Cal watched the man’s eyes and the barrel of the gun. They were both steady and insane, the eyes of a fanatic who’d found his purpose. Cal had left his own gun at home.
“He’s your son, Chuck.”
“My son is dead,” Barnes replied. “Whatever this thing is, it isn’t my son.” He cocked the hammer on the shotgun and spoke to the boy. “This will be the last time I tell you. You aren’t welcome here.”
Jake took a step backward, as though he wanted to be certain that his father knew he was going. Then he turned away.
Cal remained by the truck, wondering if he should call to Jake. But before he could, the boy shuffled away—away from his family, from the road, from Cal and his waiting truck—and into the woods across the street.
When he was no longer visible through the trees, Cal turned back to see Barnes squinting off into the distance. Cal watched him spit into the snow and return to his house, his voice audible through the closed door as he shouted at his wife and remaining children.
Cal returned to the warm cab of his truck and drove back to the hospital.
“The Franks would like it if you visited them sometime today, Cal,” Sandy Trafton was telling him. “Amber regained consciousness a few hours ago. It’s almost like a miracle.”
He could hear the anxiety in her voice, and he watched her involuntary glance toward the room where their dead children were waiting.
“Maybe I’ll do that,” Cal said, rising to his feet. The joints of his knees popped like a sheet of bubble wrap. “Can I get you something from the cafeteria on my way back? Coffee, or a sandwich?”
“No, thank you, Cal.” She gave him directions to Amber’s room, and he walked away.
You should have stopped the boy, he thought, passing doctors and people he knew from town, all of whom gave him a wide berth, as though it were he that had returned from the dead. You should have stopped him and you didn’t. What would Mandy think of you?
He knew what she’d think. And she’d be right to think it.
He’d been angry when he’d waved them good-bye. Angry and jealous. Because from the moment that his daughter—in her soft, cautious way—said that what she felt for Jake might actually be Love, capital L, Jake had ceased to be the boyfriend and had instead had become the boy that would take his little girl away from him. He knew it was wrong, but as he stood there, grinning through gritted teeth and waving like an idiot as they pulled away, that was what he’d been thinking.
And, in the end, he’d been right. Jake Barnes had taken his little girl away from him. Forever.
No. No, she’ll come back. She has to come back.
He’d arrived at Amber Frank’s room on autopilot. Her father—Cal couldn’t recall his name—saw him and rushed over to shake his hand, at once thanking him for coming and offering condolences for his loss. Cal imagined that he was so numb that he couldn’t feel either the kindness of his words or the pressure of the other man’s hand.
“Amber wanted to talk to you, Officer Wilson,” Mr. Frank was saying. “I realize this is a very, very difficult time, but once she started to get a sense of where she was and what happened to her, it became very important that we contact you.”
Cal nodded without really comprehending what the man was trying to say. He allowed Mr. Frank to guide him into his room where Mrs. Frank was sitting by her daughter’s bedside. Cal looked down at the girl in the bed. Her face was mottled and bruised, her cheeks puffed and swollen. Cal closed his eyes, remembering how her legs had been twisted when they’d found her in the snow.
“I can come back later,” Cal whispered to Mrs. Frank, who shook her head as Amber tried to speak. Her eyes were so swollen Cal hadn’t been able to tell that she was awake.
“You might have to lean close,” Mrs. Frank—Helen, he remembered—said to him. He lowered his head toward Amber.
“Jake,” she whispered. “Jake.”
Cal closed his eyes and opened them again when the vision inside his head was of Jake and his daughter, driving away.
“Jake ... wasn’t ... drinking,” she said. “Mandy ... neither.”
Cal looked at her, and then at Helen, who was smiling at her daughter and patting her hand. He straightened up and cleared his throat.
“Thank you, Amber,” he said. “Thank you for telling me. You get better, okay?”
Mr. Frank stopped him in the hallway.
“Thank you,” he said. “It was really important for Amber to tell you that. From what I gather, she and the other boys had had a few beers, but Jake refused because he was driving.”
“And Mandy doesn’t drink,” Cal said. His own throat was dry.
Mr. Frank nodded. “That’s right. That’s what Amber said. ‘Mandy doesn’t drink.’”
Cal turned to go, but before he could escape, Mr. Frank’s hand was on his arm.
“I hope ... I hope she comes back,” Mr. Frank said, faltering as Cal’s eyes met his own. “If that’s what you want.”
Cal didn’t know if he should thank him or punch his lights out, so instead he just nodded and moved away.
It is what I want, he thought.
But three days later, she still hadn’t come back.
Chuck Barnes found out about the milk and the peanut butter on toast on the third day.
The first few times, Andy had gotten away with it because Chuck was up earlier than everyone and out the door by the time they all came down for breakfast, so he never saw Andy leaving it out on the deck. Nor did he see his wife Molly, once the children had all been packed off onto the morning bus, go out onto the deck in her housecoat and slippers to retrieve the milk and toss the peanut butter toast out into the backyard for the birds and the squirrels to eat. And he was never there in time to hear Andy’s first words upon arriving home from school, which were: “Did Jake come and get his breakfast?” And he wasn’t there to see him run to the sliding door and look out onto the deck for any sign or trace that his brother had been there. Nor did he hear Molly’s assurances that Jake had, in fact, come home to have his breakfast. Andy was nine, but he still believed in both Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny; it wasn’t such a stretch for his imagination to picture the arrival of his deceased brother coming to collect his breakfast, whom he had actually seen with his own eyes.
Andy was up early again on Saturday to fix Jake his breakfast. He was excited about it because he thought that if he sat really quietly just inside the door and behind the curtain, he might actually get to see Jake. If Jake didn’t get scared, then maybe he could even talk to him. He really missed his older brother. If he saw Jake, he’d talk to him about school and TV and stuff, but Andy didn’t think he’d mention that last night he’d cried a little at bedtime thinking about him. Jake had enough to worry about without knowing his brother was a crybaby.
Andy was proud of himself when he went downstairs into the kitchen and poured Jake a big glass of milk. So proud and so elated at the thought of helping Jake that he didn’t hear his father flush the toilet down the hall and walk into the kitchen. Andy’d unlocked the sliding door and was just about to set the glass of milk down in a nice little pile of snow when his father’s voice startled him so badly he spilled half the milk onto the deck.
“What the hell do you think you are doing?”
Andy didn’t want to turn around. He wanted to keep facing toward the backyard, where at any moment Jake could be walking out of the woods, ready to take Andy away with him. Andy rose to his feet and blinked against the chill air, wishing it to happen.
“Turn around!” his father yelled. “Answer me!”
Andy turned, aware that the remaining milk was in danger of spilling because his hands were shaking. His father was glowering at him, the gray black tufts of his hair still wild from sleep. “I ... I...”