Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [107]
And no, she wasn’t dressed.
My heart jumped into my throat. She smiled a sleepy smile, pushed her hair out of her face and stared at me. She really didn’t need to say anything. Being in my bed said enough.
“You left your door unlocked,” she said.
I nodded. “Look…” I was about to say something when there was a strong knock at the door. I knew who it was. The knock told me. I also knew that he never waited. He pushed the door open and strode in. He took four steps, saw me in a towel, and then saw Heather wearing nothing.
I would have said something, but I didn’t figure it would do any good in this lifetime or the next. He stared at me a long moment, a vein popping out on his neck. He shook his head and walked out.
“Who was that?” she asked.
I stared into the mirror hanging on the back of the door. “My father-in-law.”
She chewed on a fingernail. “Senator Coleman?”
“Yeah…” I nodded. “He’s that, too.”
She shook her head, pulled the sheets up and let her hair fall over her eyes. “I’m sorry.”
I dressed, walked back up to Abbie’s room and found him standing there. “Sir, can I talk to you?”
“My only daughter is lying here, fighting for her life. And you’re up there—” He backhanded me hard across the face. The acrid taste of blood spread across my mouth. “Don’t ever speak to me again.”
“Sir, it’s not what you think.”
He turned and swung a fisted blow to my face. It spun me and cut my lip. He pointed a shaking hand at me, the spit gathered in the corner of his mouth. “Get out of my sight.”
“I’m not leaving.”
He looked at Abbie and rubbed her toes. He checked the time, then walked toward the door. He turned. “She’s too weak right now. This…would devastate her. She’d lose her will to fight. But…when she beats this…and she will…I’ll tell her the truth. What you do between now and then is up to you.”
“Sir—”
He walked out and never looked back.
When Abbie woke up, the transplant had thrown her body into a tailspin. She smiled, her eyes glassy beneath the 103-degree fever. “Hey you…”
Two months later, Abbie’s father became the donor for her second bone marrow transplant—a process that some say is more painful for the donor than the recipient.
It didn’t take, either.
40
JUNE 9, MORNING
I walked into Bob’s kitchen and found him, Petey and Rocket watching the Weather Channel. The screen showed a guy standing in the rain. He was wearing a yellow rain slicker and the wind had peeled his comb-over up and held it in the air like a rooster’s feathers. He was mid-broadcast. “Hurricane Annie stalled over the Gulf, fattening herself on the warm water. Hemmed in by opposing fronts, Annie held there for a week. On June sixth, Annie started a slow crawl across North Florida and South Georgia, where she has dumped more than twenty inches of rain.” The swirling green and red mass now filling the screen told me that the worst of the storm would miss us but it would not miss the Okefenokee. We were on the southeastern side. The side that would get little rain but lots of tornadoes. The reporter continued, “After a head-fake to the northwest, she sidestepped, twirled and tiptoed northeast.” His mimicked the storm’s path with dance moves I’d never seen before. “Climbing out of the Gulf, she slowed yesterday, weakening to a tropical storm. Given that she’s just bumped into a colder front moving down from the north, it could be a while before the rain disappears. With her massive size and bulging waistline, her three-day, four-knot crawl across land is a lot like a walrus bellying across an ice sheet.” He stepped closer to the camera and lowered his voice. “Noisy, not very pretty, threatening and almighty slow. Folks might want to start thinking about trading their cars in on boats, because we are projecting record floods across North Florida and South