And he prayed.
There were too many cars in the hospital parking lot. Absurdly, that was Rosa’s first thought as she drove into the Ian Campbell Medical Center that afternoon. It took her several minutes to find a vacant parking space. Finally, she pulled in between a battered Ford pickup truck and an old Impala, and turned off the engine.
She took a deep breath and released her grip on the steering wheel, one finger at a time. When she finished, she found that she was sweating, though the heater hadn’t worked in years and it couldn’t be more than forty degrees outside.
She gazed at the small figurine of the Virgin Mary anchored to the beige plastic dashboard. Then she got out of the car and walked toward the hospital.
The electronic doors whooshed open; the bitter, astringent smell of stale, medicated air assaulted her.
Rosa’s step faltered. She tucked her black vinyl purse against her narrow body and focused on the floor at her feet. It was an old habit, one she’d never been able to break. When she was nervous, she counted every step between where she was and where she wanted to be.
At the front desk, she stopped, barely looking up when the receptionist greeted her.
“I am here to see Dr. Liam Campbell,” she said.
“I’ll page him,” the girl answered. “Please have a seat.”
Rosa nodded and turned away. She kept her head down and counted the steps back to the collection of gray plastic chairs. Fourteen, to be exact.
She heard her son-in-law’s name echo through the halls. A few minutes later, she watched him walk toward her.
He looked as she would have expected, tired and beaten. He was a tall man, her son-in-law, although you didn’t notice that most of the time. There had been several occasions over the years when Rosa had turned to speak to Liam, or hand him something, and had been startled by his height. Ordinarily, he just didn’t seem to take up that much space. But he had the heart of a lion. Rosa had never known anyone who loved as completely as her son-in-law.
“Hola, Dr. Liam,” she said, pushing to her feet.
“Hello, Rosa.”
For an awkward moment, she waited for him to say something. She stared up at him. In his green eyes, she saw a harrowing sadness that told her everything she needed to know.
“Is she still alive?” Her voice was barely a whisper.
He nodded.
“Ah … thank God. You will take me to see her now?” she said, her fingers toying nervously with the brass closure on her purse.
Liam looked away. His sandy blond hair was clumpy and tousled, as if he’d forgotten to wash it. “I wish …”
His voice, always quiet and carefully modulated, was now as thin as a strand of silk thread. The whispery tenor of it sent a chill down her back.
“I wish I could spare you this, Rosa,” he finished, and when he was done, he tried to smile. It was a desperate failure that frightened Rosa more than his words.
“Let us go,” was all she could say.
They walked down one hallway after another. All the way, Rosa kept her head down, counting every step. Liam’s body beside her was like a guardrail, keeping her on course.
Finally Liam stopped at a closed door.
Then he did the most remarkable thing—he touched her shoulder. It was a brief, comforting touch, and it surprised her. They were not that free with each other. She couldn’t remember him ever touching her.
That he wanted to comfort her now, in the midst of his own pain, moved her deeply.
She wanted to smile up at him, or better yet, touch him in return, but her fingers were trembling and her throat was dry.
“She doesn’t look good, Rosa. Do you want to go in alone?”
She meant to say yes, thought she’d said yes, but she heard herself say no. Liam nodded in understanding and followed her into the room.
When she saw her daughter, Rosa stopped and drew in a sharp breath. “Dios mio.”
Mikaela lay in a narrow bed—a child’s bed, with silver railings. All around her, machines hissed and beeped. The room was dim; thank God. Rosa didn’t know if she could stand to see this under harsh fluorescent lighting.
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?”
