“Clymer,” I snapped at him. “My name is Clymer. Miss. I’m not married.”
“She’s upset about Justin.” Forrest explained what he apparently considered my rudeness to the doctor.
“Damn straight I am!” I could not seem to stop becoming unhealthily wrought. “Where’s Justin now?”
“We don’t know, Mom. We left him at the house with the cops and came in the ambulance with you.”
Cops?
I wanted a lot more answers, but the people in scrubs began to roll me away somewhere. To my astonishment, Quinn kissed my cheek. I felt the prickle of his chin stubble on my skin. “I love you, Mom.”
This astonished me so much and felt so good that I floated in time for a moment in which there was no Georg, no divorce, no Stoat, and no victim of Stoat. I was loved.
Forrest prolonged the moment. “I love you, Mom.” He squeezed my hand.
Then he had to let it go as nurses wheeled me off to an elevator. He and Quinn had to stay behind for some damn bureaucratic reason. But I felt only the warmth of their love all the way.
• • •
Maypop, Florida. Too damn apt. I may pop to pieces, Amy thought, because just the restraint of her seat belt felt unbearable. She felt swollen almost out of her skin by nebulous, shifting emotions, a cloud of anguished feelings that fogged her to her fingertips, even to her eyes, closing her in like the nightfall darkness pressing against the windows of the car.
Chad was driving, very much separated from her by his truck’s large console. By making an effort, turning her head and focusing, Amy could see his backlit profile. He was not speeding as usual when he drove his beloved red Ram pickup, quite the opposite. On the flat, straight road between fields of soybeans he soldiered along at the speed limit or below it, extra careful in this perilous time, and Amy could see the muscles of his jaw working in his pale face.
Chad spoke, words struggling out of him as if he felt pinned under a great weight. “Would you try that phone number again?”
“Um, sure.” He meant the number Justin had phoned from, which she had entered on her cell phone. Rummaging for the phone in her purse felt like searching a dark bog, in slow motion yet. What made the process even more surreal was that Chad showed no impatience. And when she finally found the cell and made the call, he showed no disappointment when she told him, “Not available.”
He reached across the console toward her, but not long enough for her to reach out to him in return. He retracted. “Gotta keep both hands on the wheel,” he muttered. “Not functioning real well.”
“Me either.” Amy couldn’t verbalize further, but her fog of emotions felt as if it were condensing into liquid yet growing bigger than she was, vast, a sea, and she were a jellyfish about to be beached on an unknown land.
Chad, also, might have been feeling as if he was out of his depth, because he said, “Amy . . .” He hesitated, then spoke slowly. “Honey . . . things aren’t going to get any easier.”
Having Justin back, he meant. Their son was going to need a lot of help. “I know.”
“Are we . . . are we on the same page?”
Amy felt like splattering her jellyfish self of anguish all over the interior of Chad’s precious truck. Even calling her “honey,” he still sounded as if he were talking about a working partnership, planning a job, and Amy needed so, so much more.
“That depends. Charles Stuart Bradley,” she demanded, “do you love me?”
The truck swerved across the road’s center line, then toward its dark edge, as if Chad were drunk. Amy thought he would curse, but he just took his foot off the gas, applied the brakes, and pulled over to the side of the road.
Still without speaking, he turned to her and reached for her over the console with both hands. This time he did not retract. He took hold of her firmly yet tenderly, and he kissed her—Amy had to close her eyes, dizzied by sheer hope. Chad’s mouth did not try to dominate hers; his lips coaxed her to respond, and she did. It was the perfect kiss.
He laid his head on her shoulder and said gruffly, “God, yes, I love you.”
“No more jellyfish,” Amy murmured.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. I love you always, honey. Feel better?”
“Yes. Amy, sweetheart, you’ve been right all along and I was wrong.”
“Shush. That so doesn’t matter anymore. Let’s go find our son.”
• • •
Within moments after Chad got the truck back on the road, he asked Amy to try another phone call, and this time someone picked up: a sheriff’s deputy named Morales.
Chad made it to the Maypop County Sheriff’s Office by following the directions Amy relayed to him from Deputy Morales, who stayed on the line with them the whole time, coaching them and cautioning them to drive carefully. Chad felt he might not have made it without him. He felt as if he were carrying a tremendous weight made up mostly of his own overfull heart. He felt breathless and strained, sweating as if he were running a marathon. Which in a way he was, and he hadn’t trained. For the past year he’d been lounging in a kind of emotional La-Z-Boy, and now here he was in a lather of desperate hope and fear and wanting his son and loving his wife and feeling unworthy and feeling—feeling so much he could have drowned in his own bellyful of blood, sweat, and tears.