Those We Love Most Read online

  Dedication

  For Prince Liam,

  who taught us more about how to live in

  his six short years than most people

  come to understand in a very long life

  Epigraph

  “Loss

  is not

  the end.

  It’s simply an

  invitation

  to change.”

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with Lee Woodruff

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Copyright

  1

  It was only the front edge of summer and the yard already looked overgrown, as if the squalls of May and early June had held a kind of magical elixir, a formula that put all of the plants on steroids. Standing on the perimeter of the flagstone patio with her coffee, Margaret studied the impatiens with their fat, red heads, nodding downward, and the fecund look of the peonies as they passed their peak, rotting from fuchsia and ballet slipper pink to a brown mush.

  She began to walk out past the shed where the yard narrowed between two bent willows, toward her beloved vegetable garden. When the kids were little, she had carved out slivers of her day to be here, sacrificing so she could embrace the peace this plot of land afforded her. Morning was her favorite time to be out among her plants, when her energy and joy for the day were at their peak. “Your mistress,” Roger had called her garden once, and she’d never forgotten it. The irony, she’d thought bitterly.

  There was another one, she noticed, as her mouth curved downward with displeasure. Another chipmunk hole, or possibly a mole, next to the bright green shoots of her coreopsis. It had been burrowing down and feasting on the tender roots, and nothing enraged her more than having her flowers under attack. Rodents were where she drew the line, rodents and slugs. Summer was just beginning, and they were already declaring war.

  Margaret could feel her agitation rising and fought to contain it. It was too early in the season to get worked up. In many ways, gardening was an exercise in patience, an endurance sport. She loved how it changed through the seasons. In July and August, she became an avid canner, preserving vegetables and then freezing sauces for winter. Autumn brought late-September raspberries, ropy vines with fat, lumpy pumpkins and squash. There was always enough zucchini to supply the neighbors, and she derived pleasure in baking bread and muffins. Her labors slowed in September until the first frost of October stopped the leggy fall dahlias, asters, and mums in their tracks. When it all hung brown and yellowed from the cold, she would cover the beds and perennials with dried leaves in a quiet funeral ritual, digging up the dahlia tubers to winter over in peat moss.

  Weeding between the rows of beans, she thought she heard a distant sound from the house. Could that be the phone, or was the breeze playing tricks on her? There again, so faint from all the way out back. No matter. She’d be in soon enough. There was nothing that couldn’t wait. It was probably Roger, calling from the road. This trip was Denver first and then Florida, if she remembered. It was hard to keep all the deals at his commercial real estate firm straight sometimes, and frankly she’d given up trying.

  The members of her family were like lines intersecting at random points. Her two grown daughters close to home, Maura and Erin, and her son, Stu, in Milwaukee, flitted in and out of her weeks, as did her grandchildren, with their multiple school and sports activities. Roger was mostly consumed with his work and weekend golf at the club. These days, there were times she simply felt like an afterthought.

  Margaret sighed and hauled herself up off the weeding pad and toward the shed. She would find a new sticky trap and then dig out the pack of Merits stashed behind the slug pellets on the top shelf. Although her kids thought she’d quit long ago, Margaret indulged her secret vice once or twice a day, sometimes with her morning coffee and usually with a glass of pinot grigio before Roger came home.

  Now there was the phone ringing again, just seconds after it had stopped. Someone must need to reach her, or maybe it was just coincidence. There were so many of those automated callers now, even on the off-hours, but it wasn’t even nine in the morning. She sighed and tucked the cigarettes back on the shelf in the shed. Maybe it was Maura calling. Her daughter knew she would be alone until late that night, perhaps she had an invitation for dinner. Margaret’s spirits rose. She’d bring the rest of the blueberry banana bread she had baked yesterday.

  As she approached the house, Margaret heard the measured cadence of Roger’s recorded voice on the answering machine asking callers to repeat their phone number twice. There was the shrill beep of the machine and then a woman’s voice; it was impossible to tell who was leaving a message. The words were indistinct but the tone urgent, the voice muffled as it carried across the yard and out to where she was walking. Margaret quickened her pace as she headed in.

  Roger rolled over onto one elbow and squinted at the strip of white light blazing through the slender gap in the curtains. The Florida sun was low but already warming the manicured grass, and it promised to be another hot, steamy day. A blanket of humidity lay over the city, permeating even the air-conditioned room and its muggy, damp smell. Outside, the low buzz of a leaf blower droned and some kind of tropical bird squawked. The staccato, unevenness of the noise was unsettling.

  Julia’s tanned toffee-colored back pressed against him with its gentle curve. Her shoulders rose and fell softly with her breathing. Roger’s thoughts leapt ahead to the evening, when he would board a plane home to Chicago. It would be at least a month or more before he would see her again, and he felt a melancholy about that, mingled with the comfort of heading home. He knew, from previous experience, that today would feel both eternal and swift.

  Last night they had looked like any other older couple, swaying on the hotel veranda to the band. They’d ordered fruity drinks, and Julia had laughed at his jokes, almost too loudly, as the waiter delivered them with tiny paper parasols. He’d enjoyed that, her amusement at simple things. The way Julia clasped her hands in front of her chest in delight made him feel as if he were an all-powerful magician who could conjure up her happiness.

  On his last day with her he would inevitably think of Margaret, despite his best intentions. She and the kids would intrude as he began the mental transition home. Roger forced himself to push those thoughts away. His children were grown now, with families and homes of their own, no longer in his daily orbit, yet he marveled at how the habit of that responsibility persisted.

  As he had raised his glass the night before to to
ast Julia, an image had flickered briefly in his head of his wife scraping the remains of her dinner into the disposal and methodically lowering the plate onto the bottom rack of the dishwasher.

  Julia rolled toward him on the bed, eyes fluttering open as a half sigh escaped her lips. This last day was always harder on her. She lived alone in this small stucco house in Tampa near the freeway, where she’d raised two sons and outlived her husband. For the past five years this had been their arrangement, and he had been careful never to promise her anything more.

  “How long have you been awake?” Julia asked groggily.

  “Not much before you.” He shrugged.

  “You have that look,” she mused, rolling up on one elbow. “It’s your leaving-day look.”

  “Then it must be leaving day.” The words came out more harshly than he had intended, and he silently chided himself for beginning the distancing process this early in the morning. They had most of the day left, with plans to take a walk. Perhaps they’d grab some scrambled eggs at the beachfront diner first.

  Julia looked down at the white blanket, picking at a snag in the weave. Roger closed his palm over her smaller, birdlike hands and tilted her chin up toward him, meeting her eyes with a reassuring smile. Her fine high “Puerto Rican cheekbones,” as she called them, were burnished with a few freckles and deep crow’s-feet around her eyes. Julia’s hair was jet-black, but a line of silver-gray roots growing in from her scalp jarred him. He appreciated the illusion of Julia’s seemingly effortless beauty.

  “I’m sorry,” Roger offered quietly.

  “No offense taken,” Julia said breezily, though he knew he’d stung her.

  “We’ve got one great day left, let’s go down to that little coffee shop by the beach for some eggs.”

  Julia smiled weakly and rolled into his arms. Roger liked the way it felt to hold her. He enjoyed the heft of this woman, the fleshy fullness so substantial and weighty. Her shoulders were broad and her arms heavily freckled from the sun. Dozens of tiny white buttons swooped up the front of her lavender nightgown, ending in the soft cleave of her bosom. It was an ample bosom, seductive, womanly, anything but matronly. Roger began stroking her back slowly, and her foot moved across his leg in response.

  The shrill ring of his cell phone pierced their silence, and Roger rolled onto his side, picking the phone up off the bedside table. He pressed IGNORE when he saw his home number and rolled back toward Julia.

  It rang again, immediately afterward. Odd that it was Margaret calling him twice this early in the day. Without remark, he half-turned from Julia and swung his feet onto the wooden floor, reaching for his reading glasses to scroll through his e-mails, his brow furrowed. Julia studied the flecks of moles down by his lower back and the patchy hairiness up near his shoulders. She reached to smooth his hair at the nape of his neck, still full and only flecked with gray, and then she traced her finger down the length of his spine.

  “Everything all right?” she asked casually.

  “Fine. Fine. Just a call I need to return. Why don’t you hop in the shower, and I’ll follow,” said Roger, with a more businesslike tone than he intended.

  The sky was cobalt and cloudless as Maura headed out the door for the short walk to the elementary school. She was keenly aware of the scent of newly mown lawns and mulched flower beds, the summery lift of the breeze off Lake Michigan, as if all of her senses were heightened. A suburban serenity pervaded the neatly manicured yards of her neighborhood, and yet inside she felt unbound and provocative, the polar opposite of her surroundings.

  Maura handed Sarah a lime green plastic sippy cup of juice, lifting her into the stroller as she called to James and Ryan to put on their backpacks. She bent to click the leash onto Rascal’s collar and stood up as James shot one leg over his bike and coasted out the garage and down the driveway, straight-legged on the pedals, helmet unbuckled and cocked to one side. Maura opened her mouth to admonish him and then closed it with a half smile. Today was not a day for nagging.

  Inside she felt alive, glorious, and this bright mood and a sense of giddiness lent her a visual hyperawareness. She noted the cracks in the sidewalk where the tree root had split the cement, the bright red of a child’s ball left on the grass, the way the morning sun cut sideways through the fence slats. Everything was in bas-relief. She reminded Ryan about the snack in his backpack pocket and then called ahead to James to slow down as his legs pumped wildly, propelling the bike up the sidewalk toward the elementary school. There was no response from James, and in her complete absorption, her mind replaying the events of the previous day, she let him ride on; he was too far ahead now.

  Maura paused with the stroller as Rascal lifted his leg to pee against one of the giant oaks lining the shaded street. They were only three blocks away from the school now, and down the road she could see the traffic thicken around the brick building, a column of kids and multicolored backpacks bulging by the crossing guard in his neon orange vest. One week of school left. The high school was already out, and the elementary classes were down to half days, almost a waste of time in her mind. She was ready for a break in the routine, eager to loosen the reins on schedules and deadlines and the morning craziness of making breakfast and packing lunches while dressing Sarah for the walk. Some mornings her husband, Pete, was a help, other times it was easier to do it herself, even as she careened around the kitchen on overdrive.

  Maura felt the vibration of the text in the pocket of her jeans and involuntarily smiled as she fished out her phone to check the screen. She stopped and stood for a moment, focusing on the display, her pulse quickening as she brought the letters into focus, and she smiled, a warmth spreading through her. Maura paused, gathering her thoughts for a clever response and waved absentmindedly at James, who was calling her name from up ahead. She began to type.

  She heard the brakes before she saw the car: a sickening squeal, like a high-pitched whine, as tires slid on the pavement up ahead and then the sound of metal colliding. In an instant a stab of panic and fear exploded in her chest as she began running, instinctively, pushing the stroller aside, dropping the dog’s leash and abandoning Ryan wordlessly.

  Maura was sprinting now, screaming words that she would not remember later, primal and senseless. Every part of her was focused on getting to her eldest son. She hurtled forward on the sidewalk with a surge of adrenaline, and yet it all still felt like slow motion, as if her arms and legs were weighted. In the seconds before she got to James, she registered an eerie quiet, and then the scene was before her at once in a slash of vivid color and sounds.

  In the tangle of bumper and bike, the bent front wheel and broken spokes protruded from the undercarriage of the car. And then she saw James, off to the left of the vehicle. She hesitated for a fraction of a second before she dove toward him on the road. She dropped to one knee next to his immobile body, afraid to touch, unsure of what to touch, as blood pooled onto the asphalt, soaking her jeans and then her hands. Why was there blood trickling out of his ear?

  She was dimly aware of other figures around her now: a boy, older than James, moaning and muttering, perhaps the driver of the car, but Maura couldn’t think about that now. Someone had a cell phone out, a woman urged her not to move her son, to wait for the ambulance. There was an adult restraining Ryan and Sarah, both of them crying and calling for her, and she looked up blindly to reassure them and yelled something about it being OK. Rascal was barking in the arms of someone she didn’t recognize.

  Don’t think about them now, she told herself. Don’t let the outside in. Everything on the periphery shrunk down to background noise. She had to focus on James. She was talking to him, cooing, reassuring him with her voice even though there was no reaction. He was so still, so quiet. And there was all that blood, thick and dark, darker than she would have expected, and her mind inexplicably conjured up the iron scent of beets or root vegetables. She had never seen so much blood.

  And now there it was, finally, faint at first but growing
in volume, the siren’s wail. That was good, fast, Maura thought numbly. And then everything else, the warm feeling of the day, the sequence and the clarity of its events, coalesced into one horrible, terrifying blur.

  2

  When Roger first got to the hospital, directly from O’Hare airport, he took a moment in the lobby to compose himself before riding the elevator up to the ICU floor. Almost ten years earlier he had walked through those same sliding glass entry doors with a bouquet and a silver Mylar IT’S A BOY balloon to see his daughter Maura and meet his first grandchild.

  Two years ago he had actually been the one to drive James here to have his arm x-rayed after he fell off the monkey bars. Maura had met them in the ER once she’d settled newborn Sarah with Margaret. She had been scared but purposeful. He remembered how impressed he’d been at his daughter’s competency and focus then. She’d calmed her son, joked about how many people would sign his cast and what color would look best with his baseball uniform.

  Maura had asked the doctors pointed questions, getting them to explain their medical jargon and then repeating what they said to James in a mother’s words. But that had merely been a broken arm.

  Now he was here under such unimaginable circumstances, and Roger blinked a moment in the fluorescent lights, taking in the institutional lobby with its forest green paint and maroon upholstery. A man in a corner chair was sedately holding a wad of gauze around his hand, and Roger could see rusty bloodstains on the front of his shirt. Two African American women were reading magazines, one older, with her purse clasped firmly on her lap. Behind the nurses’ station, farther down the hall, people in brightly patterned hospital tunics with stethoscope necklaces moved purposefully around the desk, holding charts and paperwork.

  “Touch and go” were the words Margaret had used to describe James’s condition on the phone, her voice clipped and agonized. There was internal bleeding and a severe head injury. They had operated immediately, while Roger was still scrambling to get to the Tampa airport, Julia going well above the speed limit, dodging in and out of lanes to make the next flight.