Finally, with lunch service over, Juan Ico signed for an order of frozen halibut from the seafood delivery service.
It needed to go right into the walk-in.
Juan put the boxes on a handcart, and when he opened the freezer door, he found himself staring down at Emily. She had a bucket on her head. A gray curtain was wrapped around her shivering body and was gripped by blue fingers.
His scream was heard on the sidewalk outside.
As Emily was carried into the dining room, she saw a sign over the kitchen door. It looked as if it had been there for many years.
It read:
Be alert. Be aware. Be alive.
No matter how many times he asked, most people called him by his old name: Bobby Ellis.
But that person was gone.
Because Bobby Ellis had died at the Churchill High School prom at the Mountain Basin Inn when the girl he was obsessed with walked out on him.
Emily Bell had been Bobby Ellis’s date on the evening he should have only been celebrating that he had been crowned prom king.
It was epic.
Just not in a good way.
Bobby Ellis had suffered first-degree sunburn earlier in the day. He had then been pulled over in his car for speeding. He had a fender bender, followed by a spray-on-tan mishap in which he cut his knee in the stall and was sent to the hospital for stitches.
The daylight portion of his catastrophe concluded when his big toe broke after he kicked a bathroom wall.
His parents had to drive him and Emily to the prom. And only an hour later, she walked out on him. The night ended with Bobby Ellis drinking so much that he was taken back to the hospital on a stretcher.
His crown, and most of his pride, got lost along the way.
Bobby decided after that to make this the summer he would have a fresh start. With everything in his life.
He started with his name.
Bobby Ellis asked people to now call him Robb. He spelled it with two b’s.
Done.
So far the only people who got the name right worked at the Hair Asylum, which was where Robb Ellis got his hair cut. The salon was located on Oak Street, just down from Ferdinand’s Fine French Restaurant. (The name of the dining establishment rubbed him the wrong way. Were there French restaurants that served coarse French food? He didn’t think so.)
Robb had vowed to himself to keep his distance from Emily Bell.
She had her life with the mysterious boy from nowhere. And Robb had his. Once they’d shared secrets. Now he found it hard to even look at her.
Or at least that’s what he thought until he saw an ambulance in front of Ferdinand’s.
Hadn’t Emily’s best friend, Nora, said Emily had a summer job there? He had tried not to pay attention, but he was certain now. Yes. That’s where she was working.
Robb picked up his pace and met the two paramedics on the sidewalk. His mother was a detective. He was used to law enforcement and disasters, and he easily wedged himself between the two men. “What kind of emergency you got going on?”
The larger of the two medics, the one carrying the orange EMS case, said, “Possible hypothermia.”
It was eighty-five degrees outside. Everyone was wearing shorts and sleeveless shirts. Robb rolled his eyes.
“C’mon, guys.”
Now it was the shorter one who spoke:
“He’s serious. A girl locked herself in the freezer.”
Robb’s eyebrows rose.
“Wow. On purpose?”
The medics blew past him into the restaurant, and Robb just naturally followed at their heels.
Inside, a half dozen people were gathered around a shape stretched out on the carpeted floor.
White tablecloths covered the body. There were no blankets in the restaurant, and as it was summer, no one had brought a coat to work.
The small group cleared to let the emergency medical technicians take charge, and it was then that Robb Ellis saw who was causing the problem.
“Emily…”
Her face was gray, and her lips were blue.
Robb Ellis found the look incredibly attractive. It was sort of like vampire makeup or something.
“Bobby…?”
Emily saw him and tried to sit up. He could see that the look on her face said: What are you doing here?
But she pulled herself forward too fast, and her body temperature was too low, and so was her blood sugar.
Emily hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and now it was three in the afternoon. The room started to spin, and then her vision started to pixelate and she dropped back to the carpet.
And Robb Ellis took it all as a good sign.
Leo Saar, the owner of the restaurant, was in a foul mood.
It was never good for business to have an ambulance with swirling lights parked in front of an eating establishment. For some people that’s all it took to trigger a decade of irrational dining fear.
So now Leo had that to worry about.
The girl had looked so trouble-free when he’d hired her. What if the halibut hadn’t arrived, and no one had gone inside the freezer, and she’d gone ice block on him?
Leo tried to shake it off. He was happy that the other kid had showed up. The tall teenager wanted to go with Emily in the ambulance, which took the burden off the restaurant to send an employee.
So that’s why Leo had offered the guy a job.
Now he looked at the slip of paper where the kid had written his contact information.
Robb Ellis.
Leo was going to have him start on Monday.
6
Sam walked out of Addison Hall and felt only one thing: relief.
He had been, he now realized, filled with dread because of summer school. But now he’d attended a college class. And survived.
He walked to the parking lot, smiling. He was one big happy face. The sun was golden warm. The trees were waving green. Not a cloud in the sky, just blue. Blue. Blue.
Joy.
That’s what he felt. And then his cell phone rang.
“Sam, this is Debbie.…”
He heard something in her voice.
“What’s wrong?”
The sun suddenly felt relentlessly harsh. The trees were sick or something, because the leaves now rattled. And the sky came falling down.
“Emily’s fine. But she’s at the hospital.”
“Hospital” was all he heard.
Sam remembered nothing about the drive.
Debbie Bell said three times that he shouldn’t worry. But her words were meaningless.
He’d known something bad was going to happen, but Sam never thought it would be that the girl who’d changed his entire life would freeze to death.
Emily didn’t succumb to the elements during her three hours in a minus-two-degree walk-in freezer, but only because she had done everything right, including not panic.
Now Sam was doing that for her.
He had been right all along.
This new world would come apart.
He found her under a flesh-colored electric blanket. She was hooked up to two machines that were monitoring something. Sam stood just inside the opening in the curtain, which surrounded the hospital bed.
Emily’s eyes were shut.
His first thought was that it wasn’t her. She was blue. Maybe it was the lights. No. It was her skin. Her circulation was that messed up.
All he could think was that this couldn’t be Emily, because she looked so small and so fragile.
But he didn’t move, because it was possible that any moment the machines keeping her alive would stop and the room would burst into flames.
As he waited for that to happen, her eyes opened, and they focused on him. There was no doubt that it was Emily.
Sam tried to say something, but nothing came out. He couldn’t lose it right in front of her.
So he just stared.
Unblinking.
For way too long.
His throat had
closed up. He could have said, How are you? He tried to say, Are you okay? But instead, in a tumble of words more heartfelt than he’d ever expressed, he managed, “I love you.”
It came out too loud. And no doubt desperate, because he could see her expression change. She was alarmed. Was he scaring her?
“Sam. It’s all right. I’m okay.”
Her hand slid out from underneath the warming blanket as he stepped to the bed. His fingers wrapped around hers, which were cold to the touch. Tears suddenly spilled from his eyes like rain. Unstoppable.
Sam stood next to the bed. What could he say that might comfort her? “I—”
But she stopped him.
“It was all my fault. I didn’t press the red light. No one knew I was in there.”
Sam climbed up onto the hospital gurney. The electric blanket had wires, and so did her left arm, but he was careful as he found a way to thread his arms around her and hold her close.
And there they lay.
Together.
It was noisy and the intercom sounded every few minutes, but being joined brought a kind of relief that found both of them, only moments later, asleep.
He woke to the sound of the curtain shifting along the rod that encircled the bed, and then a male voice said:
“Oh. Sorry. I don’t wanna interrupt or anything.”
Sam looked over his shoulder. Emily’s voice was a thin whisper:
“Sam, this is Bobby Ellis.”
The teenage boy glanced from Emily to Sam.
“Robb. Not Bobby. It’s Robb now. I changed it.”
Sam suddenly felt foolish in the hospital bed. He pulled back the electric blanket and swung his legs down to the linoleum floor. What was this guy doing here?
Emily had explained to Sam before that Bobby Ellis had helped her in the past. Now she was in the emergency room, and somehow this old boyfriend, or whatever he was, was standing there. He was part of this.
“I was just walking by the restaurant and I saw the ambulance. It was a crazy coincidence.”
Sam was surprised to hear himself say, “Emily doesn’t believe in coincidence. She believes everything is fate.”
He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth, because Emily instantly looked hurt.
Her voice was insistent. “No… all kinds of stuff can be random. I just think that sometimes unplanned things can matter.”
Sam’s eyes moved from Emily to Robb Ellis, and he couldn’t stop himself from wondering how he would make their lives different.
Clarence dedicated every minute in his cell to documenting his prison abuse. When the newly assigned lawyer next came to visit to discuss the upcoming trial, Clarence demanded expert medical care.
Henry Peacor had too many cases and not enough time to deal with his clients. And so he took on interns. He now had an office full of them.
Henry was instructed to focus on Clarence Border’s physical condition. He needed the kind of nerve testing that wasn’t going to happen in the infirmary behind the walls of the maximum-security prison.
The interns took care of everything. They sent e-mails and repeatedly called the American Civil Liberties Union. They contacted Human Rights Watch. They launched a Facebook page and opened a Twitter account with the single purpose of making an inmate’s physical plight a social issue. They cut together a compelling video. They even suggested that they might stage a hunger strike.
Together, Henry’s legal interns began to build a case describing a man with an amputated leg, in extreme pain, improperly fitted with a prosthetic device that was the equivalent of torture.
As Clarence explained, his leg was a Bill of Rights issue.
Because as written, the Eighth Amendment states that “excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
And denying a prisoner proper medical care was cruel and unusual punishment.
It just was.
7
After Emily almost froze to death, Sam went every day after summer school to meet her at Ferdinand’s. He couldn’t stand the idea of his girlfriend being in the world without the protection of his watchful eye.
It didn’t matter that he never knew when her shift would end. What was important was that he was watching there for her.
And then Destiny appeared on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant.
The girl was a little pixie of a thing.
She had on a short-short pink skirt and an oversize man’s dress shirt. She wore pointy orange slippers that came from Thailand and were not meant to ever touch the pavement.
Her hair, which was dyed the color of a blond baby’s—all shiny white—was piled up on her head and held in place by an ornamental chopstick. Little dark roots were visible at the base of her scalp.
The girl stared at Sam and said, “You look hot. If you’re going to be waiting for long, you can come hang out in the shop.” Her head tilted over to the door of a store called the Orange Tree.
Sam looked around. Was she talking to him?
The girl continued. “I saw you out here yesterday with the dark-haired girl from the French place.”
Now Sam knew for certain that she was speaking to him. He remained silent, but that didn’t stop her.
“I’m Destiny. Destiny Verbeck. I’ve got a job in there. It’s a whole-lot-of-nothing shop.”
Sam nodded and then hoped it didn’t look like he was agreeing with what she’d just said.
“We sell cards and T-shirts and toys that adults think kids would like, but they don’t. It’s all expensive junk, really. I mean just useless. But people buy it. Earrings made from bottle caps. Toilet paper with your fortune printed on one side. It’s just a bunch of crap.”
Destiny pulled on her skirt, not down but up, making it even shorter. She then continued. “We sell something called Earthquake-in-a-Can. You hit a button, and it shakes. Battery-powered. If that’s not junk, I don’t know what is.”
Destiny wiggled her toes in her tiny orange slippers and rocked back and forth on her heels. “We’ve got a couch in the store. You may as well come inside and waste your time talking to me.”
Sam wasn’t talking to her. But she didn’t seem to need any encouragement to carry on the conversation. She peered at him and suddenly seemed very serious.
“What did you say your name was again?”
He hadn’t said. Because he had yet to open his mouth. Now he did as he answered: “Sam.”
Destiny repeated it, and the word seemed to have two syllables.
“SSSSee-Aam. I like that. It fits you. It’s nice when that happens. I was born Amber, but I changed my name to Destiny. Amber didn’t work for me. It was too, I don’t know, ‘boring girl.’”
She was moving now, and Sam felt that he had no choice but to follow as she continued:
“I just wasn’t an Amber. But Destiny works. Everyone remembers it. You will, too. I guarantee it. Tonight, when you’re just about to fall asleep, you’ll think, What happened to me today? And then it will come to you. Destiny!”
And then she headed into the Orange Tree, and Sam found himself right behind the short-short pink skirt and the little orange slippers.
It was times like this, he decided, when it would have been a good thing to know more about girls.
Like how do you politely get away from one?
Destiny Verbeck might have looked like she could play the part of a baby wood nymph in a professional ice show, but she was tough.
She had to be.
Her mother had died of a drug overdose after being clean and sober for four years. Her one slipup ended it all.
After that, eleven-year-old Destiny, known up until that point as Amber, changed her name.
In a kinder world, Destiny’s father, while still grieving, would have stepped in to raise her.
If Ronnie Verbeck had lived a hundred years earlier, he would have been a horse thief. Instead, he ran a ring of crooks who only stole n
ewish Hondas from Vegas hotel parking lots. Ronnie Verbeck knew how to ship a stripped sedan south of the border in less than six hours.
Only two months after his wife died, Ronnie was caught in a government sting that led to his conviction. He named names, giving up as many members of the stolen-car ring as possible, but it wasn’t enough. He still found himself behind bars.
No one on either side of the family came forward. And that left Amber-turned-Destiny Verbeck in the hands of foster care.
Four families and five years later, she walked out the front door of a house in Boise, Idaho, and didn’t look back.
She was almost sixteen, and she’d had enough of the spin cycle of schools, makeshift families, and disappointment. Despite all the obstacles that had been thrown in front of her, she knew that she could make it on her own.
A man named Wynn Lappe married Destiny on her birthday in Billings, Montana. He was twenty-seven years old and drove trucks for a living. He thought she was twenty-three.
Destiny didn’t have a commercial driver’s license, but she learned to drive a big rig. An eighteen-wheeler requires nerves of steel when you don’t know what you’re doing, and she had those, even though turning sharp corners still presented some problems for her.
Destiny traveled with Wynn for a year, seeing thousands and thousands of miles of moving blacktop and not a lot else. Wynn was fundamentally decent but also tragically boring. At least to a teenager with big dreams.
And that was why Destiny left him at a truck stop in Lebo, Kansas, hopping a ride with another driver while Wynn slept in the upper bunk of the big rig, above the cab.
She left a note saying she was sorry that it was over. She hoped he’d file the paperwork for a divorce, but if he didn’t, she’d understand.
Now, eight months later, the girl was working at the Orange Tree gift shop in an Oregon college town. She’d been there only a few days, and already the place seemed dreary.
And then she saw Sam.
With the tall boy at her heels, she pointed to the purple sofa next to the greeting-card display. “Take a load off. You can see the sidewalk, and you’ll know when your girlfriend comes out of the restaurant.”