Die Before I Wake (36 page)

Thirty feet behind her, Roger paused. In silent pantomime, he told me to stay put. My body heat nearly depleted and my limbs growing limp, I nodded, too weak to argue. From somewhere under his raggedy sweater, Roger produced a gun. I didn’t know much about guns, but this baby was no little Saturday-night special like the one Claudia carried.

This was a serious gun, the kind that could blow off the top of your head if it had a mind to. I didn’t know where he’d gotten it, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to know.

“Joooo-leeeeeee,” Claudia called in that singsong voice that sounded just this side of madness. Or maybe she’d already crossed the line. She didn’t have far to go. “Oh, Joooo-leeeeeee, darling, where are you?”

I cast an anxious look at the bridge. I was close enough now to see Tom’s body lying there, silent and unmoving. My heart hurt. I could actually feel it hurting, there in my chest. Surely he was dead. I’d seen the blood seeping through the hole Claudia had blasted in his side. How could he possibly survive something like that? Especially out here in this cold?

Thirty feet away from me, moving so silently even I couldn’t hear him, Roger stepped up behind Claudia and pressed his gun to the back of her head.

“You don’t know how long I’ve been waiting to do this,” he said.

Oh, no. Was he going to kill her? Hadn’t there been enough bloodshed?

But he didn’t kill her. Instead, he said, “Drop the gun. Now, please.”

“What if I say no?”

I stood and said, “It’s over, Claudia. Put the gun down and let’s end this now.”

“So you’re alive,” she said. “Bravo. You win.”

“This isn’t a game,” I said fiercely. “My husband’s up there on that bridge, bleeding to death.

You told me once that you loved him. But you know what, Claudia? What you feel isn’t love, it’s obsession. Love doesn’t destroy what it holds dear.” In the distance, a siren wailed. “Drop the gun,” Roger said gently. “The police are on the way. I called them. They know everything. Give it up now.

It’s time.”

For an instant, she hesitated. I could almost read her mind as she weighed her options. Escape versus surrender. Freedom versus incarceration. Life versus death.

I knew it, the instant she made her choice. Still, as closely attuned as I was to her, I was a half second late in recognizing her intent. I opened my mouth to protest, but she was quicker. In a lightning-swift move that would haunt my nightmares for a long time, Claudia raised the Saturday-night special to her own temple and pulled the trigger.

The gunshot echoed across the water and back, ricocheting the way the earlier one had, until finally it died away. Then all I could hear was Roger’s labored breathing and the water lapping at Claudia’s crumpled body. And the eerie whine of the approaching sirens.

I could see the lights now through the trees, screaming down Swift River Road. The electric blues of the police cruisers, the flashing red of Newmarket Rescue. I reached out and rested my hand on Roger’s shoulder. He turned those sad, rheumy eyes on me, and for a long time we just looked at each other.

Then I wrapped his coat tighter around me and went to meet them on the bridge.

Epilogue

I was lucky. I only spent a few days in the hospital.

When they took me in, I was weak and dehydrated—

ironic, I know, after spending all that time in the water—and suffering from hypothermia. But I was alive, and that was what mattered.

Tom wasn’t as lucky as I. He lost a great deal of blood, and almost died on the way to the hospital.

He was hospitalized for nearly a month, in excruciat-ing pain for a good portion of it. I spent most of that month at his bedside. He doesn’t remember much of those first couple of weeks, when they kept him doped up on morphine. But I remember. It’s not the kind of thing you forget, seeing someone you love in that kind of pain.

The day after they brought us into the hospital, I was dozing by his bedside, attached to my own portable IV, when Jeannette stuck her head through the door. “Can I come in?” she said.

“He’s your son,” I told her. “Of course you can come in.”

She walked silently into the room and stood by his bedside, her hands gripping the bed rails and a single tear tracking down her cheek. Tom’s face looked pale and waxen, corpselike. The morphine had him so heavily sedated that the only evidence of life was the whoosh of the respirator. It must have frightened his mother half to death.

I got up and stood beside her. “He’s a strong man,” I told her. “And a hero. He saved my life last night.”

“Dwight Pettingill told me all about it. Do the doctors really believe he’ll survive?”

“He has everything to live for. Two little girls who adore him. A wife who’d be dead if not for him.” I paused, unable to speak past the lump in my throat.

“And a mother who’s been a fool.”

“No.” I took her hand in mine, seeing for the first time the hardened calluses, the reddened skin.

“You’re not a fool. You just wanted to protect your child. That’s admirable.”

“Oh, Julie. I’ve treated you so abominably. It wasn’t personal. Really. It’s just that—oh, God, how can I admit this? I thought Tom killed Elizabeth.

What kind of mother does that make me?”

“A human one.” I couldn’t very well cast asper-sions on her when I’d believed the same thing myself.

“They’d been fighting that night,” she said. “The night Beth died. She told him she was leaving him.

Tom went upstairs, and she put Sadie in the car and drove away. When he came back downstairs, he ran out after her. Just like he did with you last night. And then she turned up dead. What was I supposed to think?”

The same thing I’d thought. I shook my head in sorrow. How could two rational women have believed such a thing of a man like Tom Larkin?

“I can see it now,” she said, studying me.

“What? What can you see?”

“How much you love him. Your eyes haven’t left his face since I came in the room. You know, I’ve been deathly afraid of you.”

“Afraid of me? Why on earth—”

“I believed he’d killed Beth. No mother wants to believe that of her child, but it’s the truth. When you came along, the two of you seemed so close, and I was terrified that you’d unearth his secret. It would be just like Tom to tell you something like that. If you found out, the truth would destroy us all.” She hesitated, gripping the bed rails so hard her knuckles turned white. “Except that I was wrong, and both of you almost died anyway.”

“But we’re both alive,” I said. “And we have to believe Tom will recover. I won’t accept anything less.”

“Can you forgive me? You probably hate me, but for Tom’s sake, I wish you could find it in your heart to forgive.”

Still holding my mother-in-law’s hand in mine, I said, “There’s nothing to forgive.” It was an epic moment, a moment of true healing. That afternoon, standing by Tom’s hospital bed, marked a new beginning for Jeannette and me. At first we took baby steps. Learned to crawl before we could walk. But eventually, we came to understand and respect each other. More than that, we became friends. Not just for Tom’s sake, but for our own.

Two days after Jeannette and I called our truce, I lost the baby. Dr. Kapowicz said the fetus simply couldn’t take the strain that was put on it, and the miscarriage was nature’s way of protecting both of us. I was crushed, but Tom was philosophical. He said there would be other babies. That we had plenty of time, and an abundance of love to give.

One sunny October afternoon, Tom and I walked slowly, laboriously, down the hospital corridor to sit in the solarium. There, amid the thriving greenery and the last of the fall foliage, we sat holding hands while Tom filled in the rest of the blanks for me. If I’d gone a little further the day I went through his desk, in the TOM folder I’d have found an identical life insurance policy, with me as beneficiary. He’d opened them both shortly after we were married, knowing if anything ever happened to either of us, the other—and the girls—would be taken care of.

After Beth had died so young, he didn’t want to take chances. Life is unpredictable, and so precious.

Although we didn’t talk that afternoon about how close we’d come to using both those policies, I saw it in his eyes. And I’m sure he recognized that same knowledge in mine. We’d come very close to losing each other on the bridge that rainy autumn night.

Tom told me about the silent fear he’d lived with these last two years, the fear of losing Sadie to his brother. It had been with him, dogging his steps and weighing down on his shoulders, since before Beth died. Then, when he read her note—the one I’d lost from my pocket at the hospital—he’d realized he had nothing to fear, because Riley already knew the truth, and hadn’t acted on it. Riley, it seemed, was the furious man Beth had written about. It wasn’t her husband she feared, but her lover. When he’d found out he was Sadie’s father, he’d threatened to take her away. But clearheadedness had prevailed. Riley realized he was in no position at that point to be anyone’s father. And his brother had been Sadie’s dad for two and a half years. As much as he loved her, he couldn’t tear her away from the only father she’d ever known. So Riley had made the decision that he would remain her doting uncle, and never claim what he had every right to lay claim to. When Tom brought him Beth’s note after my fall, Riley had torn it up. There were still hard feelings between the two of them—

after all, Riley had slept with Tom’s wife. They might never enjoy the warm camaraderie that most brothers enjoyed. But at least they’d called a truce. It was a start.

Tom also cleared up the mystery of who the note was addressed to. The mysterious “K” was actually Melanie. Her childhood nickname had been Kitty, and that’s what Beth had called her even as an adult.

Why Mel hadn’t admitted this to me when I asked, I’ll probably never know. Maybe it was fear. But I decided to let it be. It didn’t matter anymore.

The last hole Tom plugged that October afternoon was the mystery of Beth’s paintings. The rest of them, he told me, were in a gallery in Boston. A few had already sold, and the gallery director had great expectations for the rest. The profit from the sales was going directly into a college fund for the girls. No matter what the future brought, Beth’s daughters would be taken care of. That’s something Tom and I both knew Beth would appreciate.

My recovery from the results of chronic poisoning has been gradual. Dr. Kapowicz says I’m very lucky. I could have died, or spent the rest of my life in a vegetative state. She’s closely monitoring the situation, but so far the only symptoms I’ve experienced are headaches and the occasional memory lapse. I forget people’s names, sometimes search diligently for a word but find only blank space. But that’s slowly improving, as well. Dr. K. says we may not know for years whether my body suffered any permanent damage. Because I’ve personally experienced the overwhelming fragility of life, I choose not to look that far ahead. I’m simply grateful to be alive, with Tom by my side.

It’s been eighteen months since that terrible night.

We have so much to be grateful for, Tom and I. We have each other, and neither of us seems to have suffered permanent damage from what we went through. We have the girls, and a newfound appreciation for all the gifts that life has given us. Six months ago, we gave the girls a baby brother. We named him David, after my dad, but we call him Davy. He’s a happy, healthy child, full of love and bubbly laughter. He resembles both of his sisters, and he looks a little like Tom, but most of all, Davy looks like himself. And that’s fine with us.

I’m in the process of adopting Tom’s girls. As far as I’m concerned, they’re already my daughters.

Sadie started kindergarten last fall, and Taylor has grown up so much, she’s become my best girlfriend.

Once a month, the girls and I do a mother-daughter movie night together. But most of the time, we just stay home with Tom, who took on a partner and cut his patient load in half. It’s made a big difference in him. He’s more relaxed, less stressed. He’s even been known to hang his clothes—believe it or not—

two inches apart, instead of a half inch. I’m not sure if I should worry, or rejoice.

There’ve been other changes in the last eighteen months. A nice young couple bought Claudia’s house, and we’ve become friendly with them. Dylan went to live with his dad. They moved to upstate New York, and last I heard, he was doing well. The police found the diazinon exactly where Claudia had said they would—in my strawberry-scented shampoo.

A few months ago, we took the kids to Los Angeles for a visit. We went to Disneyland, bought a map of where the stars live, shopped on Rodeo Drive, and had lunch with my crusty old friend Louis.

The girls gave the city their seal of approval. Louis gave his to Tom. “You got a winner this time, kid,” he said when he hugged me goodbye. “And those kids—” If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn I saw tears in his eyes. “Hang on to this one,” he said, and shook Tom’s hand vigorously. With Louis, you can’t get a higher recommendation than that.

Jeannette has a new beau. His name is Arthur, and he’s a building contractor who Riley introduced her to. They’re taking it slowly, but she’s started spending nights at his house, and I swear I can hear the sound of wedding bells just down the road.

A month after Roger Levasseur saved my life, I tracked down his son, the Baltimore attorney, who hadn’t heard from his father in years and had no idea if he was even alive. He came to Newmarket to visit his dad, and between the two of us, we convinced Roger to give up the filthy old trailer and move into a senior’s housing complex in town. To my surprise, it turned out that he’s loaded. Back when he was an MIT professor Roger invested wisely, and he’s been living on those investments for years. Tom gave him a complete physical exam and referred him to a psychiatrist who put him on a new psychotropic medication that’s done wonders for him. Roger now has a home health aide who comes in a couple times a week. Tom and I help him with groceries and take him out for dinner once in a while.