She was still disoriented as she regained consciousness. Her vision was blurred, but she realized she was lying in a pile of debris. She tried to sit up. But a heavy wood beam pressed against her arm and pinned her to the ground.
All of the casualties had landed in an unfinished garden area on the side of the hill—amid piles of dirt and newly planted trees and bushes. The O’Maras had turned off the outside lights to better view the fireworks, and it was dark at the bottom of the building. A cloud of dust and dirt loomed over the scene. It got in Susan’s eyes, and she tasted grit every time she took a breath. She could hear the agonizing screams and moans all around her. A child cried out for his mother. But it wasn’t Michael.
Susan tried to sit up again, but her whole body ached—and as much as she tried, she couldn’t free her left arm. Her hand was ensnared on something. She was pretty certain the arm was broken. Helplessly, she called out for Walt and Michael.
As the dust cleared, she saw the others, mangled in a mess of broken concrete, wooden planks, and dirt. Some of them were moving; others were perfectly still. She couldn’t see Walt or Michael among them. Part of her kept hoping they were okay. She continued to call out for them. But hers was just one of many voices crying out for help.
Finally, she spotted the silhouette of someone climbing over some rubble toward her. She never got a good look at the kind man’s face, but he lifted a few splintered, heavy wood beams—and at last, Susan could move her arm. Blood oozed from a six-inch gash along her forearm. The pain was excruciating. Still, she kept thanking the man. “Have you—have you seen Walt or Michael Blanchette?” she asked anxiously as he helped her to her feet. “Are they okay?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I wasn’t at the party. I’m a neighbor….”
Susan staggered through the wreckage, desperately searching for her husband and son. She could hardly walk. Every time she found someone, she tried to help them—as much as she could with her left arm out of commission. Everything she’d learned from her days as a nurse back in Harborview’s ER was coming back to her. She tried to identify people’s injuries or, at least, figure out whether or not they could be moved. She asked someone to get some sheets to make bandages and ice for the fractures and breaks. She remembered there had been two coolers full of ice at the party. So many people from the party and from neighboring buildings had rallied together to help. Susan kept looking for Michael—and Walt, hoping against hope he was among those good Samaritans.
The ambulances, cop cars, and two fire trucks finally showed up. But they had to park half a block away from the site. A stone path was the only access to the back of the condominium. Still, the nearby strobe lights from all the emergency vehicles bathed the area in an eerie red glow. The paramedics and firemen were just starting down the slope toward the casualties when Susan heard someone call her name.
She saw a man waving at her from farther down the hill. He stood over a heap of split boards and rubbish. Susan couldn’t see any bodies, but she knew they were there. She hobbled through the twisted ruins on the hillside. Tears streamed down her dirt-smudged face. As she got closer, she recognized Jim O’Mara, standing over Michael’s battered, broken body. Jim was shaking his head. There were tears in his eyes.
Susan plopped down on the ground, and she pulled Michael into her lap with her one good arm. She didn’t want to believe he was dead. She held on to his wrist and kept rocking him. But there was no pulse.
A rocket shot across the sky above them and then burst with a dazzling display of color. Susan glanced up for a moment.
“Walt’s just over here,” she heard Jim O’Mara say. “He’s unconscious. He—he’s still breathing….”
Walt never regained consciousness.
He had an epidural hematoma due to massive head trauma. They took him to Harborview Medical Center, where he died twenty hours later. Susan was at his bedside.
Later, when the lawsuits were filed against the condominium’s designers and builders, Susan remembered one of the arbitration hearings. She sat at a varnished walnut table in the conference room on the twenty-sixth floor of a downtown-Seattle office building. She listened to some hotshot attorney in a three-piece dark blue suit go on and on about how the materials used to build the decks on those condos had been up to code specifications. He kept talking about the odds of such a catastrophic accident ever happening. He said the odds were something like a million and a half to one.
And yet against all the odds, it had happened.
Michael was one of three people who had been killed on the scene. Walt was the fourth casualty. Nine more party-goers were seriously hurt and hospitalized, including Susan. She hadn’t realized the extent of her injuries from the fall until later. She’d been walking around the wreckage with two cracked ribs, a sprained ankle, and several cuts and bruises. Her left arm had been fractured in three places—and bled so profusely that she’d passed out in the ambulance with Walt.
When she came to in the hospital’s ER, it was like waking up from a dream. For a moment, she was reaching out for Michael again.
She’d known back in the ambulance that Walt would never recover—and that Michael was dead. She’d asked about Matthew. They’d told her that her younger son was fine. When the deck had collapsed, he’d been safely in bed with three other toddlers in the O’Maras’ guest room.
Yet when she’d regained consciousness in the emergency room, Susan had convinced herself that Mattie was dead, too. She thought they were lying to her when they said her friends, Jim and Barbara Church, had taken Mattie for the night. She didn’t calm down again until they called the Churches, and Barbara put a tired, confused Mattie on the phone with her.
If it wasn’t for Mattie, she would have completely fallen apart. She had to be brave and carry on for him. But that didn’t stop her from having moments when she’d think about Walt and Michael and start sobbing uncontrollably. Thank God most of these crying jags hit her when she was alone—driving in her car, or in bed at night. But occasionally they snuck up on her—in the checkout line at the supermarket or during her lunch break at the sandwich place near Dr. Chang’s office. All it took sometimes was a song on the radio or the sight of a young dad and his son, and then the damn water-works would start.
It was silly of her to think these awful, empty, heartbreaking episodes would suddenly stop now that Allen was in her life. He didn’t know that she still had those moments. He didn’t ask about Walt much—and for that, she was grateful.
The accident had been almost two years ago, and yet she still couldn’t help worrying that she’d lose Mattie, too. So if she was a bit overprotective of him at times, that was why.
At the kitchen sink, Susan blew her nose and wiped her tears away with a paper towel. Then she splashed some cold water on her face.
With a sigh, she took the Tater Tots and French bread out of the oven and set them out on the warm stove. Then she went back to the sunroom, sat down beside Mattie, and mussed his hair. “We’ll have to put WALL-E on hold for dinner, honey,” she said. “Let’s get your hands washed, okay?”
Gazing wide-eyed at the TV with the Woody doll at his side, Matthew didn’t respond.
“C’mon, Mattie,” Susan said, reaching for the remote. “You can…”
A hammering noise outside silenced her. Susan got to her feet and wandered toward the sliding screen door. She looked out at the porch. On the table by the gas grill was the platter of barbecued chicken breasts with a sheet of tinfoil over it—fluttering slightly in the night breeze.
She saw Allen by the corner of the porch, bent over the faulty balustrade with a hammer in his hand. In his mouth, he had an extra nail. He was repairing the loose railing.
Obviously, he had no idea she was watching him. Every once in a while, Allen stopped his hammering and looked out at the woods surrounding