The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [101]
Ted got up halfway through the meal and spent some time in the bathroom before coming back. As Ted walked toward the table, Abee thought his brother could have been in the cast of some cheap horror flick, but others in the restaurant were doing their best not to notice, staring at their plates instead. He smiled. It was good to be a Cole.
Still, he couldn’t stop thinking about his conversation with Candy, and he sucked on his fingers between bites, pondering it.
Frank and Jared had been in an accident.
The words scrolled through her mind like some terrible ticker tape, making Amanda more frantic with every passing minute. Her grip on the wheel was white-knuckled as she flashed her lights again, then again, willing the car in front of her to allow her to pass.
They’d been taken away in an ambulance. Jared and Frank were being rushed to the hospital. Her husband and her son…
Finally, the car ahead of her changed lanes and Amanda roared past it, quickly closing the gap to the cars that were farther ahead.
She reminded herself that Jared had sounded shaken, nothing more.
But the blood…
Jared had mentioned in a panicky voice that Frank was covered in blood. Clutching the phone, she tried to call her son again. He hadn’t answered a few minutes ago, and she told herself that it was because he was in the ambulance or in the emergency room, where phones were forbidden. She reminded herself that paramedics or doctors or nurses were caring for Frank and Jared now, and that when Jared finally answered, she’d no doubt regret her needless panic. In the future, it would be a story to be told around the dinner table, about how Mom drove like a bat out of hell, for no reason at all.
But Jared didn’t answer again, and neither did Frank. When both calls went to voice mail, she felt the pit in her stomach become a wide and bottomless chasm. She was suddenly certain that the car accident was serious, far worse than Jared had let on. She wasn’t sure how she knew, but the idea wouldn’t leave her.
She dropped her phone on the passenger seat and slammed her foot down on the accelerator, racing up to within inches of the car in front of her. Whoever was driving finally made room, and she blew past without a sidelong nod.
19
In the dream, Dawson was back on the rig, just as the series of explosions began to rock the platform, but this time everything was silent and the events unfolded in slow motion. He watched the sudden rupture of the storage tank, followed by flames that leapt outward and skyward; he traced the blackened smoke as it formed into sluggish, mushroomlike shapes. He saw the shimmery ripple of shock waves move across the deck, unhurriedly felling everything in its path, tearing posts and machinery from their housings. Men were hurled overboard as other explosions followed, every twitch of their arms plainly visible. The fire began to consume the deck in a ponderous, dreamlike way. All around him, everything was slowly being destroyed.
But he remained rooted in place, immune to the shock waves and the flying debris that magically veered around him. Straight ahead, near the crane, he saw a man emerge from an oily cloud of smoke, but like Dawson, he was immune to the ongoing devastation. For an instant, the smoke seemed to cling to him before being pulled away like a curtain. Dawson gasped as he glimpsed the dark-haired man in the blue windbreaker.
The stranger stopped moving, his features indistinct through the shimmering distance. Dawson wanted to call out to him, but no sound came to his lips; he wanted to get closer, but his feet seemed glued in place. Instead, they simply stared at each other across the rig, and despite the distance Dawson thought he felt the beginnings of recognition.
Dawson woke up then, blinking at his surroundings as adrenaline surged through his system. He was in the hotel in