The Waiting: A Supernatural Thriller(19)

“Thanks for the wine and conversation.”

“Thanks for the pie.”

“Don’t thank me till after you’ve tried it.”

Evan chuckled again, looking down at his feet.

“Have a good evening, Evan.”

“You too.”

Selena smiled and walked down the steps. He caught his eyes tracing down the slender curve of her back to the formfitting jeans, and looked away. He moved to go inside, but something froze him where he was. And before he knew it, he called out to her.

“Hey, Selena?”

She stopped halfway down the hill and turned.

“Feel free to stop by again.”

She smiled, and he saw her eyes shining, even across the distance between them. She nodded once and then continued to her father’s canoe.

An unfamiliar springy giddiness vibrated inside his chest as he returned to the living room. The moment he noticed it, another feeling began to coat the excitement with black bile that shriveled his guts with shame. His eyes went to the ring on his hand, and he stared at it, remembering the words the jeweler told him the day he and Elle had picked it out. Only thing harder than tungsten carbide is diamonds. That’s a ring to last an eternity.

The excitement gone, the familiar hollow filling him up, Evan walked across the room to check on Shaun.

~

Dusk approached, and the water became scorched glass beneath the falling dark. Evan took Shaun down to the lake and showed him the art of skipping rocks. There were quite a few perfect skippers, and he picked out the best, trying to get as many hops out of the rocks as he could. He threw until his shoulder began to ache. Shaun sat in his medical seat, transfixed by the sight of the rocks jumping like living things across the water. Whenever Evan would pause to massage his shoulder, Shaun would cry out “More!”—one of the few words he could say with ease.

“That’s all I’ve got, buddy, we gotta go in,” Evan eventually said.

“Na!”

“We have to, it’s getting dark.”

Shaun responded by kicking his feet against the chair and clawing at the belts that held him in place.

“Shaun, stop, stop,” Evan said, hurrying to his side. “It’s all done, we have to go up to the house.”

“Na!”

Evan sighed and tried to restrain Shaun from banging his head against the back of the chair. “Shaun. Stop,” Evan said, raising his voice.

Shaun froze. The anger on his face melted into a sob as he brought his hands up to cover his eyes. Evan lowered his head.

Good job, you made him cry again.

“Shaun, Shaun, look at me.”

The boy pulled one wet fist away from his eye.

“Do you want to try?”

Shaun gazed at him but didn’t move.

“Throwing the rocks?” Evan imitated the motion with his arm and then gestured at Shaun. “You try?”

A grin replaced the frown on the boy’s face.

“Okay, let’s get you out of that chair.”

Evan unbuckled his son and led him down to the water. Keeping him from falling while finding a good rock proved difficult. With one arm wrapped around Shaun’s chest, Evan guided his son’s hand in the motion, releasing the stone at the correct time. The rock hit the water and skipped once before dropping out of view.

“Yay, Shaun! You did it.”

“More?”

“Okay, buddy, one more.”

But it was full dark by the time they returned to the house, and they’d thrown so many rocks Shaun could barely keep his head upright. Evan helped him go to the bathroom, brush his teeth, and get into bed.

“That was fun today,” he said, smoothing Shaun’s hair back from his forehead. “You did good riding in the boat and at the hospital, and I think a couple more times and you’ll be skipping rocks by yourself.” He spoke in lower and lower tones, each word helping to sink Shaun’s drooping eyelids into place. “Mom’s proud of you too.”

His throat tightened, and he inhaled through his nose, blinked the tears away. After listening to him breathe deeply for over a minute, Evan leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek.

“Night, buddy, sleep good.”

He left the room and paced through the quiet house, to the kitchen, putting a mug of water in the microwave for tea. While the unit hummed, he found his laptop case amongst the rest of his luggage and sat with it at the kitchen table. After firing it up, he searched his documents for the last article he’d started, and cringed at the date the document had last been modified: almost two years prior. The disappointment only lasted a minute, and the familiar feeling took its place as he opened it up. It was an article about an Afghanistan veteran who’d run into a burning building to save a little girl, despite the fact that he was a double amputee and had only prosthetics from the knees down. The dates and facts were so old the article was useless now. Evan closed the document and slid its icon into the trash.

The sound of the microwave beeping pulled him from his seat, and he returned a minute later gripping the steaming mug of green tea. As he sat, he sipped the drink, letting his eyes flow over the half-dozen articles remaining in the document folder—an expose on a salmonella outbreak at a grocer near their house in the cities, a few hundred words about a special-education plan that affected Shaun being cut, and a document titled “Young Cancer.”