When the message clicked off, another voice came on. “Hola, Dr. Liam. This is Rosa. I am returning—”
Liam picked up the phone. “Hello, Rosa.”
“Dr. Liam. This is you? I am sorry not to call earlier, but I was working the dinner shift this ni—”
“Mike’s had an accident,” he said quickly, while he still had the nerve to form the words. Then, taking a deep breath, he told his mother-in-law everything.
A pause slid through the lines. “I will be there tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” he said, not realizing until that moment how very much he needed her help in this. “I’ll arrange for a plane ticket.”
“No. It will be quicker if I drive. I will leave first thing in the morning. Will she …”
Make it through the night.
“We hope so,” he answered the unfinished question. “The morning should be … fine. Thanks, Rosa.”
“Dr. Liam?” Another pause, then a soft “Pray for her. More than medicines and machines, she will need God now. You pray for her.”
“Every minute, Rosa. Every minute.”
When he hung up the phone, he went to his bedroom. It took all his strength to merely cross the threshold. When he’d come in here earlier, he’d had Bret with him, and the child in his arms had acted as a talisman. Now, Liam felt acutely vulnerable and alone. This was where Mikaela belonged; in this room, theirs, the one she’d once painted fire-engine red just for fun; the one that now had gold moons and stars and suns stenciled on its smooth eggshell-white walls and a chiffon-draped canopy bed that she said made her feel like Candice Bergen in The Wind and the Lion. Unfortunately, it made him feel like Candice Bergen, too, but so what? She loved their room, and so he’d crawled into their bed every night and thanked God that she wanted him there. Him, an ordinary man whose only claim to the extraordinary was the depth of his love for a woman.
Rosa Elena Luna walked toward the small altar in her living room and carefully lit two votive candles. Thin spots of light glowed reassuringly within the pebbled red glass.
She sank to her knees on the cracked linoleum floor and clasped her hands, staring at the figurine of the Virgin Mary as she began to pray. First, the Lord’s Prayer.
But the familiar words didn’t ease this ache spreading through her chest. Tears blurred her eyes but didn’t fall. She’d learned long ago that tears were just bits of water that had no power to heal.
She grabbed the rickety table leg and pulled herself to a stand. After a long night at the diner, her knees made a sound like popping corn.
For the first time in many years, she wanted to call William Brownlow. She glanced longingly at the phone on the wall.
He would be no help, of course. She hadn’t seen him in several years. Sunville was a small town, but even in so small a place, they traveled in different circles. He owned a modest apple orchard—not a powerful, wealthy man by anyone’s standards, but compared to Rosa, he might as well have been a Kennedy. Though he had fathered Mikaela, he had never been a father to her. He had another family, a lily-white one. He had spent fifteen years in Rosa’s bed, but every moment had been stolen from his wife and legitimate children.
He would not come to the rescue of his bastard daughter.
Rosa stood in the darkened living room. Here and there, watery moonlight peeked through the worn, tattered curtains, illuminating the garage-sale sofa, the wood-grained plastic end tables, the religious paintings on the walls. Mikaela and Liam had often tried to get Rosa to move from this house, or to accept money to repair it, but she always refused them. She was afraid that if she left, she would forget the mistakes God wanted her to remember.
It had all started here, in this house she never should have accepted. It had seemed safe enough at the time, a present from a man who loved her. In those days, she had still believed he would leave his wife.
Candlelight illuminated the streaks of condensation that slid down the too-thin glass windows.
When Mikaela was young, she used to love that condensation. She would shout to Rosa, Look, Mama, it’s raining inside the house.
Rosa wondered now if Mikaela had ever understood why her mother never came to stand beside her at the window. Rosa had seen tears instead of raindrops, had always known that this old house wept at the sadness it had seen.
Bad love.
It was the heart of this house; it had purchased every nail and paid most of the bills. It was mixed into the paint. Bad love had planted the hedge and made it grow tall; it had crafted the gravel walkway that led to a front door designed to conceal that love from all who would recognize it; it was woven into the fabric of the curtains that hid the windowpanes.
She had always known that she would pay for these sins. No amount of confession could cleanse her soul, but this … she’d never imagined this.
“Please God,” she said, “save mi hija …”
Again, silence. She knew that if she stepped outside, she would hear the rustling of the bare willow tree, and that it would sound like an old woman weeping.
With a tired sigh, she walked into her small bedroom, pulled her only suitcase out of the closet, and began to pack.
Chapter Four
The bedside phone rang at six o’clock the next morning. Liam had been dreaming—a good dream in which he and Mikaela were sitting on the porch swing, listening to the children’s distant laughter. For a second, he could feel the warmth of her hand in his … then he noticed the boy sleeping quietly beside him and it all came rushing back.
His heart was clattering like a secondhand lawn mower as he reached for the phone.
It was Sarah, a nurse from the hospital. Mikaela had made it through the night.
Liam leaned carefully over Bret and hung up the phone. He crawled out of bed, showered—not realizing until he’d gotten out that he forgot to use soap or shampoo—then went to wake his children.
Within an hour, the three of them drove to the hospital. Liam settled the kids in the waiting room, then went to the ICU.
He went to Mikaela’s bedside, hoping—absurdly—to find her sitting up, smiling …
But the room was deathly still; she hadn’t moved.
She looked worse. The right side of her face was swollen almost beyond recognition. Both eyes were hidden beneath puffy discolored flesh.
Clear plastic tubing invaded her left nostril, and her mouth was completely slack. A tiny silver trail of spittle snaked down her discolored cheek, collected in a moist gray blotch on the pillow. The flimsy blanket was drawn up high on her chest; it had been folded with methodical precision and tucked in tight to her body in a way that made Liam think of death.
The team of specialists arrived. They examined her, tested her, and talked among themselves. Liam waited silently beside them, watching as his beloved wife failed one test after another.
Truth is, Liam, we don’t know why she’s not waking up.
Some of the best doctors in the country, and that was all they could say. They didn’t know why she wasn’t waking up.
Just wait and hope. Pray she lives another day, then another day after that. Pray she wakes up on her own …
Although Liam hadn’t really expected a medical miracle, he’d certainly hoped for one. Even a radical surgery would be better than this … nothing.
The next time Liam glanced at his watch, it was eleven A.M. Through a sliver opening in the curtains, he saw a rosy line of morning sunlight.
It was time to tell his children … something.
He walked slowly toward the waiting room.
What a joke. As if expectation would sit only in that particular space. From now on, he knew, every room would be a waiting room. They would bring it with them, him and the children. At home they would see the empty spaces as clearly as their own hands. A vacant chair at the dinner table, an empty place on the sofa.
He allowed himself a moment’s pause before he turned into the alcove beyond the nurses’ station.
The room was good sized—big enough for large families to gather in grief or celebration. It was antiseptic white, with brown Naugahyde chairs and fake wood-grain tables that held scattered magazines and a few carefully placed Bibles. Like all such rooms, it seemed to amplify the ticking of the clock on the wall.
Jacey stood at the window, with her back to him. She appeared to be intently studying the parking lot, but he doubted that she saw anything except the image of her mother, broken and bleeding on the arena’s dirt floor.
Bret was on the gold sofa, his small body curled into the fetal position, his eyes squeezed shut. God knew what he was seeing. Again today he was sucking his thumb.
Liam found just enough strength to remain where he was. Maybe that’s how it would be from now on; he would make it through on “just enough.”
“Hi, guys,” he said at last, his voice so soft he wasn’t sure for a second that he’d spoken aloud at all.
Jacey spun to face him. Her long black hair—normally manicured to teenaged perfection—hung limply along her arms. She was wearing a pair of baggy flannel drawstring pants and an oversized knit sweater. Silver tear marks streaked her pale cheeks. Her eyes were red and swollen, and in them he saw the agonizing question.
“She’s still alive,” he said.
Jacey brought a shaking hand to her mouth. He could see how hard she was trying not to cry in front of her younger brother. “Thank God.”
Liam went to the sofa and scooped Bret onto his lap. The little boy was so still he seemed to have stopped breathing. “Sit down, Jace,” he said.
She sat down on the chair beside them, reaching out for Liam’s hand.
Bret snuggled closer and opened his eyes. Tears rolled down the boy’s pink cheeks. “Can we see her today?”
Liam drew in a deep breath. “Not yet. Yesterday I told you that her head was hurt, but there’s … a little more to it than that. She’s in a very deep sleep. It’s called a coma, and it’s the body’s way of healing itself. You know how when you have a really bad case of the flu, you sleep all the time to get better? It’s like that.”
Jacey’s colorless lips trembled. “Will she wake up?”
Liam flinched. Any answer—every answer—felt like a lie. “We hope so.”
He looked at Jacey and saw the sad, desperate knowing in her eyes. She was a doctor’s kid; she knew that not everyone woke up from a coma.
God help him, Liam couldn’t say anything to save her from the truth. Hope was something he could offer, but it wasn’t a prescription he could fill. “She needs us to believe in her,” he said, “to keep our hope fresh and strong. When she’s ready, she’ll wake up.”
Bret wiped his eyes. “Fix her, Daddy.”
“The docs are doing everything they can right now, Bretster, but she’s asleep …”
“Like Sleeping Beauty,” Jacey said to her little brother.
Bret burst into tears. “Sleeping Beauty was asleep for a hundred years!”
Liam pulled Bret into his arms and held on to his son tightly. Jacey scooted closer and hugged them both.
When Liam felt Bret’s tiny shudder, and the warm, wet rush of his daughter’s tears, he buried his face in his son’s coarse, red hair.
