Rescue - By Anita Shreve Page 0,82
you this now is that she wants to meet you.”
“She wants to meet?” Rowan pulls the covers right to her mouth. She looks stricken.
Webster hopes that a nurse doesn’t choose this moment to come to the door. “If you would like to meet her,” Webster says, “it can be arranged.”
“Meet her here? Like this?”
“Would you rather wait until you get home?”
Rowan lowers her eyes, thinking. “Will I make it home for graduation?”
“Absolutely. But probably not much sooner than that.”
“Can I think about it?”
“Of course,” he says.
Rowan scrutinizes him. “Are you and she…?”
“Are we what?”
“You know… like, reuniting?”
“No,” he says, shaking his head and smiling. “No, Rowan, we’re not. We’ve talked, but it’s mostly been about you.”
“What’s she like?”
“The same and different. Not as feisty. Older. All of which means nothing to you, since you don’t remember her when she was younger.”
“No, but I can imagine. Or try to.”
“There’s something I should tell you before you and she meet.”
“What is it?” Rowan asks.
“Your mother didn’t just go away. I sent her away.”
Rowan looks blank, as if she doesn’t understand.
“I sent her away,” he repeats.
“She didn’t just drive away?” Rowan asks, baffled.
“Well, yes, she did, but it was because I made her.”
Rowan glances out the window. All she can see from her bed is the sky.
“You remember I told you that she left because she was sick, she was an alcoholic, and needed professional help?”
“Yes.”
“Well, she did. But after the accident with you in the car, I couldn’t trust her with you, and I couldn’t be with you every second of the day. So I sent her away.”
Webster watches Rowan.
“If I hadn’t sent her away,” he says, “she’d have gone to jail.”
“Then you saved her life,” Rowan says.
He shakes his head. “No, Rowan. I saved your life.”
“And your own?”
“I don’t know about that.”
Rowan nods. “But didn’t she say she would go to rehab?”
“We couldn’t afford rehab. It wasn’t an option. Not as many places to go then as there are now.”
Even though he’s a medic and knows what nerves produce—the heart pounding, the dry mouth, the sweaty palms—he’s powerless to prevent the symptoms. He has them all.
“You couldn’t afford it?” Rowan asks.
Webster remembers his father’s offer to finance rehabilitation. Only Webster’s pride had kept him from accepting that help. “It wasn’t an option that minute. That day. If she stayed in town another two hours,” Webster says, “the police would have had to arrest her.”
Rowan’s face is pale. “Would she really have gone to jail?”
“I believe so, yes,” Webster says. “It was her second DUI, her second accident. In this case, she’d injured a man. They were going to put her away for a while.”
Rowan raises her knees under the sheets. “Wouldn’t they have made her go to rehab?”
“Well, I suppose jail is rehab in a way. Though not always. Jail is a bad place to be. Almost no one comes out the better for it. And she was in no shape to survive that.”
For a moment, Rowan is silent.
“But she’d have been out years ago,” Rowan says finally, “and maybe she’d have gone into rehab, and we could have been a family again.”
The words sting. A family again. He’s had this thought himself a thousand times. By sending Sheila away, he had destroyed the family. “The truth is,” Webster says, “I think your mother and I would have been divorced within the year. I couldn’t trust her anymore. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. I’d hoped I’d never have to. The drinking was a clue to who she was. Or maybe it made her who she was. She was reckless, she wanted adventure. She hid things.”
“If she wanted adventure, what was she doing with you?”
Webster smiles. “When I met your mother,” he says, “she was outrunning an abusive boyfriend from Boston. They were both drunks. She was looking for a place to rest. I must have seemed like a good place to lie low. She actually said that once: lie low.”
“She was pregnant when you married her.”
“Yes,” Webster says.
“Allison Newman told me just before Christmas. Her mother used to work in Gramps’s store.”
Webster tries to remember the women who worked for his father. He can recall only three of them, but he knew their first names only.
“Would you have married her if she hadn’t been pregnant?”
Webster sits forward. “I can’t honestly say, Rowan. I loved her. There was a time when I loved her so much, it hurt.” He pauses. “But if the relationship had run its normal course,”