Chapter 58 Mack
Mack
The way that Hailey knelt down in front of him, the way she leaned forward and met his eyes with such sadness, could have meant anything at this point, and yet what she said was not at all what Mack expected.
“Your mother.” He felt her hands press into his knees. “Mack, your mother died this morning. Tilda called earlier. I’m so sorry.”
Mack tipped dangerously sideways. He felt the earth move in the opposite direction; was he still on it? Did he have to be?
“Mack?”
He curled over, his head between his knees. Why couldn’t Hailey ever just leave him alone? Why did she always have to say such awful things?
They can’t stop the contractions. The baby is coming.
I’m just not sure that entertaining students is such a good idea right now.
We can’t stay in this tiny house forever.
We don’t have ten thousand dollars a month.
How could you just cash this without telling me?
“Oh my god,” Mack said, sitting up again. “They killed her, didn’t they? Sunshine Enterprises killed her, I know it.”
“I don’t think so.” Hailey shook her head. “I thought that too, but Tilda said your mom died really early this morning. There’s no way that—”
“Who died?” asked Mabel from the doorway. “Who died, Mommy?”
“Where’s Gigi?” Mack was thinking of the hole in the floor, that it might swallow Gigi up. It felt like anything could happen.
“Upstairs,” Mabel said, but as she spoke they heard feet padding through the furnace room, and then Gigi appeared. For a moment Mack just stared; she really was the spitting image of his mother.
“Daddy, who died?” Mabel tried again.
“My mom.” Mack felt no sadness. How long would that last?
Mabel stilled for a minute, and then out of nowhere she began to howl.
She went from zero to a hundred in a few short breaths.
She cried so hard that she couldn’t talk, while Hailey held her and smoothed the hair from her instantly drenched cheeks.
Gigi looked on coldly—she did not share Mabel’s devotion to a stranger, or maybe, Mack realized, she didn’t know what death was—while Gulliver barked and barked. No one paid any attention to him.
“Grammie?” Mabel finally managed to squeak out.
“Oh no,” Mack said, kneeling down beside her. “No Mabs, Grammie is Mommy’s mommy. My mom, the one that lives in Florida, she’s the one that died. Remember, I told you she’s been sick for a long time?”
Mabel nodded, hiccupping. “Not Grammie?”
“No, not Grammie.”
“Your mommy died of being sick for a long time?”
Mack looked at Hailey.
“She did,” Hailey told Mabel, but really Mack. “She died right around six this morning, they told me, while you were still asleep, Mabel. She died peacefully.”
“Six?” Mack said, trying to catch hold of one of the thoughts streaking through his brain. “Six a.m.? Not any later? Are you sure?”
“I’m pretty sure. I asked Tilda. She wasn’t with her, but—”
“It can’t be a coincidence, though, can it. Today? When the deadline—”
“What’s a coincidence?” Gigi asked, and Mack had no more patience left. He scrambled to his feet. He felt like he was suffocating. He could hear Hailey whispering to his daughters as he brushed Gigi aside.
“I could have stopped this,” he said when the girls had been shooed out. “I could’ve—”
“Could’ve what? Killed some innocent man?” Hailey’s voice sounded calm, sure of itself. “Whoever is doing this to us is crazy. The house . . . Simeon’s experts think someone poured acid on the foundations of the house when we were building it.”
“What?”
“The beams have been coated in something . . . they thought maybe someone mad about the beach access tried to sabotage the development, they—”
“Hailey.”
“What?”
“Sabotage on the beams. Bad construction.” He didn’t wait for her to catch up. “You were right. My father. Somebody knows about my father.”
“It doesn’t matter if I’m right,” said Hailey. “The point is, this has been going on for months and months—years! Sunshine Enterprises, whoever the hell they are, aren’t going to stop. Not even if you had killed this man, which we both know you were never, ever going to do.”
She didn’t know, of course.
Hailey would never know just how close Mack had come.
Mack would never describe to her how the man—the dentist—had come back from his loop through the woods, had jogged back down Danekar Drive right into the path of the Cherokee.
Mack would never explain to Hailey how he had sat there seething with hatred for this guy who was the whole reason Mack had to be out there at all.
Mack loathed this jogger for probably being able to afford his soulless house, and for having a job he probably liked and a wife who could stand to be around him and maybe even a mother who could walk and talk.
Also, there was someone out there who hated this guy enough to want him dead, which meant the guy must’ve been a prick of the highest order .
. . Unless this prick wanted himself dead, in which case he was still a prick, and screw him, Mack would be happy to oblige.
Mack’s thoughts had circled round and round, tightening around him like a noose.
How could Hailey ever understand the temptation?
The twisted thrill of just being able to move this situation forward, to show Sunshine Enterprises, whoever they were, that Mack Evans was crazy too, and not to be messed with?
Mack could imagine the smack of the body on the windshield, the rush of disbelief he would feel at what he’d done.
Would it numb the fear that had been humming in his nervous system for so long?
—that had been the exact thought in Mack’s head when he shifted the car into drive.
But then, about fifty yards in front of him, while Mack’s foot was still firmly on the brake pedal, the man had slipped on a smooth patch of ice.
Not just a stumble but a big, goofy slide that sent his mittened hands flailing out, his weight shifting backward, and almost landed him on his butt.
It scared the guy, and Mack could read his lips as he righted himself: Motherfucker, the man said with a puff of air. Fucking winter. Fuck!
And for some reason—he didn’t know what it was exactly—that outburst had brought Mack crashing back to reality, had saved the man’s life without his ever knowing it.
Mack would never tell Hailey any of this.
She was talking, he realized now, and had been for a while.
“And even if someone was there waiting, would they have just instantly murdered your mother the second you didn’t run the man over?” Mack saw her glance toward the door, to make sure the girls had gone upstairs. “In a staffed nursing home? I just don’t believe it.”
“I don’t believe any of this,” said Mack, stepping past her.
“Where are you going?”
“To get my phone. I have to call Tilda.”
“It’s here.” Hailey took Mack’s phone from her pocket. “But like I said, just keep an open mind.”
Mack stopped in the doorway, his back to her. He hadn’t heard a word she’d said.
“You weren’t listening to me at all, were you?”
“I’m sorry. I—”
She turned him gently around to face her.
“I was only saying that sometimes in the middle of terrible shit happening, something else terrible happens. And even though it feels like it’s all connected, it isn’t always.
Sometimes in this fucked-up universe, terrible things just happen to happen to you all at once. ”
“Okay,” said Mack as he took the phone from her. He couldn’t quite bear to make eye contact. “I guess you could be right.”
But nothing would ever convince him, even when the timing didn’t line up, even when Tilda had assured him that there had been no visitors and no new staff, that everyone who had come into contact with Leonora in the days and hours before her death had been taking care of her for a long, long time, even then Mack still believed that his mother’s death was connected to Sunshine Enterprises.
This overlap had to be a man-made occurrence; the universe could never have been so cruel on its own.