“A couple of hours,” she replies. “I just sent Amanda and Connor to the cafeteria for some lunch, but they’ll be back soon.”
I try to shift my position, but I have no strength, and I’m afraid to disturb the needles in my veins that are taped to the tender crook of my arm.
Becky adjusts my pillow and the blue sheet that covers my battered body. I wet my dry lips, and she reaches for the cup of water with a straw and feeds it to me. While I sip from it, she talks.
“Amanda said you had ...” She pauses. “Something like a near-death experience when you were in the water.”
I finish drinking and lie back. “Yes.”
“She also said that you felt your parents were there?”
I don’t remember telling Amanda that, but I’m groggy because of the medications. I wonder uneasily what else I said, especially about Jacob.
“Did you see him?” Becky asks.
I slowly blink and feel a deep and profound kinship with my best friend, who knows me so well. “What do you think?”
She lets out a breath of amazement. But with the pounding in my skull, despair returns with a vengeance, and I shut my eyes. “There was a part of me that didn’t want to come back, knowing what I’d have to go through, physically.”
But there’s so much more to it than that. I wish I could articulate what it felt like, but no words can describe the peace and joy I felt when I flew over the valley, then came to rest in her brother’s backyard.
“I was so happy to see him,” I say. “To feel loved like that again. I haven’t felt that way since ...” I attempt to look back at my life—at the whole of it—but everything is fuzzy. What I remember best, in this moment, is heaven.
Becky smiles shakily. “I wish I could see him too. I still miss him, and I’ve often wondered what our lives would look like today if he hadn’t died. You and I would probably be sisters-in-law.”
I turn my face toward the window. “But then I wouldn’t have Amanda or Connor.”
“True,” she replies. “And we wouldn’t want to change that.”
“Never.”
She holds my hand, and we sit quietly for a moment until Becky inches her chair forward. “There’s something else we need to talk about. We should discuss it before you get released from the ICU and get more visitors.”
“What is it?” I ask.
“I’m not sure what Amanda told you when you first woke up,” she replies, “but you need to know what’s been happening over the past few days.”
I wait for her to explain, but she hesitates.
“Tell me.”
She bows her head. “People are going to ask you what you remember about falling in the water. They’ll want to know if Nate pushed you.”
Pushed me . . .
My memories are sluggish, but I do recall Amanda whispering that question in my ear. She was upset, desperate to know the answer.
“Why do people think that?” I ask as I struggle to remember that entire afternoon, but it’s as if there’s a thick fog surrounding my brain, and I can remember only short flashes: The drive along Highway 103, sitting in silence with Nate, feeling angry, frustrated. He wanted to work things out. He believed an afternoon at Peggy’s Cove would bring us closer. But to me, it was a waste of time because our marriage was already dead. There was no way to resurrect it from the grave.
Becky glances at the door, and I sense her impatience. She’s worried the kids will return at any moment, and she doesn’t want to have this conversation in front of them.
She continues. “He’s been accused because there were witnesses that saw you arguing, and now people are following the case on social media. And yesterday, the police got a search warrant for your house because they found out that Nate’s restaurant was struggling financially. I think they must have settled on a motive—that he wanted your insurance money and control of the trust fund from the sale of your company.”
Suddenly I feel like a snowball rolling down a hill, growing in clumps of bewilderment and confusion. I shut my eyes and try to remember plunging into the water, but that event does not exist in my memory. I can recall only the powerful currents carrying my body down, then up, sideways, and forward. In my panic, I was desperate to take a breath ... I sucked in water that burned my lungs ... then I was rescued. I was drawn upward to warmth and light.
“Did he push you?” Becky asks.
Again, I struggle to recall those last few seconds. “I think ... I think I ran away from him, and he chased me. I was angry, and I felt used. But then I don’t know what happened. I only remember the wave hitting me like a truck. It slammed into me, and I was swept off my feet.”
