Matters of Faith by Kristy Kiernan Page B

scrambled for the EpiPen and jammed it into her thigh, and their joy when she came back, and they prayed over her again, and how she’d tentatively joined them.
    He said Meghan was okay, that she was talking, that she held their hands . . . until she started gasping again. And that was when she started to vomit, and when Ada clutched him and told him to stay steady, that God was working through Meghan, was testing his faith, his commitment to him, to her. And he’d tried, he’d tried, but his faith wasn’t strong enough, and when Meghan lost consciousness, he’d struggled out of Ada’s grasp, finally throwing her to the side, and started the boat and gunned it, sending Ada flying across the cockpit to split her knees open on the floor, one knee bad enough to need stitches.
    â€œWhere are Marshall and Ada now, ma’am?” the officer asked softly. I shook my head.
    â€œI told him to take her back to our house and to call her parents to come get her,” I said. “I assume they’re there.”
    He nodded his head and closed his notebook before looking at me solemnly. “I hope your daughter comes out of it, ma’am. Here’s my card. Please call me if you think of anything else.”
    I nodded, tucked the card in my pocket, and went back into the hospital room where Meghan lay.
    She’d never regained consciousness. She was alive, but the doctor told us she hadn’t been for a few moments, that she’d been starved for oxygen, and that they didn’t know when, or if, she would wake again.

MARSHALL
    They’d gone home near dinnertime. His father, unable to even look at him, had left the waiting room to go in search of the nurse, and his mother, crying quietly, told him to go home, to find Ada and go home, and to have her parents arrange to get her. The directive was clear.
    Get her out of their house.
    He didn’t want to see her at all. He wanted his mother to take care of it. He only wanted to curl up in a ball and allow his mind to blank, to find the spiritual clarity he’d been so high on just that morning. Faith was supposed to sustain people in times of crisis, but it had fled his soul at the first sign of trouble. And this was such trouble, such horrible, nightmarish trouble.
    He’d found Ada sitting in a chair in the corner of the emergency room waiting area, crutches leaning on the table beside her, her legs bandaged. When she saw him, he could do little more than shake his head at her before saying gruffly, his voice foreign to himself: “Let’s go.”
    He’d allowed her to make her way alone across the parking lot on her crutches and started the car, watching her hobble toward him in the rearview mirror, wishing he had the guts to put it in reverse and extinguish her from his view.
    She worked her crutches into the backseat and got in the car, groaning as she bent her legs, and finally slammed the door shut with a sigh. She was clutching a sheaf of papers in her left hand and as they brushed the hairs of his arm he recoiled as if singed.
    She didn’t speak until they had pulled out of the parking lot. “Is she—is everything okay?”
    He rolled to a stop at a red light and looked at her, really looked at her. Her tiny face was pinched in pain, her mouth drawn into a tight line—a mouth he’d placed his own lips on. The lines of her delicate shoulders he’d run his hands across, small, perfect breasts he’d caressed, the first he’d held, kissed, her slender hips tucked back into the seat cupping her perfect bottom that fit right in his hands as if sculpted just for them.
    He hated her.
    And he hated himself for wanting her so desperately at the same time, for feeling his cock stir while his sister lay dying. If he had the guts to cut it off right then, he would have.
    She glanced at him and then down at her lap. When the light turned green and he moved forward, she reached over and placed