How to Knit a Heart Back Home Read online

  How to Knit a Heart

  Back Home

  A Cypress Hollow Yarn

  RACHAEL HERRON

  For Lala Hulse,

  for putting on her thinking cap at all the right times.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Rachael Herron

  From Rachael Herron

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  If you cast on with joy, your stitches will dance. If you cast on with your eyes to the floor, your stitches will likely run that direction the first chance they get.

  —ELIZA CARPENTER

  In the dim light of the bar, Lucy could barely see the sock she was knitting, but it didn’t matter. These were bar socks, meant to be knitted in the dark.

  “This is the best kind of night,” said Lucy.

  “It’s dead,” said Molly, seated at the next bar stool.

  Lucy sighed in happiness and took a sip of what she always ordered, a Manhattan with two cherries, no ice. “I know. Just a regular night. It’s perfect.”

  The crash that followed was deafening, the sound ripping through the bar, tearing metal, shattering glass. A hubcap flew in through the open door. It fell to the floor and then rolled and wobbled across the bar, toppling over with a clang at Lucy’s feet.

  Lucy opened her mouth but nothing came out, and Molly’s wide eyes met hers. Lucy’s brother Jonas threw his cloth onto the bar and reached for the phone.

  With the other bar patrons, Lucy ran outside. A small blue compact car was crumpled like aluminum foil against a pole. A white car was nose to nose with a fire hydrant and a potbellied older man tried to emerge from the driver’s side, saying out his broken window, “I didn’t see her. I swear I didn’t see her.” Blood ran down his forehead.

  The blue car hissed and spat as the engine protested its demise and a flame growled underneath the chassis of the engine.

  A man in a black leather jacket pulled on the handle of the door of the vehicle, trying to wrest it open while the woman inside struggled with the seat belt. She screamed and looked out at them, her eyes wide, her mouth twisted in pain.

  Lucy’s stomach lurched as if she were seasick as she recognized first the car, and then the hair through the broken driver’s-side window. “It’s Abigail. Oh, God, it’s Abigail MacArthur. We have to get her out of there.” Lucy peered through the back window to look for a child’s car seat. “Do you have Lizzie in there?”

  Abigail shook her head and said, “She’s home. With Cade.” She gasped as something under the car made a horrible noise. “Please. Get me out.”

  Lucy looked at the man in the leather jacket fighting with the door handle. “She’s pregnant.” She glanced over her shoulder at the potbellied man. “Were you with that driver? Why are you . . .”

  “I was going past and saw him T-bone her.” The man put his entire body into trying to get the car door open, but the metal was too bent. A crackling sound came from the pole’s wires, which dangled just above his head.

  Lucy’s brother Jonas, now outside, said, “Back, all of you get back.” He used his arms and body to push the crowd onto the sidewalk. “Lucy! Get away from that car!”

  The potbellied man who had caused the accident yelled something from behind them about his insurance company.

  “Fire department’s on the way,” Lucy’s mother yelled.

  “There won’t be time,” the man in the leather jacket said to Lucy. “In a second I’m going to need your help. Don’t move.”

  Lucy had no more breath to hold. Under the warped metal at the front of the car, the orange glow of the fire grew brighter.

  He jerked his elbow through the rear driver’s side window, somehow still intact. Then he reached through and fought with the lock on the door and pulled until the back door popped open.

  “Don’t move her!” someone in the crowd yelled. “She’s injured!”

  Leaning into the car, he reached forward and then retreated. “I can’t,” he gasped, putting a hand to his hip as if he’d wrenched it. He looked pale and off balance. His eyes met Lucy’s and her heart skittered into overdrive. “Push in,” he said. “See if you can drop her seat backward. I can’t fit in there.”

  Lucy took a deep breath, like she’d done in training exercises. She’d worked car fires before, but never with a person inside, never from this close. “It won’t explode, right?” Her voice shook. They had to hurry.

  “It won’t. Not just like that. I’ve seen lots of car fires. You can do it.”

  Lucy moved forward.

  It was hot and loud inside. Lucy leaned in to the backseat area and drove her hand up the side along the front door. She could feel the heat growing beneath the car. What if she got stuck and burned to death along with Abigail? Would it be fast? Would it hurt?

  “The latch is on the side of the seat,” said the man behind her. “Feel for it and pull up.”

  “I can’t find it!” Lucy yelled.

  “Please, please, please,” said Abigail, in a strange, singsong voice.

  “Hang on, Abigail, we’ve almost got you,” Lucy said.

  “You can do it.” His voice came from behind her shoulder.

  There. Lucy could feel the hot plastic under her hand. She pulled and the driver’s seat dropped back. Lucy pushed herself out, away from the heat, away from Abigail’s awful bloodied mouth and panicked eyes.

  He said, “Okay, now we pull.”

  “Her neck could be broken, you fucking morons!” someone yelled.

  His voice was low in Lucy’s ear. “I know what I’m doing.”

  Lucy only hesitated for a split second as a tendril of fear bloomed in her heart. Moving Abigail was against all her training. They had no backboard. No C-spine.

  But then something gave a loud boom underneath the car, and it got suddenly hotter. Lucy helped him, dragging Abigail over the top of her seat, being as careful of her stomach as they could be. They wrestled her out of the car and moved her toward the sidewalk. Lucy’s younger brother Silas was now next to them, holding Abigail by the legs.

  As they set Abigail safely on the ground in front of the bar, the car went from glowing underneath, a flicker or two licking the front end, to completely engulfed in flames, erupting into a fireball. The heat drove the crowd back even farther, some people retreating back inside the bar to peek out the windows.

  Lucy heard the sirens coming. She saw the fla
shing lights reflecting against windows even before her fellow volunteers made the turn onto Main.

  The same drunk guy who’d called them morons for moving the woman was babbling, “They saved her. She woulda gone up in flames . . .”

  Abigail was crying now, weeping.

  Lucy felt a sob rising in her own chest that she wouldn’t give in to. Molly stopped digging her fingers into Lucy’s arm and moved to clutching her hand. “You saved her. You saved her.”

  Lucy could only stare.

  She watched them move Abigail into a stable position. Her brother Silas used his arms to steady her head, one hand over her forehead to keep her from lifting it to look around. The man in the leather jacket moved his hands over her body as if looking for the source of the bleeding.

  God. It couldn’t be him, could it?

  And just like that, it came back to her. Owen Bancroft. The man she thought she’d never see again. Holy hell.

  Where had he come from? Lucy looked down the street, and her eyes closed in on it as if drawn by magnets: that damn blue Mustang was parked over by the art-supply shop. So he still had that car. She wasn’t even really surprised.

  Paramedics moved in and loaded Abigail into the ambulance.

  Captain Jake Keller and some of the local volunteer fire brigade extinguished the blazing car. The street went dark as they shut down electricity to the pole. The only light now was from the moon and the lights on the firefighters’ helmets. The salty smell of the Pacific mixed with the metallic smell of the charred car.

  Lucy couldn’t take her eyes off Owen. He stood with Silas, shoulder to shoulder, their backs to the crowd. They watched the ambulance tearing up Oak Street toward the hospital, siren whooping.

  The men turned. Silas said something and Owen jerked his chin, as if in agreement. Owen’s jacket was ripped and his cheek was smudged. He was limping.

  Lucy tried to breathe around a sudden judder in her chest and examined Owen more closely. She tried to focus on stilling her breath and not on the black spots dancing in front of her eyes.

  If it was possible, Owen looked even better than he had in high school, seventeen years ago. She willed his dark blue eyes to meet hers, and then didn’t know if she’d be able to meet them if he looked at her.

  Owen stood on the street, alone, as Silas walked away from him. He’d just saved a woman’s life. He still looked perfect, dammit to hell.

  Then Molly pulled Lucy into the bar, and she lost sight of the man she’d never forgotten.

  Jonas lit the bar with candles. Lucy peered through the dim light at her knitting. Her hands were shaking too violently to even make one stitch, but it didn’t stop her from trying. Always, after working an incident, she got this—the shakes, the queasiness, the sense her body had suffered an interior earthquake. It was the worst part of working with the volunteer fire brigade—the aftershocks.

  “Yeehaw!” said Jonas, slamming down the bar phone. “Captain Keller says Abigail’s fine, and so’s the baby. Drinks on the house!”

  Molly said, “Are you sure that’s your cheap-ass brother?”

  “I feel like I’m going to throw up.” Lucy fought another wave of nausea. Thank God Abigail was going to be okay. Owen Bancroft was back.

  “Did you have too much to drink?”

  “Didn’t you see what just happened?” Lucy looked around the bar. People were already telling one another the story. The legend was already being crafted.

  Lucy’s mother held court in a booth, waving her knitting needles around.

  Her father pumped his fist in the air, letting out a yell that was drowned by her younger brother Silas’s whoop as he smacked the eight ball into the side pocket.

  Jonas was behind the bar, moving as if he were in fast-forward.

  Molly said, “I saw. You okay?”

  “She would have died. Ten seconds later, if we hadn’t gotten her out of there, she would have been on fire. Her whole body, burning. While she was alive. The baby . . . And Cade, with little Lizzie at home wouldn’t have . . .”

  Molly shook her head. “You were awesome. I’ve never seen you work; you just usually answer your pager and run out when you’re on call. But I even saw Abigail’s legs move when the ambulance guy told her to wiggle her toes. She’s gonna be fine. You get to do that all the time? And that tall firefighter was hot.” Molly reapplied her lipstick, using a metal candleholder as a mirror.

  Lucy clapped her hand over her mouth. She would not be sick here, not in her brother’s bar. She slid off her bar stool and dashed past the pool table into the women’s room, where she knelt in front of the toilet. She just made it.

  A few minutes later, she splashed cold water on her face. In the mirror, she barely recognized herself. She was pale—white, really—with high pink spots on her cheeks. Her eyes looked too big for her face. Dammit.

  No. She didn’t do that all the time. Most car fires didn’t have someone trapped inside. When she took the pager four days a month, the medicals she ran were usually older people with difficulty breathing, or fall victims. She’d had a couple of CPR calls, but they’d been elderly, expected deaths.

  Lucy didn’t wrestle her pregnant friends out of the jaws of imminent death regularly.

  And he hadn’t recognized her. Of course he hadn’t. She looked like hell. And why would Owen Bancroft remember who she was? He’d left town right after his high-school graduation. Sure, he’d kissed her. It was a kiss she’d never forgotten, even though she wished she could, but there was no way he remembered it, not after all these years. Most people had interesting lives, after all.

  Lucy grimaced at her reflection and made her way back out into the main room. As she passed the table where her mother was knitting with her friends, her mother stopped her.

  “Honey, do you know anyone that wears a size-eleven shoe?”

  Lucy’s mouth dropped open. “Really, Mom?”

  Toots Harrison nodded, her knitting needles flashing. “I got some cowboy boots at the thrift store that are divine, purple and red and green, but I can’t find anyone that they really belong to. They’re so big.”

  “Did you see what just happened out there? To Abigail?”

  Toots closed her eyes and nodded happily. “It was so good she got out in time. I wonder if she has big feet. Do you think she does?”

  Lucy sighed. “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll ask her when I see her, okay?”

  “Okay, darling.”

  Lucy made her way back to Molly and crawled up on her bar stool.

  Jonas handed out the last shot from his free tray and leaned across the bar. “You gonna live, kiddo?”

  She nodded. “Don’t call me that.” Her voice only wobbled a little bit, but Jonas wasn’t paying attention to her anyway.

  The lights blazed as power was restored. The jukebox kicked back on, blaring “I Will Survive,” mid song. Lucy squeaked, startled.

  Silas swaggered past Lucy’s bar stool. He held up his shot glass and raised his eyebrows.

  “You had your round,” said Jonas. “Pay up for the next one.”

  Silas flipped Jonas off with his free hand. But they grinned at each other, and Lucy watched something pass between them. There had always been a bond between the brothers, something that Lucy was used to being left out of. She looked down into her empty glass and decided against a refill.

  Jonas turned to Lucy and said, “That guy that helped out, that was Owen Bancroft, wasn’t it? He was in my class, so he was a year older than you, right? Do you remember him?”

  “Maybe.” Lucy shrugged.

  “He was a bad seed, that one.”

  “Oh, my God,” said Lucy. “You sound about a hundred years old. And weren’t you the one who got busted with weed in Mr. Dwight’s shop class, speaking of bad seeds?”

  “Yeah, but Owen barely graduated. And then there was his dad, with the drugs and arrests, and dying in prison and all.”

  Lucy dropped her gaze to the top of the bar again. “Just because his dad sc
rewed up didn’t mean no one could trust him.” She could feel Jonas staring at her but she didn’t look up.

  “You seem to remember him pretty well, huh?”

  “Are you serious? That’s the one you told me about, right? The one? From high school? Your bad boy?” said Molly, nudging Lucy in the side.

  “Hey, I gotta go.” Lucy stood, grabbing her knitting bag. She shoved the sock into it unceremoniously, knowing she was losing stitches that she’d regret later.

  Molly raised her eyebrows but stood also. “I’ll go with you. I’m on call in the morning, and I hate being woken by the phone.”

  Silas was looking deeply into the jukebox. Lucy kissed him on the cheek. He looked surprised, but as usual, he didn’t say anything. Then she went around to the back of the bar and kissed Jonas’s cheek, too. His face relaxed and he laughed and flicked her with the cloth he was holding. “God, Luce.”

  Lucy waved at her father, but he was already back to watching the game.

  Her mother was with the knitters, their needles flashing as their heads bobbed, rehashing what had happened. Lucy blew her a kiss. Her mother reached up, grabbed it and mimed putting it in her pocket, and then blew one back.

  At the crash, police officers were filling out forms, and a tow truck beeped as it backed up toward Abigail’s car.

  “How are they possibly going to move that?” Lucy pointed.

  “That’s what they do.”

  “What if Abigail was still in there? What if she was . . .”

  “Then they probably wouldn’t be towing it yet,” Molly said. “Geez. It’s all fine, okay? It was exciting! Different! Weren’t you just complaining it was too quiet? And then you had to work on a day you weren’t even scheduled to volunteer. But you loved it, didn’t you?”

  Lucy didn’t say anything. The damp ocean air was cool. In the distance, the surf crashed in rhythm that Lucy knew like her own heartbeat. She wrapped her scarf more firmly around her neck, bringing it up over her nose.

  “So Owen is the guy you told me about from high school,” said Molly. “Didn’t you say he was in San Francisco?”