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  For Julie, a most

  excellent friend

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  With special thanks to Linda Eddings, Stuart West, Bill “the Rock Nazi” Weidner, June Devisfruto, and all the fine folks at Acadia.

  Apologies to the demolition crew that took down the derelict barracks on Schoodic. I rather liked the old heap, so I put it back.

  ONE

  Fists white-knuckled on the crutches, sweat running into her eyes, Heath grunted like a sumo wrestler. She was walking to the window of her front room. Walking, as in proceeding forward in an upright bipedal manner by putting one foot in front of the other. For some people, toddling around a fifteen-by-twenty-foot room would be as nothing. For Heath it was a miracle, and she was sweating buckets for it.

  Eight years before, she had fallen while climbing rotten ice in Rocky Mountain National Park and broken her back: no movement, no sensation below the waist. For an eternity of hopelessness she’d wallowed in self-pity. Finding in Elizabeth a daughter, and in Anna Pigeon a friend, had convinced her to abandon her plan to drink herself to death. It was then she had begun to embrace every nerve’s worth of life she could win, earn, fight for, or steal.

  During all those years, eye level had been precisely forty-four inches above the floor. One of the first things she noticed when she stood up—stood up out of her wheelchair on her own two feet—was that nobody had dusted any surface more than forty-five inches above the floor in at least five years. Who knew?

  She smiled and looked at her reflection standing—standing—in the plate-glass window. Dem Bones, Elizabeth called it. Iron Woman in Dem Bones, Heath thought.

  Anchored to the outside of each thigh was a long silver-colored piece of contoured metal that linked to a round hinge at knee and hip. Below, another metal lozenge ran down the side of her calf to attach to a horizontal brace that went beneath her shoe. A wide strap, reminiscent of a weight-lifter’s belt, circled her waist. A battery pack the size of a hardcover book rode on the belt at the small of her back. On the right hip of her harness was a small control panel with buttons that allowed her to use the electronic exoskeleton to sit down and stand up. The rest was done with body movement. If she leaned slightly forward, wonder of wonders, she walked forward. If she leaned back, the walking stopped. The entire assemblage weighed twenty-one pounds three ounces and could be folded into a case slightly smaller than a golf bag.

  This was her second day with the skeleton. The first time she had stood up on her own—sort of on her own—she had suffered an attack of acrophobia so sudden and severe she’d nearly fallen. She, who had led precipitous climbs up sheer cliffs for fifteen years, looked down the five feet three inches from her eyeballs to her feet and felt as if she stood on the edge of a chasm a thousand feet deep, a vacuum sucking her into oblivion. She’d managed six steps before she hummed back into her wheelchair, exhausted from movement and terror.

  Terror had quickly mellowed into excitement. Still, she felt fifty feet tall, a giantess looking down on a world of dwarves. A rush of power and awe fueled her every time she stood up.

  Unfortunately, the machine wasn’t hers. There was no way Heath could afford it. She was testing it for her friend Leah Hendricks, the research and development brain of Hendricks & Hendricks. Leah’s device had three times the electronics of other models, was smaller and lighter, executed more minute movements, and was able to “learn.” Heath had yet to tap into a fraction of what it could do. One of the drawbacks was that Leah had yet to figure out how to get the thing’s battery to hold a charge for more than twenty minutes.

  In a couple of months Leah would take it back to the lab to tinker with its finer points.

  Heath chose not to think about how she would feel, who she would be, when this miracle was taken from her.

  For now, she would only think of now, walking now, standing now. Now was good.

  Twice she had walked the length of the room. Forty feet. Hooray for the para brigade, she thought. Give us forty feet and we’ll take a million miles.

  Harsh, repetitive racket shattered her moment of triumph. Rap music, an oxymoron to Heath’s way of thinking, rudely pounded down the long hallway from the direction of Elizabeth’s room.

  Until recently, Heath’s adopted daughter had been an aficionado of the lightweight modern version of what Aunt Gwen called bubblegum rock. That and, because children never cease to amaze their elders, anything by James Taylor. Heath had been unaware Elizabeth ever listened to rap. Boulder, Colorado, wasn’t much of a Mecca for rappers; too white, too rich, too much spandex. The stuff playing now was ugly and dark, “bitch” and “whore” making up a good percentage of the lyrics.

  Why Elizabeth would want to listen to this brand of aural poison was beyond Heath. Why Elizabeth would think Heath would allow it to be broadcast throughout her house, smashing all good karma in its path, was an even greater domestic mystery.

  Heath waited a couple of minutes, catching her breath and hoping Elizabeth would come to her senses. The first goal was met with satisfying rapidity. The second was not.

  “Wily,” she said to the dog laying on the hardwood, watching her workout with narrow, sleepy eyes, “go to Elizabeth’s room, boy. Unplug her whatever. Good dog!”

  Wily yawned hugely, his mouth wide and crooked like his spiritual guide Wile E. Coyote.

  “You’re a big help,” Heath said.

  Pivoting with painstaking slowness, she got herself turned around and centered facing the hallway, the crutch braces biting into her forearms. There was a gizmo built in that gave Dem Bones balance, but she’d not yet come to trust her mechanized lower body, hence the crutches. Leah had tried to explain the engineering to her, but Heath’s brain had stalled at the gyroscope analogy.

  Fear of falling was an acquired—and necessary—paranoia for paraplegics. Given her fatigue level, it would have made more sense to use her wheelchair for the journey to the back of the house. Still and all, wheeling up, no taller than a hobbit, to lay down the law to a teenager didn’t appeal to her.

  From behind the crutches, extended like forelegs in front of her, the view down the carpeted hallway—to be replaced with hardwood the moment her bank account caught up with her special needs—looked impossibly long, the doors at the end appearing as distant as the pins in a bowling alley.

  Heath sighed and began to hum “Who Were You Thinking Of” as she clasped her crutches through the sweat on her palms and began her robotic version of the Texas two-step. When it came to the two-step, nobody could beat the Texas Tornados.

  By the time she’d made it across the living/workout/rehab room to the hall, Wily padding arthritically along behind, she was regretting her impulse to stand high and mighty over her daughter and wishing she’d dropped her rear end, exoskeleton and all, into Robo-butt—Elizabeth’s name for the wheelchair.

  Having reached the point of no return, equidistant from the rude noise in Elizabeth’s room and the securit
y of her wheels, Heath rested a moment before pushing on. Elizabeth had more reasons than an overcrowded psych ward to be moody and rebellious. It was the miracle of the child that she was blessed with a naturally sunny disposition. One of those enviable souls whose brain seems to effortlessly create sufficient serotonin to power a lifetime of optimism in the grimmest of circumstances.

  Until a week ago, when sullenness and darkness had replaced the sun.

  Or was it two weeks? As much as a month? No. Even a Johnny-come-lately mom like Heath wouldn’t fail to notice over that length of time.

  Heath told herself what she always told herself when she worried that an unmarried, crippled, ex-rock-climber was not the mother a girl as fine as Elizabeth deserved; what she lacked in experience she made up for with love. Also, they had E’s godmother—Anna—and Dr. Gwendolyn Littleton. With Anna and Aunt Gwen for backup, Heath figured she could pull off the mother thing.

  Leaning against the wall for support, Heath reviewed the past couple of weeks with her daughter. There had been red flags: Elizabeth found in tears and insisting it was “nothing.” That was eight or ten days ago. Elizabeth switching screens on her computer, and snapping at Heath for sneaking up on her—as if Heath-cum-apparatus could sneak up on any hearing individual. Had that been a week back? Less. Five days.

  The dark, hard rap music started day before yesterday. Elizabeth was listening to it on her iPod so loud Heath could hear the beat. She’d had no idea what the lyrics were, but Elizabeth had looked as if they were driving spikes into her brain.

  Then today. The rancid, hate-filled, misogynist rant out in the air, poisoning the hearth fairies that protected the house. Aunt Gwen had made up the fairies when Heath was a little girl and afraid of the dark. This new dark was scarier.

  Lots of red flags.

  Heath had noticed. She’d mentioned Elizabeth’s uncharacteristic behavior to Gwen. As they did with every step in the girl’s development, the two of them hashed over Elizabeth’s every move.

  She was in the midst of the hormonal storms of puberty.

  She had a fight with a girlfriend.

  She had a secret boy-crush.

  She had an embarrassing disappointment.

  Heath and Gwen agreed not to interfere.

  That was before the rap, Heath thought. This crap was not a red flag, it was a cry for help.

  With an effort, Heath pushed away from the wall. White-knuckled, muttering, “Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones,” she began the final, interminable few yards of hallway, cursing the carpeting with every laborious shuffle of her feet.

  Sweat dripping from her nose, breath coming in puffs and gasps, she bumped open her daughter’s bedroom door without knocking. Elizabeth was not there.

  The bathroom door was ajar, rap blasting out, steam augmenting its hellishness. Forgetting the pain in her shoulders, Heath muscled her way across the room. Using a crutch as a battering ram, she bashed the bathroom door open with so much force it struck the commode.

  Tail down, Wily growled.

  Steam obscured the mirror and made a wraith of the girl in the tub. Momentarily disoriented, Heath would have fallen if she hadn’t been wedged between crutches and doorframe. Vision cleared. What remained was a child—a young woman really, sixteen—in a bath so hot her skin had reddened below the waterline. She was holding a razor blade to her wrist. Tears and sweat poured down her face to fall like rain into the bath. A girl and a razor and an angry voice shouting “fuck that bitch” to the beat of a machine gun in the hands of a madman.

  Heath reached over and pulled the iPod out of the speaker. Silence bloomed like a blessing, broken only by the drip, drip, drip of slow tears. Pressing a button on her wrist, she activated the metal bones. With a hum like that of an electric window in an older-model Cadillac, they eased her down onto the seat of the commode. She moved her crutches so they wouldn’t be between her and her daughter.

  “Honey…,” she said gently, and held out her hand. Elizabeth laid the razor carefully in her palm. Heath set it on the sink counter.

  Elizabeth had been contemplating suicide with the layered blades of a Lady Schick. At best, she could have given herself what amounted to nasty paper cuts. Though she was in a hot bath, as the media always portrayed suicides for some reason, Elizabeth, being a modest girl by nature and upbringing, was wearing the iridescent blue one-piece bathing suit she wore for swim races.

  Much to laugh at.

  Nothing funny.

  For a minute neither spoke. Elizabeth, flushed with heat, eyes and mouth swollen from crying, long dark hair sleek as a seal’s pelt on her shoulders, looked so small and young.

  A lump hard and hot as a burning coal formed in Heath’s throat. “What can I do?” she managed, her voice burned and choking. “What can I say? Who can I kill? For you, Elizabeth, I will do it. Whatever you need, I will do it.”

  TWO

  Denise sipped her Coke, flat and warm from neglect. Just like me, she thought sourly, then reminded herself not to let the sourness seep into her face. Pleasant expression neutralizing her muscles, she let her eyes casually wander past Peter Barnes and his entourage.

  Park picnics had become exercises in self-control. Denise loathed them, but she was damned if she was going to let Peter keep her from attending. Tables were scattered on the grass behind park headquarters. Two, shoved together, were loaded down with hamburger buns and condiments in the oversized squeeze bottles that always struck her as mildly obscene given the flatulent sounds that sputtered out with the ketchup, mustard, and, especially, the pickle relish.

  Peter was sitting with his new wife, Lily. Lily. Could it get any worse? He couldn’t have married a Sheila or a Judy?

  Or someone remotely his own age?

  Like me, she thought again. Hatred burned like acid in the back of her throat. Peter was forty-six, four years older than she. Pretty little Lily had just turned thirty. Their baby, Olivia, was three months. Married fourteen months and a baby girl. Lucky, lucky Peter. Lucky Lily.

  Three years had passed since Denise had been the one sitting next to Peter Barnes at the picnics. More. Thirty-eight months. Yet the wound had not healed. She still felt as if her skin had been peeled from her body, and her flesh, newly flayed, screamed silent and bloody for everyone to see.

  For a time—months, maybe as long as a year—Denise had thought things were getting better. Then they started getting worse. Hate would roar like a lion, then tears would sting, but not fall. Thoughts of them flooded her mind in muddy rivers, bursting their banks. When the baby came, the flooding grew worse. Some days Denise could not escape endless tape-loops of images of that baby girl.

  She hated Peter, hated Lily, though Lily hadn’t been the Other Woman, just the next woman. How could she not hate Lily? Lily was young and pretty. Lily had Denise’s life, Denise’s man, and just to make sure the knife was twisted, the baby Denise could never have.

  Could never have because of Peter.

  She realized her eyes had been stuck on the happy little family too long, on the baby. Lily was holding the baby, feeding it from a bottle. Lily never nursed. The little cow had no milk.

  Lily caught her, smiling, happy, welcoming.

  Denise forced a smile that probably didn’t work. Peter had undoubtedly told Lily about poor, old, pathetic Denise, the reject who had taken on the role of the ghost at the manor window, always present, never invited in.

  Deciding she’d stayed long enough to prove she wasn’t broken-hearted, Denise stood and carried her Coke to the nearest trash bin. In an impotent act of defiance, she didn’t put the can in the recycle bin. Given that Peter had chosen to trash her life and recycle his own with the lovely, fertile Lily, she was damned if she would support his pet program.

  Artie, the gung-ho new district ranger, sat at a table with one of the secretaries. Young and eager, he was trying to make being a park ranger more like being an Army Ranger, itching for black ops. Denise forced herself to smile at him.

 
After making it a point to saunter slowly from table to table saying her good-byes so it wouldn’t look like she was slinking away with her tail between her legs, Denise made it to her Miata. The last few steps she staggered like a drunk. What the hell was that about?

  Holding on to the low door to keep from falling, she took deep breaths. Tremors rattled her bones. Almost as if Peter—his eyes, all the eyes—the baby, Lily, everybody knowing, had brought on some kind of seizure, as if around Peter and his postcard-perfect life she could no longer fill her lungs. Bony fingers of a monster hand wrapped around her rib cage, squeezing and squeezing.

  Paranoia rampaged through her veins.

  No. No monster. No seizures. Hyperventilation is all. Lily doesn’t know. They are fooled. I have them all fooled, Denise told herself. For the most part she knew she was right. Certain people had a knack for seeing the ghost behind the eyes. Those people Denise avoided. The rest, when they bothered to think about her at all, believed she had moved on, that she was just as thrilled as they were with the assistant superintendent’s spiffy new family.

  When she could do so without stumbling, Denise opened the car door and slid into the low bucket seat. A Mazda ragtop in northern Maine was a rich man’s summer toy, but a foolish purchase for a woman who could afford only one car. Denise had bought it a week after Peter announced he “needed space,” then promptly gave himself that space by throwing her out of the house they’d shared for eleven years.

  Two months later he threw her out of his life.

  At the time she bought the convertible she hoped it would make her feel free, sexy. For a brief moment it seemed to, then it didn’t, and she’d come to hate it. The list of things she was coming to hate lengthened daily, each new loathing attaching to the anchor that was Peter Barnes. The chain of hate had grown so heavy that some days Denise felt she couldn’t carry it another foot, that she would collapse under it and lie helpless until all vestiges of life were crushed from her body.