“How long do you think the amnesia will last?” Liam asked, even though he knew the answer.
“There is no way of knowing,” Stephen said slowly. “Although chances are that she will remember. Long-term retrograde amnesia is rare.” His voice softened. “But it does happen.”
“How can we help her?” Liam asked quietly.
“Right now she’s afraid and confused. We want to tread very, very carefully. The mind is a fragile thing, much more delicate than the brain. We don’t want to overwhelm her with frightening information.” At last he looked at Liam. “I think it’s best if we let it come back naturally.”
Liam sighed tiredly. “You’re saying that the kids and I should stay away.”
“I’m sorry, Liam. I can only imagine how hard this is for you. But I think she needs some time to let her mind heal. Can you imagine realizing that you’d lost fifteen years of your life?”
“Yes,” Liam said, “I can imagine it.” He leaned forward and hung his head, staring down at the Oriental carpet so long, the colors smeared into one big bruise.
What in God’s name was he going to tell his children?
Julian went to a pay phone and called Val. “She woke up today,” he said when Val answered.
“No shit. How is she?”
“She’s got amnesia. She doesn’t remember anything of the last fifteen years. She thinks we’re still married.”
“Are you saying—”
“She’s still in love with me, Val. With none of the bad memories of our breakup.”
Val made a low, whistling sound. “Jesus Christ, what did you do—script this? It’s a goddamn fairy tale and you’re the prince. The press’ll love this.”
Julian sagged against the wall. “You don’t get it. How am I going to tell her that I never came back for her. Val? Val?”
His answer was a dial tone.
With a curse, Julian hung up the phone. For the first time since he’d gotten here, he was afraid.
She was alive. That was the miracle Liam needed to focus on. Over the past weeks, he had asked God to heal her, to help her open her eyes. All the while, he’d prepared himself for the physical impairments that could come with an extended coma. Paralysis, brain damage, even death—these he’d readied himself to handle. He’d never asked God to return her memories.
Now, as he drove home, he reminded himself that retrograde amnesia was a common short-term side effect of severe brain injury.
Short term. Those words were the ledge he tried to hold on to, but they kept crumbling beneath the weight of his fear.
What if she never remembered him or the kids?
He concentrated on breathing; it didn’t seem like much, but if he didn’t think about it, he stumbled into a place where panic was inches from his face, where he had to draw in great, sucking breaths just to survive.
Who are you?
Would he ever forget those words? Forget the pain that knifed through him in that single, horrifying moment when she’d said Julian’s name … and then asked Liam who he was.
He knew that her condition was purely medical in nature, a lapse in the function of her traumatized brain. But he was a man as well as a doctor, and the man in him felt like any man would feel. As if in twelve years of life together, of moments big and small, of a love that was enacted in errands and dinners and bedtime conversations, Liam had left no mark on her at all.
As if his love were like the waves that shifted and shaped, but never really changed the shore.
He was being foolish. She loved her children with every strand of her soul, and she had forgotten them, too—
No, that wasn’t right. She’d only forgotten Bret; Liam’s son. She remembered Jacey. And Julian.
He couldn’t shake a terrible, rising panic that in the end, his love would count for nothing. And what would he tell his children? They’d been through so much pain already, so much fear. Poor Bret had courageously visited her day after day, singing her favorite songs to her, waiting for a smile. It would crush him to discover that his mom didn’t remember him. One blank look and Bret would crumble.
Jacey would try to handle this like an adult, but inside, where it mattered, she would break like a little girl. She would understand that everything she and Mike had shared was gone. Every talk, every memory that entwined their lives would be Jacey’s alone now.
Liam couldn’t even think about his own fear right now; it was too overwhelming. “Please, God,” he whispered, “we can’t take this, too. It’s too much …”
The windshield wipers thumped in front of him, punctuating the silence in the car. A light snow began to fall, patterning the glass, piling up on the edges of the wiper’s sweep.
He flipped on the radio. “Memories” by Barbra Streisand blared from the speakers.
He snapped it off. Christ, what was next—“As Time Goes By”?
The snow was coming faster now. He didn’t see his own driveway until he was practically on top of it.
He put the car in four-wheel drive and lowered his speed, maneuvering carefully over the bumpy gravel road and into his own garage.
At the mudroom door, he paused, taking a moment to collect himself, then he pushed into the house. “Hello,” he called out. “I’m home.”
He heard the scurrying sound of slippered feet on the hardwood floor. Rosa appeared, wearing one of Mike’s old saddle club aprons over a black house-dress. “Buenos noches,” she said, wiping a hand across her brow, leaving a snowy trail of flour across her skin. “I am making the … biscuits for dinner. You would like a cup of coffee, sí? Or a glass of wine?”
“Where are the kids?”
“Jacey will be home any momento. Bret is upstairs in the shower. Would you like—”
“Mike woke up today.”
She gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. “Dios mio, it is a miracle. How is she?”
Liam didn’t know how to take all the information of this day and mold it into an ordinary sentence. In the end he simply said it: “She didn’t recognize me, Rosa.” He could hear the terrible ache at the edge of his voice; it didn’t sound like him at all. “Julian … she recognized Julian.”
Rosa’s hand fell slowly, slowly to her side, where her fingers curled into a tight fist. “What does this mean?”
“I could give you a bunch of technical explanations, but the bottom line is that her memory has failed. She seems to think she’s twenty-four and still married to Julian. She thinks Jacey is still a baby.”
Rosa was staring at him with a familiar look; it was the look of a patient who’d just received devastating news. She desperately wanted him to grant her hope. “This will get better, though. ¿Sí?”
“We hope it’s temporary.” He put the tiniest emphasis on the word hope. “Usually people get their memories back.”
“So she does not remember you or the children or all the years she’s been away from him.”
Each word was a brick, and when they piled one on top of the other, he broke. It was as simple as that, as anticlimactic. He’d been afraid of this moment for weeks—this time when his heart and his mind said simply no more—and yet now that it was here, it was nothing. No screaming agony, no crying jag that couldn’t be stopped. Just a narcotic weariness, an emptiness that ate through his bones. “No.”
Rosa closed her eyes and let her head drop forward. It was almost as if she were praying. “This pain for you … I can barely imagine it.”
His throat felt tight. “Yes.”
Finally she looked up, and her brown eyes—so like Mike’s—were glazed with tears. “What will you tell the children?”
There it was. Liam sighed. “I can hardly think of it, Rosa.”
“Sí. They have been praying for this for so long. It will break their hearts to learn that she does not remember them.”
“I know. But it’s a small town. Not a place where secrets keep.”
Secrets. Like a famous father a girl knew nothing about.
Rosa took a step toward him. “Do not tell them yet. At least for this night. Give Mikita until tomorrow. Maybe then we will never have to tell the niños this terrible thing, sí?” She gazed at him. “You had faith in Mikaela, Dr. Liam, from the start of this, you believed in God and in her. Don’t you stop. She will need you still … maybe even more now.”
“She has always needed me, Rosa. That’s why she married me. But before this thing is over, it will be about something else.”
Rosa flinched.
He knew that she understood what he was going to say before he spoke. “It will be about love.”
Chapter Nineteen
That night, after dinner, Liam tried to think of something that would take his mind off Mikaela. They were all in the living room now, ostensibly watching a TV movie, but no one seemed to be paying much attention.
At a commercial, Jacey hit the remote control and muted the television. “So,” she said suddenly, “how’s Mom?”
Liam dropped his medical journal. “Uh … the same,” he said into the awkward, sudden silence. “Hey, I have an idea. How about if we have one of our camp-out nights?”
Jacey frowned. “It’s freezing outside.”
Liam’s laugh had a forced, brittle edge. “I know, I know. I meant a pretend one. Like we used to when Bret was little. We’ll unplug the phones and bring our sleeping bags into the living room. Roast marshmallows and make s’mores. And I’ll tell you the story of Sam McGee.”
“That’d be great!” Bret said.
Jacey looked scared. “We haven’t done that in years. And we need the phone. If Mom—”
“I’ve got my pager. If something … happens, we’ll plug the phones back in.”
Jacey looked unconvinced. “I told Mark I’d call him tonight.”
Liam smiled at her. “You can live a few hours without talking to him.”
“No, she can’t,” Bret piped up. He planted a hand on his chest and rolled his eyes dramatically. “She’ll die if she doesn’t talk to her boyfriend.”
Jacey smacked her brother playfully on the head. “Very funny. Just wait till you stop thinking that girls have cooties.”
“Come on,” Liam said, smiling, “it’ll be fun. Your grandma’s never done it.”
Bret twisted around to face Rosa. “It’s totally rad, Grandma. Dad’s the best poem-teller.”
Rosa was smiling. “He is good at telling stories, sí?”
Liam clapped his hands together. “Let’s get started.”
An hour later they were ready.
Night turned the living room into a huge, rectangular cave. A fire crackled in the stone fireplace, casting a dancing, golden glow across the room. They’d thrown green and brown afghans over all the furniture, a disguise as fine as any. A navy blue king-sized sheet draped the piano, turning it into the mysterious Piano Lake, where swimmers were often lost even in the dog days of summer.
