Em closed her eyes and sighed.
“It’s just that I never knew how to fix you. I hated seeing you struggle, and I couldn’t help you, and if there was ever a worse feeling in the world than failing your only child, I don’t know what it is, Emmaline. Please cut me some slack. I did my best, and I’m well aware it wasn’t good enough.”
“Mom, you didn’t fail me. You replaced me.”
“That’s not true.”
“You were more than happy to ditch me on Nana, and then four months later, you have a new and improved daughter. How is that not replacing me?”
“You’re the one who wanted to live with my mother. You were so much happier out there. How could I say no?”
“You could’ve at least pretended to miss me.” Sarge lay down at her feet and sighed, biting down softly so Squeaky Chicken seemed to mew.
“I did miss you,” her mother snapped. “But what good would it have done to tell you that when you were so obviously improving? I hated that f**king stutter. I wanted to kill it for all the trouble it gave you, and when you called home and it was so much easier for you to talk, I couldn’t burst into tears and tell you that I slept in your bed, could I? How would that have helped?”
Emmaline paused. “Did you just drop the F-bomb, Mom?”
“Adopting Angela was a somewhat impulsive decision. I felt like a failure as a mother, so, yes, I tried again. If I’d have known it would hurt you, I wouldn’t have done it.”
“Can you give her back?” Em asked.
“What? No! Of course not.”
“It was a joke. I actually love Angela, you know.”
“Oh. Well. That’s good.”
The rushing of the falls was full and lovely. “I love you, too, Mom.”
Nothing. There was no sound from the other end of the phone.
“Are you crying?” Emmaline asked.
“Yes.”
“In a happy way?”
“Yes.”
Emmaline found that she was smiling. “Come and visit, okay? Soon?”
“Okay,” Mom said. There was a pause. “Emmie, I’m so sorry I couldn’t help you with the stutter.”
Em stroked her dog’s soft fur. It had been a very, very long time since her mother had used that nickname. “It wasn’t yours to fix, Mom,” she said. “Besides, it built character.”
Her mother laughed, then blew her nose. “It sure did. No one has more character than you.”
“Not even Flawless Angela?” Em teased.
“Oh, her. She’s so boringly flawless.”
“Except she’s pretty fabulous.”
“Exactly. All right, I’ll let you go.” There was a pause. “Can I call you again tomorrow?” Mom asked.
“You can call me again tonight.”
“Don’t tell Angela I said she was boring. She’s not.”
“I know it was a joke, Mom. Don’t worry.”
When she hung up, she knew where she had to go. “Up and at ’em, Sarge,” she said. “We have places to go, people to see.”
SHE BROUGHT FLOWERS. Yellow tulips, because nothing seemed more cheerful than that.
They didn’t work of course. Em realized that the second she knocked on the door of Room 405.
“Mrs. Deiner? It’s me, Emmaline Neal. Officer Neal? I was on call the night of the accident.”
Gloria Deiner looked up from where she sat at the side of the bed. “Oh. Hello.” Her voice was flat and quiet.
The Deiners were not particularly popular in Manningsport. They’d moved here six or seven years ago, from what Emmaline had heard. Too rich, too showy. They’d bought a perfectly lovely farmhouse way up on the farming side of the lake, away from the vineyards where the Mennonite farms dotted the land, then torn it down, much to the heartbreak of the former owners. In its place was a garish McMansion with a five-car garage and eight bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, an indoor pool and an outdoor pool, just for the three of them.
From what Em knew (and had heard), Josh was the worst of the spoiled rich-kid cliché—drugs and drinking and sex and the insanely fast car. Trips to Vail and Turks and Caicos and London. His parents would pull him out of school for vacations, sometimes for weeks on end, then throw a hissy fit when he stayed back a grade. Nothing was too good for their boy, who deserved everything just because he’d been born.
Guess the Deiners were rethinking their child-rearing philosophy now.
But the fact that Gloria Deiner was here alone... That was just too sad. “Would you like some company?” Emmaline asked.
“Oh. All right.”
The respirator breathed in...then out. In...then out. A beeping alarm of some kind went off in the next room, then stopped.
Em set the vase of flowers, which now looked obscenely happy, on the windowsill. It was the only arrangement there. She went over to the bed and looked down at Josh.
Oh. Oh.
He looked so small under all that equipment, the tubes and lines and swath of blankets. A downy beard sprung in patches on his face, and his eyes were open a slit but didn’t move. His hands curled in toward his chest, which itself was sunken and thin. His hair was ragged and greasy, and he smelled of body odor and Ivory soap.
“Hi, Josh,” she said, touching his hand. “It’s Emmaline Neal. One of the cops in town.”
“He can’t hear you,” Mrs. Deiner spat. “He’s brain-dead. But I’m praying for a miracle.” Her words were heavy with bitterness, as if she wanted Emmaline to start spouting facts and tell her to accept reality.
In...then out.
It was chilly in here. Em pulled up the blanket a little bit. A Star Wars comforter, probably once much beloved. She swallowed. “Can I sit down?” she asked.
Mrs. Deiner shrugged, so Em sat.
“What was he like when he was little?” Em asked, and the woman’s head jerked back in surprise.
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She paused. “I was there that night. I guess I’d just like to hear about him.”
The woman’s face didn’t change for a second; then it softened, and her eyes smiled with memory. “Oh,” she said, and her voice was young again. “He was so beautiful. And mischievous!” She reached out to touch Josh’s hand. “He had this laugh that let him get away with murder. Always running, always breaking things, but then he’d look at me with that smile, and I just couldn’t be mad at him.” Her voice cracked. “I just couldn’t. I loved him so much. I still do.” She started to cry. “My husband says we have to let him go, but I can’t! How can I let my baby die? How do I stop being a mother?”
In a flash, Em knelt by Mrs. Deiner’s side and hugged her. “I don’t know,” she said, her own voice shaking. “I don’t know.”
“The doctors say he’s already gone,” Gloria whispered, clutching Em’s shirt. “My husband says the same thing.” She looked at Emmaline. “Do you think he is?”
This was her chance to say the right thing. To make all the difference to Gloria Deiner, whose son was surely dying. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “But whatever the right thing is, you’ll know. You’re his mother.”
But Gloria just looked at her son, her face so full of sorrow that Em couldn’t understand how she bore it. “Thank you for coming,” she whispered. “I’d like to be alone now.” She looked back at Em. “And thank you for talking to him. No one does that anymore.”
Em hugged her again, but Mrs. Deiner was locked back into her vigil.
She was almost out of the room when Gloria’s faint voice stopped her. “You were there that night?”
Em turned. “Yes. Chief Cooper and I. We...we took over for Jack Holland.”
“Jack Holland.” Her voice hardened. “We wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for Jack Holland.”
No, Emmaline thought. You’d be visiting a grave.
“Jack left him for last,” Gloria said in an odd lilting voice, as if she were trying to remember a song. “The one who needed him the most, and Jack left him for last. My baby was all alone.”
The respirator breathed in and out, in and out.
“He wasn’t alone,” Em said very, very softly. “Jack was in the water the whole time.”
But Gloria’s head was turned to her son, and Em doubted that the grieving mother even heard.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
JACK KNOCKED ON the door of 3-C. A second later, Hadley opened the door. “Hey,” she said. “Come on in.”
She looked different. Younger and tired. And she wasn’t beaming at the sight of him.
It had been a week since her incident at the police station, and while Jack had seen her every day, they hadn’t really talked.
Today, they would.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee or water?”
“No, thanks,” he said. “Sit down, Hadley.”
She did, taking a throw pillow and holding it over her stomach. “This weather, huh? Crazy.”
It hadn’t been particularly crazy, not for western New York, anyway. Then again, people always talked about the weather when they were nervous.
“Hadley, it’s time for you to move on,” he said.
Her eyes filled. “I know.”
He leaned back in his chair. “I’ll take you back to Savannah, if you like.”
“Why? Why would you do that for me, after all the trouble I caused?”
A good question. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I feel responsible for you. For us. For how our marriage didn’t work.”
“I cheated on you, Jack. I’m the one to blame for our divorce.”
She’d never admitted that before. “People don’t cheat for no reason,” he said, looking out the window. “You weren’t happy, so you looked elsewhere. I’m not excusing it, Hadley. But I understand. You were lonely and bored and wanted more attention than I could give.” Than any human could give, he guessed.
“My parents barely spoke to me, they were so mad,” she whispered. “They thought you were the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“I don’t agree,” he said. “I think we were just...wrong for each other. No matter how it seemed at first.”
A tear ran down her cheek.
If he’d listened a little more carefully to smart people like Honor and his grandparents, to Mrs. Johnson and Connor O’Rourke, he might have picked up on their subtle (and not-so-subtle) notes of caution. If he’d taken longer to get to know Hadley, had her spend more time here rather than one idyllic weekend, the truth would’ve come out. And the truth was, they’d both seen what they wanted to see and not what was actually there.
“Why’d you come back here, Hadley?”
She wiped her eyes. “It seemed like everyone around me was married and having babies or a fabulous career or both, and you know what I was doing? Part-time clerk at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I was thirty years old with nothing and no one, divorced before our first anniversary. A failure.”
He could’ve pointed out that there was no shame in hard work, or that she could’ve gone back to school for something else, but he knew from experience those words would fall on deaf ears. Hadley had always had a picture of how life was supposed to be, and anything less was just what she said. A failure.
Hadley swallowed. “When I saw you on the news, that handsome Anderson Cooper standing right there in front of the lake, and they were showing pictures of the vineyard and that photo of you from the website, and I thought, ‘Hadley Boudreau, you blew it.’” She grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. “So I came up here to get back what we had.”