Before the Storm (37 page)

not wanting to let go, because she’d see the tears in my eyes.

I’d forgotten what the real Laurel looked like. Forgotten the

smile. The light in her eyes.

I finally released her. “You look unbelievable,” I said.

She knew it. Knew she gave off a glow.“It’s good to see you,

Marcus,” she said. “Come on. Let’s go to the lounge where we

can talk.” Taking my arm, she guided me through a maze of

hallways until we reached a small room filled with armchairs.

We were the only people there. We sat in a couple of chairs

by the windows.

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Kicking off her shoes, she lifted her feet onto the chair and

hugged her knees.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m okay,” I answered. “But I want to know about
you.

What’s it been like to be locked up in here?”

She smiled again. A secret smile. It reminded me of Jamie

when he talked about his “relationship with God,” like it was

something only he could understand and someone as low on

the food chain as myself could never get it. I wasn’t so crazy

about the secret in her smile.

“It was bad at first,” she said. “And I hated this place. But

they’ve helped me so much.”

“They convince you you had a drinking problem?” I asked.

That frickin’ smile again. “I’m an alcoholic.” She sounded

like a parrot, repeating what she’d been told.

I leaned forward. “You drank little pink girly things.”

“I had withdrawal symptoms getting off those little pink

girly things,” she said.“That’s how bad it was. I’m an alcoholic,

Marcus. And so are you.”

I rapped the side of her head with my knuckles. “Hello? Is

my favorite sister-in-law still in there?”

She rested her chin on her knees, her eyes pinning me to

the back of my chair.“I hurt my baby,” she said.“I was depressed

after I had Maggie. That part I couldn’t help, except that I

should have taken antidepressants when my doctor told me to.

I’m sorry I’ve been a crappy mother to her, but I have to

forgive myself for that and move on. I won’t be a crappy

mother to my little boy when I get him back. My Andy.”

I’d lost her. It wasn’t like I wanted her to be a bad mother

to her kids, but I still wanted her to be my friend. She’d been

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my
best
friend. More than that. The night in my guest room—

a night I knew she regretted but I couldn’t—would always be

in my memory. That Laurel was gone now. I’d never get her

back.

“What have they done to you?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“They’ve turned you into a Stepford wife or something.”

“I’m sober, Marcus,” she said. “And I’m happy and starting

to feel good about myself again.”

I looked out the window. Acres and acres of rolling pasture,

bordered by dense forest. I supposed the setting would seem

peaceful to most people, but I was suffocating, looking at it. I

needed the ocean. Didn’t she?

“When are you coming home?” I asked.

“I’m nowhere near ready to leave here,” she said. “I feel safe

here. Safe from alcohol.” She pinned me again with her eyes.

“Safe from you.”

I wanted to say
Bullshit,
but stopped myself. Because I

suddenly got it. I may have loved her. I may have been the

closest thing she had to a friend for a couple of years. But I

hadn’t been good for her.

She pulled a picture from her shirt pocket and handed it to

me. The baby. I’d seen him after he was born, hooked up to

monitors in the intensive-care unit. He’d looked barely alive,

his puny little chest struggling to rise and fall above ribs like

bird bones. I hadn’t been able to look at him for long. I felt

sorry for her that this flimsy piece of paper was all she had of

her baby.

“He was completely vulnerable,” she said. “Completely

dependent on me to take care of him.” She pressed her fingers

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to her mouth as her eyes filled. “I don’t care how hard this is,

being here. I’d climb Mount Everest for him. I’ll gladly give

up alcohol to have him back. To be a true mother to him.”

I stared at the baby, and something snapped inside me. I saw

bruises where this tube or that entered his body. Saw veins

under his skin. He was so defenseless. Fragile. Damaged. If

they said it was alcohol that hurt him, then maybe it was. And

I’d done my part to make his mother a drunk. For the second

time in an hour, my eyes burned.

“Marcus,” Laurel said. “Please get sober. If you don’t, then

I don’t want you coming over to The Sea Tender once I’m

home. Understand?”

“No,” I said. “I don’t understand.”

“If you don’t get sober, I’ll have to avoid you.” Her voice

broke. What she was saying cost her something.

“You’d cut me out of your life? Out of Maggie and—” I

lifted the picture in my hand “—this little guy’s lives?”

She nodded. “Get sober, Marcus,” she pleaded. “I love you,

and you’re a good man, deep inside. I know you are.”

No, I wasn’t. There’d been something off about me, right

from the start. I always managed to push away the people I

cared about. The people who cared about me.

I tried to give the picture back to her, but she cupped her

hands around my hand, forcing my fingers to tighten around

the photograph.

“Keep it,” she said. “It’s
yours.
”

I stared at her, the moment so charged it stole my voice.

What’s mine?
I wanted to ask.
The picture? Or the baby?

But the moment passed. She looked away from me, quickly.

So quickly, that she told me all I needed to know.

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* * *

baby’s picture. The booze didn’t taste as good as it usually did.

After a while, in a moment of monumental strength, I poured

every damn ounce of alcohol I had in the house down the

kitchen drain. I called AA’s twenty-four-hour number. There

was a meeting in Wilmington the next morning at seven.

I couldn’t sleep that night, afraid I’d miss my alarm. I left the

house at five-thirty and drove through a pink dawn to Wilmington. Found the church building where the meeting would be

held. Forced myself to walk into the room and was bowled over

to see Flip Cates inside the doorway. He was a rookie cop in Surf

City, a year or two older than me, and he’d made that same hour

drive I’d just made to get there. He gave me a surprised smile.

An arm around my shoulders as he led me into the room.

“Glad to see you, Marcus,” he said.

“This your first meeting, too?” I asked.

He laughed. “More like my hundred and first,” he said, and

I thought,
If he could do it, maybe I can, too.

I hit meetings every night, piling the miles on my pickup.

Flip got me a construction job with a boss who’d let me take

off for a meeting on days when I knew I was sinking. I doubt

I would have made it through without Flip, because eighty

percent of me wasn’t sold on sobriety. Eighty percent of me

craved a beer. But that other twenty percent was stubborn as

hell. It hung on to the image of a baby chained to tubes and

wires. Of a woman who’d said the words “I love you” to me,

even if she’d only said them as a sister-in-law to a brother-inlaw. That part of me was stronger than I’d ever known.

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I kept my sobriety to myself. I didn’t want to hear Jamie say

he was proud of me, when I’d wanted him to be proud of me

all along. I didn’t want to feel him watching me, waiting for

me to screw up. And I didn’t want to feel the burning guilt

that seared me every time I remembered that I’d slept with my

brother’s wife.

I got jumpy as Laurel’s release day neared. I wanted to see

her, sure, but living near her again? A mistake—for both of

us. I didn’t want to be her brother-in-law. I wanted more than

that. Not being able to have it, yet living next door to her,

would be torture. The last thing I needed with only two

months of sobriety under my belt was torture.

I had an AA buddy from Asheville. I decided to move

there—a good six-hour drive from Topsail—the week before

Laurel came home. Jamie was shocked, but pleased.

“Good for you, Marcus!” he said. “It’ll be good for you to

really get out on your own. Maybe get yourself straight.”

Fuck you, bro.

After Laurel’s return, my mother wrote to tell me it was

like having the “old Laurel” back. I remembered the old Laurel.

Very cool woman. I was glad for her.

Several months later, Mama told me that one-year-old Andy

had been returned to Jamie and Laurel. I wanted to visit.

Wanted to see Laurel and the boy I was sure was my son. I

didn’t go. I stayed in Asheville, joining the fire department—

first as a volunteer, later as paid staff—and making a life for

myself four hundred miles from my family. I was never going

back, because seeing Laurel again would be like taking a sip of

booze: I would only want more.

I HAD MY OWN ROOM LIKE AT HOME, BUT IT was a bad

room. I didn’t have any windows except in the big metal door,

and the bathroom was right next to my bed. When I went to

the bathroom, I worried someone would look in the window

in the door. I got nervous when I had to go and by the end of

the first day, my stomach hurt.

I was a lot littler than the other boys. Everybody wore dark

blue jump things and flip-flops. The man who gave me mine

said it was the littlest size they had. At dinner, it was like the

cafeteria at school with long tables and everyone being there

except there were no girls. I said hello and smiled at everyone.

It was hard because I was scared. And nobody smiled back. I

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asked everybody, when can I go home? Some of the boys said

maybe never.

I couldn’t sleep good last night. I was scared someone would

come in the metal door and hurt me. I watched the door all

night. Maybe I slept a little though, because I had a dream I

was fishing on the pier with Uncle Marcus.

A bad thing happened at breakfast this morning. I said hi to

a boy and smiled at him. He started laughing and said to the

other boys,“We got us a little pansy,” and the boys laughed too

and started saying things. One of them nearly pushed my tray

off the table and said,“We don’t allow no faggots at our table.”

I knew what that word meant and I ran around the table and

started punching him. Then they all started punching
me.
I

don’t know all what happened then except I ended up in the

nurse’s office. The nurse, who was a man but he said he really

honestly was a nurse, put burning stuff on my cuts. It hurt and

I was scared and wanted Mom. I said, when can I go home?

The nurse said a bunch of words I didn’t understand about a

“pearance.” I asked him to explain and he said, “You dumb as

a bag o’ hammers or you jes’ playin’ like it?” I sat on my hands

to keep from hitting him. He said to me to “buck up.” I didn’t

know what that meant except I thought it was swearing.

They said I could have meals in my room then, and even

though my room wasn’t nice, I was glad. That way, the boys

wouldn’t get to see me cry.

I WAS WORRIED ABOUT DENNIS SHARTELL. I couldn’t

believe I’d had such confidence in him in the beginning. He

thought Andy was guilty. He didn’t say as much, but I could

tell. Before the secure custody hearing, he told me he thought

Andy would be safer if he stayed in detention until his trial

because, as the intake officer had predicted, people were angry.

“Absolutely not!” I said. “Get him out of there.”

He shrugged as if to say
It’s your funeral.

The judge, a very young-looking woman who reminded

me of Sara, was compassionate, and I knew we’d lucked out

in getting her. She seemed to take the innocent-until-provenguilty statute to heart. In the end, she reluctantly allowed

Andy to leave detention.

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“Mrs. Lockwood,” she said,“I would suggest Andrew not go

to school during this period. If he were to stay in detention,

we could guarantee his safety. In the community, we cannot.”

I nodded, already thinking about tutors and home schooling and other ways he could keep up. It seemed unjust, but I

had to face reality. Somehow, the accelerant had gotten on his

clothes. I believed that now. Marcus had managed to talk me

out of conspiracy theories and lab errors. But he and I were

both in agreement that Andy lacked the capacity to plan and

carry out arson. I was afraid, though, that Andy’s attorney was

not so sure.

“Andrew,” the judge addressed him. “Will you and Mr.

Shartell please stand.”

Andy and Dennis got to their feet.

“Andrew, you’re being charged with the burning of a church,

three counts of first-degree murder, and forty-two counts of