amends wasn’t going to be done after he served his sentence with time off for good behavior. It wasn’t a matter of sobering up or making your apologies and walking away or nearly losing your life so that someone else was saved. All of those things, the steps he had taken so far . . . maybe they counted for something. He guessed he could feel some degree of rightness about them. And there was Livie, her visit to him in the ICU. He knew he’d dreamt the part about the rose petals, but the warmth of her breath near his ear, her whispered expressions of gratitude had been real and freely given as if he deserved her thanks. He thought how at least now there was truth between them and not lies.

But the intersection was there too and all that had been lost there, his life with Livie, his own humanity, what he’d taken from the Latimer family. And somehow he was going to have to find a way to live with that.

Chapter 25

 “Forget him,” Kat said.

“He’s shown who he really is, that he can’t be relied on,” her mother said.

“But so have you and I and Kat, too. We’re all guilty of making mistakes, shameful mistakes.” Livie shuddered and got awkwardly up from the front porch swing, one hand flattened to her burgeoning belly. “Every time I think of the circumstances of this child’s conception, I cringe.”

Kat said, “I can tell you one thing, chickie, you’ll never fit into that slinky red dress again.”

“I don’t care,” Livie retorted. “I gave it to Stella along with the shoes.”

“Little if any of what I did makes me cringe,” their mother said examining her manicure.

Kat and Livie exchanged a look.

Livie said, “Well, even so, I forgive you.”

“But I’m not asking your forgiveness.”

“No, but I want you to have it anyway.”

#

She thought about what she had said to her mother, how surprised she had been to feel the weight of her childhood bitterness disappear with her words. She thought how she might learn to one day extend such grace to herself. It occurred to her that quite possibly another person’s blessing, or even their remorse or apology, wasn’t required to satisfy the nature of forgiveness. One day she sat down and wrote to Cotton, one line:
I forgive you;
I hope one day you can  forgive yourself.

He didn’t write back. She asked Nix to tell him not to, but then as her due date approached and her child grew heavier inside her, so, too, did her disappointment that Cotton had taken her request to heart.

“You’re hopeless,” Kat said.