Home Before Dark

by Susan Wiggs

  Lila smiled a little. “I wanted to fly.”

  “Are you here by yourself, ma’am?” Dr. Martinez asked her in a sympathetic tone.

  What he was really asking was, Are you all alone, did your husband dump you, is there no one here to pick up the pieces when you fall apart?

  “My husband is out of town, but he’ll be here as soon as he can,” she said. “What happens next?”

  “The highway patrol might want to interview her. She’ll be discharged, barring any unforeseen changes in her condition.” He handed her a clipboard and pen. “You’ll need to fill this out.”

  Luz took the forms, and her teeth chattered as relief rolled through her. Then she forced herself to ask the dreaded question: “What about the other kids?”

  “Four of them are being treated here.” His dark eyes were thickly lashed, and soft with sympathy and secrets. “Another one of the victims was life-flighted from the scene to Brackenridge.”

  “Who?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say, Mrs. Benning.”

  The constriction in her chest unfurled into ribbons of pain. She had read it a thousand times in the paper—The victim’s name will be released pending notification of the family…. And then she dared to think the unthinkable. Thank God it was someone else’s child and not mine.

  Dr. Martinez’s pager vibrated against a rolling metal table. “Would you excuse me a moment?”

  Luz nodded, lost in her daughter again. Lila seemed to be dozing, or perhaps hiding behind closed eyes. It struck Luz to the core, how close Lila had come to dying or perhaps losing a limb, injuring herself permanently.

  I wanted to fly. All her life, she’d sought things Luz couldn’t give her. Flying was only one of them.

  Forcing herself to concentrate, Luz worked her way through the lengthy, detailed forms. Medical history. Her hand shook as she began filling in the blanks.

  Luz used to dream, too. Growing up, she imagined herself traveling the world, taking pictures of things most people would never see. The Taj Mahal, the caves of Lascaux, the Plains of Nasca. A husband and kids had never figured into that dream. But Luz had put her own dreams away years earlier to embrace a life she’d never anticipated for herself.

  She had never believed in love at first sight until the day it had come knocking in the form of an earnest law student, smiling at her across a crowded library study table. In that moment, the color of her dreams had changed. They decided to get married right away. Luz would work while Ian finished his law degree, then she’d complete her own schooling. There was never any question but that she’d put his education first, as she had Jessie’s. Luz had a talent for waiting. Maybe her mother had trained her to do that—to wait. All through her childhood she had waited—for a bus to pick her up, for her mother to notice her, for a check to come in…

  Ian wanted to be a death-row attorney. She didn’t really understand what that meant at the time. She thought marrying a lawyer meant stability, freedom from want. She envisioned a substantial house in a shady, old-Austin neighborhood, parties packed with interesting—no, fascinating—friends. Their future was set, golden with promise.

  The one dark spot was the fact that Jessie and Ian disliked one another at first sight. They weren’t rude about it, but…strained. When she asked them about it, separately, neither one really articulated the problem. Jessie said, “I want to make sure you’ll be happy with a guy like him.” And Ian said, “She’s a flake.”

  Luz defended her sister, as she always did, but Jessie and Ian never did warm up to one another. Then, two weeks before Luz and Ian were to marry, Jessie had shocked everyone with the news of her pregnancy and the fact that she couldn’t keep the baby.

  When Luz asked who the father was, she simply said, “He’s not an option.” Luz assumed he was married. She offered to help Jessie. It wasn’t as though Jessie would be the world’s first single mom. Jessie admitted she truly wanted to have the baby, but it was impossible. She was so scared. She’d cried straight through an entire night; Luz knew because she sat up with her. “I couldn’t even keep a goldfish alive,” Jessie sobbed, referring to some long-ago childhood pet.

  Simon had invited her to join a photography project under-written by the BBC, which would begin in the fall overseas and end, perhaps years later, with a traveling global exhibit. The work would be hard for someone who was single and unattached. For someone trying to raise a baby, it would be impossible. Still, Jessie wanted to go. She had to go. It meant everything to her. It was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

  A baby was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Luz remembered thinking.

  Jessie had said, “I’m a terrible person. I’m so ashamed. But I’d be even more terrible as this baby’s mother. That would be the real cruelty.”

  Luz told Ian she wanted them to adopt the baby when it was born. He turned white as flea powder and asked why. She told him she couldn’t let Jessie give it away. Their unorthodox childhood had rendered Jessie incapable of being a mother. Yet it had the opposite effect on Luz. She wanted to mother the world. “That child is my own flesh and blood,” Luz said.

  Ian stammered out a question about the baby’s father, and Luz explained her suspicions about Simon. Luz would always think of Ian’s agreement as a surrender. She had won the battle. She was always secretly jealous of those adoptive couples who embraced the idea with a unified ecstasy. The truth was, she had dragged Ian kicking and screaming into fatherhood.

  It had made her love him all the more. Instead of the planned honeymoon in Hawaii, they had a baby at Women’s Hospital. They promised each other they’d take a trip later, when the baby was old enough to travel.

  Seven months into Jessie’s pregnancy, something went wrong. Weeks premature, the baby girl came almost without warning and was born too quickly for the doctors to stop the contractions. The newborn was put on life support. From the moment of the birth, Luz loved the tiny girl with a fiercely protective intensity that burned like fire.

  Jessie went a little crazy when the doctors told her the prognosis. She insisted on signing the adoption papers mere hours after the birth. Since the chances of Lila’s survival were so slim, Luz and Ian went ahead and signed, if only to give the baby two parents to grieve for her and a name other than Baby Girl Ryder. Luz asked Jessie if there was anyone she should call—meaning the baby’s father. But Jessie only said, “He knows.” Luz thought she was delirious.

  Lila became her whole world, that helpless miracle encased in glass, defying the odds by surviving day after day. Luz sat vigil in the NICU, inseparable from the clear Lucite isolette that contained her baby. She celebrated every artificial breath pumped into the undersized body. She thanked God for every moment Lila survived without coding. Luz’s devotion flowed into the baby like lifeblood from a gestating mother’s umbilical cord. She nourished the struggling newborn with a love so powerful it was a pulsing, physical force.

  The day they brought Lila home, Luz put away the travel books and set her dreams on the shelf. And, as exhausted by the ordeal as any woman who’d endured a difficult labor, Luz forgot that Lila had not been carried under her own heart. The unsleeping vigil gave Luz her own sort of fierce insanity, and she embraced a new dream—to see her child grow and thrive. And she did, turning into a magical little girl, an unasked-for gift for which Luz thanked God with tears of gratitude.

  But Jessie was a part of Lila, too, Luz acknowledged as she made a row of checkmarks in the No column in response to the hospital questionnaire with its inevitable queries about family health history. What if she’d needed blood? Luz shuddered. The accident, coupled with Jessie’s appearance out of the blue, was a slap of cold reality about Lila’s biological parentage.

  Then she filled out the inevitable “responsible party” information. Dear God, how simple it had been to honor Jessie’s request to keep the adoption secret. In returning to Edenville, they reinvented themselves, reshaped their goals and dreams. They stopped planning trips—that seemed futil
e given all their debts and obligations. Then Wyatt came along, and Owen and finally Scottie. Not all of the pregnancies were planned, of course, but all were welcomed with a quiet, almost stoic joy. Ian worked hard and was a good dad, although he had always treated Lila differently than the boys. He was haunted by the nightmare of almost losing her at birth. In contrast, Luz loved her babies and loved being a mom so much she didn’t realize she was losing herself.

  Years and dreams faded away like the fall color in the lost maples of Eagle Lake, so gradually that she didn’t notice until one day she looked up and all the brilliant pink and amber and orange had dissolved to a dull, uniform buckskin brown. She refused to allow herself to feel bitter. Every day was so full. She had so much, a husband who adored her, four active, healthy kids—

  Luz bit her lip and completed the form. Then she watched Lila sleep for a while, growing restless as the minutes ticked by. Across the hall, she could see Heath’s parents consulting with three doctors, and from the stricken look on their faces, she knew the news was not good. She turned away, hoping they wouldn’t see her. Survivor guilt was its own kind of pain.

  Setting aside the clipboard, she stood and paced, darting glances at Lila. She was like a Celtic princess, lying there, delicate and ethereally lovely. Yet she seemed to possess the same deeply embedded wildness of her birth mother, the same attention-stealing personality, the same beguiling mixture of cleverness and charm. Luz wondered how Jessie could be so…so present in a child she had left before seeing her first sunrise.

  “Mrs. Benning?”

  She looked up with a vaguely guilty start. The speaker tipped a felt cowboy hat in her direction, then removed it. He was a stocky man in the long sleeve blue shirt and tie and low-heeled cowboy boots of the DPS uniform. His badge identified him as P. McKnight. Strapped to his shoulder and hip were the classic tools of his trade—a holstered gun, handcuffs, a walkie-talkie, a nightstick. He exuded the confidence of a man sworn to protect and defend, but with an unreasoning anger, she had the thought that he’d failed to protect Lila from her own rebellious nature, or to defend her from the hazards of a carload of friends.

  “I’m Officer McKnight, ma’am. I need to review somethings in the accident report,” he said. He told her more than he asked her, and they put together the likely scenario. Lila had sneaked out to join Heath Walker in his Jeep. They’d picked up the other kids and gone hill-hopping. Luz found herself squirming as Officer McKnight delved into her private struggles with Lila. The falling grades, the increasing truancy rate, the inscrutable silences, the bursts of shouting when frustration overwhelmed them. The beer and pot. How long had that been going on? For the life of her, Luz couldn’t say.

  She gazed helplessly into the highway patrolman’s world-weary eyes. “I love my daughter. I never saw this coming. I never knew she was…that she would sneak out and drink beer and smoke weed.”

  His walkie-talkie burbled and growled, and he excused himself. Luz glanced at her watch—5:30 a.m. Lord, where had the night gone? And where the hell was Ian?

  Luz stepped out into the waiting area, digging into her purse for change. She plugged a few coins in the pay phone and dialed.

  Jessie picked up in the middle of the first ring. “How is she?”

  “She’s okay,” Luz said hastily, trying to spare her sister the gut-tearing horror of the unknown. “A few cuts and bruises. They’re releasing her as soon as— I actually don’t know what we’re waiting for. I couldn’t get hold of Ian, but I left a message. I’m sure he’s on his way from Huntsville.” She hated how that sounded, as though she couldn’t find her husband and was making excuses for him.

  “What happened?” Jessie asked.

  Luz took a deep breath. She felt unexpectedly defensive as she twisted the silver phone cord around her index finger. “She sneaked out last night.”

  A long, tense hesitation hummed across the line. Luz couldn’t read her sister’s silence. Taking a deep breath, she went on, “She met up with some other kids, and they went hill-hopping.” Luz shifted the phone from one ear to the other and wiped her sweaty palm on her pant leg, then proceeded to describe the latest fad activity to her sister. As she spoke, she pictured Heath’s Jeep flying through the air, strewing children among the scrub oaks and tumbleweeds along the way. “Apparently it’s a new extreme sport.”

  Another hesitation. Then Jessie said, “That’s not exactly new.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember that El Dorado I had when I was sixteen?”

  “Vaguely.” She recalled an old green heap, one window stuck in the down position, rockabilly music blaring from a tinny radio. Then she recalled they’d had it towed to the salvage yard after Jessie drove it clunking home, its right front tire in shreds and the front end damaged beyond repair.

  A chill prickled over her skin. “Are you saying—”

  “Ridgetop Road, on the way to the quarry, right? Seven Hills? I guess stupidity must be a family trait. So you’re sure Lila is okay.”

  “Yes. Shaken.” Luz decided not to say anything about the drinking.

  “What about the boy?”

  “How did you know there was a boy? I didn’t mention any boy.”

  “There’s always a boy involved in something like this, isn’t there? You said she met up with some other kids.”

  “She did. There were three boys and three girls in the car.”

  “Oh, God.” Jessie sounded nauseous. “So is everyone okay?”

  “I don’t think so. One of them was taken to Brackenridge. I think—” She turned into the little nook of the pay phone and pressed herself against the wall, trying to disappear. “I’m afraid he’s in bad shape, but nobody’s talking. I’m scared for Lila. Afraid of how she’ll cope when all this becomes real to her.”

  “She’ll be all right,” Jessie said. “We’ll make it be all right.”

  “Thanks, Jess. We’ll be home as soon as we can.”

  Luz hung up the phone, flashing on an image of her sister. What a shock it had been to see her walking up to the porch, a younger, more vivid version of Luz herself. Breaking into Jessie’s own trademark thousand-watt smile, she had whirled into Edenville like a Technicolor tornado. Now she was in charge of Luz’s boys.

  Luz turned to scan the waiting area. She had brought Lila to the E.R. more than once, when she’d split her chin open falling from a rope swing, and when she’d broken her arm jumping off that barn roof. Wyatt had come in with a gash from a rusty nail one Sunday last year, and a few summers back, she’d driven herself here, not wanting to present that particular ailment to her hometown family practitioner.

  Now the waiting area appeared chaotic, jammed with more and more people as time went on. When she recognized Mrs. Linden, the school counselor, she realized how big this was, growing bigger by the minute. There were six kids in the car. Six families, six mothers awakened from a sound sleep in the middle of the night. The effects of this would ripple outward like circles in water, radiating from a single dropped stone, getting larger and encompassing more and more each second.

  People were crying, arguing, praying. The police were trying to question everyone. Nell Bridger collapsed into Mrs. Linden’s arms, and something inside Luz curled up in horror. Nell had two sons, Travis and Dig. Which of them had been in the Jeep? Both?

  She tried to navigate her way across the lobby to Nell, but her friend left quickly, leaning on the counselor. The noise rose in a crescendo of despair. Luz wanted to clap her hands over her ears to drown out the cacophony of fear and rage.

  Into the streaming chaos walked her husband, worried eyes scanning the waiting area. Luz’s heart rose when she saw him coming toward her. They met in the middle of everything and she clung to him, her safe harbor in a storm of confusion.

  She said nothing, for she feared that bitter accusations might come out. Often his work consumed him. His job was no mere nine-to-five occupation. He’d missed birthdays and first steps, swim meets and teacher confer
ences because he’d been in court or in session, racing against time to rescue someone from being executed. She was proud of the work he did but sometimes—God, sometimes—she wished for more of him. For all of him.

  “Is she okay?” he murmured. “Can I see her?”

  Luz clenched her hands into his shirt. Her knees liquified, and she nearly collapsed against him. “She’s going to be fine.”

  They embraced one more time and a flash went off. The media had arrived, hungry for anything that would sell papers or airtime. Grabbing Ian’s hand, Luz wove through the crowd and into the hallway, then hurried on to the exam room.

  Lila was sitting up in bed, sipping something from a plastic bottle. Her hair formed a ruby-toned nimbus around her head, and the cruel starkness of the overhead lights sucked all the color from her face. When she spied Ian, she cut her eyes away. “Daddy.”

  “Hey, sweet thing.” Ian halted at the end of the bed and regarded her with a sort of restrained reverence that was almost fear. He didn’t touch Lila other than to put his hand on the starched sheet covering her leg. Ian rarely touched Lila anymore; since puberty hit, he regarded her as some exotic creature that could be handled only by trained specialists. “You’re sure she’s all right,” he whispered to Luz.

  “Yes. Stay with her.” Luz ached to be away from the hospital. She wanted to sweep her family out of the putty-colored halls, out of the exam room with all this frightening equipment for determining damage, life or death. “I’m going to find someone to help us get the hell out of here.” She left him standing by the bed.

  After the ordeal of coping with a premature infant, she knew how to handle the bureaucracy of a hospital. Her determination hardened to rudeness as she tracked down Dr. Martinez and informed him that if he failed to discharge Lila immediately, she intended to simply leave with her daughter. The doctor promised to see to it right away. Luz was always surprised when people found her intimidating. Yet her children made her fierce. They always did. They always had. From the first moment she laid eyes on Lila, Luz had been aggressively protective.