Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,69

Sheila holding Rowan. “She’s had this with her all this time,” he says.

Sheila takes the small wrinkled scrap, studies it, and holds it to her chest. She bends her head.

Webster turns away. Sheila’s loss is horrific. As he listens to his ex-wife sob behind him, he wonders, were the situation reversed and he the alcoholic, would he be doing the same? He’s pretty sure he would. He stands in the threshold, facing away from her, giving her some privacy.

He wants to go to her. He’s used to caring for a person who’s sobbing. It happens to him at least once a week. But he can’t go to this particular person.

When he turns, she’s standing. Her face is ruined. She glances around the room one more time, as if trying to memorize it.

“You good to drive?” Webster asks. He shakes his head. “I meant…”

“I know what you meant,” Sheila says. “Yes, I’m good to drive.” She pauses. “I know I’m different, Webster. But you’re not. I recognize you.”

“Is that good or bad?” he asks.

“It’s good,” she says.

He watches her walk to her car, which she parked on the street. Hers is a problem he can’t fix. He wanted to help Rowan when he went to Chelsea, but what he really did was cause a fault line in his ex-wife to crack wide open.

Webster climbs up to Rowan’s room to make sure Sheila hasn’t left something behind, that the stuffed dog is back in its regular place. He stops as soon as he crosses the threshold. Sheila’s perfume, which he didn’t notice downstairs, is heavy in the room.

Shit.

He starts for the Lysol spray, but then thinks Rowan will want to know why he used it in her room. He decides to open the window. When he tries to raise it, however, he discovers that it’s stuck. He checks that the latch is undone, and still the window won’t budge. He tries the other window at the other end of the room. That one won’t budge either.

What the hell?

He should have fixed these for Rowan months ago. He goes back to the first window. Should he wax the sash? If he gets it open and cracks only one window downstairs, he can always say he was trying to draw the heat out of the house. He gives it one more hard shove, loosening the frame, and something falls from a piece of molding above the window. A white notebook, measuring maybe three inches by two.

He stands with the thing in his hands. That Rowan has hidden it tells Webster to put it back, though he doesn’t know which side of the molding it came from. Left or right?

He’s royally screwed.

He opens to a random page.

I don’t want to be the star of my own afternoon special. I dislike drama in others. How it suddenly manufactures itself.

Another page:

How can a person be allowed to do that? Just leave her baby for fifteen years?

And another page:

Though he’s often clueless, he’s a good dad. I try not to forget that, even when he’s at his most exasperating. He means well. He tries. He’s mine. He loves me. And he’s a hundred times better as a parent than most of my friends’ parents.

There are entries about Tommy and Gina and school that Webster skips. Another entry catches his eye.

When Allison told me just before Christmas, I was shocked and couldn’t fake it. My mother was pregnant with me when they got married! I realized then that I didn’t even know what their wedding date was. Why didn’t I ever ask Dad? Because I was afraid it would make him sad? Allison knew because her mother, who worked for Gramps, knew. I still can’t get used to the fact that I’m a mistake.

Webster winces. He never told his daughter this simple fact?

And yet another entry:

Don’t you actually have to raise a child to be called a mother? I don’t think I’d trade my life for anything. But there were days when I could have used a mother’s advice about female stuff. A lot of nights when I had to be alone and didn’t want to be. But no one can trade a life. It’s a hypothetical. My mother wasn’t here. It’s like trying to imagine a sister or a brother. I can think about it for a couple of minutes, but then it doesn’t go anywhere because it’s…

“What are you doing?”

Webster shuts the notebook with a snap.

Rowan, in maroon sweats, stands at the threshold.

“I was opening the window,”