*
Jack squinted through the windshield as he headed toward the highway. What the hell? Looked like some kind of wreck up ahead, a couple of cars t-boned against the sidewalk. Emergency lights turned the sky red and blue, and two cops stood in the middle of the street. Great. Just what he needed. Another accident to slow him down. He’d already passed two.
Having no choice, he ground to a stop as the traffic neared the line of flares. A white sedan, covered with rust and missing a license plate, had apparently crushed a small blue car. The vehicles sat wedged together, half-collapsed into one of those small glass-and-metal bus stops. From what Jack could see, the passenger side and the hood of the blue car had buckled in. The white car spewed steam, its nose broken and bent. He smelled burning rubber.
Jack drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, his patience a too-tight violin string stretched thin. Emergency personnel buzzed about the cars, taking stock. Apart from the wreck stood two young guys, disheveled and white-faced. Wide-eyed, they talked to the police and gestured at the blinking stoplight above them. Probably out hitting the bars and trying to make it home before one or both of them lost their dinner, Jack guessed. Another cruiser arrived. Paramedics moved around the blue car, which looked like it had gotten the brunt of the crash. He wondered how the hell they were going to get anyone out of it.
A baby-faced officer trotted back and forth between the wreck and the flares. He spoke to a couple of medics and pointed back toward the traffic. A fire truck arrived next, squeezing past the stopped cars and pulling onto the curb. Busy night for Boston’s finest, Jack thought.
After a long ten minutes, the officer began to wave the cars on. Jack inched the Navigator forward, waiting as the yellow sports car in front of him curved a wide path around some broken glass. The officer directed them in an s-pattern, trying to keep one side of the street clear. Jack could see the highway entrance up in front of him, less than a half-mile away. Just a couple more minutes. Then I can find her. I hope.
Why he looked back at that moment, Jack never understood. He had no reason to hesitate, no reason to look any longer at someone else’s misery. He hated rubberneckers, as a general rule. So why did he glance over his shoulder at the twisted car? If he was superstitious, he would have chalked it up to karma, to the universe pointing him in the right direction. But levelheaded Jack couldn’t accept that. So he explained it to himself later as simple coincidence, figuring that at four in the morning, most other people were home sleeping. Who else would be on the road, in that particular spot, a few hundred yards from the interstate?
He ignored the other possibility tunneled deep inside his heart: when part of you, the other half of you, lay trapped inside a broken shell of a car, you knew it somewhere inside your gut. It was as simple as that.
“Holy shit.” Jack slammed on the brakes and stared. Under the streetlight, the license plate of the blue car beamed bright white.
D-D-S-G-N.
Jack threw the SUV into park and leapt from the seat. He stumbled as he hit the ground. It can’t be Mags. It can’t. The world couldn’t be that cruel. He winced as his ankle turned. Who was he kidding? Of course it could. Look at what had happened to his mother at the age of fifty-three. There wasn’t any justice, not when it came to death. Or rather, there was perfect justice. Any person, at any given moment, could be stolen away. It was as simple as that.
He caught his balance and kept moving. He needed to see for himself. Maybe it wasn’t Maggie behind the wheel. Maybe someone else had taken her car and crashed it while she waited nearby, whole and healthy. Jack forced one foot in front of the other. He needed to stop the terrible suspicion crawling up his spine.
As he neared the wreck, he dodged through emergency vehicles and wound his way through flares. Closer. A few more feet. No one seemed to notice him. Good. Jack took another few steps toward the crushed bus stop and the car that didn’t belong inside it. From here he could see the spider-webbed windows and the hood like a crumpled tissue, used up and tossed away with other pieces of trash along the sidewalk. He could spy, beneath the fractured glass, the faces of two women in the vehicle’s front seats. One wore green, the other brown. Blood covered both their faces.
Jack stopped. Despite the angst inside him, he couldn’t move one more step. He knew who sat in that car. Beyond any doubt, he knew. Perspiration dribbled down his spine. Still he stared. Shouts came from behind him, and seconds later, a rough hand grabbed his arm. The next thing he knew, a cop’s grizzled face was staring him down.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get back into your vehicle. Now.” The burly man breathed a sour odor into Jack’s face.
“Hang on. You don’t understand.”
The cop let go and crossed his beefy arms, blocking Jack’s view. “Mister, we’ve got a serious accident here. I don’t care who you are, if you’re the Queen of England or from the goddamned press. You need to stay back and let the medics do their job. One person gets out of their car, everyone thinks it’s a show.”
“I know her,” Jack interrupted, trying to see around the man’s massive shoulders. It looked as though the firemen were setting up the Jaws of Life. Jesus Christ, this is bad. Really bad.
The man. “Excuse me?”
Jack raised his hand and pointed. His wrist shook a little and he fought to steady it. “The driver of that car. I know her. She’s…” She’s what, you idiot? Your girlfriend? Your ex-wife? The person you plan on spending the rest of your life with?
“She’s a friend of mine,” he said. “Please. I was—” He knew how unbelievable his next words would sound and hoped the cop would cut him some slack. “I was looking for her. I was following her. We had a fight, and…I wanted to talk to her.” He stuck out his chin and stuffed his hands into his pockets. “I’m not leaving.” He stood his ground, hoping that the three-hundred pound man standing in front of him would understand.
“You’re that Major guy, aren’t you?” The cop peered down at him. “Seen you in the papers once in a while.” He harrumphed. “Well, move your goddamned truck out of the middle of the road. And stand over there, if you’ve got to stay.” He gestured to an area of sidewalk twenty feet away. “I mean it. Don’t you goddamned get in the middle of things.”
Jack ducked his head and hurried to pull the Navigator out of the way. Yeah, I’ll get the truck out of the road. But I can’t make any promises about staying out of the way. Not when it’s Mags we’re talking about.
Minutes later, Jack watched from the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets. He paced, keeping his distance, until the cop stopped eyeing him and wandered off behind his cruiser. Jack wrapped his fingers around his cell phone. He thought of people he could call, people who might help him out. Lee Peters? He was chief in one of the precincts downtown. Or Teena Rae, the admitting nurse over at the hospital? He needed a plan. He needed to take action. He needed to bundle Maggie up in his efficiency and rescue her the way he rescued companies and failing mergers and disgruntled VPs. He couldn’t just stand on the corner and wait.
I’ve got to see her. Somehow, I’ve got to let her know I’m here.
But that wasn’t going to happen. At the instant the rescue team pulled Maggie from the driver’s seat, her chalky face and the awkward way her legs flopped down stopped Jack from moving any closer. A nervous whistle left his lips. He dodged behind a telephone pole.
“All right, get this one going,” he heard one of the medics say, and a minute later she was lifted into the back of an ambulance. Jack lost sight of her. His attention shifted back to the car, where an unconscious Neve was being lifted onto an identical stretcher. An EMT knelt beside the unconscious young woman, taking vital signs and saying something to the man beside her. In a flash, the two of them pushed the stretcher into the second waiting ambulance. Jack took a few steps closer and tried to eavesdrop, not caring who saw him anymore. He caught pieces of the medics’ conversation, and his skin went cold.
“This one’s in
worse condition.”
“Yep. Broken pelvis, maybe. Right leg doesn’t look good either.”
Jesus, no.
“She was pregnant, the driver said.”
Was pregnant?
“She’ll be lucky if…”
The ambulance doors slammed shut.
5:00 a.m.
Jack pressed down on the gas and managed to close the gap between the Navigator and the ambulances carrying Maggie and Neve. Pink light skated across the horizon. Almost dawn, and his exhaustion had disappeared. He shook his head, trying to roll his neck and pop out the kinks. A few hours ago, the idea of socializing with half of Boston until dawn had turned his stomach. He would have given anything to be hitting the sheets before midnight. But now? Power, panic, excitement and terror all shuttled around his brain, tag-teaming each other and gaining speed as they went. He felt as though he could stay awake for a week.
How amazing, Jack thought, to peel back the layers and realize you still loved someone beyond all comprehension. How amazing to admit you still ached down deep. And how amazing that you could spend so many years denying it to yourself and find a way to keep on living despite the hole inside you. Like an oyster piling sand upon a sore, he mused, you try to hide the irritation until one day it’s too big to ignore and you look down to realize it’s taken over you, something brilliant and blinding and rare as hell.
Jack squeaked the truck through a narrow spot in the street. Okay, so Mags had told him some things he hadn’t expected, some things he’d never guessed about her. Maybe she wasn’t the same person he remembered. Maybe she had a sorrowful side and glimmers of darkness. Maybe she held other secrets too. Jack pulled at his bottom lip. Didn’t they all? Wasn’t that part of working through relationships? Taking hold of the hard parts, examining them from every side, and fitting them into the puzzle all the same?
He hadn’t been willing to do it with Paige. He hadn’t been willing to work that hard.
I wanted to, at first. God help me, I thought we matched up in all the right ways. We were both making names for ourselves and seeking the right connections. We both appreciated a baseball game at the end of the day, a good bottle of wine, each other’s bite and backbone. I thought good sex and financial success meant a solid life. I thought after a while love would come along with that. Not the kind of love I felt for Mags, of course, but a different kind. A safer kind. I thought Mags was a fling I would outgrow.
How startling to find out he’d never been more wrong.
Jack slammed on his brakes as traffic bottlenecked at a flashing light. The ambulances slowed and waited for the cars to part. After a minute, they made their way around the corner and disappeared.
“C’mon,” he muttered to the cars crowding the road. “Get out of the way.”
He laid on the horn, tailgated a pick-up, knocked over two orange cones, and finally worked his way through. On the next street, traffic had pulled over. He swept by it all. Maybe five more minutes to the hospital, he guessed, though he hadn’t been down there in years. Since Mom’s last chemo session, he thought, and then was sorry for the memory. For a few minutes back at the accident scene, he’d felt that same helplessness that had cloaked his mother’s last days, that agony of staring at her shrunken body and knowing there was nothing he could do to save her.
Jack gunned the truck through a red light. He cut off a cab driver, who let loose a string of curse words out his open window. Jack didn’t care. He needed to be with Maggie when she woke up. He’d sit by her bedside until she did. He didn’t care if it took two hours or two days. Everything else—the mess with Paige, Taz’s memorial, work itself—could wait.
Work. Jack frowned. Bullieston. The acquisition of the Hart’s Falls’ house. Or rather, the acquisition of Maggie’s house. For a moment, practicality chased romance from his brain. How the hell was he going to handle the Hart’s Falls’ deal now? He couldn’t very well call up the board members and tell them he’d fallen in love with the owner. He couldn’t suggest they find another property to buy, not after his speech to the VPs at yesterday’s meeting. You didn’t sabotage a multi-million dollar deal in the name of passion.
But how was he supposed to tell Maggie that she might not have a home after leaving the hospital? How was he supposed to explain that if she didn’t agree to sell to his company, Bullieston would buy it at auction for a fraction of what it was worth? How could he keep watch beside her broken body while his mind whirled with figures and phone calls he was expected to make? How could he split himself in two like that?
I am the biggest traitor in the world. Jack tried to swallow past the knob of guilt in his throat. He should probably call someone else to be there with her. Her mother, maybe. Or her stepfather? Maggie had never seemed very close to the guy, but still. There was a sibling, he recalled, a brother, but Jack had never met him. He picked up his cell phone and put it down again. Someone else needed to know about the accident. Someone who could hold Maggie’s heart while he tried to reconcile Jack the CEO with Jack the man with the splintered soul.
Eden, he decided after a minute. That woman knew how to give comfort like a warm thick blanket, tucked in tight around you. Maggie would want to see her gap-toothed grin upon waking. Plus, if anyone had a link to the past, if anyone knew where to find her mother, it would be Maggie’s best friend.
Jack thought of the first time he’d met Hillary, the summer between his junior and senior years of college. He’d seen the resemblance between mother and daughter immediately: the carefree smile, the tousled red hair. The way they both watched you during a conversation as if filing away data, all the little bits and bytes that made you up.
It was July, he remembered, after the holiday weekend. They’d just spent a few days at Taz‘s place in Westchester, and Mags wanted to drive up to see her mom…
*
“That’s it, the brown house at the end of the block.”
Jack pulled up to the curb and cut the engine. “Cute place.” Tucked away on a side street, the houses mirrored each other but for the shade of paint and color of flowers on the porches.
“It’s not Wellesley.”
He glanced over, surprised at the chill in Mags’ voice. “I came here to meet your parents, not talk stocks with the neighbors. You gonna introduce me, or should we just sit in the car all afternoon?”
Maggie stuck out her tongue as she jumped from the silver BMW. “Come on, then.” She danced ahead of him up the sidewalk, dodging his kisses and worming away from the hand that tried to slip itself around her waist.
Jack laughed out loud and finally scooped her up and tossed all one hundred pounds of her over his shoulder. She squealed and a woman dragging a garbage can to the curb looked over at them.
“Put me down,” Maggie said as they neared number two-sixty. Her feet dragged a little as the sidewalk cracked and split, and her mood sobered once they neared the front steps. By the time she rapped on the door and pushed it open, she’d stopped smiling altogether.
“Mom? Hello?”
He heard rustling down the hallway, and then a mirror version of Maggie burst out of the kitchen. “What are you doing here? You didn’t call—I had no idea you were coming!” The woman flung her arms around Maggie and kissed her on the cheek. “Why didn’t you let me know? I would have planned something for dinner.” She glanced down at the turquoise hospital scrubs she wore. The laces of one rubbery white shoe hung open. “I haven’t even showered. I only got home a few minutes ago.” For the first time, she looked away from her daughter, taking in Jack.
“Hi.” He reached out a hand. “Jack Major.”
“Hillary Doyle-Murphy. It’s a pleasure. Maggie’s told me a lot about you.”
She has? Good.
“I’m afraid my husband won’t be home for a few hours.” She turned back to Maggie. “Are you staying overnight?”
Maggie shook her head, and a cloud settled across her face. Jack let his arm fall across her shoulders, protecting her from a discom
fort he sensed and couldn’t understand.
“No, we have a long drive back. We just wanted to stop in, have a drink, say hello.”
Hillary’s smile faded. “Oh. All right. Well, come on back to the porch. I just brewed some iced tea.”
“Sounds good,” Jack said. He glanced at a family photo hanging on the wall. “Do I get the grand tour?”
“Do you really want one?’
“Sure.” Didn’t Mags get it? He wanted to know everything about her: where she came from, what she pined for, how she’d come to be this amazing woman who turned his world upside down. He knew only pieces of her, gathered up in the six months they’d been dating, but he wanted to know so much more. These walls, her mother’s laugh, the scent of lemon polish that lingered in the air, the slant of the stairs, the little-girl pictures on the walls—he drank it all in, hints of the Maggie she’d been and the Maggie she might someday grow to be.
“Bedroom, bedroom, bathroom, living room on the other side of the stairs. Kitchen at the end of the hall.” Maggie stopped, her arms at her sides.
“What’s upstairs?”
“My mom and step-dad’s room, and another bathroom. And an office.” Her voice was flat.
“This your old room?” Jack pushed open a door sitting ajar. He guessed it must have been. Yellow walls matched a yellow and pink comforter. Fluffy pink pillows sat against the wall. A scarred desk in the corner. A tall dresser with a jewelry box on top. Different movie posters on the walls.
“Don’t tell me. You had a crush on Brad Pitt.”
Maggie grinned, though she remained in the doorway. “Yup. Still do,
actually. Sorry.”
Jack sighed. “I guess I’ll get over it.” He backed out into the hall. “Who had the other bedroom down here?” He paused in the open door and glanced at an old computer on a metal desk and a twin bed covered with a brown spread. Two pairs of worn work boots lay tossed in the corner.
One Night in Boston Page 22
