Ridley Pearson - In Harm's Way

Angel took the opportunity to climb onto her chest and settle into a deep and satisfied purr, and Fiona continued to scratch her behind the ears. She tried to think back, to solve the mystery of finding herself lying on the floor with a lump on her head, but nothing came to her. Only silence where an image should have been. From that silence came the sound of a car, but that had turned out to be Walt-or was that even the right night? Had there been a second car that same night, had it been an altogether different night?

She lifted Angel off and eased her to the floor and tried again to sit up, this time managing to wedge her elbows under her. Her vision woozy, she felt nauseated, on the verge of throwing up. And though the pain drummed intensely at the back of her skull, radiating down through her and provoking the urge to retch, she identified the vertigo and the unexplained silence as the source of her fear. For the fear overcame her like a wave and drowned her. As she vomited, she hoped the purge might clear her head and help her to reorient herself-to remember something, anything. But it was as if someone had placed her there on the floor, had played some awful trick on her, abandoning her with no hints or clues about the cause of her condition, that she was the object of a joke gone horribly awry.

The smell of the vomit disgusted her and made her move. She sat up, pushed away from it, and struggled forward onto hands and knees. If she hadn’t felt the bump she would have sworn she was severely hungover and wouldn’t have been surprised to find a near-empty bottle on the coffee table. A few times in her life she’d drunk herself into blackouts, although not since college. She couldn’t imagine she’d done this to herself, but at that point she would have welcomed any explanation. Anything would have been better than the mental silence that stretched as an empty bridge between her present condition and whatever had come before.

She struggled to her feet and, keeping a hand out on the back of a stool, a wall, and a doorknob, found her way into the bathroom, where she undressed and showered. The blurriness of her vision came and went, and when she threw up for a second time, she told herself to get to the hospital. Not trusting her own ability to drive, she called over to the main house, hoping for Kira, but she never picked up.

With the hospital less than a mile away, she moved slowly toward her Subaru, only to realize she was wearing only her bathrobe. She turned and admired her cottage as if seeing it for the first time. The driveway of Mexican pavers formed a kind of courtyard between the main house and her cottage and there was something there, something that connected everything. Again she tried to fill the void of what had come before the fall-for having found no bottle or evidence of drink, she assumed she’d tripped over the footstool. Her brain was functioning enough to tell her that the only viable explanation for the knot on her head was that she’d been walking backward at the time. Away from something. And that it must have been something compelling to keep her attention off the footstool behind her.

But as she drove off the property, even these thoughts became difficult to recall. She couldn’t firmly place where she’d been when she woke up. She touched her hair and found it wet, but didn’t remember having taken a shower.

She clutched the wheel more tightly, white-knuckled, focusing on the car and road like when she’d driven solo for the first time. That was her only glimmer of hope: she could recall the moment with absolute clarity-sixteen years old and terrified, her father in the passenger seat.

She convinced herself she wasn’t going out of her mind-only that she’d just lost a very important piece of it, a piece she hoped like hell to reclaim.

Looking out his back window at the sway of the aspens in a light breeze, Walt recalled a time when his two girls had played just as they were now, but with another woman by their sides. He was grateful for Lisa’s help, her tireless patience, her willingness to both discipline and comfort the girls, but he would have preferred Gail despite all her failings as a mother. The night before, he and the girls had watched a DVD that had landed on his office desk, a documentary about a Mongolian camel who wanted nothing to do with her offspring. The story had had a happy ending: a prayer, a reunion of mother and child, and a weeping camel. There would be no happy ending for his family, for his daughters. From now on the girls would be shuttled between two lives, two very different households, and no matter how hard he tried to explain it, it would be up to them to sort it all out, to make sense of the fractures they would encounter for years to come. He hoped to be the glue to hold it all together, to mend the fractures or at least keep them from widening. He could keep the day-to-day routine working; he knew routine, respected its importance. But watching Lisa laugh and play with them-on their level-he couldn’t help but see Fiona out there-all four of them out there, laughing and teasing and rebuilding something. It was absurd to make such a jump, but now that he’d crossed one line, the other wasn’t so hard, the distance not so great.

He’d clear a day soon and take the girls camping-although they’d probably prefer the shopping malls in Boise. Or maybe shopping and a movie and a motel with a pool.

“You okay?” It was Lisa. He hadn’t seen her approaching.

“Yeah. Good. Real good,” he said.

“You looked a little zoned.”

“I think I just came to an important realization,” he said. “I’ve been laboring under this notion that the girls and I need to suffer because Gail’s gone. You showed me something out there just now.”

“Me?”

“Fun is fun,” he said. “We’re going to start having fun around here.”

“I like the sound of that,” Lisa said, “and I know the girls will too.”

“Thank you,” he said to her, making sure she felt his sincerity. “You’ve practically been living here for far too long. That’s going to change.”

“No problem,” she said. She turned to call the girls. Walt caught himself glancing at the wall phone and thinking of Fiona.

Two nights had passed since the Hillabrand intruder, and still nothing but a few voice mails back and forth. She’d been pleasant enough but not gushing, and he’d expected gushing. She wasn’t feeling well but didn’t want him visiting. He tried to take it in stride. It wasn’t easy.

He debated leaving her yet another message, but couldn’t imagine a more adolescent move.

He returned to the office and sat at his desk, unable to keep his eye off the phone and e-mail. He read over a proposal currently in front of the county commissioners to privately host the Dalai Lama in Sun Valley, an outdoor event expected to draw an audience of between twenty and fifty thousand, with at least ten thousand coming from out of town. There was no way his small office could manage the traffic and simultaneously guarantee the Dalai Lama’s safety; no way he was going to turn over that responsibility to a private security firm, as was being proposed. He nearly began drafting an e-mail, but changed his mind. It could wait.

He reviewed other paperwork instead. A man held in their drunk tank had suffered convulsions and was attempting to sue the county. A suspected rapist needed transfer to Ada County. He signed some paperwork, sent a few e-mails, and made several calls. But each time he reached for the phone, he thought of her, and debated driving out to her place again.

Nancy, his assistant, stood in his doorway. “A body’s been found. Mile marker one twenty-five. Some kids, an Adopt-A-Highway crew, discovered it. Tommy Brandon responded and called it in. Says it isn’t pretty.”