“We’re supposed to meet Roger and Lyd in a little bit anyway,” Soledad tells me. “Gonna check out that new place on Las Olas.” She looks like she wants to say something else, and for a moment I almost ask her how it’s possible that my father can eat a friendly dinner with Sawyer’s parents, size up the culinary competition, but can’t find it in his heart to look at me. In the end, though, both of us let it lie. “Have a good time,” is all she says.
“We will. Come on, you,” I tell the baby, and bring her upstairs for a change before we go. “We’re road trippin’.”
*
Hannah had wicked colic when she was an infant; she didn’t sleep for more than a couple of hours at a time until she was nearly six months old. Changing her feeding schedule didn’t work. Laying her down on the dryer didn’t work. Backrubs didn’t work, and neither did long soaks in the baby tub. Soledad helped as much as she could, but in the end it was Hannah and me sitting on the floor and crying, two men trapped in a mine. I honestly had no idea what to do.
She did like driving, though, and if I wasn’t too exhausted to get behind the wheel of a car, it usually wasn’t too long before she’d pass out in the backseat—head lolled back, tiny fist shoved in her mouth. Still, for the first hour or so the slightest stop would wake her, so I took to driving for miles on the interstate, where there was no threat of red lights or pedestrians to slow us down. Once, I ran out of gas in Miami and had to call Cade to come get us. Another night I made it all the way to Vero before I realized it was probably time to head home.
Eventually, Hannah’s bellyaches subsided and our moonlight excursions up and down 95 became less and less frequent. I haven’t driven this stretch of highway in months. But tonight, as the baby drifts off to dreamland to the dependable droning of public-radio jazz, the scene out the windows is as familiar as home.
12
Before
Sawyer didn’t say a word as he sped away from the ice cream shop and toward the hospital, went quiet as nighttime and just as still. A gorge had opened up inside my chest. The CD in the stereo was still spinning, old Louis Armstrong Sawyer must have gotten from my dad, and I reached forward and clicked it off. “It’s bad, right?” I asked.
Sawyer shrugged once, eyes on the asphalt in front of him. “I don’t know.”
“It must be bad, right? If she’s already in surgery and my dad wouldn’t—” I broke off, the words swallowed up by guilt and confusion and this huge, endless fear. I dug my fingernails into the passenger seat, willing the car to go faster. “It must be bad.”
“I said I don’t know, Reena,” he told me, and I was quiet after that.
We parked in the cavernous garage at the hospital and got lost on the way to the ER, the two of us wandering the corridors like some panicky, overgrown Hansel and Gretel. “This way,” Sawyer said finally, and I followed him dumbly down a freezing, fluorescent hallway, then through a set of doors and into chaos.
There was a crowd in the waiting room, small but restless: Allie’s parents and Sawyer’s, Lydia with her wild hair secured in a complicated knot. Lauren Werner was there, crying noisily. And there were my father and Soledad, watchful and waiting, somehow already gutted like carcasses or husks. Soledad looked heartbroken. My father looked old.
They got to their feet as I ran across the wide expanse of linoleum, and I saw my father’s eyes narrow in confusion: On the phone we had never actually established where I was or who I was with, and now here was Sawyer close behind me, throwing off fear and heat.
Allie’s boyfriend, I thought, for the hundredth time in the last fifteen minutes. I was with Allie’s boyfriend.
He didn’t have time to ask, though, because Allie’s mom had spotted me and was rushing forward, grabbing me so tightly it was painful. I felt my ribs scrape together inside my chest. “She’s dead,” Mrs. Ballard wailed. It was a sound I’d never heard before and, if it pleases God, a sound I would like never to hear again. “Reena, baby. Our girl is gone.”
I thought, very clearly: This isn’t happening.
I thought, very clearly: This is our fault.
I stood there with Allie’s mom for a while, let her sob into the limp fabric of my shirt. I didn’t cry. I didn’t do much of anything, to be honest; I felt frozen, bizarrely quiet, like something had been hermetically sealed inside me. I heard the whine of an ambulance in the distance, the whoosh of a door whispering shut. Finally Mr. Ballard pried her gently out of my arms.
“We didn’t make up yet,” I told him.
“Reena.” That was Soledad, coming closer, but I stepped away, out of her reach.
“I’m serious,” I said, and my voice was louder this time. I was having a hard time getting what was going on. “We weren’t—we were …”
I trailed off as Soledad wrapped her arms around me, stood there loose-limbed and bewildered while she whispered Spanish prayers into my ear. “I’m not kidding,” I told her, voice cracking. I felt my ribs start to collapse. I looked up one last time before I stopped remembering anything, just in time to see the sharp, jagged pleat of Sawyer’s backbone as I watched him slip out the sliding doors.
13
After
Aaron and I have a date planned for Friday night, so I meet him down at the marina at the end of his shift. I stroll along the wide, weathered dock and find him chatting with Lorraine, a big-haired retiree from New Jersey whose taste in clothing definitely skews toward the noisy: At the moment, she’s wearing cheetah-print leggings. She and her husband, Hank, have been docking their boat, the Hanky Panky, at the marina for fifteen years, but every time I see her she makes a big show of telling me how Aaron’s her favorite mechanic.