Andy raced out of the room before I could stop him. I followed him into the hallway, trying to grab his arm.
“Don’t go down!” I said. He was too fast for me, though, and he went flying down the stairs.
“Stay out of there!” I heard Mom yell at him. “There’s glass everywhere.”
“Mom?” I called from the top of the stairs. “What happened?”
“Stay up there, Maggie.” Mom came into view in the downstairs foyer. She was holding the phone to her ear and looking toward the family room. “Someone threw a…I don’t know what it is. A rock, Marcus?”
Uncle Marcus answered her, but I couldn’t hear what he said.
“A chunk of concrete or something,” Mom said. “Someone threw…Yes. Hello?” She spoke into the phone, and her voice was shaking. “This is Laurel Lockwood,” she said. “Someone just threw a piece of concrete through our front window.”
I walked into my bedroom, the teddy bear clutched in my arms. Maybe I should have gone downstairs to help clean up, but I was too freaked out. Things like this didn’t happen on Topsail Island, and I knew it wasn’t any random act of violence. It was me they were after, but it was my family getting hurt.
From my bedroom window after dinner, I could see two of the news vans still outside. What were they going to do, sit there all night? All week? I bet they loved seeing the cops arrive and watching Uncle Marcus put the storm shutters over the broken window.
I closed my blinds. After a while, I got up the courage to turn on my TV and put on the news. Then I sat on my bed, waiting, my chin resting on the teddy bear in my arms. I didn’t have to wait long. Suddenly the screen was full of the people outside the prison, the ones shouting and holding signs.
“Amid protests,” a woman reporter who looked no older than me said, “Maggie Lockwood was released from Kawatchee Women’s Correctional Institution today after serving a twelve-month sentence for the attempted burning of Drury Memorial Church in Surf City.” She went on for a minute about who I was and what I’d done. Then she started interviewing people in the crowd. The first was a dark-haired man who was so angry, little bits of spit flew out of his mouth when he spoke.
“She gets twelve short months in prison and then goes on with her life like nothing happened!” he said.
“I wish,” I said out loud.
“My uncle is dead,” a young woman said. Her face was twisted into a mask of hatred. For me. “He was such a good man. And that girl just scoots out of here with her slick lawyer and everything,” she said. She had to be Mr. Eggles’s niece, since he was the only adult killed in the fire. I thought of my own uncle. Imagined him dead, the victim of someone like me. No! I shuddered, waving my hand in front of my face to erase the thought.
Reverend Bill was on the screen then. I gasped. I so didn’t want to have to look at him! He stood in front of a brick church. The new Drury Memorial? Wow. Totally different. “Many people are angry,” he said. “We’ve managed to rebuild Drury Memorial. We’re nearly finished. But we can’t rebuild those lives that were lost or shattered, and that’s hard for a lot of people. I hope, though, that this can be an opportunity to practice forgiveness.”
Forgiveness? Reverend Bill? What a hypocrite. He hated me. Hated my whole family.
Someone knocked on my bedroom door.
“Come in,” I said.
Mom poked her head inside, glanced at the TV.
“Oh, Maggie. Don’t watch that.”
“It’s all right,” I said.
“Come downstairs and have some ice cream with us. Chocolate-chip mint.”
I shook my head. My stomach hurt. “Stay away from the windows down there,” I said. I was afraid that first chunk of concrete wouldn’t be the last.
“Come on,” Mom insisted. “We want to be with you tonight.”
It was weird in the family room with all the draperies pulled shut. We never closed those draperies, but we didn’t want anyone to be able to look at us while we sat—away from the windows—eating ice cream. At least everyone else was eating, while I pushed the melting green stuff around in my bowl. The phone rang, and Mom picked it up. She looked at the caller ID and shrugged as she handed the phone to Uncle Marcus. I guessed he was the family spokesperson.
“Hello?” he said, then, “Hey. Is everything okay?” I watched a line appear between his eyebrows and wondered who he was talking to. “Okay,” he said. “She’s right here.”
I was afraid he meant me, but he covered the mouthpiece and looked at Laurel. “It’s Keith. He sounds shaken up.”
We were all quiet as Mom took the phone. I tried to picture how Keith looked now. The last time I saw him was in the hospital, when his arms looked like giant white tree stumps, thin steel rods sticking out of the bandages covering the fingers of his left hand. More bandages had covered half his face. I knew he was scarred. No one had told me exactly how bad it was. I could guess, though.
Mom held the phone away from her ear and looked at Andy.
“When Sara…Miss Sara said she was going to the store, did she say when she planned on getting home?” she asked.
Andy licked his spoon. “I don’t think so.”
“Did she say what store? What kind of shopping?”
“I don’t remember.”
She spoke into the phone again. “He doesn’t know anything, Keith,” she said. She stood up, turned her back toward us and walked toward the kitchen. She lowered her voice, but I could still hear her. “Why don’t you try Dawn?” she asked. “Maybe she’ll know something.”
Dawn Reynolds was the woman Ben had cheated on me with. Or, as I admitted to myself this past year, I was the woman—the girl, really—Ben cheated on Dawn with. He’d lived with her, after all. Thank God he’d gone back to his wife in Charlotte and I wouldn’t have to worry about bumping into him. Oh my God. That would be the worst.
“What’s up?” Uncle Marcus asked as Mom hung up the phone and sat down again.
“Keith got home around five, and Sara wasn’t there and she’s still not home.” She picked up her empty ice-cream bowl like she was going to get up and carry it to the kitchen, but she didn’t budge from her seat. “He saw the note I left, thanking her for watching Andy.”
“She probably told him she’d be out and he forgot,” Uncle Marcus said.
“Kind of strange, though.” Mom frowned. “What time did she leave, Andy?”
“Leave where?” Andy asked.
“The trailer. Their mobile home.”
Andy shrugged. “I
