Faultlines (5 page)

“It’ll be hell if he’s torn his rotator cuff again.” Emmett came back to Jordy’s bedside.

Sandy gently retucked the bed linen, not answering. A torn rotator cuff was nothing compared to the loss of one’s eyesight.

She was aware of the monitor at her elbow, the rhythmic registry of Jordy’s every breath and heartbeat. A call over the PA system summoned someone to the second-floor nurses’ station, stat. Footsteps passed. Voices rose and fell. Sandy leaned on the bed rail, feeling her eyelids shutter, feeling her mind go numb.

“How are we doing in here?” Claire crossed the room to stand next to Sandy. She picked up Jordy’s wrist, eyeing the monitor.

“Are you sure his vision is okay?” Sandy asked.

“Yes.” Claire glanced at Sandy. “I know it looks scary, but trust me, his vision is fine. He might need a bit of reconstructive surgery to minimize scarring, but other than that, there won’t be any bad effects. He was lucky.”

How many times would she hear that? Sandy wondered. What was lucky about being in a horrendous accident, especially if you caused it? Had he? A sudden urge to slap Jordan awake leaped from the floor of her mind. She wanted to shake him, to demand the truth. To shout:
What were you thinking?
She asked Claire about Travis instead.

“There’s no change, I’m afraid,” the nurse said.

“I should check on him and my sister.” Sandy glanced at Emmett, wanting him to come with her.

She didn’t think she could face Jenna alone. The sense of this was new and terrible.

“Actually, she and her husband—” Claire began.

“She and Troy aren’t married yet,” Sandy said. “They will be; they plan on it.”

“If Troy can ever get her to commit long enough to get her to plan the wedding.” Emmett smiled.

They all did, the way anyone does when the word
wedding
is mentioned.

Claire said, “They’ve gone to the waiting room, I think.”

Sandy looked down at Jordy. She smoothed his hair.

“Why don’t you join them?” Claire pushed buttons on the monitor. “You can come back at the next regular ICU visiting hour.”

“I want to stay,” Sandy said.

“I’m sorry, but visitation is over.” Claire was brisk. “You can come back at five for a half hour, and again at nine tonight. There’s a schedule up on the bulletin board in the waiting room.”

Emmett thanked her.

Claire, seeming to relent, said, “My guess? Your guy’ll be out of here and into a regular room by this time tomorrow. He’s doing really well. Barring something unforeseen,” she added.

The fine print,
Sandy thought.
The disclaimer. The thing that said, “I bear no responsibility for any promises.”

Sandy and Jenna’s parents arrived, white-faced and shaken, asking what had happened. Revisiting that awful question:
Who was driving?
Sandy wanted to scream.
What does it matter? We’re all in this together. They’re our boys, and this terrible thing happened to both of them.

She was relieved when her folks offered to go to Wyatt and gather things from their homes, essentials like clean underwear and toothbrushes. After they left, Sandy and Emmett, and Jenna and Troy, followed a mostly silent routine, leaving the ICU waiting room at regular intervals to visit Jordy and Travis, then returning a half hour later to sit like strangers. The few times Emmett and Sandy found Jordy awake, he asked about Travis. Sandy was afraid to say much. Afraid of the effect it might have. She warned Emmett with her eyes.
Don’t talk about the accident; don’t ask him again about driving.
But once, Jordy himself brought it up. “I was in the driver’s seat,” he said, “but Travis was driving.”

“How can that be, son?” Emmett was gentle.

“I don’t know, Dad. It’s hard—I got out somehow. I tried to help Trav.” Jordy’s eyes closed. Tears gathered at the corners. “He’s hurt, hurt so bad.” He spoke as if he were there, seeing it, Travis, the condition he was in. Suddenly his eyes opened wide, and he said, “I have to see him.” He lifted his head, made as if to get up, groaned and fell back.

Sandy bent over him. “Rest, honey. Just rest. It’s fine. Everything is fine.” She smoothed the hair on the crown of his head, thinking she had probably never told a bigger lie.

Sandy sat beside Jenna in the waiting room. “You should eat something.” She clasped Jenna’s hand. It was cold. “We should all go to the cafeteria, even if we don’t feel like eating.”

Emmett braced his elbows on his knees.

Troy wiped his face, blew out his breath.

Jenna said, “I’m not leaving. Not when Trav could go at any moment.”

“Go?”

“He isn’t going to make it, Sandy.”

“No! As long as he’s breathing—”

“He’s not. A machine is doing it for him. If you could see him—” Jenna stopped.

Sandy held on to her hand more tightly, but there was no response. It was as if Jenna were slipping away to a place Sandy couldn’t follow. It came to her then how they would never be the same. It was as if the sisters they had been had ceased to exist, and the reality couldn’t have struck Sandy more forcefully if Jenna had turned to her and slapped her across the face.

“He’s having these little strokes now because of all the pressure. His Glasgow Scale is less than three.”

“Glasgow—what is that? What does it mean?” Sandy wanted Jenna’s glance.

But Jenna took back her hand and bent over her knees. “It means he’s dying. There’s almost no brain activity. They’ve asked me about organ donation.”

“Holy Jesus Christ.” Emmett got up and paced a short distance away.

Sandy said, “Remember when Travis and Jordy rode the four-wheeler and Trav fell off? He lost consciousness—”

Jenna’s head came up. “How can you compare—” She paused. “Except—Jordy was driving then, too, wasn’t he? And once again he was going like a fucking maniac! He’d probably been drinking then, too.”

“He was only fourteen.”

“What about last summer? When he borrowed my car and backed it into a light pole?”

“That was an accident—”

“He was drinking, Sandy. Believe it or not, it wasn’t Santa Claus who left the empty pint of peppermint schnapps I found under the driver’s seat.”

“He swore to me it wasn’t his, that he hadn’t—”

“He lied to you. He lies all the time. You’re the only one who doesn’t see it, the world of hurt that kid is in.” Jenna’s voice pitched high. It bumped and slid. “You never stop him, discipline him, and now I’m going to lose my son, my only child, because you—”

“Jenna, Sandy.” Emmett was warning them. He was telling them this wasn’t the time or the place.

Troy crossed his arms and blinked at the ceiling.

“I want to see him.” Sandy spoke into the god-awful silence. “Jordy has asked to see him.”

Jenna sat up, ramrod straight. “I don’t want Jordy anywhere near Trav.”

“You don’t mean that.” Sandy was stunned. She waited, near breathless for several seconds, but Jenna didn’t take it back. And then out of nowhere, a voice came over the PA, toneless, yet somehow urgent.

“Code blue, ICU,” it announced. “Code blue, ICU.”

4

B
eck came through the gate, looking somber, as if the weight of the world burdened his back.

Libby’s heart thumped. “What happened?”

“You won’t believe it,” he said, and he paused, then flashed her a grin full of mischief, and grabbing her, he whirled her in a circle. He was off the hook, he said. “We were dropped, severed, let go. No more lawsuit.” He set her on her feet—both of them half-breathless—then returned to his truck and pulled out a couple of grocery sacks. “I shopped at Whole Foods in Austin.”

In the kitchen he took items from the sacks, displaying for her inspection, her oohing and ahhing, a package of mahimahi, a box of wild rice, a rubber-banded bunch of fresh asparagus. Pulling out the final item, he grinned, pumping his brows suggestively as he held it up for her to see.

Peach ice cream. One pint. Some fancy brand.

She laughed. “Heaven knows what that cost.”

“Only the best for my sweetheart,” he said.

She snapped the towel at his leg, calling him an old fool.

“Watch out who you’re calling old, woman.” He stowed the ice cream in the freezer.

She loosened the asparagus from its tie and trimmed the ends. “What happened, exactly—with the suit, I mean?”

“The plaintiff’s attorneys finally admitted the whole thing about it being a flaw in the design was bullshit.”

“Thank God.”

“You can say that again. Between the firm’s legal fees and building the house, I was starting to get a bit worried.”

Libby looked at him over her shoulder. “You never said anything. You called it an inconvenience.”

“I didn’t want you to worry, too.” He unbuttoned the cuffs of his shirt, rolled his sleeves to the elbow.

“You must have told Mia. She bit my head off when she called me last week.”

“You answered the phone?”

“Yes, it was ten o’clock in the morning. I didn’t expect her to be drunk.”

“Was she?”

“Probably. She accused me of pressuring you, making you move out here, forcing you to build a house you don’t want. Is that how it is?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” He plowed his hands over his head, looking defeated, impatient. Defensive. Some combination. He didn’t want to answer her question. He wanted to make it about his sister, his sister’s drinking, her drama, rather than tell the truth about how he was feeling. Emotions were hard for him, the result of having been raised by neglectful parents. Sissy and Harold had loved their children, but only when they were sober, when they remembered Mia and Beck were around.

Libby had worked as a high school guidance counselor for most of their married life, and over the years she’d taken a lot of psychology courses. She’d worked with children like Beck and Mia, who’d grown up in troubled circumstances. He seldom spoke of the past, but he carried it. The boy he’d been—that frightened, brave, stalwart little boy, the one who had stood guard over baby Mia, who had harbored a fierce need to protect his little sister—still lived in the man he’d become.

But now Mia was a grown-up, and she drank. All the time. Beck didn’t know what to do with that. He didn’t know what to do with Mia’s bitter envy of him, his sobriety, his success. Libby didn’t know what to do with Mia, either. She couldn’t change her upbringing, couldn’t give Mia the moon or a million dollars to make it all right. She couldn’t drink with her or talk to her, although at times she would still try, even though Beck’s own advice was that Libby should ignore her. She’d been glad when Mia had moved with her boyfriend du jour to Las Vegas three years ago. Glad when after the boyfriend left, Mia had stayed out there.

Libby looked at Beck now, saying his name, prompting him, wanting his gaze, some reassurance that he hadn’t gone to Mia with his stress, his concern over money.

“Can we just make dinner and eat? I’m starving.” He handed her the package of fish. “I’ll do the rice,” he said.

“Okay,” she said, but it hurt that he had trusted Mia over her.
How could you?
She clenched her jaw to keep from firing what would amount to an accusation at him. She refused to put him in the position of choosing. That was Mia’s game.

He dumped the rice he had measured into the pan, and it sounded like rain. She rinsed the fish, scooting over a bit when he needed water from the tap. From the corner of her eye, she caught glimpses of him, adding the water to the rice, settling a lid over the pan, adjusting the flame under it. She seasoned the fish with salt, pepper, and paprika, adding snipped bits of fresh parsley and dill before drizzling it with olive oil.

The tension between them softened as they worked. She and Beck often shared meal preparation. It was a favorite pastime for them both, a way to unwind and be together. Beck poured each of them a glass of sparkling water, to which he added a twist of lime. Handing Libby her glass, he brushed a tendril of hair from her cheek and asked about her day.

She told him about being stopped for speeding, and he laughed, as she’d known he would.

“Here’s to the ruination of your perfect driving record.” He raised his glass.

“He only gave me a warning,” she said.

“Yeah, but who knows what’s next? I mean, here we thought I might be the one to get tossed in the slammer. I was dreading it, too. Orange is so not my color.” He smirked.

Libby made a face. “Harris County inmates wear white, I think. And, anyway, the sergeant was just being diligent. There was an accident out that way earlier, a bad one.”

“I heard about it when I stopped for gas in town.” Beck leaned his backside against the counter. “Three kids lost control and hit a tree. Someone said they thought one of the boys died.”

“Augie knows them.”

“I guess as small as Wyatt is, everyone knows everyone.”

“Can you imagine?” Libby set down her glass. “How you would feel if you were driving and you killed one of your friends?”

Beck’s look was somber, probing.

She knew what he was thinking. “At least we never had that worry.”

“No,” he replied.

“There are some perks to not having children,” she said, and she could tell from the slight rise of his eyebrows that by adding that bit, she’d surprised him. He’d probably thought he’d never live to see the day she’d find one positive thing to say about being childless. Not after the hell she’d put him—put them both through.

“You do realize we could lose our car insurance.”

It took her a moment, but when Libby realized Beck was making a joke about her speeding, she laughed, letting the lightness of the moment carry her past the grief that would still come at the thought of the children they could never have.

After they finished dinner and did the dishes, Libby thought they would drive the four-wheeler to the house site. But Beck had other ideas. She was hanging the dish towel over the oven-door handle when he came up behind her, encircling her with his arms.

She leaned against him. “What are you doing?”

“Thinking about something better for dessert than that fancy peach ice cream.” His breath stirred the fine hairs at her temple, raising a rash of warm, goosefleshed desire.

Libby turned in his embrace, and when he kissed her, she arched against him. It had been a while since they’d made love, long enough that the suspicion she’d believed she’d rid herself of years ago had returned, a demon that sat in a dark corner of her mind, and in unguarded moments, it would taunt her, asking:
What if history is repeating itself? What if he’s cheating on you again?
She hated having that voice in her head, hated the paranoia that gave life to her doubt. A marriage couldn’t work in an atmosphere of suspicion. Libby hadn’t needed the counselor they’d seen at the time of Beck’s betrayal to explain that to her. She hadn’t even needed the benefit of her own expertise in the field to know that taking Beck back meant her forgiveness of him had to be bone deep—soul deep—or it wouldn’t work.

That much was common sense.

She leaned back in his embrace, locking his gaze. “It’ll be dark soon—too dark to see the work they did getting ready for the slab pour tomorrow.”

“You said it was fine. That’s good enough.” He bent his head, kissing her again, sliding his hands up the bare lengths of her arms, making her shiver, making her ache with wanting him.

Together, they fumbled their way into the bedroom. They were like—not teenagers, but heated in the way of the much younger couple they’d once been, when their appetite for each other was fresh and . . . 
insatiable
. The word darted through Libby’s mind, and it was ridiculous, but she wished she could stop time, hold on to this moment. Once out of their clothes, they lay down, facing each other. Libby ran her hand down Beck’s back and over the contour of his hip and buttock, warm and smooth beneath her palm.

She felt greedy with need, but he was in no mood to rush. His eyes were locked on hers as he trailed his fingertips along her hairline and cheek, tipping them from the edge of her jaw to the curve of her shoulder, the fullness of her breast, the dip of her waist. The rueful notion surfaced, as it often did now that she was in her fifties—soon to be sixty—that she’d gone soft. They both had, but she regretted more the changes in herself. It was useless. She knew that. And it wasn’t that she wanted to go back, to be again that feckless and often-silly, albeit slim, lithe girl Beck had married.

The girl he had met by accident when he found her sitting white-faced and shaken that day at the hospital, the day Helen had died.

People said three was a crowd, but when Libby and Ruth had met Helen at an SMU freshman mixer, they clicked. Somehow within minutes they’d been bent over laughing, finishing one another’s sentences. Within a short time, they were sharing a suite. Helen was the jokester, Ruth was her straight man, and Libby their audience. But the hilarity had ended on one awful day before Christmas break their junior year. Ruth, who to this day had never married, had been out with her current boyfriend, one in a long line, leaving Libby to play both roles, that of straight man and spectator. She’d been the one laughing when Helen, mugging for the camera—Libby was also filming—wound a string of twinkle lights loosely around her head, climbed onto a wobbly bar stool, and while holding a tape dispenser in one hand, reached across the top of the doorway with her other hand, lost her balance and fell, cracking her head on a desk corner. At first, she’d sworn she was fine, but when a fierce headache hours later was followed by nausea and rounds of vomiting, Libby overrode her objections and called an ambulance. Too late. Within hours of reaching the hospital, after suffering a massive stroke, Helen died.

Libby was leaning against the wall outside the triage room when Beck approached her. He’d come up from Houston to visit a client who’d had surgery, and passing Libby in the hallway, he’d thought she was the patient. When she said no and in a broken voice explained why she was there, he’d sat her down gently in the ER waiting room and brought her a paper cup filled with cool water. He found tissues, called Ruth, and stayed until she came. He’d supported them both then.

He was so steady and sure, so quietly brilliant and ordinarily happy, that she’d been astonished to hear, prior to meeting his parents in a Denny’s restaurant in downtown Houston, that they were avid consumers of welfare and food stamps and mostly survived on liquor and lottery tickets and pie in the sky. They had died within eleven months of each other, Beck’s father of cirrhosis and his mother of hepatitis, a few years after Libby and Beck married.

He touched her temple now. “Where are you?” he asked, and she smiled.

“Thinking how lucky I am,” she whispered.

Libby was dreaming, and in her dream she heard a coyote howl. She recognized the monotonous two-note song of crickets, the chirr of frogs, the whishing of the night wind. But there was another sound, one that didn’t seem to belong. It needled at her consciousness. But it was the light that woke her, that sent the dream scuttling behind a door in her mind. She rose on one elbow, blinking when the room was suddenly plunged into blackness again. She could barely make out the dresser’s edge, and except for the even draw of Beck’s breath to anchor her, she might have thought she was still asleep.

But now light flashed once more over the walls, dousing the room in an eerie glow. Heart tapping, she tossed aside the covers, getting up, but whatever the source was, it was gone by the time she reached the open window. Still, she could hear something in the distance. An engine? Libby glanced at Beck; he hadn’t moved. She didn’t want to wake him; he was exhausted. She thought of the recent vandalism that Sergeant Huckabee had mentioned and of Ricky Burrows, the guy on Augie’s crew whose truck door had been badly keyed here on her property.

Ricky had been pissed. He’d said he didn’t have any liability insurance on the truck and couldn’t afford to get the damage repaired. He’d looked after the cop, leaving in his shiny near-new squad car that day, and he’d said, “Fucking kids, my ass,” under his breath, but he’d meant her to hear, Libby thought. He’d kicked his truck tire. “I’ll be driving this piece of shit like this till I die.”

Libby had felt bad for him. He was a young guy, midtwenties to early thirties, maybe. Thin, with a wary, hurt look in his eyes, like a stray dog that had been abused. He’d come to Texas from Colorado, Augie had told her, looking to make a fresh start. He was a hard worker, down on his luck.