The Best of Me (46 page)

“What happened?” Amanda frowned, now utterly confused.

“I hate to have to tell you this over the phone. Would it be possible for you to come by my office this evening? Or tomorrow morning?”

“No,” she said. “I’m back in Durham. What’s going on? What happened?”

“I really think this should be done in person.”

“That’s not going to be possible,” she said with a trace of impatience. “Just tell me what’s going on. What happened at the Tidewater? And why can’t you just send the letter to Dawson?”

Tanner hesitated before he finally cleared his throat. “There was an… altercation at the bar. The place was pretty much torn apart, and numerous shots were fired. Ted and Abee Cole were arrested, and a young man named Alan Bonner was seriously injured. Bonner is still in the hospital, but from what I could learn, he’s going to be okay.”

Hearing the names, one after the other, made the blood pound in her temples. She knew, of course, the name that linked them all. Her voice was almost a whisper.

“Was Dawson there?”

“Yes,” Morgan Tanner answered.

“What happened?”

“From what I was able to gather, Ted and Abee Cole were assaulting Alan Bonner when Dawson suddenly entered the bar.
At which point, Ted and Abee Cole went after him instead.” Tanner paused. “You have to understand that the official police report has yet to be released—”

“Is Dawson okay?” she demanded. “That’s all I want to know.”

She could hear Tanner breathing on the other end. “Dawson was helping Alan Bonner out of the bar when Ted managed to fire off a last round. Dawson was shot.”

Amanda felt every muscle in her body tense, bracing for what she already knew was coming. These words, like so many in the past few days, seemed impossible to comprehend.

“It… he was shot in the head. He had no chance, Amanda. He was brain-dead by the time he reached the hospital.”

Even as Tanner spoke, Amanda could feel her grip loosening on the phone. It clattered to the ground. She stared at it, lying in the gravel, before finally reaching down to punch the
OFF
button.

Dawson. Not Dawson. He couldn’t be dead.

But she heard again what Tanner had told her. He’d gone to the Tidewater. Ted and Abee were there. He’d saved Alan Bonner and now he was gone.

A life for a life, she thought. God’s cruel trick.

She suddenly flashed on the image of the two of them holding hands and wandering in a field of wildflowers. And when the tears finally came, she wept for Dawson, and for all of the days they would never know together. Until perhaps, like Tuck and Clara, their ashes somehow found each other in a sunny field, far away from the beaten path of ordinary lives.

A
manda slipped two pans of lasagna into the refrigerator, before peering into the oven to check on the cake. Though Jared wouldn’t turn twenty-one for another couple of months, she’d come to think of June 23 as a kind of second birthday for him. On this day two years ago, he’d received a new heart; on that day he’d been given a second chance at life. If that wasn’t worth celebrating, she wasn’t sure that anything was.

She was alone in the house. Frank was at work, Annette hadn’t yet returned from a slumber party at her friend’s house, and Lynn was working her summer job at the Gap. Meanwhile, Jared planned to enjoy one of his last free days before his internship at a capital management firm began, by playing softball with a group of friends. Amanda had warned him that it was going to be hot out there and made him promise to drink lots of water.

“I’ll be careful,” he’d assured her before leaving for the softball field. These days, Jared—maybe because he was maturing, or maybe because of all that had happened to him—seemed to understand that worry went hand in hand with motherhood.

He hadn’t always been so tolerant. In the aftermath of the accident, everything seemed to rub him the wrong way. If she looked at him with concern, he claimed she was suffocating him; if she tried to start a conversation, he often snapped at her. She
understood the reasons behind his ill temper; his recovery was painful, and the drugs he took often made him nauseated. Muscles that had once been strong began to atrophy despite physiotherapy, underscoring his sense of helplessness. His emotional recovery was complicated by the fact that unlike many transplant patients, who’d been waiting and hoping for a chance to add years to their lives, Jared couldn’t help feeling that years of his life had been taken away. He sometimes lashed out at friends when they came to see him, and Melody, the girl he’d been so interested in that fateful weekend, informed him a few weeks after the accident that she was dating someone else. Visibly depressed, Jared decided to take the year off from school.

It was a long and sometimes discouraging road, but with the help of his therapist, Jared gradually began to rebound. The therapist also suggested that Frank and Amanda meet with her regularly to talk about Jared’s challenges, and how they could best respond to and support him. Given their own marital history, it was sometimes hard for them to set aside their own conflicts in order to provide Jared with the security and encouragement he needed; but in the end, their love for their son came before everything else. They did what they could to support Jared as he moved steadily through periods of grief, loss, and rage to get to a point where he finally began to accept his new circumstances.

Early last summer, he’d signed up for an economics class at the local community college, and to Amanda and Frank’s enormous pride and relief he announced soon thereafter that he’d decided to re-enroll full-time at Davidson in the fall. Later that same week he’d mentioned over dinner, in an almost offhand way, that he’d read about a man who’d lived thirty-one years after his heart transplant. Since medicine was improving every year, he figured he’d be able to live even longer.

Once he was back in school, his spirits continued to lift. After consulting with his doctors, he took up running, working up to the point where he now ran six miles a day. He started going to the gym
three or four times a week, gradually regaining the physique he’d once had. Fascinated by the course he had taken in the summer, he decided to focus on economics when he returned to Davidson. Within weeks of returning to school, he met another prospective economics major, a girl named Lauren. The two of them had fallen head over heels in love, and they’d even begun to talk about getting married after they graduated. For the past two weeks, they’d been on a mission trip to Haiti, sponsored by her church.

Aside from diligently taking his medications and abstaining from alcohol, Jared, for the most part, now lived the life of an ordinary twenty-one-year-old. Even so, he didn’t begrudge his mother’s desire to bake him a cake to celebrate the transplant. After two years, he’d finally reached the point where, despite everything, he considered himself lucky.

There was, however, a recent twist in Jared’s thinking that Amanda wasn’t sure how to handle. A few evenings ago, while she’d been loading dishes into the dishwasher, Jared had joined her in the kitchen, stopping to lean against the counter.

“Hey, Mom? Are you going to do that charity thing for Duke this fall?”

In the past, he’d always referred to her fund-raising luncheons as
things
. For obvious reasons, since the accident, she hadn’t hosted the event, nor had she been volunteering at the hospital. Amanda nodded. “Yes. They asked me to take over as the chairperson again.”

“Because they botched it the last couple of years without you, right? That’s what Lauren’s mom said.”

“They didn’t botch the events. They just didn’t go as well as planned.”

“I’m glad you’re doing it again. For Bea, I mean.”

She smiled. “Me, too.”

“The hospital likes it, too, right? Because you’re raising money?”

She reached for a towel and dried her hands, studying him. “Why are you suddenly so interested?”

Jared absently scratched at his scar through his T-shirt. “I was hoping that you could use your contacts at the hospital to find something out for me,” he said. “It’s something I’ve been wondering about.”

With the cake cooling on the counter, Amanda stepped out onto the back porch and inspected the lawn. Despite the automatic sprinklers that Frank had installed last year, the grass was dying in spots as the roots withered away. Before he’d gone to work this morning, she’d seen him standing over one of the dull brown patches, his face grim. In the past couple of years, Frank had become fanatical about the lawn. Unlike most of the neighbors, Frank insisted on doing his own mowing, telling anyone who asked that it helped him relax after a day spent filling cavities and shaping crowns at the office. Though she supposed there was some truth in that, there was also something compulsive about his habits. Rain or shine, he mowed every other day, making checkerboard patterns in the lawn.

Despite her initial skepticism, Frank hadn’t had a single beer or even a sip of wine since the day of the accident. At the hospital, he’d sworn he was stopping for good, and to his credit, he’d kept his vow. After two years, she no longer expected him to slip back into his old ways at any moment, and that was a big part of the reason things between them had improved. It wasn’t a perfect relationship by any means, but it wasn’t as terrible as it once had been, either. In the days and weeks following the accident, arguments between them had been an almost nightly occurrence. Pain and guilt and anger had sharpened their words into blades, and they often lashed out at each other. Frank slept in the guest room for months, and in the mornings, eye contact between them was rare.

As difficult as those months had been, Amanda could never bring herself to take the final step of filing for divorce. Given
Jared’s fragile emotional state, she couldn’t imagine traumatizing him any further. What she didn’t realize was that her resolve to keep the family intact wasn’t having the intended effect. A few months after Jared came home from the hospital, Frank was talking to Jared in the living room when Amanda walked in. As had become the pattern by then, Frank got up and left the room. Jared watched him go before turning to his mom.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Jared said to her. “I was the one driving.”

“I know.”

“Then stop blaming him,” he said.

Ironically, it was Jared’s psychologist who ultimately convinced her and Frank to seek counseling for their troubled relationship. The tension at home was affecting Jared’s recovery, she pointed out, and if they truly cared about helping their son, they should consider seeking couples counseling themselves. Without a stable home environment, Jared would have difficulty accepting and coping with his new circumstances.

Amanda and Frank drove in separate cars to their first appointment with the counselor, who Jared’s psychologist had referred them to. Their first session degenerated into the kind of argument they’d been having for months. By the second session they were actually able to talk without raising their voices. And at the counselor’s gentle but firm urging, Frank began attending AA meetings as well, much to Amanda’s relief. In the beginning, he went five nights a week, but lately it was down to one, and three months ago Frank had become a sponsor. He met regularly for breakfast with a thirty-four-year-old recently divorced banker who, unlike Frank, had been unable to achieve sobriety. Until then Amanda had not allowed herself to believe that Frank was actually going to be successful in the long term.