Harvest by Robert Pobi

Author:Robert Pobi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone

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FOR THE first time in as long as Hemingway could remember, she was alone, something that rarely happened at the station and never happened during daylight hours. The rain filled the air with static that blocked out ambient noise. She stared out the window, watching the buildings across the street flicker through the heavy downpour.

Her corner of the floor was abandoned and quiet; Papandreou and Lincoln were at the clinic waiting for Dr. Selmer; and Phelps had gone for food when they came back from Uncle Dwight’s. The DA was still with Judge Lester. The Matheson boy was with the coroner. Fenton was with her lawyers. All was at rest for the moment.

Except that he was out there, gearing up for another child.

She was tired but that was nothing new. Ever since the incident with Shea she had slept badly. She didn’t suffer nightmares or have residual flashbacks, but for no reason she could understand, she never woke fully rested.

Hemingway didn’t think about Shea anymore, not really. Along with the hospital and the surgeries and the physiotherapy, the memory of him had slowly faded away. Mank was a different story. He came back sometimes, mostly late at night when Daniel was asleep beside her and she was alone inside her head, staring at the shadows on the ceiling. She’d think of him, remember some little thing they had talked about, and she’d start to wonder what they might have had. She’d lie there in the dark and cry. But lately those moments were becoming rarer, and part of her worried that she’d forget about Mank altogether.

It wasn’t fair to Daniel. She loved him; he loved her. What they had seemed to be right for both of them. And she felt safe with him, something she had never felt with Mankiewicz. And now they might be having a baby.

But it wasn’t just a baby; it was a human life. From cradle to grave and all the pain in between. How could she bring a child into a world where the people who told you they had a handle on goodness tended to be the first to judge and to hate? Where genocide was taking place all over the world and torture was deemed okay by the government? Where a monster was out there sawing children up while their hearts were still beating?

She closed her eyes, focusing on the thrum of the rain against the world outside and the roof above her head, and everything else ceased to exist. She was back in the river, on the Hudson, feeling nothing more than the wind in her hair and the resistance of the water. She felt her body swaying a little, riding the swells in her kayak. She gripped the arms of the chair and the steel warmed to her touch like the carbon shaft of her paddle. For an instant she was under the George Washington Bridge, being pulled downriver by the tide, traffic rumbling across the spans high overhead.

And it all fell apart to the chirp of her cell phone.

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