“You’re not a child. You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”
“I know that, and I do make my own decisions every day of the week. This, well, this is a little tougher.”
“Many adults have differences with their parents.”
“But there are emotional issues here, very strong emotional issues.”
“They blame me for Ethan’s death.”
“They blame you for everything that happened that summer.”
“But mostly for Ethan’s death.” He sat up abruptly and turned to her, feelings he’d held in for years suddenly splintering outward. “Don’t they know it was an accident? Those two cars collided and began spinning all over the road. There was no possible way I could have steered clear. Hell, we were wearing helmets, but a motorcycle didn’t have any more of a chance against either of those monsters than Ethan’s neck had against that tree.”
Marni was lying stiffly, determined to say it all now. “It was your motorcycle. They felt that if Ethan had been with anyone else he would have been in a car and survived.”
Frustrated, Web thrust his fingers through his hair. “I didn’t force Ethan to come with me. For that matter, I didn’t force Ethan to become my friend.”
“But you were friends. My parents blame that on you, too.”
“They saw their son as wasting his time with a no-good bum like me. Well, they were wrong, damn it! They were wrong! My friendship with Ethan was good forbothof us. Ethan got a helluva lot more from me than he was getting from those other guys he hung around with, and I got more from him than you could ever believe. My, God! He was my friend! Do you think I wasn’t crushed by his death?”
Tears glistened on his lower lids. Marni saw them and couldn’t look away. She wanted to hold him, to comfort him, but at the moment there was a strange distance between them. She was a Lange. She was one ofthem.
“Y’know, Marni,” he began in a deep voice that shook, “I lay in that hospital room bleeding on the inside long after they’d stitched me up on the outside. I hurt in ways no drug could ease. Yes, I felt guilty. It was my motorcycle, and I was driving, and if I’d been going a little faster or a little slower we would have missed that accident and been safe…. I called your father from the hospital. Did you know that?”
Eyes glued to his, she swallowed. “No.”
“Well, I did. The day after the accident, when I’d been out from under the anesthetic long enough to be able to lift the phone. It was painful, lifting that phone. I had three cracked ribs, and my thigh was shattered into so many pieces that it had taken five hours of surgery to make some order out of it—and that’s not counting the two operations that followed. But nothing,nothingI felt physically could begin to compare with the pain your father inflicted on me. He didn’t ask how I was, didn’t stop to think that I was hurting or that I was torn up by the knowledge that Ethan had died and I was alive. No, all he asked was whether I was satisfied, whether I was pleased I’d destroyed a life that would have been so much more meaningful, so much more productive than mine had ever been or could be.”
An anger rose in Marni, so great that she could no longer bear the thought of presenting her parents’ side of the story. She sat up and moved to Web, her own eyes flooding as she curled her hands around his neck. “He had no right to say that! Itwasn’tyour fault! I told him that over and over again, but he wouldn’t listen to me. I was an irresponsible seventeen-year-old who’d been stupid to have been involved with you, he said. That showed how muchIknew.”
Web dragged in a long, shaky breath. He was looking at her, but not actually seeing her. His vision was on the past. “I cried. I lay there holding the phone and cried. The nurse finally came in and took it out of my hand, but I kept on crying until I was so tired and in so much pain that I just couldn’t cry anymore.”
She brushed at the moisture in the corners of his eyes, though his face was blurred to her gaze. “I’m so sorry, Web,” she whispered. “So sorry. He was wrong, and cruel. There was nothing you could have done to prevent that accident. It wasn’t your fault!”
“But I felt guilty. I still do.”
“What about me?” she cried. “If it hadn’t been for me—for my pestering the two of you to take me along—you would have been in Ethan’s car as you’d originally planned. Don’t you think that’s haunted me all these years? I tried to tell that to my father, too, because it hurt so much when he put the full blame on you, but he wouldn’t listen. All he could think of was that Ethan, his only son and primary heir, was gone. And my mother seconded everything he said, especially when he forbade me to see you again.”
“What about Tanya? Didn’t she come to your defense?”
“Tanya, who’d been itching for you from the first moment she knew we were involved with each other? No, Tanya didn’t come to my defense. She told my mother everything she knew, about the times I’d said I was out with friends but was actually out with you. She was legitimately upset about Ethan, I have to say that much for her. But she did nothing to help me through what was a double devastation. She sided with my parents all the way.”
Marni hung her head. Tears stained her cheeks, and her hands clutched Web’s shoulders for the solace that his muscled strength could offer. “I wanted to go to you, Web.” Her voice was small and riddled with pain. “I kept thinking of you in that hospital, even when we returned to Long Island for the funeral. I wanted to go back to Maine to see you, because I needed to know you were okay and I needed your comfort. You’d meant so much to me that summer. I’d been in love with you, and I felt that you might be the only one to help me get over Ethan’s death.”
“But they wouldn’t let you come.”
“They said that if I made any move to contact you, they’d disinherit me. That if I tried to see you, they’d know that they’d failed as parents.”
He smoothed her hair back around her ears, then said softly, “I waited. I was hoping you’d come, or call, because I thought maybe you could make me feel a little better about what had happened. I was in that godforsaken small-town hospital for two months—”
“How could I go against them?” she cried, trying desperately to justify what she’d done. “Regardless of how wrong they were about you, they were grief-stricken over Ethan. It wasn’t the threat of being disinherited that bothered me. It wasn’t a matter of money. But they’d given me everything for seventeen years. You’d given me other things, but for barely two months.” She took a quick breath. “You said that you thought I was headstrong in my way even then, but I wasn’t really, Web. I couldn’t stand up for something I wanted. I’d already disappointed my parents. I couldn’t do it again. They were going through too rough a time. Dad was never the same after the accident.”
Web’s expression had softened, and his voice was tinged with regret. “None of us were. That accident was the turning point in my life.” His words hung, heavy and profound, in the air for a minute. Then he turned, propped the pillows against the headboard and settled Marni against him as he leaned back. “My leg kept getting infected and wouldn’t heal, so I was transferred to a place in Boston. The specialist my stepfather found opened the whole thing up and practically started from scratch again, and between that and a second, less extensive operation, I was hospitalized for another six weeks. I had lots of time to think. Lots of time.
“Ethan and I, I realized, each represented half of an ideal world. He had financial stability, but though many of the things he had told me about in those hours we spent together sounded wonderful, they didn’t come free. I had freedom and a sense of adventure, but without roots or money I was limited as to what I could do in life. As I lay there, I thought a lot about my father and about why I’d been running, and it was then I realized I wanted something more in life. Your parents thought I was dirt, and I felt like it after the accident. But I didn’t want to be dirt. I wanted to besomeone,not just a jock moving from job to job and place to place.” He stroked her arm as though needing to reassure himself that he’d found a measure of personal stability at last.
“What happened to Ethan made me think about my own mortality,” he went on in a solemn voice. “If I’d died then and there, no one—well, other than my immediate family—would have missed me, and it was questionable as to whether they’d really miss me, since I’d never been around all that much.” He took a deep breath. “So I hooked onto that dig in New Mexico. It was the first time I’d ever done something with an eye toward the future. By the time I realized I’d never make it as a writer, my pictures were selling. I was on my way. I don’t think anything could have stopped me from pushing ahead full steam at that point.”
