Chapter Thirteen
Liam sat at his desk. He didn’t bother to turn on any of the lights, or to leaven the silence by playing one of the CDs stacked by the stereo.
The intercom buzzed. Carol’s staticky voice came through the small black box. “Doctor? Are you in there?”
He pressed the button. “I’m here, Carol. You can go ahead and go home. We’re done for the day.”
“You’re not going to believe this, Doctor. There’s a man on the phone who says he’s Julian True.”
Liam’s heart skipped a beat. “I’ll take it.”
“Do you think it’s the real—”
“Patch him through, Carol, and go on home. We’re done for the day.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
The red light on line one started flashing. Liam took a deep breath, stabbed the button, and picked up the phone. “This is Dr. Campbell.”
There was a pause at the other end, then: “Dr. Liam Campbell?”
Even through the impersonal medium of the phone lines, Liam would have recognized the voice. “This is he.”
“This is Julian True. You left a message with my agent, Val Lightner, regarding Mikaela Luna—”
“She’s been injured.”
“Oh, God. How bad?”
“She’s in a coma.”
Another pause crackled through the lines, and Liam realized that Julian was on a car phone. “A coma. Jesus … What can I do? I’ll pay for her hospital bills, and for the best doctors in the country—not to say that you’re not great, Dr. Campbell, but—”
“She doesn’t need your money, Mr. True. I called you because … well, she shows some response to your name. I … we thought that maybe if she heard your voice—”
“You think she’ll wake up for me?”
Liam was unprepared for the pain that came with that simple question. “We think there’s a chance.”
“I’ve got an interview this afternoon, but I can be there tomorrow. Where is she?”
“In the Ian Campbell Medical Center in Last Bend, Washington. About sixty miles east of Bellingham.”
“Okay, I’ll get Antoinette to set me up.”
“When you get to the medical center, ask for me. I’ll be in my office there.”
“Okay.”
Liam waited for Julian to end the conversation, but he just hung on the line, breathing, not saying anything. Finally Liam said, “Is there something else?”
“Yeah. Uh … how does she look? I mean, I need to be prepared.”
It was a perfectly human question, nothing wrong with it, so why did Liam feel suddenly angry? His answer was barely audible along the crackling line. “She looks as beautiful as you probably remember.”
Val’s office was a huge, open space tucked into the northeastern corner of a high-rise on Wilshire Boulevard. Huge glass windows paneled the corner, capturing a vista of other tall buildings. Behind them lay a filmy layer of brown smog.
A few sleek chairs were gathered around a glass coffee table. Movie posters and theater announcements graced the walls, each one representing a client. A huge television, flanked by fifteen smaller screens, dominated one corner. Currently a music video pulsed on every screen.
Val’s desk was an immense, rectangular sheet of green glass. He was slouched over in his chair, holding his head in his hands.
Julian didn’t need to be told to keep his voice down. He’d partied with Val enough over the years to know when his best friend was nursing an ugly hangover. He crossed the room and sat down in the cushiony black leather chair opposite the desk.
“Quieter,” Val moaned.
“Look, Val, I know you feel like four kinds of shit, but I really need to talk to you.”
“Whisper, please.”
“I called that doctor in Podunk, Washington. It was about Kayla. She’s had an accident. She’s in a coma.”
Slowly Val lifted his head. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. “So, what, they need money for her hospital bills?”
“No. The doc said she responded to my name. They seem to think it would help if I talked to her.”
Val ran a hand through his hair. The greasy blond locks fell right back in front of his ashen face. A slow-growing smile plucked one corner of Val’s mouth. Julian recognized the look: It was Val’s we-can-make-money-here look. “It’s like one of those chick fairy tales. A kiss of true love to wake her up—get it? True love wakes her up. Now, there’s a hell of a headline.”
“This is serious, Val. She’s pretty bad off. She could die.”
“Oh.” Val’s smile faded.
Julian stared at his friend. Val was so goddamn transparent. Now he was thinking that it wouldn’t do much good if the headline was TRUE LOVE KILLS.
“So, what are you going to do?” Val said at last.
Julian leaned back. The chair squeaked, rolled an inch backward. Images and memories drifted through his mind like clouds on a summer’s day. “She was the one, Val. She really loved me.”
“They all love you, Julian.”
“Kay was different. I loved her, too.”
“I’ve seen movies that run longer than your love.”
That stung. “I’m going up there. Right after the Rolling Stone interview.”
“What? This f*cking movie’s gonna be big, Juli. Big. We’ve got a shitload of press scheduled—”
Julian smiled. There was nothing he liked better than surprising Val; it was damned hard to do. “It’s not like I’m vanishing. I’m just going out of town for a day or two. I pay you two and a half million a year. Make it work.”
Val shook his head. “Okay, Jules. Go play Prince Charming. But be back in two days. I mean it.”
“And no press. I want to do this alone.”
Val looked at him hard. “Jesus, Juli, you never do anything alone.”
“There’s always a first time.”
The kitchen lights were off, but Liam could see two blue spots of flame on the stove. The mouth-watering aroma of Rosa’s arroz con pollo wafted up from the pots. In the dining room, the table was set for dinner. A vase of fern fronds and pine boughs made a graceful centerpiece.
In the great room, there were candles on every windowsill and tabletop. The candelabra on the grand piano was a blaze of flickering golden light.
He heard the soft, even patter of Rosa’s slippered feet on the stairs.
“Buenos noches, Rosa,” he said.
She reached the bottom of the stairs and turned toward him. “Buenos noches, Dr. Liam.”
“What’s with all the candles, Rosa?”
“It does not bother you, I hope? I know it is not my place …”
“Mi casa es su casa,” he answered. “I just wondered why … all of a sudden …”
She ducked into the great room, moving hurriedly toward the grand piano. The ebony surface captured her reflection, dotted it with candlelight.
He followed, came to a stand behind her. “Is this all for Mike?”
She shook her head. The tip of her white braid brushed against her hip. Slowly she turned around and looked up at him.
He could see the worry carved into her face. “It is for you also that I light these candles, Dr. Liam. For you and the children. I spoke to Carol today. She told me that Julian True called you. It is quite the fiery gossip in town.”
“Hot,” he said distractedly. “Hot gossip. And Julian will be here tomorrow.”
Her mouth puckered with disapproval, but she didn’t say anything.
“You think I shouldn’t have called him.”
“It does not matter what one old woman thinks.”
He said, “Follow me,” and led her to the sofa.
She sat stiffly, her knees and ankles clamped together, her gaze riveted on her lap.
He sat beside her, leaning forward in the hopes that it would make her look at him. “I’m afraid of him, too, Rosa. More afraid than I’ve ever been in my life. But I love her. I can’t let her go without trying everything possible.”
Rosa sighed heavily. “You cannot understand bad love. My poor Mikita, she grew up watching this kind of love … and I think I—what is the word?—infected her with my sorrow.”
“Julian True married her, Rosa. He must have loved her.”
“There is love … and love. The good love, like what you have for my Mikaela, it does not let a young girl run off alone with a tiny baby. It does not stay hidden for years and years. It does not leave you cold in the winter in bed all by yourself.”
Liam looked away. Candlelight reflected all around the room, a thousand tiny golden drops hovering against the night-tarnished windowpanes. “When I asked Mike to marry me,” he said quietly without looking at Rosa, “she told me she’d been married before … and that she was afraid she could never love anyone that way again.”
“Of course she was afraid. Love for a woman like her is a terrifying thing. She knew only one kind of love then—the fiery kind that burns everything around it. And she had seen me, alone for so long, waiting for a man who would never come. How could my Mikita be anything but afraid when you said you loved her? But I remember when she first told me about you. ‘A doctor, Mama,’ she said. ‘And he loves me something awful.’ I tell her, ‘You be smart, you love him back.’ And she said to me that a broken heart doesn’t love so good. I will always remember this, because it made me want to cry.” She touched his face gently with her work-calloused hand. “I talked to her many, many times as the years went by. When Bret was born … I have never seen my Mikita so full of joy. I think she stopped thinking about the things that were gone. She loves you, Dr. Liam. I know this in my mother’s heart.”
“Enough?” he asked.
Rosa’s gaze slid away from his. She made a soft, sighing sound, something like air leaking from an old, worn tire. “You have heard many of the words of Mikaela’s story, but maybe they do not create the right picture. She was a young girl when she met Julian—only a few years older than Jacey. But she was nothing like Jacey. She had a mother who was weak and poor, and a father who would never speak to her in public. She lived in a bad part of town, in a house no one was supposed to see. One day she saw a god. She fell in love with him, in the way that only young girls can fall in love. They married … but he was not a god. He was just a young, selfish man who wanted nothing from life but to have fun. He wanted everything to be given to him, but love, it is not an easy road, sí? And the very heart that he once filled with love, he broke.” She leaned over and touched Liam’s hands. “When he comes here, you cannot tell Jacey who he is. This is muy importante. We cannot let him hurt our precious girl.”
Liam knew it was the easy road, not telling Jacey the truth, but he told himself that Mikaela should be the one to reveal her secrets to Jacey. “You’re right, Rosa. We won’t say anything yet.”
Yet even as he said the words, he knew it was the wrong thing to do.
Liam walked slowly up the stairs. He knew he shouldn’t talk to Jacey right now. He figured his chance of saying the right thing to her was about equal to his chances of climbing Mt. Everest in a Speedo. But he had to sit with her, hold her hand, and look into her eyes. It was guilt, of course, but there was so much more. For the first time in his life, he was afraid of losing his daughter’s love.
He paused at her bedroom door, then quietly knocked.
“Come in.”
He opened the door and found her exactly as he’d expected: on the telephone. She said good-bye and hung up. “Hi, Dad.”
Dad.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“How is she?”
“The same.” He sat down beside her and gently took hold of her hand. “How are you doing?”
She bravely hoisted a smile onto her pale face. “Okay.”
He couldn’t think of anything else to say. All he could think about was what would happen to all of them when Julian True came into their lives. Jacey, like Liam, had been told only that Mike had been married too young, to a man who wasn’t ready to settle down. Two kids … a marriage that didn’t work out. It was an ordinary story Mike had devised. There was no room in it for the possibility of Julian True.
Liam knew that in all the days and weeks and years that lay ahead, he would divide his life into two neat pieces. Before the coma, and after.
Tragedy was like that, a razor that sliced through time, severing the now from the before, incising the what-might-have-been from reality as cleanly as any surgeon’s blade. Even if Mikaela recovered, their lives would be changed. He was afraid that the secrets she’d kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would—for one heartbeat—flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red.
Now, as he looked into Jacey’s sad brown eyes, he knew he should tell her the truth about Julian. He knew, too, that he wouldn’t do it. He would lay down his life before causing her such pain.
“Are you okay, Dad?”
A smile was beyond him. “Right as Seattle rain.” He leaned toward her and pulled her into his arms. She clung to him, and for a brief and shining moment, everything was forgotten except that he loved her … and she loved him back.
When he pulled back, he could see it in her eyes, this mixture of grief and fear that had changed them all. “Dad?”
He felt fragile suddenly; one touch and he could shatter into a dozen pieces. “I love you, Jacey. That’s all I came up here to say.”
She smiled easily, relieved. “I love you, too, Dad. Remember when I had appendicitis?”
He stroked her hair. “Of course.”
“You gave me a sucker and told me you’d take the pain away … and you did.”
“I wish it were that simple now.”
She lost her smile. “I wish I were little again.”
He pulled her into his arms again.
If she wondered why he held her a bit too tightly, she never said a word.