Dana Stabenow - Nothing Gold Can Stay

She’d read out loud to Tim while he lay in the hospital. Half the time she didn’t know if he heard her or not. She read to him anyway, books from her childhood like Little House on the Prairie and The Lost Wagon and Nancy and Plum and Anne of Green Gables and The Lion’s Paw. It was make-believe, but it was what Tim needed, and she read them all to him every minute she could spare. The business suffered some that month.

When he came home with her from the hospital, she had already furnished the second bedroom in her house, empty until then. Just the basics, a bed, a nightstand, a reading lamp, a desk with another lamp, some new clothes in the closet, khakis and T-shirts she’d ordered over the Internet from the Gap. There was also a bookshelf she’d filled with books, the Heinlein juveniles, all fourteen of the Oz books, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, everything by Gary Paulsen. By then he was reading on his own.

He’d stopped for a time earlier this year, when he’d gotten in with a group of kids who had maximum security written all over their futures, but he’d begun easing away from them after Liam’s arrival, and he’d broken with them entirely after Kerry and Michael Malone had died. He had respected and admired Michael, who played opposite him on the basketball court, and Wy suspected he had been a little in love with Kerry, a pretty cheerleader.

Liam had handled that with Tim, talking to him honestly about what had happened to the two kids, offering intelligent sympathy without ever once resorting to “Bad things happen to good people.”

Liam was good with kids. She’d never seen him with Charlie, the son who had been killed by a drunk driver before he was two, but she’d bet Liam had been great with him, too. He wanted more kids. Well, so did she.

She had to tell him. She could feel something like tears well behind her eyelids and blinked them away.

There was a sudden snapping of twigs and cracking of branches and she shot to her feet, checking that both barrels were loaded and that the safety was off.

It was only Teddy and John. The smell of beer preceded them into camp by a good twenty feet. “Oh hell,” she said, disgusted all over again.

“Let’s go,” John said shortly, brushing by her to head for a caribou haunch hanging from a tree. Teddy barreled after him. Both of them were pale of face and sweating. Both seemed a lot more sober than she had expected. “How much can we take with us?”

“I thought I was flying you out one at a time,” Wy said, standing with the shotgun hanging from the crook of her arm, muzzle down.

He looked at her. “Yeah. Right. Of course. Sorry.” He looked at Teddy. “You go in first.”

“No, you go in first.”

“Goddamn it, Teddy, I said you go in first!”

“And I say you do!”

They went toe to toe, glaring at each other, and it was a moment before Wy, watching stupefied from the sidelines, stepped forward to pull them apart. “Guys. Relax. Toss a coin or something. Whoever gets left behind is only going to get left behind for ninety minutes.”

They continued to glare. Teddy Engebretsen and John Kvichak had never been known to raise a hand or even a voice to the other. They stood shoulder to shoulder against all comers, but never against themselves. And now here they were fighting over who should go into town first?

Teddy broke the stalemate eventually. “Okay, John.”

Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

“Good,” John said gruffly. “Help me load up.” He caught Teddy’s eye. “It’s okay, Teddy. I’ll be all right.”

“What’s going on?” Wy said.

“Lend me a hand with this line, will you, Wy?” Teddy said.

Old Man Creek, September 2

They ate salmon fresh out of the creek, sticky rice with generous helpings of soy sauce and steamed wild celery, the latter gathered by Amelia, who had finally gotten back out of bed. After dinner they got out the cards and played single-deck pinochle, girls against boys. Bill had to carry Amelia, but Moses told Tim, “Jesus, boy, you think you’re some kind of card shark, don’t you?” Tim, still sore from the second practice of the day-this one had lasted two hours-trumped Bill’s ace of diamonds and shot the moon. Bill sighed and subtracted thirty-three points from their score, which put them at minus ninety-seven. “Another fifty-three points and we can go out the back door,” she told Amelia.

Amelia blinked at her. “What am I doing here?” It was the first time she’d spoken all day.

She didn’t look good, Bill thought, surveying the girl with a critical eye. Her eyes had deep dark shadows beneath them, the natural warm brown of her skin had turned a pasty kind of yellow in between the big blue and purple bruises, and she kept pulling at her hair.

Bill looked at Moses. “Because you’re a damn fool, is why,” he said. “Shuffle the goddamn cards.”

The girl focused on him as if she were seeing him for the first time. “Uncle.”

“Yeah, what of it?”

“Where’s my husband? I want my husband.”

He looked at her, at the bruises blooming beneath her skin, at the swelling of her eye only now going down. Darren Gearhart had a mean right; short, stiff, packed a lot of power. Amelia wasn’t a pygmy but she wasn’t his equal in size. Moses remembered Joe Gould, the Newenham ambulance’s emergency medical technician, describe a head injury once over a lot of beer at Bill’s bar. Joe had just lost a patient to head trauma suffered when a fight at the small-boat harbor led to a fall between boats. “One of the guys told me you could hear the crack all the way up to the harbormaster’s office when the guy went in. Like breaking an egg.” He went on to explain, with a delivery that became more didactic as the drink in his glass dwindled, that the human brain floated inside the skull like a cork bobbing in the water. When something hit the front of the skull, the brain inside was knocked against the back of the skull, which was why so many blows delivered by fists caused injury to the back of the cerebrum, not the front.

Maybe, Moses thought, maybe I should have run her by the hospital before I packed her onto a plane to get her out here.

He consulted the voices on the subject. They were silent. Figured. Most of the time they wouldn’t shut up. Now, when he was actually looking for insight, they wouldn’t talk.

“I want my husband,” Amelia repeated. Her voice sounded more stubborn than whiny. If that stubborn could be harnessed for her own benefit, she might make it after all.

“No, you don’t,” Moses told Amelia, and snatched up the cards and began to shuffle them himself.

Later, when both kids were in bed and asleep, Bill and Moses moved to the porch. “What are we going to do with her?” she said.

“Come here, woman,” he said. She curled easily into his lap. One of his hands settled naturally on the rise of her hip, the other on the curve of her breast. She sighed a little and wriggled as if to press into both. He gave her a smack on the back. “Be still before I haul you down to the ground and have my way with you.”

“You mean you won’t if I stay still?”

“I will no matter what you do and you know that perfectly well.” He smacked her again, turning it into a caress. “I’m going to keep them isolated and safe for a few days. I’m going to teach them tai chi. I’m going to sweat the evil spirits out of them in the banya.”

“It won’t be enough for Amelia.”

She felt him shrug beneath her cheek. “It’s what I can do.”

“You told her not to marry him, didn’t you?”

“Nope.”

“I was there in the bar, I remember.”

“I didn’t tell her anything. She asked me if she should marry that little prick, and I said her father’s name.”