Primal Threat - Earl Emerson [101]
The whole thing got sucked down the drain after Charlene died. Zak couldn’t count how many times his mother talked about that night, never once openly accusing him, though he knew what she was thinking. He always knew what she was thinking. And what made it even worse was that she knew he knew what she was thinking. Over the last eighteen years, Zak had relived those minutes thousands, if not tens of thousands of times—though, curiously, he hadn’t thought about it much since he’d pulled Nadine out of her overturned Lexus. But then, this morning when he failed to check Ryan Perry for a pulse, it all came back in an avalanche of personal recrimination. He’d failed Charlene and he’d failed Ryan Perry, too.
Charlene had always been the good-natured sister who tried to put a damper on any strife in the household, and after she was gone he’d missed her badly. That night she begged him to help her, and then, when she realized he was too terrified to crawl back into the car again, she’d given him a look that imbued an expression of pity so pure, so unrelenting and immediately forgiving that Zak never forgot it. Nor had he ever forgiven himself for being on the receiving end of it.
Everything that had gone wrong in his life, his father’s life, his mother’s, and Stacy’s could be traced to that one simple act of cowardice.
Zak had gone to a psychologist several years back to work it out, and the psychologist told him all the things he already knew on a rational level: He was a child when it happened. He couldn’t expect to take on the responsibilities of an adult at eleven. The odds were that anybody else outside the car that night wouldn’t have rescued Charlene, either. In fact, others had been there and hadn’t rescued her. He’d been placed in a position no child should be placed in. And what if, asked the psychologist, who was a kindly but rather tight-lipped middle-aged woman with prematurely graying hair, what if he’d gone inside the car and it had burst into flame with Charlene and him inside? Wouldn’t that also have destroyed the family? Nothing he heard or said in the counseling sessions alleviated any of Zak’s guilt or changed his basic perception of the world.
Oddly enough, as a firefighter, every time he made a successful entry into a wrecked car it made things worse, because each entry was an example of how easy it could be.
After his father left and his mother drowned herself in religion, Zak figured it was his fault. When she drowned herself in drugs—his fault. Zak even blamed himself for his mother’s cancer. Hadn’t scientists tied disease to stress and despair, and wasn’t it possible his mother’s torment had altered her body chemistry enough to invite the cancer in? As many times as Zak told himself he couldn’t live other people’s lives for them, he was sure the total disintegration of his family had been all his doing.
And now Al was living with him, and although he paid rent, on those months when he came up short, Zak did not press him. Nor had he asked his sister for money. He felt it was a privilege to take care of his father and sister.
Until a few minutes ago Zak hadn’t viewed his history squarely. He hadn’t thought of taking in his father and sister as penance for a crime he’d committed at eleven. He hadn’t thought of himself as trying to rebuild the family unit he felt responsible for destroying. He hadn’t fully realized that every time he responded as a firefighter to the scene of a car accident, he was not only trying to prove to himself that he wasn’t a coward, but also trying to change the outcome of that first car accident in his life. It was a shock to realize how blatant his penance was and how blind he’d been to it. He was twenty-eight years old and was still trying to atone for an event that had taken place when he was eleven. All these thoughts had been rattling around in his brain for years, but it wasn’t until