Andrew Gross - The Blue Zone

Kate reached over and hugged him. But what started out as only a throbbing in the pit of her stomach grew into something far more fearsome.

Right on the street. Outside the lab. Kate understood exactly what that meant.

“How long has she been in there?” she asked.

“Going on two hours now. They said it was a small-caliber gun. Fired from behind. That’s the only reason she’s still alive.”

“Tina’s strong.” Kate squeezed Tom’s hand and gave Tina’s mother’s arm a tug. “She’ll pull through.”

Please pull through.

Greg came back out a while later and said they were still in surgery. All they could do was wait. And that’s what they did. For over two hours. Kate sat on the floor with her back pressed against the wall. The fast-forming truth was really starting to scare her. It was she who should have been there on that street. She gripped Greg’s hand.

Finally, after 1:00 A.M., the surgeon came out.

“She’s alive,” he said, taking off his surgical cap. “That’s the good news. The bullet entered through the occipital lobe and lodged in the right frontal. We’re not able to get to it yet. There’s been a lot of swelling. I’m afraid she’s lost a lot of blood. It’s a very tricky procedure. I wish I could tell you more right now, but we just don’t know.”

Ellen clung to her husband. “Oh, Tom…”

“She’s fighting,” the doctor said. “Her life signs are stable. We have her on a respirator. We’re going to treat her as best we can for now and see how the swelling goes down. All I can honestly tell you now is, it’s touch and go.”

“Oh, Jesus, God,” Ellen O’Hearn gasped, placing her head against her husband’s chest.

Tom stroked his wife’s hair. “So all we can do is wait? How long?”

“Twenty-four hours, forty-eight. I wish I could give you more. The best I can tell you is, she’s alive.”

Kate held on to Greg. Tina’s mother started to sob.

Tom nodded. “Assuming she pulls through”-he swallowed tightly-“she’ll be all right, won’t she?” The meaning on his face was clear. Brain damage. Paralysis.

“We’ll get to that when it’s time to get to it.” The doctor squeezed his shoulder. “Right now we’re just hoping she survives.”

Hoping she survives…

Kate sank back, her head crashing and empty at the same time. She wanted to cry. She leaned against Greg. In the hollow of her heart, the questions had disappeared. A horrible new fear had started to emerge.

Not so much a fear as a certainty.

It was she who always closed up the lab. She who should have come out that door. The police had said as much. It was as if they were waiting for her…

She looked at Tom and Ellen and wanted to tell them. This was no gang killing .

But they were right about one thing: Tina was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

With all the certainty in her heart, Kate knew-that bullet had been meant for her.

Emily Geller pushed through the doors of her high school, spotting the familiar Volvo SUV waiting at the end of the long line.

He hadn’t even pulled the car up to her.

Weirdo. Emily shook her head. But Dad had been acting a little weird since he’d been back with them. He wasn’t the same person she’d always known-interested and funny and full of life-who always drove her around to squash tournaments and pushed her if she hadn’t finished her homework. Or got pissed at her when the cell-phone bills came in sky-high.

Maybe something had happened to him while he was away. (They’d all decided not to call it prison.) Now her dad always seemed distracted and remote. If you told him something that happened at school or how you kicked someone’s ass on the squash court, he only nodded back with this glassy, half-pleased look in his eyes, like he wasn’t even there.

Nothing was the way it was before.

Emily didn’t like it out here. She missed her friends, her coaches. Most of all, she missed Kate. They didn’t do things the same way now-as a family. One more year and she’d be out, Emily kept telling herself-in college. The first thing she would do was take back her name.

“Dad?” Emily rapped on the passenger window.

He was staring vacantly ahead, like he was deep in thought.

“Calling Dad?”

He finally acknowledged her, unlocking the passenger door. “Em…”

She threw her heavy knapsack into the backseat. “Did you remember my squash bag?”

“Of course.” He nodded. But he had to turn and check to make sure it was there.

“Yeah, right,” Emily snorted, climbing into the front. “Mom probably put it there.”

It was the one thing they could still do together. He seemed to love to watch her play. Of course, they didn’t have a school team where they were now, and the competition wasn’t the same. But there was a club about fifteen minutes away that had some pros she could train with. It was a risk, but she was pushing to get to the nationals in the spring, under a different name.

They pulled out of the school lot and drove down the main road of the suburban town they lived in. In a minute they were on the highway.

“I’m hitting with this guy Brad Danoulis today,” Emily told him. He was this cocky kid who got in early at Bowdoin and who played for a private school a couple of towns away. “He’s always bragging that the guys can whip the girls. You wanna watch?”

“Course I do, tiger,” her father said, distracted. He was dressed in a jacket and a plaid dress shirt, as if he was going somewhere. He never went anywhere anymore. “I just have something I have to do. Then I’ll be back.”

“Try not to be late, Dad, okay?” Emily said sternly. “I have a chem quiz and this take-home on The Crucible . Anyway, you want to watch me kick this guy’s butt.”

“Don’t worry. Look up. I’ll be in my spot. I’ll be there.”

They pulled off the highway and into the business park where the North Bay Squash Club was located. There were a few cars parked in front of the aluminum-sided building. Emily reached over and grabbed her bag. “Next month there’s this regional in San Francisco. I need to enter there. I need a West Coast ranking. We could go. You and me. Like we used to?”

“We could do that.” Her father nodded. “We used to have a lot of fun, didn’t we, tiger?”

“We all had fun,” Emily answered, a little acidly. She reached behind and yanked her squash bag out of the back. “Any last words of advice?”

“Just this.” He looked at her a little cock-eyed. “Always remember who you are, Em. You’re Emily Raab.”

She tilted her head at him. Everything he did now was weird. “Guess I was thinking more like, ‘Keep pressing his backhand, Em.’”

“That too, tiger.” He smiled.

As Emily pulled open the door to the squash club, he shot her a wink, and just for a flash it seemed to have a little of the old Dad in it. The one Emily hadn’t seen for a long time.

“Kick his ass, babe.”

Emily grinned back. “I will.”

Inside, Brad was already waiting on the court, crisply smacking the ball. He had on a T-shirt that read CABO ROCKS.

Emily went into the locker room, put her hair in a ponytail, and changed into her shorts. She came out and stepped onto the court. “Hey.”

“Hey.” Brad nodded. He tried this show-off, behind-the-back “boast” to get her the ball.

Emily rolled her eyes at him, a little skeptically. “You ever even been to Cabo?”

“Yeah. Christmas last year. It was cool. You?”

She started cracking forehands. “ Twice.”