Henry glanced up to see a dark-haired woman slide herself beneath Del’s other arm, taking part of his weight on her own shoulders. He might have been mistaken, but he had a feeling that this was the mother of the little girl who’d been used as a human shield and somehow survived. The woman said nothing, simply nodded to Henry, then focused on helping him get Del down the steps.
Somehow, they managed. Del’s feet were dragging beneath him by this time, but they didn’t stop.
“That way,” Henry said, turning and heading unerringly toward home.
Henry had never counted the number of steps between the house he’d grown up in and the shack through the woods by the marsh, though he must have made the trip a hundred thousand times, in his youth and as an adult. Perhaps his mother had known.
At the moment, it felt like a billion, and each one a mountain to climb.
Del didn’t speak. Henry glanced over at his brother when his head lolled forward on his neck, and within moments, the weight in Henry’s arms seemed to triple. Del was unconscious. Unconscious, or dead, he thought.
The forward momentum of Del’s weight was too much, and Henry stumbled. Del went down onto the dark and wooded path, taking Henry and the woman with him.
“No, no, no,” Henry chanted in a low voice. “You’re not going to die right here. Not here. Not like this.”
He rolled his brother onto his back, shocked at the white glow coming from his skin. Henry wanted to check his pulse, make sure they were carrying a wounded man and not a dead one, but he couldn’t. He told himself he didn’t have the time to waste checking, but the truth was he was too afraid of what he’d find.
They still had so far to go.
Grabbing his brother beneath the arms, with his back now faced toward home, and Alice and Eve, Henry grunted and gave another desperate and mighty heave, lifting Del’s upper body from the ground. He’d drag him home if he had to.
But he didn’t have to.
With shock and wonderment, Henry saw that he and the woman who’d helped him weren’t alone. All of the women from the shack, and the children as well, were following them silently on their trek through the woods, away from the marsh and the dead men they were leaving in their wake.
No less than five other women had stepped up to join the one who’d been helping already. They took Del’s legs and torso in their hands, and they shared the load with Henry as he lifted his brother off the ground.
With awe and gratitude clogging his throat, Henry could do no more than nod shortly as the women worked in concert with him, carrying the unmoving body of his brother back home.
The remainder of the walk through the woods was interminable, made more so by Henry’s growing sense that time was running out.
When he could make out the lights of the house in the distance, Henry had to stop himself from breaking into a run. Still, he quickened his step, and the women followed suit.
Together as one, they carried Del through the field, toward the burning lights beckoning them to home and safety.
When Henry and the women reached the boards of the porch steps, he opened his mouth to shout Alice’s name. But the sound that came from inside the home tore the words from his throat. Screams. There were screams coming from inside.
Setting Del on the porch in a panic, Henry threw open the front door, forcing himself to face whatever was waiting inside. Had one of the men from the shack escaped, made his way here, even as Henry had carried his brother home?
Alice didn’t look up from where she knelt on a blanket on the floor. Her face was set in hard and determined lines, echoing the expression on Del’s face as he had walked into the line of fire.
“Henry, I tried to call you,” Alice said in a distracted, reproachful voice. He finally registered that the figure lying on the floor just in front of where Alice knelt was Eve. She was panting and sweating, and her knees were raised in his sister-in-law’s direction.
“Alice, it’s Del . . . ,” Henry said, dizzy with the weight of the needs converging upon him at once.
“I tried to call Del too. What were you two thinking, not answering—”
She lifted her eyes, meeting Henry’s gaze, and her words broke off. He couldn’t begin to imagine what he must look like, covered in blood and mud and fear.
“It’s Del, Alice,” Henry said. “He needs you. He needs you now.”
For just a moment, she was speechless. Then it must have registered that given the current circumstances, only life or death would cause Henry to pull her away at this particular moment.
She rose and she ran past Henry onto the porch. “Where? What? Oh God . . . Del,” she breathed, catching sight of her wounded husband lying on the ground, ringed by a group of women and children she’d never seen before.
“Oh. Oh,” she said with shock and fear in her voice. But only for a moment. Because she had no more than that to spare.
With determination, she placed her hands on Del’s midsection and ripped apart the shirt he wore, laying open the bullet wound for all to see.
It was surprisingly small considering the damage it had done.
“Call 911, Henry. Call them now,” Alice said in a voice made of steel. “I should have done it already. Eve insisted. Insisted no doctors. Shouldn’t have listened,” Alice was mumbling to herself.
She glanced up at Henry, who hadn’t moved.
“Now!” she yelled, leaning down to put pressure on her husband’s wound.
Del groaned, and she whipped her head back to him.
“God, Del, what have you done to yourself?” she asked in a voice that was calm yet reproachful.
“Alice,” he whispered.
“I’m here. Henry’s calling for the ambulance. You hang in there, you’re gonna be fine.”
Henry ran for the house phone and grabbed it from its cradle. His fingers were fumbling, and he was searching for the right buttons when he heard Alice speaking again from the porch.
“What do you mean ‘no’? Don’t you tell me no, Delwyn Doucet. I don’t know who you think—”
She broke off, and Henry ran back toward the door, the phone still gripped in his hand.
Del was speaking again, a whisper intended only for his wife’s ears, in spite of the audience that had gathered.
“Too late, love. Too late,” Del said, shaking his head.
“Don’t you die on me, you bastard! Don’t you dare!” Alice shouted down at him.
“Really did love you, Alice,” Del said, his voice so weak now, it could barely be made out. “Always were too good for me.”
And he closed his eyes.
That was all. He closed his eyes, and they didn’t open again. His breath went out, and it didn’t come back in. A quiet, quiet death that rang through the darkness of the night, echoing all the way to the moon and back again, hitting both Alice and Henry in their cracked hearts, finally shattering them into a million broken shards.
The scream that filled the night came from every direction—Alice, mourning for the husband dead in her arms, and at the same time, Henry realized, Eve, screaming as another life was coming into the world. The screams did a dance around one another, weaving, tangling together and becoming one.
Turning away from Alice’s grief, he saw Eve on the floor, straining at the pain ripping through her.
He ran in her direction. He had no idea what to do, but he knew, as surely as he’d ever known anything to be true in his life, that he couldn’t and wouldn’t pull Alice away from Del right now.
She didn’t deserve this, she’d done nothing to deserve it, but now that it was here, he knew only that these moments with her husband, as his life left his body, were precious and sacred.
“Eve,” Henry said on a breath, skidding to a halt and kneeling in front of her. “Look at me, breathe,” he said. Her eyes opened and he saw panic, pure and simple.
“Henry,” she gasped. “I can’t. It hurts, Henry. It hurts!”
And with hardly a breath to spare, another c
ontraction ripped through her body. Eve’s muscles tensed, her shoulders rising from the floor. She opened her mouth and let out a scream that put a voice on all the horror and pain of the weeks and months past and encapsulated the rage and the violence of the night that had descended upon them.
Henry glanced down, saw the crown of the baby’s head, and he had the terrifying realization that there was no one else. The first hands this child would feel would be his own, whether he was ready for the crushing weight of that responsibility or not.
“Almost there, Eve,” he said, trying to soothe her. She was a cornered animal with nowhere to run. Her eyes gave away her fear. All he could do was his best.
“Breathe, Eve. Take a big breath, then one more big push. As hard as you can. The baby’s almost here. It’s almost over.”
“I can’t,” she panted, shaking her head, looking around the room with wild eyes, searching for a way to escape. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t,” she said, over and over again.
“You can,” he said firmly.
Henry looked up into the eyes of the woman who’d helped him carry his brother home. She was kneeling behind Eve, setting Eve’s head in her lap, wiping the sweat from her forehead.
“One more push, Eve,” Henry said. “Just one more.”
Another woman took Eve’s right hand, and Henry saw Eve’s face register confusion before the pain began to overcome everything. A third woman took her left hand. The women whispered and crooned. Henry could hear some English, some Spanish, and he thanked God they were there.
There was no more time.
“Deep breath,” Henry said as the contraction wound up the final pitch inside of Eve. “Now push!” he yelled as her body tensed a final time.
The veins rose in her reddened face, the muscles in her neck strained, and she gripped the hands of the strangers who surrounded her like her very life depended on those connections. But Henry didn’t see that.
What Henry saw were the first glorious moments of a child being brought into the world. Moments as precious as the last moments of a life. Henry saw the shoulders push their way out and into the light. He saw the rest of the bloody little body slide out of Eve behind those shoulders. He looked onto the face of a creature that he’d only vaguely imagined up until that moment, just a muted form somewhere in the distance that he couldn’t make out.
But this was real. More real than anything that had come before.
Henry gazed in wonder at the baby in his arms.
“It’s a boy,” he whispered, awed by the miracle that had taken place right before his eyes. “Eve, you have a son,” he said, stronger now, his face alight with joy.
He looked up into her face, tears in his eyes, his arms full of the weight of a new life, but her eyes were squeezed shut.
There was a figure at his side. One of the women from the shack was leaning over, clearing the baby’s mouth with her finger, and the baby gave a great gasping cry.
“Eve, you have a son,” he said again, laughing while the baby made his entrance known to the world.
There were laughter and tears from the women who surrounded him. Someone arrived with a blanket taken from the arm of the sofa to wrap the child in, and Henry watched in wonder.
“We need to cut the cord,” he heard Alice say from a great and painful distance. “I’ll get some scissors.”
He looked up into Alice’s face, and there was a spent but sublime calmness to her. Henry had the brief hope that perhaps, one day, she’d be all right. In the end.
And so Alice held the child, directing Henry how to clamp and cut the umbilical cord. Then she handed the bundle, so light and yet so incredibly heavy, back to Henry, motioning toward Eve.
“Eve,” Henry said gently, moving up to her side as Alice saw to the rest of the job below. “Eve, would you like to hold your son?” he asked.
She opened her eyes, and what Henry saw there made him blink. It was pure and naked fear.
He smiled down at her.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s fine.”
“Put him in her arms, Henry,” Alice said.
So he did. Eve was leaning back against one of the women, and Henry placed the baby, her son, in Eve’s lap. She looked down at him, but the confusion and shock of the last few hours hadn’t passed from her yet, and she seemed nothing except overwhelmed. Tears were still streaming down her silent face as she gingerly placed her hands on the child.
“Hold him, Eve,” Alice directed gently. “Lift him to your chest.”
Eve glanced quickly up at Alice and did as she was told. Henry knew very little about new mothers or infants, but he knew that the process he’d just witnessed had been amazing, and traumatic, and painful. For someone like Eve, who’d suffered so much in her life, the shock must have been tenfold.
That must have been the reason she looked frightened and ill at ease with the weight of her child in her arms for the first time.
Of course, that’s it, Henry thought, watching her with a warm glow in his heart. It would pass.
It would pass.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
Henry sat with Alice on the steps of the porch and held her hand while they waited for Brady and the ambulance to arrive.
“They’ll take him away,” Alice said. “They’ll take him away, and we’ll have a funeral, and bury him in the ground.” Her voice was dazed, the emotions swirling inside of her hidden beneath her confusion. “Henry, how? How did this happen? What happened?”
“Alice . . . I . . .” Henry thought of the newborn inside the house, felt again the weight of him in his arms, so slight, and the enormous weight of responsibility that he placed upon Henry simply by being.
But how could he lie to Alice? She deserved more than that.
Lights were coming up the drive, quickly. Bouncing along the lane. The time had come for Henry to find the words to explain what had happened. There was no going back. The truth? The lies?
The way forward was in his hands, and still, he didn’t know how to untangle the right thing to do.
“He saved a little girl’s life,” he whispered to Alice as they watched the outside world come to them, and all that would entail.
Alice searched his face, seeking a kind of solace. Henry knew he had that one true thing he could give her. So he did.
“The little girl inside, she’s about six,” he said. “Del was shot while he was protecting her.”
Tears began to pool in the bottom of Alice’s eyes.
“Really?” she asked, her voice unsure.
Henry nodded. He didn’t trust himself to speak.
Alice’s chin wavered, and she squeezed his hand. The small smile she gave him sent the waiting tears streaming down her cheeks, but she didn’t make a sound, only cried in silence while she held tight to the best parts of the man she called husband.
And the lights were upon them.
Brady leapt from his vehicle. The paramedics brought a stretcher.
The questions began, questions that only Henry could answer.
And he lied.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
“What a mess. What a big damn mess,” Brady said.
It was late. Everyone had begun to settle for the night. The medics had taken Del away. A crime scene unit had been called in from Cordelia to process the scene at the shack. The bodies of the men in the woods would be taken away soon, if they hadn’t been already.
Brady had called the state police. Finally. They’d want to question them all again, including the women and children who were now spread around Henry’s house, trying to sleep, trying not to worry about what would happen to them the next day, the next month. Trying.
“Should have called them weeks ago. I told Del, I damn well told him, but the son of a bitch wouldn’t listen.”
Henry sipped from the beer in his hand. Not because he wanted the drink but because he couldn’t bring himself to look into Brady’s eyes.
When he did, all he could see was the devastated con
fusion on Brady’s face when he’d leaned down and lifted the sheet and seen his oldest friend’s body lying dead beneath it. His breath had left him and he’d sunk to his knees beside Del.
“He was convinced. So sure those guys had killed his dad. I knew he wasn’t handling things the way he should, but I thought . . . Ah, hell. I don’t know what I thought,” Brady continued.
Alice had answered the questions she’d been asked, though she’d had little to add in the way of explanations. After what felt like hours, she’d gone into the back room and shut the door, saying she was going to try and rest. Henry thought it more likely she wanted a private place with no questions, a place to mourn, away from the eyes that looked at her with sorrow and sympathy. There was nothing he could do for her but give her the time and space she asked for.
“You want to know the hell of it?” Brady asked, waving his beer bottle in the air. “All this bullshit—the waiting, not calling in the state boys when we should have—I knew what Del wanted. I did. I told myself he wanted to be the one to bring them in, no matter what it took. That’s what he said, and I bought it. But all you had to do was look in his eyes. He wanted payback.”
Brady took a long swig from his beer and slammed the empty bottle on the porch.
“And the kicker? The real kick in the ass? I’m not even convinced those guys had anything to do with Livingston’s disappearance.”
Every cell in Henry’s body went on alert. If Brady had been looking at him, he wouldn’t have been able to miss the way Henry stiffened, or the slight widening of his eyes.
But Brady wasn’t looking at him. He was staring off into the trees instead.
“What makes you say that?” Henry asked, faking a calm he didn’t feel. Not by a long shot.
Brady shook his head, worry pulling his features together like he’d come across a bad smell.
“I don’t know. Just . . . just something Jonah said,” he replied.
Henry sat up straight and stared at Brady under the glow of the porch light. But it was Brady who wouldn’t meet Henry’s eyes this time.
The Unremembered Girl: A Novel Page 24
