SULLIVAN'S MIRACLE

by Lindsey Longford

  “My imagination, I reckon.” He was troubled. Something had changed in her since the night, but he didn’t see a damn thing and neither did Nurse Beatrice.

  If anything were different, she would notice. She noticed everything, storing it in some mental file.

  All the same, he figured he’d wait a few more minutes. He would give Maggie as much time as she needed to come back to him. The meeting with Walker and the lawyers could wait.

  When Beatrice left, Sullivan leaned over and picked up Maggie’s thin wrist. “Hey, sugar-buns.” He stroked the underside skin. Her pulse was a mockery of the strong beat he had first touched, that pulse thrumming in sync with his own heart. He reached for an ice chip and tucked it into the corner of her mouth, letting it melt over her tongue and down her throat.

  “I know you’re in there listening, Maggie. Can’t fool me with that butter-won’t-melt-look. You don’t have a guileless bone in your whole sweet little body. And a very nice little body it is.” He ran his thumb over the side of her neck and down to her collarbone. She was all pale skin and bones.

  And spirit. It was that spirit flickering inside her that propelled the green line of the monitor into peaks instead of a long horizontal. It was that spirit that had delighted in sassing him and not giving him an inch he hadn’t earned.

  His Maggie was no wuss.

  He eased another ice chip down her throat. “Wouldn’t you like to wake up and see what a really swell hairstyle I’ve given you? Not as sexy as the topknot with an insecurity complex you create, though. Got to admit I like that topknot. I love the way it reads my mind and falls apart, letting all that gorgeous hair go wild around your face.” He wanted to see her hair spread again across his pillow, across his chest. Wanted to clothe himself in its warm richness. “If you wake up, I’ll go wild with you, sweetheart. Remember?”

  The monitor blipped and bleeped.

  “I don’t know what you’re doing or where you are, but I hope you’re having a damned good time, because I’m not. In case you’re interested, Maggie, you look fetching as hell in your open-backed hospital gown, but don’t turn over, sweetheart, or you’ll moon that guy over there in the oxygen tent. He might not recover.”

  *

  What was Sullivan talking about? Her nightgown? Maggie tried to tell him he was waking her up, and she wanted to sleep for another hour at least, and what was this stuff about her bare fanny? She tried, she really did, to tell him to shut up, but her mouth was dry and her tongue thick.

  He was shouting too loud. How did he expect her to sleep?

  “Beatrice! Stat!”

  Maggie tried to lick her parched lips, but her mouth wouldn’t work right. Who was poking her chest?

  Not Sullivan. She knew his touch.

  And she knew his voice. Remembered hearing it along a dark river somewhere.

  Seth’s Landing.

  She opened her eyes and saw Sullivan looking down at her. “Hey, Sullivan,” she croaked. “Don’t you have something—” she managed to get her tongue working “—more interesting to do?” She thought that’s what she said, but his face was so shocked she might have said aliens had landed on her chest and were tap-dancing on her nose.

  “Maggie?”

  The man looked as if he’d seen a ghost. The man looked like a ghost himself, burned to the bone. Somebody needed to tell him to take better care of himself. He needed a haircut and a shave.

  “Can you hear me?”

  He was shouting. Of course she could hear him. Why couldn’t he hear her? And he’d brought all these people into her bedroom. They would have to leave. She told them very clearly to get out of her room, but they only stared at her. Heck with ‘em. If they wouldn’t answer her, she was going back to sleep.

  She let her eyelids drift down. They’d gotten so heavy. Maybe aliens really were…

  “Maggie!”

  She reached out to him to tell him … something.

  Sullivan saw the flick of her little finger as he yelled.

  He rubbed the heels of his hands against his eye sockets, scrubbing hard. Maggie had heard him. She’d pushed at the tube in her mouth until Beatrice removed it.

  That series of gurgling sounds was so faint he wouldn’t have heard them if Chapman hadn’t pulled him closer to her.

  “Guess what, Mr. Barnett?” Chapman was thumping him on the shoulder. “Guess what?”

  Beatrice grabbed him around the waist and squeezed him like a squeaky toy. “Maggie’s going to be all right, Sullivan.” Her nose was wiggling like all get out. Beatrice’s eyes were damp as she hugged him. Finally realizing she had him wrapped in a bear hug, she stepped back, her face almost as pink as her nose. His knees buckled.

  Chapman grabbed him and plunked him into the chair. “That’s right. We’ve been watching for infection, but she’s fought off anything like that. We had to see if her body could survive the massive insult to her systems. I didn’t think she’d come out of the coma, if you want to know the truth, Mr. Barnett. She’s one damned lucky lady, let me tell you.”

  Sullivan bowed his head in his shaking hands.

  Maggie was going to live.

  *

  Once she started speaking, they couldn’t get her to shut up. She chatted about the weather, the hospital, Nurse Beatrice Bunny, everything except what had happened to her.

  He didn’t understand what she was trying to do.

  He wanted to ask her about that instant at the pier when she’d stepped in front of him.

  She wanted to talk about everything else.

  He could wait until he took her home.

  And if she thought she was going anyplace else except the cottage, she could go fly a kite. That’s what he told her when she argued with him, swearing on the illustrious names of an imaginary line of relatives that she would not go to the cottage.

  “You don’t have a choice, Maggie, so shut up.” He thumped her pillow.

  “Of course I have a choice. I’m not going. Period.” She thumped her pillow back the way it had been.

  Chapman himself told her she had to go with Sullivan or he wouldn’t release her from the hospital, even though she’d been out of the Intensive Care unit for a week.

  What Sullivan didn’t want to tell her yet was that Jackson, Ryder Thompson and Callahan had all posted bond on their attempted murder charges. They’d been arrested, but Sullivan, Maggie and Royal were the only witnesses.

  The wild card in the deck had turned out to be Royal instead of Maggie.

  Callahan and Thompson had implicated Royal, swearing under oath that Gaines had shot Jackson before arresting them in an attempt to avoid charges himself. With Palmaflora’s esteemed banker, mayor and police chief under indictment and on the loose, Sullivan didn’t want Maggie anywhere he couldn’t see her.

  Federal agents from a drawerful of alphabet agencies were settling into Palmaflora. Indictments were papering the county like parking stickers. One supervisor at a pulp company had been indicted by the county grand jury on forgery and conspiracy charges.

  A team of investigators from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development had upcoming subpoenas under preparation by the US Department of Justice for Callahan and three county officials, on the charge of receiving kickbacks for referrals in mortgage transactions.

  As the result of a pending federal grand jury investigation into his activities while director of the savings and loan, Callahan was being charged with misuse of monies and with making false entries in the thrift’s books.

  Conspiracy charges under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law were run-of-the-mill. Everyone was being charged with conspiracy.

  Convictions, however, in most of the cases, were going to be another matter, Sullivan kept hearing as he made phone calls and went on interviews. The complicated banking, real estate and toxic-dumping charges could drag on for years.

  Reid’s notes were a starting point, but the different agencies were all going to have a chance to stick
their respective oars in very muddy waters that would only become muddier.

  The chances were excellent that no one would ever be charged with Reid’s murder. No witnesses. No evidence. Nada. Zip.

  Sullivan was irate. He’d wanted Reid’s murderer caught and executed. He believed he could pull the lever of the electric chair himself every time he thought of Baby Paulie and his mother.

  But the charges of attempted murder involving Sullivan and Maggie were immediate and provable.

  The witnesses were alive and kicking.

  Sullivan intended to see that they kicked for many years to come.

  Maggie had found out Royal had been indicted.

  She’d been reading a newspaper article, Sullivan’s name on the byline, when he’d walked in. She’d folded the paper inward, the large black headline sandwiched between the back-page advertisements for a back-to-school sale. She’d looked up at Sullivan as he sat on the bed, the newspaper lying between them with its story of greed and betrayal. She’d touched the folded edge once as if she meant to speak, but she’d dropped the paper to the floor and said nothing.

  The television stations carried nightly reports updating the progress of the different investigations. Sullivan refused to be interviewed on camera, his protest against a world that preferred its news in bits and bites.

  Maggie had teased him about missing his opportunity to be a star.

  Royal had been interviewed, though, his photogenic features playing well to the camera, his crisp suit, dark gray and elegant—even Sullivan recognized the style of it—showing up well on the seven o’clock news as, flashing a smile, he’d said first, “No comment, guys.” As the local reporters persisted, he relented. He made a brief statement indicating that he’d known nothing of what had been happening. He had been at the meeting site because he’d been trying to catch up with his former partner to ask her a question about a meeting they’d had earlier.

  When he’d seen Jackson threaten her and Barnett and fire on them, he’d shot Jackson and arrested the men with him. Everything sounded plausible. He stepped through the minefield of implications and questions perfectly, never setting a foot wrong.

  Sullivan had seen the interview.

  Maggie had seen it.

  And they hadn’t discussed it.

  He waited for her to bring it up, reluctant to face her with the betrayal of her friend.

  But he would face her with it once he had her safe at the cottage. He could wait until they had time to sort through the muddle of what had happened and straighten out things between them, wait until she talked to him about real things, not all the folderol she’d been using as a wall between them. He didn’t know why she didn’t want to talk about Royal, but since she didn’t bring his name up, Sullivan wasn’t about to.

  There were issues between them they had to face. On his part. On hers.

  He had to sort out his own thinking, too.

  Maybe he had been crazy for a while and imagined those moments in the ambulance and at the pier.

  His inability to forget them made him uneasy. The more time passed, though, the more he questioned whether they’d actually happened.

  He wanted to believe in what he thought he’d seen, but was terrified to accept what his heart suggested with each beat.

  Didn’t dare believe in those moments.

  And backed away from their meaning.

  She’d saved him at the pier. He’d saved her during the days and nights at the hospital. Even Steven.

  Why turn that simple equation into something it wasn’t, couldn’t be?

  He let each ticking second move him further from the night he’d breathed his life into Maggie and believed her to be Lizzie, believed Lizzie had returned to him.

  Every day he added to his list of arguments against those moments. Hallucinations. Exhaustion. Sleep deprivation. Depression. He’d been at a low point when Maggie had entered his life. The night she’d walked up onto his deck he had been drunk and confused, lonely. Sex. Oh, hell, yes, sex was the best reason of all for arguing against the otherworldliness of those seconds when he thought he’d seen Maggie’s eyes mist into Lizzie’s gray ones and back again. The night he’d had sex with Maggie when she showed up at the cottage had been incredible.

  He forced himself to forget that sense of homecoming when he’d entered her, when she’d welcomed him into her, turning with him in that sweetest, wildest moment.

  Oh, yes. Sex could make you believe whatever you wanted to. Under the influence of hormones, a person might believe cows could fly to the moon.

  In his mind he had pages of arguments against accepting what he remembered. And all of the arguments were rational. They all made sense of everything that had happened.

  But.

  That was the crux of the situation. He accepted every rational point. Believed them. Was comfortable with them.

  But.

  At the end of each argument he found himself, against all logic, adding that small conjunction.

  What he remembered couldn’t possibly have been real.

  But.

  His heart beat to a different truth.

  And while he put in long hours with Walker, the lawyers and an assortment of gray-suited officials, Maggie talked a blue streak about nothing of importance to him.

  The wall growing larger day-by-day between them was invisible and very real.

  And time ticked on as he felt something precious slipping away from him with every day he added to his list of arguments.

  *

  The day Chapman released Maggie, Sullivan bundled her into his car while she ranted, raved and ripped into him. After fifteen minutes, she was too drained and too weak to continue her tirade. When he bribed her with a large, juicy hamburger on the way to the beach, she was too hungry for what she called real food to resist any longer.

  He figured they could talk about Royal and the trials when he had her safely settled at the cottage.

  “D’cious,” she muttered, a pink stream of special sauce decorating her chin. She ate half of the burger before falling asleep in the car.

  As had become his habit since Seth’s Landing, he checked the house before he brought a sleeping Maggie inside and settled her into the clean sheets on his bed. He’d thought he would never see that mass of cloudy curls spread across his pillow again. He trailed his finger down one strand that curled under her stubborn chin.

  What was Maggie to him?

  He didn’t know.

  Oh, during those hallucinatory days and nights after the shooting, he’d believed she was his other half, his soul mate. As Lizzie had been. In the grip of his hallucination, he’d merged the two and thought he loved the one, the one lying in his bed, her pink mouth soft in sleep, the quiet b-b-b he’d become used to making her bottom lip tremble.

  He cared for her. Lying on the bed with her in his arms, Sullivan admitted that. He had no problem now with admitting that he cared for her.

  The emptiness he’d lived with after Lizzie’s death had vanished, and in its place was … caring.

  To believe what he felt was anything more would be … unthinkable.

  He held her more closely, burying his face in the perfume of her hair, her skin. This was enough.

  He didn’t need love. Caring would be enough. So long as she stayed within arm’s reach. He pulled her closer to him, curving himself around her. Facing the computer, he saw their images, tiny, caught in the empty blackness of the monitor screen.

  As she recuperated during the days and nights at the beach with him, Maggie became a dance-away lover, the wall between them staying firmly in place, both of them growing increasingly afraid of disturbing the delicate equilibrium they’d established.

  She slept with him, her body turning in sleep toward his. She slept with him.

  That was all.

  And he wanted more.

  He wanted her the way she’d been with him at Seth’s Landing, urgent and straining against him. He wanted her the way she’d come to hi
m in the night, with that sense he’d had of something just out of his reach. He wanted her the way she’d been in that early morning, when their coming together had been exquisitely slow and dreamy, a homecoming.

  He wanted.

  But Maggie danced away from him to a distant beat he heard only faintly, the beat fading with each day.

  Sometimes he saw her studying him, her brown eyes deep and mysterious, filled with his reflection. She studied him as if she were waiting for a signal from him, but he couldn’t figure out what kind of signal that would be.

  One morning as she curled up with him in a chaise longue on the deck to watch the sunrise, the sun coming up from behind them to gild the shimmering sand stretching down to the gulf, she said, “Sullivan, I love this cottage. But I’m going back to my apartment.”

  Contented, peace lying inside him like a blessing, he wasn’t prepared for what she was telling him. He’d had no sense that this trap was lying in wait for him.

  She stumbled over her next words. “I know you don’t like surprises, but I didn’t know how to prepare you for my decision.”

  “Damned right I don’t like surprises. Why the hell would you go back to the apartment? Now after—”

  “After what, Sullivan?” she interrupted gently. “That’s what I’ve been waiting to hear from you. I know you, Sullivan Barnett.” She brushed her hand over his hair, down its too-long locks. “I know what you’ve been thinking.”

  “Yeah?” Aggression bubbled in him. “So tell me what I’m thinking right now, sweetheart, okay?” He snagged her chin and looked deep into her brown eyes.

  Her smile was sweet, her skin gilded like the beach, with rosy color creeping back steadily as she grew well. “You’re turning everything that happened over in that cynical brain of yours, tidying up the loose ends until it all makes sense to you. Until all the sums balance. Until one and one are two.” Her smile turned rueful. “Aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He scowled at her.