As Mary handed Helena the phone, the two women’s stares locked. The men in the adjacent room would have been surprised at the sympathy in the secretary’s gaze and at the fear in Helena’s.
“Hello?” She hugged the receiver with both hands. “Yes, this is Mrs. Whitworth.”
A long pause followed. No questions. No denial of information. No cries. “I understand.” She forced her voice to steady. Years in business served her well. Emotions were a luxury she could not afford to wear. “I’ll be right there.”
Helena’s shoulders were rod straight now, as if her jacket were still on the hanger. Her voice brittled with forced calmness, for she knew full well the men labored to listen from just beyond the door. They couldn’t see her grip Mary’s hand. They heard no cry as her lips whitened with strain.
“There’s been an accident on the oil rig J.D. and Shelby Howard are investing in. The nurse said five men were badly burned. Some died before the crew got them to the hospital.”
“Five?”
Helena nodded once.
“J.D.?” Mary whispered.
“One man’s burned too badly to identify, but he’s still alive.” Helena shook her head. “The odds are not with us.”
Mary cried in tiny little gulps that sounded like hic-cups. Helena opened her arms to her employee, her friend. Helena had buried two husbands already. Mary had sobbed each time. But, for Helena, there was too much to do, too much to think about for tears.
She handed Mary a tissue. “Would you go to my house and tell the girls, when they arrive, to stay put until I get back to you? I know as soon as they hear, they’ll come by, and I don’t want them laying siege on the hospital with all their children in tow. Tell them I need them at my house to answer calls. I’ll phone as soon as I know something.”
“They love J.D. like he’s their father,” Mary lied, as always, trying to be kind.
Helena pulled her keys from her purse and smiled, thinking J.D. hated her forty-year-old twin daughters only slightly less than he hated bird poachers. If he were burned and near death, Paula and Patricia were the last two he would want at his bedside.
“He’s got to be the one alive,” Mary mumbled and blew her nose. “He didn’t survive thirty years in the Marines to come home and die in an accident. Three Purple Hearts prove he’s too tough for that.”
“Before you go, inform the men inside that the meeting is over.” Without another word, Helena turned and marched down the hallway, her steps echoing like a steady heartbeat off the drab walls lined with colorless pictures and maps.
She was not a woman to make a charade of being dainty or falsely feminine, but she would not wear grief lightly for a third time in her life.
“Be alive,” she ordered in more than a whisper. “Be alive when I get there.”
She hurried through the deserted courthouse. The alarm bell from years past hung in a glass case reserved for memorabilia. “Not today,” Helena said as she remembered her childhood during the oil boom. “I’ll hear no bell today. Not for my J.D.”
10:37 a.m.
Clifton Creek Elementary
In a town marinated in secrets, hinted at but never told, Meredith Allen played Alice, innocently lost in Wonderland. At thirty-four, she still wore her hair long with a ribbon and faced life as if all she saw made sense.
Her path would not have been so tragic if she had wandered blind, but she knew…she knew and she still pretended.
When pulled from the refuge of teaching her second-grade class to report to the office, Meredith saw a lie in the principal’s eyes. Something he refused to say. Something he could not reveal as he told her she was needed at the hospital. Kevin had been involved in an oil rig accident.
She asked no questions as they walked back to her classroom, brightly decorated in a papier-mâché autumn. Principal Pickett offered to read the students a story while Meredith gathered her things and organized her desk, putting markers in order and papers in line. She was in no hurry. The lie in what he had not said could wait.
Meredith compiled lies, organizing them, ranking each, but never confronting any. Her father had been the first master of the craft. Her first memories of Christmas echoed with stories and half truths. “Things will be better next year.”
“This is just as good as what you wanted.” He kept up the falsehoods until finally he told his last, “Don’t worry, princess, I’m not going to die and leave you.”
As Meredith left the school, she thought of how Kevin had fallen right into the shoes of her father with his lies. Only last week he had sworn he no longer left the bank except to eat lunch. He must have lied, for oil rigs did not spring up over cafés. He was probably still leaving the office every chance he got, still staying away too long. His boss would be furious if Kevin lost hours of work or was hurt bad enough to have to take sick days. He might even be fired.
Ten minutes later, Meredith parked in front of the twenty-bed hospital, straightened her sweater appliquéd with the alphabet and lifted her head, carefully erasing all anger from her face.
County Memorial Hospital stood exactly as it had since the early ’70s when Meredith had played on the grass out front while her father died inside. The trees had grown larger. A slice of lawn had been paved over in the ’80s to allow for three handicap parking spaces. The eaves, built without any thought of architectural style, now sported aluminum siding and gutters. All else, even the putty-colored door frames, remained the same. Twenty beds available for a town that had never needed ten.
As a young girl, she had tried to imagine a big city hospital where people rushed about shouting orders, and groups huddled in corners speaking in foreign tongues. The busiest night at Memorial had probably been three years prior when the Miller triplets were born. Memorial was not much of a hospital. Even the name, Wichita County Memorial Hospital, that had once been lettered across the front had been shortened to simply County Memorial. It was mostly where the people of Clifton Creek came to give birth and die. If anyone needed surgery or faced a long stay, they drove the hour to Wichita Falls.
Meredith slammed her aging blue Mustang’s door three times before it stayed closed. Kevin had promised to fix it a month ago. But he had not, just as he had not done a hundred other things. Or was it a thousand by now? Things had been piling up since they started dating at sixteen and married five years later.
It must be at least a thousand, she thought: the car door, the front lock, the garbage disposal…their marriage. Not that their marriage was crumbling, only cracked, Meredith decided. She had no doubt they both still loved one another. But sometimes, it felt uneven, like a table with one short leg, never in danger of falling, but irritating all the same.
Meredith fought the wind as she hurried into the emergency entrance. She glanced back at the bank of dark, boiling clouds forming to the north. The storm was moving in quickly. She should be in reading circle, not standing in a tiny foyer with the smell of bleach and antiseptic death thickening the air around her.
A swirl of dried leaves charged the automatic door as it closed behind her. She arranged her sweater once more and touched the ribbon that held her natural curly auburn hair away from her face.
Shaking her head, she tried to figure out what Kevin had managed to do now. With all his sports activities and weekend drinking, the hospital was a familiar place. As a junior officer at the bank, he had no business being out at an oil rig. If he had ruined another suit, she would say something this time.
Last summer, she had sat quietly as Kevin told his latest adventure to his friends. He had been looking over land near the south fork of the Red River when an old football buddy begged him to catch one more long pass.
In the end,