“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.
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.