Home Again

“I …” He winced. God, it hurt to talk. “I called my business manager. He’s sending her an autographed picture.”

Sarah beamed, then brushed a lock of sweaty hair from his forehead. “Thank you, Mr. DeMarco.”

He whispered, “No problem.”

She checked one last bag, then turned and bustled away. The door closed behind her and silence settled into the room again, punctuated only by the computerized blip-blip-blip of the monitor.

Angel sighed again, wishing that he could close his eyes and drift off to sleep. Knowing that he couldn’t.

He turned slightly to look out the wall of glass beside his closed door. The Intensive Care Unit was silent and shadowy, the private rooms darkened for the night. Wraiths in white guarded the nurses’ station, huddled together in pockets of glowing light.

He stared so long his vision blurred and the nurses and interns became shadows within shadows, talking among themselves, sipping coffee, laughing silently.

I call her Lina.

He squeezed his eyes shut. Regret was a raw, throbbing wound in his soul. He couldn’t think of anything but the girl in the photograph. The look of her, so like him. The flame-blue eyes, the jet-black hair, the tiny little mole on the pale skin of her neck.

He wondered what she was like, this teenager who wore his smile on her heart-shaped face, but before he could even formulate a fantasy, it was gone.

He knew he couldn’t be a father. Not when he was healthy and certainly not now, when he lay dying. It saddened him, that pathetic realization of his own inadequacy. No man should have to see himself so clearly, know his own bleak soul with such intimacy, but Angel had never been one to lie to himself—only to others. He’d always seen his own frayed edges and known that he couldn’t change them. Change was too hard and the outcome too uncertain. Instead, he accepted himself, accepted and went on.

It was what he’d always done. Seen the truth and tucked his regrets so deeply in the pocket of his soul that after a while, he’d forgotten they existed. Until a day like today when his shortcomings were exposed.

His thoughts spun out like a fisherman’s line across the yawning darkness of the room. The years slid away from him, took him back, back.

It had been a breathtakingly beautiful summer evening—a week before he betrayed Madelaine. He remembered it clearly—a midnight sky lit with the bluish white of a full moon, the rustle of maple leaves overhead, and the faraway sounds of a carnival.

Come on, Angel, take me on the Ferris wheel I’ve never been on one….

He he

ard the softness of her words, whispered against his ear, remembered the gentle tugging of her hand as she pulled him down the midway.

It had been a Ferris wheel ride like no other. He felt the seat rock beneath him, sway and creak as it took them up, up, up, into the star-spangled sky.

When he looked down, he saw a whole new world. Gone was the tawdriness of the carnival, the dirt beneath the bright lights, and the crass cheapness of the prizes. Instead, he saw it as she saw it. Lights, action. Magic.

He held her close in that swaying seat, clinging to her, wanting her with all the pent-up desperation of a seventeen-year-old boy in love for the first time in his life. His hand had slid down her arm, feeling the softness of her skin and the sudden goose bumps his touch caused.

She turned to him then, and that instant was emblazoned on the ragged organ that was his heart—her hair ruffled by the wind, her eyes shining with love, her face backlit by a blanket of stars and moonlight. I love you, Angel DeMarco.

He gave her the same quiet declaration, feeling the humiliating sting of tears that he didn’t bother to brush away. He felt safe with her in that second, safe enough to cry, and both of them knew it.

Afterward, they strolled hand in hand down the midway, and Angel was struck again by the magic of it all. He remembered how it had felt tp be swept into that fantasyland; for a boy who’d grown up in a rickety trailer on the wrong side of town with an alcoholic mother, it was a dizzyingly heady time.

He spent his money at one booth after another, winning stuffed animals and a wineglass and a cheap bow-and-arrow set. But it was the last prize he remembered the most clearly.

The earrings, she whispered to him, pointing at a pair of garish red metal hoops. He knew instantly why she wanted them—they were so gaudy and cheap that Alex would be horrified to find them in her possession. She, with her pearls and diamonds and emeralds, the poor little rich girl who had never owned a carnival trinket.

It cost him eight dollars in quarters to place the earrings in her hand. But the look in her eyes was worth every cent.

After that, they walked to Carrington Park and stretched out beneath a hundred-year-old oak tree, wrapped in each other’s arms as they stared up at the night sky. They talked forever, spilling secrets and making vows, dreaming aloud of their future.

He held her, kissed her, and vowed to always be there for her.

Dawn washed their night away in shades of pink and purple. As they rose to leave, Madelaine pulled the hoops from her ears and stared down at them. “I can’t bring them home. My father… he looks through my things.”

He reached for them. “I’ll keep them.”