Rescue (23 page)

“What happened to him?” Webster asks.

She tears the elastic off her ponytail with an angry gesture. Her hair falls down her back. “He died of pancreatic cancer.”

Webster closes his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he says. “That must have been awful.”

He gets up and walks around the room, jiggling the change in his pockets. The love of her life, and he died. He feels sorry
for her. On the other hand, she was the love of
his
life. So where does that leave him?

The same place he’s been for fifteen years.

“I’ll think about it,” Webster says. “About whether you should meet Rowan or not. I’ll speak to her. I’ll give her that choice.
I might not do that right away, though.”

“Thank you,” Sheila says.

“What changed your mind?” he asks.

“After you left, I leaned against the wall and slid right to the floor. I’ve made a life, Webster. A good life, but it’s fragile.
When you came—and I wondered if someday you would come—I was shaken. I reacted badly. But later, I thought about how you said
Rowan was in trouble. I don’t believe I can help at all, but I feel I should do something. That’s all I can tell you.”

He nods. That will have to be enough for now.

He will ask Rowan if she wants to do this. He suspects that she’ll be wary at first, but then maybe curious enough to agree.

“I guess I’d better go,” Sheila says. “Can I use the bathroom? As you know, it’s a long ride.”

“You remember where it is?”

“You never made a powder room?”

“I’ll do it when I can’t get up the stairs.”

*    *    *

It’s a good three minutes before Webster realizes his mistake. He bolts up two flights of stairs and finds Sheila sitting
on Rowan’s bed, weeping. She holds a stuffed animal that might once have been a dog.

“What the fuck? Sheila?”

Sheila looks up. “I gave her this,” she says. “I had no idea she—you—had kept it. To think it’s been here all these years.”
She hugs it to her chest, as if the toy were a child. “Webster, I’ve missed so much. Every bit of this room is a part of Rowan
I know nothing about. All those years.” She moans. “The desk, look. And the clarinet. And that mural? My God, Webster. There’s
so much in here, and I never saw any of it.”

He didn’t want her to experience this—or did he? He walks to Rowan’s desk and rummages around in the top drawer. He finds
what he wants and holds the picture out for Sheila to see. It’s the photo taken right after Rowan’s birth, the snap of Sheila
holding Rowan. “She’s had this with her all this time,” he says.

Sheila takes the small wrinkled scrap, studies it, and holds it to her chest. She bends her head.

Webster turns away. Sheila’s loss is horrific. As he listens to his ex-wife sob behind him, he wonders, were the situation
reversed and he the alcoholic, would he be doing the same? He’s pretty sure he would. He stands in the threshold, facing away
from her, giving her some privacy.

He wants to go to her. He’s used to caring for a person who’s sobbing. It happens to him at least once a week. But he can’t
go to this particular person.

When he turns, she’s standing. Her face is ruined. She glances around the room one more time, as if trying to memorize it.

“You good to drive?” Webster asks. He shakes his head. “I meant…”

“I know what you meant,” Sheila says. “Yes, I’m good to drive.” She pauses. “I know I’m different, Webster. But you’re not.
I recognize you.”

“Is that good or bad?” he asks.

“It’s good,” she says.

He watches her walk to her car, which she parked on the street. Hers is a problem he can’t fix. He wanted to help Rowan when
he went to Chelsea, but what he really did was cause a fault line in his ex-wife to crack wide open.

Webster climbs up to Rowan’s room to make sure Sheila hasn’t left something behind, that the stuffed dog is back in its regular
place. He stops as soon as he crosses the threshold. Sheila’s perfume, which he didn’t notice downstairs, is heavy in the
room.

Shit.

He starts for the Lysol spray, but then thinks Rowan will want to know why he used it in her room. He decides to open the
window. When he tries to raise it, however, he discovers that it’s stuck. He checks that the latch is undone, and still the
window won’t budge. He tries the other window at the other end of the room. That one won’t budge either.

What the hell?

He should have fixed these for Rowan months ago. He goes back to the first window. Should he wax the sash? If he gets it open
and cracks only one window downstairs, he can always say he was trying to draw the heat out of the house. He gives it one
more hard shove, loosening the frame, and something falls from
a piece of molding above the window. A white notebook, measuring maybe three inches by two.

He stands with the thing in his hands. That Rowan has hidden it tells Webster to put it back, though he doesn’t know which
side of the molding it came from. Left or right?

He’s royally screwed.

He opens to a random page.

I don’t want to be the star of my own afternoon special. I dislike drama in others. How it suddenly manufactures itself.

Another page:

How can a person be allowed to do that? Just leave her baby for fifteen years?

And another page:

Though he’s often clueless, he’s a good dad. I try not to forget that, even when he’s at his most exasperating. He means well.
He tries. He’s mine. He loves me. And he’s a hundred times better as a parent than most of my friends’ parents.

There are entries about Tommy and Gina and school that Webster skips. Another entry catches his eye.

When Allison told me just before Christmas, I was shocked and couldn’t fake it. My mother was pregnant with me when they got
married! I realized then that I didn’t even know what their wedding date was. Why didn’t I ever ask Dad? Because I was afraid
it would make him sad? Allison knew because her mother, who worked for Gramps, knew. I still can’t get used to the fact that
I’m a mistake.

Webster winces. He never told his daughter this simple fact?

And yet another entry:

Don’t you actually have to raise a child to be called a mother? I don’t think I’d trade my life for anything. But there were
days when I could have used a mother’s advice about female stuff. A lot of nights
when I had to be alone and didn’t want to be. But no one can trade a life. It’s a hypothetical. My mother wasn’t here. It’s
like trying to imagine a sister or a brother. I can think about it for a couple of minutes, but then it doesn’t go anywhere
because it’s…

“What are you doing?”

Webster shuts the notebook with a snap.

Rowan, in maroon sweats, stands at the threshold.

“I was opening the window,” Webster says, “and this fell, and I picked it up…”

“You’re reading it,” she says.

“It just…”

“You had no right to do that,” Rowan says.

“It just fell open…,” he says, knowing how lame that sounds.

“YOU HAD NO FUCKING RIGHT!” his daughter yells. She puts her hands up against the jambs, as if holding herself back from charging.
“That was mine! That was personal!”

“I know it was, I know it is,” Webster protests, dropping the diary onto the bed.

“Get out!” Rowan screams. “Get out of this room, and don’t ever, ever, ever come back. Ever. DO YOU HEAR ME?”

He has never seen this level of rage in his daughter. Rowan moves inside the room to allow her father to leave. As soon as
he’s gone, she slams the door so hard the attic shakes.

W
ebster knows that Rowan spent some part of the afternoon at the hairdresser with Gina. He won’t make it easy for her to ignore
him tonight. In his shirt and jeans, he waits for her to come down the stairs. Every time he thinks about the notebook, he
cringes.

He can hear the clicking of high heels on the floor above him. He gapes when Rowan descends the stairs and walks into the
kitchen. She’s chosen a black dress, high waisted, that looks disturbingly like the one Sheila wore to their wedding. Rowan
has pearls at her throat, a gift from her grandmother. His daughter walks to a mirror in the back hallway. She turns from
side to side as a model might. His daughter is a woman, he tells himself. He’s had this thought before, but each time he realizes
it, it strikes him anew. He tries not to think about it at all, but Rowan reminds him again and again. When he sees the way
she is with Tommy, his head fills with static, like a TV on a channel with no signal. It’s none of his business, Webster tells
himself over and over, but of course it is. How can it not be?

“Those are some heels,” he says, the first time he’s spoken to her since he left her room.

Rowan doesn’t respond.

“I want to get your picture.”

If she refuses him this, he’ll know the rift is even deeper than he fears.

“Where?” she asks, her tone sullen.

“Where we always do them.”

Rowan walks to the bare patch of kitchen wall, against which he has taken many pictures of his daughter: dressed as a bunch
of grapes at Halloween; holding her softball trophy aloft, her eyes popping with pride; in her Girl Scout uniform, trying
and failing to look serious.

Did she choose the black dress because he told her Sheila wore a similar dress to their wedding? Has he never shown Rowan
the wedding pictures? He doesn’t even know where they are—packed up in one of the many boxes in the cellar, he imagines. Was
Rowan’s an unconscious choice or a conscious one?

Rowan shakes her hands at her sides, trying to loosen herself up. He’s seen her do that before games. He aims the digital
in her direction, studies the screen, finds an angle he likes. She isn’t smiling. He presses the silver button.

She doesn’t ask to see the picture.

She wrestles with the small purse she is taking with her, performing her own triage. Lipstick in, hairbrush out, ditto hair
spray, keys in, mirror in, cell phone in, hand cream out.

It’s a beautiful summer night. He remembers similar weather for his own prom, now called the senior dance. He rented a tux.
Do boys do that nowadays? He also remembers his date, Alicia, who had on a poufy dress with big shoulders. At the time, he
wondered if she would put out, but she didn’t. He’s pretty sure they both had a decent time.

Webster glances at the clock over the sink. He can hear Tommy’s car in the driveway.

Rowan opens her purse and studies the contents once again.

Of all times to look heartbreakingly lovely.

She snatches up a wrap from a chair. She opens the back door and closes it without a word. Webster walks into the dining room
and watches through the window. Tommy is out of the car and on his way toward the house. He and Webster would have shaken
hands. Perhaps a look of understanding might have passed between them.

Rowan’s mincing walk in her stilettos might have made Webster laugh. Tommy opens the car door for Rowan, a nice touch. He
walks around the back of his car, straightening his sport coat. No tux. When the engine starts, Webster turns away.

No kiss good-bye. No hug. No chance to tell his daughter she looks beautiful.

Webster waits fifteen minutes and then climbs into his cruiser. He has an hour before he has to be at Rescue.

Webster drives away from town and up a long ridge. The moon will be .95 tonight, full tomorrow. He opens all the windows and
lets the warm air blow through the car. If he had the radio on, and if he were twenty years younger, he’d sing. He hasn’t
been to the top of the ridge in nearly two decades. He’s had calls halfway up, but he’s never gone back to the place he once
considered his life’s dream.

He parks the cruiser at the edge of the road and slips out. The mountains are purple, green, and rust-colored, depending on
the light and the high clouds. He wades into the tall grasses. He’s amazed that whoever owns the land hasn’t sold it to a
developer or built on it himself. The previous owner passed away.

What were his dreams all those years ago? What did he hope for?

A house with a window.

Now his hopes are so much more complicated.

The grasses move. Part of what used to be the owner’s house has caved in, creating an oyster shell of a roof.

Would he have had a sheep or two? Dogs? A vegetable garden worthy of the name? A house he’d built, over time, having done
much of the work himself?

Webster gazes in the direction of the high school, but he can’t see it. Below him somewhere is the town he’s lived in all
his life. Will he die here, too? Will Rowan live nearby or will she move away with a family, the husband needing to live closer
to a city? Webster can’t imagine the future. For the first time since he was a boy, he feels alone.

Somewhere nearby is the place where Sheila and he conceived Rowan.

The what-ifs are dizzying.

Webster doesn’t want to end the year on a sour note. He doesn’t want his time with his daughter to come to such an ugly close.
He’s heard of teens who walked out the door without so much as a wave and went their own way, never to be heard from again.

He checks his watch. He has twelve minutes to get to Rescue. He can do it in five.

He decides that when Rowan leaves Hartstone, he will too. Maybe move closer to a city, see what that’s all about. Maybe leave
Vermont altogether. He wonders if he could hack being a medic in Manhattan, say, or in the Bronx. Shit, they’d toss him out
the door. Emergency medicine is geography-specific. He remembers the “jumper down” call, how odd that was in
Vermont. On the other hand, he guesses the medics in the Bronx have never seen a leg mangled by a tractor and baler.

There’s something in the landscape, and he can’t catch it. He wants it. Inside him, there’s a powerful longing to hold on—a
feeling both new to him and old.

He cuffs the high grasses.

W
hat are you doing here?” Koenig asks.

“Switched my schedule so I’d have graduation free,” Webster answers, pumping for his coffee. “What are you doing here?”