Wicked Restless (Harper Boys #2)(82)

“Teddy, not now,” he says, scooping him and dropping him on the floor. He glances up at me. “Hazard of the job,” he smirks. I had forgotten—Emma’s father is a dogcatcher.

I bend down, and Teddy scurries up to me, putting his front paws on my knees. I scratch at his chin.

“I always wanted a dog,” I say, chuckling slightly.

“You want this one?” Carl says, I think only half kidding.

I rub my thumbs behind Teddy’s ears, watching his tail wag, until Carl leans back again in his chair, a file folder in his hands. He lays it on the desk, flipping it open, nodding for me to look.

I move to his side as he rolls his chair out a little to make room for me. When I begin to slide out the clippings and photos, my stomach lurches. The first thing I notice is a photo that appears to have been printed out at home—Emma in a hospital gown. Her hair is just as it was the last time I saw her before Lake Crest, her eyes look happy—hopeful even—though maybe a little sunken in, and her mom is sitting on the edge of the hospital bed with her.

“Did Emma…donate bone marrow or something?” I feel insensitive asking the question, but I don’t understand what I’m looking at, and the potential of what it might mean terrifies me to the point that I have to kneel next to the desk, no longer able to stand.

“No,” Carl chuckles softly, picking the photo up and pulling his glasses out to study it closer. “No…this was the day Emma got her heart.”

“Her…I’m sorry…” I stumble with my words.

“I didn’t think she told you. She was funny like that. I think it was her age, wanting to prove how normal she was, what she could do. I get it…she just wanted people to treat her normal,” he says.

“I’m sorry, Carl. I’m…I’m not following. Emma…she needed a heart? Was it the accident? Did something happen?” My mind is racing with dozens of questions. I understand getting cut and bleeding; I understand how burns and bruises heal. If this were mechanics, I would be able to get what Emma’s father was saying, but this is Emma’s world—medicine and biology and a broken body. I don’t understand, and I can’t help but feel like it’s my fault, and that’s why her parents never told her where I was.

My head is sweating, and I tug my hat off and run my hand through my hair, huffing for air. I fall back on my heels and land on my ass, bending my knees up and staring straight ahead.

“Andrew, it’s okay. She’s okay now, and no…this wasn’t from the accident,” he says. I barely register him, but nod in response.

“What…what was wrong with her?” I ask.

He sighs, sliding some photos around in the folder before pulling out a piece of paper and handing it to me. I read a few words along the top, something about New Hampshire Hospital, left ventricles, medications. It’s dated the year before I met Emma.

“Emma was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome. Basically, half of her heart worked, and the other half was broken. She had three surgeries before we turned to the transplant. That’s when you met her—when she was waiting on the list. We moved here for a doctor. Dogcatchers and phone-bank workers—we’re not exactly rolling in the dough,” he says, his lip inching up on one side in a half smile. I reflect it with one of my own. I don’t say it out loud, but turns out young men with juvenile records don’t make a lot of dough either. I’m hopeful that will change, though.

“This doctor, Dr. Wheaton, she performed Emma’s surgery for free. But we still had to wait for her to come up on the list,” he says, his eyes wandering back to the folder. I slide the diagnosis sheet up, and he folds it in with the other papers. “Her heart finally came…about a month after that accident you two had.”

He doesn’t try to mask the disapproval in his voice, and I cower a little under it. I lower my gaze, but I don’t acknowledge it any more. That accident has taken up too much of my life.

“While I was at Lake Crest,” I say instead, wanting to talk about where I was, and why Emma couldn’t know.

“Yes,” he says, not even flinching.

His conviction causes me to look up, and our eyes lock again. We keep coming to the same civil standoff.

“I would have supported her…through that…her surgery? If I had known,” I say, swallowing hard. “I wrote her letters. I would have written her every day, tried to call…”

I stop when I see his face fall, his lips pursed, a hint of regret perhaps shadowing his expression.

“You know I wrote her letters. You…you never gave them to her,” I say, that sick feeling from when I stepped out of my car coming over me again in a wave. It’s quiet for almost a full minute, the only sound the papers shuffling back into the folder, the drawer being pulled open and Carl’s chair sliding back from the desk as he stands. I pull myself up to stand with him, following him back from the den toward the front of the house. He stops in the kitchen.

“Can I get you a water? I don’t have much, but…I have water,” he says.

I laugh once under my breath and look back to the room on one end of the hallway and the doorway to my car on the other. All of this—and I still don’t have the answers I needed, the closure I needed—I’m still the f*ck-up from that family everybody talks about.