Harlan Coben - Stay close

“Thank you for that.”

“For what?”

But he’d already hung up.

Lucy The Elephant was closed for the night. Ray waited for the last guard to leave. Ventura’s Greenhouse, a rather happening restaurant and bar, was in full swing across the street from Lucy. It made entering from that side particularly difficult. Ray circled around to the usual spot by the gift shop and hopped over it.

Years ago, when Cassie had lifted a key off an ex-boyfriend, she had made him a copy. He had kept it all these years. He already knew that it didn’t work anymore, but that didn’t worry him much. Lucy had doors in both thick hind legs. The visitors used one. The other had a simple padlock on it. Ray picked up a heavy rock and broke the lock with one swing.

Using his key ring flashlight to guide him, Ray headed up the spiral staircases and into the belly of the mammoth beast. The “innards” were a vaulted chamber that gave off the feel of a small church. The walls had been painted a strange shade of pink that was purported to be the anatomically correct hue for an elephant’s gastrointestinal tract. Ray would take their word for that.

In the day, he and Cassie had hidden a sleeping bag in the bottom of the closet. It looked like the closet had been taken out during a renovation. Ray wondered if someone had stumbled across the old sleeping bag and what they’d made of that and what they ended up doing with it-and then he wondered why, when the world was caving in on him again, he was thinking of something so asinine.

Silly to come back here.

He hadn’t been inside this six-story pachyderm in seventeen years, but if this stomach lining could talk… He let the smile hit his face. Why not? Why the hell not? He had tortured himself long enough. That horrible night was all coming back now. There was no way to stop it. He was about to face some really bad times, so why not remember the glorious nights? As his father had always reminded him, you can’t have an up without a down, a left without a right-and you can’t have good times without expecting bad.

Here he was, in the belly of the beast, waiting for the only woman he’d ever truly loved, and he realized that there had been virtually no good times in the past seventeen years. Just the bad. Pathetic. Pathetic and stupid.

What would his father have thought?

One mistake. One mistake made seventeen years ago and he-the intrepid photojournalist who had no issue with working the frontlines during firestorms-had let that mistake cripple him. But that was how life worked, wasn’t it? Timing. Decisions. Luck.

Crying over spilled milk. How attractive.

Ray took the spiral staircase up to the canopy/observatory on Lucy’s back. The night air was brisk now, the wind coming in hard off the ocean. It smelled wonderfully of salt and sand. The sky was clear, and the stars glistened off the Atlantic tonight.

The sight, Ray thought, was breathtaking. He took out his camera and started snapping pictures. It was amazing, he thought, what you could live with and what you could live without.

When he finished with that, Ray sat out in the cold and waited and wondered-another what-if-how telling Megan the truth would change things all over again.

When the doctor put the bandage on Megan’s arm he muttered something about working for a butcher in his youth and wrapping ground chuck. Megan got it. The arm was, to put it kindly, a mess.

“But it’ll heal,” the doctor said.

The arm still throbbed its way through the morphine. Her head ached too, probably from the aftereffects of a concussion. She sat up in bed.

Dave had been made to stay in the waiting room while Megan was interviewed bedside. The cop-she had introduced herself as County Investigator Loren Muse-had been surprisingly reasonable. She had let Megan patiently explain what happened, never so much as raising an eyebrow, even though the story sounded crazy: “Yes, see, I was leaving an old folks’ home when this preppy blonde jumped me with a knife… No, I don’t know her name… No, I don’t know who she is or why she tried to kill me, except, well, I saw her hanging around Harry Sutton’s office last night…”

Muse had listened with a straight face, interrupting rarely. She didn’t ask condescending questions or look dubious or any of that. When Megan was finished, Muse called Broome down in Atlantic City to confirm the story.

Now, a few minutes later, Muse slammed closed her notebook. “Okay, that’s enough for tonight. You must be exhausted.”

“You have no idea.”

“I’ll try to get an ID on the blonde. Do you think you’ll be up for talking again tomorrow?”

“Sure.”

Muse rose. “You take care of yourself, Megan.”

“Thanks. Would you mind doing me a favor?”

“Name it.”

“Could you ask the doctor to let my husband come down now?”

Muse smiled. “Done.”

When she was alone, Megan lay her back on the pillow. On the nightstand to her right was the cell phone. She thought about texting Ray that she wouldn’t show up-wouldn’t ever show up, in fact-but she felt too weak.

A moment later, Dave rushed into the room with tears in his eyes. A sudden hospital memory surged through Megan, taking her back, making it hard to breathe. Kaylie had been fifteen months old, just starting to walk, and they’d taken her to Thanksgiving dinner at Agnes and Roland’s house. They had all been hanging in the kitchen. Agnes had just handed Megan a cup of tea when she turned and saw the stumbling Kaylie lean hard against the baby gate at the top of the basement stairs. Roland, she would later learn, hadn’t set up the gate correctly. As she watched in mounting horror, the gate gave way, and Kaylie began to tumble down the concrete steps.

Even now, thinking about it some fourteen years later, Megan could still feel that maternal panic. She remembered that in that split second, she could foresee the inevitable: The basement steps were steep and dark with jagged edges. Her baby would land headfirst on the concrete. There was nothing Megan could do to stop it-she was too far away-but sit there, teacup in her hand, frozen, and watch her baby fall.

What happened next would stay with her always. Dave, sitting next to her, dived toward the open door. Dived. As if the floor were a pool. Without any hesitation or even time for conscious thought. Dave was not a great athlete nor did he possess lightning reflexes. He was not particularly quick or agile, and yet he dived across that linoleum floor with a speed he could never duplicate if he trained for ten years. As Kaylie started to fall out of sight, Dave slid across toward the open door, stretched his arm out, and grabbed the falling Kaylie by her ankle. He couldn’t stop his momentum, couldn’t stop himself from falling down those harsh steps, but somehow he managed to throw Kaylie back toward the kitchen floor, saving her. Dave had no way to break his own fall now. He crashed to the bottom of the steps, breaking two ribs.

Megan had heard about such heroics before, those rare spouses or parents who sacrificed themselves without thought. She read about shootings where husbands naturally stepped in front of their wives, saving them. They weren’t always good men, by classic definition. Some were drunks or gamblers or thieves. But they also were on some base level congenitally brave. There was a selflessness within them, a purity of action. They made you feel safe and cared for and loved. You couldn’t teach it. You had it or you didn’t.

Even before that, Megan knew that Dave had it.

He sat next to her and took her hand-the hand of the good arm-in his. He stroked her hair gently, as though she were suddenly made of porcelain and might break.

“I could have lost you,” Dave said, and there was a terrible sense of awe in his voice.