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I put my foot down and the engine roars, as I pray for a clear road and check my rearview for any pesky reds-and-blues that might burst out of nowhere. The GPS says I’m fifteen minutes away, but I think I can do it in ten. After all, it’s four in the morning—I can risk it, just this once.
* * *
Now that I’vefully rehearsed what I’m going to say to Summer when I see her, I conclude my video with, “I’ve fallen for you, Summer, and I hope that’s—”
The confession dies on my lips as I’m blinded by headlights and my car is engulfed in hazy white light. There’s a deafening, grating sound of metal crunching like aluminum foil crumpled, but I can’t see anything. Is it my bones shattering or the car? The world moves in slow motion, my body a ragdoll as I’m thrown into a sickening spin, the pressure piling on my chest, my neck on the brink of snapping, until some heavenly fingertip switches off the lights, plunging me into shadow.
I know this is it. I don’t know how I know, but I do. I can smell gasoline and burnt rubber; I can hear the scream of steel and the splinter of plastic and the crack of bone and the animal bellow of someone in agony, but it’s all far away and muffled, like I’m watching it on TV with the volume turned down.
There’s no pain, at least, and as the scents and sounds fade further from my senses, all I can think is,This is going to kill us both.
29
SUMMER
Imust have fallen asleep in the rocking chair, soothed by the murmur of the Gulf and the rustle of the trees, whispering soft lullabies. But a sound stirs me, leaving me disoriented—the buzz of an insect. A big one, close by. It takes a second to realize it’s not an insect; it’s my phone, lit up like a Christmas tree, flashing the name “Lyndsey” over and over.
I pick up, confused; my voice sleepy as I say, “Hello?”
The sun still hasn’t risen, so why is Lyndsey calling me?
“Are you still at the cottage?” she asks in a rush, the pitch of her voice peaking into the shrill decibels of panic.
“I’m on the porch. Is everything o—”
“It’s Rowan,” Lyndsey interrupts. Everything clearly isn’t okay. “He’s going to the ICU at Merit. How quickly can you get there? Oscar is in Jackson, and no one is picking up who can take Grace. I don’t know what to do, Summer. I can’t bring her to a hospital. If anything happens, I don’t want her to… see. I can’t do it, Summer. I can’t… but I can’t leave him on his own, either.”
From the fog of just waking up, a piercing light of terror slices through, shoving me toward lucidity. But I can’t put the pieces of what Lyndsey is saying together; the fragments are all floating around in my head, each one as jagged and dangerous as the broken champagne bottle, threatening to cut my brain and my fading hope to ribbons.
“Take a breath,” I tell her, surprised by the calm in my voice. “Explain what’s going on. I can get to Merit in twenty minutes if I put my foot down, so don’t worry about that, but I need to understand what’s happening. Start as close to the beginning as you can.”
Lyndsey’s breath hitches. “That’s just it. I don’t understand why he was there.” She coughs and I hear the blare of her blowing her nose. “The cops just called. Said he’s on his way to the ICU —that he was in a car wreck on Beach Boulevard, just near the bridge, about a half hour ago. A drunk driver hit him head on, and… it doesn’t sound good, Summer. I can’t… I can’t do this again. I can’t. I can’t bring Gracie to a place like that. I can’t have her stuck in some waiting room until we get told that…” She trails off, but I don’t need her to finish the sentence. Worst-case scenarios are already spinning in my head, dredging up a grainy scene, like an old movie, of me standing on this same porch two years ago, watching the flare of red and blue as the cops came down the path to tell me that Ben was gone.
No…It’s a tiny word, screamed inside my skull: a bomb detonating.
I can’t do this again, either.
But this is Lyndsey’s brother, and she doesn’t know that he’s anything more to me than that. She doesn’t know that, if he doesn’t make it, he takes my second—likely last—chance of happiness with him, and that will almost certainly kill me. I’ll become the carved board getting pushed out to sea, drowning in the deep, never to be recovered. But there’s a sort of medicine in the fact that she doesn’t know; a temporary drug that keeps my mind from collapsing in on itself, sending me crashing to the warped floorboards where I’ll melt into tears that will trickle all the way to the water’s edge, and absorb every part of me until there’s nothing left.
Her pain, her confusion, her desire to keep Grace wrapped in cotton for just one more day gives me a weird strength that the old Summer wouldn’t have been able to hold on to.
“I’m on my way. I’ll call you from the hospital. Let me know if you can get someone to watch Grace, but I’ve got this, Lyndsey,” I tell her, unnerved by the eerie calm in my entire demeanor.
Did I not just hear that the guy I’ve fallen for is on his way to the ICU? Did I not just hear that he was in a crash on Beach Boulevard, barely fifteen minutes away from the cottage? I think I can guess what he was doing there, though maybe not why he was there at four in the morning, and I think that’s why I have to be strong… because this is, in part, my fault. If Lyndsey loses her brother and Grace loses her uncle because I decided to send Rowan away instead of going back to New Orleans with him, or at least sending him back there with a promise that everything was okay between us, then I’ll never forgive myself. This time, I really won’t. There’ll be no epiphany or grand “letting go” ceremony somewhere down the line. It’ll eat me alive. I’ll have to wave goodbye to Lyndsey and Grace too, because they won’t want anything to do with me when they find out why he was there, why this has happened. Even if they didn’t shun me, I’d shun my damn self, since looking at either one of them would be a particular kind of torture.
“Thank you,” Lyndsey gasps. “Oscar is trying to make it down as soon as he can, but I don’t know when that’s going to be. I’ll keep trying the moms I know, but… hurry, Summer. Please, hurry. I don’t want him to be alone.”
I swallow thickly and dart into the cottage. “He won’t be. Okay, I’m grabbing my keys. Call you soon.”
I hang up and, keys in hand, I sprint back out in my pajamas and Birks, not stopping until I get to my banged-up Honda. For the first time, I really wish I’d bought a better car, but this is going to have to do… and it’s going to have to push itself to every speed limit on the way.
The sun rises, bleeding reds and pinks and oranges up into the sky, turning the world rosy and surreal. Through gaps in the trees, it watches me, though my focus is entirely on the road, my foot on the gas, racing along until the whole car judders and buzzes with the strain of keeping pace.
I’m so fixated on the potholed asphalt and the faded white lines in the center that I don’t realize what road I’m on until I see the warning lights and the police tape. Beach Boulevard. I reach my hand toward the passenger side of the car as if Ben were there to comfort me.
They’ve cut off a section of one lane to let traffic pass, though I’m the only one on the road. Not the only car, though. Two crumpled vehicles stick out, both possessing a one-way ticket to the scrapyard. One—Rowan’s—is squashed against a tree; the hood peeled back like a tin can, the windshield smashed, the driver’s side door cut away, or so it appears. The other—a big, black SUV—is on its side, and I don’t know why, but I feel like the wheels should be spinning.
Rowan was coming to see me. He’d made his decision, and he was coming to see me.The first pinch of paralyzing dread slips through a crack in the wall of strength I’ve put up for Lyndsey and Grace’s sake.
