Deliver Her: A Novel

by Patricia Perry Donovan

  “Not about the guitar. The notes. What did she say?”

  “I don’t know. Stuff. She cried a bunch. Guess what? Shana’s here.”

  OMG. Why was Shana there?

  Jack didn’t know. “They talked a bunch upstairs. In your room.”

  “Who talked?”

  “Mom and Shana. Now she’s sleeping on the couch. I stayed up later than her.” Abruptly, he sniffled. “Come home, Al. Everybody’s sad. I miss you.”

  “Miss you, too.”

  “So now that you’re found, you can come tomorrow, right?”

  His first baseball game. Obviously, she wouldn’t make it. Neither would her parents, leaving Jack with only Melissa in the stands to cheer him, not his whole family as he had asked.

  “I’ll try, Jack.”

  “Everybody says that.”

  “I know. It sucks.” She wanted to pump Jack for more details about Shana, but her godmother chose that moment to take the phone from him.

  “Here you go, Alex.” Mia held out a T-shirt.

  “You don’t have to lend me any more of your precious stuff.”

  “Don’t worry. It’s old.”

  Alex took it, wadding it under her head like a pillow.

  Springs creaked as Mia sat on her bed. “Listen. I’ve been thinking about before.”

  Alex stiffened. Please don’t give me any more shit. I’ve had enough today.

  “In the car . . . I shouldn’t have said what I said. I wish you’d told me the whole story, but at least you told someone.” Mia crossed her legs and leaned toward Alex. “You must have totally freaked out, with a big moose coming out of nowhere.”

  “I did. The hole that thing made on top of the car . . .” Touching her cheek, Alex recalled the sleet spraying through the opening.

  “It must have been so scary.” Mia’s eyes softened. “Anyway, sorry I went off on you.”

  Here it was again: sincerity oozing out of Mia’s every pore. Could Alex trust her? She twirled her braid. “I’m sorry, too.”

  “Get some sleep. I heard your parents are coming at the crack of dawn.” She slid under her covers.

  “Wait, Mia. Is that girl from Hope Haven OK?”

  Ellen was taking care of Reyna, Mia said, reaching up and switched off the light. “I hope that girl figures it out. Reyna thinks running away is the answer, but stuff always comes back ten times worse.”

  Alex squirmed. She’d heard the gist of what Mia was saying before: from her therapist and from her mom, angry and bleary eyed at the top of the stairs at two in the morning, pulling her fuzzy mom robe around herself. “I know you’re hurting about Cass. I can’t imagine what that feels like. But you need to face things. Please let us help.” Alex had given her mom the finger and slammed her bedroom door. How about you and Dad help yourself, she had longed to yell. Didn’t they have a clue how much she needed them to be a family right now?

  But now, crammed on the trundle bed next to Mia, the artist’s words spoke to her heart. (“Truth hurts,” Cass used to say to her when they were younger and arguing over stupid stuff.) Maybe Mia was right. In Lydia’s tears, in Jack’s neediness, even in the serious eyes of Jamie, the girl with the puppy she had never met, Alex began to understand the miserable consequences of a bad decision.

  And maybe, just maybe, Alex blaming her despair on her parents was merely an excuse to avoid facing her problems.

  Alex rolled onto her back and sighed. Enough reflection for one night. “What’s the deal with these pictures, anyway? Were you, like, obsessed with purple?”

  Mia chuckled in the dark. “For a while. My art therapist said purple is the color of good judgment. Spiritual fulfillment.”

  Alex felt the hair rise up on her bare arms. Cass at work again. Was it serendipity or destiny that Cass’s parting gift had been purple, too? With a stab of sadness, Alex thought of the lost reminder of happier times.

  If only she could conjure a time machine and go way, way back, before the vodka-blurred bits, to the start of her Sweet Sixteen, when she and Cass halted at the top of the ballroom steps and shrieked with excitement, drinking it all in: the sea of tables swagged in black and white tulle, the gauzy curtains of the fortune-teller’s booth a shot of fuchsia in the corner, the mirrored reflections of the disco ball (retro, but Cass had insisted) dappling floor to ceiling. Cass yanked her down the steps, and the friends circled the room, exclaiming over the photos topping each table that marked a year of Alex’s life, Cass essential to many of those moments. They were whooping over year sixteen’s—one of Alex, Cass and Shana blowing kisses in Alex’s bedroom—when laughter at the ballroom door signaled the arrival of the first guests.

  “Oh, my God,” Alex squealed. “They’re here. Feel my hands.”

  “Here. Use this.” Cass handed Alex a cloth table napkin to dry her palms.

  “Thanks.” She blinked at her best friend. “Do I look OK?”

  “Almost.” Cass reached up and righted Alex’s tiara. “There. Now you’re perfect.” She grabbed Alex’s hand. “Ready for the most unforgettable night of your life, girlfriend?”

  “More than ready.”

  They stepped onto the dance floor, Alex’s crown catching the disco ball’s reflection, laying lacy patterns of light on the hardwood.

  “Ready for what?” Mia’s voice was foggy with sleep.

  Alex gasped, horrified she’d spoken aloud. “Sorry. Half-asleep.”

  Mia groped for the lamp. “Hey, can I ask you something? What did you mean in the car before . . . when you couldn’t believe it was happening again?”

  No. Please don’t make me think about that now. “Um, no clue. I was probably, like, in shock or something.”

  Mia gazed at her a long moment. “OK. ’Night.”

  In the dark again, Alex suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of going on like this for one more second. She desperately needed to talk to somebody right now—the weight of the day and the year was too heavy to bear any longer.

  She turned over to face Mia’s bed. “Her name was Cass,” she whispered.

  The lamp back on, Mia rubbed her eyes. “What?”

  “Cass.” Alex’s voice grew stronger. “She was my best friend.”

  Mia sat up and wrapped herself in a purple afghan.

  “I killed her,” Alex sobbed. “I killed my best friend.”

  MEG

  How was it possible to live with someone for so long and not notice the signs, the red flags? And she, a nurse. Meg turned on the bedside lamp, a ruby-colored faux hurricane lantern, and sat up to listen while Jacob came clean about his drug use, the origins of which coincided not with his association with Ben but rather with the death of his father, Walter Carmody.

  His dad’s passing two years ago, when the economy was still firmly entrenched in a recession, sent Jacob into a tailspin, he said. He and his dad were close, and the loss hit him hard.

  Meg nodded. It had surprised her at the time that she hadn’t seen Jacob shed a tear over the loss. But, then again, everyone grieved in their own way, she had told herself. When she questioned him about it, he had said he needed to be strong for his mother.

  “When he died, I not only lost my dad but also my business partner,” Jacob continued. Having had little exposure to the practical side, which Walter deftly managed until his death, Jacob found himself ill-equipped to estimate costs, manage the books, seek out new projects, especially in a recession. On his own, he vastly underquoted the small jobs he did manage to get, then scrambled to complete them, a vicious cycle that only set him back further.

  “Why didn’t you ask me for help?” Meg asked.

  “I kept thinking things would get better. And you were already stepping up, taking on all those extra shifts,” he said. “I needed to do this on my own—to know I could provide for you guys.”

  “This isn’t 1950, Jacob. We’re supposed to be a team.”

  “I didn’t feel like a team player. I was depressed. And anxious. So I went to the doctor for somet
hing to take the edge off.”

  “A psychiatrist?”

  “No, a regular doctor.” Not their family practitioner, but a walk-in clinic, he said. “I didn’t need a shrink.”

  Of course not; admitting that would have placed Jacob squarely on “touchy-feely” turf. But if what Jacob was telling her was true, why hadn’t Meg seen any insurance claims?

  “I paid for them myself. I didn’t want you to worry.”

  You mean, you didn’t want me to know. “I would have understood you were taking care of yourself. There’s no shame in taking antidepressants.”

  He shrugged. The medication costs became more than he could manage. Around the same time the construction work had all but dried up, Ben offered him a place on the tree crew, where drugs were plentiful. From that point on, everything he’d told Meg in the car was true, Jacob said, crossing his arms. “That’s the whole story, I swear.”

  Meg wanted to believe him. He deserved some credit for amending his story. Then again, he’d been living this whole other life, lying to her for over a year, so why should she believe him now?

  There was something else, too. The timeline he’d just outlined—the dearth of construction work, Ben taking him on, Jacob’s restlessness and irritability—paralleled the disintegration of their marriage. It was a perfect storm of conditions leading to Jacob’s pronouncement on the deck that night.

  “Is this why you wanted out of our marriage?” Meg asked. “If you were feeling so desperate, why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “I felt guilty. I messed up so bad, I thought you’d be better off without me.”

  She sighed. “Damn it, Jacob. You don’t get to decide that.” She got out of bed, dragging the quilt with her, and walked to the window. Amber streaked the sky over the empty swimming pool. Smoke rose from the trucks’ cabs idling in the parking lot. It would be daylight in a few hours. “What are we going to tell her, Jacob?”

  When she turned to him for a response, Jacob’s lower lip was trembling, just as Alex’s did when she was on the verge of tears, their father-daughter resemblance never stronger than at that moment.

  “Last Sunday. When you told me about the school. It sounded great. I wanted to help her, Meg. I did.” His voice cracked. “I love her so much.”

  ALEX

  “She never would have been in that car if it wasn’t for me,” Alex finished. “I hate myself.”

  There. She’d said it out loud. She didn’t dare look at Mia, expecting her to totally judge her. When she finally did, the artist’s eyes were filled with compassion, not contempt.

  “You’re making yourself sick over this, Alex. That night was an accident, too. Like today. It was fate.”

  “Don’t even say that.” Alex hated that word. The palm reader had spouted a bunch of crap about fate and outside forces and protection.

  “If you really feel that guilty, at least channel it by honoring your best friend’s memory.”

  “I am. Look.” Alex offered up her forearm to show Mia the tattoo she and Shana had designed: an infinity loop, sprinkled with three stars, one large and two small. “See, Cass’s star is the biggest.” It definitely had been worth all the pain and headaches of getting fake IDs and months of hiding the tattoo from her parents, she thought, running a finger around the loop.

  “A tat to memorialize someone is nice, but it’s only the start.”

  Alex yanked her arm away. Mia was right. She’d been taking small steps toward a new life. Maybe it was time for a big one. Was it possible she’d misread Cass’s signs? After all, this was a new way of communicating on both sides.

  Maybe Mia was Alex’s guardian angel after all.

  Then she remembered Evan. “It’s too late. Everything’s wrecked already.” She told Mia about the older boy, the regretted favors and the message from the rest-stop bathroom—more stupid actions that couldn’t be undone.

  Mia rolled her eyes. “He’s scum, Alex. Tell him to find himself some other mule. And your girl Shana? You might want to start fresh with a new set of friends.”

  Start fresh. As Mia turned out the lamp again, her advice spun in Alex’s head. Somebody else who wasn’t high on Shana. Alex sighed and rolled over, and under the watchful gaze of Mia’s purple princesses and butterflies she slept, finally, her last waking thought the realization the night had fallen eerily quiet outside Swiftriver.

  The storm was over.

  She’d barely closed her eyes when someone shook her, calling her name. This could not be starting again—was this Groundhog Day, the nightmare edition? I told you. I’m not going.

  “You have to, Alex.”

  Alex blinked at the vibrant sunlight pouring through Mia’s sheer curtains, illuminating the artist like an angel.

  “I’ve been trying to wake you up for, like, forever. There’s troopers downstairs. You have to talk to them.”

  SATURDAY

  MEG

  Meg woke to the wheeze of a sixteen-wheeler’s hydraulic brakes outside their curtainless window—and the familiar weight of Jacob’s arm draped over her bare stomach. Instinctively, she sucked in her gut.

  Neither had intended this to happen. At some point before daylight, Jacob had slipped into her bed, Meg settling against him as if it were the most natural thing in the world, as it had been for sixteen-plus years, absorbing his warmth in the drafty motel room, hoping to grab an hour of sleep. Both of them had been fully clothed.

  And then they weren’t. Their coupling was swift, intense—born of the day’s trauma and tragedy, a primal need for release—and nothing more, Meg told herself sternly. Despite their respective resentments, they remembered how to comfort one another, relying on intimate knowledge of each other, their shared history. Instinctively, they resumed their natural rhythms, finally dozing off in this habitual position.

  What wasn’t natural was the waking-up part. Holding her breath, Meg wriggled out from under his arm, so intent on not disturbing him she bumped her head on the headboard in the process. At the noise, Jacob groaned and turned over, blinking at her.

  Meg yanked up the sheets to her chin in attempted modesty. “Good morning.”

  “Morning. Meg, that . . .”

  “It’s OK, Jacob.” She rolled over to grab her scrubs from the floor. “You don’t have to say anything.”

  “I was just going to say, I’ve missed you. Last night was nice.” Yawning, he pushed himself up against the headboard. “Maybe we should just table this discussion until later.”

  “Of course. Alex.” The coffeemaker clock barely registered six. Had it only been twenty-four hours since she sat in the van with Jack and Angel? “Do you think it’s too early to go over there?”

  “I don’t care.” Jacob stepped into his pants and boots and hugged himself, bare chested. “What happened to the heat?”

  “I don’t know.” The radiator had given out some time after they’d fallen asleep. When it came to lodging, she and Carl Alden had vastly different standards. While Jacob used the bathroom, Meg checked in with Melissa, surprised to learn Shana had spent the night. She had been a good distraction for Jack, Melissa said.

  Outside, Jacob went directly to the passenger side of his truck. Meg gazed at him over her sunglasses. Was he letting her drive to keep the peace? Or had he taken something in the bathroom? His own sunglasses masked his eyes.

  When she climbed in next to him, Jacob squeezed her hand. “Let’s go get our daughter.”

  ALEX

  The troopers’ backs formed a burly, steel olive wall along Swiftriver’s counter. Anxious, Alex cleared her throat coming down the stairs, getting their attention.

  “Miss Carmody? Sorry to disturb you so early. Just have a few questions for you about yesterday.”

  Now I’ll get what I deserve, Alex thought, heart flip-flopping as she walked over to the counter.

  The trooper snapped open a pad. “Let’s start with yesterday morning.” He grilled Alex on every aspect of the accident, from the hours leading up to the
crash to everything after. How long had they driven without a break? Where had they stopped for lunch? Had the adults consumed any alcoholic beverages? Had she seen any weapons in the car? Had she noticed any erratic driving?

  Answering, it dawned on Alex it wasn’t her behavior they were concerned with but Camo Man’s.

  “Think, Miss Carmody,” said the shorter one, fake smiling at her. “Did anything jump out at you?”

  Alex folded her hands on her lap, cracking her knuckles. Did they not know what had happened? “Of course. A moose.”

  The two officers smirked.

  “I swear. There was a moose. Did he not tell you that part?” She gestured to the bench, where Camo Man nursed a mug of coffee.

  “What we meant was, did any circumstances of the accident seem unusual to you.”

  Duh. Jump out at you. Now they pegged her as a wiseass. She could see where this was going: they were trying to nail Camo Man. Alex had walked away from her driver-captor once. Now she had a chance to redeem herself. She sat up straight and flipped her braid over her shoulder.

  “He didn’t do anything wrong. The road was really slippery. He didn’t see the—”

  She stopped as the officer scribbled furiously. “Wait. What are you writing? What’s going to happen to him?”

  “Nothing, unless charges are filed. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” He turned the page of his pad. “OK, let’s focus on those men in the truck who picked you up.”

  Ugh. Alex’s skin crawled at the mention of them.

  When she’d climbed into the truck, the cab’s smoky dry heat had scorched her face like the sauna at Aunt Melissa’s gym. Ignoring her parents’ warnings about hitchhiking that played like a YouTube video in her brain, she settled on a scratchy blanket in the backseat and told them right away about Camo Man’s car in the ravine.

  “Don’t forget the purple scarf on the guardrail,” she’d prompted, as Chester called it in. “You can’t miss it.” Chester repeated her instructions. The troopers were on it, he promised. Relieved, Alex accepted the cigarette he offered, dragging on its unfiltered tip like it was the last one on earth. Kyle, the driver, was seriously quiet, but Chester made up for his silence with stories about the Kanc and missing hikers and bloody moose impaled on hoods of cars.