Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,46

next morning, Webster entered Sheila’s room at eight o’clock. She was dressed in her old leather jacket. Burrows must have warned her. She looked grotesque, her lip split, forehead and cheeks bandaged. Rowan had a broken leg and wrist, unlike Sheila, who could walk.

“You almost killed three people,” he said. He stood ten feet from her, his fists in his pockets.

She bent her head. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“You almost killed Rowan.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t care about that.”

“I’ll go to rehab,” she promised.

“You’ll go to jail.” He paused. “I’m supposed to take you to the police station now.”

She looked up. “But you’re not.”

“No.”

Voltage crossed the distance between Sheila and Webster. A current composed of anger and remorse and something else—the last flicker of attraction.

Webster pulled the cruiser around to the front of the hospital. Mary wheeled Sheila down. Nye, Burrows, and Mary making it happen. Webster would owe Nye forever.

In the cruiser, Webster asked Sheila what she had been doing on 222.

“I don’t remember,” she said.

His hands clenched and unclenched on the wheel. He couldn’t keep his jaw from jutting forward. He was furious with her for what she’d done, for making him do what he had to do now.

He stopped a mile short of his parents’ house. He faced Sheila, but she didn’t look up.

“I’m leaving the keys in the car,” he said. “There’s fifteen hundred dollars in the glove compartment. Keep driving until you’re past New York. Then ditch the cruiser at a twenty-four-hour convenience stop. Find a bus and get on it and go as far as you can. Don’t come back. You come back, you’ll be arrested.”

Sheila began to cry.

“And you’ll go to jail.”

He waited. He thought she might ask to see her daughter. He was prepared to refuse her. She never asked.

Webster stepped out of the cruiser onto the road. He shut the door, aware that he was shutting the door on a life. He walked forward, his shoulders hunched, as if waiting for a bullet.

He was a thousand feet away when he heard the cruiser start up. He listened as the engine moved toward him.

A wild hope flared, a skinny flame. He imagined Sheila stopping. He would tell her that he loved her. Something miraculous would happen, and the three of them could be a family again.

Sheila drew abreast of him, hesitated, and then drove on.

He watched the back bumper of the cruiser until he could no longer see it.

Webster collapsed onto the dead grass at the side of the road. He wept, and he didn’t care who saw him.

2009

After Rowan leaves for school and Webster washes the birthday breakfast dishes, he climbs the narrow staircase, the house his own now since the death of his parents. Both had been under hospice care in the front room, Webster with his fully loaded belt, helpless in the face of the cancers that ravaged each of them. Prostate for his father; lung for his mother. She’d never smoked a day in her life. Even at the end, or especially at the end, watching his father take his last breaths, each followed by seconds of nothing, Webster, with his training, felt panic. It was all about the morphine and the hospice nurses and sitting in the dim light then, his father in the hospital bed in the front room, his hand light and cool in Webster’s. It was not Webster’s first experience with death by any means, but it rocked him nevertheless. Traveled inside and screwed around with his innards and his brain so that by the time he brought ten-year-old Rowan in to say good-bye to her grandfather, Webster felt the fear and responsibility of fatherhood stopping up his chest. He was it. Nothing between him and the morphine drip at the end. Sheila already gone eight years.

Rowan is seventeen now.

Webster lies down on his daughter’s bed.

Overhead, Rowan has painted a mural of all the New England ski areas she’s visited. The mountains are rendered with intricate trails, a dry blue sky behind them, the distances among the mountains shortened by curving roads dotted with Jeep Cherokees and Subarus and Rowan’s Toyota, all of them with ski racks on top. Sunday River, Stowe, Okemo, Loon, Killington, Stratton, Bromley, Bretton Woods, and even Wachusett Mountain to the southeast.

After his parents died, Webster renovated his old bedroom for Rowan, building a closet and bookshelves and a desk with drawers. Rowan still sleeps on the old oak bed Webster once had, but gone is the Bruins blanket, replaced now with