Faultlines (6 page)

Likely going nowhere,
Libby thought now. She bet the cop wouldn’t have been so cavalier that day if it had been her Lexus that had gotten keyed. It made her squirm inside. It made her think of words like
entitlement
and
privilege
. Maybe if she were to go to the Greeley police department and ask them, they would investigate the matter, since the police in Wyatt didn’t seem to care. Or maybe, if she asked him personally, Sergeant Huckabee would look into it.

When he’d stopped her, he’d given the impression that he was thorough and professional, that he
did
care. She thought of how he’d driven up behind her and lingered there after they’d both left the road’s shoulder. She hadn’t mentioned that to Beck because of how it had unnerved her. He’d gotten a radio call, obviously. That’s what Beck would say.

The light had disappeared; the room lay in near utter darkness. Libby went back to bed, crawling into it carefully so as not to wake Beck, spooning against him. He pulled her close, murmuring something, and she smiled, drifting. It was only in the subliminal regions of her brain that she registered it, what sounded like a squeal, the same squeal the service gate made every time it was opened or shut.

Her last thought before sleep consumed her, though, was of those children, the ones who had been involved in that awful accident. She really was grateful to have been saved from that particular hell, at least. She couldn’t imagine what it must be like as a parent, getting that call in the middle of the night. But neither would she ever resolve the question of what was worse: losing a child or never having one.

5

S
andy’s parents returned to the ICU waiting area on the heels of the code-blue call, and they were there when the nurses burst through the ICU doors, three of them, racing alongside a gurney. One of the nurses rushed to where Sandy and her family were standing, rooted, terrified.

“Oh dear God,” Sandy heard someone say. Her mother, she thought.

Travis.
It was Travis on the gurney. Something had happened to him, something worse . . . That was Sandy’s thought.

But no, the nurse stopped in front of her—K
AREN
, her name tag said—and her eyes were soft with pity, backed by the resignation that must go with her job. The delivery of bad news was inevitable in this place. Somebody had to do it. Sandy felt sorry for her.

“Jordan’s blood pressure,” Karen said. “It just suddenly nose-dived.”

Nose-dived.
Sandy would remember that word. She would remember thinking it was what planes did, or stocks. A stock could take a nosedive. You could lose everything. She would remember hurrying beside the gurney bearing her son into an elevator. She would remember looking at him, her eyes fastened in horror on the only part of him that was visible: his head, his face—his swollen, disfigured, unrecognizable, precious, and once-beautiful face. She would remember Showalter, the two minutes’ worth of explanation he gave them in the surgical waiting area. She’d watched his mouth make the words, retaining only a few:
blood in the gut
,
organ rupture
,
laceration
. They would open Jordy, Showalter said.

Like a book,
Sandy thought.

Emmett had been angry. “You said there was no sign of internal bleeding.”

Showalter had shrugged. Win some, lose some. He might have said it, for all Sandy knew.

It was midmorning now. Saturday? Sandy wasn’t sure. Hours had passed, or what felt like hours. “What is taking so long?” She spoke from where she stood, looking through the windowed door down the deserted corridor where they’d taken Jordy. “Why doesn’t someone tell us something?”

“Come and sit down.” Her mother patted the seat of the faux leather–upholstered chair beside her.

But Sandy couldn’t abandon her vigil to sit next to her mom, whose anguish, despite her aura of calm, was as palpable as Sandy’s own.

“Look, Emmett’s back. He’s brought coffee.”

Sandy turned as Emmett crossed the waiting area, bearing a small cardboard tray that held three paper cups. Steam rose from the rims. She didn’t want it, but she took the cup when he handed it to her, feeling the heat through its thin paper walls soak the cold palms of her hands. She met his gaze, but only for a moment. It was all she could stand; he looked so haggard, the fear she felt herself was so raw in his eyes. There was something else there, too, that she recognized—it was helplessness, and she knew how it felt, that they might lose their son, their child, and there was nothing they could do to stop it.

“I went by the ICU,” he said.

“How is Travis?” Sandy’s mom asked. “Any change?”

“No.” Emmett sat next to her. “They’re saying—Jenna says they keep telling her the same thing every hour: there’s no response, no brain activity.” He raised his cup, then lowered it without drinking.

Sandy resumed her post by the surgical-room doors. The image of her face, reflected in the glass, was as faint as that of a ghost’s. Her ears rang. Panic held her heart in its unyielding fist.
Please please please.
The word echoed through her brain as if begging were her last and only resort.

Her mother asked about Michelle. “Jenna said that right as they got her to the hospital, she had a stroke.”

“Yeah. Still in a coma, last we heard.” Emmett went on, saying even more useless things that didn’t matter, like the whole situation was
god-awful
and it shouldn’t have
happened
. As if that wasn’t already apparent, Sandy thought. She didn’t really care, wasn’t even really paying attention, not until he started in repeating the totally pointless what-ifs: “What if Michelle doesn’t make it? What if Travis—”

“Stop it!” Sandy wheeled, heedless when hot coffee sloshed over the rim of her cup, burning her fingers. “Stop awfulizing. I’m sick of it! It’s all bad enough.”

“We’ve got to face facts, babe.” Emmett’s look was resigned, bleak. “I’m trying to think, do we even know a lawyer? Jordy’s going to need representation, a good criminal attorney.”

Sandy stared at Emmett.
If he lives.
The words rose in her mind, but she pushed them down. She couldn’t say them, couldn’t let herself think them—not about Jordy, Travis, or Michelle.

“The cops in Wyatt had it in for Jordy even before this happened. God only knows what kind of charges they’ll lay on him now.”

“What do you mean, Emmett?” Sandy’s mother asked.

He looked contrite. He hadn’t meant to raise the issue, to spark her curiosity, because of where it would lead. Sandy could see the regret on his face. Her mother thought the world of Len Huckabee. The whole family—the entire town did. He’d done the hardest thing a cop ever had to do when he’d gone to Jenna’s door in San Antonio to tell her that her husband, his best friend and partner, had been shot and killed in the line of duty, trying to stop a couple of bank robbers—with Huck’s own gun. Jenna had blamed the crooks, but Huck had blamed himself, and ever since, he’d devoted himself to Jenna and Trav.

He was part of the family. That was how they thought about him. That was why Huck’s professional harassment of Jordy as a Wyatt police officer was so hard to understand. Jordy wouldn’t talk about it, and when Sandy and Emmett had questioned Huck, he’d acted as if he didn’t know what they were complaining about.
Jordy broke the law, simple as that,
Huck had said.
You could have worse problems with him, trust me,
he’d said.

“It’s nothing, Mom,” Sandy said now. “Huck’s given Jordy a hard time lately, stopping him for the least little thing.”

An elevator bell dinged faintly in the silence. The squeal of rubber soles approached and fell away. A voice over the PA system asked for a Dr. Van Zandt to come to the third-floor nurses’ station.

Emmett said, “Harvey saw Trav.”

Sandy set her coffee down untasted. “They let Daddy in?”

“Really?” Her mother’s surprise echoed Sandy’s own.

“Yeah, I guess because he’s Travis’s granddad. It was only for a minute. Harvey said it was hard. It shook him up.”

Sandy thought seeing her dad shook-up had shaken Emmett.

He took out his cell phone and held it, staring at it. “I’ve got to call Grant, see if he can cover for me.” Emmett looked up, blinking. “Man, I’m not sure I can talk about it.”

Without breaking apart, he meant. Sandy hadn’t even thought about work. She remembered she had two consultations, one today and one on Monday, that she’d have to cancel. And the koi-pond install. That was scheduled for Wednesday. She doubted this was going to be over by then. She didn’t have anyone to cover for her, really, other than Hector and his crew. They helped her with the installation of the gardens she designed, but she met with the home owners and drew up the plans. At least it was summer; the hottest part of the year was her slow time. It was different for Emmett. There wasn’t really a slow time in the oil industry.

“I guess Dad will have to put off retiring for a bit,” her mom said. “Not that he was that serious about it.”

Her mother wanted it more than her dad. She was ready to travel, do things other than work. Sandy didn’t blame her. She’d helped them sell their home in Wyatt and move into their patio home in a community for older folks, where lawn-care and housekeeping services were provided if you wanted it. You could even have your meals brought in or walk to a centrally located restaurant if you didn’t feel like cooking. But her dad still came to the office in Wyatt a couple of times a week; he and Emmett would drive around and talk to customers together. Emmett missed him, though. He’d been used to running with her dad almost every day. They’d go as much as five miles, sometimes more. They’d competed in marathons together.

It had started when Emmett was in high school. Her dad had coached him on the side when he joined the track team. Even then no one had questioned the notion that Emmett would go to work for her dad after he got his business degree from the U of H. It was the motivation for hiring on as a roughneck, so he could learn the business from the ground up. It was Emmett’s nature to be thorough and methodical, to follow a plan. As long ago as their high school days, Emmett had talked about how important it was to do the grunt work. The shit work, he called it. He wasn’t too proud to get dirty, to work hard. He’d work till he dropped, if that’s what the job took. The guys he bossed now respected him; they looked up to him.

Jordy admired him, too, but he didn’t share his dad’s drive, his no-nonsense work ethic, or his sense of responsibility. They’d fought about it in May when the letter came from UT, advising Sandy and Emmett that Jordy was on scholastic probation. Jenna had gotten a letter, too, telling her Trav had made the dean’s list. Sandy had barely been able to offer congratulations. Emmett had yelled about the money Jordy was pissing down the drain, not to mention his future. He’d accused Jordy of being a slacker. Sandy thought Emmett was too hard on Jordy.

Emmett had dismissed her concern. “We’re throwing our hard-earned money down the drain while he wastes time,” he’d said.

Neither one of them had talked about the way in which Jordy might be wasting time; they hadn’t considered that his poor performance might be the result of excessive partying and drinking. Instead, Sandy had brought up the past.

“You wasted time. Remember?” she’d said. “When you took off and went to Berkeley in the middle of our junior year, when you decided you didn’t want to be tied down? How many hours did you lose—that my dad helped you pay for?” Sandy had regretted bringing up all that old business, but she’d felt pushed to remind Emmett that even he wasn’t perfect. “I thought I’d never see you again,” she’d told him, loud voiced, offended.

They’d gone to bed angry, slept little, and woken up still fuming and feeling as if they were hungover. Sandy cringed now from the memory. Jordy had been in need of guidance, a firm hand; there had been all kinds of warning signs, but she and Emmett had left him to founder. Shame rose hot and thick in her throat. She had never wanted to be that sort of mother, the one who clings to her delusions, who can’t face the facts.

“Grant sends prayers,” Emmett said. “He wanted to know if there was anything he or Brenda could do.”

“They’re always so nice,” Sandy said.

Grant Kennedy had worked for the company going on twenty years. He and his wife, Brenda, were close friends of her parents, and god-grandparents, an honorary title they’d laughingly created, to both Jordy and Travis.

“He offered to donate blood. Harvey and I talked about it, too.”

Sandy turned to look at Emmett.

“In case Jordy needs more than the transfusion he’s getting now.”

“Aunt Frances had a transfusion once,” Sandy’s mother said. “When we were girls, she fell off a horse and fractured her shin so badly the bone broke through her skin. She lost a lot of blood before they got her to the hospital.”

“I remember that story,” Sandy said. “You almost fainted.” Frances was gone now. She and her mother, Sandy’s grandma Florence, had died of breast cancer within three years of each other a little over seven years ago now. It was Sandy’s mom’s insistence on regular mammograms that had saved Jenna’s life. So far.

Emmett bent his elbows onto his knees. “If I’d done it before, Jordy could be getting my blood now instead of some stranger’s.”

Sandy went to him and sat beside him, and he pulled her against him, as if she were a rock he could hang onto, when he said, “I wish I could take this on for him. I wish it was me in there.” His voice caught on the words.

Sandy bit her teeth together to stall the press of her tears. On the other side of Emmett, she heard her mother say, “You’re a good man, Emmett, a good father,” and she closed her eyes, feeling them burn from fatigue and sorrow and panic.
What about me, Mama? Am I a good mother? A good person?
The query fell, unbidden, a specter down from the attic of her mind, and it hung there, unvoiced.

“What’s he doing here?” Emmett straightened.

Sandy looked at the lawman in uniform who was crossing the waiting-room floor toward them. He was from Wyatt. Not Huck. A different patrol officer. He was young, late twenties, maybe early thirties.
New on the job,
Sandy thought. His mother might have pressed the crease into his uniform pants; she might have shined his badge with her hankie and told him how proud she was of him before he left the house to work his shift.

He wanted to know if they were Jordy’s parents, and Emmett said they were, getting to his feet. “What’s this about?” he asked.

Sandy stood up, too, and so did her mother, taking Sandy’s hand. Her grasp was dry and cool.

“I’m Patrol Sergeant Ken Carter,” the cop said. “I worked the accident scene with Sergeant Huckabee.”