The Courage Tree. Diane Chamberlain

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СКАЧАТЬ not ready, not willing, to settle down.

      She was good, at least as good as she could be. She didn’t swallow an ounce of alcohol once she learned she was pregnant, and she stopped smoking. But the physical risks she loved—climbing the cliffs at Great Falls, kayaking in the white water of the Potomac, canoeing the Shenandoah River—she did not give up. She wanted to learn how to fly, she told Joe. Maybe she would even be a stunt pilot or a wing walker. Joe told her to “grow up.” They had no money for her to take flying lessons, he said. He was working at a grocery store, trying to keep food on their table, and Janine thought he’d become remarkably stodgy overnight. It would be years before she understood that Joe’s quiet commitment to his job was a sign of his maturity, and that her wild streak was the hallmark of a self-indulgent, self-centered girl who had no business being married, much less a mother.

      It was during one of her canoe trips that her baby decided to be born. Joe was not with her; he was working and would have been upset if he’d known she had gone off with her friends for a day on the Shenandoah. It was a weekend, and she didn’t see why she should have to stay home just because Joe had to work. Yet she knew better than to ask him if he minded. She simply went. She never would have gone if she’d known the baby would come six weeks early.

      She was with three of her friends from high school: her best friend, Ellie, and two male friends who were simply that—friends. They were in two canoes, deep in the forest, battling a patch of white water, when the pains started. Quickly, Janine was bleeding, her terror mounting with each stab of pain.

      They paddled to the riverbank, and Ellie stayed with her on a bed of leaves and moss, while the guys went for help. Ellie had no idea what to do, of course, and looking back on the event later, Janine barely remembered her friend’s presence. Instead, she remembered feeling completely alone, the trees a canopy of gold above her as she gasped from the pain and shivered in the October chill.

      By the time the paramedics found her, she had delivered a stillborn baby boy, which Ellie had wrapped in her windbreaker.

      The paramedics lifted Janine onto a stretcher and covered her with blankets.

      “What the hell are you doing out here when you’re nearly eight months pregnant?” one of them asked her, as he rested a blanket on top of her.

      She couldn’t answer, but she knew she deserved the hostile tone of the question. Once in the ambulance, she stared at the unmoving bundle where it rested in a clear plastic bassinet, and it was as if she were acknowledging for the first time that there had truly been a life inside her that she had taken for granted. A life she had, in effect, abused and neglected. She didn’t cry, at least not aloud, but tears washed over her cheek onto the stretcher.

      Joe had been furious. He didn’t talk to her for weeks, and she’d felt alone and completely deserving of the isolation. She would mourn for that baby for the rest of her life. That had been her first true taste of guilt—a bitter, vile taste that was unfamiliar in her mouth. But it was not to be her last.

      “Are you awake?”

      She heard Joe’s voice in the darkness and drew herself back to the present.

      “Yes.” She sat up straight, brushing tears from her cheeks. They were still in the car, somewhere on Beulah Road, and she saw the lights of the Meadowlark Gardens parking lot ahead of them. Leaning forward, she tried to make out the vehicles in the far corner of the lot.

      “Looks like Gloria’s van,” Joe said. “And Rebecca and Steve’s Suburban. Your car. That’s it.”

      They pulled into the lot, vast and dark in its emptiness, and drove to the corner. The four of them—Paula, Gloria, Rebecca and Steve—were sitting on small beach chairs set on the macadam. The Krafts’ two sons were no longer with them, and Charlotte had apparently gone home. Crushed bags and empty cups from Taco Bell littered the ground near the chairs.

      Everyone stood up as Joe parked the car next to the Suburban.

      “Any news?” Janine asked, as she got out of the car.

      “Nothing,” Gloria said. “How about on your end? Did you see anything?”

      “No clues,” Joe said. “But it was so dark up there, and the people working at the gas stations and restaurants are not the same people who were there this afternoon. So it was a little frustrating.”

      “Plus, a lot of the shops and restaurants are closed,” Janine added.

      “The police told us to go home and stay close to the phone,” Gloria said. “But we didn’t want to leave until you two got back.”

      “Your parents called us a million times,” Rebecca said to Janine. “They’re so worried. You might want to give them a call.”

      Rebecca and Steve no longer wore their wide, optimistic smiles. They looked a little ragged around the edges now, with dark shadows around their eyes, and Janine wanted to pull Rebecca into a hug. But there was still some distance in Rebecca, as if she were intentionally holding herself apart from the scene, and Janine did not feel that they were sharing the same frightening experience at all.

      Joe touched Janine’s arm. “I’ll take Paula home, then meet you over at Ayr Creek, okay?” he asked.

      She nodded, uncertain if it would help or hurt to have Joe there when she spoke to her parents.

      She walked toward her car. It seemed like weeks had passed since she’d driven into the lot, full of excitement at seeing her daughter. Inside the car, she felt the emptiness in the back seat where Sophie should have been, and she kept turning to glance behind her, as though Sophie might pop up, yelling “Surprise!” and telling her this had been some silly kind of trick, some crazy scheme of Alison’s. But Sophie was not in the car, and as Janine drove through the dark, winding back roads on the outskirts of Vienna, she said a prayer that, wherever Sophie was, she would be alive and healthy and, somehow, unafraid.

      CHAPTER SIX

      Janine didn’t drive directly home. She pulled out of the parking lot at Meadowlark Gardens and onto Beulah Road, glancing in her rearview mirror as if she still expected the blue Honda to turn into the lot any moment, then drove as quickly as she could toward Lucas’s property. He lived at the end of a cul-de-sac on an acre of mostly wooded land bordering Wolf Trap National Park. She parked in the driveway near the small, rambler and walked along the darkened, familiar path through the woods to reach the tree house. She was relieved to see that the lights were on in his living room; she would hate to wake him.

      Gripping the banister, she climbed the stairs that circled the oak tree. He must have heard her, because he was waiting for her on the deck by the time she reached it. Wordlessly, he pulled her into his arms. She breathed in the soap-and-earth scent of him, feeling enclosed, but not truly comforted; sheltered, but not safe. Nowhere would she feel safe right now.

      “You must know Sophie’s missing,” she whispered.

      “Yes.” His breath was warm on her neck.

      “How?”

      “Cop came to ask me some questions.”

      She pressed her hands against his back. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

      “It’s all right. Is there any news?”

      She СКАЧАТЬ