Home Again

“Yeah, well, I got better things to do.”

“Like smoking down by the creek?”

Lina shrugged and glanced around the bleachers, noticing the film of wrappers and old popcorn and spilled Coke that lay in sticky heaps on the metal flooring. “I thought you wanted to talk.”

There was a long pause, then slowly, quietly, her mother began to speak. “I was six years old when my mom died. One night I kissed her good night and went off to bed…. When I woke up, she was gone. No one wanted to tell me how sick she was—my dad thought it didn’t matter, I guess, preparing a little girl to lose her mother. But there were so many things I never got to say.” There was a surprising bitterness in her mother’s voice, a hardness she’d never heard before. She frowned a little. “After that, I saw the world differently. I knew it wasn’t a safe place.”

Lina felt the tears come back, stinging, burning. She thought about wiping them away, but didn’t bother. “H-He was always there for me.”

“He still is, baby.”

Lina snorted and smeared a hand across her eyes. “Don’t get into that God stuff. It doesn’t help.”

“You can call it God or Jesus or Allah or mumbo jumbo; it doesn’t matter. What matters is looking inside yourself and discovering what you believe. If you don’t, you’ll have nothing to cling to, nothing to believe in, and everything will start falling apart. Trust me, I know.”

“I don’t want to think about that stuff now,” she said in a tiny, broken voice. “If I do, all I end up thinking about is how gone he is, how he’s never coming back, and how much I miss him.”

“If Francis were right here, right now, what would he say to you?”

For a split second she could almost feel him beside her, whispering in her ear. A sad little smile plucked at her lips. “He’d tell me to ditch that loser bunch of friends and go home.”

“You see? He’s there, inside you. He always will be.”

Lina wanted to smile, wanted it badly, but she couldn’t. “He hated my friends. He thought they weren’t going anywhere.”

Madelaine didn’t respond, but her silence seemed to say it all.

“I know he’s right,” Lina said shakily, “but I don’t know what to do about it. I never did.”

“The biggest journeys start with a single step. Maybe you could go to the Christmas dance. You’ll see a whole different crowd of people there. A girl as pretty as you could get a date in a second.”

Lina rolled her eyes. “As if Mom. Jett Rodham wouldn’t be caught dead at something as dopey as a school dance.”

“What about you, Lina? Would you like to go?”

It was exactly the sort of idea Francis would have come up with. Lina thought about it, and wished immediately that she hadn’t. The idea of attending a school dance was oh, so seductive. She thought about dressing up, fixing her hair, coming down the stairs and getting her picture taken with a boy who smiled shyly for the camera. She thought about her mother, grinning from ear to ear, slipping her arm around Francis’s waist—

No. Francis wouldn’t be there. He’d never be there again….

Lina jerked to her feet. “Don’t talk to me about these things,” she hissed. It hurt so badly, missing him; she hadn’t thought anything could hurt this bad. “I don’t have that kind of life, damn it. It’s too late for me to become some idiotic homecoming queen. Just leave well enough alone.”

“Oh, baby …” Madelaine said on a sigh, reaching for her.

Lina could feel her mother’s love—a heat that was inches beyond her grasp. But she couldn’t get rid of the picture of her going to the prom, of Francis and her mother waiting up for her.

The thought of him twisted her insides into a tight, throbbing knot. Wordlessly she spun away from her mom’s sad face and ran across the football field. She didn’t know where she was going. It didn’t matter.

She just knew she had to run.

Chapter Eighteen

Madelaine slipped on her mask and paper slippers and headed for Angel’s room in isolation. As she glanced through the glass observation doors, she saw the nurse standing alongside his bed, monitoring his every heartbeat.

She stepped quickly through the doors and stood beside the nurse. He lay completely still, his face pale and slightly gray, his body hooked up to a dozen machines and intravenous solutions. Two huge chest tubes lay alongside his new heart, sticking out from wounds at the base of his rib cage. Blood bubbled through the clear plastic and collected in a huge canister at the foot of the bed.

He looked peaceful now, but she knew it was an illusion. Every thirty minutes the special-care nurses turned his weakened body from side to side, pounding on his back to keep his lungs and swollen, hacked-up chest clear. They forced him to breathe into a tube to work his lungs. The massive doses of immunosuppressant drugs that he’d been given in the first twenty-four hours had been diminished somewhat on this, the second day after surgery, but the antibiotic dosage had been increased.

She reached for his charts and studied them, looking for anything that might be problematic. “How’s our patient doing?”