The Off Season (7 page)

As on edge as she was, Christina didn’t expect to fall back asleep, didn’t really mean to. But Renee showed such compassion, insisting on serving her breakfast in bed, with a cold glass of milk to wash down the waffles, that Christina felt duty-bound to try.

Most likely because she’d been asked not to, Lilly—now dressed in the outfit they had laid out before bedtime—slipped upstairs to snuggle and kiss Christina’s face, her lips sticky from her own meal. But she was too wiggly to settle, her blue eyes alive with mischief.

“Mommy take nap.” She climbed from the bed to twirl around, the skirt she wore over purple leggings flaring like a ballerina’s. “
Mommy
sleep, not me!”

Christina smiled. “That’s what Miss Renee tells me. And we always listen to her, right?”

Lilly nodded solemnly before crinkling her nose. “Or you gonna get time-out.”

Christina snorted, amused to imagine herself being ordered by her petite friend to the designated corner chair in the family room. Though come to think of it, Renee would probably have better luck getting her to sit still for five minutes than either of them had had so far with Lilly.

“Guess I’ll take my nap, then,” Christina said before she heard Renee calling upstairs for Lilly to come back down. “And you’d better stay with Jacob now. Or time-out will be too crowded for both of our patooties.”

Lilly laughed like a pint-size maniac, then darted back to give her one last kiss. “Nighty-night. And when you wake up, come find me, Kay-dee-Mommy!”

Christina stared, unable to form a coherent thought, much less a question before Lilly closed the bedroom door behind her.

Come find me, Katie.

Shivering, she could only listen as the turquoise-and-hot-pink boots her daughter was practically living in this winter clumped down the hall toward the steps.

I should get up and go after her, make her explain where she first heard that.
But Christina’s limbs felt like lead, her eyelids heavier still. For a split second, she suspected Renee had drugged her milk in an attempt to force her to rest. But the idea was so preposterous, she put it out of her mind, assuring herself that the long nights had finally caught up with her instead. Or perhaps she was only seeking to escape the words still crashing through her brain. Words warning, sometimes in the strange woman’s voice and other times in Lilly’s, of the dire consequences should she fail to find the biological mother who’d been missing for three decades.

Sometime later, she jerked awake from a disturbing dream where she’d been called into the trauma bay, only to find her husband lying on the gurney, his abdominal cavity laid wide open with a medical examiner’s Y incision. Turning from the horrific sight, she remembered looking back, telling herself it couldn’t be real, and seeing Harris’s bomb-blasted corpse lying there instead.

Beside her on the nightstand, her cell phone was buzzing. As Christina struggled to shake off the nightmare, the strange brightness of the bedroom had her blinking in confusion, uncertain what day it might be, let alone what time.

She swiped the “Answer” button, her vision still too bleary to read the caller ID. “Hello?”

In the silence that followed, the details of last night’s terror came roaring back to mind. Her pulse thundering in her ears, she was seized with the conviction that this was no telemarketer calling.

“Christina? Is that you?” asked Christina’s younger sister, surprise in her voice. “This time of day, I was sure I’d be talking to your voice mail. Did you—did you change up your work schedule?”

“Annie.” Relief spilled into Christina’s chest, warm and welcome, before her stomach squeezed out an ice-cold warning. “Is everything all right?”

“No, it isn’t. Didn’t you get my texts?”

“What texts? I was sleeping. Last night was—” Christina decided she didn’t want to get into it. Not now. “I’ve got the day off. So what’s going on?”

While waiting for an explanation, she saw that it was a little after noon already. Normally, Annie would have been at one of the many temp positions that never seemed to lead to full-time offers. She recalled her sister saying she’d be working as a receptionist for the next two weeks. Unless things had already fallen apart somehow.

Bracing to hear another list of the ways in which her sister’s latest boss was a
pure idiot
or the job
impossible
, Christina nearly dropped the phone when Annie said, “Our—our mother called me.”

“She called—was it from Italy?” Overwhelmed by the uphill battle of her own day-to-day responsibilities, Christina had quickly lost track of their mom’s itinerary. “Or is it Portugal today?”

When she heard no answer but her sister’s rapid breathing, fear had her own breath catching. “Is Mom all right? You’re scaring me.”

“She—she’s fine, as far as I know,” Annie said, her voice more strained by the moment, “but I’m not talking about her.”

“You’re not talking about—?”

It hit Christina then that instead of the thumps and squeals of playing, fussing children or the muffled drone of the TV she should be hearing from downstairs, there was only silence. Were Jacob and Lilly napping? Or had Renee taken them out as she’d promised, leaving Christina in this big old house alone?

She climbed from the bed, her skin erupting with gooseflesh. But before she could leave the room to check out her suspicions, she paused to shake her head. “Wait. If you weren’t talking about Mom before, then who?” Her grip on the phone tightened. “Who did you mean when you asked if she’s called me, too?”

Dread pooling in her stomach, Christina waited for an answer. But she knew already. She could feel it in the screaming silence from the first floor, in the memory of the words from her daughter’s room last night.

“Our—our
mother
, Christina.” Annie’s voice sounded small and hesitant, the pale shadow of a girl—though now a woman, physically—who never took a single step without endless internal debate. Who’d avoided committing to anything, from a college major to a job or one of the men caught on the flypaper of her fragile beauty. The wrong men, time after time, most of them the kind who believed Christina’s delicate, golden-haired sister needed saving. The kind who inevitably grew discouraged when she couldn’t decide on any of them, either. “You know, the one who—who left us out there. Or at least a woman claiming she’s—”

“Our
birth
mother called you? On the telephone?” Christina was rocked by a wave of dizziness. Because if Annie had heard from this woman, those incidents she’d been telling herself couldn’t possibly be real must be. They couldn’t both be hallucinating.

“
Someone
did,” her sister said. “And she claimed to be—she said it wasn’t her fault, what happened to us that night.”

“What—what else?” Christina asked, too shocked to admit she’d experienced something similar. And uncertain whether to be relieved or horrified that she was no longer so alone.

“She claimed that she was forced to leave us.” Annie’s voice trembled. “She told me she was taken.”

“Taken,”
Christina echoed, her stomach knotting with the memory of her daughter using the word
murdered
instead. Or had it been the baby monitor she’d really heard that night, too, instead of a twenty-eight-month-old toddler? The idea took hold, and once more, she imagined some criminal deliberately hacking into the device, someone eager to game both her sister and herself.

Was it for money? But Christina’s thoughts turned to her car and the crude word carved into its side. The malice in that act made the silence from the floor below even more unnerving.

“Yes,
taken
,” Annie said as Christina hurried to the staircase. “I tried to get her to say more, at least to tell me if she’s safe now. But all she said was that she n-needed us to come find her.”

Christina’s heart stuttered as the familiar words sank in. “Find her where?”

At the sound of her feet on the treads, Max came wagging from the family room to meet her on the landing. Ignoring the big dog, Christina edged past him.

“I don’t know,” said Annie. “I couldn’t think. I didn’t—”

“So what did you say to her?” Christina headed for the kitchen, then reached for a scrap of paper left sitting on the counter. She recognized Renee’s loopy handwriting, still girlish as ever, at a glance.

“I told her I needed
her
, that we both needed her back then. But not now, and that the last thing I have time for in my life is someone playing sick games.”

Christina skimmed Renee’s note, her stomach unclenching at its promise to be home from the Kid Zone by two o’clock or so.

“You still there?” Annie asked, doubt spilling back into her voice.

“Good for you,” Christina said, proud that her sister had grown past the days when she’d dreamed up childish stories of their
real
mother, making her out to be the kidnapped princess in some dark fairy tale. “But did you ask her name? Did she say?”
Just in case this nutcase really is our mother . . .

“She just kept begging me to listen. I—I was so upset, I cut her off, and when she tried to call me right back, I turned off my phone. Do you—was I wrong to do it?”

Christina cringed at this cry for approval. But she couldn’t deny it to her sister. She never had been able to.

“Of course you weren’t wrong,” Christina said, falling back into the familiar habit of rescuing Annie—and her sister’s of looking to her to do so—that had been permanently ingrained in each of them so long ago. “But we’re going to need more information. Did you look back to see the number? Maybe we can track her down.” Or maybe, Christina thought, she should call back the private investigator she’d hired and have him deal with this lunatic.

And there was always Harris, though the thought of trusting him with the story she’d told only to her husband turned her stomach.

“I—no, I didn’t,” Annie said. “I didn’t think. I just tried to pull myself together. But in the end, it was no good. I had to go to bed.”

“I wish you’ll called me right away.”

“I—I was worried you might be mad I hung up on her.”

“Why would I be upset?” Christina asked her. “We have no idea who this woman really was or what she could’ve wanted. But maybe I should try to find out, in case she decides to hassle you again. Did you get the phone number?”

“I—no. I didn’t notice.”

“Could you check your phone’s recent calls, then, while you have me on the line?”

“I’m not sure how to do it. Let me try—”

When the call disconnected, Christina rolled her eyes at her sister’s hopeless technical skills. Figuring Annie would call back, Christina walked to the front window and opened the blinds, then squinted until her eyes adjusted.

The remaining snow had melted, leaving behind puddles and muddy patches that reflected the winter sun. Across the empty street, the gently sloping beach—a wide ribbon now, at low tide—had attracted a host of long-legged shorebirds, all busy pecking the mirrored strip bordering the relatively calm Atlantic.

There was something hypnotic in the feathered hunters’ rhythm, the way they trotted farther out when the blue-gray water ebbed, and then ran for drier sand as it washed their way again. Christina stood taking it in for several minutes, struggling to focus on nothing but the rush and retreat of her own breathing. She realized that during the entire six weeks she’d lived here, this was the first and only time she’d allowed herself to enjoy this privileged view.

I should show Doug.

The thought had bubbled to the surface, a lost artifact of her marriage. But instead of making her sad, she felt the sharp bite of her own anger that he would never be around to share anything with again. Even when he’d been alive, he’d rarely been available, instead spending long hours at work and gripped by his increasingly obsessive interest in running, bicycling, and swimming. In the triathlon training that had killed him . . . 
because he had to get away from you.

Grateful when the phone interrupted her thoughts, she snatched it up again, only to see that it wasn’t Annie calling, but Renee’s photo flashing on the screen.

“Hi, Renee, is everything all—”

“I called the ambulance! It’s—” Renee cried, the words so garbled they were almost impossible to understand. “Where are they? I can’t—”

Christina’s heart leaped through her chest. Was Lilly hurt? How badly? How would she survive if her daughter, too, was—

“Where are you, Renee?” she asked, speaking with a calm that belied her racing pulse. “What’s going on?”

Her grip tightened as Renee sobbed into the phone. Christina struggled to comprehend what she was saying, but she could only pick out a few words . . .

Her daughter’s name among them.

CHAPTER SIX

“Christina, this is Harris,” he told her after pulling the phone from his incoherent ex-wife’s grip. He wished he’d been able to stop her before she’d made the call. But what he’d seen on entering the Kid Zone, after racing there following a frantic call from the manager, had slammed him like a two-by-four across the shoulders. “I’m sending an officer to your house, lights and siren.”

“Is it Lilly? Is she—has something happened to my—”

“Lilly’s fine,” he assured her. “It’s Jacob.”
My son. My best buddy.
He glanced toward the spot where a registered nurse who’d happened to be there with her own kids was kneeling at his three-year-old’s side while Renee sobbed and clutched his hand. The shock of seeing Jacob, pale and unmoving, snaked across Harris’s nerve endings, all of them sparking like downed wires.

“What’s going on?” Christina demanded. “Harris, talk to me. Was there a car wreck? Or are you at the—”

“The Kid Zone, yeah.” He shook his head, distracted by the flashing lights and the beeping backup warning of an ambulance approaching the glassed-in front entrance. “Sorry. EMTs just pulled up. It was a fall, Christina, off one of those padded tube things—I can’t even imagine how he got up on top of it, much less slipped off and hit his head, but there’s a huge lump on the side. Blood, not a lot, but—”

“Is he conscious? Moving?”

Her seriousness, her focus, reminded him that he was talking to an experienced emergency physician.

“He hasn’t said a word,” Harris told her, “but he—he moaned and pushed me away when I tried to blot the bump with a handkerchief so I could see it.”

“Those are both good signs,” she said. “Vocalization. Response to painful stimuli.”

“Then he’ll be all right?” Part of him knew she couldn’t tell him that, not without examining Jacob for herself. But Harris was fighting hard to hold himself together. To hang on to the hope that the last person in the world he loved without reservation wouldn’t be torn from him.

“He will be, Harris, if I have anything to say about it,” Christina vowed. “I’ll call the hospital on the way over—you
are
using Shoreline, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Great,” Christina went on. “I’ll make some calls and try to get Alana Marshall over there to consult. She’s a pediatric neurologist, one of the best I’ve ever worked with.”

“And you’ll look in on Jacob there, too?” He was surprised at how badly he wanted Christina’s opinion. Wanted the unvarnished truth about his son’s condition, no matter how difficult it might be to hear.

“I’d be glad to. But what about Lilly? Is she all right?”

He spotted the delicate blonde girl, standing frozen in place about ten feet behind where Renee and the nurse knelt at Jacob’s side, staring with those pale eyes that somehow reminded him of a much older woman’s. An old soul, his mother would have put it. Or was the toddler simply mesmerized by the confusion? When two EMTs hurried inside with their equipment, she didn’t budge as the men cut around her.

“She seems okay,” Harris told her mother. “I’ll bring her with us to the hospital and make sure she’s looked after. Renee—Renee’s pretty distracted right now.”

“Of course she would be—both of you,” Christina said. “I’m so sorry this has happened, Harris. And I promise you, I’ll help in any way I can. I adore Jacob. He’s a great kid.”

“Yeah,” he said, voice breaking. “He’s everything I’ve got.”

“I get that. Believe me.” The compassion in her voice served as a reminder that she, too, had recently lost a spouse.

“The patrol car’s just pulled up,” she added.

“Thanks, Christina. Thanks for meeting us,” Harris said before ending the call. As he hurried to return Renee’s phone and see what the EMTs were doing with Jacob, Lilly caught his eye again. The little girl was approaching his ex-wife and trying to slip beneath her arm, the uncertainty in her eyes telegraphing her need for reassurance.

Instead, Renee physically recoiled, glaring at the tiny child. “I told you to stay over there,” she said, gesturing emphatically toward the spot where Lilly had been standing. “Get away from him now. You’ve already done enough.”

Christina swiped her ID card, then hurried through an automatic door and into the heart of the emergency department. With its blues, greens, and natural wood tones, the modern layout was designed to calm civilians rudely thrust into the space. But Christina’s pulse picked up as she spotted Harris off to one side of the nurses’ station, in the consult area, with one of her fellow physicians.

In one strong arm, Harris was holding Lilly. Though Christina’s daughter looked comfortable enough, leaning her head against his shoulder, the tall cop’s stiff posture betrayed a tension she could feel from across the open space.

Cy Goldstein, an emergency-department veteran respected for his thoroughness and gentle manner, was explaining something to Harris. The dark eyes behind Goldstein’s silver wire-framed glasses were wells of calm sincerity.

“Sorry to interrupt,” she said as she approached them. Reaching for her daughter, she added, “Just let me take her off your hands, and I’ll get out of your—”

“Mommy!” Lilly wriggled to get to her.

Harris passed her to Christina, the pain in his expression making him look a decade older than when she’d last seen him and somehow more vulnerable, dressed in off-duty jeans and a gray sweatshirt with the leather jacket he’d worn last night. “There you go,” he said. “The doc here was just telling me they’re taking Jacob for a CT scan. He’s still—he hasn’t said a single word or even tried to lift his head since . . .”

Suppressing an impulse to give Harris a hug, Christina asked her colleague about Jacob’s Glasgow Coma Score and a rundown on his vitals.

A balding man with a round face, Goldstein looked to Harris, his raised brows clearly questioning whether she was here in a professional or personal capacity.

“Tell her everything.” Harris’s voice was rough as old burlap.

With a solemn nod, Goldstein shared the GSC, which was concerning but not dire. No deterioration of the vitals, pupils equal and reactive. But her colleague’s tone told her what he wouldn’t say in front of any worried father.

If Jacob’s unconsciousness was the result of a serious brain bleed, it could kill the three-year-old before they could do anything about it. The CT scan and the other tests Goldstein had outlined would give them more information—and buy time until the neurologist Christina had arranged could get here. If surgery was indicated, a chopper would rush Jacob to the nearest Level I pediatric trauma center. Christina prayed it wouldn’t come to that, but both training and experience had her forming a mental flowchart detailing every possibility.

Including those with the most heartbreaking of outcomes.

“Mommy, I hafta go,” Lilly said, looking distressed as she struggled to escape Christina’s grip.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said, doing her best not to sound exasperated by her daughter’s timing. “Just a minute.”

“Go now,” Lilly whined, just as Christina caught sight of Renee on the opposite side of the nurses’ station. Standing outside one of the urgent-care treatment areas, she was supporting herself with one hand braced against a column, her head bowed and her wavy, reddish-blonde waves obscuring her face.

In the course of her work, Christina had seen so many patients’ family members in the grip of unimaginable pain, but her heart stumbled at the sight of her oldest friend so clearly devastated.

Rushing toward her, Christina struggled to keep hold of Lilly, who was whining, “Mommy, no. No want,” and trying even harder to get down.

“Be still, please, just a minute,” Christina said, wincing as her daughter stiffened and cried out.

Renee’s head jerked in their direction, her face wet and blotchy, her eyes and nose red.

“Oh, Renee,” Christina said, reaching out to hug her in spite of Lilly’s fussing. “I’m so sorry about Jacob. What a terrible—”

Renee’s eyes were locked on Lilly, a look that froze Christina and had her daughter dissolving into tears.

“She
pushed
him,” Renee hissed, fury twisting her face into a stranger’s. “On
purpose
, when he tried to bring her back down for me.”

“She’s
two
,” Christina said as she turned her body away, clutching Lilly to her. Her daughter pressed her face to her chest, hiding from Renee’s wrath and heaving choking sobs. And she was wet now, Christina realized. Scared by a grown woman into losing control. “Just twenty-eight months. She couldn’t possibly have meant to—”

“
She
pushed through a gap in the netting she’d been told twice to stay away from, hoisted herself up on top,” Renee said.

A wave of dizziness engulfed Christina, and selfishly, she thought,
It could be my baby, right now in the CT tube. My Lilly, as lost to me as Doug.

But Renee wasn’t finished. “While I was telling her to stay still and calling for a manager to bring a ladder to get her down safely, Jacob climbed through after her, just trying to help, and he—” Renee stopped a moment before gearing up to shriek, “She
pushed
him, and he tumbled backward. Get that child away from me. Get her out of here,
now
!”

Harris came running, thrusting in front of her to grasp Renee’s raised wrists as she lunged forward. While Christina froze in horror, too shocked to react to the physical threat, he peered into Renee’s face.

“Calm down right this minute,” he warned. “Do you want to be here for Jacob? Because if you can’t settle yourself, you’ll be escorted out.”

“You don’t even care,” she wailed, fighting to get away while Harris struggled to contain her. “You’ve never cared about us. Don’t pretend you—”

“Please don’t do this,” he said. “Jacob needs you. He needs
us
.”

As a nurse and a hospital security officer approached, Christina fled with her daughter to a small restroom designated
Family.
Grateful to find it unoccupied, she locked the door behind them and went to her knees.

“Miss Renee doesn’t mean it,” Christina swore before kissing her daughter’s damp and overheated temple as Lilly’s sobs echoed off the tile. “I know she didn’t, baby. She’s just worried about Jacob, that’s all.”

At the mention of Jacob, the crying wound down.

“Jacob hurt,” Lilly said. Exhausted by her weeping, she felt boneless in Christina’s arms—and looked so vulnerable, with tear trails glistening like snails’ tracks across her winter-chapped pink cheeks.

“How?” Christina asked, her heart pounding so hard, she felt the pulsing in her teeth as she thought of Renee’s accusation. And whether it was remotely possible that a little girl scarcely out of diapers was capable of deliberate malice. “How did Jacob fall down? What happened?”
Did you really push him?

Rather than giving her an answer, Lilly looked up, clearly miserable. “Wet, Mommy. I cold.”

“Of course you are.” Pulling herself together, Christina started digging through the big purse she’d grabbed on the way out the door earlier. Bypassing her wallet, bagged Cheerios, and lip balm, she whisper-shouted, “Yes!” when she came up with training pants and a change of clothes—probably from last Sunday, when she’d taken Lilly to visit her grandmother before the trip to Europe. There was a small pack of disposable wipes, too, thank heavens.

As she worked to clean and change her daughter, Lilly sobbed quietly, seemingly in a world of her own. “No, Jacob,” she murmured to herself. “
No
come down now. No grab!”

A wave of nausea hit Christina as she wondered whether that really was all this boiled down to—Jacob grabbing Lilly to pull her back toward the gap when she refused to come down with him? And Lilly, who could be stubborn as the dickens, pushing him away? Not out of a desire to hurt him—Christina doubted any child her age could comprehend the consequences—but from an impulsive, purely toddlerlike frustration at having her will thwarted.

Horrible, yes,
she thought as she wrung cool water from a couple of paper towels. But the act had been no more
deliberate
than the injury to a young mother she’d recently treated, whose toddler had broken her nose with a well-placed kick during a bedtime tantrum, or another injury that had occurred when a man with dementia had scalded his elderly wife by knocking a pot of boiling water from the stove.

As Christina wiped her daughter’s face, she felt a flare of anger. As upset as Renee had been, she’d had no right to lash out, to raise her fists to strike as she had. Didn’t she realize how terrifying this must all have been for Lilly, too? How her daughter could be scarred?

Emotionally scarred, but alive and physically whole.
Christina’s stomach turned with the thought. But a protective instinct overwhelmed all else, as primitive as it was fierce. She knew then that she’d do anything—fight or even kill—to keep her own child safe.

And if that meant stepping back from her duties as a friend and a physician right now, that was what she would do, without hesitation. She’d call Annie to come take them home or arrange for a cab—whatever it took to get Lilly out of here.