Sweet Water(8)

As if sensing my thoughts, Martin says, “I have backers for my automation software, Sarah. They paid a mint for it, and I had enough for the whole down payment. I wanted to keep the news under wraps until I closed on the house. I thought the combination of the two would make for a bigger surprise.”

Oh, I’m surprised all right. “Closed on the house” sounds so final, and as excited as I am, I don’t love that Martin didn’t at least ask my opinion on purchasing the property. I guess after all I’d blubbered about this place, he thought he didn’t have to.

After all, it’s my dream home. It just isn’t our dream home.

“That’s fantastic. Congratulations!” I hug my husband because it feels like the right thing to do, and maybe my dad will be okay that Martin bought this place for us if he used his own hard-earned money to do so and not his parents’. Dad always loved the way Stonehenge made me smile.

He was wrong about one thing regarding this house, though. He said there was no harm in stopping in and checking out Stonehenge and pretending we were the Bowmans, because we’d never get the chance again. But we should’ve driven on by. Because instead of just fantasizing about Stonehenge from the outside, I fell in love with the inside too, my want for it visceral, skin-deep, a part of everything I lacked and everything I wanted to become.





CHAPTER 3

Present

When we get home, the orders continue—strip my clothes, place them in a plastic bag, shower. I’m freezing and filthy, so I quickly do as I’m told, and when I come out, Finn is still shaking like he can’t hold heat, despite the blankets we’ve placed on top of him.

“Martin, hospital,” I plead.

He hasn’t put that damn phone down, and I’m about to take it from him and break it into a million pieces. He hasn’t given me mine back yet either.

“Bath!” he commands.

“What?” I ask.

“Upstairs now, run the bath,” Martin says urgently. “We need to warm Finn up. Mom says now.”

“Okay.” Mary Alice, Martin’s mother, is a nurse, and the only reason I comply is because the closest thing I have to a hospital right now is her. And because Finn is violently shaking.

I can feel the night’s terror pull down the bags beneath my eyes. Emotionally and physically exhausted, I concentrate on filling the garden tub with hot, sudsy water.

Being useful helps when you’re running on adrenaline. This will help Finn.

I hear Martin struggle up the stairs with him. “Help me,” he huffs.

I kneel beside him, and we both remove Finn’s soiled clothes as he yelps.

“It’s okay, baby,” I tell him, but it’s not okay. It’s wrecking me.

Martin carefully lowers Finn’s half-conscious body into the water. “Wash off the dirt. Keep him warm and above the water.”

“Okay,” I say, but I’m just going through the motions, my nerve endings numb, in shock. Martin dashes out of Finn’s bathroom, and I hear him walk quickly into ours. The water turns on, and it’s Martin’s turn to get the dirt off, but can we ever? He lets me do the washing, because I’m the mother, and it’s the natural order of things.

Mother bathes the children.

But Finn isn’t a child—he’s a grown boy.

An injured grown boy.

I cry as I run the terrycloth washrag over his stomach and shoulders. There’re signs of bruising, already purpling in places, and I don’t know if it’s from sports or from what happened tonight.

“What’re these, babe?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer me. He can’t answer me. And what is wrong with him?

I feel helpless not knowing, responsible somehow. If Finn was in trouble, I always thought I’d have a better sense for it because of my work, but here I am—shocked and disappointed, like every other parent who’s ever had tragedy befall their teenager.

I’ve failed you, Finn.

I wash his hair as quickly as I can, but that’s when I see the worst of it.

“No,” I whisper. There’re nail marks—indentations, really, like half-moons—etched into Finn’s neck.

“Finn, who did this?” I ask him. “Please tell me.”

No response, and he’s settled into the bathwater now, which is good—no more shaking. But his neck. It’s like someone has taken ahold of him but not hard enough to form a scratch. Just looking at the marks makes my own hands shake, because only females leave marks like that.

It’s a sign of a struggle. What did you do to that girl?

Martin comes back in, freshly showered, and lifts Finn out of the tub without asking me if I’m finished. “We need to get him to my parents’. Dress him.” Martin towels him off and throws clothes he’s grabbed from Finn’s room on the floor.

“No. He needs to go to a doctor, Martin!”

“Yes. At my parents’!”

“There will be a doctor there?” I ask, and it’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. The Ellsworths once paid a child therapist to fly from Nepal to counsel Livvy, William’s much younger sister, when she refused to eat for a solid month.

“Yes,” I hear him echo down the hall.

I can hardly pull on Finn’s clothes. It’s as if he’s a sleeping 160-pound toddler. “Come on, honey.”