Angel Falls

Chapter Nine


The next morning, Rosa was finishing the last of the breakfast dishes when the phone rang … and rang … and rang. Frowning, she went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled up for Dr. Liam to answer it.
In the other room, the answering machine clicked on, and Rosa was momentarily stunned to hear her daughter’s voice. For a split second, she felt hope … then she realized it was only the recorded message.
“Rosa? Are you there? Pick up the phone, damn it. It’s me, Liam.”
She threw the damp dishrag over her shoulder and raced back into the kitchen to answer. “Hola,” she said, a little out of breath.
“Have the kids left for school?” he asked.
“Sí. Bret’s bus just left.”
“Good. Come to the hospital.”
“Is Mikaela—”
“The same. Just hurry.” He paused, then said, “Please, Rosa. Hurry.”
“I am leaving.”
He didn’t even say good-bye before she heard the dial tone buzzing in her ear.
Rosa snagged her car keys from the hook near the phone and grabbed her purse.
Outside it was snowing lightly; not much, but enough to make an old woman like her drive slowly. All the way through town and out to the hospital, she tried to be hopeful. But Dr. Liam had sounded upset. He was such a strong, silent man that such emotion from him was frightening. He had remained steady through much bad news already.
She parked in one of the vacant visitor spots and reached for her coat. It was then that she realized she was still wearing the wet dishrag across her shoulder … and that she hadn’t braided her hair yet this morning. She would look like a demented scarecrow with all that snow-white hair flowing everywhere. A woman like her, old and unmarried, could not afford to look so bad.
As she crossed the parking lot, she braided her hair. Without a rubber band, it wouldn’t stay, but it was better than nothing.
She hurried through the hospital. At the closed door to Mikaela’s room, she paused and drew in a deep breath, offering a quick prayer to the Virgin, then she opened the door.
Everything looked the same. Mikaela lay in the bed, on her back this morning. A shaft of sunlight sneaked through the partially opened curtains and left a yellow streak on the linoleum floor.
Liam was sitting in the chair by the bed. He was wearing the same clothes from yesterday—khaki pants and a black sweater. Only now the clothes were so wrinkled it looked like they’d been stomped on. Shadows rimmed his tired eyes.
“You slept here last night,” she said, frowning. “Why—” The look in his eyes was so cold and unfamiliar that she bit her sentence in half. “Dr. Liam?”
“Julian True.”
Rosa gasped. She grabbed hold of the metal bed rail. If she hadn’t held on to something, she would surely have fallen. Her legs felt like warming butter. “Perdón?”
“You heard me. I said his name.”
She brought a trembling hand to her chest. “Why …” Her throat was dry as ashes; she couldn’t force out another word. She let go of the bed rail and reached for the pitcher on the bedside table, pouring herself a glass of water. She drank it in three huge, unladylike gulps, then set the glass back down. At no time did she look at Liam. “Why do you say this name to me now?”
“Last night, when I was looking for Mike’s dress, I found a pillowcase hidden in the closet. It was filled with pictures and newspaper clippings … and a huge diamond ring.” He rose from the chair and moved toward her. “I knew his name, of course, everyone does, but I didn’t know he meant anything to me.”
She forced a smile. “Y-You must have loved a woman before Mikaela.”
“Not Sharon Stone.”
At last she looked at him. “Forget this, Dr. Liam. It is old news. You knew she had been married before.”
“Watergate is old news, Rosa. This is something else—and you know how I know this?”
“How?”
“I said his name to Mikaela. That’s all, just his name, and she blinked. Now, it could mean nothing, but after all these weeks, it’d be pretty damned coincidental, don’t you think?”
“She blinked?”
“Yes.”
And just that quickly, she saw the anger leave her son-in-law’s eyes. Without it, he looked old and tired and afraid.
“All this time,” he said quietly, “I’ve been talking to her, holding her hand, brushing her hair, and singing her love songs. Why? Because you made me believe that love would reach her. But it wasn’t my love that reached her, Rosa. Or yours, either. It was just a man’s name.”
“Madre de Dios.” She clutched the bed rail again and stared down at her sleeping daughter. “Mikita, are you hearing us, querida? Blink if you can.”
Liam sighed. “She’s hearing us. We’ve just been saying the wrong things.”
Rosa wanted to cover her ears. She didn’t want to hear what Liam was going to say next, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from asking the question. “What is it you think we should be telling her?”
Liam sidled in close beside her, so close she could feel the heat from his body. “Maybe it’s not about our love for her. Maybe it’s about her love … for him.”
“Don’t—”
“I want you to talk to her about Julian. Tell her everything you know about them. Remind her how much she loved him. Maybe that will help her come back to us.”
She turned and gazed up at him. She could feel the way her mouth was trembling; it matched the shaking in her fingers, but she couldn’t stop it. “That is very dangerous.”
“Believe me, if she wakes up because of Julian …” He ran a hand through his shaggy hair and closed his eyes.
Rosa could only imagine how much this was hurting him, this good, good man who loved so deeply. She thought that if she listened closely enough, she would hear the sound of his heart breaking.
“It’s her life,” he said at last. “We have to do everything to reach her.”
Rosa wished she could disagree. “I will try this, to tell her who she used to be and who she used to love, but only if you remember always that she married you.”
He looked like he was going to say something; in the end, he turned and walked to the window.
She stared at him. “Y-You are not going to stay in the room for this, Dr. Liam? It will be most hurtful.”
He didn’t turn around. His voice, when he found it, was low and scratchy, not his sound at all. “I’m staying. I think it’s time I got to know the woman I love.”
Rosa stood beside the bed, clasping the silver St. Christopher’s medallion at her throat.
Slowly she closed her eyes.
For fifteen years, she had not allowed herself to remember those days. That’s how she thought of them—those days—when he had breezed into their airless life and changed everything.
It was only now that she realized how close the memories had always been. Some things could never be forgotten, some people were the same.
She pulled up an image of Mikaela—twenty-one years old, bright brown eyes, flowing black hair, a vibrant flower in a hot, desolate farming town where migrant workers lived eight to a room in shacks without indoor plumbing. A town where the line between the “good” folks and the Mexicans was drawn in cement. And Mikaela—a bastard half Mexican—wasn’t fully welcomed in either world.
It had been the full heat of summer, that day he came into their lives. Mikaela had just finished her second and final year at the local junior college. She’d received an academic scholarship to Western Washington University in Bellingham, but Rosa had known that her daughter wanted something bigger.
Cambridge. Harvard. The Sorbonne. These were the schools that called to Mikaela, but they both knew that girls like her didn’t make it to schools like that.
It was Rosa’s fault that Mikaela had felt so alone as a young girl. For years, Mikaela waited for her father to acknowledge her in public. Then had come the dark, angry years when she hated him and his perfect, white-bread children. The years when she wrote trash about him in girls’ bathrooms all over town, when she prayed to God that just once his blue-eyed, blond-haired cheerleader daughter would know how it felt to want. In time that phase had passed, too, and left Mikaela with a deeper loneliness.
She dreamed of going someplace where she wouldn’t be the Mexican waitress’s bastard kid anymore. She used to say to Rosa that she was tired of staring through dirty windows at other people’s lives.
They had been working in the diner, she and Mikaela, on the tail end of a slow, hot afternoon shift …
“Mikita, if you wash that table any more, it will disappear.”
Mikaela tossed the rag down. It landed with a squishy thwack on the speckled yellow Formica. “You know how Mr. Gruber likes his table clean, Mama, and he should be here any second for lunch. I’ll get Joe to start his meatloaf sandwich—”
Mikaela’s words were drowned out by a loud, thundering noise, like the first rumble in an earthquake. Behind the counter, in the diner’s small kitchen, Joe looked up from the grill. “What the hell is that?” he growled, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.
Mikaela raced to the picture window that looked out on Brownlow Street. It was high noon in the first week of July, and the storefronts all wore the crackled, faded look of exhaustion. It was too hot for anyone to be outside.
The sound came closer, grew louder. Out in the deserted street, dust swirled up in a thick brown cloud that grabbed hold of black-tipped leaves and swept them into eddies in the air.
Three silver helicopters hurtled above the rooflines like bullets against the blue sky, then dropped out of sight behind Bennet’s Drug Store. An eerie silence fell, the windows stilled.
A limousine pushed through the dust storm like something out of a dream, sleek and black and impossibly shiny in this dirty heat. No car could get to Sunville that clean, not if it drove on the back roads from Yakima. The blackened windows captured the town’s tired reflection and threw it back.
Mikaela leaned forward, pressing closer to the glass. The orange polyester of her uniform stuck to her skin. Overhead, the wooden fan swirled slowly with a thwop-thwop-thwop that did little more than distribute the smell of burning bacon.
Three limousines pulled up in front of City Hall and parked. No one got out of the cars, and the engines kept running. Gray smoke seeped lazily from the tailpipes.
One by one, people came out of the stores and stood on the sidewalks, drawing together, speculating among themselves, pointing at the cars that in this town were as foreign and unexpected as spaceships.
Rosa and Mikaela crowded into the diner’s narrow doorway.
The click of a lock silenced the crowd, then the doors opened, all of them at once, like huge, enameled beetles unfurling their wings. Strangers in black suits and sunglasses emerged from the cars, one after another. And then he appeared.
A shiver of recognition moved through the crowd.
“Oh, my God, it’s Julian True,” someone whispered.
He stood with the casual, unaffected elegance of one who is used to the stares of strangers. Tall and lean, with long, sunstreaked hair that covered half his face, he looked like a rebellious angel cast down from the heavens. He wore a loose black pocket T-shirt and a pair of ragged Levi’s that were tattered and ripped out at the knees. Whatever blue dye had once been woven into the denim had long ago bleached to a foamy white.
The crowd surged toward him, crying out. One sound, one name rose from the confusion.
Julian True … It’s him … Julian True in Sunville.
Then came the requests: Here! Sign my shirt … my notebook … my napkin.
Rosa turned to whisper something to Mikaela, but the words caught in her throat. Her daughter looked … mesmerized. Mikaela stepped back into the diner and glanced around. Rosa knew that her daughter was noticing the cracked floor, the broken light fixtures, the ever-present film of grease that coated everything. She was seeing the diner through this stranger’s eyes, and she was ashamed.
Rosa moved away from the door and went back to work. Mikaela headed for the lunch counter and began refilling the sugar jars.
Suddenly the bell above the front door jingled, and he was standing there, in Joe’s Get-It-While-It’s-Hot diner, beneath the lazily whirring overhead fan.
Mikaela dropped the half-empty sugar jars on the table. Her cheeks turned bright pink.
He gave Mikaela a smile the likes of which Rosa had never seen. It was the old cliché, sun erupting through the clouds. Eyes the color of shaved turquoise looked at Mikaela as if she were the only woman in the world.
“C-Can I help you?”
His smile held the tattered edge of exhaustion. “Well, darlin’,” he said in that world-famous Texas drawl, as thick and sweet as corn syrup, “we’ve been travelin’ for hours over the shittiest patch of road I’ve seen since I left Lubbock, and any minute that doorway’s gonna fill up with every thirteen-year-old girl between here and Spokane. I was hopin’ a pretty little thing like you could round me up a beer and a sandwich and show me where I could eat it in peace.”
That had been the beginning.
Rosa opened her eyes. She could feel Liam behind her, hear his measured breathing, and she knew she’d been quiet too long.
“Hola, Mikita,” she said softly. “Mama estoy aqui.” She took a deep breath and began. “You remember the first day you met him, querida, your Julian True?”
Mikaela sucked in a sharp breath; her eyelids fluttered.
Rosa felt a rush of hope, as pure and clean and cold as springwater. “We were at the diner, both of us working the lunch shift. There was a noise, one like I had never heard before. Helicopters, in our little town. And then he appeared. Ah, the way he looked at you, as if you were the only woman in the world. Even I could feel the lure of him. He was like no one we had ever seen before … like no one we would ever see again.
“You thought I was too old to understand what you were thinking, my Mikaela, but I could see it in your eyes. You thought you were Cinderella, all covered with soot and dirt, and here … here was a prince.
“He called you a pretty little thing, remember? Dios, I have never seen you smile so brightly. He started calling you Kayla almost from the start. Kayla of the midnight hair, that was his nickname for you, recuerdes? I hated that he would give you a gringa name and that you would take it … but it did not matter what I thought, not once you had met him.
“When he first kissed you, you told me it felt like you’d jumped off a skyscraper. I said that such a fall could kill a girl. Remember your answer? You said, ‘Ah, Mama, but sometimes it is worth it to fly.’”
Rosa leaned down and touched Mikaela’s still, white face. “I watched you fall in love with him, this man with the face of an angel. I knew there would be fireworks at the start of it—how could it be otherwise? I knew, too, that there would be pain at the end of it. Enough to last a lifetime.
“I told you that he was no good for you, but you laughed and told me not to worry. As if a mama could stop worrying so easily.”
She let her fingertips linger on her daughter’s cool, sunken cheek. “You thought I did not understand, but I was the only one who could.”
Rosa gave her daughter a small, sad smile. “You promised that you would not make my mistake. But I knew, querida, I saw it in your eyes. You already had.”