by Demaree Iles
At that very moment, his left ventricle collapsed altogether.
****
Charlie opened his eyes. He was surprised to find the pain was gone. Embarrassed to be the center of attention, he looked up from the demolished table amidst fragments of wood, porcelain, and cake. People were looking down at him with shock and fear. He had to get up.
Strange to find that regaining his feet wasn’t as hard as he expected. He managed to pull himself up by a table leg, but wondered why no one bothered to give him a hand up. Granted, he wasn’t well-liked by many of the guests, and yes, he’d just accidentally demolished the cake, but even the worst of people should be able to show some compassion for a man having what he figured was a heart attack. Still, they just stood there.
Two of the police officers and Bill Reynolds rushed forward with looks of concern, but even they went right past him. What the hell?
Everyone crowded around, yet he seemed to have no trouble weaving through the throng of guests. A commotion was going on behind him and for some reason he wouldn’t—couldn’t turn around. Charlie instead found himself drawn from the ballroom toward the front door of the club and was already well on his way.
Like a moth to flame, he simply had to get there.
It was crazy, but the fall must have helped his hip and knees somehow, too, because they didn’t hurt for the first time in years. There was no limp, either. As if that wasn’t enough, he’d also managed to avoid getting any cake on his suit. Not a crumb.
Ballroom behind him, he went past the coat room, through the empty foyer, and approached the front door. Charlie stopped in his tracks. What awaited him in the doorway trapped air in his throat. Then it came out in a gush and he gasped.
A well-dressed, handsome figure stood leaning against the doorjamb and smiled at him. Brilliant, warming light came through the door behind the young man. Even with the intense illumination, Charlie recognized the face and began to cry. The man came toward him.
In an instant, everything changed. The sadness within Charlie was no longer just a feeling. He became aware of his deep-seated sorrow as an actual thing, with thickness and weight—an entity.
The man reached out and placed his hand on Charlie’s chest. Like a cancer being surgically removed, he could feel something being extracted from deep inside, from the very core of his being. When it left his body, there was a snap like that of a rubber band, and suddenly everything that had hurt throughout Charlie LaRue’s entire life—insults, slights, abuse—fell away in an instant and faded into nothingness.
He felt light as a feather.
At that same moment, the empty space within him began to fill with something else. Charlie didn’t need to be told what it was and wouldn’t have been able to explain it to someone if asked. How, he thought, do you describe utter and absolute peace?
“Hello, Dad.”
Charlie stepped close and into the embrace of strong, healthy arms. He gazed into the familiar eyes he would have recognized anywhere, but that now sparkled with a much deeper, knowing intelligence.
“Got a few things to show you,” the young man said. “Take a deep breath.”
Charlie did, and the air seemed to be filled with the best, fresh-baked bread he’d ever smelled. In shock, he found his voice. “Is…Is this real?”
“What is real?” the young man asked in return.
Tears streamed down Charlie’s face, but they weren’t borne of sadness. He wasn’t afraid anymore, and he wasn’t angry. Filled with warmth and overflowing with loving emotion, he couldn’t help himself. “Am I…dead? Is this Heaven?”
Tommy said nothing more. Instead, he took his father’s hand and led him to the door. They stepped out into bright, warm sunshine. It was the brightest light Charlie had ever seen.
Chapter Eighteen
Charlie and Pearl LaRue stopped mattering to their daughter the moment Ruby found out they were both out of the picture for good. According to the medical examiner’s report, her mother (the only one she really cared for) had died alone—choked to death on one of her daddy’s goddamn cream puffs. Rumor had it her body wouldn’t have been discovered for days had the police not gone by the LaRue residence to tell Pearl of her husband’s heart attack.
Strange world, Ruby thought. But shit happens.
Along with Randall’s help, she had cleaned out her parents’ house the day after Pearl’s funeral. It had been filled mostly with junk as far as she was concerned; old people’s clothes, dusty knick-knacks and photo albums she could’ve cared less about. She held a garage sale a week later and sold whatever things she thought might bring a buck or two before making sure Randall hauled the rest to the county dump.
“What’s this?” Randall had asked as they were going through the place.
He’d been packing up loose items from the living room and had saved the little bookshelf behind the couch for last. Pearl’s dog-eared paperbacks went into a box pretty quick, so he’d started gathering her crafting supplies when he came across a crumpled paper bag half-buried under bracelets as if it had been hidden there. The pinstripes had caught his eye and inside he found some gold colored wire.
Ruby looked over. “Who cares,” she said, shrugging. “Trash it.”
The wire went into the garbage bag. He was looking around and making sure he hadn’t missed anything when Ruby suddenly screamed and he spun around.
“I don’t believe it! I just don’t freakin’ believe it!”
Randall rushed over and she shoved a sheaf of official-looking papers at him; each sheet typed with the letterhead of the Bossier County Courthouse. It was a copy of a will—an addendum actually—to the original will her parents had filed years ago. This one had been dated about a year ago.
“He ain’t getting away with this—oh, HELLLL no.”
Ruby hurried over to her purse and grabbed her phone.
Randall lowered the papers. “What’re you doing?”
“What the hell do you think I’m doing?” she said, flipping through her collection of business cards and coming across the one she was looking for. She grabbed her phone. “I’m calling our attorney.”
“But honey, you’re a lawyer.”
“Tax law. This is gonna take someone good at contract law,” she said, waving the card.
She was put on hold by a legal secretary as Randall went to the next room to finish packing. As the other end of the line turned to elevator music, Ruby hissed under her breath.
“Thanks a buttload, Dad.”
****
The bakery had been closed for two weeks following the news about Charlie and Pearl LaRue.
Kathy Cable was heartbroken. Working for Charlie had been the best experience of her life and he’d been a wonderful boss. Eventually, she stopped going by to visit the place where he now rested in silence. It was just too painful. Besides, she still had a job to do at the bakery.
With Charlie no longer around, Ruby LaRue Bailey—having sole controlling interest in The Baker’s Dozen—still wanted the place operating to supplement her salary from the law firm. She was too lazy to work in the bakery herself and even less enthusiastic on the notion of selling it.
Kathy disliked working for Ruby, but it was job security and she couldn’t bring herself to leave the place anyway. It would be like letting Charlie down. She’d stopped in to clean up the cookware he had used for his last cake. The pans and utensils still soaked in the final sink of soap water he’d ever drawn, though the suds were long since history.
Tough as she was, the tears still came as each item was cleaned and put away. What a shame, she thought. A good man and great friend, and no one ever got to taste the masterpiece he had worked so hard on.
Before leaving, she set the garbage bags by the back door as she always did to be tossed into the dumpster on her way out. She thought nothing of the empty box of poison in the last trash can. After what Dave Finley’s boys pulled a couple years back, Charlie always took preventative measures against rats getting in ag
ain.
“Smart thinkin’, boss,” she said to the empty kitchen as she turned off the lights and carried the bags out. She ached to hear him reply and would’ve given anything to hear his voice again.
She also wondered how he would’ve felt if he’d known the Finley boys had broken in again. On the day of Ruby’s wedding, the youngest one had been caught inside the bakery by a patrolman cruising past and the police had even gone to the reception to let Charlie know so that he could press charges. The heart attack had taken down her old boss before they could tell him.
Shame. One of these days, she thought, those little bastards were going to pay. And their father, too.
A minute later, Kathy drove out of the parking lot. She thought about stopping on the way home to have a beer in Charlie’s honor. But then, as if hearing his usual good-natured advice, she decided against it. “Miss you around here, boss,” she said, and drove straight home.
****
“So what’s that contract lawyer say?” Randall asked during dinner a couple days later. “Can he do anything to change it?”
“Probably,” Ruby said. “I think God’s lookin’ out for us, though.”
“How’s that?”
“Well the way Larry tells it, he needs more time to find a loophole with the new will that goes along with my Power of Attorney—maybe find some precedent in case law—but he says we’d have been screwed right from the start if Dad had died. As long as he’s still breathing, Larry has more time to find a way around this mess and keep that Kathy-girl from getting shit.”
“She doesn’t know about the will, does she?”
“No. And I’m sure as hell not gonna tell her. Dad’s heart just needs to keep pumpin’ long enough for Larry to do his thing and we’ll be in the clear. Weʼll put him on a goddamn breathinʼ machine if we have to.”
She noticed Randall poking at the food on his plate rather than eating. He only did that when something was bothering him.
“What?” Ruby asked.
“Well…you know there’s another possibility, too.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“What if…” he said with caution, “what if he comes back?”
“You mean Dad? Out of the coma?” She barked a laugh. “Not likely, sugar. The odds of that happening are slim to none, and even if he did come out of it, he’d never be the same again.”
Chapter Nineteen
To his opening eyes, everything was blurry and dark. His eyelids felt gummy and thick like someone had glued them together, and they seemed to weigh a ton. It was a big contrast to the brilliant light Tommy had shown him in the dream.
For it had to have been a dream. I’m alive…at least I think so.
He was lying on his back, nose stuffy and clogged, yet he still caught a faint whiff of something familiar. Alcohol, and not the drinkable kind. He was in a hospital.
It took a monumental effort to raise his hands, but he did so, slowly, suddenly aware of tubes and wires attached all over. Too restricted, his left hand could move no more than a couple of inches or so, but his right could reach his face where it found the source of his stuffy nose: oxygen tubing. Then his fingers found his face.
Charlie had shaved every day since he was sixteen. He distinctly remembered using a brand new razor before going to the wedding, but the beard he found on his cheeks felt like a lot more than a few days worth of stubble. He winced from the pain in his bicep as his hand dropped and landed back on the bed.
Any doubt as to whether or not he was alive vanished. The pain was proof enough.
“Yes, Charlie,” said a woman nearby in the dark. “You’re still here.”
The voice was as familiar as his own breathing; gentle, warm, and filled with life.
“Isabelle,” he said without thinking.
To his own ears he had said her name, but what actually came out of his mouth was creaky and incomplete, sounding more like Ith-a-buh. And it made his throat hurt.
From a chair beside the bed, her hand found his. “I knew you’d come back to me.”
He wanted to see her, but when he tried to ask why they were bathed in darkness, his voice wouldn’t cooperate. Trying hurt even worse.
She squeezed his hand. “Please don’t worry, Charlie. Try to relax,” she said. “Turning on a light right now would hurt your eyes.”
“I…I don—”
“I know you don’t understand.”
Her other hand found his and she squeezed them both as she leaned close, a vague outline of her face looming in front of him among the dark purple haze. Despite the oxygen tubing, he thought he could smell wisps of wild honeysuckle.
“Prepare yourself, Charlie,” she said, and he felt her soft lips on his hand. “You’ve been asleep for quite a while. The doctors actually had to put you in a coma to allow you to heal.”
She let it hang in the air a moment before answering the obvious question. “A year,” she said. “You’ve been asleep for a year.”
It’s not every day that you find out you’ve missed twelve months of your life, but Charlie was okay with it as he let it sink in. He’d been missing snippets of his life for years through his blackouts, so the knowledge of an extended slumber didn’t put him in shock. So he’d finally caught up on his sleep after all. In truth, he was simply glad to be alive.
“I’ll be right back,” Isabelle assured him.
She hurried out into the hallway and down to the nurse’s station to tell the staff she had a surprise for them. Within seconds, Charlie could hear excited chatter and the sound of many more footsteps coming back down the hall toward his room.
****
The next several hours were a whirlwind, with word spreading like wildfire and all departments of the hospital staff contributing where they could. On Isabelle’s request, no one in the local press was notified of Charlie’s awakening, but rumors often fly around hospitals at the speed of light. It wouldn’t be long before the media showed up to cover the big story.
Calls from the hospital to Charlie’s next of kin had gone unanswered. The administrator would try again soon. Maybe he’d ask the sheriff’s department to make a courtesy visit to the Bailey home if there was no better luck reaching the patient’s daughter. She’d certainly be shocked by the news. Word was, she hadnʼt been around much since that first week or two.
Somehow, Charlie wasnʼt surprised.
The medical team took great care with him; swarming all over as they infused his IV with unknown substances, cleaned him up, checked and re-checked everything concerning his vital signs and bodily functions. His muscles had atrophied, but that was to be expected from the man they had come to know over the last several months as Rip Van Winkle. Had it not been for the physical therapy staff performing range-of-motion exercises the entire time, he likely wouldn’t have been able to move at all.
“Yeah, those PT folks will be glad to start working with you for real tomorrow,” a nurse said as she finished making adjustments to the IV pump at his bedside. “You’re a celebrity now.”
Celebrity. He’d never liked the word. To Charlie, it was a term used to make a human being sound like so much more. From the amount of activity that surrounded him, however, it didn’t sound like he was going to have much choice. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that he was going to have a busy next few days.
“There’s a little more,” Isabelle said, resuming her seat beside him as the room finally cleared out and the nurse left.
Charlie looked at her as best he could. Finally, under the fluorescent light above, Isabelle appeared to be a real person and not just some fantasy his imagination had come up with. She took his hand again, and the warmth of her touch was all woman.
“Pearl’s gone, Charlie.”
The words floated, unmoving. He had just assumed his wife wasn’t with him at the hospital for the same reasons she didn’t make Ruby’s wedding—her weight and health problems. But deep down inside, he had somehow known. He’d been out cold for a year. That w
as a lot of cheeseburgers and toaster pastries under the bridge.
“When,” he managed between sips of water from a paper cup. “How?”
“Before your heart attack.”
Before?
“At least, that’s what the coroner said. She died the night before the wedding.”
Charlie’s forehead creased. It didn’t make sense.
“She choked to death, Charlie.”
Still fuzzy, his mind found the memory anyway. For him, the wedding had been just hours ago—not months. He remembered with clarity how much he had hated Pearl that night, in that moment when he came up behind her sitting on the couch. She’d been sitting there, stuffing her face with…
He looked back up at Isabelle. She shook her head. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She didn’t have to tell him the details. With the way his wife scarfed down snacks, it could have happened anytime. If only Pearl would…would have…
Charlie’s heart jumped to his throat. He needed to start thinking of Pearl and his marriage in a different way. In past tense. That thought did something to him. It took the soft thud of droplets on the sheet covering his lap for him to realize he was crying.
“It’s okay,” Isabelle said, taking his hand again. “Let it out.”
No one would have been more surprised than Charlie. He wanted to explain to Isabelle, but he couldn’t. There seemed to be no clear answer. Then she gave it to him.
“Fifty years is a long time.”
Tears flowed. Charlie cried for what he and Pearl could have been—should have been. He cried for the lost years. More than anything, he felt like an old dam in the path of a strong river; battered by time and collapsing under the pressure of pent-up anger, pain, and frustration.