Accidental Happiness Read Online Free PDF Page A

the night, I searched her expression for sarcasm, for anger; but didn’t find any. She was asking the question, as if it could possibly be true. She looked worn-out, scared.
    “How could I have been waiting for you? Why the hell would I have fired the gun if I’d known it was you?”
    She shrugged, her paranoia apparently having run its course.
    “I couldn’t sleep,” I went on. “I have trouble sometimes. I heard you and I thought . . . I don’t know. When you stepped on the boat, I just reacted. I don’t remember pulling the trigger. I wish I could take it back. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone, especially not a child. God, you have to believe that much.”
    She turned her head, looked out the car window, and I didn’t press. Everything felt too raw. I glanced at her again, couldn’t get over actually seeing her, having her in my car—after all the years of wondering what she was really like. In her gypsy getup—wild, curly hair falling around her face—she looked exotic, the precise opposite of my straight hair, ponytail look. My clothes ran toward the casual coastal, entirely ordinary variety. I owned a few skirts, but I wasn’t at all sure where they were. How could Ben have chosen such different women to love?
    After a few miles and an eternity of silence, she spoke again.
    “I know you didn’t mean to hurt Angel,” she said, her voice softer. “I just don’t know what to do. I’m here and she’s there with God knows what happening all around her.”
    “We’ll be there in five minutes,” I told her. “They’re probably arriving with her now. We aren’t that far behind them. Just hang on.”
    She’d settled back, gave over at least some level of trust to my navigational skills. She stared out her window again, didn’t say anything more, and I realized how much I was dreading the conversation we would have about Benjamin. She would ask again and I would have to say it.
He’s dead.
    I went for days, still, forcing those words out of my thoughts, denying them by omission. I had friends whose husbands were in the military. Those guys shipped out, stayed away longer than Benjamin had been gone, a lot longer sometimes. He could just be
away.
The fantasy seemed more plausible than the truth. That he had died. How could he have woken up beside me one morning and died that afternoon?
    “It’s getting light over there,” Reese said absently. “See the way the sky changes color?”
    She was making noise so she didn’t have to think. I knew the drill all too well. Making your mind busy, wanting to travel back to yesterday’s dawn, before anything happened. On some days, occasional mornings, it was still possible in the gauzy prewaking moments of the day to
not
know that Ben was gone, if only for seconds at a time. Even allowing for the crushing reality that followed, I craved the naive awakenings, took each one as a gift. A brief moment of life as I’d remembered it, handed back to me.
    “I’m going to be sick.” She interrupted my thoughts.
    We were near the hospital, on the back street that went around to the Emergency entrance.
    “Let me pull over.” I was veering toward the curb as I spoke and before I’d even stopped the car she had the door open, was leaning out.
    Blood and vomit. I’d have to burn the car when everything was said and done. I turned away from her, hoping to offer privacy, but the sounds of her retching were heartbreaking. I handed her a roll of paper towels from the backseat. She took them without saying anything.
    “Can I do anything?” I asked, still looking away.
    She didn’t answer, so I turned to face her. It seemed that she had missed soiling herself and the car after all. Small wonders. I saw in her face that she had moved already from sickness to sorrow; was hunched over, the comforter still around her. She sat half out of the door, crying. When she straightened, she lifted the edge of her skirt, still wet for reasons I had yet to sort out, and rubbed the