Angel Falls

Chapter Eight


“Daaaaad! Dinner’s ready!”
Liam rose unsteadily to his feet and walked away from the pictures on the bed. Closing the door behind him, he moved forward only when he heard the muffled click of the lock. There was no point in staying up here. The things he’d seen wouldn’t change; he’d carry those burning images in his heart forever.
He clung to the slick oak banister and went down the stairs, drawing a heavy breath before he turned into the dining room.
Bret was already at the trestle table, looking dwarfed in the big oak chair that his grandfather had crafted by hand. Jacey sat beside him, just now putting the checkered red-and-blue napkin in her lap. “Hi, Dad,” she said with a smile.
She looked so much like Mike that he almost stumbled.
Rosa came around the corner, carrying a glass bowl of salad, with a bottle of dressing tucked under her arm. She paused when she saw him, then she smiled softly. “Good, good, you are here. Have a seat, Dr. Liam,” she said as she plunked the bowl onto the table and took her own place.
As usual, no one looked at the empty chair at the opposite end of the table.
Liam made it through dinner like one of those Disney robots. He forced his dry mouth to smile. He could feel the way Jacey and Rosa were staring at him. He tried to act as if this were a normal dinner—at least as normal as their meals had become in the past month—but he was weary and the veneer had worn thin.
“Dad?”
He looked up from the chicken enchiladas, realizing that he’d managed to push them around on his plate into an unappetizing pile of orange mush. “Yeah, Jace?”
“Did you find that dress for me?”
“Yeah, honey. I found it. I’ll give it to you after dinner. Maybe you and Grandma can practice fixing up your hair.”
She smiled. “Thanks, Dad.”
Dad.
The word had a hook that drew blood.
Jacey had called him that almost from the start. She’d been a little bit of a thing back then, a baby-toothed four-year-old with jet-black pigtails and ears that seemed so big she’d never grow into them.
He could still remember the day Mike had shown up in the clinic, carrying Jacey. It was only a few months after Liam’s father had died, and he’d been trying to find an excuse to talk to Mikaela again.
Jacey had had a dangerously high fever; convulsions racked her body. One minute she was stretched taut and shaking, and the next, she was as limp as a rag doll, her brown eyes drowsy and unfocused.
“Help us,” Mikaela had said softly.
Liam had canceled his nonemergency appointments for the day and rushed to the ER with them. He’d stood in the OR, watching as the surgeon gently sliced through Jacey’s abdomen and removed her burst appendix. His was the last face she saw before the anesthesia took her, and the first one she saw when she woke up in Recovery. He transferred his patients to Dr. Granato and spent the next three days in the hospital with Mikaela and Jacey; together they watched the Fourth of July fireworks through the rectangular window of Room 320.
He’d sat in the hospital cafeteria for endless hours with Mike, listening to her ramble from topic to topic. At some point she’d looked up at the wall clock and started to cry. He’d reached across the table, past the remains of her uneaten meal, and taken hold of her hand. She’ll be all right, he’d said. Trust me …
She’d looked up at him then, his Mike, with her brown eyes floating in tears and her mouth trembling. I do trust you.
That had been the beginning.
Jacey had called him Dad for so long, he’d forgotten that there was another father out there, another man who could lay claim to both his wife’s and daughter’s hearts.
“Dad. DAD.”
Bret stared at him. His little face looked unbalanced with the one black eye. “You’re gonna take me to basketball tryouts aren’t you?”
“Of course, Bretster.”
Bret nodded and started talking to Jacey about something. Liam tried to pay attention, but he couldn’t do it. A single sentence kept running through his mind. She was married to Julian True.
When he looked up again, he saw that Rosa was staring at him, her dark eyes narrowed and assessing.
“Do you have something you want to say to me, Rosa?”
She flinched, obviously surprised by his tone of voice. He knew he should have softened his tone, pretended that everything was okay, but he didn’t have the strength.
“Sí, Dr. Liam. I would like to speak to you … privately.”
He sighed. Perfect. “Sure. After the kids are in bed.”
Liam knew that Rosa was waiting for their “talk,” but he wasn’t ready yet. He’d spent almost an hour reading to Bret, then kissed Jacey good night and taken a long, hot shower.
Jacey was bunkered in her room now, probably talking on the telephone to one of her many friends and trying on her mother’s dress. Liam hadn’t gone to her, afraid that if he saw her wearing that beautiful gown, looking like her mother, he’d lose it.
Right now he wanted to hole up in his own quiet space. Christ, he’d give almost anything to be able to go downstairs, sit at the piano, and play the hell out of some sad bit of music.
He wanted to be angry, to scream and rail and feel honest-to-God outrage. But he wasn’t that kind of man. His love for Mikaela was more than just an emotion; it was the sum total of who he was.
This one thing he knew above everything else. He loved Mikaela too much. Which in its way was as bad as loving someone not enough.
Slowly he went downstairs.
The piano stood in the empty living room like a forgotten lover.
Liam closed his eyes and remembered a time when music swirled through this room every night … He could almost hear the squeaky joint of the bench as Mike sat down beside him.
Tips are welcome, he’d say, just as he’d said a thousand times on a thousand nights.
Here’s a tip for you, piano man: Get your wife to bed or miss your chance.
When he opened his eyes, the room was empty and silent.
He’d never thought much about silence, but now he knew its every shape and contour. It was a cheap glass jar that trapped old voices and kept them fresh.
He went to the piano and sat on the antique bench with its needlepoint seat. With one finger, he plunked at a single key. It made a dull, thudding sound.
Mrs. Julian True.
“Dr. Liam?”
He jumped, and his hand crashed on the keys in a blast of discordant sound.
Rosa stood in the archway that separated the great room from the dining room.
Liam didn’t want to talk to his mother-in-law right now. If she opened the door to intimacy, he might ask the question that was killing him: Did she ever love me, Rosa?
And God help him, he wasn’t ready for the answer.
“Lo siento, I do not mean to bother you.”
He studied her, saw the nervous trembling in her hands, the almost invisible tapping of her right foot, and he was seized by a sudden fear that she knew what he’d found, that she’d talk about Mikaela’s past now, tell him more than he wanted to know. He got slowly to his feet and moved toward her. In the pale, overhead light, she looked incredibly fragile, her wrinkled skin almost translucent. A tiny network of blue blood vessels crisscrossed her smooth cheeks. “Yes, Rosa?”
She gazed up at him, her dark eyes steeped in sorrow, and he knew that she understood the pain of a broken heart. “The anniversary … it must be very hard on you. I thought … maybe, if you do not think I am sticking my old woman’s nose where it does not belong, that we could watch a movie together. Bret has loaned me his favorite: Dumb and Dumber. He says it will make me laugh.”
The idea of Rosa watching Dumb and Dumber brought a smile. “Thank you, Rosa,” he answered, touched by her thoughtfulness. “But not tonight.”
“There is something else wrong,” she said slowly, eyeing him.
He tried to smile again. “What else could be wrong? Love will reach my wife, won’t it, Rosa? Isn’t that what you’re always telling me, that love will wake her up? But it’s been four weeks and still she’s asleep.”
“Do not give up, please.”
He looked at her for a long, desperate minute, then he said softly, “I’m falling apart.”
It was true. His wife was hanging on to life by a strand as thin as a spider’s web, and now suddenly it felt as if his whole life was hanging alongside her.
“No, Dr. Liam. You are the strongest man I have ever known.”
He didn’t feel strong. In fact, he’d never felt so close to breaking. He knew that if he stood here a moment longer, feeling Rosa’s sympathy like a warm fire on a cold, cold night, he’d ask the question: Did she ever love me, Rosa?
“I can’t do this now.” He shoved past a chair, heard it squeaking and crashing across the floor. When he spun around, he found himself staring into the silvered plane of an antique mirror. The network of lines around his eyes had the ridged, shadowy look of felt-tipped etchings.
Laugh lines.
That’s what Mike had called them. Only Liam couldn’t now recall the last time he’d laughed.
The image blurred and twisted before his eyes, until for a flashing second, it wasn’t himself he saw. It was a younger man, blindingly handsome, with a smile that could sell a million movie tickets. “I need to go to the hospital.”
“But—”
He pushed past her. “Now,” he said again, grabbing his coat off the hook on the wall. “I need to see to my wife.”
The emergency room was bustling with people tonight; the bright hallways echoed with voices and footsteps. Liam hurried to Mike’s room.
She lay there like a broken princess in someone else’s bed, her chest steadily rising and falling.
“Ah, Mike,” he murmured, moving toward her. It was beyond him now, the simple routine he’d constructed so carefully—the potpourri, the pillows, the music.
He stared down at her.
She was still beautiful. Some days he could pretend that she was simply sleeping, that it was an ordinary morning, and any moment she’d wake up and reach for him. Not tonight, however.
“I fell in love with you the first second I saw you,” he said, curling his hand around hers, feeling the warmth of her flesh. Even then, he’d known she was running from something … or someone. It was obvious. But what did he care? He knew what he wanted: Mikaela and Jacey and a new life in Last Bend. A love that would last forever. He hadn’t known who she was—who she’d once been. How could he? He’d never been one to read celebrity magazines, and even if he had, he would have read about Kayla True, a woman who meant nothing to him.
After Jacey had recovered from her surgery, Mike had begun to pull away from Liam. He’d seen how tired she was, how frightened and worn out, and he’d slipped in to stand beside her. Let me be your buffer against the wind, he’d whispered. Let me keep you warm.
He’d known why she reached for him, why she’d crawled into his bed and let him kiss her. She’d been a fragile, lonely little bird, and he’d built her a nest. Over time she’d learned to smile again. And every day that she stayed with him was a blessing.
He closed his eyes and culled memories, brushing some aside and savoring others. The first time he’d kissed her, on a bright and sunny day at Angel Falls … the way she snorted when she laughed really hard and cried at a good Hallmark commercial … the day Bret had been born and they’d put him in Liam’s arms, and Mike had whispered softly that life was good. The day he’d asked her to marry him …
That was the one that hurt.
It had been the year Batman exploded across theater multiplexes and the Exxon Valdez crashed in Prince William Sound.
They’d been at Angel Falls, stretched out on a blanket beside a still, green pool of water. There had been tears in her eyes when she told him she was pregnant.
He had known to tread carefully. It had been difficult, when all he wanted to do was throw back his head and laugh with joy, but he’d touched her cheek and asked her quietly to marry him.
I’ve been married before, she’d answered, a single tear sliding down her pink cheek.
Okay. That’s what he’d said, all he’d said.
It’s important.
He’d known that, of course.
I loved him with all my heart and soul, she’d said. I’m afraid I’ll love him until I die.
I see.
But he’d known that she was the one who could see. She’d known she was breaking his heart. She turned and knelt beside him. There are things I can’t tell you … ever. Things I won’t talk about.
“I didn’t care about all that, did I, Mike? I was forty years old and I’d seen things no human being should ever see.
“Until I met you, I had given up on love, did you know that? I had grown up in a great man’s shadow; I knew that everyone I met compared me to the famous Ian Campbell, and beside him, I was an agate pushed up alongside a diamond.
“Then I met you, and you’d never really known my father. I thought at last I’d found someone who wouldn’t compare me all the time … but you’d already had a diamond, hadn’t you, Mike? And I was still just an ordinary agate …”
But he hadn’t told her any of this when he asked her to marry him, when she told him she’d already found—and lost—the love of her life. All he’d said was that he loved her, and that if she could return even a piece of his love, they’d be happy.
He’d known that she wanted it to be true, just as he’d known she didn’t completely believe it. I will never lie to you, Liam, and I’ll never be unfaithful. I will be as good a wife as I can be.
I love you, Mike, he’d said, watching her cry.
And I love you.
He’d thought that over the years, she’d learned to love him, but now he was seized by doubt. Maybe she cared for him. Only that.
“You should have told me, Mike,” he said, but even as he said the words, he heard the lie echoing within them. She couldn’t have told him. She was right in that, at least. The knowing was unbearable.
She had loved him that much, anyway.
“I found the pillowcase, Mike,” he said, leaning close. “The pictures … the clippings. I know about … him.”
He squeezed her hand. “I guess I know why you didn’t tell me. But it hurts, Mike. Jesus, it hurts and I don’t know what to do with all of it.”
He leaned toward her. “Did you ever love me, Mike? How can I go on without knowing the answer to that question?
“I guess I shouldn’t even ask,” he said. “I should have seen it in your eyes, should have known somehow that you were always comparing me to someone else. God knows I had the experience to see it, so why didn’t I? And how could I ever measure up to Julian True?”
She blinked.
Liam gasped, squeezing her hand so hard it should have crushed the fragile bones. “Mike … can you hear me? Blink if you can hear me.” With his other hand, he hit the nurses’ button.
Within seconds, Sarah came bustling into the room, already out of breath. “Dr. Campbell, is she—”
“She blinked.”
Sarah came closer to the bed, studying Mike first, and then Liam.
Mike lay perfectly still, her eyes sealed shut.
“Come on, Mike. Blink if you can hear me.”
Sarah checked each machine, one by one, then she moved to stand by Liam. “I think it was a reflex. Or maybe—”
“It wasn’t my imagination, damn it. She blinked.”
“Maybe I should call for Dr. Penn.”
“Do it,” he said, without looking up.
He let go of Mike’s hand for just long enough to hit the play button on the tape recorder. Music swept into the room, songs from the Tapestry album by Carole King.
Liam held her hands again, both of them this time, talking to her, saying the same thing over and over again. He was still talking, begging, when Stephen came into the room, examined Mike, and then quietly left.
Liam talked until his throat was dry and there were no more pleas left inside of him. Then he slumped back down into the chair and bowed his head. Please God, help her.
But deep inside he knew. It hadn’t been God who’d helped Mikaela blink. It was a name, just that after all these weeks, just a simple name. When she heard it, she responded.
Julian True.
She is floating in a sea of gray and black … there is the smell of something … flowers … a music she can almost recognize.
She longs to touch the music, but she has no arms … no legs … no eyes. All she can feel is the thudding beat of her heart. Fast, like a baby bird’s, and she can taste the metallic edge of fear.
“You should have told me.”
It is the voice she’s come to know, soft and soothing, and she knows that somewhere, sometime, she knew it, but here there is no before, there is no now. There is just the dark, the fear, the helpless longing for something….
“Julian.”
Julian. The word seems to sink deep, deep inside her; it makes her heart beat faster, and she wants to reach for it, hold it against her chest.
Julian. In the black rubble of her life it is connected to another word, one she remembers.
Love.