Chapter One

"How long has this been going on?"

Jen turned toward her brother in the Jeep's passenger seat.

"I want an answer, all right?" Matt continued, sounding considerably older than his fifteen years.

Jen swung back to the road and glimpsed the red light above her. She hit the brakes and heard the grinding screech in the last instant before the eighteen-wheeler barreled through the intersection and struck the Jeep Cherokee broadside. It spun across the road like a top, twisting and turning until the passenger side wrapped around a telephone pole in a shower of glass and steel.

Jen didn't remember much after that. There was the blistering bang of the air bag inflating, followed by the taste of blood in her mouth and the odd feeling that her teeth seemed to have shifted. Her vision was blurred and her head ached horribly. It hurt to breathe and something heavy was pressing against her chest. She managed to look down and saw that the heavy object was the steering wheel wrapped in the billowy shape of the deflated air bag.

I'm trapped . ...

Regaining awareness was like being reluctantly stirred from a deep sleep. She fought it every step of the way, preferring the dark to the reality around her.

A soft moan drew her gaze to the passenger seat. For an instant she saw no one and was disoriented enough to believe she had been alone in the car. Then she glimpsed her brother Matt slumped against the seat back, shrouded from the face down by the floppy remnants of the air bag on the passenger side.

There were people at the smashed-in window on the driver's side by then, urging her to stay calm, not to move. But Jen tried to shimmy herself free and stopped when a surge of agony like hot lightning cut into her pelvis. She shrieked in pain and a man by the window smashed the remaining glass aside and plunged his hand through to press against her shoulder.

"Let go of me!"

"Don't move. Please. You shouldn't move."

"My brother! Help my brother!"

Jen thrashed to free herself, groping futilely toward Matt, coming up short. More hands jabbed through the window to hold her down. Jen fought them and her pelvis exploded in pain again.

The sound of sirens came next, picking up cadence as they drew closer. Jen closed her eyes, and when she opened them the firemen were surrounding the Jeep. The hands upon her now were those of paramedics. One of them spoke comfortingly to her before trying to cover her face with something heavy. Jen flailed and stripped it free. A fireman angled a Jaws of Life apparatus that looked like a huge pair of mechanical pliers to Matt's side of the Jeep. Once again the hands joined in against her. Jen's face and body were covered again and the rest of her held firmly in place.

The sound followed while she continued to struggle, a sound like an engine idling followed by a quick rev and a pop! as the Jaws of Life separated the passenger door from the Jeep's frame. The hands restraining her let up enough for Jen to shake free of her hood in time to see a flurry of hands easing Matt out from beneath what had been the dashboard. A brief surge of relief filled her until she saw the blood. It was everywhere, the seat soaked and darkened by it. As the paramedics held Matt still and attached a collar to his neck, more of it flooded from him in huge rivulets to the Jeep's floor.

Jen screamed.

"Hold her still!" one of the paramedics ordered, continuing his examination of Matt, stopping when he came to one of the boy's legs. Jen could see him hesitate then. Her eyes flashed downward and caught a glimpse of her brother's shredded jeans matted with blood.

"I need a leg splint here!" the lead paramedic ordered, and another scrambled to get it.

A wave of nausea struck Jen and then her view was blocked by the paramedic who had come back with the leg splint.

The man's eyes gaped as he helped steady Matt's leg. "God, he's lost a lot of blood. ..."

"Keep your damn voice down!"

"We can't move him like this."

"The hell we can't!"

The chief paramedic worked furiously, barking orders as he immobilized Matt's leg. Whatever he was doing was out of Jen's line of vision, adding to her sense of helplessness.

What's going on? Jen wanted to ask. What's happening?

But the words choked up in her throat. She could barely swallow.

"This one's stable!" a voice near her roared, and only then did Jen realize other paramedics had been working on her as well.

"Matt!" she managed to scream finally, and the men looked at each other from across the twisted remnants of the front seat.

"Okay," said the paramedic working on Matt, "we're going to move him."

"Christ," from another, shaking his head.

More hands pushed their way in toward Matt.

"On my mark. One, two, three! "

The hands worked in unison and Matt glided gently outward, a trail of blood left dripping in his wake as the paramedics eased him toward the sunlight. Jen gagged and felt bile spill up into her throat. She swallowed it down and managed to shift enough to see four of the hands holding Matt's splinted leg like it was precious china. The acrid, coppery stench of blood filled the cab, as the hands lowered him to the pavement out of her sight line.

"Vitals strong!" a voice blared from over her.

"Blood pressure 170 over 110!"

"Strong breath sounds!"

"Let's get the Jaws over here!"

This last command uttered while an oxygen mask was lowered toward Matt.

"What are they doing? What's going on?"

"Try to relax," a voice soothed.

"I want to see my brother!"

She watched the paramedics working over him with frantic precision, readying IV pouches and lowering needles into that nether region below the Jeep's passenger-side running board. She could see their upper bodies and uniforms splattered with Matt's blood, latex gloves dripping with red too.

One of the paramedics shielded Jen's face with his coat. Then the low groan of the idling hydraulic pump for the Jaws of Life turned to a soft rumble as the machine separated steel. She heard her door bang to the pavement and then felt hands probing about her belly and hips.

"Okay," a voice said in her ear, trying to sound soothing, "we need to fit this collar on you."

The paramedic lifted the coat from her face and Jen turned her eyes back toward Matt. "I'm all right."

"I need you to turn to the front."

"I want to watch my brother."

"Your brother's doing well. He's stable. We need to get you out now."

Jen might have continued her protest if the paramedics on the other side of the Jeep hadn't hoisted Matt's spinal board gently upward and moved it toward a waiting ambulance.

"Hold still."

The next moment Jen felt the collar being clamped into place around her neck, keeping her head fixed so she couldn't turn it.

"Okay, let's get her out."

She fixed her gaze downward, afraid of the sight that awaited her as the paramedics eased her legs out from under the dashboard.

Chapter Two

"What'll you have?"

Jamie Brooks looked up at the bartender and raked his fingers through his long, snow-dampened hair.

"Beer."

"What kind?"

"Draft. The cheapest you've got."

As the bartender turned to fill his order, Jamie rested his elbows on the counter and blew into his frigid hands. Even the short distance from his car to the front door had left him shaking from the cold, brutal for this time of year even by New Hampshire standards. Beyond the horseshoe-shaped bar, all but a few of the booths were empty. Band equipment was stacked on a makeshift stage set before a partitioned dance floor, though Jamie figured the storm had kept even the musicians away tonight.

"Here you go," the bartender said, setting a frosty mug down before him.

Jamie yanked a bill from his jeans and thrust it on the bar. He had guzzled almost half the beer when he heard the man's voice again.

"Ah, excuse me."

Jamie peered over the top of his mug.

The bartender was holding the bill Jamie had laid down. "What exactly do you call this?"

Jamie looked closer and saw that he had paid him with the eviction notice he had plucked from his apartment door ten hours earlier. He quickly reached into his pocket for a real bill to replace it.

"Sorry."

"Sure," the bartender said, and readjusted the duckbill baseball cap that cast a thin shadow down the length of his face. In spite of the weather, he was wearing a short-sleeve shirt and his biceps looked like baseballs squeezed under his skin.

Jamie crunched the eviction notice in his fist and deposited it in the nearest ashtray atop the shiny, light-finished wood. He snatched a book of matches someone had left on the bar, struck one, and touched the flame to the balled-up paper.

He had found the notice taped to his door by his landlord Mrs. Dellagash just before the first time he almost died that day. Crumpled it up and stuffed it in the same pocket as his few remaining dollar bills. The bills were the last of his savings, even fewer since he had stopped at the drugstore early that morning.

When he got back to the apartment, Jamie had gone straight into the small kitchen, smelling the scent of Meg strongly for a moment. He knew from experience that for some reason he didn't understand, her scent would fade away in a few minutes. The first days without her he had made excuses to go out, found errands to run just so he could come back and feel Meg near him. Each time he returned her scent was fainter, the time when it would fade forever inevitable.

But he wasn't going to wait for that day to come.

The pills in the prescription bottle clinked against each other as he set the CVS bag down on the kitchen table in the same spot where he'd found Meg's note the week before.

It's not working out. ...

The note said more, but that was the line Jamie kept coming back to. They had been going out since high school and things had always worked out. They had gotten through everything until now, so what had changed?

Jamie considered that question again as he shifted the CVS bag onto a place mat. The pills inside were like a legacy. His leg had hurt for years after the accident, a painkiller called Vicoden the only thing that could calm it while casting a deep dreamlike blur over the world.

It had been five years since Jamie had gotten his last prescription, just before his nineteenth birthday. But he'd never had it filled, a recollection that had sent him scurrying out the night before to scavenge through his glove compartment as though there were treasure to be found. He'd about given up hope when a shake of the owner's manual sent the small sheet of scribble fluttering out, wrinkled and a little faded, yet reasonably intact. Altering the year at the prescription's top was as simple as changing a "3" to an "8."

Jamie stripped his jacket off and laid it over the back of a chair. Then he snatched up the CVS bag and walked the length of the apartment into the bathroom, where he made sure to pull the shade down all the way before turning on the twin faucets of the tub. He adjusted the water temperature, then stood back up and removed the Vicoden from the CVS bag. He had trouble working the child-guard cap, but finally popped it off and tipped a half-dozen pills into his palm, gulping them down with a swig from the tap.

The water ballooned his jeans as he sank into the tub and settled back. He remembered he had left the razor blades on the vanity and reached up to snag them from inside the CVS bag. The Vicoden was starting to work now, a dull fog misting over reality the way the steam covered the mirror.

Jamie pulled the top blade from the package and threw out the rest. He lowered the steel edge to his wrist and shuddered at its cold touch, closing his eyes to concentrate on Meg's fading scent, imagining her hair bouncing behind her as she lugged her suitcases toward the door, just before he felt himself drifting, drifting away. ...

Chapter Three

"Do you always see patients at night?"

As she spoke, Jen kept her stare fixed out the window into the spill of a flickering streetlight. A light rain had begun to fall, speckling the glass.

"Only when they call me," Dr. Ryerson said and crossed her legs.

"This is only my second visit."

"All the more reason. What happened after they got you out of the Jeep?"

"They took Matt and me to the hospital. Separate ambulances. I wasn't hurt badly. A few cuts and bruises, that's all."

Dr. Ryerson made a note on the pad before her, visible to Jen as a reflection in the darkened, water-flecked glass, a reflection infinitely preferable to her own. Jen looked years older, although only a week had passed since the accident. Her face was pale and drawn. Tiny lines had formed around her mouth.

"How old is your brother, Jen?"

She turned from the window and faced Dr. Ryerson. "Isn't that in the history I wrote out last time?"

"I'd prefer to hear it from you."

"Fifteen."

"And how old are you?"

"Twenty-eight next week. Should I sit down?"

"That's up to you."

Jen moved to the chair opposite Dr. Ryerson, but didn't sit down. The simplicity of the office surprised her. The leather love seat and chairs were arranged comfortably around a gas fireplace aglow with a soft orange flame. A rose-colored oriental rug, sun-bleached along the far edge, covered the floor in front of an uncluttered Queen Anne desk. During her first visit, Jen had noticed a series of framed pictures atop it,--Dr. Ryerson's husband and children, she guessed. The only one picturing the doctor herself featured her in midflight down a ski slope, catching her in the midst of a turn. Jen thought it must have been taken fairly recently.

She looked at the demure Ryerson now and tried to visualize her carving up snow on some black-diamond trail. Just thinking about it made her pelvis ache; not a serious injury, the doctors had assured her, but a lingering one all the same that had kept her from her regular six-mile runs.

"You and Matt have different fathers?" Dr. Ryerson asked.

"My father died when I was eleven. My mother remarried two years later. She was forty when Matt was born."

"And Matt's father?"

Jen stiffened a little. "He left three years ago."

"Was that after your mother..." Dr. Ryerson let her question tail off purposefully.

"No--before." Jen felt something hot building in her face. "You shouldn't ask for a patient history if you're not going to read it."

The two women stared at each other for a long moment, the quiet ticking of a clock perched on the psychiatrist's ornate shelves the only sound between them. Finally Dr. Ryerson took pen in hand again.

"Let's talk about what happened after you got to the hospital."

Jen climbed down off the narrow emergency-room bed and slipped through a crack in the lime-colored curtain. It hurt terribly to walk, the pain centered squarely in the middle of her pelvis. Each step seemed to grind bone together, but she kept moving deeper into the ER, checking the various rooms and cubicles for Matt.

She found him in a trauma room in the center of three beds, surrounded by doctors and nurses working with grim determination. She moved closer, and they seemed not to notice her.

Matt was blocked from her view mostly, but she could see they had removed the splint applied by paramedics at the scene and cut away the jeans to expose his shattered leg. Distance spared her full view of the damage; she saw enough, though, to stagger her woozily backward.

Below the knee, it didn't even resemble a leg anymore, just a mishmash of flattened bone, gristle, and muscle. They must have stopped the blood because the exposed jagged husk of Matt's leg was a sickly pinkish color now.

"Someone get her out of here!" a doctor finally ordered, and a pair of nurses moved toward Jen.

As they led away from the bed, she had a clearer view of Matt and she saw that, ridiculously, his foot looked totally intact.

"Tommy Hilfiger," Jen finished.

"Who?" asked Dr. Ryerson.

"The kind of jeans Matt was wearing. Eighty-five dollars. I remember buying them for him. I remember thinking how upset he'd be to wake up and find them ruined."

"His leg..."

"I had to sign some papers. That was the hardest part. I didn't want to make the decision alone. I wanted to talk to him. I needed time."

"And the doctors told you there wasn't any."

"Emphatically. They kept stressing they could save the knee. That was very important. The rest, well, I had seen for myself. That still didn't make it any easier."

"It never does."

"Accepting responsibility--that's what this comes down to. I'm holding the clipboard in front of me, everyone's waiting for me to sign, and I'm afraid of making another mistake. Doing the wrong thing. To this day I'm still not sure I didn't do the wrong thing. I mean, I could have waited, insisted they pursue other options."

"You said you had seen for yourself."

"That's not what I'm talking about. I wanted Matt to come live with me; nobody forced me to do it. But I'm not sure I ever accepted responsibility for him. I never understood exactly what that meant."

"Was there an alternative?"

"Not one that I could live with."

The clock ticked on.

"You think I did the right thing. ..."

"No," said Dr. Ryerson. "I would have waited for the jeans to go on sale."

Jen tried to smile.

"Do you feel you did something you weren't ready for?"

"On-the-job training. We could have made it work; it was working." Jen heard her voice cracking. "Then I'm holding a clipboard and they're asking me to change everything forever."

"Again."

"I guess."

"So you accepted responsibility, as you told me."

"And ruined my brother's life in the process."

"Does Matt believe that or do you?"

"Both of us, I think." Jen managed to smile this time but there was something all wrong about it. "Last thing we have in common, you might say."

"If you had it to do all over again, you wouldn't sign the papers. Is that it?"

Jen was trembling now. "I wouldn't have run that damn red light. That's what. It was my fault. The whole goddamn thing was my fault and having to sign those papers was like going through it twice. I go to sleep at night and sometimes I see the traffic light and sometimes I see the papers. But I haven't gone back to that intersection. Even if it means going twenty minutes out of my way, I won't go back to that intersection."

"Did you contact Matt's father?"

"He was telling me how sorry he was when his call waiting clicked in. I hung up after hanging on for five minutes."

Dr. Ryerson's eyebrows flickered. "He never called back?"

"No."

"How did that make Matt feel?"

"Matt hates him anyway."

"And you?"

"I think Matt hates me now, too."

"I was asking you about Matt's father."

"Oh. Sorry."

"For what?"

"There are too many things to list."

"Start with the most important."

Jen took a deep breath. "I'm sorry I can't help Matt, that I can't reach him anymore, that maybe I've lost him for good."

"You said you wanted to talk more about the accident itself," Dr. Ryerson said. "What led up to it."

"The drugs. We were arguing about drugs. I found them in his jeans the night before."

"Did you confront him?"

"Not exactly," Jen said evasively.

Dr. Ryerson looked confused for the first time. "You didn't confront him?"

Jen finally sat down, but leaned forward stiffly. "I haven't told this to anyone yet."

"But it's the real reason why you called me tonight, isn't it?"

"Yes," Jen said softly.

"We've still got half the hour left."

Jen started speaking again, wondering if that would be long enough.

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