Angel Falls (6 page)

Nine steps. That’s how many it took to get to her daughter’s bedside.

Mikaela’s beautiful face was scratched and bruised and swollen, her eyes hidden beneath puffy black folds of flesh.

Rosa leaned over the railing and touched her daughter’s cheek. The skin felt bloated, hard to the touch, like a balloon overfilled with air. She was silent for many minutes. “My little girl,” she said at last, “I have seen you looking better,
sí
? That must have been
quite a fall you took.” She drew back. Her hand was shaking so badly, she was afraid Mikaela would hear the rattling of her fingers against the bed rail.

“We don’t know how much she can hear … or if she can hear at all,” Liam said. “We don’t know … if she’ll wake up.”

Rosa looked up at him. At first she was stung by his words, but then she realized it was the doctor in him speaking. He couldn’t change himself any more than she could. He was a man of science; he believed in evidence. Rosa was a woman of faith, and a long, hard life had taught her that truth almost never revealed itself to the human eye. “Do you remember when you all went to Hawaii last summer?”

He frowned. “Of course.”

“When you got home, Jacey called me. She had been surfing,
sí
?”

“Yes.”

“And she got into trouble. The board, it hit her on the head, and when she was underwater, she was scared. She did not know up from down.” She noticed the way Liam’s fingers tightened around the bed rail, and she understood. “Do not be afraid, Dr. Liam. Mikaela is like Jacey. She is lost in a place she cannot understand. She will need us to guide her home. All we have is our voices, our memories. We must use these as … flashlights to show her the way.”

Liam’s gaze softened. “I’m glad you’re here, Rosa.”

“
Sí
. It is hard to be alone for something like this.”

He flinched at the word
alone
, and she knew what he was thinking, that without his wife, there would be
a lifetime of alone. He had his children,
sí
, whom he loved, but still there was a kind of loneliness that only a lover could ease. This, Rosa knew too well.

And one thing Rosa knew about Liam—she’d known it from the first time she saw him, almost twelve years ago—he loved his Mikaela. Loved her in the bone-deep way that most women long for and only a handful ever find.

Rosa couldn’t help wondering if Mikaela knew this, if she understood her good fortune. Or if, in some dark, forbidden corner of her heart, there grew the untamed remains of an old, bad love.

Rosa knew how deep the roots of that love had gone into her daughter’s heart, and she knew, too, that sometimes a first love went to seed, growing in wild disarray until there was no room for anything—or anyone—else.

Rosa spent almost an hour with her daughter, then she left Liam at Mikaela’s bedside and went in search of her grandchildren.

Jacey and Bret were in the waiting room, sitting together on the sofa, their arms wrapped around each other.

It took her a moment to find her voice. “Children?”

With a cry, Jacey pulled out of her brother’s arms and hurled herself at Rosa.

“It will be all right,
niña
,” Rosa said over and over again, holding her granddaughter.

Bret sat quietly on the couch, sucking his thumb.

Rosa eased away from Jacey and went to the sofa. In front of Bret, she knelt. “
Hola
, my little man.”

Bret’s red-rimmed eyes looked huge in the tear-streaked pallor of his face. “She’s dead, Grandma.”

“She is alive, Bret, and she needs us now.” Slowly Rosa took hold of Bret’s right hand, tugging gently until the thumb popped out of his mouth. Then she pressed her hands against his in prayer. “These hands of ours, they are for praying.”

Jacey layered her hands on top of theirs.

Rosa bowed her head and began to pray: “Our Father, Who art in Heaven …” She let the words fill her aching heart. It was the prayer she’d offered to God every day since her First Communion more than five decades before.

At last Bret and Jacey joined their voices to the prayer.

The house was quiet now, not like it should be at nine-thirty in the evening, but the way it had become.

Jacey was in Mike’s office, surfing the Internet for a school report. Liam came up behind her.

“How’s it going?” he asked, squeezing her shoulder gently.

She looked up. Her eyes were still a little puffy; he knew she was like all of them, prone to sudden, unexpected tears. “Okay, I guess.”

“We could move the computer into the living room if—”

“No. I … like being in her office. I can feel her in here. Sometimes I forget and think she’ll poke her
head in here and say, ‘That’s enough, kiddo, I need to use the computer.’” Jacey tried to smile. “It’s better than the quiet.”

Liam knew what she meant. “Well, don’t stay up too late.”

“Okay.”

He left her there, in that room that held Mike’s presence like a favorite scent, and headed to Bret’s room.

He knocked on his son’s door. There was a scuffling noise from inside, then a quiet “Come in.”

He opened the door. The room was dark except for a small Batman night-light that tossed a triangle of golden light toward the bed, and a skylight cut into the sharply angled ceiling that revealed the starry night sky, making the room seem almost like an astronaut’s capsule.

“Heya, kiddo.”

“Hi, Daddy.”

It was a baby’s voice that came out of the darkness, not at all the voice of a nine-year-old boy who’d hit his first home run last spring, and the sound of it brought Liam to a halt.

When he realized he wasn’t moving, he forced a watered-down laugh. “Sorry. I think I just stepped on Han Solo.”

“His legs were missing awready. Joe Lipsky bit ’em off last summer.”

Liam folded himself awkwardly onto the narrow bed. He brushed a lock of red hair from Bret’s eyes.
“You know you can sleep with me anytime you want.”

Bret nodded but said nothing.

“You used to come into our bed whenever you had a nightmare. You can still do that … even if you haven’t had a nightmare and you just feel like being with me.”

“I know.”

This wasn’t getting them anywhere. It had always been Mike who could get the kids to talk about anything; Liam wasn’t quite sure how to go about it.

“Mommy’s not there.”

Of course. The king-sized bed seemed as big and empty to Bret as it did to Liam. “I’m still here, Bret, and you know what?”

“What?”

“It’s a secret. Will you promise not to tell anyone?”

Bret’s blue eyes looked impossibly big in his small face. “I promise.”

“Sometimes I get really scared … especially at night when I’m alone. It would help me an awful lot to be cuddled up with you. So, you come on in, anytime you want to. Okay?”

Bret laid his head on Liam’s shoulder and burrowed close.

They lay there a long time, so long the stars twinkled and faded one by one. Liam started to pull away, thinking that Bret had fallen asleep, but the moment he moved, his son said, “Don’t go, Daddy …”

Liam stilled. “I wasn’t going anywhere.” He twisted to the right and pulled a slim paperback book out of
his back jeans pocket. “I thought I could start reading to you every night, the way Mo—Mommy and I used to. I know you’re big enough to read your own books, but I thought you might like it. Might help you sleep.”

“It would help.”

“I brought one of your mom’s favorite books.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
.”

“Is it scary?”

“No.” Liam positioned himself against the bed’s headboard and pulled Bret up beside him. Opening the book, he flipped to the first page and began to read aloud. “Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy …”

The words gently bound father and son, and transported them to a world where children could step into an armoire and discover a magical land.

Finally Liam came to the end of a chapter and closed the book. The bedside clock read ten-thirty, well past time for Bret to go to sleep. “That seems like a good enough place to stop for tonight. We’ll pick up where we left off tomorrow.”

Bret looked at him. “Do you believe in magic, Daddy?”

He smiled. “Every time I look at you or Jacey or Mommy, I
know
there’s magic.”

“Tell me about when I was born again.”

It was a well-worn legend, a quilt of often-told stories that could warm them on the coldest night. “She cried,” Liam said. “She cried and said you were the most perfect, most beautiful baby she’d ever seen.”

Bret smiled. “And you said I looked like I wasn’t done cookin’ yet.”

Liam touched his son’s soft, soft cheek. “You were so little …”

“But I had big lungs, and when I got hungry, I cried so loud the windows rattled.”

“And the nurses had to cover their ears.”

Bret’s genuine smile warmed Liam’s heart.

“Daddy, the kids that went through that … armwar. Do they come back?”

Liam wasn’t surprised that Bret wanted a guaranteed happy ending. “Yes, they do. Sometimes they get lost, but sooner or later, they always come back to the real world.”

“Will you read me more tomorrow night? Promise?”

“You bet.” He leaned down and kissed Bret’s forehead. As he did it, he remembered the “Mommy Kiss.” Mike had invented it when Bret was three years old. A magical kiss that prevented nightmares. “Should we start a daddy kiss? I have a bit of magic myself, you know.”

“Nope.”

Liam understood. Bret wanted to save that kiss for his mom. Trading it would make it feel as if she wasn’t ever coming home.

Bret looked up. Tears flooded his blue eyes. “I think about her all the time.”

“I know, honey,” he said, pulling Bret close. “I know.”

For a moment, perhaps no more than a heartbeat, life settled into a comfortable place. Liam smelled the
sweet scent of his little boy’s hair, felt the soft twining of arms around his neck, and it was enough. A dozen treasured images came back to him, memories he’d collected over the years of their lives together. And in remembering what had been, he found the strength to pray for what could be.

Rosa moved into the small cottage beside the main house, set her few personal items in the pink-tiled bathroom, and stocked the refrigerator with iced tea and a loaf of wheat bread. There was no point in doing more; she planned on spending all of her time with the children or Mikaela.

The next morning, after Liam left for the hospital, Rosa made the children a hot breakfast and tried to take them to school.

Not yet, Grandma, please …

She had not the heart to deny them. She granted their wish for one more day at the hospital—but after that, she said, they must go to school. The waiting room was no place for children, not hour upon hour, day upon day.

They drove the few miles to the medical center, and then Rosa settled the kids in the waiting room.

She hurried through the busy corridor, head down,
purse tucked against her body, counting the three hundred and eleven steps to Mikaela’s room in the ICU.

The small, curtained room still frightened her—there were so many unfamiliar noises and machines. At the bedside, she gazed down at her beautiful, broken child. “I guess it does not matter how old we get, or that you have children of your own, you will always be my little girl,
sí, mi hija
?” She gently stroked Mikaela’s unbruised cheek. The skin was swollen and taut, but Rosa thought she could feel a little more softness in the flesh than had been there yesterday.

She picked up the brush from the bedside table and began brushing Mikaela’s short hair. “I will wash your hair today,
hija
.”

She forced her lips into a smile and kept talking. “I am still not used to this short hair of yours, even though it has been many years like this. When I close my eyes, I still see my
niña
with hair streaming like spilled ink down her back.”

Rosa’s thoughts turned to the bleak days when her daughter had been so unhappy that she’d chopped off her own hair with a pair of drugstore scissors. Mikaela had been waiting for
him
. Waiting and waiting for a man who never showed up, and when she realized that he had no intention of returning, she’d cut off her lovely hair. The thing he liked best about her.

You cannot make yourself ugly—
that’s what Rosa had said when she’d seen what Mikaela had done, but what she’d meant was,
He isn’t worth this broken
heart of yours
. She hadn’t said that; she was the last person in the world to devalue a woman’s love for the wrong man.

She had thought that Mikaela would get over him, and that when she got over him, she would one day grow her hair long again.

Yet still, Mikaela’s hair was as short as a boy’s.

“No,” Rosa said aloud, “I will not think about him. He was not worth our thoughts then and he is not worth my words now. I will think instead about my little girl. You were so bright and beautiful and funny. Always you make me laugh.

“You had such big dreams. Remember? You used to pin all those
fotografías
up on your bedroom wall, pictures of faraway places. You dreamed of going to London and France and China. I used to say to you, ‘Where do you get such big dreams, Mikita?’ And do you remember your answer?”