Sam Goodis standing behind him, shirtless and sweaty, holding a beer can in one hand and a leather belt in the other. The belt was wrapped once around his hand, and the silver buckle dangled in front of Matt's face.
'What are you doing down there, boy?'
Matt stared at the buckle. There were specks of fresh blood on the hook. He swallowed hard.
'Looking for money.'
Sam snorted and took a slug of his beer. “You think there's buried treasure under your house?'
'I broke my piggy bank and some of the coins fell through the cracks in the floor.'
It wasn't entirely a lie. It had actually happened, only it was a year ago. He figured he had a better chance not getting caught in a fib if it was at least partially based on truth.
'What do you need a flashlight and a broom for?'
'I'm afraid of spiders,' he said. “There are some big ones under there.'
'Well, now that I know there's money under your house, maybe one night I'll crawl under there and take it all for myself.' Sam grinned and finished his beer. “What would you say to that?'
'That it'd be nice if a black widow bit you while you were down there.'
Sam squatted down on his haunches, close enough that Matt could smell the beer on his breath.
'You got balls. That comes as a surprise. Have you seen my boy?' Sam looked him in the eye.
'Boy?'
Matt couldn't help stealing a quick glance under the house. Andy was shivering with terror. He looked up at Sam Goodis again.
'No, sir,' Matt said.
'You see him, you tell him he's the most worthless creature that ever crawled out of a woman's snatch.'
Sam tossed his empty beer can under the house, got to his feet, and walked down the street.
When Matt looked back under the house, Andy was gone. For the next few weeks, every time he heard a sound under the house, he feared it was Sam Goodis, looking for his money.
Andy escaped that beating, but there were more, for him and for his mother. The beatings went on for years, until Sam walked out one day when Andy was a teenager and never came back.
'After that, Mrs. Goodis and Andy were on their own and my parents started looking after them,' Matt said now, watching Rachel idly go after the last few crumbs of the pie with her fork. “Dad would fix things up around their house. Mom would bring them leftovers. I made sure Andy always had a friend.'
'That was very sweet of you,' she said.
'If we'd shown that concern a few years earlier, we could have spared them both a lot of pain. But we pretended we didn't see the evil that was right in front of us. We turned our backs and hoped it would go away.'
'It did,' Rachel said.
Matt shook his head. “Sam Goodis was gone, but we still felt him. He was there in the scars, the ones you see and the ones you don't. That's why Andy is the way he is.'
And that was why late one winter night, a couple of years back, Marla Goodis walked naked out onto Spirit Lake and fell through the ice, but Matt didn't tell Rachel about that.
'You were a child, Matt. None of it was your fault. You shouldn't feel guilty about what happened.'
'But I do,' Matt said.
He was the most sensitive, caring man Rachel had ever met, and she had never wanted to make love to anyone more than she wanted to with him at that moment. She reached across the table and took his hand.
'You don't have to pick me up in the morning for the ski trip. You can come over tonight instead.' She looked him in the eye. “And stay with me.'
He smiled. “I appreciate that, but I'm real tired and I've still got to pack.'
'Right, pack, I forgot about that. I've got to do that, too.' She started to withdraw her hand, but he didn't let her go. He gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
'I'm looking forward to this trip.'
'So am I.' She kissed his hand, closing her eyes and pretending the wedding ring wasn't there.
CHAPTER SEVEN
It began with a sore back.
At first, Janey thought she'd twisted something the wrong way as she was lifting a box of school supplies out of the pickup truck. Matt was always telling her to lift with her knees, not her lower back, and she always ignored him.
But the ache wouldn't go away. After a week or two of ice packs, massages, and enough Advil to eat away half her stomach lining, she gave in and saw the doctor, something she absolutely hated to do. She saw it as a sign of weakness, a failure of character, and an avoidable expense. But it was the only way, short of hitting up one of her drug-dealing high school students, to get her hands on some Vicodin.
She went in for her aching back, but all the doctor wanted to talk about was some freckle he saw right above her hip. Janey found it incredibly irritating, especially when he refused to give her a prescription for painkillers until she went across the hall to see a dermatologist, an old coot with hair coming out of his ears who insisted on cutting the freckle out with what felt like a razor-edged melon baller.
But he stitched her up, gave her the Vicodin, and sent her back home.
Two days later, she got The Call. The little freckle was malignant.
It turned out that the freckle was a tiny speck of an unusually aggressive, particularly corrosive strain of skin cancer that had metastasized, wrapped itself around her lower spine, and then went straight up to her brain, where it was spreading like an oil slick.
Within just a few weeks, she was in the hospital and grim-faced doctors were telling Matt it was time to talk with Janey about her 'end of life' wishes.
She had no wishes for death. All of her wishes were about life, and the future she and Matt were supposed to have together.
But now her future was measured in the steady drip of fluids into her IV, which was pumping her full of drugs that dulled her pain but fogged her thinking.
She'd long since lost the will to eat and was being nourished by a feeding tube. She pissed through a catheter and crapped into a bedpan, unable to make it to the restroom any longer.
Janey mostly slept. When she was awake, she was rarely lucid, more often dazed, incoherent, irrational, and irritable. Only occasionally would the real Janey emerge and offer him a tender smile and a look of sadness, and then she'd disappear into herself again.
Matt spent his days sitting at her bedside, holding her hand, soothing her as best he could.
There was a couch in the room that folded out into a hide-a-bed, but he'd usually fall asleep in his chair, still holding his wife's hand.
As he had now.
It was the coldness that woke him up. It was like he was holding on to an icicle.
He jerked awake to find a doctor he'd never seen before standing on the other side of her bed, looking down at Janey, who seemed to be sleeping peacefully, her chest rising and falling with her labored, rasping breathing.
The doctor had a jaunty demeanor, as if he was waiting for the Oompa-Loompas to finish their rhyme before breaking into song. He was wearing a round reflector band on his head, and an outrageously large stethoscope dangled from his neck.
'Why is she so cold?' Matt asked him.
'Perhaps because she's dead.' The doctor reached into the pocket of his lab coat and then held a selection of lollipops out to Matt like a sugary bouquet. “Want a lollipop?'
'She can't be dead,' Matt said, glancing at the EKG, the little light bouncing across the screen. “Her heart is still beating.'
'Really?' the doctor put on his stethoscope and touched the diaphragm to her chest. “We can't have
