“Get it ready. Do you have any paint? You or maybe Lady Alice?”
She shrugged. “Maybe some old paint under the house. Probly not still good.”
“Well, maybe good enough,” I said, although I was wondering: exactly how old? Could there be lead in it? “I thought maybe we could…I don’t know. Freshen the room up with some paint over the wallpaper. Or if you had a couple of different colors, we could paint designs on the walls. We can make a mattress cover for the bassinet.” I realized I hadn’t looked inside the bassinet to see if she’d already thought of bedding. “Does the bassinet have a mattress, or—”
“Do you ever feel trapped?” she interrupted me.
I sat lower in my chair, nearly sinking into it. Hell, yes, I felt trapped. But this wasn’t about me. “Do you feel trapped, Simmee?” I asked.
She set the pants and her needle down on the table and looked me in the eye. “I love this baby, Miss Maya.” She seemed so different this morning. I’d come to think of her as otherworldly. Today she looked all too human.
“Yes,” I said. “I know you do.”
“I love it with my complete heart, but I’m so scared.” She wrapped her arms around herself as if she were cold.
“Oh, Simmee.” I leaned forward, my forearms stretched toward her on the table. Of course she was scared. “I understand,” I said. “But everything’s going to be fine, honey. What happened with your mother was an aberration…an unusual circumstance.”
She looked down at the pants again but didn’t release her arms from across her chest.
“Listen to me,” I said. “I don’t think for an instant that you’ll have a problem, but I really wish you’d have the baby at a hospital. Wouldn’t that ease your mind?”
“Tully won’t go along with that,” she said.
“Why don’t I talk to him about it.” I sat up straight again. “I’ll insist.” What gave me the right to insist on anything? “Once Larry comes and you can get a new boat, then you’ll be able to get to the mainland and have your baby there. If there’s a problem…and there is not going to be a problem…but if there is one, you’ll feel more confident that you’ll be safe.”
“I keep feelin’ like the baby’s gonna come soon.” She glanced at me almost shyly. “Maybe before Larry comes. If that happens, at least you’ll be here. You can birth it for me, can’t you?”
I was taken aback. One way or another, I planned to be long gone by the time Simmee’s baby arrived. “Of course,” I said. “Most likely, Larry will have shown up by then and he’ll help you get a new boat and you can have the baby at the hospital, because I am going to talk to Tully about this. But if the baby comes sooner, of course I’ll help you.”
For the first time since I’d walked into the kitchen, Simmee smiled. “You bein’ here’s a blessin’, Miss Maya.” Then she glanced through the window screen, and I knew without her saying a word that she was looking to see if Tully was nearby. I knew before she opened her mouth that what she was going to say next was something she didn’t want him to hear.
“I need to tell you somethin’,” she said quietly. “It’s real important.”
“Okay.” I kept my voice as low as hers.
Simmee licked her lips. “I want you to have my baby,” she said.
I didn’t know what I’d expected her to say, but that wasn’t it. “Why would you say that?” I asked.
Simmee looked down at Tully’s pants and ran her fingers over the fabric. Her chin trembled. I wanted to hug her. Make that trembling stop.
“You can give him a better life than me,” she said without looking up.
“Simmee.” I reached across the table for her hand. I had to tug it a little to get her to look at me. “Material things are not what matter most,” I said, although I was thinking, God, yes. I could do so much more for this child! I erased that thought from my mind before I dared to feed it. “You love your baby. You’ve said so, and it’s so clear to me that you do. I know you can’t wait to hold it in your arms, and you’re going to be such a good mother. Look at how you took care of me. You’re a caretaker, Simmee. You’re meant to be a mom.”
Simmee pulled her hand from mine and hugged herself again. “You don’t understand,” she whispered. “You can’t know. You can’t understand how it is.”
“Do you mean what it was like growing up out here? So isolated?”
She shrugged with a half nod, not looking at me.
“I know it must have been hard for you.” I pictured her as a child, taking the boat across the water to go to school, having to leave her classmates behind as she returned to Last Run Shelter each day. At least she’d had Lady Alice’s children to play with. Simmee’s baby would have no one. “Maybe you and Tully can move to the mainland,” I said.
“He won’t.”
“Maybe for the sake of the baby, he would,” I said. “He loves you, Simmee, and he’s excited about this baby. You know that.”
“I know.” She shut her eyes. I could see the slender blue veins in her eyelids. She looked so fragile.
“So maybe for the good of your baby, he’d be willing to move someplace where his son or daughter would have better chances,” I continued, but I thought of how stubborn Tully could be and how he relished his backwoods lifestyle. It would kill something in him to give that up. Still, people made all sorts of sacrifices for the sake of their children.
“Why won’t you take it?” Simmee asked me. “You want a baby, and I want you to have him.” Her eyes glistened. “Is it ’cause it ain’t your blood kin?”
I shook my head. “It’s because he’s yours and I know you’ll fill him up with loads of love.” My arms began to ache with the thought of cradling her baby. Simmee was only seventeen. Seventeen! “There are social services to help you,” I said. “You have so much to give, Simmee.”
“Please.”
“The way you’re feeling right now is normal,” I said. “It’s normal to be overwhelmed. You’ll feel differently when the baby comes and he looks up at you for the first time. You won’t want to let him go then. I promise.”
She stood up abruptly, picked up the pants and her scissors from the table, and walked past me toward the hall. In the doorway, she stopped and turned to look at me. Her eyes were flat and empty and she suddenly looked closer to thirty-seven than seventeen.
“You’re wrong,” she said. “You ain’t never been so wrong.”
33
Rebecca
SHE WAS AVOIDING ADAM.
They’d been on different work schedules since their conversation a few nights earlier, Rebecca dragging herself into the trailer just as he was leaving, and she was responsible for the change in their shifts. She couldn’t handle another long conversation with him. She was not a “long, heavy, deep conversation” type of woman. Maybe that was why Maya had kept things from her. Rebecca could talk about DIDA all day, but cross the line into emotional territory and she was ready to bolt. That was one reason she was putting off calling Brent, although Brent was worse than she was when it came to that sort of intimacy. Adam, though…Adam was a champ at it, and that felt both dangerous and seductive, because she found herself craving a closeness she’d never known she needed. She couldn’t believe she’d gotten into the whole baby hunger thing with him when she didn’t yet understand it herself. Now she felt both exposed and attracted to him and totally confused about her feelings, and she didn’t handle confusion well. It seemed she couldn’t talk to Adam without revealing things she didn’t want to reveal. She couldn’t look at him without noticing how damn gorgeous he was. And when he’d fling a brotherly arm across her shoulders, the same way he had for years, every molecule in her body now suddenly stood on high alert.
So she was avoiding him—as much as she could avoid someone she was sharing a trailer with. She resolved to think only about her work, and only once did that resolve slip—when the volunteer, Patty, mentioned that she now wanted to be a doctor herself. “It was so awesome watching you and A
dam save the life of that asthmatic boy,” she said, and Rebecca remembered the reflection of the overhead light in Adam’s eyes, the gentleness of his voice. The memory sent a shock wave of heat through her before she could put up a wall to keep it out.
Most of the time, though, the work inside the school provided a welcome distraction as the hours turned into days. A few things had improved: some of the evacuees, especially those with the money to move into hotels, had left the school, and housing was slowly being found for others. Although the power was still out, there were more generators now and chicken-and-rice casserole had been baked in the kitchen and served to a thousand or so people the night before. After more than two weeks of MREs, the casserole tasted like manna from heaven. Best of all, in Rebecca’s opinion, the medical supplies had been well replenished and National Guard members now stood outside the makeshift pharmacy’s door twenty-four hours a day.
In spite of the improvements, the medical staff was still extremely busy in the clinic. People whose chronic illnesses had been neglected during the first week of the crisis were now paying the consequences. Wounds that had seemed inconsequential days ago now festered with infection, and viruses spread like wildfire throughout the school, particularly among the children.
The doctors and nurses who’d been working in the airport and the school for the past couple of weeks had, for the most part, left Wilmington for their homes and jobs around the country. Dorothea no longer bothered to ask Rebecca and Adam if they wanted to leave, though. Instead, she simply sent the replacement medical staff to them for orientation and training. In a way, it was like starting all over again as she and Adam helped the stunned new volunteers cope with the human casualties of the sister storms.
Rebecca finished her shift in the clinic around sunrise one morning, but instead of returning to the trailer, she sat on the ground in front of the Welcome—Viking Territory! sign and lit a cigarette. Leaning her head against the wall, she shut her eyes. She was so tired that when she felt the unmistakable bite of a mosquito on her forearm, she ignored it.
“Hey, Bec.”
She opened her eyes to see Adam walking toward her, ready to start his day shift, a thermos of coffee in his hand.
“Coffee?” She couldn’t mask the hope in her voice.
He smiled, handing her the thermos. She took a long swallow and gave it back to him.
He lowered himself to the ground next to her. “Trade you another sip for one of those.” He pointed to her cigarette.
“You’re kidding.”
“Uh-uh.”
She pulled the pack from her pocket, handed it to him and watched as he shook a cigarette onto his palm. He lit it from the end of hers and drew the smoke into his lungs as though he always had a cigarette with his morning coffee.
She frowned at him. “Since when?” she asked.
“Well, not since I was twenty, actually.” He blew a stream of smoke into the pink morning air. “It just looked so…delicious, watching you inhale.” He laughed. “I thought, why the hell not?”
She understood. It felt like there wasn’t much left to lose.
“I think you’ve been avoiding me,” he said after they’d smoked a moment or two in silence.
“How can I avoid you?” she countered. “We share a trailer.”
“Exactly my point. We share a few square feet of space and haven’t spoken to each other in days.”
She rested her head against the wall. Here we go again, she thought, wondering what to reveal, what not to reveal. She sighed. “Talking to you the other night made me realize…” She felt too tired to have this conversation now, yet it was better that they have it by the light of day. What was it about him that made her want to talk in spite of herself? “I was so upset that Maya had an abortion and never told me about it.” She’d always said—always believed—that she and Maya were as close as two sisters could be. Yet that was a sham, wasn’t it? A lie they were both careful to tend and nurture. Learning about the abortion only drove that fact home to her. She tipped her head against the wall to look at him. “There was a lot of unfinished business between her and me, too,” she said.
“Like what?”
“Like, we never, ever talked about our parents’ murders.” The words came out in a rush, as though she knew if she didn’t say them quickly, she wouldn’t say them at all.
“What do you mean, ‘never, ever’?”
“We never really got it all out in the open,” she said. “I’m sure she blamed me, and I…we just moved on with our lives after it happened. We let it become this gigantic elephant in the room.” She stubbed out her cigarette in the grass and immediately pulled another from the pack.
“Why would she blame you?” Adam took the matches from her and lit her cigarette, cupping his hands around it, although there was no breeze. She smelled the soap on his fingers, the scent an aphrodisiac, and she turned her head away as she inhaled.
“Because I brought Zed into our lives,” she said, blowing the smoke from her lungs.
“Who’s Zed?”
She looked at him quizzically. He sounded as though he’d never heard of Zed before. Maybe Maya had never told him his name. “The guy who killed our parents,” she said.
He frowned. “I thought the killer was a student of your father’s. Some kid who was pissed off about his grade.”
Rebecca was dumbfounded. “I can’t believe she didn’t tell you,” she said.
“Tell me what?”
In the parking lot, Rebecca saw Dorothea leaving her trailer. This was not the time for an interruption. “Let’s walk,” she said, getting to her feet. She nodded toward the lot. “Dot’s coming.”
Behind the school, they turned left and began walking along the border of the woods.
Rebecca helped herself to another swallow of his coffee. She could think of only one reason that Maya had kept Adam in the dark about Zed’s identity.
“Maya must have been trying to protect me, Adam,” she said. “She didn’t want you to look down on me. Zed was one of our father’s students. But he was also my boyfriend. My ex-boyfriend.”
“Back up,” Adam said. “You’ve lost me.”
She let out a breath. “I was eighteen.”
“And Maya was fourteen. That much I know. It sounds like that’s all I know, though.”
“I fell for Zed. He was twenty. I met him at a party, and he was sexy and hot looking, but he was also a total asshole. I just couldn’t see that part of him.
“I was obsessed with him. He dealt drugs, and I thought that was cool. My father hated him, which made him even more appealing to me, of course. My parents forbade me to see him, which infuriated him. I started sneaking out to see him. Maya knew what I was doing, though she would never have told on me. My parents figured it out, though, and really clamped down, and I stopped seeing him. That’s when Zed started acting crazy. He kept trying to see me, following me home from school. That sort of thing.” She took a long drag on her cigarette. “He once told me he’d kill my parents for breaking us up, but I thought…I just blew him off,” she said. “Kids said things like that all the time.”
“Wow,” Adam said. “How much of this did Maya know?”
“Well, I sure never told her he said he’d kill our parents. And she didn’t know that I…” She stopped, unsure how—or why—she would tell him the rest.
“That you what?”
“I was so stupid,” she said. “I went back to seeing him. He was seductive and I was…I’ve thought about it so many times, Adam. My motivation. He was hot, my father hated him, I wasn’t allowed to see him, and I was a wild child. A bad combination. So that’s the other thing Maya didn’t know. I never told her I started seeing him again.” She glanced at Adam. His gaze was on the ground as they walked, his brow furrowed. “I never told anyone that,” she added.
He put his arm around her shoulders, and the scent of soap, of shampoo, filled her head. “You’ve been carrying a lot of crap around inside you, haven’t
you?” he asked.
She could only manage a nod.
“And I can’t believe that Maya never told me any of this,” he said.
“Well, now you know,” she said. “And of course you know the rest of the story.”
“I don’t know what I know, anymore, Bec,” he said testily, dropping his arm to his side. “I’m beginning to wonder if she’s told me half-truths throughout our whole relationship.”
“Oh, no, Adam,” Rebecca said, but how did she know that? She no longer felt as though she knew her sister.
“She told me a masked stranger—who turned out to be your father’s student—killed your parents in your driveway. And she was in the backseat. Is that true?”
She nodded. “I was upstairs,” she said. “I heard the doorbell. My father was picking Maya up from a class or something. He was always taking her someplace or picking her up. She was Daddy’s little girl.” She was appalled at hearing the bitterness in her voice and hoped Adam hadn’t noticed it. “My mother was home and I figured she’d answer it. Then I heard our car pull in the driveway and the squeal of brakes, which was weird, because my father would usually just pull into the garage. My mother started screaming.” She stopped walking, pressing her hands to her eyes, and she felt Adam take the cigarette from between her fingers. “I looked out my bedroom window,” she said, lowering her hands. “It was March, so it was dark out even though it wasn’t that late.” She looked into the woods behind the school, but what she saw was not the trees in front of her. She was back in her childhood bedroom, staring out the window. “In the headlights, I saw a guy standing in front of the car. I knew right away it was Zed. I couldn’t see him well, but I knew by his build and the way he was standing who he was.”
She plucked the cigarette back from Adam’s hand, took a shaky drag, then crushed the butt into the grass beneath her shoe. “My mother was…” She was afraid she was going to cry. “Oh God, Adam, I can’t stand to remember this!”
He put his hand on the back of her neck. “Don’t then,” he said. “You don’t have to.”