Can’t Breathe by Heather McGhee
*****
Prologue
The judge’s gavel landed with a solid plunk.
It was over...all over. Robin sank down into the wooden chair under her and stared at nothing. This was the end to five years of her life...five years of waiting and fighting, and it was finally over.
She tried to smile and nod as her lawyers congratulated her, but she couldn’t. This negligence lawsuit controlled her life for the past five years, and she’d just been awarded several million dollars for her loss, her disfigurement and her brevity. Yet, she’d gained nothing.
The stale air in the courtroom suddenly became unbearable, and Robin dashed to her feet, ready to leave, yet afraid of what her life would be like once she did. Outside, the moist April air met her as her team of lawyers battled reporters and and news cameras -- and the usual crowd of on-lookers, eager to get a glance at the woman who’d become a celebrity freak-show almost overnight. She was quickly ushered past all that to a Towncar that waited by the curb. Robin kept her head down, her brown hair astutely hiding the scars that warped the left side of her face. It didn’t matter if she flaunted the ugliness or not. Half the country knew about her, had seen her face, sent her letters of sympathy, hounded her for interviews and solicited her for reconstructive surgery.
Robin hated her scars, but she kept them. Everyday, they reminded her of what she would never hold in her arms again. Every hour she remembered the pain of the fire that consumed her after the semi-truck rammed into her car. And every second of those memories was not nearly as painful as the sight of her baby girl, mangled beyond recognition, with no life left in her body.
The trucking company wanted to settle out of court. The trucking company wanted to bury the whole incident in a drawer. Robin wouldn’t let them. They took her little girl. They had to pay.
But she did not walk into that courtroom that morning looking for money. She wanted revenge and justice and something to fill the hole in her chest, other than five years -- the nineteen hundred, eight-one days -- of torment that resided there. She wanted her Lucy back, and they couldn’t give her back.
She met with her lawyers at their office, signed off on the remaining paperwork, and drove off, alone, heading west to a place where Lucy now slept. Lucy needed to know it was all over. Her little girl -- killed on her fifth birthday -- needed peace. Robin didn’t know if she could give that to her, but Lucy deserved to know.
*****
Brent Poole pulled off of the dirt road in his cruiser. The disturbance call had been nothing more than a woman complaining that her husband was a fat, lazy slob. It was days like these that he thanked God he wasn’t married. Who would want to go through that every day?
The small county road led back toward town, and Brent was glad to finally be done with the day. This had been his last call of the afternoon. His eight hour shift as a Sheriff’s deputy was done with, and there was a recorded Packer’s game and a cold beer waiting for him at home. He’d speed if he wasn’t a part of law enforcement. There were standards to uphold, after all.
A few miles down, he spotted a small, rattletrap of a car on the side of the road and a woman with her head stuck under the hood. Brent sighed and pulled over behind it. Ignoring a lone female stranded in the middle of nowhere wasn’t in his genes. If his momma heard about it, she’d tan his hide.
“Afternoon,” he greeted the back of the woman after emerging from his cruiser and cautiously walking up to her. Just because she was alone and having car trouble didn’t mean she wasn’t dangerous. As he got closer, he noticed her hair first off. It was a strange brown color, encompassing lighter streaks and darker shades and strong hints of red, but it all meshed well together and actually looked natural.
Her head came up and she turned to him. Brent’s breath caught in his lungs. Old, faded scars stretched from her left temple down her cheeks and the side of her neck, disappearing under the collar of her white blouse. Sweet Jesus, what the hell happened to this woman?
“Hello,” she said with a voice like melodies coming from a harp, and he’d know. His momma played that instrument all her life. He grew up on classical music. Didn’t mean he liked it, but he was familiar with it.
Grunting because she took him by surprise, and Brent didn’t like surprises, he waved a hand at her car. “Got stuck, huh?”
She nodded, her eyes darting back to the engine. They were green eyes, wide, open, innocent and polished, like two spheres of jade set in a freckled, porcelain face. Even with the sinful flaws of the scars, she was a beautiful lady...a full bottom lip, a perky nose, and a petite, fragile frame. Brent experienced an unwelcome sense of protectiveness for her, and he didn’t even know her name.
“I think it finally died on me,” she said, staring down at her broken vehicle with helplessness.
“Did you call a tow?”
She laughed, and the sound filled him from the marrow out. “I don’t have a cell phone,” she said.
That surprised him...again. “No cell phone? That’s unusual in this day.”
“Money has been a little tight for me lately,” she commented, kicking the tire of her dilapidated car as to fortify her point. She raised those jade eyes to him. “Do you mind if I use yours? I’ll pay you for the charges, of course.”
At that, Brent grinned and shifted his weight to one leg. “Didn’t you say you were short on money?”
She blinked rapidly and looked off down the road in the direction she’d been heading. “I’ve recently received a few extra dollars.”
Now, normally, something like that would please a person. Extra money was always a good thing, but she said it as if her few extra dollars came with a death sentence.
“No charge,” he said, unclipping his phone from his belt and handing it to her. She reached out her left hand and more scars defected it. Brent wondered if that whole side of her body was covered with them.
“Thank you,” she murmured and made her call. Brent walked around to the front of her car and peeked under the hood as she talked to a towing company. He wasn’t a prime mechanic by no means, but he figured pretty quickly her problem. Oil splatters dotted the entire engine, and it looked as though most of the hoses were just about rotted through. There was no saving this heap of junk.
She ended her call and handed over his phone again. “Thank you,” she said again. “It was very nice of you to help me out.” Brent lowered the hood and watched as she retrieved her purse from the inside, leaving the keys in the ignition. Then she nodded and started to walk.
“Hey, aren’t you going to wait for the tow truck?”
She paused and licked her bottom lip. “Um...no. I don’t really care what happens to it.” She looked up at the darkening sky. A spring rain was coming. Brent could smell the extra moisture in the air. “I’m meeting someone, so I need to get going.”
“You’re gonna walk?” He glanced down at her shoes. She wore plain black heels that had seen better days, but they were still heels nonetheless.
“It’s not far,” she commented. “Thank you again.” And she walked away, stumbling on the gravel alongside the road. Brent frowned at her. She obviously didn’t want to wait for a ride to wherever she was going, but he wasn’t in the habit of playing taxi with his deputy’s cruiser.
Still...his momma raised him better. Florence Poole had a sixth sense when it came to her children’s going ons. Even if no one else knew he ignored this deserted woman, his momma would find out. And that won’t be a pretty conversation.
Brent exhaled heavily. Already, she managed to cover a lot of ground while he stood there like a lump on a log and deliberated. He got back in his car and drove up to her. She slowed down as he rolled down the passenger window. “Can I give you a lift?” he asked. She bent to peer through the window at him.
“Really, I don’t want to be any trouble. I’m not going far. I’ll be fine,” she insisted.
Brent reached across and jerked the door open for her. “It’s no trouble,” he said, leaning over the seat and smiling. “Besides, my mother will find out I left you here, and then I won’t get invited to Christmas dinner this year. Do you want that on your conscious? I’ll be missing out on some of the best apple pie if you turn me down.”
A small smile curved her lips, and Brent thought it was the prettiest smile he’d ever seen because there was a lot of pain in that meager attempt at cheer. She slid into the seat, tucking her purse at her feet and closed the door. “A mother’s suffering is not something to thumb your nose at,” she said simply, but he got a funny feeling it had a deeper meaning.
“I’m Brent Poole,” he introduced himself as he shifted the vehicle into drive and eased off the brake pedal.
“Robin Brooks,” she replied, and her name triggered something in his brain, but he couldn’t grasp at it. “Thank you, again. Your mother will be very proud of you.”
Brent laughed. “You say that as if you’ve some experience with being a mother,” he told her.
“Some,” she said, looking out her window.
“Are you married?” he inquired, and then wished he kept his mouth shut. It didn’t really matter one way or the other. He was just a good Samaritan...a chauffeur for a person in need...that was it.
“No,” she said softly. “I never married.”
He glanced at her. Why should such a sorrow-filled statement cause a rush of warmth in him? So, she never married. And she had “some” experience as a mother...and she recently acquired some extra funds. And every bit of that information about Robin Brooks brought a glimpse of sadness in her eyes.
He began to wonder if his life was about to change after meeting this woman.
*****
“Turn here,” Robin pointed to a gravel road off of the county highway. A rusty, iron gate marked the entrance to Mount Olive Cemetery. She chose this place to lay Lucy to rest because of its obscurity. And because Lucy would have loved the dogwoods that bloomed and lined the property.
“Here?” Deputy Poole asked in a confused voice.
“Yes,” Robin said. “I’ll walk from here.” She unbuckled her seat belt and opened the car as a drizzle began misting over the windshield. “Thank you for the ride.”
He jerked the gear shift into the park position and peered out of the windshield at the block letters on the gate. “I thought you said you were meeting someone.”
“I am,” Robin said, just wanting to go see Lucy and leave his company. He hadn’t stared at her scars once -- oh, he saw them, but he didn’t gawk and ask uncomfortable questions, and that disturbed her. He disturbed her.
He was a handsome man with jet black hair sprinkled with gray at the temples and warm brown eyes. And his benevolence pierced her heart. It hadn’t been pity that drove her here. Deputy Brent Poole was a gentleman, through and through, even to the point of fearing his mother if he didn’t act accordingly.
And Robin couldn’t handle any of that right now. Lucy was waiting on her.
“Ms. Brooks, it’s starting to rain,” he said, leaning back against his seat. The mist graduated to tiny drops on the windows.
“I’ll be fine,” she said and exited the car, closing the door firmly and waving him off. He didn’t move. Robin just sighed and headed into the cemetery. Deputy Poole could think whatever he wanted.
Lucy’s grave sat in the middle, next to an ancient stone bench and a pitted, crumbling statue of a weeping angel. The gleaming granite headstone seemed out of place in the old graveyard, but Lucy liked pretty things. She would have been ten years old now, dreaming of sailing around the world and studying pictures of the ocean and sea life, reading books about dolphins and sea horses. Robin hoped there was a beach up in Heaven where her daughter could spend her time in the Afterlife, combing the sands for shells and gazing down into tide pools to see what had been trapped.
Lucy loved the water. Robin swore she must have been born a mermaid, because her daughter took to swimming right away, never fearing the depths of the swimming pool near their home. Two years in a row, Robin scrimped and saved every dime she could to take Lucy to the beach during the summers when she’d been old enough. Only two years of playing in the sand on the Gulf of Mexico...that was all Lucy got to experience.
Being a single mother had been riddled with sacrifices and near poverty, but their vacations weren’t one of them. Robin couldn’t take Lucy everywhere she wanted to visit -- they never had the money for that -- but she tried her best to provide as many experiences as possible for her little girl.
And now...Lucy was gone, and Robin had the means to go anywhere in the world.
It wasn’t fair.
Robin dropped to her knees in front of the grave bearing Lucy’s name, not caring that her black slacks soaked through immediately. The rain picked up, and her hair plastered to her head, but still she didn’t care. It was just another form of water, and Lucy loved the water.
“Hey, baby,” Robin said to Lucy in a forced, cheerful voice. “It’s over...It’s all over, and guess what? We won! Isn’t that amazing?”
Yeah, amazing...there was nothing amazing for getting paid for a daughter’s death.
Robin plucked at the weeds around the base of the Lucy’s stone. “Now, we can go anywhere you want...just you and me. Do you still want to see the Caribbean? And the Mediterranean? We can go there now. We can take a ship and sail around the world. Won’t that be exciting? Just think of all the fish you will get to see...”
She trailed off and told herself not to cry. She hadn’t cried since the day Lucy moved here. She won’t cry now.
Wet footsteps squished behind her, and Robin glanced over her shoulder. Deputy Poole approached, wearing a rain slicker and carrying an umbrella. His brown eyes flicked to Lucy’s grave, and Robin wanted to drape her body over it, hiding Lucy from his curiosity. But all he did was hand over the umbrella and say, “Here...take this. I’ll drive you home when you’re done.”
Robin closed her fingers over the handle of the umbrella and held it above her head, shaking with shame that someone saw her huddled next to her daughter’s grave, and trembling with anger that he invaded her privacy. Her eyes followed him as he moved over to the bench and sat down on it, disregarding the pool of rain that now drenched his pants. He crossed his arms over his chest, nodded to her once, and then looked off away from her.
She positioned the umbrella to shield as much as her body as she could from his presence and gathered more words of excitement so Lucy wouldn’t know just how sad and lonely her mother was...and would be until the day she could hold her baby again.
*****
Brent hadn’t cried in a single day since the time Maggie Wilson broke his nose in the seventh grade when she caught him kissing another girl. But he sure felt like it now.
When Robin said she had “some” experience as a mother, he never expected that it was because she buried a child. Glancing quickly at her sodden frame kneeling down on the wet grass, he felt his throat close up. Lucy Brooks. Robin Brooks. Now, he knew why her name sounded so familiar. This was the woman from the news. The one who lost her little girl in a horrible accident and sued the trucking company.
No woman should have to go through something like that. This woman shouldn’t be here right now. If Brent remembered correctly, the driver of the truck reportedly had a history of drinking while on the job, and the company ignored it. The man emerged from the wreckage unscathed and was currently serving time in prison, but that had not been enough for Robin Brooks. The media swarmed over the tragedy. All the stories told about how she was out for blood, that she devoted every ounce of her time and resources to plow that trucking company into the ground. And some claimed she was only after the money.
Brent didn’t believe that last one for a second.
He tried not to stare at her as she chatted to her daughter’s grave, but it was difficult. He couldn’t wrap his head around her. There were no tears on her face, and her voice -- though obviously determined to sound happy -- spoke with calm reassurance, and Brent got a sense of how far this woman would have gone for her daughter.
Glancing to the statue of a crying angel beside the bench, Brent wondered why God would take such a young, innocent life. He’d been raised Catholic, taught to believe that God had a plan for everything, and he was only part of that plan, but he hadn’t stepped into a church in almost six years. Not because he lost his faith, but because he found himself questioning it. Especially during times like now. Robin’s grief should not be part of any plan.
“Deputy Poole?” her voice called to him, and he snapped back to the present. She stood before him, clutching the umbrella over her head and eying him thoroughly. Brent didn’t realize he’d been staring at the statue all this time. How long had she been standing there, calling to him?
“It’s starting to rain rather heavily,” she announced, and he raised his face to the sky, receiving a spattering of wet for his curiosity. So, it was... “You’re completely soaked,” she added. “We should leave.”
He stood slowly. “Please don’t cut your visit short on my behalf,” he said, noticing that the sadness in her eyes had diminished a tad.
“I’m finished,” she said, shifting the umbrella to her other hand. “Lucy says hello and thank you.”
Brent almost stumbled back from her then. Her daughter...her dead daughter said hello? Maybe some of those news stories were accurate. Maybe she was crazy. “She’s welcome,” he replied hesitantly, watching for a flicker of insanity in her face. There was none. She blinked at him with complete normality, as though they were discussing someone who recently just walked out of a room. And that sent his hackles up.
“Are you sure you’re ready to go?” he asked, wary of her now. She didn’t look crazy, but that didn’t mean anything. She looked kind of sweet, actually. Like a woman he’d readily become enamored with. Brent pushed that thought right out of his head. He liked his women sweet, but not with the excessive baggage. And Robin Brooks carried a cargo train on her back.
She nodded and squished through the rain and mud to his car. Brent followed behind and turned up the heater as soon as he got the engine started. It took a moment for the air to warm up, but when it did, they both sighed contently, and Robin held her cold, wet hands up to the vents.
Other than the directions to her house, she didn’t say much on the ride back to town. As Brent rolled to a stop beside a tiny, square structure with a chained-link fence around the tidy front yard, bars on the windows, and a paint job that once could have been called white, he frowned. In this neighborhood, he -- a sheriff’s deputy -- would be hesitant about exiting his vehicle. Robin’s place was neat, with a row of flowers along the front of the porch and the patchy grass cut evenly, but the houses on either side of her could only be described as scary. One boasted three vehicles in various levels of disuse in that yard, and the other had clearly been the scene of a recent crime, considering how the Do-Not-Cross tape over the front door still looked shiny and freshly applied.
“Thank you for the ride, Deputy Poole,” Robin said, gathering her purse and yanking on the door handle. “It was very kind of you.”
She was polite, he’d give her that. He’d never heard so many Thank-you’s in a single day since he found her on the side of the road. Unbuckling his seat belt, he exited the car at the same time as her. “I’ll walk you to your door,” he offered, glancing around. Across the street, a group of thugs sneered at him, and Brent rushed around to shield Robin from their glares.
“There’s no need,” she began, but Brent wanted to make sure she got inside and locked her doors, so he wasn’t taking no for an option here. He grasped her elbow and escorted her through her gate and up her porch, keeping one eye on her neighbors and the other on the rest of the street.
“Do you live alone?” he asked roughly, and she skidded to a stop, raising wide eyes to him.
“Why--why do you ask?”
Brent softened his face into an easy smile. He didn’t mean to scare her. “In this area, I’d be afraid of living alone,” he admitted.
“Oh,” she said, glancing over his shoulder at the immediate world around her as if she saw it for the first time. “Yes, I live alone, but I’ll be moving soon, though no one has ever bothered me here.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” he quoted.
“And there’s a last time for so many,” she returned softly, that horrible sadness entering her jade eyes again.
Brent got a sudden urge to steal her away and take her to his Momma. This woman needed someone to look after her. Florence Poole would find a way to bring laughter back into Robin’s life, he didn’t doubt that for a second. Opening his mouth to say...anything, he was stalled by her palm on his chest.
“Please, do no worry about me. I’ll be fine.” She seemed to say that a lot, too. Brent blinked at her hand, pressed into the tan material of his uniform, and he swore his heart beat just a little bit faster, a little bit harder, a little bit determined to express some unknown emotion.
Robin removed her hand, curling her fingers into a loose fist as she lowered her arm by her side. She chewed on her lower lip. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That was rude of me...to touch you.”
“I’m not offended,” he replied in a gruff imitation of his usual deep voice. Brent swallowed hard. “Make sure you lock your doors -- all of them.”
A ghost of a smile graced her lips. “I will. I promise.” And she opened her front door, Brent caught a whiff of rose petals and clean house, and then she was gone, bolting the locks firmly, just as he commanded.
Brent trotted back to his car, mentally noted that the group across the street added a few members to watch his leaving, and drove off. As soon as he got to his own house, he rang his mother. “Brent, dearie!” Florence called when she answered. “How nice of you to call me. I was just thinking of you.”
Brent smiled. His mother was made of sunshine. That was the only way he knew to describe her. “Hey, Momma. I just wanted to tell you that I love you, and I don’t say it often enough.”
His mother paused on the other end of the line. “Oh, hon...what happened?”
Brent sighed, collapsed in his recliner and told his mother about meeting Robin Brooks, the visit to the cemetery, her talking to her daughter’s grave, and taking her home to one of the worse neighborhoods in the city. Reliving the past few hours brought back that urge to cry...but he didn’t. Robin Brooks was now just a memory.