Home Again

Slowly, hurting, he turned his head to look at her.

She stood poised in the doorway, one slim, pale hand lingering tentatively on the jamb. As always, she stood perfectly erect, her chin upthrust just a little, her hair combed into a series of honey-brown curls around her face.

He wanted to smile at her, cockily, as if none of this mattered, and he tried. “Hiya, Doc.”

“Hello, Angel. Are you ready?”

He was staring at her so intently that it took a second for her words to register. When they did, they hit with the force of a blow. “Ready?” he whispered, blowing how pathetic he sounded. He was lying there, shaved from chin to ankles, his skin discolored by antiseptic solution, his veins riddled with intravenous needles, his hair covered by a paper cap.

He was going to die, here and now, with his chest cut open and his heart taking its last feeble beats in another man’s gloved hands.

Madelaine let the door shut behind her and moved quietly toward his bed, sitting down beside him. “Dr. Allenford is on his way to Tacoma to check out the donor heart.”

Donor heart.

The words reverberated through his skull, echoing, echoing. One heart cut out, another sewn in.

“I don’t know if I can do this, Mad,” he said softly.

She leaned toward him, and her touch was cool and comforting on his damp cheek. “You never did have much faith in yourself,” she said with a smile that came and went so fast, he wondered if he imagined it.

He gave a laugh that ended in a rattling cough. “When you’re lying around waiting to die, you tend to think about what your life means.”

Another smile, softer, longer-lasting. “Don’t tell me you’re getting philosophical.”

He wanted to smile at her, but there was no smile inside him right now. There was only that yawning fear and the loneliness. “Don’t look so surprised. I almost qualified for ‘Jeopardy’ in 1986. It was the morality category that screwed me.”

“It would be.”

He fell serious again. “My life doesn’t mean much, Mad.”

“Life is what you make it, Angel. Maybe … after the surgery you’ll make a different one.”

“Life is what you make it,” he parroted, feeling a rush of unexpected bitterness toward her. The bitterness left him, and without it, he felt cold again. “Yeah, you’re right,” he conceded, staring at her, seeing for the first time the tiny lines that hung like commas at the corners of her mouth. Self-consciously she smoothed a nonexistent hair from her forehead, and he noticed that a button was missing from her sleeve.

It made her look so human, that little tangle of thread on her perfect silk blouse.

“I shouldn’t have run out on you that way.” He tossed the words out as if they meant nothing, but surprisingly, they did mean something. Even though the apology was pitiful and small and years too late, it felt good to admit to his mistake. He had spent a lifetime running from one bad decision, as if he could change it or outrun it. From a dozen dirty pay phones

in towns he couldn’t remember, he’d called Madelaine and Francis, dialed the numbers and listened to the intermittent ringing. But he’d always hung up before they answered.

What could he have said to them?

But still he’d tried, until the numbers he had for them had been disconnected.

“That was a long time ago, Angel.”

“Sometimes it feels like aeons. And sometimes it feels like yesterday. Anyway, I know it doesn’t matter, but I wanted you to know. I should have faced Alex with you.”

She flinched. He watched as color fell from her cheeks, left her face an ashen white.

He saw the pain in her eyes, and it made him feel like an ass. Of course, she didn’t want to think about that. “Sorry,” he whispered.

She didn’t move, just sat there, staring at him.

Her beeper went off, blipping through the tense silence. Absently she reached for it, shut the noise off, and grabbed his phone. Punching in the numbers, she asked for Dr. Allenford. She spoke a few quiet words, then hung up.

He knew it was bad by the look on her face. “What is it?”