Last Safe Place, The (32 page)

Yesheb realizes the operative is still standing in front of his desk. He looks up at the man questioningly.

“Sir … about the reward …”

“
Reward?
You think you bumbling morons earned a reward? You didn’t find her; she found you. I’ll let you know when I require your services again. Leave me.”

“Yes sir.”

Yesheb is surprised he doesn’t salute, but he does pivot on his heel and march out of the room with military precision. Yesheb sits alone with the framed photograph of Zara’s son and a trout. He stares at it, studies it, and a smile creeps up to his mouth and soon captures his whole face.

This is it; this really is it. He makes a Tiger Woods fist-pumping motion and hisses a single word under his breath.

“Gotcha!”

CHAPTER
15

P
EDRO PICKED UP
A
NGELINA
’
S RIGHT HAND AND GENTLY CLEANED
it with the sea sponge full of sweet-scented soap. He’d tried lots of things over the years looking for the softest possible material, before he happened upon a sea sponge. Who would have thought something as rough and scratchy when it was dry could be so incredibly soft wet? He squeezed the soapy sponge in the basin of water and smiled. When he and Ty had gone fishing, the boy had commented, “Imagine how deep the ocean would be if it wasn’t full of sponges.” Had to be one of Theo’s lines.

Ty’s humor was only surface, though. Underneath the smile was a lonely little boy who needed a father, someone to—

Whoa, there, hold your horses. That position may be vacant, but nobody’s asked
you
to apply for the job.

Pedro needed to tread lightly here. He was definitely in a mine field and any wrong step could set off an emotional explosion. He had not felt anything for a woman in … okay, way too long. Just like Angelina’s fingers had drawn up into something like fists because she never moved them, his emotions had atrophied from disuse. Until Gabriella walked into the Mercantile trying to act calm and self-assured when he could see the pain beneath the façade as clear as trout in a mountain stream. He had discovered that day that his emotions had a lot more life in them than he’d imagined. But Gabriella had been so traumatized, how could she ever trust a man again, how …?

Just let it go. Back off and let it go.

He picked up a fluffy towel to dry Angelina’s hand. As he did, he tried hard not to imagine her hand holding a fishing pole, sunshine sparkling in her black hair. She probably would not have wanted to go fishing, though. Anza had been a girly-girl even as a toddler, liked pretty dresses and dolls, turned up her nose when Joaquin came in from outside dirty and sweaty.

But maybe not. Maybe Angelina would have been—

Don’t! Would-have-beens were dangerous waters. Swim out far in them and a riptide picks you up and carries you out to sea.

The ventilator puffed and sighed, puffed and sighed and the chest of the china doll lying perfectly still on the bed rose and fell each time it did. That was the only sign of life in her. Every couple of days, he’d disconnect the breathing tube and watch her chest rise and fall on its own for a while. Five minutes. Ten, sometimes. But she tired quickly, grew weak. As soon as she began to have trouble breathing, he hooked her back up to the machine. The doctors said it might be possible to wean her off the ventilator, let her gradually build up strength breathing on her own. They also said her heart might stop from the effort.

The bell on the door of the post office/laundromat side of the Mercantile jingled when someone stepped inside.

“I’m in here,” he called out to the customer. Whoever it was would have to wait until he was finished getting Angelina ready for the day. He had to take care of the child and run the cash register in the store at the same time because Anza had gone to a dentist’s appointment.

If Anza leaves, this will be the new normal.

He had wallowed the whole thing around in his head over and over until all the arguments had worn so thin he could not even donate them to Goodwill. Once he had calmed down, he had been forced to admit that his screwy ex-wife had been right about one thing—Anza had no future in St. Elmo. But she was so devoted to Angelina it would break her heart to leave. Should he …
force
her to broaden her horizons, experience more of the world than a little town on a mountainside? Better question:
Could
he force her to go? Could he
make
her leave … and could he make himself demand it?

Reality check: How on earth could he do life without Anza to help him care for her little sister? Oh, his mother lived down the street and she always helped when she could. But she was seventy years old and had her own medical issues. The neighbors always pitched in whenever there was an emergency. But on a day-in, day-out basis, Pedro and Anza were the ones who kept the wheels on the bus. Without Anza, how—?

The saloon doors that separated his home from the store swung inward and Gabriella took an uncertain step through them. His heart ramped into
a gallop at the sight of her and a wide smile spread across his face. So much for
back off and let it go.

He could tell she was instantly ill-at-ease at the sight of Angelina. He had forgotten about that part, how seeing the little girl so helpless made some people feel awkward at first. No one in St. Elmo was uncomfortable with Angelina anymore; almost all outsiders were.

“I don’t need anything right now,” Gabriella said. “You can go ahead with … I can get my laundry started before I get supplies.”

“I will not be long. Come back when you get the machines loaded and running. The coffee ees not out of a fancy rocket engine but it ees fresh.”

“Okay, thanks,” she said and hurried out.

That woman was as twisted up inside as last year’s Christmas lights, had so much hurt down in the depths of her hazel eyes, so much sadness. Pedro supposed it was what drew him to her—the pain. He had been down that road. And if what he suspected about her was true, her pain had driven her to the place where the Wild Things are.

She came back a few minutes later with a smile on her face that never reached her eyes. He knew she had screwed up her courage to come through the door chatty and cheerful, pretending Angelina was not there.

Pedro was not okay with that.

“Tell me where the cups are and I’ll pour us both some coffee,” she said.

“I already have a cup.” He gestured toward the hospital bed tray that stretched across the end of Angelina’s bed. “You can warm it up though. Get a cup for yourself in that cabinet beside the fireplace.

She poured coffee for herself then brought the pot over to pour him some. She did not look at Angelina.

“It ees all right,” he said. She looked a question at him that he answered before she wrapped it in words. “It ees hard to know how to act.” He nodded toward Angelina. “Hard to know what to say. I understand.”

He could feel it coming then, the way you can feel something hurling at you in the dark.
The question.
He knew he had left himself open for it, practically invited it. But it had been a long time since he had had to answer it and he had forgotten how hard it was.

She didn’t ask. She did look at Angelina, though, almost caressed the child’s face with her eyes.

Pedro put the towel down on the tray and crossed to the table and stood with his back to Gabriella. He felt the words leave his mouth without consciously willing them to go.

“I left her in the car, strapped into her car seat when she was six months old. Forgot about her.” A heartbeat pause. “Eet was July, a hot day.”

He turned around. Gabriella’s face was white. She lifted her hands to cover her mouth as tears welled in her eyes. Slowly shaking her head back and forth, she whispered, “Oh, Pedro, no …”

He could explain what happened.

How his only two employees had
both
called in sick, left him busier than a one-armed paperhanger.

How Adriana always dropped Anza and Joaquin off at their aunt’s house in Buena Vista on the days she worked as a part time nurse in the infirmary at the prison.

How
she
always took the baby to day care.

How that morning Adriana had gone in early so he had to make the kid run.

Adriana had strapped Angelina into her car seat. Anza and Joaquin had argued and bickered nonstop all the way to their aunt’s house and the car was blessedly quiet after they got out. Angelina had fallen asleep.

He could explain how … but he didn’t. It was hard to breathe. It still hurt so bad to go there it literally took his breath away. His mouth went dry, his heart thudded with a pedantic clumping sound in his chest. Sweat popped out on his brow. He sank down on the bench beside the table, facing Gabriella. He stared at the floor, couldn’t look at her.

Finish it!

The words were made of daggers and razor blades and broken glass.

“I parked in front of the store. I deed not find her until … about noon.”

A line has stretched out in front of the cash register five deep all morning, even before the tour bus arrived. Now a herd of large women wearing uniformly ugly flowered dresses crowds the narrow aisles of the Mercantile babbling about everything and nothing in unpleasant, nasal voices he is trying hard to ignore. But one voice rises above the others. It belongs to a frazzled woman, her face a bad-sunburn red, fanning herself with an ugly pink sun visor.

“… and I said to Edna, ‘Edna, I just think it’s awful to leave that little baby out there in a car like that with the windows rolled up. It’s too hot—’”

Realization slams into Pedro’s chest with the force of a hundred-ton wrecking ball. He drops the gallon of milk he is placing in a customer’s sack and it bounces twice before the plastic container splits open and splashes milk all over the wooden floor. He shrieks an inarticulate, yearning wail of denial and terror and slogs through air as thick as quicksand.

Everything has cranked down into slow motion.

He is at the door, shoves a camera-laden tourist out of the way.

He races down the porch steps at a crawl.

The car is locked; the keys are in the cash register drawer.

He slams his elbow into the driver’s door window. Hits it again and again until it shatters, and all the time he hears someone screaming and the someone is Pedro. The blood on his fingers makes it hard to pull up the button on the back door.

Angelina is limp, not sweating.

He whispers her name.

Calls her name.

Shrieks her name.

But she doesn’t open her eyes.

After that, reality breaks into shards of jagged glass that shift like the colors in a kaleidoscope to form the images and moments he remembers. The space in between those moments is blank.

At times, Pedro seems to be on a dark stage in front of a large audience and he wanders around the stage until he happens to step into the beam of a spotlight and is momentarily illuminated before he steps out again. Other times, he is standing on some tall white cliff somewhere overlooking the sea and at regular intervals the beam of a distant lighthouse shines on him for a moment and then passes on.

When Pedro is in the light, he is aware of and can relate to people, events and life. When he is in the darkness, he is as cold and dead as he prays to be with every breath he takes.

At some point in the telling of the story, Gabriella had left Angelina’s bedside and now sat next to Pedro on the bench. He couldn’t look up, couldn’t meet her eyes.

Go ahead. Tell her the rest, all of it.

“I served a year in prison for first degree assault and endangering the welfare of a minor. The remainder of the sentence was probated.” He was surprised that his voice was steady, marveled at the body’s ability to level the ship in the midst of a storm. “And St. Elmo, the whole town … they took it hard. Some of them walked by the car that morning, came into the store, bought their groceries, mailed their letters, did their laundry and walked back by the car when they left. But everybody was caught up in their own lives, doing their own thing. Nobody noticed her. That is why they all feel so … protective now.” He let out a long breath. “Communal guilt.”

He had not meant to say that last part.

Gabriella reached out and touched his arm.

“I … know about guilt,” she said.

She wanted to say more. He watched her wrestle with it, then spared her from having to ask.

“You want to know how I do it,” he said. “How I live with what I did.”

“I’ve seen you,
watched
you. How did you get there, on the other side of it?”

“The God-forgiveness is the easy part. You only have to ask. But forgiving yourself … that is a get-up-every-morning-and-do-it-again thing. Some days I manage, other days … not so much.”

“I can’t.” The defeat in her voice was heartbreaking.

“Your older brother’s death, that was not your—”

“Yes, it was. And so was Garrett’s.”

G
ABRIELLA WONDERED IF
the look she’d seen on Pedro’s face as he told his story was what other people saw on hers sometimes but didn’t know why. Didn’t know a movie was playing in her head and she was the star. A horror movie.

Pedro had spent every speck of emotional energy he had to lift up that horrible weight out of his heart and lay it before her, steaming and stinking in the sun. She understood that he believed what he’d done was an act so heinous nobody could possibly empathize with it. But he was wrong.

“I talk to him even now sometimes,” she said. “Garrett. He’s the other half of me that’s always missing. He left a huge hole in my world and I still
stumble into it if I don’t look where I’m going. It’s hard to crawl out.” She took a deep breath. “In the beginning, I didn’t. Crawl out. I stayed there, down in the dark pit. Lived there. Died there, but kept breathing.”

She suspected she was babbling. She didn’t know for sure except that Pedro wasn’t saying anything. But he probably had no air or words left to speak even if she weren’t rattling on and on.