“No,” I snapped. “Ethan, what’s the matter with Moonster?”
“He hates it here.”
“I get it.” I put an arm around Ethan, and Moonie resettled on my son’s far side.
“Dad, will she be okay? You said she has a heart murmur.” Ethan pulled his knees up to his chest, wrapping his arms around them. “What’s that?”
“It’s common.”
“Why didn’t you guys tell me?”
“It didn’t matter enough.”
“I’m worried about Muggy, too.” Ethan called my mother-in-law Muggy, since he hadn’t been able to say grandma when he was little. “I don’t want the bad guys to get her.”
“They won’t. The FBI’s going to protect her. Wiki said so.”
Suddenly my cell phone rang on the end table, and I dove for it, checking the screen. “It’s Dom,” I told Ethan.
“Dom, how is she?”
“She’s fine. It’s a panic attack.”
Thank God. I repeated for Ethan’s benefit, “So it’s not a heart attack, it’s a panic attack?”
“Yes. They’re going to give her something to calm her. We’ll be back tonight.”
“Thank you.” I exhaled with relief. “Can you put her on?”
“No, she’s with the doctor. I stepped outside to make the call.”
“Can I call her? She usually has her phone—”
“No. It’s too risky if you’re overheard.”
“Okay. Tell her I love her.” I felt resigned. An FBI agent was telling my wife I loved her. We ended the call, and I set down the phone.
Ethan frowned. “What’s a panic attack?”
“It means Mom’s upset about Muggy. It got to her. All at once.”
“She’s not gonna die?”
“No, not at all. She’s not even sick. We don’t have to worry, and she’ll be home soon.” I gave him a hug, masking my concern. Lucinda had never had a panic attack in her life. I felt like we were beginning to fall apart at the seams.
Moonie started growling.
And though I had sympathy for everyone in the family, I was running out of patience with Moonie. “Hush,” I told him.
Chapter Twenty
Lucinda rested her head on my chest, with one leg over me in the darkness of the bedroom. She called it her “husband cocoon,” I assume because she thought I kept her safe. Now we both knew that was sheer fantasy.
“I’m so stupid,” Lucinda said softly. “I mean, it felt like a heart attack.”
“No, don’t say that. That’s how they feel.” I had read about panic attacks online, getting up to speed.
“I feel like a drama queen.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, meaning it. My wife never complained. She got things done, no matter what.
“I never thought I was the kind of person to have a panic attack.”
“It’s human, and you’re a human being. Everybody has a breaking point.”
Lucinda fell quiet. The chirping of crickets wafted through the open window, carried on the cool, loamy air. I sensed I had said the wrong thing, so it was time to change the subject.
“At the hospital, how did it work? Were you able to tell the doctor about Allison?”
“Yes, Dom cleared it. Cleared. Now I speak FBI.” Lucinda chuckled, without mirth. “He stayed with me, though. I made him hold my hand.”
“Good.” I smiled.
“I felt silly.”
“Nah. You like your hand held. Everybody does.” I reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. “See? The circuit is complete.”
“？‘We fit.’ Remember, we used to say that?”
“Of course.” I felt a glimmer of happiness, like a splinter of light in the dark, a door cracking to a room that used to be mine, in a house where I no longer lived.
“Dom waited outside when I talked to the shrink.”
“How did that go?”
“Well. Mostly I cried.”
“Aw, honey.” I held her closer, feeling terrible for her.
“He gave me Ativan, but it makes me groggy. I don’t think I need it, really.”
“Take it, at least until the funeral.”
Lucinda sniffled. “I’m sorry I freaked Ethan out.”
“He’ll be fine,” I told her, though I wasn’t sure.
“It was just seeing Mom. We’re abandoning her.”
“We don’t have any choice,” I told her, knowing I was repeating myself.
“She doesn’t know that.” Lucinda shifted position. “The shrink said we have ‘acute grief and . . . PTSD.’ He said we should all go to counseling, not just Ethan. Would you?”
“Sure,” I answered. I hadn’t thought about PTSD. It made it so real.
“I keep remembering that when it happened, you were handling it. Like you just handled it. You took your shirt off. You knew what to do.”
“I don’t feel like I handled it,” I said, surprised. I felt exactly the opposite. I felt ashamed.
“But you did, you really did. You did more than I did, I didn’t do anything. I just held her, freaking out. I didn’t do anything to help her, I mean I didn’t try to stop the blood, I didn’t get the phone, and I messed up when I tried to call from the car.”
“You tried, don’t blame yourself.” I realized that as guilty as I felt, Lucinda felt worse.
“But I do, I always thought I was good in an emergency.”
“You are. Remember when she got hit with a ball? On her forehead? You went into action.”
“Then, I knew, but this . . . this was too much. I couldn’t even believe it was really happening, and the blood was so warm, it just was so warm.” Lucinda sniffled, beginning to cry. “I told the shrink . . . I think about her all the time, but . . . when they started putting those EKG monitors on me . . . I said, ‘Please don’t let me die’ . . . and I feel guilty . . . I wanted to . . . live.”
“Oh, honey, that’s okay.” I felt the words like a weight on my chest.
“And I do, I don’t want to . . . go under but I feel like I am . . . but I have Ethan, and I have you, and we have to . . . I just feel wrong . . . like we’re a train leaving the station . . . leaving Allison . . . our baby girl . . . and my mom, we just leave them . . .”
“No, we don’t, we won’t, honey.” I didn’t know how to console her because I felt the same way. It was important to go on, but impossible to go on. And in the end, that was what I told her.
But by then, she was crying too hard to listen.
Chapter Twenty-One
The week leading up to the funeral started off badly. The FBI had no news on Milo’s whereabouts. They were liaising with another federal agency, OCDETF, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which went after the major drug traffickers. Dom said it would add jet fuel to their manhunt. I put on a brave face for Lucinda, but despaired we had lost Milo.
I continued running with Dom, picking his brain about the case, but learned nothing new. He commiserated, but kept telling me to keep the faith. I sensed Lucinda’s panic attack had been a turning point for him, and he sympathized with our position more than before. Dom’s boss was still refusing to get a message to Melissa, despite the fact that she and our other friends had searched the Lagersen Tract after a neighbor posted that Coldstream had been closed off by police action. The community was speculating, the consensus being that I had murdered my family. Marie and Justine from my office were asked to comment, but didn’t. God only knew what they were thinking.