In the Waning Light
Page 38
But it was the child who comforted her now. “It’s okay, Meg,” he said, his green eyes holding hers. His father’s eyes. As if Blake were talking to her through him from the other side, through his boy, and she couldn’t bear the gaping maw of loss.
“I … I loved him,” she whispered. “I loved your father, and I’m going to be there for you, Noah.” She sniffed. “We’re going to finish fixing up Crabby Jack’s for him. We … we’ll have a grand opening in spring … We’ll have that big crab boil in November, like he wanted. We’ll invite everyone. The whole town …” She struggled to find her voice. Sniffed again. Tried to smile. “You can wear your granddad’s crab hat … with … with the … googly eyes. We’ll do it for your dad.”
“Crabby Jack’s got flooded,” he said quietly.
She gripped his hand. Tight. “That’s okay. We’ll fix it. We will.”
Please. Save my boy … look after him.
I will, Blake, by God I will … I will be there for him …
The next few days were gray, cold. Geoff’s remains were found. Baby Joy was born, and the adoption contract declared null and void. Lori-Beth was left bereft, with only Henry’s shell-shocked parents, Rose and Albert, to comfort her. She’d had a falling-out with her sister, Sally, who had been charged for her attack on Meg’s house, and was now awaiting trial.
Brooklyn was devastated by the loss of her father, and was reeling in the face of the revelations of the horrific legacy Tommy Kessinger had left. Emma confessed that Tommy had been physically abusive throughout their relationship, but she’d stayed mum because he’d threatened to take Brooklyn away from her if she ever spoke out. She told police Sherry had been scared of him, and had been trying to break off their relationship prior to going with Ty to the spit. An investigation was reopened into the death of Tara Brogan, and Deliah Sproatt Kessinger.
Noah was meanwhile put into temporary foster care, but while Meg was still in the hospital, Jonah helped her start the process of filing for immediate guardianship. Her resolve was to adopt him, and she held Blake’s last words like a mantra to her chest.
Please … Save my boy… Do not let me die for nothing …
Those words would guide her forward now. And when the day came that she was released from the hospital, she got news that a judge had granted her temporary guardianship of Noah Sutton. It was a first step.
“Are you certain that you’re ready to do this, Meg?” Jonah asked as he drove her from the hospital to pick up Noah from foster care. She heard the deeper question in his words. She saw the concern in his features. And more.
She nodded.
“You’re still in a state of shock, you know. These are big decisions.”
“I know.” She was scared. She knew that half of her was numb, that on some level she had shut down. But when they pulled up at the foster house, and the door opened, and little Noah ran out to meet them, his face white, his body thin, she dropped to her knees and hugged him tightly against her body, and she knew it was the right thing. The only thing.
Jonah helped her and Noah move into the old Brogan house on Forest Lane while Meg made plans to address the water damage on the ground floor of the marina building and finish off the renovations.
She and Noah visited the marina together, a quiet pilgrimage. They spoke about his dad, and Uncle Geoff, and how they’d restore Crabby Jack’s together. Jonah was right, Noah was stoic. A tower of tiny strength in his sensitive shell.
“I worry he’s bottling it all in,” Meg told Jonah the night after they’d been to the marina, once she’d tucked Noah into bed. She hadn’t read to him. Rather, she’d told him a story about how his dad had caught a big salmon once when they were little, and it had swum away with his rod. Her plan was to tell Noah a story about his dad’s youth every night, as long as she had tales to tell. Then she’d learn more about what Blake had done in the army, and share those stories, too.
“All you can do is be there for him, Meg.”
“What about you, Jonah?”
“I’m here for you. As long as you need someone.”
“I mean, what about work, Seattle? The foot case.”
He held her gaze in silence for several beats. Meg could see in his eyes that he knew what she was asking. The future. Long-term plans. His ring was gone. She didn’t know where. She’d lost it sometime during the attack.
She’d told him that she’d taken it off, and why.
She’d told him that she’d fallen in love with Blake. That she probably always had been.
“I think the more important question is what about you,” he said. “You’re going to stay.” It wasn’t a question, yet it was. And he followed it quickly with “Because I want you back in my life, Meg. I want to try again.”
She looked away. At the fire he’d built in her parents’ hearth. So handsome, so smart. She was desperately fond of him. It would be so easy to slip back into a relationship as a way to assuage her grief, but then she’d have learned nothing. “I need to stay,” she said quietly, and turned to meet his gaze.
“Noah?” he said.
“For me.” Her words hung. The fire crackled. This old home was warm again. Messy with kids’ things. There would be school again soon. Life. Irene was staying with them now. Meg was interviewing homecare nurses for a more long-term arrangement. She wanted Irene to live with her and Noah until the last possible moment. Her dad’s sister had cared for her, and now it was her turn.
“You were right, Jonah, but not in the ways I at first thought. I did need to come back and rewrite the past within new context. Not only did it reveal the truth of what happened to Sherry, it showed me who I was, who I always had been, at the core. How, for all these years, I’ve been trying to run from my true self, mold myself into a woman I thought I should be, that you wanted me to be, but always, underneath, lay this struggle to reconcile those disparate halves. And this is who I am.”
He appraised her in silence for several moments, then reached up, curled a lock of her hair around his finger. He smiled, a sad and poignant look filtering into his eyes. “Meggie Brogan, with the wild red hair, who belongs by the sea,” he whispered. “Who’ll write her books in a romantic cottage overlooking the waters of Shelter Bay on the Oregon coast. Who’ll run crab boats with her lover’s son. Be a community stalwart and famous for her annual crab boils on the marina.” He paused, his eyes darkening, glimmering. “Who’ll travel for her research and dress up for her interviews, but retreat to this place that is her home, and where her roots go down deep.”
Tears filled her eyes. His smile faded. “Who learned, once again, how to find the sweet, sad release that comes from tears, and from opening her heart.” A pause. “I love you, Meg, I always will.” He came slowly to his feet.
“Where are you going?”
“To pack. I need to let you get on with it. But know one thing, I’m a phone call away. And I’m the best goddamn forensic shrink consultant you’re going to find when you need one again.”
CHAPTER 28
A week later, on a cold but clear Sunday morning, Meg and Noah were scrubbing and mopping the Crabby Jack floors clean of sea gunk, Meg doing her best with her right hand in a cast.
“When will we move back in here?” Noah asked.
“Soon, I hope,” she said. “I’m putting my old house on the market next week now that it’s all fixed up.” That dream Blake had painted for her, writing by the sea in a renovated boathouse, had seized hold of her. “Irene would love it, too, I think.” She smiled, wiping her brow with the back of her wrist. “And she has a nurse to help her now, so she’ll be safe.”
He started to cry. Finally releasing. Meg dropped her mop and held him while he sobbed. Finally, she could offer succor. Grief. She understood it. It was her old friend. She knew its tricky paths. How it could come and go, and surprise you in unexpected ways.
“I miss him,” he said, his voice muffled by her jacket.
“I know. Me too.” She stroked his hair.
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br /> “We should have waited for him. Maybe he’d have come out.”
Meg closed her eyes. She’d been through this so many times herself—the questions. Was there something else she could have done? Was there a better way to have softened the blow with Noah?
Save my boy. Look after him … please, do not let me die for nothing …
She kissed his towhead, inhaling his scent—like sunshine and hay. “We’ll make this work, Noah. I’m not going to lie to you, ever, and the first truth I will tell you is that it doesn’t get easier over time. It just gets different. And it’s never the same for anyone. Each one of us grieves in their own way, and the hurt can sneak up on you at funny times. But I think you already learned that, when you lost your mom. I think that’s why it was so hard when I came into your and your dad’s lives.”
He was silent a while. Then he nodded, and looked up slowly. “You told me on the yacht that you can’t destroy the ghosts. You can kill people, but their ghosts will always stay alive inside you.”
“What I meant was—”
“Will Dad talk to me? Like Sherry talks to you?”
Tears flooded into Meg’s eyes. For a moment she couldn’t speak. “I … I don’t know,” she whispered. “It’s different for everyone. When I was little I used to go down to the beach and sit and wait for Sherry’s spirit to come to me, and … sometimes I think she did.” Meg paused. “Why don’t we do that—go across to the spit later, and find a warm place in the dunes, and just sit there and listen to the waves, and think about the people we love who are not with us anymore? Would you like that?”
“Yes,” he said, looking away from her and picking up his scrubbing brush.
A memory stirred through her, Jonah’s words in the corn maze.
Are you happy? … What do you want out of life—children?
Happiness was a strange thing. Perhaps in her sadness she was content in her new role here now, with Noah. And Irene. With this town, and her writing, and the books that lay ahead. And she was struck suddenly by the disparate ways in which people could become family.
She’d always wanted a child, but never could have anticipated a family would become hers in this way. She reached for her mop, and as she did, something outside the window caught her eye. Her heart kicked.
“Noah!” she whispered urgently. “Look, over there.” She pointed.
He stilled, glanced up.
“Lucy!” He dropped his scrubbing brush, scrambled out of the office door, raced along the gravel. He fell to his knees, and hugged his black Lab, who was all skin and bone. Meg ran out after him. Lucy wagged her tail.
“Lucy.” He sobbed, burying his face in her dusty fur. “Lucy, you came home!”
Meg joined him in the puppy pile, stroking Lucy.
“She’s so thin,” he said, surging to his feet, fire crackling fiercely back into his green eyes. “We need to feed her, get her some water. Come, Lucy, want some food, girl? Come.” Lucy followed Noah into the building.
Meg stood, watching the boy and dog go. Her heart ached. She was about to follow them when she heard the sound of a vehicle approaching down the gravel drive. She started and spun around.
State police. Her chest went tight. An officer got out. She went up to meet him, drawing her jacket close against the cold. The breeze ruffled his hair. He took off his shades.
And she knew. She just knew. They’d found his body.
“You found him?” she whispered.
“We did, ma’am.”
Her knees crumpled out from under her.
The cop led her over to a wooden stump under the covered deck area, and helped her sit. Noah came up to the window. She made a motion with her hand, telling him to wait inside for a minute.
“He was found three days ago.”
“Three?” she whispered. “Where?”
“Ma’am, he’s alive.”
Shock gripped her like a vise. “What?”
“He’s alive. He just came around. Until now they didn’t know who he was.”
Meg’s world pitched like a boat at sea. “I … I don’t understand.”
“He was found among rocks with several other bodies from a small pleasure craft that washed ashore several miles south of Whakami. He was unconscious, had no ID on his person. It was assumed he was one of the pleasure-boat crew. Coast Guard and law-enforcement personnel have been working hard to match up bodies with missing persons and boats since the storm. They were looking in the wrong direction with him, until he came around after surgery.”
“Surgery?”
“He’s badly injured, ma’am.”
“But he’s alive, he’s talking?”
The officer opened his mouth, but she lurched to her feet. “Noah! Get out here, Noah!”
“Wait.” The cop’s hand clamped on her arm. “He lost his right hand,” he said quietly, as Noah flung open the door. “He lost a lot of blood. Head injury. Back injury. Broken femur. It’s going to be a long road.”
“Where is he?!”
Noah came up, Lucy in tow.
“They’re airlifting him to Chillmook General. There’s a surgical team on standby. He needs further amputation.”
“Noah … Noah, come here.” Tears streamed down her face. Her brain spun so dizzyingly she thought she might throw up, so wildly she couldn’t even begin to articulate her thoughts or emotions, or absorb the cop’s words. She was acting on gut drive. All she wanted to do was to see him, to prove it with her own eyes. To touch him. “He’s alive! Your dad—they say he’s alive. He … He made it. He’s going to make it.”
“He didn’t drown?”
“No, Noah—” Her voice caught on a sob as she crouched down and gripped his shoulders. “They found him. He’s badly injured, but he … he’s going to make it. He will.”
Noah just stared, eyes wide. His father’s eyes. Then as comprehension appeared to dawn in his face, emotion started to gleam. A tear slid down his cheek.
The cop said, “I can take you to the hospital now.”
They piled into the cruiser, Lucy too. Meg clutched Noah’s hand tight. So tight. Her whole body was tight. Scared. Thrilled. Terrified.
The surgeon came forward in scrubs to meet them.
“You the family?”
“Me and Noah.” She held his hand tight.
He gestured to a group of chairs nearby and seated himself. Meg tensed. She and Noah sat. The state police officer had offered to stay outside with Lucy. Meg’s focus narrowed only on this man in his green scrubs now, this man who’d operated on Blake.
The cop had taken her aside prior to entering the hospital, and told her that Blake had used an ax—the fire ax—to chop off his own hand. Blake Sutton, an army vet, a trained medic accustomed to operating under impossible circumstance, a medic who’d done countless emergency amputations on others, had used his free hand to fashion a tourniquet with wiring and tubing he’d pulled from the wall as he was going down. He’d used the ax she’d been hacking through the door with to chop off his own hand. That was how badly he wanted to live. That was how badly he wanted to see his son again. That was what he’d told doctors when he came around after they’d operated on his hand. He’d stuck his bleeding stump into fire and coals on the boat, and seared off the veins. And he’d managed to climb back into the whale boat with his cooked, smoking stump, and he made it some distance before passing out. The rest, he’d told the team, he couldn’t remember.
An expert group of doctors, led by this surgeon seated in front of Meg now, had gone in again to amputate more.
“He’s going to pull through,” the doctor said, his clear brown eyes earnest. “All things considered.”
“Meaning?”
“There’s always a risk of infection. We took off a clear margin.” He held her eyes. “His presence of mind, under duress, the pain he must have endured—the human will to live is phenomenal. His military training, operating under stress and extreme circumstances, attack, could only have helped.”
Noah nodded in somber silence.
The surgeon talked a bit about the future, prosthetics, but Noah interrupted.
“Can we see my dad now?”
The surgeon nodded. “But go easy on the big guy.” He smiled. It crinkled his eyes. “It’s going to take a while.”
When they walked in, Blake believed he’d died and gone to heaven, and this was a vision come to him. Noah and Meg. Alive. In one piece. Meg’s arm in a cast. Her free hand holding his son’s.
“Daddy?” Noah whispered.
“Come here, champ.”
Noah rushed forward. With his good arm, Blake grabbed his boy, and just held him. Tears filled his eyes, and spilled from the corners. Meg bent over, kissed them away, kissed his mouth. “They say you’re one stubborn brute,” she whispered, holding his eyes. “That you refused to die.”
He gave a weak smile. “I wanted that second chance, Meg,” he whispered. “I was not letting it go, not this time. Those last words you said to me … they made me fight. They saved me.”
She swiped emotion from her eyes, and his chest crunched. So much to say, and no words would come to him. It was all just there. The two people he cared about most in the world.
“We’re fixing the marina, Dad. We’re fixing Crabby Jack’s. The water got in, but we went to look, and we’re cleaning up, and we can do it, Dad. We can. We can still get it ready for a grand spring opening.”
Blake’s eyes swam. “God, I love you, champ.” His eyes locked with his son’s. “And you know what—you’re going to be my right-hand man, right?”
He saw Meg’s gaze go to the tented structure over his right hand. And her mouth tightened.
“Small mercies, huh,” he said to her. “Good thing I’m left-handed.”
She clasped his left hand, lacing her fingers tightly through his.