Praise for Diane Chamberlain

“Diane Chamberlain is a marvellously gifted author. Every book she writes is a gem.”

—Literary Times

The Bay at Midnight

“So full of unexpected twists you’ll find yourself wanting to finish it in one sitting. Fans of Jodi Picoult’s style will love how Diane Chamberlain writes.”

—Candis

“This complex tale will stick with you forever.”

—Now Magazine.

“Emotional, complex and laced with suspense, this fascinating story is a brilliant read”

—Closer

“A moving story”

—Bella

“A fabulous thriller with plenty of surprises”

—Star

“A brilliantly told thriller”

—Woman

“This compelling mystery will have you on the edge of your seat”

—Inside Soap

The Lost Daughter

“A strong tale that deserves a comparison with Jodi Picoult”

—www.lovereading.co.uk

Before the Storm
Diane Chamberlain

www.dianechamberlain.co.uk

For John, both helpmate and muse

Acknowledgements

On my first research trip to Topsail Island, I stumbled into a realty office to ask directions. When realtor Lottie Koenig heard my name, she told me she loved my books and gave me a hug. That was my introduction to the friendly people who call Topsail Island home. Lottie gave me a tour of the island and hooked me up with another valuable resource, fellow realtor and longtime Topsail Island resident Patsy Jordan. In turn, Patsy introduced me to Anna Scott, one of the few teens on the island. Anna gave me a wealth of information about what life would be like for the teenagers in Before the Storm. I’m grateful to these three women for their help and enthusiasm.

Thank you to special friends Elizabeth and Dave Samuels and Susan Rouse for generously allowing me to use their Topsail Island homes as I did my research.

I could not have written this story without the help of Ken Bogan, Fire Marshal of the Town of Surf City’s fire department. Ken went out of his way to give me an understanding of my firefighting characters, instruct me in arson investigation and much, much more. Ken and his wife, Angie, also introduced me to Sears Landing Grill, where I arrived armed with a list of forty-five questions for them to answer over dinner. They answered them all and would have answered another forty-five had I asked. Thank you, Ken and Angie! Thanks also to these other Surf City firefighters: Tim Fisher, Kevin “Butterbean” Head and Bill Lindsey.

I found several excellent resources on Foetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder, but none better than Jodee Kulp, an FASD activist, author and mother of a daughter with FASD. The Best That I Can Be, a book Jodee wrote with her daughter, Liz, was a huge help to me in understanding Andy. Jodee not only answered my questions, but read Andy’s first chapter to make sure I was on target with his character.

For helping me understand the legal and juvenile justice system, I’m indebted to attorneys Barrett Temple and Evonne Hopkins, as well as to Gerry McCoy.

I kept Ray McAllister’s book, Topsail Island: Mayberry by the Sea, close at hand as I wrote. It’s an excellent, lovingly written treat for anyone wanting to read further about the Island.

In a raffle sponsored by the North Carolina Writers’ Network, Jabeen Akhtar won the right to have her name mentioned in Before the Storm. I hope she’s happy I named a coffee shop after her! Although some of the places mentioned in Before the Storm do exist, Jabeen’s Java, Drury Memorial Church and The Sea Tender are, like the characters themselves, figments of my imagination.

I’m also grateful to the following people for their various contributions: Sheree Alderman, Trina Allen, Brenda Burke-Cremeans, BJ Cothran, Valerie Harris, Christa Hogan, Pam “bless your heart” Lloyd, Margaret Maron, Lynn Mercer, Marge Petesch, Glenn Pierce, Emilie Richards, Sarah Shaber, Meg Skaggs, David Stallman, MJ Vieweg, Brittany Walls, Brenda Witchger, Ann Woodman and my friends at ASA.

Thanks to the readers of my blog, especially Margo Petrus, for inspiring this book’s title.

Finally, I often hear that agents and editors are so busy that they can’t take the time to help their authors create the best books possible. That certainly is not true in my case. Thank you to my agent, Susan Ginsburg, and my editor, Miranda Stecyk, for their skill, wisdom, commitment and passion. You two are the best!

Laurel

They took my baby from me when he was only ten hours old.

Jamie named him Andrew after his father, because it seemed fitting. We tried the name out once or twice to see how it felt in our mouths. Andrew. Andy. Then, suddenly, he was gone. I’d forgotten to count his fingers or note the color of his hair. What sort of mother forgets those things?

I fought to get him back, the way a drowning person fights for air.

A full year passed before I held him in my arms again. Finally, I could breathe, and I knew I would never, ever, let him go.

Chapter One

Andy

WHEN I WALKED BACK INTO MY FRIEND Emily’s church, I saw the pretty girl right away. She’d smiled and said “hey” to me earlier when we were in the youth building, and I’d been looking for her ever since. Somebody’d pushed all the long church seats out of the way so kids could dance, and the girl was in the middle of the floor dancing fast with my friend Keith, who could dance cooler than anybody. I stared at the girl like nobody else was in the church, even when Emily came up to me and said, “Where were you? This is a lock-in. That means you stay right here all night.” I saw that her eyebrows were shaped like pale check marks. That meant she was mad.

I pointed to the pretty girl. “Who’s that?”

“How should I know?” Emily poked her glasses higher up her nose. “I don’t know every single solitary person here.”

The girl had on a floaty short skirt and she had long legs that flew over the floor when she danced. Her blond hair was in those cool things America-African people wear that I could never remember the name of. Lots of them all over her head in stripes.

I walked past some kids playing cards on the floor and straight over to the girl. I stopped four shoe lengths away, which Mom always said was close enough. I used to get too close to people and made them squirmy. They need their personal space, Mom said. But even standing that far away, I could see her long eyelashes. They made me think of baby bird feathers. I saw a baby bird close once. It fell out of the nest in our yard and Maggie climbed the ladder to put it back. I wanted to reach over and touch the girl’s feather lashes, but knew that was not an appropriate thing.

Keith suddenly stopped dancing with her. He looked right at me. “What d’you want, little rich boy?” he asked.

I looked at the girl. Her eyes were blue beneath the feathers. I felt words come into my mind and then into my throat, and once they got that far, I could never stop them.

“I love you,” I said.

Her eyes opened wide and her lips made a pink O. She laughed. I laughed, too. Sometimes people laugh at me and sometimes they laugh with me, and I hoped this was one of the laughing-with-me times.

The girl didn’t say anything, but Keith put his hands on his hips. “You go find somebody else to love, little rich boy.” I wondered how come he kept calling me little rich boy instead of Andy.

I shook my head. “I love her.”

Keith walked between me and the girl. He was so close to me, I felt the squirmies Mom told me about. I had to look up at him which made my neck hurt. “Don’t you know about personal space?” I asked.

“Look,” he said. “She’s sixteen. You’re a puny fourteen.”

“Fifteen,” I said. “I’m just small for my age.”

“Why’re you acting like you’re fourteen then?” He laughed and his teeth reminded me of the big white gum pieces Maggie liked. I hated them because they burned my tongue when I bit them.

“Leave him alone,” the pretty girl said. “Just ignore him and he’ll go away.”

“Don’t it creep you out?” Keith asked her. “The way he’s staring at you?”

The girl put out an arm and used it like a stick to move Keith away. Then she talked right to me.

“You better go away, honey,” she said. “You don’t want to get hurt.”

How could I get hurt? I wasn’t in a dangerous place or doing a dangerous thing, like rock climbing, which I wanted to do but Mom said no.

“What’s your name?” I asked her.

“Go home to your fancy-ass house on the water,” Keith said.

“If I tell you my name, will you go away?” the girl asked.

“Okay,” I said, because I liked that we were making a deal.

“My name’s Layla,” she said.

Layla. That was a new name. I liked it. “It’s pretty,” I said. “My name’s Andy.”

“Nice to meet you, Andy,” she said. “So, now you know my name and you can go.”

I nodded, because I had to hold up my end of the deal. “Goodbye,” I said as I started to turn around.

“Retard.” Keith almost whispered it, but I had very good hearing and that word pushed my start button.

I turned back to him, my fists already flying. I punched his stomach and I punched his chin, and he must have punched me too because of all the bruises I found later, but I didn’t feel a thing. I kept at him, my head bent low like a bull, forgetting I’m only five feet tall and he was way taller. When I was mad, I got strong like nobody’s business. People yelled and clapped and things, but the noise was a buzz in my head. I couldn’t tell you the words they said. Just bzzzzzzzzz, getting louder the more I punched.

I punched until somebody grabbed my arms from behind, and a man with glasses grabbed Keith and pulled us apart. I kicked my feet trying to get at him. I wasn’t finished.

“What an asshole!” Keith twisted his body away from the man with the glasses, but he didn’t come any closer. His face was red like he had sunburn.

“He doesn’t know any better,” said the man holding me. “You should. Now you get out of here.”

“Why me?” Keith jerked his chin toward me. “He started it! Everybody always cuts him slack.”

The man spoke quietly in my ear. “If I let go of you, are you going to behave?”

I nodded and then realized I was crying and everybody was watching me except for Keith and Layla and the man with glasses, who were walking toward the back of the church. The man let go of my arms and handed me a white piece of cloth from his pocket. I wiped my eyes. I hoped Layla hadn’t seen me crying. The man was in front of me now and I saw that he was old with gray hair in a ponytail. He held my shoulders and looked me over like I was something to buy in a store. “You okay, Andy?”

I didn’t know how he knew my name, but I nodded.

“You go back over there with Emily and let the adults handle Keith.” He turned me in Emily’s direction and made me walk a few steps with his arm around me. “We’ll deal with him, okay?” He let go of my shoulders.

I said “okay” and kept walking toward Emily, who was standing by the baptism pool thing.

“I thought you was gonna kill him!” she said.

Me and Emily were in the same special reading and math classes two days a week. I’d known her almost my whole life, and she was my best friend. People said she was funny looking because she had white hair and one of her eyes didn’t look at you and she had a scar on her lip from an operation when she was a baby, but I thought she was pretty. Mom said I saw the whole world through the eyes of love. Next to Mom and Maggie, I loved Emily best. But she wasn’t my girlfriend. Definitely not.

“What did the girl say?” Emily asked me.

I wiped my eyes again. I didn’t care if Emily knew I was crying. She’d seen me cry plenty of times. When I put the cloth in my pocket, I noticed her red T-shirt was on inside out. She used to always wear her clothes inside out because she couldn’t stand the way the seam part felt on her skin, but she’d gotten better. She also couldn’t stand when people touched her. Our teacher never touched her but once we had a substitute and she put a hand on Emily’s shoulder and Emily went ballistic. She cried so much she barfed on her desk.

“Your shirt’s inside out,” I said.

“I know. What did the girl say?”

“That her name’s Layla.” I looked over at where Layla was still talking to the man with the glasses. Keith was gone, and I stared at Layla. Just looking at her made my body feel funny. It was like the time I had to take medicine for a cold and couldn’t sleep all night long. I felt like bugs were crawling inside my muscles. Mom promised me that was impossible, but it still felt that way.

“Did she say anything else?” Emily asked.

Before I could answer, a really loud, deep, rumbling noise, like thunder, filled my ears. Everyone stopped and looked around like someone had said Freeze! I thought maybe it was a tsunami because we were so close to the beach. I was really afraid of tsunamis. I saw one on TV. They swallowed up people. Sometimes I’d stare out my bedroom window and watch the water in the sound, looking for the big wave that would swallow me up. I wanted to get out of the church and run, but nobody moved.

Like magic, the stained-glass windows lit up. I saw Mary and baby Jesus and angels and a half-bald man in a long dress holding a bird on his hand. The window colors were on everybody’s face and Emily’s hair looked like a rainbow.

“Fire!” someone yelled from the other end of the church, and then a bunch of people started yelling, “Fire! Fire!” Everyone screamed, running past me and Emily, pushing us all over the place.

I didn’t see any fire, so me and Emily just stood there getting pushed around, waiting for an adult to tell us what to do. I was pretty sure then that there wasn’t a tsunami. That made me feel better, even though somebody’s elbow knocked into my side and somebody else stepped on my toes. Emily backed up against the wall so nobody could touch her as they rushed past. I looked where Layla had been talking with the man, but she was gone.

“The doors are blocked by fire!” someone shouted.

I looked at Emily. “Where’s your mom?” I had to yell because it was so noisy. Emily’s mother was one of the adults at the lock-in, which was the only reason Mom let me go.

“I don’t know.” Emily bit the side of her finger the way she did when she was nervous.

“Don’t bite yourself.” I pulled her hand away from her face and she glared at me with her good eye.

All of a sudden I smelled the fire. It crackled like a bonfire on the beach. Emily pointed to the ceiling where curlicues of smoke swirled around the beams.

“We got to hide!” she said.

I shook my head. Mom told me you can’t hide from a fire. You had to escape. I had a special ladder under my bed I could put out the window to climb down, but there were no special ladders in the church that I could see.

Everything was moving very fast. Some boys lifted up one of the long church seats. They counted one two three and ran toward the big window that had the half-bald man on it. The long seat hit the man, breaking the window into a zillion pieces, and then I saw the fire outside. It was a bigger fire than I’d ever seen in my life. Like a monster, it rushed through the window and swallowed the boys and the long seat in one big gulp. The boys screamed, and they ran around with fire coming off them.

I shouted as loud as I could, “Stop! Drop! Roll!”

Emily looked amazed to hear me tell the boys what to do. I didn’t think the boys heard me, but then some of them did stop, drop and roll, so maybe they did. They were still burning, and the air in the church had filled up with so much smoke, I couldn’t see the altar anymore.

Emily started coughing. “Mama!” she croaked.

I was coughing, too, and I knew me and Emily were in trouble. I couldn’t see her mother anywhere, and the other adults were screaming their heads off just like the kids. I was thinking, thinking, thinking. Mom always told me, in an emergency, use your head. This was my first real emergency ever.

Emily suddenly grabbed my arm. “We got to hide!” she said again. She had to be really scared because she’d never touched me before on purpose.

I knew she was wrong about hiding, but now the floor was on fire, the flames coming toward us.

“Think!” I said out loud, though I was only talking to myself. I hit the side of my head with my hand. “Brain, you gotta kick in!”

Emily pressed her face against my shoulder, whimpering like a puppy, and the fire rose around us like a forest of golden trees.

Chapter Two

Maggie

MY FATHER WAS KILLED BY A WHALE.

I hardly ever told people how he died because they’d think I was making it up. Then I’d have to go into the whole story and watch their eyes pop and their skin break out in goose bumps. They’d talk about Ahab and Jonah, and I would know that Daddy’s death had morphed into their entertainment. When I was a little girl, he was my whole world—my best friend and protector. He was awesome. He was a minister who built a chapel for his tiny congregation with his own hands. When people turned him into a character in a story, one they’d tell their friends and family over pizza or ice cream, I had to walk away. So, it was easier not to talk about it in the first place. If someone asked me how my father died, I’d just say “heart.” That was the truth, anyway.

The night Andy went to the lock-in, I knew I had to visit my father—or at least try to visit him. It didn’t always work. Out of my thirty or forty tries, I only made contact with him three times. That made the visits even more meaningful to me. I’d never stop trying.

I called Mom to let her know the lock-in had been moved from Drury Memorial’s youth building to the church itself, so she’d know where to pick Andy up in the morning. Then I said I was going over to Amber Donnelly’s, which was a total crock. I hadn’t hung out with Amber in months, though we sometimes still studied together. Hanging out with Amber required listening to her talk nonstop about her boyfriend, Travis Hardy. “Me and Travis this,” and “me and Travis that,” until I wanted to scream. Amber was in AP classes like me, but you wouldn’t know it from her grammar. Plus, she was such a poser, totally caught up in her looks and who she hung out with. I never realized it until this year.

So instead of going to Amber’s, I drove to the northern end of the island, which, on a midweek night in late March, felt like the end of the universe. In fourteen miles, I saw only two other cars on the road, both heading south, and few of the houses had lights on inside. The moon was so full and bright that weird shadows of shrubs and mailboxes were on the road in front of me. I thought I was seeing dogs or deer in the road and I kept braking for nothing. I was relieved when I spotted the row of cottages on the beach.

That end of the island was always getting chewed up by storms, and the six oceanfront cottages along New River Inlet Road were, every single one of them, condemned. Between the cottages and the street was another row of houses, all waiting for their turn to become oceanfront. I thought that would happen long ago; we had to abandon our house after Hurricane Fran, when I was five. But the condemned houses still stood empty, and I hoped they’d remain that way for the rest of my life.

Our tiny cottage was round, and it leaned ever so slightly to the left on long exposed pilings. The outdoor shower and storage closet that used to make up the ground floor had slipped into the sea along with the septic tank. The wood siding had been bleached so pale by decades under the sun that it looked like frosted glass in the moonlight. The cottage had a name—The Sea Tender—given to it by my Grandpa Lockwood. Long before I was born, Grandpa burned that name into a board and hung it above the front door, but the sign blew away a couple of years ago and even though I searched for it in the sand, I never found it.

The wind blew my hair across my face as I got out of the car, and the waves sounded like nonstop thunder. Topsail Island was so narrow that we could hear the ocean from our house on Stump Sound, but this was different. My feet vibrated from the pounding of the waves on the beach, and I knew the sea was wild tonight.

I had a flashlight, but I didn’t need it as I walked along the skinny boardwalk between two of the front-row houses to reach our old cottage. The bottom step used to sit on the sand, but now it was up to my waist. I moved the cinder block from behind one of the pilings into place below the steps, stood on top of it, then boosted myself onto the bottom step and climbed up to the deck. A long board nailed across the front door read Condemned, and I could just manage to squeeze my key beneath it into the lock. Mom was a pack rat, and I found the key in her desk drawer two years earlier, when I first decided to go to the cottage. I ducked below the sign and walked into the living room, my sandals grinding on the gritty floor.

I knew the inside of the cottage as well as I knew our house on Stump Sound. I walked through the dark living room to the kitchen, dodging some of our old furniture, which had been too ratty and disgusting to save even ten years ago. I turned on my flashlight and put it on the counter so the light hit the cabinet above the stove. I opened the cabinet, which was empty except for a plastic bag of marijuana, a few rolled joints and some boxes of matches. My hands shook as I lit one of the joints, breathing the smoke deep into my lungs. I held my breath until the top of my head tingled. I craved that out-of-body feeling tonight.

Opening the back door, I was slammed by the roar of the waves. My hair was long and way too wavy and it sucked moisture from the air like a sponge. It blew all over the place and I tucked it beneath the collar of my jacket as I stepped onto the narrow deck. I used to take a shower when I got home from the cottage, the way some kids showered to wash away the scent of cigarettes. I thought Mom would take one sniff and know where I’d been. I deserved to feel guilty, because it wasn’t just the hope of being with Daddy that drew me to the cottage. I wasn’t all that innocent.

I sat on the edge of the deck, my legs dangling in the air, and stared out at the long sliver of moonlight on the water. I rested my elbows on the lower rung of the railing. Saltwater mist wet my cheeks, and when I licked my lips, I tasted my childhood.

I took another hit from the joint and tried to still my mind.

When I was fifteen, I got my level-one driver’s license and was allowed to drive with an adult in the car. One night I had this crazy urge to go to the cottage. I couldn’t say why, but one minute, I was studying for a history exam, and the next I was sneaking out the front door while Mom and Andy slept. There was no moon at all that night and I was scared shitless. It was December and dark and I barely knew how to steer, much less use the gas and the brake, but I made it the seven miles to the cottage. I sat on the deck, shivering with the cold. That was the first time I felt Daddy. He was right next to me, rising up from the sea in a cloud of mist, wrapping his arms around me so tightly that I felt warm enough to take off my sweater. I cried from the joy of having him close. I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t believe in ghosts or premonitions or even in heaven and hell. But I believed Daddy was there in a way I can’t explain. I just knew it was true.

I felt like Daddy was with me a couple more times since then, but tonight I had trouble stilling my mind enough to let him in. I read on the Internet about making contact with people who’d died. Every Web site had different advice, but they all said that stilling your mind was the first thing you needed to do. My mind was racing, though, the weed not mellowing me the way it usually did.

“Daddy,” I whispered into the wind, “I really need you tonight.” Squeezing my eyes more tightly closed, I tried to picture his wavy dark hair. The smile he always wore when he looked at me.

Then I started thinking about telling Mom I wouldn’t be valedictorian when I graduated in a couple of months, like she expected. What would she say? I was an honors student all through school until this semester. I hoped she’d say it was no big thing, since I was already accepted at UNC in Wilmington. Which started me thinking about leaving home. How was Mom going to handle Andy without me?

As a mother, Mom was borderline okay. She was smart and she could be cool sometimes, but she loved Andy so much that she suffocated him, and she didn’t have a clue. My brother was my biggest worry. Probably ninety-five percent of my time, I thought about him. Even when I thought about other things, he was still in a little corner of my mind, the same way I knew that it was spring or that we lived in North Carolina or that I was female.

I talked Mom into letting Andy go to the lock-in tonight. He was fifteen; she had to let go a little and besides, Emily’s mother was one of the chaperones. I hoped he was having a good time and acting normal. His grip on social etiquette was pretty lame. Would they have dancing at the lock-in? It cracked me up to imagine Andy and Emily dancing together.

My cell phone vibrated in my jeans pocket and I pulled it out to look at the display. Mom. I slipped it back in my jeans, hoping she didn’t try to reach me at Amber’s and discover I wasn’t there.

The phone rang again. That was our signal—the call-twice-in-a-row signal that meant This is serious. Answer now. So I jumped up and walked into the house. I pulled the door closed to block out the sound of the ocean before hitting the talk button.

“Hi, Mom,” I said.

“Oh my God, Maggie!” Mom sounded breathless, as though she’d run up the stairs. “The church is on fire!”

“What church?” I froze.

“Drury Memorial. They just cut into the TV to announce it. They showed a picture.” She choked on a sob. “It’s completely engulfed in flames. People are still inside!”

“No way!” The weed suddenly hit me. I was dizzy, and I leaned over the sink in case I got sick. Andy. He wouldn’t know what to do.

“I’m going over there now,” Mom said. Her car door squeaked open, then slammed shut. “Are you at Amber’s?”

“I’m…” I glanced out the door at the dark ocean. “Yes.” She was so easy to lie to. Her focus was always on Andy, hardly ever on me. I stubbed out the joint in the sink. “I’ll meet you there,” I added. “At the church.”

“Hurry!” she said. I pictured her pinching the phone between her chin and shoulder as she started the car.

“Stay calm,” I said. “Drive carefully.”

“You, too. But hurry!”

I was already heading toward the front door. Forgetting about the Condemned sign, I ran right into it, yelping as it knocked the air from my lungs. I ducked beneath it, jumped to the sand and ran down the boardwalk to my Jetta. I was miles from the church in Surf City. Miles from my baby brother. I felt so sick. I began crying as I turned the key in the ignition. It was my fault if something happened to him. I started to pray, something I only did when I was desperate. Dear God, I thought, as I sped down New River Inlet Road, don’t let anything happen to Andy. Please. Let it happen to me instead. I’m the liar. I’m the bad kid.

I drove all the way to Surf City, saying that prayer over and over in my mind until I saw the smoke in the sky. Then I started saying it out loud.

Chapter Three

Laurel

THERE IS ONLY ONE STOPLIGHT ON THE twenty-six miles of Topsail Island. It sits two short blocks from the beach in the heart of Surf City, and it glowed red when my car approached it and was still red when I left it behind. If there’d been a dozen red lights, they wouldn’t have stopped me. People always told me I was a determined woman and I was never more so than the night of the fire.

Miles before the stoplight, I’d seen the yellow glow in the sky, and now I could smell the fire itself. I pictured the old church. I’d only been inside it a few times for weddings and funerals, but I knew it had pine floors, probably soaked with years of oily cleaner, just tempting someone to toss a match on them. I knew more than I wanted to know about fires. I’d lost my parents to one, plus Jamie had been a volunteer firefighter before he died. He told me about clapboard buildings that were nothing but tinder. Probably one of the kids lit a cigarette, tossed the match on the floor. Why oh why did I listen to Maggie? I never should have let Andy go. Maggie was around him so much, she thought of him as a normal kid. You got that way when you were around him a lot. You got used to his oddities, took his limitations for granted. Then you’d see him out in the world and realize he still didn’t fit in, no matter how much you’d tried to make that happen. It was easy to get seduced into thinking he was okay when the environment around him was so carefully controlled and familiar. Tonight, though, I threw him to the wolves.

The street near Drury Memorial was clotted with fire trucks and police cars and ambulances and I had to park a block away in front of Jabeen’s Java and The Pony Express. I’d barely come to a stop before I flew out of my car and started running toward the fire.

A few people stood along the road watching clouds of smoke and steam gush from the church into the bright night sky. There were shouts and sirens and a sickening acrid smell in the air as I ran toward the front doors of the church. Huge floodlights illuminated the building and gave me tunnel vision. All I saw were those gaping doors, smoke belching from them, and they were my target.

“Grab her!” someone shouted.

Long, wiry arms locked around me from behind.

“Let go of me!” I clawed at the arms with my fingernails, but whoever was holding me had a grip like a steel trap.

“We have a staging area set up, ma’am,” he shouted into my ear. “Most of the children are out and safe.”

“What do you mean most?” I twisted against the vise of his arms. “Where’s my son?”

He dragged me across the sandy lot before loosening his hold on me. “They’ve got names of the children on a list,” he said as he let go.

“Where?” I spun around to see the face of Reverend Bill, pastor of Drury Memorial. If there was a person on Topsail Island I didn’t like, it was Reverend Bill. He looked no happier to realize it was me he’d been holding in his arms.

“One of your children was here?” He sounded stunned that I’d let a child of mine set foot in his church. I never should have.

“Andy,” I said. Then I called his name. “Andy!” I shaded my eyes from the floodlights as I surveyed the scene. He’d worn his tan pants, olive green-striped shirt, and new sneakers tonight. I searched for the striped shirt, but the chaos of the scene suddenly overwhelmed my vision. Kids were everywhere, some sprawled on the sand, others sitting up or bent over, coughing. Generators roared as they fueled the lights, and static from police radios crackled in the air. Parents called out the names of their children. “Tracy!” “Josh!” “Amanda!” An EMT leaned over a girl, giving her CPR. The nurse in me wanted to help, but the mother in me was stronger.

Above my head, a helicopter thrummed as it rose from the beach.

“Andy!” I shouted to the helicopter, only vaguely aware of how irrational I must have seemed.

Reverend Bill was clutching my arm, tugging me across the street through a maze of fire trucks and police cars to an area lit by another floodlight and cordoned off with yellow police tape. Inside the tape, people stood shoulder to shoulder, shouting and pushing.

“See that girl over there?” Reverend Bill pointed into the crowd of people.

“Who? Where?” I stood on my toes trying to see better.

“The one in uniform,” he shouted. “She’s taking names, hooking parents up with their kids. You go see—”

I pulled away from him before he could finish the sentence. I didn’t bother looking for an entrance into the cordoned-off area. Instead, I climbed over the tape and plowed into the clot of people.

Parents crowded around the officer, who I recognized as Patty Shales. Her kids went to the elementary school in Sneads Ferry where I was a part-time nurse.

“Patty!” I shouted from the sea of parents. “Do you know where Andy is?”

She glanced over at me just as a man grabbed the clipboard from her hands. I couldn’t see what was happening, but Patty’s head disappeared from my view amid flailing arms and angry shouting.

From somewhere behind me, I heard the words “killed” and “dead.” I swung around to see two women, red eyed, hands to their mouths.

“Who’s killed?” I asked. “Who’s dead?”

One of the women wiped tears from her eyes. “I heard they found a body,” she said. “Some kids was trapped inside. My daughter’s here somewhere. I just pray to the Lord—” She shook her head, unable to finish her sentence.

I felt suddenly nauseated by the smell of the fire, a tarry chemical smell that burned my nostrils and throat.

“My son’s here, too,” I said, though I doubted the woman even heard me.

“Laurel!” Sara Weston lifted the yellow tape and ducked under it, running up to me. “Why are you here?” she asked.

“Andy’s here. Is Keith?”

She nodded, pressing a trembling hand to her cheek. “I can’t find him,” she said. “Someone said he got burned, but I—”

She stopped speaking as an ominous creaking sound came from the far side of the church—the sort of sound a massive tree makes as it starts to fall. Everyone froze, staring at the church as the rear of the roof collapsed in one long wave, sending smoke and embers into the air.

“Oh my God, Laurel!” Sara pressed her face against my shoulder and I wrapped my arm around her as we were jostled by people trying to get closer to Patty. Parents stepped on our feet, pushing us one way, then another, and Sara and I pushed back as a unit, bullish and driven. I probably knew many of the people I fought out of my way, but in the heat of the moment, we were all simply desperate parents. This is what it was like inside, I thought, panic rising in my throat. All the kids pushing at once to get out of the church.

“Patty!” I shouted again, but I was only one voice of many. She heard me, though.

“Laurel!” she yelled. “They took Andy to New Hanover.”

“Oh God.”

“Not life threatening,” Patty called. “Asthma. Some burns.”

I let out my breath in a silent prayer. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

“You go.” Sara tried to push me away, but I held fast to her. “Go, honey,” she repeated. “Go see him.”

I longed to run back to my car and drive to the hospital in Wilmington, but I couldn’t leave Sara. “Not until you’ve heard about Keith,” I said.

“Tracy Kelly’s parents here?” Patty called.

“Here!” a man barked from behind me.

“She’s at Cape Fear.”

“Is Keith Weston on the list?” Sara shouted into the din.

I was afraid Patty hadn’t heard her. She was speaking to a man who held a pair of broken glasses up to his eyes.

“Keith Weston was just airlifted to New Hanover,” Patty called.

“Oh, no.” Sara grabbed my arm so hard I winced. I thought of the helicopter rising into the sky above me.

“Let’s go,” I said, pulling Sara with me through the sea of people. Tears I’d been holding in spilled down my cheeks as we backed away, letting other parents take our places. “We can drive together.”

“We’ll go separately,” Sara said, already at a run away from me. “In case one of us has to stay longer or—”

“Mom!” Maggie suddenly appeared at my side, winded and shivering. “They told me Uncle Marcus is here somewhere, but I couldn’t find out anything about Andy.”

“He’s at New Hanover.” I grabbed her hand. “I’m parked over by Jabeen’s. Let’s go.”

I took one glance back at the smoking church. The ragged siding that still remained standing glowed red against the eerie gray sky. I hadn’t thought about my former brother-in-law being there, but of course he was. I pictured Marcus inside the church, moving slowly through the smoke with his air pack on, feeling his way, searching for children who never stood a chance. Could he have been hurt when the roof collapsed? Please, no. And for the briefest of moments, I shifted my worry from Andy to him.

Maggie and I barely spoke on the way to Wilmington. She cried nearly the whole time, sniffling softly, shredding a tissue in her lap. My eyes were on the road, my foot pressing the gas pedal nearly to the floor. I imagined Andy trying to make sense out of the chaos of a fire and its aftermath. Simply moving the lock-in from the youth building to the church had probably been more than he could handle.

“Why did you say they moved the lock-in to the church?” I asked when we were halfway there.

“The electricity went out in the youth building.” Her voice broke. “I heard some kids died,” she said.

“Maybe just rumors.”

“I’m so sorry I talked you into letting Andy—”

“Shh.” I reached for her hand. “It’s not your fault, all right? Don’t even think that.” But inside I was angry at her, at how cavalierly she’d told me, Oh, Mother, he’ll be fine!

I tried to pull my hand from hers to make a turn, but she held it tightly, with a need that was rare for Maggie, and I let our hands stay locked together for the rest of the trip.

The crammed waiting area of the emergency room smelled of soot and antiseptic and was nearly as chaotic as the scene at the church. The throng of people in front of the glass reception window was four deep. I tried to push through, carving a space for Maggie and myself with my arms.

“Y’all have to wait your turn,” said a large, wide woman as she blocked my progress.

“I need to find out how my son is.” I kept pushing.

“We all need to know how our children are,” said the woman.

A man in the waiting area let out sudden gut-wrenching sobs. I didn’t turn to look. I wanted to plug my ears with my fingers. Maggie leaned against me a little.

“Maybe it was the electrical,” she said.

“What?”

“You know, how the electricity was out in the youth building? Maybe that’s connected to the fire somehow.”

The woman ahead of us left the window and it was finally our turn. “They told me my son was brought here,” I said. “Andrew Lockwood.”

“All right, ma’am. Have a seat.”

“No!” I wailed, the sound escaping my mouth like a surprise. “Please!” I started to cry, as though I’d been holding the tears in by force until that moment. “Tell me how he is! Let me go to him. He’s…he has special needs.”

“Mom…” Maggie tried to pull me away from the window.

The receptionist softened. “I know, honey,” she said. “Your boy’s okay. You take a seat and someone will come get you right quick.”

I nodded, trying to pull myself together, but I felt like fabric frayed too much to be mended. Maggie led me to one of the seats in the waiting area and when I looked at her I realized that she, too, had dissolved in tears once more. I hugged her, unable to tell whether it was her shoulders quaking or my own.

“Laurel?”

I saw a woman heading toward us from the other side of the room. Her face and T-shirt were smeared with soot, her hair coated with so much ash I couldn’t have said what color it was. Beneath her eyes, two long, clean trails ran down her cheeks. She’d had a good cry herself. She smiled now, though, as she took both my hands in hers. I recognized the slightly lopsided curve of the lips before I did the woman. Robin Carmichael. Emily’s mother.

“Robin!” I said. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” she said. “And Andy’s fine, too,” she added quickly, knowing those were the words I needed to hear before anything else.

“They won’t let me see—”

“What about Emily?” Maggie interrupted.

Robin nodded toward the other side of the waiting area, where I spotted Emily curled up on a chair, hugging her knees and holding a bloodstained cloth to her forehead.

“She’s gonna be okay,” Robin said, “but we’re waiting to get her seen. She cracked her glasses right in two and got a little cut over her eyebrow.” Robin still held my hands and now she looked hard into my eyes. “Andy saved Emily’s life.” Her voice broke and I felt her grip tighten on my fingers. “He saved a load of people tonight, Laurel.”

“Andy?” Maggie and I said at the same time.

“Yeah, I know.” Robin clearly shared our amazement. “But I swear, it’s the truth.”

“Mrs. Lockwood?” A woman in blue scrubs stood at the entrance to the waiting area.

“Yes!” I stood up quickly.

“Come with me.”

We were ushered into one of the treatment areas I remembered from three years earlier when Andy broke his arm at the skating rink. The room had several beds separated by curtains. Someone was screaming behind one of the curtains; someone else cried. But the curtain was not drawn around Andy’s bed. He was bare chested and barefooted, but wearing his now-filthy pants. A woman in blue scrubs was bandaging his left forearm, and he wore an oxygen cannula below his nose. Andy spotted us and leaped off the bed, the gauzy dressing dangling from his arm, the cannula snapping off his face.

“Mom!” he shouted. “There was a big fire and I’m a hero!”

“Andy!” the nurse called sharply. “I need to finish your arm.”

Maggie and I pulled Andy into a three-way hug, and I breathed in that horrible acrid scent from the fire in great gulps. “Are you okay, sweetie?” I asked, still holding him tight. He fidgeted beneath my arms, and I knew they’d given him something for the asthma. I could tell by the spring-loaded tension in the muscles of his back, that’s how well I knew my son. Still, I wouldn’t let go of him.

Maggie came to her senses first, pulling away from us. “The nurse still needs you, Panda Bear,” she said. She lifted his arm and I saw the angry red swath that ran from his wrist to the bend of his elbow. First degree, I thought with relief. I led him back into the cubicle and looked at the nurse as Andy climbed onto the bed.

“Is that the worst of it?” I asked, pointing to his arm.

She nodded as she fit the cannula to his nostrils again. “Check it tomorrow for blisters. We’ll give you a prescription for pain. He’ll be okay, though. He’s a lucky fella.”

“I made a new friend,” Andy said. “Layla. I saved her.”

“I’m glad, sweetie.” I dusted ashes from his hair until its nutmeg color showed through.

The nurse carefully taped the gauze to his arm again. “He doesn’t seem to feel pain,” she said, looking at me.

“Not when he’s wired like this.” Maggie boosted herself onto the end of the bed.

“He’ll feel it later.” I remembered the swim meet last year when he hit his head on the side of the pool. He swam lap after lap, blood trailing behind him, not even aware he was hurt until the adrenaline had worn off.

“Did you hear me, Mom?” Andy said. “I saved Layla.”

“Emily’s mother told us you saved several people.” I smoothed the elastic strap of the cannula flat behind his ear. My need to touch him, to feel the life in him, was overpowering. “What happened?”

“Not several,” he corrected me. “Everybody.”

“You need to talk to him?” The nurse was looking over our heads, and I turned to see a man in a police uniform standing a few feet behind us. He looked at Andy.

“You Andy Lockwood?” he asked.

“Yes,” I answered for him.

The man took a few steps closer. “You’re his mother?”

I nodded. “Laurel Lockwood. And this is my daughter, Maggie.”

The nurse patted Andy’s bare shoulder. “Give a holler, you need anything,” she said, pulling the curtain closed around us as she left.

“I’m ATF Agent Frank Foley,” the man said. “How about you tell me what happened tonight, Andy?”

“I was the hero.” Andy grinned.

The agent looked uncertain for a moment, then smiled. “Glad to hear it,” he said. “We can always use more heroes. Where were you when the fire began?” He flipped open a small notebook.

“With Emily.”

“That’s his friend,” I said. “Emily Carmichael.”

“Inside the church?” Agent Foley asked, writing.

“Yes, but she’s my friend everywhere.”

Maggie laughed. I knew she couldn’t help herself.

“He’s asking if you and Emily were inside the church when the fire broke out,” I translated.

“Yes.”

“Where in the church were you? Were you standing or sitting or…”

“One question at a time.” I held up a hand to stop him. “Trust me,” I said. “It’ll be easier that way.” I looked at Andy. “Where were you in the church when the fire broke out?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Try to think,” I prodded. “Were you by the front door or closer to the altar?”

“By the baptism pool thing.”

“Ah, good.” The agent wrote something on his notepad. “Sitting or standing?”

“I stood next to Emily. Her shirt was inside out.” He looked at me. “She used to do that all the time, remember?”

I nodded. “So you were standing with Emily near the baptism pool thing,” I said, trying to keep him focused. “And then what happened?”

“People yelled fire fire fire!” Andy’s dark eyes grew big, his face animated with the memory. “Then they started running past us. Then some boys grabbed a…the long thing and said one two three and broke the window with the bald man.”

It was my turn to laugh as the words tumbled out of his mouth. An hour ago, I’d been afraid I’d never hear my precious son speak again.

Agent Foley, though, eyed him with suspicion. “Were there drugs there, Andy?” he asked. “Did you drink or take any substances tonight?”

“No, sir,” Andy said. “I’m not allowed.”

The agent stopped writing and gnawed his lip. “Do you get it?” he asked me. “The long thing? The bald man?”

I shook my head.

“Are you still talking about being inside the church, Panda?” Maggie asked.

“Yes and the boys caught on fire, but there were no ladders, so I told them to Stop! Drop! Roll! and some of them did. Keith was there.” He looked at me. “He was mean to me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. Sara was my best friend and I was worried sick about her son, but Keith could be a little shit sometimes. “You mean there were no ladders to escape the fire, like the ladder we have in your room at home?”

“Right. There weren’t any,” Andy said.

“Okay,” Agent Foley said. “So while this was happening, where were you?”

“I told you, at the baptism thing.” Andy furrowed his forehead at the man’s denseness.

The agent flipped a few pages of his notepad. “People told me you got out of the church and—”

“Right,” Andy said. “Me and Emily went out the boys’ room window, and there was a big metal box on the ground, and we climbed onto it.”

“And then what happened?”

“We were outside.”

“And what did you see outside? Did you see any person out—”

“One question at a time,” I reminded him.

“What did you see outside, Andy?” Agent Foley asked.

“Fire. Everywhere except by the metal box. And Emily was screaming that nobody could get out the front door because fire was there. I saw somebody did get out the door and they were on fire. I don’t know who it was, though.”

“Oh God.” Maggie buried her face in her hands, her long dark hair spilling in waves over her arms. I knew she was picturing the scene as I was. Sitting there with Andy, it was easy to forget how devastating the fire had been for so many people. I thought again of Keith. Where was he?

“Did you see anyone else outside beside the person on fire?” the agent asked.

“Emily.”

“Okay. So you went back in.”

“You went back in, Andy?” I repeated, wondering whatever possessed him to reenter the burning church.

Andy nodded. “I climbed on the metal box and got into the boys’ room and then called for everyone to follow me.”

“And they did?” the agent asked.

“Did they what?”

“Follow you?”

“Not exactly. I let some of them, like my friend Layla, go first.” He pulled the cannula from his nostrils and looked at me. “Do I still have to wear this?”

“A little longer,” I said. “Until the nurse comes back and says you can take it off.”

“So you let Layla go out the window first?” Agent Foley nudged.

“And some other kids. Then I followed them. But some were still following me, too.” He wrinkled his nose. “It’s hard to explain.”

“You’re doing fine, sweetie,” I said.

“How did you know the…metal box was there?” the agent asked.

“I don’t remember.”

“Try to remember,” I said.

“I saw it when I went to the bathroom.”

“When was that?” the agent asked.

“When I had to pee.”

Agent Foley gave up, closing his notepad with the flick of a wrist.

“Sounds like you are a hero, Andy,” he said.

“I know.”

The agent motioned me to follow him. We walked outside the curtained cubicle. He looked at me curiously.

“What’s his, uh, disability?” he asked. “Brain injury?”

“Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder,” I said, the words as familiar to me as my own name.

“Really?” He looked surprised, glancing over my shoulder as though he could see through the curtain. “Don’t those kids usually…you know, have a look to them?”

“Not always,” I said. “Depends on what part of them was developing when the alcohol affected them.”

“You’re his adoptive mother then?”

The police on Topsail Island know me and they know Andy and they know our story. An ATF agent in Wilmington, though, was a world away.

“No, I’m his biological mother,” I said. “Sober fifteen years.”

His smile was small. Tentative. Finally he spoke. “You’ve got a year on me,” he said. “Congratulations.”

“You, too.” I smiled back.

“So—” he looked down at his closed notepad “—how much of what he says can I believe?”

“All of it,” I said with certainty. “Andy’s honest to a fault.”

“He’s an unusual kid.” He looked over my shoulder again.

“You don’t need to tell me that.”

“No, I mean, in a fire, seventy-five percent of the people try to get out the front door. That’s their first reaction. They’re like a flock of sheep. One starts in that direction and they all follow. The other twenty-five percent look for an alternate exit. A back door. Bash open a window. Who’s the bald-headed guy he was talking about?”

“I have no idea.”

“Anyway, so Andy here goes for the window in the men’s room. Strange choice, but turns out to be the right one.”

“Well,” I said, “kids like Andy don’t think like that first seventy-five percent, or even the twenty-five percent. It was sheer luck. He could just as easily have gone for…I don’t know, the ladies’ room window, let’s say, and still be stuck there.” I hugged my arms across my chest at the thought. “Do you know if everyone got out okay? I heard rumors that some didn’t.”

He shook his head. “This was a bad one,” he said. “Last report, three dead.”

I sucked in my breath, hand to my mouth. “Oh, no.” Some parents wouldn’t have the luxury of hearing their children tell what happened tonight. “Do you know who?” I thought of Keith. Of Marcus.

“No names yet,” he said. “Two of the kids and one adult is all I know. A lot of serious burns and smoke inhalation. This E.R.’s packed tight as a can of sardines.”

“What’s the metal box?” I asked.

“The AC unit. Whoever laid the fire skipped around it.”

“Whoever…You’re saying this was arson?”

He held up a hand as if to erase his words. “Not for me to say.”

“I know there was an electrical problem at the youth building. Could that have affected the church?”

“There’ll be a full investigation,” he said.

“Is that why you asked Andy if he saw anyone else outside the church?”

“Like I said, there’ll be a full investigation,” he repeated, and I knew that would now be his answer, no matter what question I asked.

I opened the curtain around Andy’s bed once I returned to his cubicle, and noticed a man sitting on the edge of a bed on the other side of the room. His head was bandaged and his T-shirt-clad broad shoulders drooped. When he looked up to say something to his nurse, the movement made him wince. I recognized the dark hair, the thick-lashed brown eyes. He passed a tremulous hand over his face and I saw the sheen of tears on his cheek.

Andy’s nurse was listening to his lungs. She asked him to breathe deeply. To cough. I took that moment to whisper to Maggie.

“Ben Trippett’s over there,” I said. Ben was a volunteer firefighter, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He was also Andy’s swim-team coach and I wasn’t sure how Andy would react to seeing him there, injured and upset.

Maggie started as if I’d awakened her from a dream, then followed my gaze to the other side of the room. She knew Ben fairly well, since she coached the younger kids’ swim team.

Maggie got up, and before I could stop her, walked across the room toward Ben. He’d be embarrassed that we’d seen him crying, but Maggie was seventeen and I had to let her make her own errors in judgment. Her back was to me as she greeted Ben and I couldn’t see his reaction. But then she pulled a rolling stool close to the bed and sat down and they talked, both of them with their heads bowed as though they were sharing a prayer. Ben’s shoulders shook, and Maggie reached out and rested her hand on his wrist. She amazed me at times. Had she learned that compassion from me, watching me with Andy? I doubted it. All good things about Maggie had been Jamie’s doing. A seventeen-year-old girl finding it in herself to comfort a grown man. I was, for just a moment, in awe of her.

Andy’s nurse straightened up. “Let me take your vitals and then I’ll see about getting you discharged,” she said.

Andy stuck out his left arm for the blood pressure cuff.

“Your other arm, Andy,” the nurse said. “Remember? You need to be careful with the burned arm for a few days.”

She took his blood pressure and temperature and then left us alone.

“I’m going to write a book about being a hero,” Andy said, as I reached beneath the bed for the plastic bag containing his shirt and shoes.

“Maybe someday you will.” I considered bringing him down to earth a little, but how often did he get to crow about an accomplishment? Other people would not be so kind, though.

Opening the bag, I recoiled from the pungent scent of his clothes. “Andy, what you did tonight was very brave and smart,” I said.

He nodded. “Right.”

I thought about letting him leave the hospital without his odorous shirt or shoes, but it was chilly outside. I handed him the striped shirt.

“But the fire was a very serious thing and a lot of people were hurt.” I hesitated. It was best that he heard it from me. “Some died.”

He shook his head violently. “I saved them.”

“You couldn’t save everyone, though. That’s not your fault. I know you tried. But don’t talk to people about how you’re a hero. It’s bragging. Remember, we don’t brag.”

“Is it bragging if it’s in a book?”

“That would be okay,” I said.

Behind me, the glass door plowed open and I turned to see Dawn Reynolds fly through the room toward Ben.

“Oh my God! Ben!” She nearly knocked Maggie off the stool as she rushed to pull Ben into her arms. “I was so scared,” she said, crying. Tears welled in my own eyes as I watched the love and relief pour from her. She and Ben lived together in a little beach cottage in Surf City, and Dawn worked with Sara at Jabeen’s Java.

“I’m okay.” Ben rubbed her arms in reassurance. “I’m all right.”

Maggie quietly stood up, offering the stool to Dawn, then walked back to us.

“Is he okay?” I nodded toward Ben.

“Not exactly.” She bit her lip. “He has a seven-year-old daughter who lives with his ex-wife in Charlotte. He keeps thinking about her being trapped like that. He’s upset that people…” She looked at Andy, then me. “You know.”

“I explained to Andy that some people died in the fire,” I said.

Maggie started to cry again. She reached in her jeans pocket for her shredded tissue. “I just don’t understand how this could happen.”

“I’m going to write a book about it so it won’t be bragging,” Andy said as he pulled on one of his shoes.

Maggie stuffed her tissue in her pocket again. She lifted Andy’s leg so his foot rested on her hip as she tied his shoelaces. “Ben said a beam landed on his head,” she said. “Uncle Marcus was with him.”

Marcus. I remembered what the ATF agent had said: Two kids and one adult. And for the second time that night, my fear and worry shifted from my son to my brother-in-law.

Chapter Four

Marcus

I DIALED LAUREL’S NUMBER FOR THE THIRD TIME as I swerved onto Market Street. Voice mail. Again. Cute, Laurel. Now’s not the time to pretend you don’t know me.

“Call me, for Christ’s sake!” I shouted into the phone.

I still couldn’t picture Laurel letting Andy go to a lock-in, especially one at Drury Memorial.

I’d just come out of that fire pit when Pete ran up to me.

“Lockwood!” He’d only been a few feet away, but he had to shout above the racket of generators and sizzling water and sirens. “Your nephew’s at New Hanover. Get out of here!”

It took a second for his words to register. “Andy was here?” I shrugged out of the air pack and peeled off my helmet. My hands had been rock steady inside the church. Suddenly, they were shaking.

“Right,” Pete called over his shoulder as he raced back to the truck. “Drop your gear and get going. We’ll take care of it.”

“Does Laurel know?” I shouted as I stripped off my turnout jacket, but he didn’t hear me.

I ran the few blocks to the fire station, yanking off my gear along the way until I was down to my uniform. Jumped into my pickup and peeled out of the parking lot. They’d closed the bridge to all traffic other than emergency vehicles, but when the officer guarding the entrance recognized me, she waved me through. I’d tried Laurel at home as well as her cell. Now I called the emergency room at New Hanover. I had to dial the number twice; my hands were shaking that hard. I set the phone to speaker and dropped it in the cup holder.

“E.R.,” a woman answered.

“This is Surf City Fire Marshal Marcus Lockwood,” I shouted in the direction of the phone. “You have a patient, Andy Lockwood, from Drury Memorial. Can you give me a status on him?”

“Just a moment.”

The chaos at the hospital—sirens and shouting—filled the cab of my pickup. Someone screamed words I couldn’t make out. Someone else wailed. It was like the frenzied scene at the fire had moved to the hospital.

“Come on, come on.” My fists clenched the steering wheel.

“Mr. Lockwood?”

“Yes.”

“He’s being treated for smoke inhalation and burns.”

Shit.

“Hold on a sec…”

I heard her talking to someone. Then she was back on the phone. “First-degree burn, his nurse says. Just his arm. He’s stable. His nurse says he’s a hero.”

She had the wrong boy. The words “Andy” and “hero” didn’t go together in the same sentence.

“You sure you’re talking about Andy Lockwood?”

“He’s your nephew, right?”

“Right.”

“His nurse says he led some kids out of the church through the men’s room window.”

“What?”

“And she says he’s going to be fine.”

I couldn’t speak. I managed to turn off the phone, then struggled to keep control of the pickup as the road blurred in front of me. As nerve-racking as the fire had been, it hadn’t scared me half as much as those last couple of minutes on the phone.

Now that I knew Andy was going to be okay, I was royally pissed off. The fire was arson. I had been on the first truck out and done a quick walk around. The fire ring was even on all four sides of the building. That didn’t happen by accident.

I understood arson. I’d been the kind of kid who played with matches and I once set our shed on fire. I tried to blame it on Jamie, but my parents knew their saintly older son would never be that stupid. I don’t remember my punishment—just the initial thrill of watching Daddy’s oily rags explode into flame on his workbench, followed by terror as the fire shot up the wall. So I got it—the thrill, the excitement. But damn it, if some asshole had to start a fire, why a church filled with kids? Why not one of the hundreds of empty summer homes on the island? The building itself was no great loss. Drury Memorial had been on a fund-raising kick for years, trying to get the money to build a bigger church. So, was that just a coincidence? And was it a coincidence that the lock-in was moved from the youth building to the church? Whatever, it felt good to be thinking about the investigation instead of Andy.

Ben Trippett and Dawn Reynolds were coming out of the E.R. as I ran toward the entrance. Now there was a guy who could call himself a hero. As much as I wanted to see Andy, I had to stop.

“There’s the man!” I said, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Dude,” Ben said, with a failed effort at a smile. He leaned against Dawn and in the light from the entrance I saw her eyes were red.

“How’s the head?” He’d been crawling in front of me in the church when something—a joist or a statue or who knew what—crashed on top of him, knocking off his helmet. In the beam from my flashlight, I’d seen blood pouring down his cheek.

“Seventeen stitches.” Dawn pressed closer to him. “Maybe a concussion.”

“You saved at least one life tonight, Trippett,” I said. “You can have my back anytime.”

Truth was, I hadn’t liked going in with him. Ben had been a volunteer for less than a year, and I was sure he wouldn’t last. He had the desire, the ambition and the smarts, but he was claustrophobic. He’d put on the SCBA gear, take that first breath through the face piece and freak out. Full-blown panic attack. The guys razzed him about it. Good-natured teasing at first, but when the severity of the problem became clear, the taunting turned ugly, and I couldn’t blame them. No one wanted to go into a fire with a guy they couldn’t trust. Ben had been ready to quit. Ready to leave the island altogether. But he finally made it through the controlled burn during a training session, and a month or so ago, he told me he was ready to go live.

“You sure?” I’d asked him. “There’s a huge difference between a controlled fire and a live burn.”

“I’m sure,” he’d said. He hadn’t been kidding. He was ahead of me tonight, inching on his hands and knees through the burning church, when his low-air alarm sounded. We’d both started out with full tanks, but nerves made you chew up the air faster and he was running on empty.

“Let’s go!” I’d shouted to him, the words muddy from behind my mask. He heard me, though. I knew he did, but he didn’t turn around. Instead, he kept moving forward and I thought he was losing it. I heard the dull thud of whatever hit his helmet. Heard his grunt of pain. Saw the streak of red on his cheek. “Ben!” I’d shouted. “Turn around!” But he kept right on going.

I called into my radio. “I’ve got an injured man with low air,” I said, but through the murk, I suddenly saw the screen of his thermal image camera. There was someone in front of us. He was going after one of the kids.

The girl had crawled into her sleeping bag and somehow found an air pocket. Ben grabbed her, and together we dragged her from the church. She was unconscious but alive.

“Your boyfriend’s a stubborn SOB,” I said now to Dawn. “But there’s a girl who’s lucky he is.”

“I know,” Dawn said.

“I heard some kids didn’t make it,” Ben said. “I should’ve stayed. Maybe we could have—”

“You couldn’t stay, man.” I gripped his shoulder. “Your head was split open.”

Ben pressed his sooty fingers to his eyes. He was gonna come unglued any second.

“It’s okay, buddy,” I said. “You did good tonight.” The hospital lights fell on his dark hair and all of a sudden, he reminded me of Jamie. That brawny bulk of him that made me feel scrawny by comparison. Big man with a soft heart.

“Do you hear him, Ben?” Dawn turned to Ben, one hand on his chest. “You did all you could, sugar.” She looked at me. “Do you know how it started?”

“Arson, most likely.”

“Who would do something like that?” Dawn asked.

I shook my head. “Y’all happen to see my nephew inside?” I looked past them through the glass doors of the E.R. “Andy?”

“He’s there.” Dawn touched my arm. “He’s okay.”

Andy sat cross-legged on a bed in the E.R., looking like a skinny little Buddha with a bandaged forearm, and my throat closed up. Laurel sat next to the bed, her back to me, black hair falling out of a barrette. Maggie was curled up at the end of the bed, hugging her knees.

Andy spotted me as I opened the glass door.

“Uncle Marcus!” he called.

I reached the bed in a few strides and leaned past Laurel to hug him. His back felt boyish and narrow—a little kid’s back, though his muscles were tight from swimming. I inhaled the smoke from his hair, unable to speak. Finally, I got a grip on myself and stood up.

“Good to see you, Andy.” My voice felt like sandpaper in my throat.

“I’m a hero,” Andy said, then glanced quickly at Laurel. “Can I tell Uncle Marcus that?”

Laurel chuckled. “Yes,” she said. “Uncle Marcus is family.” She looked at me. “I told Andy that he shouldn’t brag.”

I put an arm around Maggie and hugged her to me. “How’re you doin’, Mags?”

“Okay,” she said. She didn’t look okay. Her face was waxy. Beneath her eyes, the skin was purplish and translucent.

“Don’t worry,” I said, squeezing her shoulders. “He’s okay.”

“Who’s okay?” She was definitely out of it.

“Andy, babe,” I said.

“Oh, I know.” She leaned forward, rubbed her hand over Andy’s knee.

“How about you, Marcus?” Laurel asked. “You’re a mess. Are you okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “But I’d like Andy to tell me why he’s a hero.”

There was no place to sit, so I leaned against the side of Laurel’s chair, hands in my pockets. Andy jumped into the story with a zeal that made me forget my anger at Laurel for not calling me. He was suddenly a storyteller.

Laurel glanced up at me as Andy spun his tale. Our eyes locked for about half a second. She was quick to look away.

Andy was on a roll. “So, I clumb out the—”

“Climbed, sweetie.” Laurel stroked her thumb over his hand.

“I climbed out the boy’s room window and onto the metal box with Emily and then went back in and got everyone else to follow me out.”

“Unreal,” I said. “Like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.”

“Who’s that?” Andy asked.

“The Pied Piper is a man from a fairy tale, Andy,” Laurel said. “Children followed him. That’s what Uncle Marcus meant. You were like the Pied Piper because the children followed you.”

“I thought it was rats that followed him,” Maggie said.

I groaned. “Never mind. It was a bad analogy to begin with.”

Laurel looked at her watch, then stood up. “Can I talk with you a minute?” she asked.

I leaned toward Andy, my hands on the sides of his head as I planted a kiss on his forehead. Breathed in that stench of fire I never wanted to smell on him again. “See you later, Andy,” I said.

I had to run to catch up with Laurel outside the room. She was a jogger—a vitamin-chomping health nut—and she didn’t walk as much as dart. Now she turned toward me, arms folded—her customary posture when talking with me. That was the way I usually pictured her in my mind—arms across her chest like a shield.

“Why the hell didn’t you call me?” I asked.

“Everything happened so fast,” she said. “And look. Keith Weston’s here somewhere.”

Whoa. “Keith was at the lock-in, too?”

She nodded. “He was airlifted. Sara left the fire about the same time I did, but I haven’t seen her.”

“Come on.” I started walking toward the reception desk.

“An ATF agent was here talking to Andy,” Laurel said.

“Good.” They were moving fast. That’s how I liked it.

“He said three people were killed. Do you know who?”

“No clue.” I knew she was scared Keith was one of them. So was I. I touched her back with the flat of my palm. “There were plenty of injuries, I know that much.”

We’d reached the desk, but the clerk was too overwhelmed to be bothered. I stopped a guy in blue scrubs heading toward the treatment area.

“Can we find out the condition of one of the fire victims?” I asked after identifying myself. “Keith Weston?”

“Sure,” he said, like he had nothing better to do. He disappeared down a hallway.

I looked at Laurel. “Is this for real?” I nodded toward the treatment room. “He led other kids out?”

“Unbelievable, isn’t it? But the agent said it was true. I think it was because he didn’t think like everyone else—you know, heading for the front doors.”

“And he has no fear,” I added.

Laurel was slow to nod. Andy had plenty of fears, but she knew what I meant. He had no sense of danger. No real understanding of it. He was impulsive. I thought of the time he dove from the fishing pier to grab a hat that had blown off his head.

The guy in scrubs came back. “He’s not here,” he said. “They took him straight up to UNC in Chapel Hill.”

Laurel covered her mouth with her hand. “The burn center?”

He nodded. “I talked to one of the medics. They induced a medical coma on the beach.”

“Is he going to make it?” Laurel’s hand shook. I wanted to hang on to my anger at her, but that trembling hand did me in.

“That I don’t know,” the guy said. “Sorry.” His beeper sounded from his waistband, and he spun away from us, taking off at a run.

“Is his mother with—” Laurel called after him, but he was already halfway down the hall.

Laurel pressed those shaky hands to her eyes. “Poor Sara.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m just thankful Andy’s okay.”

“Oh, Marcus.” She looked at me. Right at me. More than a half second this time. “I was so scared,” she said.

“Me, too.”

I wanted to wrap my arms around her. I needed the comfort as much as I needed to comfort her. I knew better, though. She’d stiffen. Pull away. So I settled for resting my hand on her back again as we headed toward the treatment area and Andy’s bed.

Chapter Five

Laurel

1984

JAMIE LOCKWOOD CHANGED ME. For one thing, I could never again look at a man on a motorcycle without wondering what lay deep inside him. The tougher the exterior, the greater the number of tattoos, the thicker the leather, the more I’d speculate about his soul. But Jamie also taught me about love and passion and, without ever meaning to, about guilt and grief. They were lessons I’d never be able to forget.

I was eighteen and starting my freshman year at the University of North Carolina when I met him. I was pulling out of a parking space on a Wilmington street in my three-month-old Honda Civic. The red Civic was a graduation present from my aunt and uncle—technically my adoptive parents—who made up for their emotional parsimony through their generosity in tangible goods. I checked my side mirror—all clear—turned my steering wheel to the left, and gave the car some gas. I felt a sudden thwack against my door and a meteor of black leather and blue denim streaked through the air next to my window.

I screamed and screamed, startled by the volume of my own voice but unable to stop. I struggled to open my door without success, because the motorcycle was propped against it. By the time I escaped through the passenger door, the biker was getting to his feet. He was huge pillar of a man, and if I’d been thinking straight, I might have been afraid to approach him. What if he was a Hells Angel? But all I could think about was that I’d hurt someone. I could have killed him.

“Oh my God!” I ran toward him, moving on sheer adrenaline. The man stood with his side to me, rolling his shoulders and flexing his arms as if checking to see that everything still worked. I stopped a few feet short of him. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you. Are you all right?”

A few people circled around us, hanging back as if waiting to see what would happen.

“I think I’ll live.” The Hells Angel unstrapped his white helmet and took it off, and a tumble of dark hair fell to his shoulders. He studied a wide black scrape that ran along the side of the helmet. “Man,” he said. “I’ve got to send a testimonial to this manufacturer. D’you believe this? It’s not even dented.” He held the helmet in front of me, but all I saw was that the leather on his right sleeve was torn to shreds.

“I checked my mirror, but I was looking for a car,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I somehow missed seeing you.”

“You need to watch for cyclists!” A woman shouted from the sidewalk. “That could have been my son on his bike!”

“I know! I know!” I hugged my arms. “It was my fault.”

The Hells Angel looked at the woman. “You don’t need to rag on her,” he said. “She won’t make the same mistake twice.” Then, more quietly, he spoke to me. “Will you?”

I shook my head. I thought I might throw up.

“Let’s, uh—” he surveyed the scene “—let me check out my bike, and you back your car up to the curb and we can get each other’s insurance info, all right?” His accent was pure Wilmington, unlike mine.

I nodded. “Okay.”

He lifted his motorcycle from in front of my door, which was dented and scraped but opened with only a little difficulty, and I got in. I had to concentrate on turning the key in the ignition, shifting to Reverse, giving the car some gas, as if I’d suddenly forgotten how to drive. I felt about fourteen years old by the time I managed to move the car three feet back into its parking space. I fumbled in the glove compartment for my crumpled insurance card and got out.

The Hells Angel parked his motorcycle a couple of spaces up the street from my car.

“Does it run okay?” I asked, hugging my arms again as I approached. It wasn’t cold, but my body was trembling all over.

“It’s fine,” he said. “Your car took the brunt of it.”

“No, you did.” I looked again at the shredded leather on his arm. “I wish you’d…yell at me or something. You’re way too calm.”

He laughed. “Did you cut me off on purpose?”

“No.”

“I can tell you already feel like crap about it,” he said. “Why should I make you feel worse?” He looked past me to the shops along the street. “Let’s get a cup of coffee while we do the insurance bit,” he said, pointing to the café down the block. “You’re in no shape to drive right now, anyway.”

He was right. I was still shivering as I stood next to him in line at the coffee shop. My knees buckled, and I leaned heavily against the counter as we ordered.

“Decaf for you.” He grinned. He was a good ten inches taller than me. At least six-three. “Find us a table, why don’t you?”

I sat down at a table near the window. My heart still pounded against my rib cage, but I was filled with relief. My car was basically okay, I hadn’t killed anyone, and the Hells Angel was the forgiving type. I’d really lucked out. I put my insurance card on the table and smoothed it with my fingers.

I studied the width of the Angel’s shoulders beneath the expanse of leather as he picked up our mugs of coffee. His body reminded me of a well-padded football player, but when he took off his jacket, draping it over the spare chair at our table, I saw that his size had nothing to do with padding. He wore a navy-blue T-shirt that read Topsail Island across the front in white, and while he was not fat, he was not particularly toned either. Burly. Robust. The words floated through my mind and, although I was a virgin, having miserably plodded my way through high school as a social loser, I wondered what it would be like to have sex with him. Could he hold his weight off me?

“Are you doin’ all right?” Curiosity filled his brown eyes, and I wondered if the fantasy was written on my face. I felt my cheeks burn.

“I’m better,” I said. “Still a little shaky.”

“Your first accident?”

“My last, too, I hope. You’ve had others?”

“Just a couple. But I’ve got a few years on you.”

“How old are you?” I asked, hoping it wasn’t a rude question.

“Twenty-three. And you’re about eighteen, I figure.”

I nodded.

“Freshman at UNC?”

“Yes.” I wrinkled my nose, thinking I must have frosh written on my forehead.

He sipped his coffee, then nudged my untouched mug an inch closer to me. “Have a major yet?” he asked.

“Nursing.” My mother had been a nurse. I wanted to follow in her footsteps, even though she would never know it. “What about you?” I opened a packet of sugar and stirred it into my coffee. “Are you a Hells Angel?”

“Hell, no!” He laughed. “I’m a carpenter, although I did graduate from UNC a few years ago with a completely worthless degree in Religious Studies.”

“Why is it worthless?” I asked, though I probably should have changed the subject. I hoped he wasn’t going to try to save me, preaching the way some religious people did. I was beholden to him and would have had to listen, at least for a while.

“Well, I thought I’d go to seminary,” he said. “Become a minister. But the more I studied theology, the less I liked the idea of being tied to one religion like it’s the only way. So I’m still playing with what I want to be when I grow up.” He reached toward the seat next to him, his hand diving into the pocket of his leather jacket and coming out with a pen and his insurance card. On his biceps, I saw a tattooed banner, the word empathy written inside it. As sexually excited as I’d felt five minutes ago, now I felt his fingertips touch my heart, hold it gently in his hand.

“Listen,” he said, his eyes on the card. “Your car runs okay, right? It’s mostly cosmetic?”

I nodded.

“Don’t go through your insurance company, then. It’ll just cost you in the long run. Get an estimate and I’ll take care of it for you.”

“You can’t do that!” I said. “It was my fault.”

“It was an easy mistake to make.”

“I was careless.” I stared at him. “And I don’t understand why you’re not angry about it. I almost killed you.”

“Oh, I was angry at first. I said lots of cuss words while I was flying through the air.” He smiled. “Anger’s poison, though. I don’t want it in me. When I changed the focus from how I was feeling to how you were feeling, it went away.”

“The tattoo…” I pointed to his arm.

“I put it there to remind me,” he said. “It’s not always that easy to remember.”

He turned the insurance card over and clicked the pen.

“I don’t even know your name,” he said.

“Laurel Patrick.”

“Nice name.” He wrote it down, then reached across the table to shake my hand. “I’m Jamie Lockwood.”

We started going out together, to events on campus or the movies and once, on a picnic. I felt young with him, but never patronized. I was drawn to his kindness and the warmth of his eyes. He told me that he was initially attracted to my looks, proving that he was not a completely atypical guy after all.

“You were so pretty when you got out of your car that day,” he said. “Your cheeks were red and your little pointed chin trembled and your long black hair was kind of messy and sexy.” He coiled a lock of my stick-straight hair around his finger. “I thought the accident must have been fate.”

Later, he said, it was my sweetness that attracted him. My innocence.

We kissed often during the first couple of weeks we saw one another, but nothing more than that. I experienced my first ever orgasm with him, even though he was not touching me at the time. We were on his bike and he shifted into a gear that suddenly lit a fire between my legs. I barely knew what was happening. It was startling, quick and stunning. I tightened my arms around him as the spasms coursed through my body, and he patted my hands with one of his, as though he thought I might be afraid of how fast we were going. It would be a while before I told him that I would always think of his bike as my first lover.

We talked about our families. I’d lived in North Carolina until I was twelve, when my parents died. Then I went to Ohio to live with my social-climbing aunt and uncle who were ill-prepared to take on a child of any sort, much less a griefstricken preadolescent. There’d been a “Southerners are dumb” sort of prejudice among my classmates and a couple of my teachers. I fed right into that prejudice in the beginning, unable to focus on my studies and backsliding in every subject. I missed my parents and cried in bed every night until I figured out how to keep from thinking about them as I struggled to fall asleep: I’d count backward from one thousand, picturing the numbers on a hillside, like the Hollywood sign. It worked. I started sleeping better, which led to studying better. My teachers had to revise their “dumb Southerner” assessment of me as my grades picked up. Even my aunt and uncle seemed surprised. When it came time to apply to colleges, though, I picked all Southern schools, hungry to return to my roots.

Jamie was struck by the loss of my parents.

“Both your parents died when you were twelve?” he asked, incredulous. “At the same time?”

“Yes, but I don’t think about it much.”

“Maybe you should think about it,” he said.

“It’s all in the past.” I’d healed from that loss and saw no point in revisiting it.

“Things like that can come back to bite you later,” he said. “Were they in an accident?”

“You’re awfully pushy.” I laughed, but he didn’t crack a smile.

“Seriously,” he said.

I sighed then and told him about the fire on the cruise ship that killed fifty-two people, my parents included.

“Fire on a cruise ship.” He shook his head. “Rock and a hard place.”

“Some people jumped.”

“Your parents?”

“No. I wish they had.” Before I’d perfected my counting-backward-from-one-thousand technique, vivid fiery images of my parents had filled my head whenever I tried to go to sleep.

Jamie read my mind. “The smoke got them first, you can bet on it,” he said. “They were probably unconscious before the fire reached them.”

Although I hadn’t wanted to talk about it, I still took comfort from that thought. Jamie knew about fire, since he was a volunteer firefighter in Wilmington. For days after he’d fight a fire, I could smell smoke on him. He’d shower and scrub his long hair and still the smell would linger, seeping out of his pores. It was a smell I began to equate with him, a smell I began to like.

He took me to meet his family after we’d been seeing each other for three weeks. Even though they lived in Wilmington, I was to meet them at their beach cottage on Topsail Island where they spent most weekends. I’d probably been to Topsail as a child, but had no memory of it. Jamie teased me that my mispronunciation of the island—I said Topsale instead of Topsul—was a dead giveaway.

By that time, he’d bought me my own black leather jacket and white helmet, and I was accustomed to riding with him. My arms were wrapped around him as we started across the high-rise bridge. Far below us, I saw a huge maze of tiny rectangular islands.

“What is that down there?” I shouted.

Jamie steered the bike to the side of the bridge, even though ours was the only vehicle on the road. I climbed off and peered over the railing. The grid of little islands ran along the shoreline of the Intracoastal Waterway for as far as I could see. Miniature fir trees and other vegetation grew on the irregular rectangles of land, the afternoon sun lighting the water between them with a golden glow. “It looks like a little village for elves,” I said.

Jamie stood next to me, our arms touching through layers of leather. “It’s marshland,” he said, “but it does have a mystical quality to it, especially this time of day.”

We studied the marshland a while longer, then got back on the bike.

I knew Jamie’s parents owned a lot of land on the island, especially in the northernmost area called West Onslow Beach. After World War II, his father had worked in a secret missile testing program on Topsail Island called Operation Bumblebee. He’d fallen in love with the area and used what money he had to buy land that mushroomed in value over the decades. As we rode along the beach road, Jamie pointed out property after property belonging to his family. Many parcels had mobile homes parked on them, some of the trailers old and rusting, though the parcels themselves were worth plenty. There were several well-kept houses with rental signs in front of them and even a couple of the old flat-roofed, three-story concrete viewing towers that had been used during Operation Bumblebee. I was staggered to realize the wealth Jamie had grown up with.

“We don’t live rich, though,” Jamie had said when he told me about his father’s smart investments. “Daddy says that the whole point of having a lot of money is to give you the freedom to live like you don’t need it.”

I admired that. My aunt and uncle were exactly the opposite.

All the Lockwood houses had names burned into signs hanging above their front doors. The Loggerhead and Osprey Oasis and Hurricane Haven. We came to the last row of houses on the Island and I began to perspire inside the leather jacket. I knew one of them belonged to his family and that I’d meet them in a few minutes. Jamie drove slowly past the cottages.

“Daddy actually owns these last five houses,” he said, turning his head so I could hear him.

“Terrier?” I read the name above one of the doors.

“Right, that’s where we’re headed, but I’m taking us on a little detour first. The next house is Talos. Terrier and Talos were the names of the first supersonic missiles tested here.”

Those two houses were mirror images of each other: tall, narrow two-story cottages sitting high on stilts to protect them from the sea.

“I love that one!” I pointed to the last house in the row, next to Talos. The one-story cottage was round. Like all the other houses, it was built on stilts. The sign above its front door read The Sea Tender.

“An incredible panoramic view from that one.” Jamie turned onto a narrow road away from the houses. “I want to show you my favorite spot,” he said over his shoulder. We followed the road a short distance until it turned to sand; then we got off the bike and began walking. I tugged my jacket tighter. The October air wasn’t cold, but the wind had a definite nip to it and Jamie put his arm around me.

We walked a short distance onto a spit of white sand nearly surrounded by water. The ocean was on our right, the New River Inlet ahead of us and somewhere to our left, although we couldn’t see it from our vantage point, was the Intracoastal Waterway. The falling sun had turned the sky pink. I felt as though we were standing on the edge of an isolated continent.

“My favorite place,” Jamie said.

“I can see why.”

“It’s always changing.” He pointed toward the ocean. “The sea eats the sand there, then spits it back over there,” he moved his arm to the left of us, “and what’s my favorite place today may be completely different next week.”

“Does that bother you?” I asked.

“Not at all. Whatever nature does here, it stays beautiful.” Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then Jamie broke the silence. “Can I tell you something?” For the first time since we met, he sounded unsure of himself. A little shy.

His arm was still around me and I raised mine until it circled his waist. “Of course,” I said.

“I’ve never told anyone this and you might think I’m crazy.”

“Tell me.”

“What I’d really like to do one day is create my own church,” he said. “A place where people can believe whatever they want but still belong to a community, you know?”

I wasn’t sure I understood exactly what he meant, but one thing I’d learned about Jamie was that there was a light inside him most people didn’t have. Sometimes I saw it flash in his eyes when he spoke.

“Can you picture it?” he asked. “A little chapel right here, full of windows so you can see the water all around you. People could come and worship however they chose.” He looked toward the ocean and let out a sigh. “Pie in the sky, right?”

I did think he was a little crazy, but I opened my mind to the idea and imagined a little white church with a tall steeple standing right where we stood. “Would you be allowed to build something here?” I asked.

“Daddy owns the land. He owns every grain of sand north of those houses. Would nature let me build it? That’s the thing. Nature’s got her own mind when it comes to this spot. She’s got her own mind when it comes to the whole island.”

The aroma of baking greeted us when we walked into Terrier. Jamie introduced his parents Southern style as Miss Emma and Mr. Andrew, but his father immediately insisted I call him Daddy L. Miss Emma had contributed the gene for Jamie’s full head of wavy dark hair, although hers was cut in a short, uncomplicated style. Daddy L was responsible for Jamie’s huge, round brown eyes. They each greeted their son with bear hugs as if they hadn’t seen him in months instead of a day or so. Miss Emma even gave me a hug and a kiss on the cheek, then held my hands and studied me.

“She’s just precious!” she said, letting go of my hands. I caught a whiff of alcohol on her breath

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Jamie said to his mother as he helped me out of my leather jacket.

“I hope you’re hungry.” Daddy L leaned against the doorjamb. “Mama’s cooked up a storm this afternoon.”

“It smells wonderful,” I said.

“That’s the meringue on my banana pudding you’re smelling,” Miss Emma said.

“Where’s Marcus?” Jamie asked.

I hadn’t met him yet, but I knew Jamie’s fifteen-year-old brother was something of a bad boy. Eight years younger than Jamie, he’d been a surprise to parents who’d adjusted to the idea of an only child.

“Lord only knows.” Miss Emma stirred a big bowl of potato salad. “He was surfing. Who knows what he’s doing now. I told him dinner is at six-thirty, but the day he’s on time is the day I’ll keel over from the shock.”

Jamie gave his mama’s shoulders a squeeze. “Well, let’s hope he’s not on time, then,” he said.

An hour later, we settled around a table laden with fried chicken, potato salad and corn bread. Marcus was not with us. We were near one of the broad oceanside windows and I imagined the view was spectacular in the daylight.

“So, tell me about your people, darlin’,” Miss Emma said as she handed me the bowl of potato salad for a second helping.

I explained that my mother grew up in Raleigh and my father in Greensboro, but that I lost them on the cruise ship and was raised by my aunt and uncle in Ohio.

“Lord have mercy!” Miss Emma’s hand flew to her chest. She looked at Jamie. “No wonder you two found each other.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by that. Jamie smiled at me and I figured I could ask him later.

“That explains your accent.” Daddy L looked at his wife and she nodded. “We were trying to peg it.”

Daddy L helped himself to a crisp chicken thigh. He glanced at his watch, then at the empty chair next to Jamie. “Maybe you could talk to Marcus about his grades, Jamie,” he said.

“What about them?”

“We just got his interim report, and he’s fixin’ to flunk out if he doesn’t buckle down,” Miss Emma said quietly, as if Marcus could overhear us. “Mostly D’s. And it’s his junior year. I don’t think he knows how important this year is for getting into college.” She looked at me. “Jamie’s Daddy and I never made it to college, and I want my boys to get an education.”

“I love going to UNC,” I said, although I was really thinking that she and Daddy L had done quite well for themselves without a college degree.

“I’ll talk to him,” Jamie said.

“He spends all the time he’s not in school on that surf-board,” Miss Emma said, “and then is off with his friends on the weekends, no matter what we say.”

“Boy’s out of control,” Daddy L added.

I’d been in the house only an hour, but already the primary Lockwood family dynamic was apparent: Jamie, despite the long hair and the tattoo and the motorcycle, was the favored son. Marcus was the black sheep. I hadn’t even met him and I already felt sympathy for him.

We were nearly finished when we heard the downstairs door open and close. “I’m home!” a male voice called.

“And your dinner’s cold as ice!” Miss Emma called back.

I heard him on the stairs. He came into the dining room barefooted, wearing a full-length wet suit, the top unzipped nearly to his navel. He had a lanky, slender build that would never fill out to Jamie’s bulk, even though Jamie had eight years on him. A gold cross hanging from his neck glittered against the tan that must have been left over from summer, and his hair was a short, curly cap of sun-streaked brown. He had Miss Emma’s eyes—blue, shot through with summer sky.

“Hey.” He grinned at me, pulling out the chair next to Jamie.

“Go put some clothes on,” Daddy L said.

“This is Laurel,” Jamie said. “And this is Marcus.”

“Hi, Marcus,” I said.

“You’re a sandy mess,” Miss Emma said. “Get dressed and I’ll heat you a plate in the microwave.”

“Not hungry,” Marcus said.

“You still need to change your clothes if you’re going to sit here with us,” said his father.

“I’m going, I’m going.” Marcus got up with a dramatic sigh and padded toward the bedrooms.

In a few minutes, I heard the music of an electric piano. The tune was halting and unfamiliar.

Jamie laughed. “He brought the piano with him?”

“If you can call it that,” Miss Emma said.

Daddy L looked at me. “He wants to play in a rock-and-roll band,” he explained. “For years, we offered to buy him a piano so he could take proper lessons, but he said you can’t play a piano in a band.”

“So he bought a used electric piano and is trying to teach himself how to play it,” Miss Emma said. “It makes me ill, listening to that thing.”

“Ah, Mama,” Jamie said. “It keeps him off the streets.”

After we’d eaten the most fabulous banana pudding I’d ever tasted, I wandered down the hall to use the bathroom. I could hear Marcus playing a song by The Police. When I left the bathroom, I knocked on his open bedroom door.

“Your mother said you’re teaching yourself how to play.”

He looked up, his fingers still on the keys. He’d changed into shorts and a navy-blue T-shirt. “By ear,” he said. “I can’t read music.”

“You could learn how to read music.” I leaned against the doorjamb.

“I’m dyslexic,” he said. “I’d rather have all my teeth pulled.”

“Play some more,” I said. “It sounded good.”

“Could you recognize it?”

“That song by The Police,” I said. “‘Every Breath You Take’?”

“Awesome!” His grin was cocky and he had the prettiest blue eyes. I bet he was considered a catch by girls his age. “I’m better than I thought,” he said. “How about this one?”

He bent over the keys with supreme concentration, the cocky kid gone and in his place a boy unsure of himself. The back of his neck looked slender and vulnerable. He grimaced with every wrong note. I struggled to recognize the song, to let him have that success. It took a few minutes, but then it came to me.

“That Queen song!” I said.

“Right!” He grinned. “‘We are the Champions.’”

“I’m impressed,” I said sincerely. “I could never play by ear.”

“You play?”

“I took lessons for a few years.”

He stood up. “Go for it,” he said.

I sat down and played a couple of scales to get the feel of the keyboard. Then I launched into one of the few pieces I could remember by heart: Fur Elise.

When I finished, I looked up to see Jamie standing in the doorway of the bedroom, a smile on his face I could only describe as tender. I knew in that moment that I loved him.

“That was beautiful,” he said.

“Yeah, you’re good,” Marcus agreed. He tipped his head to one side, appraising me. “Are you, like, a sorority chick?”

I laughed. “No. What made you ask that?”

“You’re just different from Jamie’s other girlfriends.”

“Is that good or bad?” I asked.

“Good.” Marcus looked up at his brother. “She’s cool,” he said. “You should keep this one.”

I heard the sound of dishes clinking together in the kitchen and left the brothers to help clean up. I found Miss Emma up to her elbows in dishwater.

“Let me dry.” I picked up the dish towel hanging from the handle of the refrigerator.

“Why, thank you, darlin’.” She handed me a plate. “I heard you playing in there. That was lovely. I didn’t know a sound like that could come out of that electric thing.”

“Thanks,” I said, adding, “Marcus plays really well by ear.”

“It’s his choice of music that makes me ill.” I had the feeling nothing Marcus did would be good enough for her.

“It’s what everybody listens to, though,” I said carefully.

She laughed a little. “I can see why Jamie likes you so much.”

I felt my cheeks redden. Had he talked about me to his parents?

“You care about people like he does.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I mean, I care about people, but not like Jamie does. He’s amazing. Three weeks ago, I almost killed him. I did. Now I feel like…” I shook my head, unable to put into words how I felt. Taken in. By Jamie. By his family. More at home with them than I’d felt in six years with my icy aunt and silent uncle.

“Jamie does have a gift with people, all right,” she said. “The way some people are born with musical talent or math skills or what have you. It’s genetic.”

I must have looked dubious, because she continued.

“I don’t have the gift, Lord knows,” she said, “but I had a brother who did. He died in his thirties, rest his soul, but he was…it’s more than kindness. It’s a way of seeing inside a person. To really feel what they’re feeling. It’s like they can’t help but feel it.”

“Empathy,” I said.

“Oh, that stupid tattoo.” She squirted more dish soap into the water in the sink. “I about had a conniption when I saw that thing. But he’s a grown man, not much his mama can do about it now. He doesn’t need that tattoo.” She scrubbed the pan the corn bread had been baked in. “My aunt had the gift, too, though she said it was more of a curse, because you had to take on somebody else’s pain. We were at the movies this one time? A woman and boy sat down in front of us before the lights were shut out. They didn’t say one single word, but Aunt Ginny said there was something wrong with the woman. That she felt a whole lot of anguish coming from her. That was the word she used—anguish.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, keeping my expression neutral. Miss Emma was going off the deep end, but I wasn’t about to let her see my skepticism.

“I know it sounds crazy,” she said. “I thought so too at the time. When the movie was over, Aunt Ginny couldn’t stop herself from asking the woman if she was all right. Ginny had a way of talking to people that made them open right up to her. But the woman said everything was fine. As we were walking out of the theater, though, and the little boy was out of earshot, she told us that her mother’d had a stroke just that morning and she was worried sick about her. Ginny’d picked right up on that worry and took it inside herself. She ended up with a bleeding ulcer from taking on too many other people’s worries. That’s how Jamie is, too.”

I remembered Jamie after the accident, when I wondered why he’d expressed no anger toward me. You already feel like crap about it, he’d said. Why should I make you feel any worse?

I shivered.

Miss Emma handed me the corn-bread pan to dry. “Here’s what happens with people like Jamie or my brother or my aunt,” she said. “They feel what the other person feels so strong that it’s less painful for them to just…give in. I knew when Jamie was small that he had the gift. He knew when his friends were upset about something and he’d get upset himself, even if he didn’t know what had them upset in the first place.” She reached into the dirty dishwater and pulled the stopper from the drain. “One time, a boy he barely knew got his dog run over by a car. I found Jamie crying in bed that night—he couldn’t have been more than eight or nine. He told me about it. I said, you didn’t even know that dog and you barely know that boy. He just kept crying. I thought, oh Lord have mercy on me, please. Here’s my brother and Aunt Ginny all over again. It’s a scary thing, raising a child like that. Most kids, like Marcus, bless his heart, you have to teach them how other children feel and how you need to be sensitive to them and all.” She pulled another dish towel from a drawer and dried her hands on it. “With Jamie, it was the opposite. I had to teach him to take care of himself.”

I bit my lip as I set the dry pan on the counter. “Are you trying to…are you warning me about something?” I asked.

She looked surprised. “Hmm,” she said. “Maybe I am. He likes you. I can tell. You’re a nice girl. Down-to-earth. You got a good head on your shoulders. He’s had a few girlfriends who took advantage of his kindness. I guess I’m asking you not to do that. Not to hurt him.”

I shook my head. “Never,” I said, thinking of how good it felt to have Jamie’s arms around me. “I couldn’t.” I thought I knew myself so well.

Chapter Six

Laurel

“I GUESS WE’RE SUPPOSED TO SIT UP THERE.” Maggie pointed to the front row of seats in the crowded Assembly Building. Trish Delphy’s secretary had called us the day before to say the mayor wanted us up front at the memorial service. I was sure our special status had to do with Andy, who was scratching his neck beneath the collar of his blue shirt. I’d had to buy him a new suit for the occasion. He so rarely had need of one that his old suit no longer fit. I let him pick out his own tie—a loud Jerry Garcia with red and blue swirls—but I’d forgotten a shirt and the one he was wearing was too small.

“We’ll follow you, sweetie,” I said to Maggie, and she led the way down the narrow center aisle. The air hummed with chatter, and the seats were nearly all taken even though there were still fifteen minutes before the start of the service. There’d been school buses in the parking lot across the street, and I noticed that teenagers occupied many of the seats. The lock-in had attracted children from all three towns on the island as well as from a few places on the mainland, cutting across both geographic and economic boundaries, tying us all together. If I’d known how many kids would show up at the lock-in, I never would have let Andy go. Then again, if Andy hadn’t been there, more would have died. Incredible to imagine.

I sat between my children. Next to us were Joe and Robin Carmichael, Emily’s parents, and in front of us was a podium flanked by two dozen containers of daffodils. Propped up on easels to the left of the podium were three poster-size photographs that I was not ready to look at. To the right of the podium were about twenty-five empty chairs set at a ninety-degree angle to us. A paper banner taped between the chairs read Reserved for Town of Surf City Fire Department.

Andy was next to Robin, and she embraced him.

“You beautiful boy,” she said, holding on to him three seconds too long for Andy’s comfort level. He squirmed and she let go with a laugh, then looked at me. “Good to see you, Laurel.” She leaned forward a little to wave to Maggie.

“How’s Emily doing?” I asked quietly.

Joe shifted forward in his seat so he could see me. “Not great,” he said.

“She’s gone backward some,” Robin said. “Nightmares. Won’t let us touch her. I can hardly get her to let me comb her hair. She’s scared to go to school again.”

“She had her shirt on inside out,” Andy piped in, too loudly.

“Shh,” I hushed him.

“You’re right, Andy,” Robin said. “She was already sliding back a ways before the fire, but now it’s got real bad.” She raised her gaze to mine. “We’re going to have to take her to see that psychologist again.”

“I’m so sorry,” I said. Emily had suffered brain damage at birth, and I knew how far they’d come with her over the years. How hard it had to be to have a child who hated to be touched! Many FASD kids hated being touched, too, but I’d gotten lucky with Andy; he was a hugger. I needed to rein that hugging in with people outside the family, though, especially now that he was a teenager.

Robin looked behind us. “So many people affected by this…mess,” she said.

I didn’t turn around. My attention was drawn to the Surf City firefighters who were now filing into the seats reserved for them. In their dress blues and white gloves, a more sober looking bunch of men—and three women—would be hard to find, and as they sat down, a hush washed over the crowd. I saw Marcus glance at us, and I quickly turned my attention to the pink beribboned program I’d been handed when I entered the building.

Some people had wanted to put the memorial service off for another couple of weeks so the new Surf City Community Center would be open and the event could be held in the gymnasium. But the somber mood of the island couldn’t wait that long. In the week since the fire, that’s all anyone talked about. The part-time counselor at the elementary school where I worked was so inundated with kids suffering from nightmares about being burned or trapped that she’d had to refer the overflow, those whose fears showed up as stomachaches or headaches, to me. People were not only sad, they were angry. Everyone knew the fire was arson, although those words had not been uttered by anyone in an official capacity, at least not publicly.

Maggie hadn’t said a word since we walked into the building. I glanced at her now. Her gaze was on the firefighters and I wondered what she was thinking. I was never sure how much she remembered of her father. She had a framed picture of Jamie in his dress blues on her bureau beside a picture of Andy taken on his twelfth birthday. There was another picture, taken a couple of years ago at a party, of herself with Amber Donnelly and a couple of other girls.

She had no picture of me on the bureau. I realized that just the other day.

Andy started jiggling his leg, making my chair vibrate. I used to rest a hand on his knee to try to stop his jiggling, but I rarely did that anymore. I’d learned that if I stopped the energy from coming out of Andy in one place, it would come out someplace else. Jiggling his legs was preferable to slapping his hands on his thighs or cracking his knuckles. Sometimes I pictured a tightly coiled spring inside my son, ready to burst out of him with the slightest provocation. That’s most likely what happened when Keith called him names at the lock-in. It was rare for Andy to react with violence, but calling him names could do it.

“Hey, I know him!” Andy said suddenly.

“Shh,” I whispered in his ear. I thought he meant Marcus or Ben Trippett, but he was pointing to the third poster-size photograph at the front of the room. It was Charlie Eggles, a longtime real estate agent in Topsail Beach. Charlie’d had no kids of his own but often volunteered to help with community events. I’d been saddened to learn he was one of the fire victims. I looked at his engaging smile, his gray hair pulled back in his customary ponytail.

“It’s Mr. Eggles,” I whispered to Andy.

“He held on to me so I couldn’t hit Keith again.” I watched a crease form between Andy’s eyebrows as reality dawned on him. “Is he one of the dead people?”

“I’m afraid he is,” I said.

I waited for him to speak again, but he fell silent.

“What are you thinking, love?” I asked quietly.

“Why didn’t he follow me when I said to?”

I put my arm around him. “Maybe he didn’t hear you, or he was trying to help some of the other children. We’ll never know. You did the very best you—”

Somber piano music suddenly filled the room, swallowing my words, and Trish Delphy and Reverend Bill walked up the center aisle together. Reverend Bill stood behind the podium, while the mayor took the last empty seat in our row. Reverend Bill was so tall, skinny and long necked that he reminded me of an egret. Sara told me that he came into Jabeen’s Java every afternoon for a large double-fudge-and-caramel-iced coffee with extra whipped cream, yet there was not an ounce of fat on the man. He was all sticks and angles.

Now he craned his long neck forward to speak into the microphone. “Let us pray,” he said.

I bowed my head and tried to listen to his words, but I felt Maggie’s warm body against my left arm and Andy’s against my right. I felt them breathing, and my eyes once more filled with tears. I was so lucky.

When I lifted my head again, Reverend Bill began talking about the two teenagers and one adult killed in the fire. I forced myself to look at the blown-up images to the left of the podium. I didn’t know either of the teenagers, both of whom were from Sneads Ferry. The girl, Jordy Matthews, was a smiling, freckle-faced blonde with eyes the powder-blue of the firefighters’ shirts. The boy, Henderson Wright, looked about thirteen, sullen and a little scared. A tiny gold hoop hung from one end of his right eyebrow and his hair was in a buzz cut so short it was difficult to tell what color it was.

“…and Henderson Wright lived in his family’s old green van for the past three years,” Reverend Bill was saying. “We have people in our very own community who are forced to live that way, through no fault of their own.” Somewhere to my right, I heard quiet weeping, and it suddenly occurred to me that the families of the victims most likely shared this front row with us. I wondered if it had been necessary for Reverend Bill to mention the Wright boy’s poverty. Shrimping had once sustained Sneads Ferry’s families, but imported seafood was changing all that. There were many poor people living amidst the wealth in our area.

I thought of Sara. Ever since I’d heard that Keith had referred to Andy as rich, apparently with much disdain, I’d been stewing about it. Andy and Keith had known each other since they were babies and the disparity between our financial situations had never been an issue, at least as far as I knew. I wondered now if there was some underlying resentment on Sara’s part. God, I hoped not. I loved her like a sister. We were so open with each other—we had one of those friendships where nothing was off-limits. We’d both been single mothers for a decade, but Jamie had left my children and me more than comfortable. We had a handsome, ten-year-old four-bedroom house on the sound, while Sara and Keith lived in an aging double-wide sandwiched in a sea of other mobile homes.

My cheeks burned. How could I have thought that didn’t matter to her? Did she say things to Keith behind my back? Had Keith’s resentment built up until it spilled out on Andy at the lock-in?

Sara had been at the UNC burn center with Keith since the fire, so we’d had no good chance to talk. Our phone conversations were about Keith’s condition; he was still battling for his life. Although the most serious burns were on his arms and one side of his face, his lungs had suffered severe damage, and he was being kept in a medicated coma because the pain would otherwise be unbearable.

Neither of us brought up the fight between our sons. Maybe she didn’t even know about it. She had one thing on her mind, and that was getting Keith well. I’d offered to help her pay for any care he needed that wouldn’t be covered by his father’s military health insurance, but she said she’d be fine. Was it my imagination that she’d sounded chilly in her response? Had I insulted her? Maybe she simply resented the fact that Andy was safe and whole while her son could die.

Everyone around me suddenly stood up. Even Andy. I’d been so caught up in my thoughts that I didn’t realize we were supposed to be singing a hymn, the words printed on the back of the program. I stood up as well, but didn’t bother singing. Neither did Andy or Maggie, and I wondered where their thoughts were.

Long ago, Sara helped me turn my life around. When I got Andy out of foster care, he was a year old and I had no idea how to be a mother to the little stranger. After all, Jamie’d been both mother and father to Maggie when she was that age. It was Sara who helped me. Keith was nearly a year older than Andy, and Sara was a goddess in my eyes, the mother I wanted to emulate. Keith was adorable, and our boys were friends. They stayed friends until Andy was about nine. That’s when Keith started caring what other kids thought, and my strange little son became an embarrassment to him. Andy never really understood the sudden ostracism. In Andy’s eyes, everyone was his friend, from the janitor at school to the stranger who smiled at him on the beach. Over the past few years, though, I was glad Keith and Andy had drifted apart. Keith got picked up for drinking once, for truancy a couple of times, and last summer, for possession of an ounce of marijuana. That was the last sort of influence I needed over Andy. Andy longed to fit in and, given his impulsiveness, I worried how far he’d go to reach that goal.

We were sitting again and I felt ashamed that I’d paid so little attention to the service. Reverend Bill swept his eyes over the crowd as he vowed that “a new Drury Memorial will rise from the ashes of the old,” embracing everyone with a look of tenderness, skipping over my children and me. Literally. I saw his eyes light on the man sitting next to Maggie, then instantly slip to the Carmichaels on the other side of Andy. We were the heathens in the crowd, and Reverend Bill carried a grudge for a good long time. I was willing to bet his eyes never lit on Marcus either when he looked in the direction of the firefighters. Still, I felt for the man. Even though his congregation was planning to build a new church, he’d lost this one. I knew some families were talking about suing him for negligence. Others wondered if Reverend Bill himself might have set the fire for the insurance money. I was no fan of the man, but that was ridiculous.

My gaze drifted to Marcus. His face was slack and I could suddenly see the first sign of age in his features. He was young. Thirty-eight. Three years younger than me. For the first time, I could begin to see how he’d look as he got older, something I’d never have the joy of seeing in Jamie, who’d only been thirty-six when he died.

Reverend Bill and Trish Delphy were changing places at the podium. Trish licked her lips as she prepared to speak to the crowd.

“Our community will be forever changed by this terrible tragedy,” she said. “We mourn the loss of life and we pray for those still recovering from their injuries. But I’d ask you to look around you and see the strength in this room. We’re strong and resilient, and while we’ll never forget what happened in Surf City on Saturday, we’ll move forward together.

“And now,” she continued, “Dawn Reynolds has an announcement she’d like to make.”

Ben Trippett’s girlfriend looked uncomfortable as she took her place behind the podium.

“Um,” she began, “I just wanted to let y’all know that I’m coordinating the fund-raising to help the fire victims.” The paper she held in her hand shivered and I admired her for getting up in front of so many people when it obviously made her nervous. “The Shriners have come through like always to help out with medical expenses, but there’s still more we need to do. A lot of the families have no insurance. I’m working with Barry Gebhart, who y’all know is an accountant in Hampstead, and we set up a special fund called the Drury Memorial Family Fund. I hope you’ll help out with a check you can give me or Barry today, or you can drop by Jabeen’s Java anytime I’m working. Barry and I are thinking of some fund-raising activities and we’d like your suggestions in that…um…about that.” She looked down at the paper. “We’ll make sure the money gets to the families who need it the most.”

She sat down again at the end of our row. I saw Ben, his head still bandaged, smile at her.

Trish stood up once more at the podium.

“Thank you, Dawn,” she said. “We have a generous community with a generous spirit and I know we’ll do all in our power to ease the suffering of the families hurt by the fire.

“Now I’d like to recognize the firefighters and EMS workers who did such an amazing job under grueling circumstances. Not only our Town of Surf City Fire Department, but those firefighters from Topsail Beach, North Topsail Beach and the Surf City Volunteer Fire Department as well.”

Applause filled the building, and as it ebbed, I saw Trish drop her gaze to us.

“And I’d like to ask Andy Lockwood to stand, please.”

Beside me, I felt Andy start.

“Go ahead, sweetie,” I whispered. “Stand up.”

He stood up awkwardly.

Before the mayor could say another word, applause broke out again, and people rose to their feet.

“Are they clapping for me?” Andy asked.

“Yes.” I bit my lip to hold back my tears.

“Why did they stand up?”

“To honor you and thank you.”

“Because I’m a hero?”

I nodded.

He grinned, turning around to wave at the crowd behind us. I heard some subdued laughter.

“Can I sit down now?” Andy asked finally.

“Yes.”

He lowered himself to his seat again, his cheeks pink. It took another minute for the applause to die down.

“As most of you know,” Trish said, “Andy not only found a safe way out of the church, but he risked his own life to go back in and lead many of the other children to safety. Our loss is devastating, but it would have been much worse without Andy’s quick thinking and calm in the face of chaos.”

Andy sat up straighter than usual, his chest puffed out a bit, and I knew he was surprised to find himself suddenly the darling of Topsail Island.

Chapter Seven

Andy

MOM PUT HER VITAMINS IN A LINE by her plate. She ate breakfast vitamins and dinner vitamins. Maggie and I only ate breakfast ones. Maggie passed me the spinach bowl. Dumb. She knows I don’t eat spinach. I tried to give it to Mom.

“Take some, Andy,” Mom said. “While your arm is healing, you need good nutrition.”

“I have lots of nutrition.” I lifted my plate to show her my chicken part and the cut-up sweet potato.

“Okay. Don’t spill.” She put her fingers on my plate to make it go on the table again.

I ate a piece of sweet potato. They were my favorite. Mom made sweet potato pie sometimes, but she never ate any. She didn’t eat dessert because she didn’t want to ever be sick. She said too many sweet things could make you sick. Maggie and I were allowed to eat dessert because we weren’t adults yet.

“Andy,” Mom said after she swallowed all her vitamins, “your arm looks very good, but maybe you should skip the swim meet tomorrow.”

“Why?” I had to swim. “It doesn’t hurt!”

“We need to make sure it’s completely healed.”

“It is completely healed!”

“You’ve been through a lot, though. It might be good just to take a rest.”

“I don’t need a rest!” My voice was too loud for indoors. I couldn’t help it. She was pressing my start button.

“If your arm is all better, then you can.”

“It’s better enough!” I wanted to show her my arm, but I punched it out too hard and hit my glass of milk. The glass flew across the table and crashed to the floor. It broke in a million pieces and milk was all over. Even in the spinach.

Mom and Maggie stared at me with their mouths open. I saw a piece of chewed chicken in Maggie’s mouth. I knew I did an inappropriate thing. My arm did.

“I’m sorry!” I stood up real fast. “I’ll clean it up!”

Maggie catched me with her hand.

“Sit down, Panda,” she said. “I’ll do it. You might cut yourself.”

“I’ll get it.” Mom was already at the counter pulling off paper towels.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “My arm went faster than I thought.”

“It was an accident,” Mom said.

Maggie helped her pick up the pieces of glass. Mom put paper towels all over the milk on the floor.

“My arm did it because it’s so strong and healed,” I said.

Mom was scrunched on the floor cleaning milk. Sometimes when I talk, she looks like she’s going to laugh but doesn’t. This was one of those times.

I put my napkin on top of the spinach to clean off the milk.

“Andy,” Maggie said, while she got five or maybe six more paper towels. “I know you’re upset that you might not be able to swim, but you’ve got to think before you react.” She sounded exactly like Mom.

“I do,” I said. That was sort of a lie. I try to think before I act, but sometimes I forget.

Mom stood up. “We’ll check your arm again in the morning.” She threw away the milky paper towels. “If it still looks good and you feel up to it, you can swim.”

“I’ll feel up to it, Mom,” I said. I had to be there. I was the secret weapon, Ben told me. I was the magic bullet.

The pool was the only place where my start button was a very good thing.

Chapter Eight

Maggie

I WAS SPACED-OUT AS I LINED UP MY TEAM of ten little Pirates at the end of the indoor pool. Aidan Barber pranced around like he had to pee and I hoped that wasn’t the case.

“Stop dancing, Aidan,” I called to him, “and find your mark.”

He obeyed, but then Lucy Posner actually sat down on the edge of the pool and started picking at her toenails.

“Lucy! Stand up! The whistle’s going to blow any minute.”

Lucy looked surprised and jumped to her feet. I usually loved these kids. I was good with them. Incredibly patient. That’s what the parents always told me. You’re so much more patient with them than I am, Maggie, they’d say. Now that I was floating through this meet like I was in a weird dream, I had no patience at all. I wanted it to be over.

People talked about canceling the meet, since it was only a week since the fire. It was like Mom had called me to say the church was on fire minutes ago instead of days; I was still that shaken up. I couldn’t sleep. I kept seeing flames and smoke pouring out of the church and was afraid of what I’d dream if I shut my eyes.

Since I coached the little kids’ team, I had some say about if we should hold today’s meet between our team, the Pirates, and the Jacksonville team, the Sounders. I voted for canceling. I told Ben, who coached Andy’s team, that it was totally insensitive to hold it, but mostly I didn’t think I could concentrate. Ben wasn’t much in the mood for a meet either. He still had a bandage over the gash on his forehead, and he was on pain meds for his headache.

One of the girls who was in the burn center at UNC was on Ben’s team, though, and her parents wanted us to have the meet. The kids need it, her mother said. They need the normalcy. They persuaded Ben, and I didn’t have much choice but to go along.

The whistle blew and my kids were off, paddling furiously through the water in a way that usually made the people in the bleachers laugh, but either there was less laughter today or I couldn’t hear it through the fog in my head. I shouted encouragement to my kids without really thinking about what I was saying.

I got through their event—they lost every match and that was probably my fault—but they didn’t care. I hugged every one of their cold, wet little bodies as they came out of the pool and told them they did great. I was so glad it was over. I pulled my shorts on over my bathing suit and headed for the bleachers. Ben passed me as his team came together at the end of the pool.

“They’re getting better,” he said.

I almost laughed. “Yeah, sure.”

I climbed the bleachers to sit next to my mother. “You’re so good with those kids,” she said, as usual. “I love watching you.”

“Thanks.”

I looked for Andy at the end of the pool and found him right away. Even though he was on a team with kids his age, he was a little shrimp and easy to pick out. He was jabbering to a couple of kids who were, most likely, tuning him out. Ben put his hand on Andy’s shoulder and steered him to the edge of the pool in front of lane five.

Andy’s burn was so much better. I looked at him lined up with the other high schoolers. I would have felt sorry for him if I didn’t know his skill. His tininess always faked out the other teams. He was ninety pounds of muscle. He had asthma, but as long as he used his inhaler before a meet, no one would ever guess. I watched him at the edge of the pool, coiled up as tight as a jack-in-the-box. Ben called him his team’s secret weapon. I smiled, watching him lean forward, waiting for the whistle. Next to me, my mother tensed. I thought we were both holding our breath.

A whistle lasts maybe a second and a half, but Andy always seemed to hear the very first nanosecond of the sound and he was off. This time was no different. He leaped through the air like he’d been shot from a gun. In the water, he worked his arms and legs like a machine. I used to think his hearing was more sensitive than the other kids’, that he could hear the sound of the whistle before they could. Then Mom told me about the startle reflex, how babies have it and outgrow it, but how kids with fetal alcohol syndrome sometimes keep it until their teens. Andy still had it. At home, if I walked around the corner from the living room to the kitchen and surprised him, he’d jump a foot in the air. But in the pool, his startle reflex was a good thing. Ben’s secret weapon.

Mom laughed as she watched the race, her hands in fists beneath her chin. I didn’t know how she could laugh at anything so soon after the fire. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to laugh again.

“Hey, Mags.” Uncle Marcus suddenly showed up on the bleachers. He squeezed onto the bench between me and the father of one of the kids on Ben’s team.

“Hey.” I moved closer to Mom to give him room. “I didn’t know you were here.”

“Just got here,” he said. “Sorry I missed your team. How’d they do?”

“The usual,” I said.

“Looks like Andy’s doing the usual, too.” Uncle Marcus looked toward the water, where my brother was a couple of lengths ahead of everyone else. “Hey, Laurel.” He leaned past me to look at my mother.

“Hi, Marcus,” Mom said, not taking her eyes off Andy, which could just be a mother-not-wanting-to-look-away-from-her-son kind of thing, but I knew it was more than that. My mother was always weird about Uncle Marcus. Cold. Always giving him short answers, the way you’d act with someone you were tired of talking to, hoping they’d get the hint. I asked her about it once and she said it was my imagination, that she didn’t treat him differently than anyone else, but that was a total crock. I thought it had to do with the fact that Uncle Marcus survived the whale while Daddy didn’t.

Uncle Marcus was always nice to her, pretending he didn’t notice how bitchy she acted. A few years ago, I started thinking of how cool it would be if Mom and Uncle Marcus got together, but Mom didn’t seem interested in dating anyone, much less her brother-in-law. Sometimes she and Sara went to a movie or to dinner, but that was it for my mother’s social life. I thought her memory of my father was so perfect she couldn’t picture being with another man.

The older I got, the more I thought she should have something more in her life than her part-time school nurse job, her every single day jogs, and her full-time job—Andy. I said that to her once and she turned the tables on me. “You’re a fine one to talk,” she said. “Why don’t you date?” I told her I wanted to focus on studying and coaching, that I had plenty of time to date in college. I shut up then. Less said on that topic, the better. If Mom knew how my grades had tanked this year, she’d realize I wasn’t studying at all. That was the good thing about having a mother who only paid attention to one of her kids.

The race was down to the last lap and I stood up along with everyone else on the bleachers. I spotted Dawn Reynolds in the first row near the end of the pool. She had no kids on the swim team; she was there to watch Ben. I followed her gaze to him. Ben had on his yellow jams with the orange palm tree print. His chest was bare, with some dark hair across it. He was tall and a little overweight, but you could see muscles moving beneath the tanned skin of his arms and legs.

“Go, Pirates!” Dawn yelled, her hands a megaphone around her mouth, but she wasn’t even looking at the swimmers. She was so obvious that I felt embarrassed watching her. It was like watching someone do something very personal, like inserting a tampon. I imagined climbing down the bleachers when the race was over to sit next to her. I could ask her how the fund was doing. I could ask if there was a way I could help. I wanted to in the worst way. I knew Mom put in three thousand, and I gave five hundred from the money I was saving for extra college expenses, although I told Mom I only gave a hundred. Andy gave thirty from his bank account. Money was not enough. I needed to do more. I watched Dawn cheer on Ben’s team, imagining the conversation I’d never have with her.

The race was almost over. Andy was in the lead. Surprise, surprise. “Come on, Andy!” I yelled. Mom raised her fists in the air, waiting for the moment of victory, and Uncle Marcus let out one of his ear-piercing whistles.

Andy slapped the end of the pool, and the applause exploded for him, like it had two days before in the Assembly Building, but he just turned and kept swimming at the same insane pace. Mom laughed and I groaned. He’d never understood about ending a race. At the end of Andy’s next lap, Ben leaned over, grabbed him by his arms and lifted him out of the pool. I saw him mouth the words You won! to Andy, and something else that looked like You can stop swimming now.

We all sat down again. Andy looked at us, grinning and waving as he walked to the bench.

Uncle Marcus leaned forward again. “I’ve got something for you, Laurel,” he said.

My mother had to break down and look at him then. “What?”

Uncle Marcus pulled a small folded newspaper article from his shirt pocket and reached across me to hand it to her.

“One of the guys was up in Maryland and saw this in the Washington Post.”

I looked over my mother’s shoulder to read the headline: Disabled N.C. Boy Saves Friends.

Mom shook her head with a laugh. “Don’t they have enough of their own news up there?” She looked at Uncle Marcus. “I can keep this?”

“It’s yours.”

“Thanks.”

Uncle Marcus took in a long breath, stretching his arms above his head as he let it out. Then he sniffed my shoulder. “You wear chlorine the way other women wear perfume, Mags,” he teased.

He was not the first guy to tell me that. I liked that he said “women” and not “girls.”

The pool had been my home away from home since it was built when I was eleven. Before that, I could only swim during the summer in the sound or the ocean.

Daddy taught Andy and me how to swim. “Kids who live on the water better be good swimmers,” he’d said. He taught me first of course, before Andy even lived with us. One of my earliest memories was of a calm day in the ocean. It was nothing major. Nothing special. We just paddled around. He held me on his knees, tossed me in the air, swung me around until I practically choked on my laughter. Total bliss.

When I was a little older, Andy joined us in the water and he took to it the same as I did. Daddy’d told me that Andy probably wouldn’t be able to swim as well as I could, but Andy surprised him.

I couldn’t remember ever playing in the water with my mother. In my early memories, Mom was like a shadow. When I pictured anything from when I was a little girl, she was on the edge of the memory, so wispy I couldn’t be sure she was there or not. I didn’t think she ever held me. It was always Daddy’s arms around me that I remembered.

“How’s Ben’s head?” Uncle Marcus asked.

“Better,” I said, “though he’s still taking pain meds.”

“You know who he reminds me of?”

“Who?”

“Your father.” He said this quietly, like he didn’t want Mom to hear.

“Really?” I tried to picture Ben and Daddy standing next to each other.

“Not sure why, exactly.” Uncle Marcus put his elbows on his knees as he stared at Ben. “His build. His size, maybe. Jamie was about the same height. Brown eyes. Same dark, wavy hair. Face is different, of course. But it’s that…brawniness or something. All Ben needs is an empathy tattoo on his arm and…” He shrugged.

I liked when he talked about my father. I liked when anyone, except Reverend Bill, talked about Daddy.

I was probably five or six when I asked Daddy what the word “empathy” meant. We were sitting on the deck of The Sea Tender, our legs dangling over the edge, looking for dolphins. I ran my fingers over the letters in the tattoo.

“It means feeling what other people are feeling,” he said. “You know how you kissed the boo-boo on my finger yesterday when I hit it with a hammer?”

“Uh-huh.” He’d been repairing the stairs down to the beach and said, “Goddamn it!” I’d never heard him say that before.

“You felt sad for me that I hurt my finger, right?”

I nodded.

“That’s empathy. And I had it tattooed on my arm to remind me to think about other people’s feelings.” He looked at the ocean for a long minute or two and I figured that was the end of the conversation. But then he added, “If you’re a person with a lot of empathy, it can hurt more to watch a person you care about suffer than to suffer yourself.”

Even at five or six, I knew what he meant. That was how I felt when something happened to Andy. When he fell because his little legs weren’t steady enough yet, or the time he pinched his fingers in the screen door. I cried so hard that Mom couldn’t figure out which of us was hurt at first.

When I heard that Andy might be trapped by the fire—that any of those children might be trapped—the panic I felt might as well have been theirs.

“I was worried about him,” Uncle Marcus said.

I dragged my foggy brain back to our conversation. “About who?” I asked. “Daddy or Ben?”

“Ben,” Uncle Marcus said. “He had some problems in the department at first and I didn’t think he’d last. Claustrophobia. Big guy like that, you wouldn’t think he’d be afraid of anything. But after the fire at Drury—”he shook his head “—I realized I’d been wrong about him. He really proved himself. All he needed was the fire.”

And right then I knew it wasn’t fog messing up my brain. It was smoke.

Chapter Nine

Marcus

EXCELLENT DAY FOR THE WATER, AND the boaters knew it. From the front steps of Laurel’s house, I stopped to look at Stump Sound. Sailboats, kayaks, pontoon boats. I was jealous. I had a kayak and a small motorboat. I used the kayak for exercise and fished from the runabout. Or on those rare occasions I had a date, I’d take the boat for a sunset spin on the Intracoastal. I had this fantasy of taking Andy out with me someday. Never happen, I told myself. Give it up.

I rang Laurel’s doorbell.

Nearly every Sunday that I wasn’t scheduled to work, I did something with Andy. Ball game. Skating rink. Fishing from the pier. Maggie used to come, too, but by the time she reached Andy’s age, she had better things to do. I got it. I was fifteen once myself. I liked the time alone with Andy, anyway. He needed a man in his life. Father figure.

My beautiful niece opened the door and gave me a kiss on the cheek. I’d dated a woman a while back who turned out to be too artsy-fartsy for my taste, but I did learn a few things from her. We were standing in the National Gallery in Washington one time, in a room full of paintings of women. Most of the women had thick wavy hair and big, heavy-lidded eyes. They looked like they were made of air. You could lift any one of them up with a finger.

“These paintings remind me of my niece,” I told my date.

“Really?” she asked. “She has a Pre-Raphaelite look to her?”

Whatever, I thought.

“I’d like to meet her,” my date said.

We broke up before she could meet Maggie, but since then, whenever I saw my niece, the term Pre-Raphaelite popped into my mind even though I didn’t know what it meant. I would have given my right arm—both my arms—for Jamie to have the chance to see the long-haired, heavy-lidded beauty his daughter had become.

“What are you up to today, Mags?” I asked.

“Studying at Amber’s,” she said. “I have some exams this week.”

I sat down on the stairs that led to the second story. “You can see that ol’ light at the end of the tunnel now, huh?”

She nodded. “You better have my graduation on your calendar.”

“Can’t imagine you gone next year,” I said.

“I’ll only be in Wilmington.”

“It’s more than geography, kiddo,” I said.

She looked up the stairs, then lowered her voice. “How’s Mom gonna manage Andy without me?” she asked.

“Hey,” I said, “I’m not going anywhere. All your mom has to do is say the word and I’m here.”

“I know.”

“You decide on a major yet?”

She shook her head. “Still between psych and business.”

I couldn’t see a Pre-Raphaelite woman in one of those stiff, pin-striped business suits. Her choice, though. I’d keep my trap shut.

“You’ve got plenty of time to decide,” I said.

Maggie swung her backpack over her shoulder. “Do they know what caused the fire yet?” she asked.

I shrugged. “We’re still waiting on results from the lab.”

“You’re in charge, aren’t you?” she asked.

“On the local side, yeah. But once there are fatals…” I shook my head. “The State Bureau of Investigation and ATF are involved now.”

“Oh, right. That guy who talked to Andy at the hospital.”

“Right.” I got to my feet. “Your brother upstairs?”

“Yeah.” She smiled. “Wait till you see his room. It looks like a Hallmark store. Oh, and Mom said don’t mention anything about him writing a book. She hopes he’ll forget about it.”

“He’s still talking about that?”

“Every once in a while.” She clipped her iPod to her lowrise jeans.

“Your mom home?”

“Went for a run.” She popped in the earbuds. “Later,” she said, pulling open the door.

Maggie wasn’t kidding about the Hallmark store, I thought as I walked into Andy’s room. Greeting cards were propped up on his desk and dresser and the windowsills. Tacked to the cork wall he used as his bulletin board, clustered around the charts Laurel had made to keep him organized. What I Do Before Going to Bed on a School Night: 1. Brush teeth 2. Wash face 3. Put completed homework in backpack. 4. Pick out clothes to wear to school. And on and on and on. Laurel was a very patient woman.

Andy was at his computer and he swiveled his chair around to face me.

“What’s with the cards?” I asked.

“They’re thank-yous.” He stood up and handed me one. The front was a picture of an artificially elongated dachshund. Inside it read, I want to extend my thanks. Then a handwritten note: Andy, you don’t know me, but I live in Rocky Mount and heard about what you did at the fire and just want you to know I’d want you around any time I needed help!

He handed me a few others.

“Some are from people I know,” he said as I glanced through them. “And some are from people I don’t know. And some girls sent me their pictures.” He grinned, handing me a photograph he had propped up next to his computer. “Look at this one.”

I did. Yowks. She had to be at least twenty. Long blond hair and wispy bangs that hung to her eyelashes. She wore a sultry look and little else. Well, all right, she had on some kind of skimpy top, but it didn’t cover much. I looked up at Andy and caught the gleam in his eye. He scared me these days. He used to see girls as friends, like his little skew-eyed pal, Emily. Now, he was getting into fights over girls. When did that happen? His voice was starting to change, too, jarring me every once in a while with a sudden drop in pitch. Sometimes standing next to him, I smelled the faint aroma of a man. I bought him a stick of deodorant, but he told me Laurel’d already gotten him one. That was part of the problem. If Laurel would just talk to me about Andy, we wouldn’t be buying him two sticks of deodorant. It had to scare her, too, the changes in him. The temptations he could fall victim to because he wanted to be one of the guys. By the time I was Andy’s age, I’d been having sex for two years and drank booze nearly every day. I didn’t have a disability and I still managed to screw myself up. What chance did Andy have of surviving his teens?

“How about we fly your kite on the beach today?” I suggested.

“Cool!” Andy never turned me down.

Laurel suddenly appeared in the doorway. She had on her running shorts and a Save the Loggerheads T-shirt. Her cheeks were a bright pink. She leaned against the jamb, arms folded, a white sheet of paper dangling from her hand. “What are y’all going to do today?” she asked.

“We’re going to fly my kite,” Andy said.

“That’ll be fun,” she said. “Why don’t you go get it? It’s in the garage on the workbench.”

“I can get it when we leave,” Andy said.

“Get it now, sweetie,” Laurel said. “We should check it and make sure it’s all in one piece. It’s been a while since you flew it.”

“Okay.” Andy walked past her and down the stairs.

So Laurel wanted to talk to me without Andy there. A rarity. I tried to look behind the half smile on her face.

“You won’t believe the e-mail I got this morning,” she said.

“Try me.” I was stoked she wanted to share something with me. Who cared what it was? She looked down at the paper instead of at me. With her head tipped low like that, I could see that the line of her jaw was starting to lose its sharpness. To me, she’d always be that pretty eighteen-year-old girl Jamie brought home so long ago. The girl who played Fur Elise on my electric piano and who took me seriously when I said I wanted to play in a band. Who never made me feel second-best.

“It’s from a woman at the Today show,” she said, handing me the paper. “They want Andy and me to fly to New York to be on the show.”

“You’re kidding.” I took the paper from her and read the short e-mail. She was supposed to call the show Monday to make arrangements. Would appearing on TV be good for Andy or not? “Do you want to do it?” I asked.

“I think I’d like to,” she said. “It’s a chance to educate people. Make them aware they can’t drink while they’re pregnant. And that kids with FASD aren’t all bad and out of control and violent and…you know.”

Once you got Laurel started on FASD, it was hard to reel her in.

“Those bits they do are short.” I didn’t want her to get her hopes up. “They might just want to hear about Andy and the fire and not give you a chance to—”

“I’ll get my two cents in,” she said. “You know I will.”

“Yeah.” I smiled. “You will.” I looked around the room at the cards. Swept my arm through the air. “It’s bound to generate more of this stuff.” I picked up the photograph of the blond from Andy’s desk. “Did you see this one?”

Her eyes widened. “Lord, no!” she said. “Ugh. I’ll keep a better eye on his mail.”

“His e-mail, too.”

“Marcus.” She gave me one of her disdainful looks. “I check everything. His e-mail, where he surfs, his MySpace page. You know me.”

I heard Andy on the stairs and quickly plucked the picture from her hand and set it back on his desk.

“It’s perfect!” Andy blew into the room, the box kite just missing the doorjamb.

“Okay, you two,” Laurel said. “Don’t forget the sunscreen. It’s in the drawer by the refrigerator. You’ll grab it, Marcus?”

“I’ll do that.” I put my hand on the back of Andy’s neck. “Let’s go, And.”

I trotted down the stairs with him, feeling pretty good. It was a step forward, Laurel telling me about the Today show, although she was so psyched, she probably would have told the plumber if he’d been the only person available. Still, it was progress.

For a year or so after Jamie died, Laurel didn’t let me see the kids at all. My parents were dead. My brother as well. Laurel, Maggie and Andy were all the family I had left, and she cut me out. I’d had some shitty periods in my life but that year was my worst. I’m sure it was Sara who got her to let me back in. It was slow going at first. I could only see the kids with Laurel skulking someplace nearby. Then she finally gave me freer rein. “Just not on the water,” she’d said.

I didn’t blame her for her caution. How could I? She had good reason not to trust me.

After all, she believed I killed her husband.

Chapter Ten

Laurel 1984-1987

JAMIE COULD INDEED KEEP HIS WEIGHT off me when we made love. I discovered, though, that I didn’t want him to. Blanketed beneath him, I took comfort in the protective mass of him. Being with him, whether we were making love or riding his bike or talking on the phone, made me feel loved again, the way I’d felt as a young child. Loved and whole and safe.

We dated my entire freshman year at UNC. When I went home to Ohio for the summer, we kept in touch by phone and mail and made plans for him to come visit for a week in July. I told Aunt Pat and Uncle Guy about him as carefully as I could. They didn’t like the fact that he was four years older than me. I could only imagine what they would say if I told them that there were really five years between our ages. They liked his religious studies degree, jumping to the conclusion that he was a Presbyterian like they were—and like they thought I still was. I’d been swayed by Jamie’s negativity about organized religion and was gradually coming to understand his own deep, personal and passionate tie to God. They didn’t understand why he was a carpenter when he should be using his degree in a “more productive manner.” I wanted to tell them he was a carpenter because he liked being a carpenter and that his family had more money than they could ever dream of having. But I didn’t want them to like Jamie for his family’s wealth. I wanted them to like him for himself.

On the evening Jamie was due to arrive, Aunt Pat and Uncle Guy waited with me on the front porch of their Toledo home. They sat in the big white rocking chairs sipping lemonade, while I squirmed on the porch swing, my nerves as taut as the chains holding the swing to the ceiling. I tried to see my aunt and uncle through Jamie’s eyes. They were a handsome couple in their late forties, and they looked as though they’d spent the day playing golf at a country club, although neither was a golfer and they couldn’t afford the country club.

Although it was July, Uncle Guy had on a light blue sweater over a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and he didn’t appear to be the least bit uncomfortable. He had chiseled good looks accentuated by the fact that he combed his graying hair straight back.

Aunt Pat wore a yellow skirt that fell just below her knees as she rocked. She had on sturdy brown shoes and panty hose. Her yellow floral blouse was neatly tailored, and her light brown hair was chin length, curled under, and held in place with plenty of spray. I tried to see my gentle mother in her face many times over the years, but I never could find her in my aunt’s hard-edged features.

As dusk crept in from the west, I suddenly heard Jamie’s motorcycle, still at least two blocks away. My heart pounded with both trepidation and desire. It had been a month since I’d seen him and I couldn’t wait to wrap my arms around him.

“What’s that ungodly sound!” Aunt Pat said.

“What sound?” I asked, hoping she was hearing something I could not hear.

“Sounds like a motorcycle,” Uncle Guy said.

“In this neighborhood?” Aunt Pat countered. “I don’t think so.”

I saw him rounding the corner onto our street, and I stood up. “It’s Jamie,” I said, and I knew the meeting between my relatives and the man I loved was doomed before it even began.

He pulled into the driveway. His bike sounded louder than it ever had before, the noise bouncing off the houses on either side of the street. I walked down the porch steps and across the lawn. I wanted to run, to fling myself into his arms, but I kept my pace slow and even and composed.

I saw him anew as he pulled off his helmet. His hair fell nearly to the middle of his back. He took off his jacket to reveal what I’m sure he considered his best clothes—khaki pants and a plain black T-shirt. I saw how out of place he looked in this starched and tidy Toledo neighborhood.

He opened his arms and I stepped into them, only long enough to whisper, “Oh God, Jamie, they’re going to be insufferable. I’m so sorry.”

They were worse than insufferable. They were downright rude to him, shunning his attempts at conversation, offering him nothing to eat or drink. After a half hour of the coldest possible welcome, I told Jamie I’d show him to the guest room and we walked inside the house.

Upstairs, I led him into the spare room that I’d dusted and vacuumed that morning and closed the door behind us.

“Jamie, I’m sorry! I knew they’d be difficult but I really had no idea they’d be this…mean. They’re not mean people. Just cold. They—”

“Shh.” He put his finger to my lips. “They love you,” he said.

“I…what do you mean?”

“I mean, they love you. They want the best for you. And here comes this big, hairy, scary-looking guy who probably doesn’t smell so good right now and who has a blue-collar job and no car. And all they can see is that the little girl they love might be traveling down a path that can get her hurt.”

I pressed my forehead to his shoulder, breathed in the scent of a man who’d been riding for two days to see the woman he loved. I loved him so much at that moment. I envied him, too, for his ability to step outside himself and into my aunt and uncle’s shoes. But I wasn’t sure he was right.

“I think they just care what the neighbors will think,” I said into his shoulder.

He laughed. “Maybe there’s some of that, too,” he said. “But even if that’s true, it’s their fear coming out. They’re scared, Laurie.”

“Laurel?” my aunt called from the bottom of the stairs.

I pulled away from him, kissing him quickly on the lips. “The bathroom’s at the end of the hall,” I said. “And I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

I walked downstairs, where Aunt Pat waited for me. Her face was drawn and lined and tired. “Come out on the porch for a minute,” she said.

On the porch, I took my seat on the swing again while Aunt Pat returned to the rocker. “He can’t stay here,” she said.

“What?” That was worse than I’d expected.

“We don’t know him. We don’t trust him. We can’t—”

“I know him,” I said, keeping my voice low only to prevent Jamie from hearing me. I wanted to scream at them. “I wouldn’t be in love with someone who wasn’t trustworthy.”

Uncle Guy leaned forward in the rocking chair, his elbows on his knees. “What in God’s name do you see in him?” he asked. “You were raised so much better than that.”

“Than what?” I asked. “He’s the best person I know. He cares about people. He’s honest. He…he’s very spiritual.” I was desperately trying to find a quality in Jamie that would appeal to them.

“What does that mean?” Aunt Pat asked.

“He plans to start his own church some day.”

“Ah, jeez.” My uncle looked away from me with disgust. “He’s one of those cult leaders,“he said, as if talking to himself.

“I think your uncle’s right,” Aunt Pat said. “He has some kind of power over you, or you wouldn’t be with someone like him.”

She was right that he had power over me, but it was a benevolent sort of power.

“He’s a good person,” I said. “Please. How am I supposed to tell him he can’t stay here when he just rode all the way from North Carolina to see me?”

“I’ll pay for him to stay in a hotel for one night,” Uncle Guy said.

I stood up. “He doesn’t need your money, Uncle Guy,” I said. “He has more money than you would know what to do with. What he needed from you was some tolerance and—” I stumbled, hunting for the right word “—some warmth. I should have known he wouldn’t find it here.” I opened the screen door. “He’ll go to a hotel, and I’ll be going with him.”

“Don’t…you…dare!” My aunt bit off each word.

I turned my back on them and marched into the house, amazed—and thrilled—by my own audacity.

In the end, Jamie wouldn’t let me go with him. He told my aunt and uncle that I was a special girl and he could understand why they’d want to protect me so carefully.

“You talk like a sociopath, Mr. Lockwood,” my uncle said, any remaining trace of cordiality gone.

Even Jamie was at a loss for words then. He left, and I sat on the porch steps the entire night, alternating between tears and fury as I imagined Jamie alone in a hotel room, tired and disappointed.

My aunt and uncle tried to coerce me into changing colleges in the fall, but my parents had been very wise. Even though they died in their early forties, they’d left money for my college expenses as well as a legal document stating the money was to be used at “the college, university or other institute of higher learning of Laurel’s choice.”

When I left Toledo for UNC that fall, I took everything with me. I knew I’d never be coming back.

Jamie proposed to me during the summer of my junior year and we set a wedding date for the following June. I exchanged an occasional letter with my aunt and uncle, but the wedding invitation I sent them went unanswered and, as far as I was concerned, that was it. I was finished with them. I didn’t miss them—I was already so much a part of the Lockwood family and knew Miss Emma and Daddy L better than I’d ever known Aunt Pat and Uncle Guy. Daddy L was mostly a benign presence, a quiet man with an uncanny business sense when it came to real estate. Miss Emma couldn’t survive without her three or four whiskey sours every afternoon-into-the-evening, but no one ever said a word about her drinking, as far as I knew. She was the sort of drinker who grew more mellow with each swallow. Marcus was cute and sweet but self-destructive, and he knew how to push his parents’ buttons—as well as Jamie’s. He’d long ago been labeled the difficult child and did his best to live up to expectations. He landed in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder after wiping out on his surf-board because he was so drunk. He got beaten up by a girl’s father for bringing her home late—by twelve hours. And twice before Jamie and I were married, he was arrested for driving under the influence. Daddy L bailed him out once. The second time, Jamie took care of it quietly so their parents wouldn’t know. Marcus was a real challenge to Jamie’s yearning to be empathic.

But I loved each of the Lockwoods, warts and all. I was so happy and full of excitement in those days that I no longer needed to count backward from a thousand to fall asleep. We were married the week after I received my nursing degree. Daddy L surprised us with the gift of The Sea Tender, the round cottage on the beach, my favorite of his properties. I took a job in a pediatrician’s office in Sneads Ferry, where I fell in love with every infant, toddler and child that came through the door. With every baby I held, I longed for one of my own. I felt the pull of motherhood in every way—biological, emotional, psychological. I wanted to carry Jamie’s baby. I wanted to nurse it and love it and raise it with the love my parents had showered on me before their deaths. I had no family of my own any longer. I wanted to create a new one with Jamie.

While I worked in the doctor’s office, Jamie left carpentry to get his real estate license, manage his father’s properties, and join the Surf City Volunteer Fire Department on the mainland. He even cut his hair—a radical change in his looks it took me a while to get used to—and bought a car, although he never did get rid of his motorcycle.

Living on the island in the eighties was extraordinary. I’d commute the easy distance to my job, then drive to the docks in Sneads Ferry to buy fresh shrimp or fish, then drive home to paradise. In the warm weather, I’d open all the windows in the cottage and let the sound of the waves fill the rooms as Jamie and I made dinner together. It was a time that would live in my heart always, even after things changed. I would never forget the peaceful rhythm of those days.

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