LITMIR.BIZ

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she’d said. Maya needed to put the whole baby thing out of her mind for a while. She had to give Adam time to grieve before reintroducing the topic of adoption. Maybe by then he’d be ready.

      Maya listened in that patient way she had, looking more at her mug of coffee than at Rebecca. And when Rebecca had offered every last bit of sisterly advice she could come up with, Maya leaned toward her.

      “I know you have my best interest at heart, Bec,” she said, “but you can’t really understand how this feels.”

      Rebecca didn’t know why the words hurt her so much, but they did. Maybe because they were the truth. She couldn’t understand. She was out of her league, and that was a feeling she loathed. She thought of telling Maya about that weird fantasy she’d had in Brent’s hotel room of holding the baby, that powerful sense of loss, but caught herself in time. Maya’s loss was real; hers was imagined.

      “Well,” she’d said, “I want to understand.”

      “It’s creating issues between Adam and me,” Maya said.

      Rebecca frowned. What did she mean by “it”? Maya could be so vague. She had a way of talking around a subject instead of coming out and saying what she meant. “What do you mean?” she asked. “Because he won’t adopt or what?”

      “Partly,” Maya said. “I haven’t told you a lot of this because I didn’t want you to worry, but ever since the first miscarriage, things haven’t been the same between us.”

      She remembered that lunch she’d had with Adam a few weeks earlier when he talked about the Pollywog. How happy he’d looked. How she’d realized then that some of the joy had gone out of him in the last year or so.

      She stubbed out her cigarette and leaned forward. “You two are solid, Maya,” she said. “All couples have their ups and downs.” She held her breath, waiting for Maya to tell her once again that she couldn’t understand since she’d never been married, but Maya only shrugged.

      “I know,” she said. “But this just … this feels bad.”

      Adam and Maya. Maya and Adam. Their personalities were entirely different—extroverted versus introverted, jocular versus serious—but together the two of them formed one whole, balanced human being. Rebecca couldn’t imagine Maya without Adam. She couldn’t imagine her own life without Adam in it as her brother-in-law.

      “This is a phase,” she said. “You’ll get through it, honey. You can’t rush it. You can’t do anything about it. But—” she leaned forward again “—the thing you can do something about is work, and I think you’re working way too hard right now.” Work was a topic she could understand and she felt herself on safer ground. Maya was covering for one of her partners who was on vacation. Someone else could have covered for him—someone who hadn’t miscarried a couple of weeks ago.

      “I need to stay busy,” Maya said. “You know how I am.”

      She did know. Work had always been Maya’s way of coping. Even after their parents’ deaths, when their lives had been turned completely upside down, Maya threw herself into her schoolwork. Her teachers and the school counselor had been astounded. Maya had always been a good student, the type who didn’t have to study all that hard to do well, something Rebecca had envied since she’d had to cram to get the same grades. But after their parents’ deaths, Maya lost herself completely in her studies, graduating from high school in three years instead of four. Everyone talked about how amazing she was. No one paid much attention to the fact that Rebecca had sacrificed her own first year of college to play mother and father to her sister, or that she’d fought the system to keep Maya out of foster care or that she’d cooked and cleaned and done the laundry while Maya rose to the top of her class.

      The thing that really changed about Maya after the murders, though, was her transformation from a happy-go-lucky kid into a girl afraid of her own shadow. Totally understandable. She’d been right in the line of fire. Who could go through something like that and remain unchanged?

      Rebecca closed the book on the Chinese earthquake, giving up. She hadn’t absorbed a single word in the past fifteen minutes. Swallowing the last of her Americano, she got to her feet. She’d go for a run. Lose the negative memories.

      She left the store and headed for her car, walking quickly as though she could leave the memories behind, but it wasn’t so easy. The whole time she and Maya had been talking the night before, Rebecca had been thinking about the shooting in the restaurant. She hated guns, hated treating gunshot victims, although she did it, wanting to save their lives with a desperation that went beyond the simple practice of medicine. Two decades had passed, yet she still saw her parents’ bloodied bodies in every shooting victim she treated.

      The incident in the Brazilian restaurant had to remind Maya of that night. Rebecca had seen the panic in her eyes. She’d still been trembling later, when Rebecca hugged her good-night. They never talked about their parents’ murder. It was an agreed-upon, unspoken rule between them. Yet she knew that Maya had to blame her for that night.

      Maybe even more than she blamed herself.

      11

      Maya

      “Holy shit, Maya,” Adam called from the sofa in THE FAMILY ROOM. “COME LOOK AT THIS.”

      I closed the dishwasher and walked into the family room. Outside the windows, the rain created a dark, undulating curtain so thick I couldn’t see the woods behind the house. It was eight o’clock, so I wasn’t sure how much of the darkness was encroaching nightfall and how much of it was the storm. Either way, it was the sort of weather that made me glad to be inside. Chauncey sat at the sliding glass door, looking discouraged.

      Adam pointed toward the TV. “They’re in Wilmington,” he said. “They’re saying now it’s a category four.”

      I sat down on the sofa next to him. On the screen, a newscaster dressed in a slicker and hood held on to a lamppost to keep from flying away. He was trying to shield his eyes against the wind and rain, shouting to be heard above the din. I squinted at the TV. “Is he … where is he?” I asked. Wilmington was less than three hours from us, and I loved the charm of the city on the Cape Fear River. “Is that the Riverwalk?”

      “Right,” Adam said. “He’s near the Pilot House. Listen.”

      “… not moving,” the reporter said. “Just sitting at the mouth of the Cape Fear. There’s no one out here on the downtown streets, but most people didn’t evacuate. Some were starting to, because the next storm, Erin, is expected to make a direct hit. And that’s a problem—” He slapped his hand on his hood to keep it on his head. “A big problem,” he said. “We’ve got people who were trying to leave and are now stuck on the roads because of flooding and downed trees. They tried to. you know … get out, but it’s just too late.” The reporter was getting blown all over the place. His knuckles were white where he clung to the pole. “You know the next named storm was Donald, but that one sort of just. fizzled, but the big … but Carmen. no one expected this. This … strength. And of course, no one expected her to make landfall here.” He fiddled with his earpiece. “Some people are trying to leave the area, like I said, but there’s already flooding on some of the major roads and many, if not most, of the minor roads. And I tell you … if this next storm, Erin, packs this kind of punch while people are here … unable to evacuate …” Something blew past his head and he ducked, then recovered. “If it packs this kind of punch,” he repeated, “we’re going to have a major catastrophe on our hands.”

      Chauncey had moved to my side. He rested his big head on my knees and I massaged my fingertips into the short fur on his neck. “I hope there’s enough of a break between the storms that people can leave.” I glanced out the window, but now it truly was dark outside and I couldn’t see a thing. I’d been worried about the rain and wind in our own yard. I could still remember Hurricane Fran, which hit North Carolina shortly after I moved to the state. I was in medical school and sharing an apartment with Rebecca

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