“I know, I know, but allow me my little fantasies. I like to remember you as you were … when you didn’t wear combat boots and your favorite four-letter word was mama.” He was laughing and so was she as they made their way down the sidewalk.
Beside his car, Lina stopped and looked up at him. “What was I like … you know, when I was a kid? Was I so different from her then?”
Francis heard the pain in her voice, the uncertainty. He led her toward a wooden bench at the corner and they sat down. She huddled close to him, and suddenly she didn’t look nearly so cocky. She looked like a thin young girl in big, ugly clothes—a child eagerly wanting to find a way to womanhood.
He drew her close. Together they leaned back into the bench and stared up at the crisp autumn sky. “I remember your first day of school like it was yesterday. You and your mom lived in that gross apartment building in the U District. Those were the days when she was doing her residency at the UW hospital and she was working around the clock. You spent your days in the pediatric wing—hanging with the post-op kids in the recreational therapy room. Your mom never slept. She worked and studied, and every spare second she was with you, reading to you, playing with you, loving you like I’d never seen anyone loved before.”
“Fairy tales,” Lina murmured. “She used to read me fairy tales.”
“Even back then, you were a fiery, independent little thing. On the first day of kindergarten, your mom took the day off from work. She dressed and re-dressed you until you looked like a doll with your shiny black shoes and pink hair ribbons and your Sesame Street lunch box. It was set up that parents could ride the bus in with the kids on the first day—and Maddy was so excited. She’d never ridden a school bus before, and she couldn’t wait.
“But when you got to the bus stop, you turned to her and said you wanted to ride all by yourself.”
Lina frowned. “I don’t remember that.”
“Well, I do. Your mom almost burst into tears, but she wouldn’t let you see how hurt she was. Instead, she let go of your little hand and let you get on that big bus all by yourself. You didn’t even wave good-bye, just marched to an empty seat and sat down. When the doors shut, Maddy raced home, jumped in that junker of a car she had, and followed the bus to school. Crying all the way there and back.” He turned to her, touched her cheek. “She was so proud of you … and so scared.”
“I know she loves me,” Lina said, staring off into the distance. “And I love her. It’s just… hard sometimes. I feel like I don’t really belong with her. It’s like some alien accidentally left me behind.”
He tightened his hold. “That’s part of growing up. None of us know where we belong. We spend a lifetime trying to find out.”
“Easy for you to say. You love Mom and me, but you belong to God.”
He found himself unable to answer her. But he wished—Lord, how he wished—that it seemed as simple to him. “Yes,” he said slowly. “That pretty much sums up my life.”
“Did you know Mom promised to contact my dad?”
For a second, Francis couldn’t draw a decent breath. Finally he answered, “No, I didn’t know that.”
Lina flashed him a grin. “Yeah. I’m sorta nervous, but mostly I’m excited. Pretty soon I’ll get to meet him.”
Francis felt the fear returning, and on the heels of it came the shame. God forgive him, he didn’t want Lina to know her father. “Well,” he said at last. “What do you say we go get some pizza?”
“You’re going to offer pizza to a cardiologist’s kid?”
He laughed and it felt good, as if for a second everything in his world was normal. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Long after she’d left him alone in his room, long after the nurses had finished poking and prodding him, long after Hilda had fired off her litany of rules for the soon-to-be-eviscerated, Angel still couldn’t sleep. He’d asked for more drugs to help him sleep and been denied, so he lay there, wide awake.
Thinking was the last thing he wanted to do in this godforsaken place. But he couldn’t force the images from his mind. Francis and Madelaine humping wildly in a four-poster bed, twelve kids asleep in the bedroom next door. A white picket fence around a sparkling clean jungle gym.
He closed his eyes and knew instantly that it was a mistake. The memory came to him, sharp and clear and in heartbreaking focus….
It had been daylight, a sunny summer day, and Angel had been confined to a hospital bed. Francis was beside him, talking. But Angel was seventeen and too angry to listen—angry that he was sick, angry at the stupid doctors who told him he’d have to change his life, that he could die if he didn’t take care of himself. He didn’t know what the hell myocarditis was—and he didn’t give a damn. All he knew was that he felt too good to be hospitalized. He didn’t want to be trapped in a bed his mother wasted no time in telling him they couldn’t afford.
The summer stretched out before him, long and boring, and the diagnosis—viral infection affecting the heart—battered him. The stupid doctors kept telling him he could die if he wasn’t careful, that he had to quit smoking and drinking, but he felt perfectly healthy. There was nothing wrong with his heart.
The hospital door opened, but Angel didn’t bother to move. He was too busy feeling sorry for himself. Francis leaned close, whispered an awestruck, “Jeez.”
For a second Angel hadn’t known what his brother was talking about. Then he turned his head and saw her. A thin wisp of a girl—candy striper volunteer—standing in the doorway, her eyes wide and unblinking, her teeth nipping ever so softly at her full bottom lip. She had pale ivory skin and dark eyebrows that looked like they’d been slashed on with a marking pen. She was clutching a pile of Heartbeat and Tiger Beat magazines to her chest.
Angel had thought she was pretty enough, in a bland, private schoolgirl sort of way, but then he’d seen her reflected in his brother’s clear blue eyes, and suddenly she’d become more, so much more. The first girl Francis had ever looked at twice.
“Jeez Louise,” Francis whispered again.
Angel made his move without even thinking about it. He flashed the quiet candy striper his trademark grin, the one he’d used mercilessly on the girls in his low-rent neighborhood. He knew he was good-looking—a tanned, dark-haired Italian-Irish kid with rebellion in his green eyes.
She smiled back, slowly at first, and then more broadly. The smile transformed her features, tilted the corners of her eyes, and made her look exotic and Gypsy-like. Waves of light brown hair, streaked in places to the color of sand, shimmered in the artificial light.