Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [129]
“And you’ve got this attorney on tap?”
“He’s already drawn up the paperwork. All we have to do is sign it.”
“You’ve been a busy girl.”
“Yes, I have.”
For myself, I’d come to terms with my fate, and whether it happened today, tomorrow, or in two minutes, I was good to go. What I had not come to terms with was abandoning my children. I especially did not want to leave them with Wes and Lillian Tindale, whose home was now and always had been a breeding ground for neurotics.
“You realize this will be forever?”
“I’m fully aware of that.”
“You planning to take them with you, or relocate here?”
“I’ve had an offer at Tacoma General.”
“You got a deal, babe.”
We kissed and then, charged with the excitement of the moment, she leaped out of bed and began trotting out purchases she’d made while I slept. “I found most of this stuff downstairs in the gift shop, but I had to go down the block for the swimsuits. I got red sandals for Ally. A doll for Britney, a teddy for Ally, and a Monopoly game. What do you think?”
“I think if you keep parading around like that, you’re going to have to dole out another MF.”
“MF?”
“Mercy fuck.”
She laughed, crawled over the bed and kissed the tip of my nose, and was gone before I could grab her. After we showered and dressed and she’d applied Silvadine to my burns, we woke the girls. She’d purchased haircutting utensils and fingernail polish in the same shade Achara Carpenter used, Stephanie’s covert tribute to a woman who’d befriended us at the cost of her own life.
Within half an hour both girls had bobs matching Achara’s, were sitting on the edge of the tub in the bathroom painting their fingernails and toenails, jabbering away about Achara, who they didn’t yet know was dead.
Their house had been leveled. Every personal possession they’d ever owned had gone up in smoke. The family pet was dead. Any sense of security they’d ever felt was compromised. They didn’t need to hear about Achara. Not today.
We had a leisurely breakfast delivered from room service, and after that it was a race to see who got to Boardwalk first. As sick as I was of Monopoly, I was glad to be alive to play it. Glad my girls were alive to play it. “This is good,” Allyson said, “because we lost the old wheelbarrow, and I always wanted it.”
“I like the thimble,” said Britney in a tiny voice.
“What do you like?” Stephanie asked me.
“Whatever’s left.”
“I’ll take the little dog, then.”
We played for an hour, Stephanie and I making cell phone calls in between our moves, she to her aunt, who’d heard about the fire in North Bend and was sick with worry for all of us, and me to Carl Steding in Chattanooga to get the final word on Jane’s. Steding could not be reached. We changed into our swimsuits and went downstairs and swam, nearly two hours of cavorting in the pool, interspersed with telephone calls trying to track down Steding or, at this point, Charlie Drago or anybody else in Chattanooga who might know what was going on. Stephanie taught Allyson to dive while Britney and I floated around in the shallow end. Except for the constant ringing in my ears and the chlorine biting my burns, I felt pretty darn good.
Later, in the suite, I noticed Allyson, who was not ordinarily given to neatness, had arranged the toothbrushes and hand towels in the bathroom in perfect descending order, mine, Stephanie’s, hers, and then her little sister’s. I knew Allyson had done it, because Britney would have arranged it with the mother and father toothbrush at either end. Poor girls. They so much wanted the one thing they were destined never to have, a real family.
It would have been a perfect day if it hadn’t been for the fact that I would be brain-dead in less than forty-eight hours, maybe less than twenty-four, a thought that wedged itself into my brain like an ax blade every five minutes. Just around the time I managed to stop thinking about it, it came back again.