“Oh my word,” the doctor said, clucking his tongue. “I didn’t realize! Of course. I used to play golf with his father, at the lake club. He owns that cabin down here, you know…”
Something like a glimmer of hope was presenting itself to Caitlin. She had to sit up and take notice. She couldn’t succumb to the light-headedness or the encroaching panic. “Yes,” she said, smiling as demurely as she could. Sometimes it paid to be the wife of a senator’s son. Please God, she thought, let it be one of those times.
“The cabin is actually where this happened, where we are staying,” she explained. “It was my mother-in-law’s Ambien. I thought it was out of reach—he’s never climbed on the counter before—”
She didn’t fight the tears this time when they started to come. Better for him to see them.
“Oh, her insomnia,” he said, nodding. “Augustus used to talk about that.” His tone softened, and he placed a gentle hand on her forearm. Caitlin felt almost guilty. She didn’t deserve his sympathy, she really didn’t. But Leo and Gus needed her. And at this moment, so did Bear. And Violet.
“Why don’t you call George,” he said, handing her a tissue from the end table at his side. “Then we’ll talk. Never fear—this is all routine. Nothing to worry about.”
Caitlin nodded, dabbing at the tears with the rough fabric. “When do you think Leo can come home?” she asked. “George will be asking, I’m sure,” she added for good measure.
“Provided that he remains stable, that depends on when he can be roused. Could be later today. Could be tomorrow morning.”
Caitlin nodded, not trusting her voice to speak again.
Maybe the powder had settled at the bottom of the thermos after all. If Leo hadn’t had enough to cause any alarm, there was a chance Finn had had more than enough. Which simultaneously renewed her hope that he wasn’t likely to wake anytime soon and her fear that she might have slipped him too much. She couldn’t think about the latter. The important thing was she might not be out of time to try to fix this unfixable mess.
“I’ll give you privacy to make the call,” he said. “I know these times are not easy. Being a parent never is.”
And then Caitlin was left alone with the receiver, and only one thing left to do. She would call George, and he would come. And if she managed to walk out of this hospital untouched today—and if Leo managed to walk out unharmed—she would have gotten better than she deserved. And she would pay it forward by doing what she should have done all along, no matter the consequences.
29
AUGUST 2016
It wasn’t that Violet was ungrateful for Gram’s support. It was just that she desperately wanted her to leave before she witnessed any more of her unraveling.
Gram was there, dropping off yet another casserole from the ladies at her living center, when Caitlin’s call came in. Gram had let herself in, dragged Violet out of Bear’s bed, announced that she looked like “death warmed over,” ordered her to stop torturing herself, and informed her that what she needed was a meal to settle her stomach and clear her head. It was lunchtime, after all. Standing disheveled in the center of Bear’s room, Violet told her what Agent Martin had said about the possible lead on a car, and Gram clapped her hands so enthusiastically, yelling out, “Now we’re cooking!” that Violet couldn’t help but follow her to the kitchen. Violet was scooping coffee grounds into the filter, Gram squinting at the dial to preheat the oven, when the phone rang.
Violet took the call in her bedroom, and when she returned a few moments later, she was determined not to tell Gram what had happened. But Gram saw through her, like she always did, and before Violet knew it she was repeating the conversation practically word-for-word.
An odd thing had happened these past few days. Gram had gone from encouraging Violet to open her eyes and stop telling herself the stories that she wanted to believe about her life, to trying to convince her that things weren’t as bad as she made them out to be.
When Violet admitted that she’d basically hung up on Caitlin, leaving her to wait alone in the emergency room, Gram’s eyes filled with tears. “I know you’ve just had shock after shock,” Gram told her. “But that doesn’t mean you have to do a complete about-face on everyone in your life. It might seem easy to blame Caitlin, but try to put yourself in her shoes, how caught in the middle she must have felt.”
Violet’s hands were still shaking from the sickening combination of high emotion and low blood sugar, and she steadied them on the counter while she waited for the coffee to brew.”But—”
“I’m not saying she was right not to tell you the things that she didn’t tell you, but that doesn’t change the fact that for years, she’s been your closest friend. And I’m not sure this is a time when you should be pushing people away. If Caitlin needs you—”
“You know what? Spare me the lecture,” Violet snapped. “Maybe I should have gone. But aren’t I allowed to be a little selfish right now? Can’t I stay in self-preservation mode if that’s what it takes to get through the day without Bear, without even knowing where Bear is, or if he’s okay?”
Gram dropped it then, but she didn’t leave. Instead, in true Gram form, she served up the casserole to Violet, had only a few bites for herself, and then set about baking a cheesecake neither of them had any desire to eat.
Violet perched at the kitchen table, nursing her hangover and watching. Even in her exhaustion, she couldn’t seem to quiet her mind, couldn’t shut off the dizzying strobe light shining in flashes over her best and worst memories. She had to bite her tongue not to talk at Gram, rehashing everything all over again.
Violet had never been one to overanalyze, and she’d once seen her more even-keeled approach as an asset. She’d tried not to dwell on the things she and Finn might not know about each other as intimately as they should. She’d tried not to worry about worst-case scenarios with Bear the way Caitlin did with her twins. She’d never convinced herself that any of his ordinary colds were meningitis, or that if she looked away for an instant at the playground he’d fall off the slide and break a bone, or be snatched up by a sex-trafficking ring.
Now, of course, it was hard not to view what she’d once seen as levelheadedness—or a faithful trust in the natural order of the universe—as a fault.
It didn’t take much stretching of the imagination to see that a little more analysis at certain points along the way might have prevented all of this in the first place. If she’d allowed her wildest fears to have free rein, some of them might not have been too off the mark.
But now that she couldn’t stop herself from frantically turning things over in her mind, she hated the sensation that came with this obsessing. It was as if she were spinning along with her thoughts, over and over, until she felt physically sick, but she didn’t know how to hit the Off switch on the ride.