Holly's Story Read online

  The memory of his face, his dark eyes and his unruly curly hair flashed. There might have been a time when she’d have been ecstatic to have a boy call her. Now it was inconsequential. “I’ve had my phone off for days.”

  “Holly … I’m really sorry. I don’t know what to say.”

  “You aren’t alone. Nobody knows what to say.”

  “If you ever want to talk … you know … just talk …”

  She let the silence lengthen. “That’s nice of you,” she said finally. “I don’t know what I want right now.”

  “Can I call you again? E-mail you?”

  “I guess.” She regretted not being nicer to him and added, “Thank you for calling. I—I know I have to start talking to people again. This was good practice.”

  “Anytime. My number’s in your cell phone’s memory now.”

  For reasons she couldn’t explain, Holly did feel better after talking to Chad and Kathleen. She remembered what Kathleen had said about the videotape being shown on the news and went downstairs. The noon news was about to air. She turned on the TV, turned the volume down low and waited. Within the first few minutes of the broadcast, the tape ran. Her heart hammered as she watched the grainy footage, shown once in real time, then again in slow motion.

  The image of a male wearing a torn T-shirt and jeans, with a baseball cap pulled low over his face, filled the television screen. The camera zoomed in on him, freeze-framing his head. Holly couldn’t make out any of his features. How could anyone ever identify him? How could the cops ever find him if they had no better pictures than that?

  “Turn it off.”

  Holly whirled and saw her mother standing in the doorway, her face an ashen, stony mask. Holly scrambled to turn off the set. “I—I …”

  Her mother said nothing more, just turned on her heel and left the room.

  Holly’s face burned with shame, as if she’d been caught doing something awful. Tears threatened. She hadn’t meant to hurt her mother. She’d only wanted to look at the force of evil that had destroyed her brother and devastated her family. She sank onto the sofa, buried her face in her hands and cried silently.

  On Thursday, the coroner’s office called to say that Hunter’s body had been released to the funeral home for burial.

  eleven

  FOR RAINA, ALL light had gone out of the world. Everything that had once been familiar and friendly loomed like treacherous icebergs, pulling her deep into waters that were icy cold and dark. She felt great gratitude toward the pills she was taking. They kept her brain foggy, her body languid and relaxed, just hovering on the verge of consciousness. If one dose began to wear off before it was time for another, she wept.

  “These are just temporary,” Vicki warned her as she gave Raina another dose. “Tomorrow you will taper off. One every eight hours. After that, one sleeping pill only at night. Then none.”

  Raina was too fractured to plead, but she was certain that she couldn’t keep it together without the lovely little pills. By Friday morning, the prescription was finished and her retreat from reality was over. She was left to face her life without Hunter. Forever.

  Vicki made her come down to breakfast, which she couldn’t eat. Vicki spread honey on a sliver of toast and handed it to Raina. “Eat it.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You must. You’ll need strength. Hunter’s funeral is this afternoon. I assume you’ll want to go. Naturally I’ll go with you.”

  “Today?” Raina felt dismayed. She wasn’t ready. She’d never be ready.

  “Mike Harrison called last night to tell me. Only family and close friends are being invited to the graveside service. There will be a memorial service at the Harrisons’ church afterward, and the whole community is expected to show up. Reporters will be there, I’m sure. If anyone shoves a mike in your face, kick them where it will hurt the most.”

  Raina nodded. She forced down the toast, went upstairs, took a long, hot shower, washed her hair and put on light makeup. She dressed in a soft floral-print dress that Hunter had loved. She brushed her hair until it shone like spun gold. She put on sunglasses. She did it all for Hunter … because it would be the last thing she could ever do for him.

  Holly was seated with her parents at the burial site, under a canopy, when the invited guests began to arrive. The mahogany casket that held her brother sat on a raised platform, draped with a mantle of spring flowers. Holly clutched a box of tissue, watching Raina and her mother walk from their car. Behind them came Kathleen and Carson, pushing Mary Ellen’s wheelchair over the bumpy ground. Three of Hunter’s best friends from high school and three buddies from their church youth group were acting as pallbearers.

  The cemetery looked beautiful, clipped and trimmed and bathed in sunlight. Bright splashes of flowers dotted the landscape, tributes to all who’d come before her brother. In the distance, she saw a small lake edged with tall rushes and grasses, a fountain in its center. The water sprayed upward to some mysterious rhythm; the droplets caught sunbeams and then splattered onto the surface, where they disappeared into the deep only to rise and shower again.

  Holly was glad that her parents had opted for the small private burial. She was dreading the memorial service yet to come. How much more grief could she and her parents bear?

  When everyone was gathered, Pastor Eckloes stepped forward and read Bible passages about life and death, hope and heaven. Holly’s thoughts wandered. She’d attended church all her life, believed in what she’d been taught, never questioned it. Until now. Yes, the promise of heaven seemed glorious, but she could not understand why God had taken Hunter away from them.

  She had overheard her mother challenging the pastor one afternoon at their house. “I thought God sends angels to protect his own. Where were Hunter’s angels the day he was shot?”

  “Hunter’s angels had a different job that day—to carry him up to heaven,” the pastor had answered.

  Holly thought the image of winged angels bearing Hunter off a pretty one, but it brought her no understanding, no peace. Her brother had not deserved to die. God could have prevented it. He hadn’t. It made no sense to her.

  When the brief graveside service was over, Holly went to Raina and Kathleen. They hugged one another. Kathleen said, “This is so hard. So horrible.”

  “I’m just pretending he’s away at college, like he planned,” Holly said. “It’s easier to lie to myself than to say he’s never coming home again.”

  Raina said, “This is the worst day of my life.”

  Carson came up, put his arms around Kathleen and Holly. “Do the cops have any news?”

  “Not that we’ve heard.”

  “They’ll get the sorry scumbag.”

  “You sound like the detective who’s in charge of the case,” Holly said. “But why is it taking so long?”

  Holly’s father called her. “I really wish we could go home. I don’t want to go through another service,” she told her friends.

  “None of us do,” Raina said. “It’s just more of the same nightmare.”

  “I’ll call you both later,” Holly said, and she hurried off to ride to the huge brick church for a second service, which would commemorate Hunter’s brief life.

  “There certainly was a crowd,” Mike said that evening.

  “Even people who hardly knew him or us,” Holly said, feeling resentful about reporters she thought had no business coming.

  She sat with her parents at the kitchen table. A few dishes of the many brought by friends and neighbors had been heated, but no one had an appetite. Evelyn picked at a salad and Holly toyed with a bowl of soup.

  “But a lot who did,” Mike said. “A lot of people loved our boy.”

  Holly had looked over the crowd briefly, recognizing teachers and kids from school, and many from the hospital—Sierra; Susan from the pediatric cancer wing; Mrs. Graham; Carson’s parents; Betsy, the newborns’ nurse Raina had liked so much; even Mark Powell, the director of volunteer services, including the Pin
k Angels program. Seeing them jolted her back to a life she’d almost forgotten. She’d been so swallowed up by what had happened that she hadn’t thought about a world she’d soon have to rejoin.

  “Mike, why did God take our son away from us?”

  The look of sadness on her mother’s face made Holly feel sick.

  “Who can know the mind of God? His ways are beyond us.”

  “I don’t want religious platitudes. I want to know why a boy who only wanted to serve God wasn’t allowed to live. Why did God do that? God was supposed to take care of Hunter. He was supposed to keep him safe.” Tears swam in Evelyn’s eyes.

  Holly’s father looked weary, smaller somehow, as if he’d shrunk over the past days. “I don’t know why. I just know that we still need God to get us through this. What do you want to do? Curse God and die? How would that honor Hunter? How would that help you?”

  Evelyn locked gazes with him. Holly held her breath. Her mother’s comments were valid. Someone owed them an explanation, a reason.

  “In other words, God calls all the shots and we have no one to appeal his decisions to.” Evelyn carefully folded her napkin, placed it on the table, pushed her chair backward. She stood and, without another word, left the room.

  In her dream, Raina was floating in the pool at night. Stars glittered overhead and a soft tropical breeze rippled the water’s surface. She felt warm, as liquid as the water itself.

  “Hello, Raina.”

  The voice startled her. She righted herself. “Who’s there?”

  Hunter stepped from out of the darkness. Her heart leaped. “Hunter! You’re all right!”

  He crouched by the edge, laughing. “Of course I’m all right.”

  “You are! Oh, Hunter, I’m so happy to see you.”

  “Then why don’t you swim over here and show me?”

  She began to swim and swim and swim. The side of the pool never got closer. Soon she was gasping for air. “I—I don’t know what’s wrong.” She looked up and saw that Hunter was standing.

  “I’ve got to go, babe.”

  “But you can’t! Don’t leave me.”

  He stepped away, the smile still on his face. “I have to go.”

  “No! Don’t go!” Raina thrashed in the water and it clung to her arms and legs like quicksand. “Hunter!”

  Light streamed across Raina’s face and she woke with a gasp and sat straight up. Her mother was opening the blinds on the window over Raina’s bed.

  “Honey, what’s wrong?”

  “I—I was having a dream. About Hunter. He was alive and … and …” Raina started to cry, covering her face.

  Vicki sat on the bed, took Raina’s wrists and pulled her hands away gently. “Listen to me. It was just a dream. You’re going to have them from time to time.”

  “It was just so real.” Raina noticed that her mother was dressed and beautifully groomed. “You’re going to work?”

  “I have to. And you have to go back to school. It’s been ten days, Raina. Even Holly’s gone back. Her mother told me this morning that she started back yesterday.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “I know, but you have to. Life goes on.”

  “Why?”

  Vicki heaved a sigh. “Get up and get moving.”

  Raina felt raw anger bubble up. “I’m not going! I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can. You can’t change what’s happened. You can’t bring him back from the dead. I know something about this personally.”

  She was talking about Justin, Raina’s father, who’d died of a drug overdose without ever knowing that Vicki was pregnant with Raina. She’d wondered if her mother had even mourned him. “I hurt!” Raina cried.

  “We all hurt. But you’re still alive and you have your senior year to finish and you have a network of people at the hospital asking when you’ll be back and a ton of friends who love and care about you. It’s time, Raina; pick up the pieces and go on.”

  “I hate you.”

  Vicki flinched, but she didn’t back down. “Fine. Hate me. You’re still getting out of that bed and going to school. I’m taking you, so start moving. Now.”

  twelve

  HOLLY BECAME A minor celebrity at school. Classmates stepped aside for her in the halls, and teachers put no pressure on her in the classroom. Almost everybody looked at her with pitying eyes. She considered it ironic. There had been a time when she craved such deference. Now she felt like a freak in a sideshow. She heard the whispers. “That’s her. The girl whose brother was murdered,” and “I heard he got shot in the head—execution-style,” and “How’s she going to make it through?”

  Friends other than Kathleen would look away when Holly came into a room. Or they’d get tears in their eyes. Even teachers teared up around her. Most people had known Hunter, so many felt personally connected to him. “They’ll find something else to talk about soon enough,” Kathleen assured her.

  Strangely, Holly didn’t truly care. Let them talk. It was a way to keep his memory alive. She felt oddly aloof, as if she were floating above the dramatics of her brother’s death. She drove his old car to school, parked in the student lot and thought back to the time when she had so looked forward to driving it. Now that didn’t matter either. Her parents hardly noticed her taking the car out of the driveway. And when she’d asked her dad for gas money, he’d reached into his pocket and handed over a twenty-dollar bill without comment.

  She and Kathleen were the first to return to the hospital for their credit-earning hours with the Pink Angels. Sierra welcomed them both with hugs. “Will Raina be back?”

  “I’m sure she will,” Kathleen said. “Her mom wants her to finish high school, and this is one of the things she signed up for last year.”

  “I have your assignments.” Sierra picked up a chart. “Holly, would you like to stay up on pediatrics?”

  “If that’s okay.”

  “And Kathleen, back to the gift shop and the medical library when they need you. Mrs. Nesbaum says she saved your Saturday job for you if you still want it.”

  Relieved, Kathleen said, “I’d like that.”

  It was obvious that Sierra was giving them the choicest spots.

  “How about Raina?” Holly asked.

  “I thought I’d start her in geriatrics, helping with the elderly—you know, transporting them to radiology, physical therapy, the OR. She’s never done that before.”

  Holly guessed that the new learning curve would be good for Raina, while her own return to the children’s floor would be equally good for her. She had an affinity for children, probably because she felt like a kid herself. At least, she used to feel that way. Over the past days she felt as if she’d grown old, skipping the growth process altogether. Facing the death of someone you loved must do that. She thought of her mother, still wandering the house like a lonely ghost. It frightened Holly. Bad enough to lose Hunter, but she felt she was losing her mother too.

  Most evenings, Holly put some kind of dinner on the table, or her dad brought home takeout, mostly for the two of them. Evelyn lay alone in a darkened bedroom, nursing excruciating headaches—migraines, she said—escaping into one kind of pain in order to mask another.

  “I don’t feel like going to a party,” Kathleen told Carson. He’d been telling her about a blowout planned for Halloween by one of his friends and urging her to come with him.

  “Why? Do you think sitting around doing nothing is helping anybody?”

  “It’s disrespectful to Holly and Raina.”

  “You’ve been a good friend to them, but it’s time to rejoin the land of the living.”

  Kathleen wanted to go with him; she was weary of feeling depressed, of being afraid of having too good a time, because Holly and Raina were still having trouble returning to the flow of high school life. Yet she didn’t want to be disloyal.

  Carson must have sensed her ambivalence; he put his arms around her and nuzzled her neck. “Come on, baby. If you look like you’re having t
oo much fun, we’ll leave.”

  She gave him a sideway glance and suppressed a smile. “You won’t overdo the beer, will you?” She remembered their last party and the mess that had come out of it.

  “No way. Scout’s honor.”

  His dark eyes danced with mischief. He could charm the scales off a fish. “Then we’ll go.”

  The party house was decorated in a Halloween theme, with fake spiderwebs and ghosts made of sheets hanging from trees in the front yard. When they stepped onto the porch, a wild witch’s cackle blared. Kathleen jumped, making Carson laugh. Inside, the living room furniture had been pushed against the walls and throngs of couples danced under synchronized blinking lights of every color. “There’s a haunted house set up downstairs,” Carson shouted above the racket. “Want to check it out?”

  “Later.” Kathleen looked around. She recognized many kids from other parties, yet still didn’t feel as if she fit in with Carson’s bunch. She saw Stephanie gyrating to the music between two boys. Stephanie rubbed her body suggestively against the boy in front, and he darted closer and kissed her mouth. “I’m thirsty,” Kathleen shouted to Carson, turning away.

  “This way.” He took her hand and led her toward the back of the house and the kitchen, giving high fives to his friends along the way. A few acknowledged Kathleen.

  The kitchen was less crowded, but an absolute mess. Cups, bottles, bags of chips and trays of messy dips cluttered the counters. “Bombs away,” Kathleen said, surveying the debris.

  “The maids will restore order tomorrow,” Carson said, opening an ice chest.

  His attitude irritated Kathleen. These kids were rich and clueless about the real world, where people worked to earn a living—Carson included. They just assumed that someone was always going to clean up their messes.

  “How’s this?” He offered her a Coke.

  She reached around him and pulled out an ice-cold wine cooler from the chest.