Page 67 of The Summer Guests

“I stand corrected. Now how do we get them down?”

“Give me a leg up, Ben. I’ll get them,” said Declan.

“Or we could call Jo Thibodeau,” Maggie said, pulling out her cell phone.

“We’re right here. Let’s just do this.”

“That’s a long way up, Declan. Leave this to the police.”

But Ben had already boosted Declan up onto the first branch. Declan had always been the most athletic of their group, outpacing them all on the obstacle course at the Farm, where he’d easily scrambled up its ropes and over barriers. He might be forty years older and grayer now, but he was still athletic enough to scale a tree. He pulled himself up from branch to branch until he was just beneath the one where the goggles were snagged. He yanked on the branch overhead, again and again, trying to shake the goggles loose.

“Here they come!” he yelled.

Maggie heard a loudcrackand looked up in horror as the branch holding Declan suddenly snapped.

The goggles tumbled down. So did Declan.

Chapter 33

Susan

When Zoe was two years old, she was admitted to the hospital for pneumonia. For three days, Susan had hovered over her daughter’s bedside, watching her chest rise and fall, alert to any changes in her breathing. Susan had trained as a nurse, yet her own baby was ill, and she couldn’t stop blaming herself. Did she not dress her warmly enough for that winter walk the week before? Had she allowed someone with an incubating virus to come too close to her daughter? While other children sailed through infancy with only a few sniffles, Susan’s had landed in a hospital bed, and Zoe’s every wheeze and cough was like an accusation that she’d failed a mother’s most important job: protecting her baby.

Now once again she sat at her daughter’s bedside, watching Zoe’s chest rise and fall with each ventilator whoosh. Once again, she felt as if she’d failed. She should have protected her. She should have kept her safe and fought off the monsters who were always circling young girls. And because she hadn’t been there, one of those monsters had done this to her daughter.

A daughter Susan could scarcely recognize now. The right side of Zoe’s face was grotesquely bloated, and her eye was swollen shut. Half of her beautiful brown hair had been shaved off so the neurosurgeon could drill into her skull and drain the blood pressing on her brain.The doctor had told Susan about all of Zoe’s fractures, and the list was so long that she could scarcely remember them all: the skull, the pelvis. The collarbone, two ribs. The forty-foot plummet into the ravine would have killed almost anyone else. It was a miracle that Zoe had survived not only that fall, but also the days that followed.

“Your girl’s a fighter,” the doctor had said.

Please keep fighting, darling. Please come back to me.

She heard the ICU curtain slide open and turned, expecting to see Ethan returning from the cafeteria. Instead, it was Elizabeth who stepped into the cubicle, holding two cups of coffee. “They only allow two visitors at a time in the ICU,” said Elizabeth. “I told Ethan to go home. I’d like to sit with you for a while.” She handed one of the cups to Susan. “I thought you’d need a pick-me-up.”

“Thank you.” Susan lifted the plastic lid and inhaled the delicious steam rising from the cup of coffee. Sugar and caffeine were exactly what she needed now.

“Do you mind?” said Elizabeth, pointing to the other chair. “May I stay?”

“Of course.” What else could she say?No, I want to be alone with my daughter? While Elizabeth had always been cordial to her, there was a coolness to the woman, an impenetrable layer of New England stoicism that always seemed to keep Susan at arm’s length. Now they sat side by side, trapped together in the cramped cubicle, and Susan could not think of a single thing to say.

“Has she said anything?” Elizabeth asked.

“No. They gave her barbiturates to put her in a medically induced coma. It’s to protect her brain, give it time to heal while the swelling goes down. Once they taper off the drugs, she should start to wake up, but right now, we don’t know what she remembers. We just have to wait.”

“I’m so sorry, Susan.”

“At least there’s a chance shewillwake up.”

“She’s young, strong. We just have to be patient.”

There was another pause as the ventilator cycled, filling Zoe’s lungs. It had been decades since Susan attended nursing school, since she’d worked with endotracheal tubes and ventilators. If something went awry now—a sudden power outage or her daughter’s lung collapsing from a pneumothorax—would she remember how to respond? Just the thought of that responsibility made her hands sweat.

“I wish I’d had the chance to know her better,” Elizabeth said, looking at Zoe. “When you and Ethan got married, I thought that we had all the time in the world to be together. To be a family. But things keep getting in the way.”

Susan sighed. “Life.”

“Yes. Life gets in the way. George’s health. Ethan and that novel he can never seem to finish. And Zoe, always so busy at school. I confess, I’m not good at dealing with teenagers. I never could, even when my boys were young. But I will try harder. Now that I have a grandchild.”

“You have Kit.”

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