Rescue

by Anita Shreve

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

A powerful and moving story of love, loss and recrimination, from the bestselling author of Testimony.
Peter Webster, a rookie paramedic, pulls a young woman from her wrecked car. Sheila Arsenault is a gorgeous enigma - streetwise and tough-talking, with haunted eyes and fierce desires. Soon Sheila and Peter are embroiled in an intense love affair. Eighteen years later and Peter is raising their teenage daughter, Rowan, alone. But Rowan is veering off course and Peter fears for her future. He seeks out the only person who may be able to help her…

Release date: November 30, 2010

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 304

Sample

“From its opening car crash, Anita Shreve’s Rescue is worth the ride…. No one can create the beginning of a complex relationship like Shreve…. She gets deep inside these characters,
and her insights draw us into their lives. This random encounter in the small hours of the morning leads into a story of hope
and fear, of promises made and broken…. The relationship between the secretive, hard-drinking, oddly vulnerable Sheila and
the down-to-earth small-town hero is wonderfully etched. Shreve creates a little world, peoples it with believable characters,
and puts them through agonizing and joyful moments without a false note or a dissonant figure of speech.”


—Brigitte Weeks, Washington Post

“With taut, evocative prose, Anita Shreve takes us deeply into a single father’s love for his daughter. His profession is
rescuing strangers from serious harm, but what if those closest to him are beyond rescue? This engrossing novel forces its
flesh-and-blood characters, and us, to live through these compelling and haunting questions, whose answer leads to a most
universal place, the human heart.”


—Andre Dubus III, author of The Garden of Last Days and Townie

“Fans of Anita Shreve will likely devour this new novel…. EMT Peter Webster is so smitten with Sheila, a beautiful yet deeply
damaged young woman he encounters at the scene of a drunk-driving accident, that he marries her soon after…. The narrative,
which jumps back and forth between their marriage and the years during which Webster raises his daughter on his own, is compelling.”


—Sara Vilkomerson, Entertainment Weekly

“The prolific Shreve brings her customary care to this thoroughly absorbing, perfectly paced domestic drama. Alternating between
life-and-death scenarios Peter encounters on the job and the fraught family tension between father and daughter, Shreve pulls
readers right into her story.”


—Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

“Anita Shreve knows love may be intense, life-changing, and passionate, but it is never enough. Her characters bruise each
other as much as they comfort each other and in Rescue their lack of understanding leads to wrecked lives and loneliness…. Rescue is full of themes that Shreve loves: how a moment can change a life; loss and love; forgiveness and pain. These have often
been the backbone for her writing…. Rescue is Shreve at her best, looking at a family tragedy and the events that caused those involved to reevaluate their past and
to find the courage to possibly change their lives.”


—Mary Foster, Associated Press

“A compassionate, perceptive, uncommonly moving tale of a family shattered and redeemed. Rescue picks you up by the scruff of the neck and refuses to let you go.”


—Stacy Schiff, author of Cleopatra: A Life

“Smooth…. The story runs like a well-oiled machine and should sate the author’s fans.”

—Publishers Weekly

“A paramedic and the troubled young beauty he saves propel Shreve’s engrossing latest…. With the insistent thrum of life-and-death
EMT calls as background, Shreve’s vividly told tale captures the deep-seated fears of mortality and loneliness that can drive
us to test the bounds of family and forgiveness.”


—Joanna Powell, People

“Anita Shreve, the bestselling master of thrillers that keep you up way too late, has a new one for your nightstand.”

—Redbook

“This book is why I love Anita Shreve: her prose is so flawlessly disciplined and elegant, the characters seem too real to
be made out of words, and the story she unfolds is gripping, fiercely intelligent, and deeply moving. Rescue is a literary novel for those ruled by the heart.”


—Augusten Burroughs, author of You Better Not Cry

“In Rescue, the most gracefully economical of Shreve’s novels, salvation takes the form of hard-earned wisdom, not easy redemption.”


—Anna Mundow, Boston Globe

“Webster is every woman’s ideal of the nurturing male…. It’s hard not to root for such a WASP mensch.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“Shreve’s sixteenth novel will keep her fans turning the pages…. Shreve draws us in with her feckless characters. Remember
The Pilot’s Wife? She had plenty of clues and so did we, but we couldn’t put it down. Same here.”


—Valerie Ryan, Shelf Awareness

“Anita Shreve gets the (sometimes gory) facts right in her newest book…. Shreve has made a comfortable living writing intense,
thoughtful novels about relationships, grief, and the peculiarities of chance…. Rescue is about Peter Webster, a lonely and hardworking paramedic in Vermont. The small-town setting allows Shreve to show Webster’s
entire life—his parents, friends, neighbors, and values—in a way that a book set in a big city cannot.”


—Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Shreve knows what readers like: books that feature tragedy and hope.”

—Dorothy Robinson, Metro (New York)


“ Rescue has everything a reader could want in a novel. It’s a literary page-turner with gorgeous writing, layered characters, a gripping
story. No one is better than Shreve at mapping the emotional intersections of families—that place where tension, suspense,
inevitability, and love collide and take our breath away. I adore this book!”


—Mameve Medwed, author of Of Men and Their Mothers

“A treat for readers…. Rescue is another domestic tragedy, a genre Shreve has mastered…. Regular readers will know that Shreve often includes a surprise
in her novels, which definitely keeps things interesting…. The characters of Webster—solid, honest, and hardworking—and of
Sheila—flawed, but as Shreve describes her, ‘sassy and dangerous’—are well worth getting to know…. The book’s themes of forgiveness
and fractured families ring true; the fragility of our health and relationships is presented in a true-to-life, believable
way. Shreve said she hopes readers will find the book a solid, heart-filled story, and indeed it is.”


—Tracy Sherlock, Vancouver Sun

“A beautiful novel about the limits of forgiveness and the fragility of family. Pitch-perfect all the way to the final line.”

—Dennis Lehane, author of Moonlight Mile

“Heart-pounding…. An engrossing novel about adventure in Africa and a marriage in turmoil.”

—Cynthia Dickison, Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Contrasting the sweetness of young love with the primal recklessness of lust, Shreve paints a chilling portrait of how bad
decisions in brief moments can ruin lives.”


—Joanna Powell, People

“Shreve, with her serene style and impeccable prose, returns…. Here, a young widow gets drawn into a rivalry between two adult
brothers, with heartbreaking consequences.”


—The Atlantic

“Engrossing…. An excellent novel about new beginnings threatened by old memories that ultimately reveal uncomfortable secrets
from the past…. By book’s end, lives are drastically changed, and Shreve has made readers care that they have.”


—Tasca Robinson, Fort Worth Star-Telegram

“Compelling. The questions of what led to the baby’s abandonment, and how the plucky, smart, but still childish narrator will
come to terms with such human evil, make the book difficult to put down.”


—Kelly Jane Torrance, Washington Times

“Anita Shreve is up to her old page-turning tricks…. There’s something addictive about her literary tales of love and lust….
Shreve is a master at depicting passion’s ferocious grip.”


—Jocelyn McClurg, USA Today

“A helluva read…. Shreve simply has the Gift—the ability to hook you from the first page and not let go until the final word.”

—Zofia Smardz, Washington Post Book World

“Shreve is careful in this story of an undying love affair to let the pressure grow slowly, compelling her readers to turn
each page hungrily to gain a deeper understanding of the characters’ lives.”


—Rebecca Banks Zakin, Providence Journal

“Fortune’s Rocks kept me reading long into the night…. Shreve renders an adolescent girl’s plunge into disastrous passion with excruciating
precision and acuteness.”


—Katherine A. Powers, Boston Globe

“Gripping…. You don’t want to stop turning the pages once Kathryn has opened her door.”

—Georgia Jones-Davis, Washington Post Book World

“Engrossing…. A haunting novel…. Shreve unravels themes of adultery, jealousy, crimes of passion, incest, negligence, loss,
and guilt…. ultimately creating an almost intolerable tension.”


—Susan Kenney, New York Times Book Review

“Touching…. The monumental events of World War II provide a vivid, terrifying backdrop to what is essentially a tender but
tragic love story. This is war on an intimate scale.”


—Jocelyn McClurg, Hartford Courant



Back Bay Books

Webster jogs down the narrow stairs in stocking feet and says, “French toast,” as he rounds the corner.


Rowan blushes over the pan, the one that has more scratches on it than Teflon.

Webster loves his daughter’s face. Even when she was an infant, she had that extra, what, quarter inch above the eyebrows.
As though someone took a pair of pliers, stretched her head a little. It makes her blue eyes open up. It makes her look a
bit startled by life. Webster likes that. Rowan has the same widow’s peak as Webster’s, her hair brown, almost black. Rowan
covers hers with bangs. Webster covers his, more pronounced, with a baseball cap. The widow’s peak is a problem, always will
be.


Webster, on automatic, opens the fridge for the juice.

“I already did that,” Rowan says.

Webster turns and sees that the kitchen table is set with plates, silverware, napkins, and butter in the old butter dish instead
of just a saucer, the juice in proper juice glasses. Rowan has on a pale blue sweater from J. Crew that he bought her for
Christmas. Something is ending, and they want to mark it. Webster has been thinking this for months now.


The birthday has to be celebrated in the morning. Webster has the night shift.

Rowan slips the French toast onto the plates.


“You should have applied to culinary school,” Webster says as he sits down and pulls the chair closer to the table.

Mistake. He sees the tiny wince at Rowan’s mouth. It’s there, and then it’s gone.

Rowan has been rejected by three schools, one of them Middlebury, her top choice. Webster remembers his daughter waiting at
the computer in the kitchen for five o’clock on March 15, the day and hour at which some of the schools sent out acceptances
and rejections. Webster was messing around with the dishes, washing the same glass twice, pretending he wasn’t there. He knew
to the minute when five o’clock arrived. The minute came and went. More minutes came and went. Not a sound from Rowan. No
joyous yelp, no happy shout. Maybe the schools were late with the results, Webster thought, though he knew that whenever you
hoped for divine intervention, it never worked out.


That day, he gazed at her back. The girl was still, studying her hands, fiddling with a silver ring on her middle finger.
Webster wanted to say something, to touch her, but he couldn’t. It would embarrass her, make it worse. Better if Webster left
Rowan her dignity. After twenty minutes in the same position, Rowan stood and left the kitchen. She went up to her room and
didn’t come down, even for supper. Webster was angry with the schools, and then sad. By morning, he had worked himself around
to encouraging. He talked up the University of Vermont, which had been her safety school and to which she had been accepted
in the fall. She didn’t want to go there, though. She had hoped for a smaller college. What Webster minded most was the loss
of the joyous yelp, that happy shout.


Rowan deserved it.

Webster deserved it.


“Delicious,” Webster now says.

The bread is thick, drenched with egg and milk and perfectly toasted. Rowan loads her plate with syrup. Webster eats his toast
plain, the way he’s always done, though sometimes he covers the last piece with jelly. Webster doesn’t recall buying the eggs,
and he’s pretty sure the syrup can had only crust at the bottom.


“I’ve got the four-to-midnight,” Webster says. “Covering for Koenig. His daughter’s getting married. Rehearsal dinner tonight.”

Rowan nods. Maybe Webster has already told her. “I’ve got practice till six anyway,” she says.

What to do about Rowan’s supper? He’s been asking himself that question for fifteen years. He lifts his head and notices a
wrapped plate of extra French toast on the stove.


Done.

“Open your present now,” Rowan says, the first time either of them has acknowledged the birthday, the father forty today.
Rowan, five nine and seventeen, stands and glides into the dining room. She returns and sets the present to one side of her
father’s plate. The box is wrapped in gold paper with red Christmas trees. It’s almost June. “It’s all I could find,” she
says.


Webster leans back and takes a sip of coffee. He has the present in his lap. He sees that Rowan has been generous with the
tape. With his Swiss Army knife, a present from Sheila a hundred years ago, Webster gets the package open and puts the silver
cube on the table. He begins to fool with it. He discovers that if he lays it on one side, it tells the time and date. If
he sets it on another, it shows the weather for the next four days: two suns; a cloud with rain coming out; and then a sun.


“It’s hooked up to a weather channel somewhere,” Rowan explains as she moves her chair closer to her father’s. “It’s better if you keep it near a window. This side is an alarm clock.
I tried it. It’s not too bad. The sound, I mean.”


Webster guesses the silver cube cost Rowan at least three days’ pay from her job at the Giant Mart over the state line. She
commutes from Vermont to New York and back again two afternoons a week and every Saturday if there isn’t a game. Webster puts
his hand on Rowan’s back and lightly rubs it just below her long neck. “I can really use the outside temperature thing,” he
says. “And what does this side do?”


Rowan takes the silver cube from her father and demonstrates. “You rock it from side to side and then set it down. It tells
your future inside the black square.”


Webster remembers the black balls of his youth, the ones with sayings floating in who knew what liquid. Probably something
toxic.


“Whose future?”

“Yours, I guess. It’s yours now.”

Rowan returns the cube, setting it on her father’s lap. They wait. Abruptly, Webster flips the cube over, but not before he’s
seen the ghost of his future struggling to the surface. Prepare for a surprise. He refuses to own the prediction.


“Why did you do that?” Rowan asks.

“Surprises, in my business, are nearly always bad.”

“You’re too cynical,” she says.

“I’m not cynical. Just careful.”

“Too careful for your own good,” she adds as she glances at the clock. “I have to go.”

She slips from her chair and kisses his cheek. He watches her graceful movements, performed a thousand times. She holds up
her hair, twists it, and lets it fall over her right shoulder. He’s never seen this particular gesture from his daughter,
and it hits him in the gut.


“Thanks for the breakfast and the present,” he says.

“Sure.”

Webster swivels back to his French toast.

He registers an odd silence in the hallway, not the rattle of the knob, the usual friction of the warped door in its frame.
After a few seconds, Webster turns his head around.


His daughter is still in the back hallway, gazing out the window of the door.

“What’s up?” he asks.

“Nothing.”

“Rowan?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t bite my head off.”

Webster notices what might be the outline of a hard pack of cigarettes in the pocket of her light jacket. He suspects his
daughter is drinking. Is she smoking, too? Is she experimenting? Is this normal for a girl her age?


Webster can’t remember the last time he’s felt relaxed with Rowan. For a few moments earlier this morning, his heart lifted:
Rowan remembered the birthday, Rowan cooked for him, she was excited about his present.


“Rowan.”

“What?” Rowan asks, grabbing her backpack from a hook.


“I just… I just want you to be happy.”

Rowan sighs and rolls her eyes.

Webster struggles for the high note of the birthday breakfast. “Love my present,” he says again.

Webster can feel his daughter’s impatience. Eager to be away.


He turns back to the table. He hears the tug and pull of the door, the necessary slam.

He walks to the window and looks out. As he watches his daughter get into her car, an ache moves through his chest, sucking
him empty.


Rowan is leaving him.

She’s been leaving him for months.

Webster got the call at 1:10 in the morning. “Unresponsive female half-ejected one-car ten-fifty.” He made it from his parents’
house in to Rescue in two and a half flat. He parked the secondhand cruiser near the building and climbed into the passenger
seat of the Bullet as Burrows put his foot to the floor, turned down the lights and the siren, and swooped into the left lane.
Webster had his uniform over his pajamas; his stethoscope around his neck; his gloves, trauma shears, flashlight, tourniquet,
oxygen key, and window punch on his utility belt; his radio in its holster. In his head, he ran through the protocol for a
10-50. Assess scene safety, including potential for fire, explosion. Wires down, leaking gas tank, turn-out gear and visor
if extrication indicated. Open the airway. Jaw thrust, if necessary. Assess breathing and circulation. Stabilize spine. Check
the pulse, get a blood pressure check, and look for lacerations. Webster was twenty-one and a rookie.


“Where?” he asked.

“Near the garden store where 42 takes a bend.”

Four minutes out. Max. Maybe less.

“Victim wrapped herself around a tree,” Burrows said.

Burrows was a beefy guy with cropped blond hair where he still had it. His uniform shirt was missing two buttons, which he
tried to hide with a zippered vest. The guy had a bad scar on his right cheek from a melanoma he’d had removed a year ago. He fingered it all the time.


Because he was a probie, Webster was the packhorse. Burrows, his superior, carried only the med box and his own protective
clothing. Webster dealt with the oxygen, the trauma box, the c-collar, and the backboard.


“Fucking freezing,” Burrows said.

“Whatever happened to the January thaw?”

In the distance, a cop with a Maglite directed nonexistent traffic. Burrows made a fast and expert U-turn, pulling to a stop
on a flat piece of shoulder thirty feet from a Cadillac that had rolled and come to rest upside down.


“Just kissed the tree,” said Nye, a weasel with a chip the size of Burlington on his shoulder. “And what I want to know is
what’s a fucking girl doing with a two-ton Cadillac?”


Not a girl, Burrows and Webster discovered. A woman, twenty-four, twenty-five. No seat belt. The Cadillac was at least a decade
old with rust in the wheel wells.


“Unresponsive,” Nye’s younger partner, McGill, said as he moved to make way for Burrows and Webster. The medic and the EMT
knelt to either side of the partially ejected patient. The shock of glossy brown hair in the artificial light registered with
Webster, replaced immediately by acronyms: Airway. Breathing. Circulation. ABC. He maintained spine stabilization and took
the vitals. Burrows handled the airway.


“A hundred twenty-two over seventy,” Webster read out. “Pulse sixty-six.” Even in the cold Vermont air, he could smell the
alcohol. “ETOH,” Webster reported. “Lips are blue.”


“Respirations?”

“Eight.”

“She’s in trouble.”


“She reeks.”

Still, Webster knew, they couldn’t assume.

A star pattern on the windshield had produced facial lacerations on her forehead. A crushed window had loosened a shower of
sparkles. Webster gently brushed the glass from her eyes and mouth.


“Anyone know her name?” Burrows asked.

Webster watched the Weasel reach for the woman’s purse, which had lodged under the car.

Nye opened a wallet. “Sheila Arsenault.”

“Sheila!” Burrows said in a loud voice. “Sheila, wake up!”

Nothing.

Burrows administered a sternal rub to wake the dead.

The woman lifted her head in the direction of the pain. “Fuck,” she said.

“Nice girl,” Nye said.

“Responsive to painful stimuli only,” Burrows stated for the record as he fastened the c-collar onto the woman’s neck.

“Can we do a clothes drag onto the board?” Webster asked.

“Go around,” Burrows said as he removed the rest of the glass from the woman’s face and slapped on a non-rebreather mask.
He made a slit with his trauma shears down the length of the denim sleeve of her jacket. He started a line in her arm.


From where Webster knelt on the other side of the car, he could see a piece of metal he couldn’t identify, its sharp edge
pushing into the woman’s belly, making the front tails of a light blue shirt bloody. A sheared-off piece of the dashboard?
Something that had come up from the floor? . . .