Someone Else's Love Story (13 page)

Bethany said, “Your father didn’t give you that expensive iPhone strictly for playing that game with the upset birds and texting your little friend here. He gave it to you so you could call, should you for some unimaginable reason need to be almost four hours late.”

This was a true Bethany-style reaming, and the longer she went on, the happier I got, basking in the stream of icy invective.

Walcott beetled his eyebrows at me. He knew I could stop this lecture any second. I had the best excuse in the universe for not calling—“Sorry,
B
, there was this gunman, and he wouldn’t let me use my phone!”—but I didn’t.

She owed me, for all the times she had given me oblique crap about getting knocked up—“Being ready to become sexually active, Shandi, includes understanding all your options in regards to birth control, and also having the maturity to openly discuss these options with your chosen partner . . .”—and me unable to defend myself and say, “Do you think I never practiced putting a condom onto a banana in Health? Do you think that I, a doctor’s daughter, believed that I would not get pregnant if I jumped up and down twenty times after intercourse?” But I never did defend myself, because Bethany didn’t know how I got Natty.

That information stayed in a tightly closed circle: Walcott. Mimmy. Dad, who was smart enough about his second wife to leave her outside any loop involving me. Aimee and Darla, who’d loved me since I was little, and who decided to love Natty, too, on principle. I hadn’t even let
myself
think about it, until now. I was simply another knocked-up high school girl, certainly not the first one seen in Lumpkin County or Atlanta.

Now I stood in Bethany’s vaulted ice-blue foyer, getting deeper into a giddy form of PTSD every second, deserving reassurance and a belt of medicinal whiskey, or maybe a Valium. Bethany had an endless supply of those. But instead I was getting martyred.

It was too delicious to pass up. I sent a psychic look at Walcott that said,
Beloved friend, go beetle your brows elsewhere because I have more than earned
the coming moment.

He grinned, rueful, conceding my point with his complicit silence, and Bethany harped on, digging herself in ever deeper, until finally, finally, she asked me the million-dollar question: “Why didn’t you call?”

I’d been waiting for that one, the way a baseball savant waits for the soft, fat pitch he knows is coming, right over the plate.

“I was held up,” I said, deadpan.

Walcott snorted and then bent a little at the waist, felled by a sudden coughing fit.

“That’s it? That’s your whole explanation. You were held up?”

When she repeated the phrase, Walcott lost it. He couldn’t hold it to a cough. He outright howled, and I was so punchy and crazed by then I lost it, too. We folded, helplessly gaffawing and shaking like Jell-O, leaning on each other to keep from sinking down to the floor. Bethany’s salon-shaped eyebrows arched up high and higher and ever-angry highest. Actual color rose in her cheeks, as she stood furiously on the outside of my awful joke.

“You were
held up
,” she said, not yelling yet, but close, closer than I had ever heard her come to a harsh, raised voice, and Walcott laughed so hard tears spurted out of his eyes.

“Yes,” my dad said. He had come back into the foyer. He looked pale and sick. Our laughter clicked off. I stood up straight, still hanging on to Walcott, though. “She was held up. It’s on TV. Shandi is on the television.”

“She whatted? She what?” said Bethany, her voice getting shriller and higher with every little barked question. “She was what?”

I pushed past her, dragging Walcott. We all followed my dad back into the living room. Sure enough, there I was. It was so weird to see myself on Dad’s big flat-screen. I hadn’t noticed anyone filming, but the camera had caught the scene from pretty far away. They must have been in the Hardee’s parking lot when we came out. I hadn’t clocked the news van, what with the host of cops swarming all over. Even SWAT had been there, standing around their black van, smoking.

But it was recognizably me with Natty perched on my hip, bending over William Ashe on the gurney. I could see my palm resting on his chest, near his shoulder on the unshot side. They’d cut his shirt off, and his chest had been sprinkled with khaki colored hair, sun-bleached a shade lighter than his warm, tanned skin. My hand balled into a fist, closing over the remembered feel of him. It had been like touching the top of my dresser; there was no give to him at all.

The reporter was talking over the footage, saying, “. . .  ended after twenty minutes when one of the hostages rushed the gunman . . .”

So strange, watching myself touch William, hearing a newscaster tell a distant version of a thing I’d actually lived. I knew the real soundtrack, though.

Good job
, I was telling William. Like nine hundred times. As if William Ashe was a professional robber-thwarter instead of some kind of scientist.

Walcott blew a raspberry. “You look like you’re about to kiss his dying lips and then set him on fire in the parking-lot version of a Viking funeral.”

I hadn’t realized how every muscle in all my whole body had bunched up, watching this, until Walcott made me smile. I knuckle-punched his arm and glanced up, saying, “Shut up, you,” but he didn’t have on his joking face.

On the screen, Natty leaned down to touch William, too, pat-pat-patting his arm. I knew what he was saying. He was telling William,
You did what Batman would have do’ed.

Then the talking head of the news anchor replaced the shaky footage of us by the ambulance, but I knew what had happened after that. They’d loaded him in and closed the doors and drove him away from us, because I didn’t really belong in the wife slot. Not yet, anyway.

“Shandi?” Walcott said. He sounded weird. He said my name in a strained tone I’d never heard before.

The talking head was replaced with a picture, an informal thing, snapped at a park. It was William. But he wasn’t alone. He was holding a baby. He was sitting by a woman.

All at once I was intensely interested in what the talking head might say, so of course this was the moment that Bethany decided to finally take up yelling, after years of snow-soft, well-modulated, disparaging comments.

“Are you goddam kidding me?” It was almost a shriek. “You mean you were literally held up, in a holdup, you were held up, and you stood there, you stood there in the foyer and you
let
me go on and on! You made a joke of it, you—”

“Shut up!” I hollered back. On TV a bubble-haired blond lady was saying vital things about William, and I couldn’t hear her over Bethany. Then my dad joined in.

“Bethany! Stop! Shandi is in shock. Go get her some water! Go get her some wine!”

“Hush, hush,” I said, even more desperately. “Walcott, turn up the TV.”

“Okay, okay!” He turned and began digging around in all the Bethany-inflicted silken throw pillows that were infesting the couch.

“No, I will not hush!” Bethany was talking over Dad and me and the TV, too. “Do you think I am some kind of monster? I never would have said those things to you if I had known! But you, you
let
me!”

In the picture, William Ashe was sitting on the grass. He had a good, sharp-looking haircut and a serious, reserved smile. A baby girl, maybe eighteen months old, was flopped barefoot and happy-sleepy in his lap. Her hair was gathered into a ridiculous sprig of strawberry-blond floss on top of her head. Beside him, leaning into his broad shoulder with her legs curled under her, was a smiling redheaded woman. The anchorman was talking now; I heard him say “William Ashe” and “hero of the hour,” and “tragic accident.” Did he mean the shooting? Was William all right? But I couldn’t follow because Bethany was yelling now. Really yelling.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were in a robbery? You hid it! Deliberately! To make me look bad. What kind of a conniving person does that?” She was right. It had been low, and I was getting a hard and instant karma-slap for it.

The red-haired woman was Mrs. Ashe. No doubt about that. I could see it in the way she leaned her head toward him and tucked her shoulder close against his. I hated her, a little, for existing.

“Walcott!” I hollered over Bethany. “Remote?”

“—stuck in this house all day waiting and then she comes here
knowing—
”

“Shandi, honey, you need to sit down,” my dad said. “Shut
up
, Bethany.”

“Everyone, shut up!” I screeched.

I stepped close to the TV, staring at the wife for the few seconds they left the picture up. She had freckles and a long, bony Irish face, but a really good smile. Her thick, wavy hair was flat gorgeous, but she was no Mimmy. She was like me; pretty enough for real life, but not television pretty. She looked happy, though. They all three looked happy. Still, I didn’t think William Ashe was married to her now. In the Circle K, he had showed all the signs of being a recently, but not too recently, divorced male.

The picture was replaced with the blond anchorwoman, with an I’m-making-a-sad-face-but-not-the-kind-that-leaves-a-wrinkle expression.

“If you think I am going to apologize!” Bethany raged on, with Dad talking over her, saying, “Well, Shandi is not going to apologize. No one needs to apologize,” and me saying, “Just stop yelling for one second,” and Walcott digging in the pillows.

“Got it,” Walcott said, and the volume bar appeared and shot from left to right, filling all the way in.

As the sound came up, the anchorman blared, “. . . killed in a tragic auto accident, exactly one year ago today.”

It was so violently loud, everyone did finally shut up, and I rocked back from the TV, blinking, as if the words had literally slapped me.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Walcott come up beside me, but he wasn’t looking at the TV, he was looking at my face.

“Walcott, please,” said my father, very loud over the TV, and Walcott turned the volume down.

The camera backed up, showing the blonde beside the man anchor. She was making complementary what-a-damn-shame eyebrows.

“It’s so ironic,” the woman anchor said. “To become a hero, to save other people, on such a sad anniversary.”

In that moment, I understood his wife was dead. As understanding dawned, I realized that I’d read the shaggy hair and the pale band of flesh on William’s ring finger wrong. He was not divorced, and I was standing here curling my lip and checking a dead woman’s looks against mine. I was selfishly wishing her out of the picture, only to find out she was. Really, really out of the picture. I felt exactly like the piece of crap I was. I glanced at Walcott, my eyes swimming with tears, and saw him swallow, his Adam’s apple hopping up and down once in his long, narrow throat. His eyes on me were, for maybe the first time in our lives, unreadable.

Bethany was staring me down with fury written in every line of her face, but she kept her yap shut, and my dad just looked shaken.

The anchor kept talking, reporting about Stevie now, showing what looked like Stevie’s old mug shot. The man anchor said he had a long criminal record, no shock there.

Yes, I was a lowly worm, but I hadn’t
willed
his wife into being dead. They said the accident happened a year before I ever laid eyes on him. His heart must be broken, and I would never have wanted that. I’d only wanted, desperately, for him to be a thing that I could have.

Which he was. Feeling like an awful person for being glad of it couldn’t stop me wanting him for me and Natty. Couldn’t stop me wondering about him. Maybe he was a single dad, like me. Maybe he was lonely, like me. An inadvertent tingle buzzed in my belly. Maybe he was really good at sex. Unlike me. But sweet damn, I was so willing to learn.

That weird predestined feeling that I had run smack into the love of my life intensified. He was sad and tragic, and helping a girl like me hunt justice might be exactly what he needed.

Then it occurred to me that the baby, the daughter, could have been in the accident as well. I had that mom-reaction I think every parent gets. A fast
Please, never, not my kid
, aimed at heaven, combined with the red-hot slicing empathy that cuts you when you understand a nearby soul has already fallen into your worst fear, and for them it is real and forever.

I felt a clenching of the mother-node inside me. That little girl with the silly, flossy sprout on her head? She was gone, too, with her mother. That was why William had moved so immediately, putting himself between the gun and Natty. He’d leaned in to make a human tent with me over Natty, too, without even thinking about it. He had lost his child; he knew how fast things could spin out of control. He knew a person could lose anything in half a heartbeat. William understood. The tears spilled all the way out of my eyes, and I brushed them fast away.

“Baby,” Dad said, and he came over and took me in his arms. “What a day you’ve had. Of course you are staying here. Bethany, go get some sheets for the couch downstairs, for Walcott.”

I felt Bethany’s cool gaze on me growing even cooler, but she turned away and went to get the sheets. The sports guy came on then, and a whole new terrible thought occurred to me.