Chapter 19
Donna couldn’t stand hospitals, so in the morning she slid to the edge of her cot, hung her legs over the side, and reached
for the aluminum crutch leaning against the wall.
She got it under her left armpit and lowered herself carefully down. She put her bare right foot on the floor. The left foot
she kept raised. It was wrapped in gauze from toes to mid-shin and encased in some kind of black bionic boot with Velcro straps,
like a snowboarder’s boot. The heel throbbed hella bad and she clenched her teeth. Her johnny flapped open at the back to
show her bare ass to the morning. She didn’t give a fuck. If she had to breathe hospital air for another minute, she was going
to gag—that odor of iodine and blood was suffocating. She hopped-shuffled-skipped her way to the swinging door and pushed
through it and continued out onto the beach on Cherokee Island.
The cold sand felt good under her bare right foot. Thin clouds unraveled across a chilly sky. Gulls wheeled over the dark
water, crinkling with whitecaps. Van waited for her, down by the edge of the sea, one hand in the pocket of his jeans and
the breeze playing with his red hair. His pant legs were rolled up almost to the knee and his bare feet were sandy. She thought
he had never looked so handsome. He waved, then bent to look for seashells. A wave broke and foam rushed up the beach to hiss
around his toes.
She made her slow, awkward way across the drifts of sand to him, no easy thing to do on a crutch. As she neared him, he discovered
a perfect sand dollar and held it to the sky. His other hand came out of his pocket and she saw, as she approached, that he
had already collected half a dozen of them.
“There’s a sight,” Donna said. “Van McBride with more than five dollars in his hand. First time ever. Pro tip: don’t try and buy weed with it. Your dealer will laugh you into next Monday.”
He smiled at her with a heartbreaking fondness. “This is the only wealth that really means anything, you know: the time to
collect sand dollars and lungs to breathe the ocean air.”
“Fuckin’ hippie.”
The corners of his eyes wrinkled with happiness.
They turned and fell into step together, walking side by side. It was easier, down here, close to the water, where the ocean
had pounded the sand into a hard, wet, flat surface.
“I miss you so much,” she said, and then wished she could take it back, because she hated to cry.
His hand rested on her back. “That’s still no excuse.”
She lowered her face. “Goddamn it. If you’re just going to scold me, you can go back to being dead.”
“It’s no excuse for the way you’ve lived. What you’ve done to yourself and what you’ve done to the people who love you. What
you did to a few hundred women who lived lives of abuse and grief. Every one of them a Cady Lewis.”
“They were nothing like Cady,” Donna said, jerking away from him so violently, the crutch slipped and she tumbled, fell with a shout to the
sand.
“They were all Cady,” he said, looking down at her benevolently, but doing nothing to help her up. “Even the person who killed
Cady Lewis was a Cady Lewis himself once.”
“It doesn’t matter what got done to you,” she snarled, from the sand. “I don’t care how much abuse you soaked up. I don’t give a fuck about what
you didn’t have and what got taken from you. It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter how much hurt anyone feels, it doesn’t give
them the right to destroy other lives.”
“Yes. This is my point exactly,” he said. “I think we agree on something for the first time in our lives.”
The sun was behind him, and his red hair burned like a crown of gold.
“You want to scold someone, go haunt Gwen!” Donna cried. “She’s as bad as me! Do you know what she was doing in that hospice?”
“Yes. And so do you. Giving people their dignity back. Gwen almost died trying to claw a sad, fucked-up kid out of the rubble
in New Hampshire. Is that the kind of person who offs old people for kicks? You never believed that, not for an instant. You
can bullshit others, but you can’t bullshit me. Or yourself.”
“I can’t fix it,” she said, and covered her face. He was too beautiful to look at, and she was crying again. “I’d give every
dime I have to fix it, Van, but I can’t. Not with all the money in the world.”
“No. Not with all the money in the world. But there are other kinds of wealth.”
And he crouched and took her hand and put a sand dollar in her palm and folded her fingers over it.
“This isn’t real,” she said. “This is a dream.”
“It’s more than that,” he said. “When you wake up, and see this sand dollar in your hand, you’ll know it’s not too late to
make things right.” He bent forward and she closed her eyes and her brother kissed her cheek.
She opened her eyes and found herself in her hospital bed, staring at the drab drop ceiling. Her foot was elevated by a stainless
steel gantry and a collection of rubber straps. Her right fist was squeezed tight. Donna thought she could feel a sand dollar
pressed into her palm, and for the longest time she didn’t want to look, because when she opened her hand and saw it was empty,
she would know for sure it was too late to fix anything, and she was afraid to start crying, afraid if she got going, she
might never be able to stop.