But she didn’t hear him. Bullet was fighting her, lunging and bucking as Mommy tried to rein the mare down to a controlled canter.
“Whoa, girl, slow down. Calm down …”
Bret heard the words as Mom flew past him. He wanted to scramble down from his perch, but he wasn’t allowed to—not when she was working a horse over jumps.
It was too late to yell anyway. Mom was already at the fence. Bret’s heart was hammering in his chest.
Somethingiswrong. The words jammed together in his mind, growing bigger and uglier with every breath. He wanted to say them out loud, to yell, but he couldn’t make his mouth work.
Silver Bullet bunched up and jumped over the fake brick siding with ease.
Bret heard his mom’s whoop of triumph and her laugh.
He had a split second of relief.
Then Silver Bullet stopped dead.
One second Mom was laughing, and the next, she was flying off the horse. Her head cracked into the barn post so hard the whole fence shook. And then she was just lying there in the dirt, her body crumpled like an old piece of paper.
There was no sound in the big, covered arena except his own heavy breathing. Even the horse was silent, standing beside her rider as if nothing had happened.
Bret slid down the fence and ran to his mom. He dropped to his knees beside her. Blood trickled down from underneath her helmet, smearing in her short black hair.
He touched her shoulder, gave her a little shove. “Mommy?”
The bloodied hair slid away from her face. That’s when he saw that her left eye was open.
Bret’s sister, Jacey, was the first to hear his scream. She came running into the arena, holding Dad’s big down coat around her. “Bretster—” Then she saw Mommy, lying there. “Oh my God! Don’t touch her!” she yelled at Bret. “I’ll get Dad.”
Bret couldn’t have moved if he’d wanted to. He just sat there, staring down at his broken mommy, praying and praying for her to wake up, but the prayers had no voice; he couldn’t make himself make any sound at all.
Finally Daddy ran into the barn.
Bret popped to his feet and held his arms out, but Daddy ran right past him. Bret stumbled backward so fast, he hit the fence wall. He couldn’t breathe enough to cry. He just stood there, watching the red, red blood slither down his mommy’s face. Jacey came and stood beside him.
Daddy knelt beside her, dropping his black medical bag into the dirt. “Hang on, Mikaela,” he whispered. Gently he removed her helmet—should Bret have done that?—then Daddy opened her mouth and poked his fingers between her teeth. She coughed and sputtered, and Bret saw blood gush across his daddy’s fingers.
Daddy’s hands that were always so clean … now Mommy’s blood was everywhere, even on the sleeves of Daddy’s flannel pajamas.
“Hang on, Mike,” his dad kept saying, over and over again, “hang on. We’re all here … stay with us.…”
Stay with us. That meant don’t die … which meant she could die.
Dad looked up at Jacey. “Call nine-one-one now.”
It felt like hours they all stood there, frozen and silent. Finally red lights cartwheeled through the dim barn, sirens screamed; an ambulance skidded through the loose gravel alongside the horse trailer.
Blue-uniformed paramedics came running into the barn, dragging a bumping, clanking bed on wheels behind them. Bret’s heart started beating so loud he couldn’t hear.
He tried to scream Save her! but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was a thick black cloud. He watched the smoke turn into a bunch of tiny spiders and float away.
He clamped his mouth shut and backed away, hitting the fence so hard it knocked him dizzy. He covered his ears and shut his eyes and prayed as hard as he could.
She is dying.
Memories rush through her mind in no particular order, some tinged with the sweet scent of roses after a spring rain, some smelling of the sand at the lake where she tasted the first kiss that mattered. Some—too many—come wrapped in the iridescent, sticky web of regret.
They are moving her now, strapping her body to a strange bed. The lights are so bright that she cannot open her eyes. An engine starts and the movement hurts. Oh, God, it hurts …
She can hear her husband’s voice, the soft, whispering love sounds that have guided her through the last ten years of her life, and though she can hear nothing from her children, her babies, she knows they are here, watching her. More than anything in the world, she wants a chance to say something to them, even if only a sound, a sigh, something …
Warm tears leak from the corners of her eyes, slide behind her ears, and dampen the stiff, unpleasantly scented pillow behind her head. She wishes she could hold them back, swallow them, so that her children won’t see, but such control is gone, as distant and impossible as the ability to lift her hand for a final wave.
Then again, maybe she isn’t crying at all, maybe it is her soul, leaking from her body in droplets that no one will ever see.
Chapter Two
When he was young, Liam Campbell hadn’t been able to get out of Last Bend fast enough. The town had seemed so small and constrained, squeezed as it was inside his famous father’s fist. Everywhere Liam went, he was compared to his larger-than-life dad, and he fell short. Even at home, he felt invisible. His parents were so in love … there simply wasn’t much room left over for a boy who read books and longed to be a concert pianist.
To his utter astonishment, he had been accepted at Harvard. By the time he’d finished his undergraduate studies, he’d learned that he wasn’t good enough to be a concert pianist. The best player at Last Bend, even the best at Harvard, wasn’t good enough. He could be a music teacher at an expensive private school, maybe, but his talent didn’t include the power or the anger or the desperate passion of the best of the best. So he’d quietly tucked that youthful dream aside and turned his attention to medicine. If he wasn’t talented enough to entertain people with his hands, he believed he was caring enough to heal them.
He studied day and night, knowing that a quiet man like him, so reserved and ordinary, needed to be better than the competition.
He graduated at the top of his class and took a job that stunned and appalled his Ivy League classmates—at an AIDS clinic in the Bronx. It was the early days of the epidemic and people were terrified of the disease. But Liam believed that there, amidst true suffering, he would discover the man he was meant to be.
In hallways that smelled of death and despair, he made a difference in patients’ lives, but he never once got to say “You’ll be fine. You’re cured.”
Instead, he dispensed medicines that didn’t work and held hands that got weaker and weaker. He held newborn babies who would never have the chance to dream of living in Paris. He wrote out death certificates until he could no longer hold a pen without horror.
When his mother died of a sudden heart attack, he came home and tended to the father who, for the first time, needed his only son. Liam had always meant to leave again, but then he’d met Mikaela …
Mike.
With her, at last, he had found his place in the world.
Now he was in the hospital, waiting to hear whether she would live …
They had been here for only a few hours, but it felt like forever. His children were in the waiting room—he could picture them, huddled together, weeping, Jacey drying her little brother’s tears—and though he longed to be with them, he knew that if he looked at his children now, he would break, and the tears that fell from his eyes would scald them all.
“Liam?”
He spun toward the voice. His hip cracked into a crash cart and set the supplies rattling. He reached out and steadied them.
Dr. Stephen Penn, the chief of neurology, stood before him. Though he was Liam’s age—just turned fifty—Stephen looked old now, and tired. They had played golf together for years, he and Stephen, but nothing in their relationship had prepared them for this moment.
He touch
ed Liam’s shoulder. “Come with me.”
They walked side by side down the austere corridor and turned into the ICU. Liam noticed the way the trauma nurses wouldn’t look at him. It was humbling to know how it felt to be the “next of kin.”
At last they entered a glass-walled private room, where Mikaela lay in a narrow bed, behind a pale privacy curtain. She looked like a broken doll, hooked up to machines—ventilators, IVs, monitors that tracked everything from her heart rate to her intracranial pressure. The ventilator breathed for her, every breath a rhythmic thwop-whoosh-clunk in the quiet room.
“The … her brain is functioning, but we don’t know at what level because of the meds.” Stephen produced a straight pin and poked Mikaela’s small, bare feet, saying nothing when she failed to respond. He conducted a few more tests, which he knew Liam could assess along with him. Quietly he said, “The neurosurgeon is on board and up to speed, just in case, but we haven’t identified anything surgical. We’re hyperventilating her, controlling her pressure and temperature. Barring development of any bleeding … well, you know we’re doing everything we can.”
Liam closed his eyes. For the first time in his life, he wished he weren’t a doctor. He didn’t want to understand the reality of her condition. They had a state-of-the-art medical center and some of the best doctors north of San Francisco, all drawn here by the quality of life. But the truth was, there wasn’t a damn thing that could be done for her right now.
He didn’t mean to speak, but he couldn’t seem to hold it all inside. “I don’t know how to live without her …”
When Stephen turned to Liam, a sad, knowing expression filled his eyes. For a split second, he wasn’t a specialist, but just a man, a husband, and he understood. “We’ll know more tomorrow, if …” He didn’t finish the sentence; it wasn’t necessary.
If she makes it through the night.
“Thanks, Steve,” Liam said, his voice barely audible above the whirring of the machines and the steady drip-drip-drip of the IVs.
Stephen started to leave but paused at the doorway and turned back. “I’m sorry, Liam.” Without waiting for a response, he left the room. When he came back, there were several nurses with him. Together they wheeled Mikaela out of the room for more tests.
Courage, Liam thought to himself, wasn’t a hot, blistering emotion held only in the hands of men who joined the special forces and jumped out of airplanes and scaled unnamed mountains. It was a quiet thing, ice-cold more often than not; the last tiny piece you found when you thought that everything was gone. It was facing your children at a time like this, holding their hands and brushing their tears away when you were certain you hadn’t the strength to do it. It was swallowing your own grief and going on, one shallow, bitter breath at a time.
He put away his own fear. Where, he couldn’t have said, but somehow he boxed and buried it. He focused on the things that had to be done. Tragedy, he’d learned, came wrapped in details—insurance forms that had to be filled out, suitcases that had to be packed in case, schedules that needed to be altered. All of this he managed to do without breaking; if he did it without making eye contact with another human being, well, that was the way it had to be. He called Rosa Luna—Mike’s mother, who lived on the eastern side of the state—and left an urgent “Call me” message on her answering machine. Then, unable to put it off any longer, he walked down the busy corridor to the hospital’s lobby.
Jacey was sitting in one of the red vinyl chairs by the gift shop, reading a magazine. Bret was on the floor, idly playing with the toys the hospital staff kept in a plastic box.
Liam’s hands started to shake. He crossed his arms tightly and stood there, swaying a little. Help me, God, he prayed, then he forced his arms to his sides and strode into the area. “Hi, guys,” he said softly.
Jacey lurched to her feet. The magazine she’d been reading fluttered to the floor. Her eyes were swollen and red-rimmed; her mouth was drawn into a tremulous line. She was wearing a wrinkled pink sweatshirt and baggy jeans. “Daddy?”
Bret didn’t stand. He pushed the toys away and wiped his moist eyes, tilting his little chin upward. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” he said in a voice so dull and defeated that Liam felt the grief well up inside him again.
“She’s not dead, Bretster,” he said, feeling the hot sting of tears. Damn. He’d promised himself that he wouldn’t cry, not in front of them. They needed his strength now; the fear was his alone to bear. He forced his eyes to open wide and pinched the bridge of his nose for a second, then he knelt down beside his son and scooped him into his arms, holding him tightly. He wished to God there was something he could say, some magical bit of verbal wizardry that would banish their fear. But there was nothing save “wait and see,” and that was a cold comfort.
Jacey knelt beside Liam and pressed her cheek against his shoulder. He slipped an arm around her, too.
“She’s in bad shape right now,” he said slowly, searching for each word. How could you tell your children that their mother could die? “She’s suffered a pretty severe head injury. She needs our prayers.”
Bret wiggled closer to Liam. His body started to shudder; tears dampened Liam’s lab coat. When Bret looked up, he was sucking his thumb.
Liam didn’t know what to do. Bret had stopped sucking his thumb years ago, and here he was, huddled against his dad like a boy half his age, trying desperately to comfort himself.
Liam knew that from now on his children would know that dark and terrifying truth, the one that he and Mike had tried so hard to keep from them: The world could be a frightening place. Sometimes a single moment could change everything, and people—no matter how much you loved them—could die.
The hours of their vigil dripped into one another and formed a day.
Finally it was evening. Liam sat in the waiting room with his children, each of them watching the slow, methodical pirouette of the wall clock’s black hands. It had been hours since anyone had spoken. Words, he’d learned, had the density of lead. Each one seemed to weigh you down. And so they sat, together and yet alone.
At eight o’clock they heard footsteps coming down the hallway toward them. Liam tensed instantly and leaned forward. Please, don’t let it be bad news …
Jacey’s boyfriend, Mark Montgomery, swept into the quiet room, bringing with him a swell of energy. “Jace?” he said, his voice too loud. He stood in the doorway, wearing a red-and-white letterman’s sweater and baggy black sweatpants. “I just heard …”
Jacey ran into his arms, sobbing against his chest. Finally she drew back and looked up at him. “We … haven’t gotten to see her yet.” Mark kept his arm around her and led her to the sofa. Together they sat down. Jacey leaned against him. The quiet flutter of their whispery voices floated through the room.
Liam went to Bret and hugged him, cradling his son in his arms, carrying him back to the chair. And still they watched the clock.
Just before nine o’clock, Stephen came into the room.
Liam eased Bret onto the floor. Then he stood up and went to Stephen.
“The same,” Stephen said softly. “There’s nothing more we can do for her tonight. We just have to wait and see.” He lowered his voice then, speaking with a friend’s concern. “Take your children home, Liam. Try to get some sleep. We’ll talk again in the morning. If anything … happens, I’ll call you.”
Liam knew that Stephen was right. He should take his children home, but the thought of walking into that empty, empty house …
“Take them home, Liam,” Stephen said again.
Liam sighed. “Okay.”
Stephen patted him on the shoulder, then turned and left.
Liam took a deep breath. “Come on, kids. It’s time to go home. We’ll come back in the morning.”
Jacey stood up. “Home?” She looked terrified. Liam knew that she didn’t want to walk into that house, either.
Mark glanced at her, then at Liam. “A bunch of us were going to go to the haunted house. Maybe �
�� maybe you want to come?”
Jacey shook her head. “No, I need to stay—”
“Go, Jace,” Liam said softly. “Just take your beeper. I’ll call you if anything happens.”
She moved toward him. “No, Dad—”
He pulled her into his arms and held her tightly, whispering, “Go, Jace. Think of something else for an hour or two. We can’t help her this way.”
She drew back. He could see the war going on within her; she wanted to go and she wanted to stay. Finally she turned to Mark. “Okay. Maybe just for a few minutes.”
Mark came over, took Jacey’s hand in his, and led her out of the room.
“Daddy?” Bret said after she’d left. “I’m hungry.”
“Jesus, Bretster, I’m sorry. Let’s go home.”
Bret popped his thumb back in his mouth and got to his feet. He looked small and pathetic. For the first time, Liam noticed the clothes his son was wearing. Plaid flannel shirt, fake leather vest with a tin sheriff’s star pinned on the chest, crisp Wrangler jeans, and cowboy boots. A costume. The haunted house.
Shit.
It was almost nine-fifteen. For the last few hours, all over town, kids dressed as astronauts and aliens and princesses had been piling in and out of minivans. Their parents, already tired and headachy before it began, would crank the music up—mostly comfort rock and roll from their youth—and drive to the single housing development in Last Bend. In a town where your nearest neighbor was often half a mile away, trick-or-treating had to be carefully planned.
Liam glanced down at his son. He had a sudden flash of memory—Mike staying up late at night to finish the chaps that went with the costume. “You want to drive over to Angel Glen and go trick-or-treating?”
Bret’s cheeks bunched up as he sucked his thumb, then slowly he shook his head.
Liam understood. It was Mommy who always organized Halloween. “Okay, kiddo. Let’s go.”
Together they walked outside, into the cold, crisp October night. The air smelled of dying leaves and rich, black earth.
Kristin Hannah's Family Matters 4-Book Bundle: Angel Falls, Between Sisters, The Things We Do for Love, Magic Hour Page 2