Chapter Three
Jacey came home earlier than Liam expected, looking wan and tired. She hardly said a word; instead, she kissed his cheek and headed up to her room.
When he was pretty sure that both kids were asleep, Liam went into Mikaela’s office. He opened the door and flicked on the light.
The first thing he noticed was her fragrance, soft and sweet as newfallen rain. Her desk was scattered with piles of haphazardly stacked papers. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine her sitting at that desk, a cup of steaming French Roast coffee in her hand, her gaze glued to the computer screen as she wrote letter after letter on behalf of animals that were being neglected.
On an ordinary day, she would have looked up at him, her mouth turned downward, her beautiful eyes filled with compassion. There’s a mare in Skykomish so starved she can’t stand up … Can we take in one more?
He went to her desk and pushed a pile of newspapers off the chair. They hit the wooden floor with a thwack. He turned on the computer and maneuvered himself onto the Internet, where he ran a search for “Head injury.”
For the next hour, he read about other people’s pain. He filled up almost an entire yellow legal pad with scribbled bits of information—books, specialists, medications. Anything and everything that might make a difference. But in the end, he knew only what he’d known at the beginning. There was nothing to do but wait …
He clicked the machine off without even bothering to close out of the program and left the room.
Downstairs, he poured himself a double shot of tequila—something he hadn’t done since the Tex-Mex hoedown at the Legion Hall two summers ago. He drank it in one swallow. Disappointed that the world still seemed remarkably stable, he poured and drank another. This, at last, lent his mind a soft dullness, and finally the knot in his throat eased.
He went to the big picture window that framed the darkened pastures below. The horses couldn’t be seen now on this black night, but they were out there. A dozen horses that Mikaela had saved; they’d come from all over the western half of the state, from groups and individuals and bankrupt farms. They arrived, broken and starved and untended, but Mike healed them, one by one, then gave them away to good homes. She had such a tender heart. It was one of the things he loved most about her.
But when was the last time he’d told her that? He couldn’t remember, that was the hell of it.
He’d never been good with words. He showed his love, over and over again, but he knew that words mattered, too.
He wished to hell he could remember the last time he’d told her that she was his sun and his moon, his whole world.
He poured another shot and slumped on the overstuffed down sofa.
She could die …
No. He wouldn’t let his mind wander down that road. Mike would wake up soon, any minute now, and they would laugh together about how afraid he’d been.
But the road beckoned him anyway; he could smell despair burned into the asphalt, hear the fear rustling treelike along the shoulders.
He closed his eyes, remembering everything about her, and when he opened his eyes, she was there, beside him on the couch. She was wearing the ratty, torn old Levi’s that he was always threatening to throw away, and a black chenille boat-neck sweater that could have fit a woman twice her size. She leaned back and looked at him.
He wished he could reach for her, touch the softness of her favorite sweater, kiss the fullness of her lower lip, but he knew she wasn’t really there. She was inside him, filling him so full that she’d spilled out. “You would have laughed if you’d seen me in the kitchen tonight, babe.”
He couldn’t hold the grief inside him anymore; he couldn’t be strong. At last, he leaned back on the sofa, and he cried.
“Daddy?” The small, hesitant voice floated down the stairs. “Who are you talking to?”
Mike vanished.
“I’m not talking to anyone.” He wiped his eyes and rose unsteadily to his feet. He crossed the room and climbed the stairs.
Bret stood at the top in his makeshift pj’s—a purple glow-in-the-dark triceratops T-shirt and flannel boxers. Somewhere in his jumbled chest of drawers were several sets of real pajamas, but only Mike could find anything in that mess.
“I couldn’t sleep, Daddy.”
Liam scooped Bret into his arms and carried him up to the master bedroom, tucking him into the bed that was too big without Mike in it. He curled against his son.
“She was lookin’ at me, Dad.”
Liam tightened his hold on Bret. It was funny, but only last week, Liam had thought that Bret was growing up too fast. Now the boy in his arms seemed impossibly young, and since this morning, he had been regressing. It was something that would have to be dealt with … later.
“When you saw Mommy, her eyes were open. Is that what you mean?”
“She was lookin’ right at me, but … she wasn’t there. It wasn’t Mommy.”
“She was just too hurt to close her eyes and now she’s too hurt to open them.”
“Can I see her tomorrow?”
Liam thought about how she looked—her face battered and swollen and discolored, a nasogastric tube snaking up one nostril, all those needles tucked into her veins, the machines … It would terrify a child. Liam knew what those memories were like—he had them of his father. Some things, once seen, could never be forgotten, and they could taint an image forever.
“No, kiddo, I don’t think so. It’s against hospital policy to let a child into Intensive Care. You can see her … as soon as she gets moved to the regular ward.”
Bret said quietly, “That’s how dead looks in the movies.”
“She’s not dead. She’s just … resting for a little while. Like Sleeping Beauty.”
“Did you try kissin’ her?”
It took Liam a long time to answer. He knew he would remember this moment forever, and that’s how long it would hurt. “Yeah, Bretster. I tried that.”
Liam stayed in bed until Bret fell asleep, then he cautiously extricated himself and went downstairs. This time he made himself a cup of tea. God knew the tequila hadn’t worked.
Did you try kissing her?
Liam glanced up at the slanted wooden ceiling. “Did you hear that, babe? He wanted to know if I’d tried kissing you.”
The phone rang.
He ignored it. On the fourth ring, the answering machine clicked on. He wasn’t ready to hear Mike’s soft, throaty voice. He squeezed his eyes shut. You have reached the Campbell residence, and the winter office of Whatcom County’s horse rescue program. No one is available right now …
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.