Page 7 of After All The Wreckage
“I was surprised when you weren’t here,” Nan commented as I strolled in and tossed my helmet onto the loveseat under the room’s single window.
Nan’s hair used to be as dark as mine but was now mostly white. It was cut close to her head for ease, but it suited her. She was only in her midseventies, but the loss of her parents, her sister, her husband, and now her daughter had aged her in an irreversible way, adding wrinkles that shouldn’t have been there.
“Where’s the Jeep?” Nan asked, head tilting toward the helmet I’d tossed aside. Technically, the Jeep I’d been borrowing ever since Mom’s SUV had been totaled was my grandfather’s. Nan had kept it running right along with her green Volkswagen Beetle from the sixties even though she definitely didn’t need both vehicles. After twelve years, she still couldn’t part with a single piece of him. It was why their closet still held his clothes, and the shed out back of their house held his woodworking tools.
“I had some business to take care of in D.C., and the bike needed to be driven.”
I hadn’t told Nan I was asking Dad for a loan because she would threaten to sell the cottage again. A home she and Pop had bought in their twenties and was mortgage free, but that she could still barely afford because the property taxes and insurance stretched her meager income.
“You got a new case?”
I nodded. It wasn’t a lie. I had Mom’s case now.
“How is she today?”
Nan’s knitting needles slowed ever so slightly, and she didn’t respond right away. When she finally looked up, I saw hopelessness in her eyes. It had been a bad day, and I’d been off on a useless errand.
I went to her, crouching down and surrounding her hands with mine. “What happened?”
“Doctor Huan showed up. She basically said we were wasting time, money, and love holding on to a physical body when Hallie is already gone.” Nan choked on the last words, and my anger flared back to life.
How could everyone just give up? I knew the odds. I knew the miracle we were looking for was rare. Mom’s lack of eye movement, the lack of any response, and the stupid Glasgow Coma Scale they administered all told us the numbers were not in our favor. But every time I looked at my mother, I felt like shewas still there, and I’d read enough stories about people who’d recovered even a year later that I couldn’t just remove the life support and let her body die. Not yet. Not when we were still within those miraculous months.
“Screw her, Nan,” I said gently. “She doesn’t know Mom. She doesn’t know us. She has no clue what kind of fighters we Marlowes are.”
Nan sniffed, grabbed a tissue from the side table, and dabbed her eyes with it. “You didn’t get that fight from the Bishops, that’s for sure.”
After giving her a weak smile, I winked. “I got my charm from them.”
I stood and Nan smiled. “The Marlowe women have been known to make a few siren calls ourselves. You got the best of both families. Which makes me wonder why you haven’t been luring any hot bodies to your bed lately.”
I laughed and went over to Mom’s side, grabbing her cold hand and rubbing it between mine. I didn’t answer because I didn’t have to. Nan and I had been consumed with Mom’s recovery. But even before that, my sex life had been pretty hit or miss. Especially when most of the guys I’d tangled with in high school and college had been overwhelmingly immature. Or maybe it had nothing to do with them but a flash of stormy gray eyes I couldn’t forget. Memories of a boy who’d burned himself onto my soul without even knowing it. Without even a single kiss.
A man I’d purposefully ignored since moving back to Cherry Bay.
I wasn’t exactly sure why.
Liar, my soul screamed. The harsher truth was that I didn’t want him to see me this way. I didn’t want him to look at the girl he’d thought could be Veronica-Mars-strong and see her struggling to hold herself together.
I didn’t want to be pitied by him. Not him.
I sat on the edge of the bed, moving Mom’s legs, massaging them, and doing all the things the physical therapists and nurses had taught us to do. She’d be weak when she eventually came back to us, but she was going to recover. She had to. The Marlowe strength was part of our doggedness. We didn’t give up once we set our minds on something.
And it would be a hot day in space before I gave up on the most important person in my life.
? ? ?
I spent Friday night and most of Saturday on my laptop in Mom’s room, doing what I always did—working on my cases and my classwork.
Normally, whenever Nan wasn’t in the room, I talked aloud to Mom because the first doctors we’d seen had said it was important for a coma patient to hear their loved ones’ voices. I’d ramble on about the Department of Defense background checks I was running, the cheating partner I was following, or the deadbeat parent I was tracking down for child support. I’d talk about my classes or brag about Nan’s latest gardening achievement.
This weekend, my silence hung oppressively in the air.
As I was researching her accident, I didn’t want her to relive the trauma if she could hear. The most recent reports insisted she didn’t have any brain activity and that nothing I said mattered anymore, but I couldn’t believe that because if I did…
I shook my head, concentrating on the final string of code I needed to create a backdoor into the Cherry Bay Police Department’s server. I smiled when I got in, covering my tracks as I went, like brushing away footprints in the snow.
There was nothing like the thrill of a good hack in the morning.
