Snow cocked his head suddenly and a smile oozed across his lips.
I didn’t understand why he was smiling.
Then I heard the puttering of a car engine. Blue-white headlights pierced the front windows as Sarah’s Subaru turned into the dooryard. I could feel my swollen heart pumping hard against my sternum.
Snow stepped out of the light. I rolled my head toward him and saw his sick, goblin leer.
“Just like Ashley and the professor,” he said.
The car door slammed as Sarah got out.
It took everything in me to shout her name.
Snow kicked me hard in the head. “That was stupid.”
He yanked open the door and went leaping down the front steps like some long-legged hunting dog. I felt myself on the verge of blacking out again, but fear kept me awake. I got up on one knee and then collapsed forward against the hanging coats, bringing down a pile of wool and Gore-Tex on top of me.
I heard Sarah shriek out in the yard. But I didn’t allow myself to be distracted.
Focus, focus, focus.
I found the pistol in the pocket of my jacket with my left hand and pulled back the hammer with my thumb.
Snow had left the door hanging ajar. Mist drifted into the house on the breeze. When I crawled onto the front stoop, I saw him stretched on top of Sarah in the mud, pummeling her. She kept screaming my name over and over.
Carefully, I raised my left arm. I watched the barrel of the pistol weave back and forth. I steadied it with my shattered hand.
“Snow,” I mumbled.
He didn’t hear me above Sarah’s screams.
“Snow!”
As he twisted his body and rose up on his knees to face me, I shot him through the chest.
39
The next thing I knew, I was waking up in the hospital. My throat was scraped raw from the tube the doctors had used to pump my stomach, and there was a ringing in my ears, like a phone from a distant room, that just wouldn’t stop. I tried to rise on the pillow but felt instantly dizzy, as if I’d been spun around in a circle half a dozen times. I bent my elbow slightly and discovered a fat IV needle taped to the big vein that ran along my left forearm.
Most people who suffer from a concussion experience amnesia-they can’t remember the incident that caused the head trauma.
I remembered everything.
With my blurred vision and the splint on my hand, it took me a few moments to push the call button. The woman who answered wore blue-green scrubs; she had wiry black hair and dark, tired-looking eyes. It took me a while to recognize her as the ER nurse I’d met the night of the ice storm.
“Where’s Sarah?” I rasped.
The woman touched my hand and nodded. “She’s resting comfortably.”
The little blond doctor appeared around the edge of the ICU curtain. Dr. Tennis Shoes wasn’t smiling this time. He leaned close to the nurse.
“How’s he doing?” he asked, as if I weren’t awake and looking right at him.
“He just asked about his girlfriend.”
His whisper was loud enough for me to hear. “Did you tell him she lost the baby?”
The nurse grabbed him forcibly by the biceps and shoved him away from my bed. “Doctor,” she said sharply, “I need a word with you, please. ”
Later, before the drugs shoved me back into unconsciousness, I found myself remembering the night my mother announced she was divorcing my father.
During their nine-year marriage, my mom miscarried twice.
I learned about the first time long after the fact. It was just one of those things when the uterus rejects the fetus.
The second miscarriage was different. I was nine years old, and one warm spring evening, my dad told me I was going to have a little brother or sister. He announced the news at the dinner table while pounding down the last can of a six-pack. My mom was washing dishes at the sink, and I remember her turning around with a look of utter horror, which confused and frightened me. They must have had some tacit agreement not to tell me about the pregnancy.
My mother hurled the bowl in her hands at my father’s head, but he ducked, and it shattered against the fake-wood wall of the trailer. Usually, when my mom did something like that, she would scream and rage at him, sometimes even claw his face. This time, she just walked out of the kitchen while my father laughed softly to himself. He seemed to be enjoying a cruel joke.
A few days later, my mom took me to stay with the Coles, who lived down the road. They were a nice retired couple who sometimes baby-sat me when my mom attended one of her Dale Carnegie courses in Farmington or visited my aunt in Portland. She didn’t trust my dad to watch me for any length of time, because sometimes he would just stay out all night, drinking at his favorite roadhouse, the one where the waitresses became strippers after dark.
On this occasion, she was gone for three days. While she was away, I began thinking what it would be like to have a little brother or sister. I decided it wasn’t a prospect I welcomed. The whole pregnancy thing baffled me. I knew where babies came from-my father had shared the facts of life with me, using Playboy magazine as an instructional guide. It was more that I’d been oblivious to my mother’s condition. I’d noticed she had been gaining weight, because she never gained weight; to this day, she could still wear clothes she had worn in high school. But I was just a kid, so what the hell did I know?
When my mom came home from wherever she’d gone, she looked ashen and thinner, and she hugged me so hard, I could barely breathe. In the car, riding back to our mobile home from the Coles’, she told me that she’d had an accident and was no longer pregnant.
“What happened?” I asked as the wind rushed in around my ears.
“I fell,” she said.
“What happened to the baby?”
“He’s in heaven.”
She must have stopped at the house to break the news to my father before she came to fetch me, because when we got there, the door was ajar and his truck was gone. He didn’t return for three weeks, and when he finally did, my mom announced they were getting a divorce and that the two of us were moving to the big city, which was how she always referred to Portland.
My mother was a strict Roman Catholic. She attended Mass every Sunday and still said the Rosary. It didn’t occur to me until much, much later what she’d done.
When I woke again in the hospital, Sarah was sitting in a chair at the foot of my bed. She was wearing Levi’s and a black turtleneck. Her lower lip was swollen, and I late discovered that she had purple-and-black bruises across her abdomen. Her hair appeared greasy for the first time I could recall, and the shadow behind her eyes was visible for any fool to see. She leaned forward and called my name, summoning me from sleep.
“Stanley Snow is dead,” she said.
My voice was still barely a croak. “Good.”
“I thought he was going to kill you. I thought he was going to kill us both.”
“Me, too.”
She came around to the side of the bed and touched my hand. “The doctor said you have a concussion but that you’re going to be OK.”
“What about you?”
“Just some cuts and bruises.” She said this while looking at my IV bottle.
I had a hard time getting the next words out. “Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?”
My question startled her. Her eyes widened and she leaned back slightly, and I could see her trying to decipher how I could have discovered her secret. After a moment, she breathed out again. Ultimately, it didn’t matter how I knew.
“I was going to tell you, but you weren’t ready and-I think it was because I was afraid.”
She waited for me to answer, not knowing if I would respond with anger or with tears.
“You didn’t need to be afraid,” I said.
She didn’t speak, just squeezed my hand harder.