Home Again

Chapter Twenty

Angel shifted uncomfortably and punched his pillow into a little ball, then shoved it behind his head. Above him, the television spewed commercial jingles.

He reached for the remote control and flipped through the channels. One of those tabloid pseudo-news programs splashed his picture across the screen. The picture switched immediately to Angel’s cleaning lady from Las Vegas—wearing more makeup than Robin Williams in Mrs. Doubtfire. She was babbling about how Angel never dusted behind his bed and sometimes forgot to leave a check for her services. Then the bleach-blond reporter returned to the scene, offering a plastic smile as she said, “It is believed that Angel DeMarco is currently in a hospital somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. There’s been no confirmation of his illness but the word AIDS has been whispered at more than one Hollywood party in recent days. Sources close to the bad-boy star say—”

In a burst of irritation, he jabbed the Off button and threw the remote control across the room. It hit the wall with a satisfying clatter and crashed to the linoleum floor.

He crossed his arms and sighed heavily.

He couldn’t stop thinking about yesterday. No matter how hard he tried to push Madelaine’s words away, they kept coming back, turning up again and again as he lay in this lonely room.

Her name is Lina.

Finally he gave up and lay back down. Wishboning his arms behind his head, he stared up at the white acoustical tile ceiling.

A daughter.

He tried to imagine what it would be like, having a kid. He’d never spent much time thinking about that sort of thing. In fact, the only time he ever thought about children was just before sex—it was the thing that made him reach for the rubbers in his pocket.

He wanted to push the whole discussion aside as irrelevant and ridiculous. And he was certain that before the surgery, he could have done just that. He could have met Madelaine at a concert or a movie premiere, heard about the amazingly wonderful child she’d given birth to sixteen years ago, and felt nothing. Less than nothing.

He would have offered her a straight shot of tequila and drunk a toast to the kid he’d fathered. But that would have been the extent of it. After he drank the tequila, he’d have exited stage right.

But he was beginning to understand that running didn’t always get you anywhere, that sometimes you ended up right where you’d started.

He didn’t think of himself as immortal anymore. How could he with the stranger’s heart pulsing in his chest and the bright red Frankenstein scar in his flesh? Every time he got a shot or took a pill, he was reminded that he was alive by the grace of God—and the gift of a stranger. It was the sort of thing that made a man think about his life—even if he didn’t want to.

Even before the surgery, he’d been tired of running and getting nowhere, tired of parties with women he couldn’t remember and friends who disappeared when the cameras turned off. But he didn’t know how to do anything else.

He’d never created a life for himself, not a real, honest-to-God life. He had an existence—a condominium in a high-rise tower in Las Vegas, friends who came and went as easily as film roles, cars that he drove for a year and then traded in, a job that kept him rolling in money and working less than four months a year.

What had he done the rest of the time? He could hardly remember now. When he thought back on his life, all he got were random images of parties and hangovers.

He wanted to remember the early days, when he’d been a serious actor who went on one grueling audition after another, playing Shakespeare in the Park. But that was the history he had devised—the fiction he’d given to the press as they created the persona of Angel DeMarco from snippets of reality and piles of fantasy.

The sad truth was, he didn’t know anything about acting. He’d been hired for his looks on his first audition—an audition he’d attended on a dare. Val’s mother had told a producer that her son was an agent, and voila! Val was an agent. And when Val became an agent, it was only seconds until Angel be

came an actor.

Maybe getting that first job wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d been a bit player and found a calling, but he was the star and the movie grossed over $150 million. After that, they would have let him play Othello if he’d wanted to. A star was born.

He frowned, wondering why he hadn’t worked harder to learn his craft. Why hadn’t he taken the spark of talent the critics saw and honed it into something special?

He couldn’t remember the whys; even the whens and hows were beginning to blur for him. Everything about his life before the heart attack was beginning to feel like an ephemeral memory that belonged to someone else.

And yet he remembered things like the carnival in crystal clarity.

A dream, you forget, Angel. Have you forgotten me?

He had. Until he woke up in that damned hospital in Oregon, he had practically forgotten Madelaine; their time together had faded to a hazy memory of first love, tucked like all high school memories into the tattered scrapbook of the soul. But now it felt real, so real he could touch it. Maybe the only real thing in his life.

She wanted him to be a father to their daughter. It was the only thing she’d ever asked of him.

She needs you, Madelaine had said.

God help him, he didn’t know what to do. In some small pocket of his soul, he wanted to reach out to this daughter who looked so much like him. He wanted to take hold of her and bring her into his life, and know he’d done something right in this world before he died.

But he was afraid. What kind of father could he be? He was an alcoholic who’d just stopped drinking and a drug addict who’d quit using. He could drop dead of another man’s heart failure any second.