Angel Falls

Bret wished Daddy hadn’t mentioned visiting Mommy. Just the thought made Bret feel sick. Usually he pretended that she was out of town, at a horse show in Canada.

He hated it when he was reminded that she was in the hospital. It was bad enough that he remembered THE DAY. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the memories came anyway, the ones he hated, the ones that lived curled in the wheels of his Corvette bed and came at him every night as soon as Daddy turned off the lights and shut the door.

Wait, Mommy. The jump is in the wrong place. Someone musta moved it …

Bret turned to look at Dad. “Do you swear Mom’s gonna wake up?”

Dad didn’t answer right away. When he finally did, it was in a quiet voice. “I can’t swear she’ll be fine, son. I can’t even swear that she’ll wake up. But I believe it with all my heart and soul, and she needs you to believe it, too. ”

“I believe it. ”

He said it too fast; his daddy knew he was lying.

After that, Bret leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see his mom lying in that hospital bed. He liked it better when he pretended she was still alive. Sometimes he could close his eyes and imagine her standing beside his bed, with her hair short and spiky around her face and her arms crossed. She’d be smiling at him, and she looked like she used to—no bruises or cuts at all. And she always said the same thing: How’s my favorite boy in the whole world?

But it was just a silly old dream, and it didn’t mean a thing. Bret might be little, and maybe sometimes he didn’t know what to do with the remainder at the end of a long-division problem, but he wasn’t stupid. He knew that fairy tales and cartoons weren’t real. Everybody knew that Wile E. Coyote couldn’t really fall from an airplane and live or that princesses who ate poisoned apples and slept in glass cases for years couldn’t wake up.

And mommies who fell off horses and cracked their heads against the wooden post at the end of the arena were really dead.

Chapter Seven

Liam stared at the mail in his lap. Almost all of it was addressed to Mikaela. Bills from the Country Corner General Store and the feed store, stabling and lessons checks from the twelve families who paid to board their horses at the barn, postcards and leaflets and flyers. A postcard announcing Nordstrom’s latest sale.

In ordinary times, he would have gone into the kitchen and tossed the postcard on the kitchen table and said, “Oh, no, the Christmas sale is starting…. ” She would have laughed easily, turning away from the stove or the refrigerator or the washing machine as she said, “We’ll just sell a few shares of Microsoft to get me through…. ”

“Daddy, why are we sitting at the mailbox?”

“Oh. Sorry about that, Bretster. I was just thinking about something. ” Tossing the pile of mail into the well between them, he eased his foot off the brake pedal and pressed cautiously on the gas. The Explorer’s tires spun on the mushy rim of the road, then grabbed on to the gravel and lurched forward. Ahead of them, the deserted road was a twisted river of fallen snow. Towering Douglas firs and cedar trees, their downslung branches dusted white, hemmed the thin strip of road that Ian Campbell had carved from the forest almost fifty years ago. There were a few other farmhouses along the way, their slanted, rock-dented mailboxes stuck at haphazard angles on spindly wooden legs.

“Maybe we could build a snowman after dinner,” Liam said awkwardly, wondering where Mikaela kept the mittens and the extra woolen socks. He knew there was a box somewhere, probably marked Winter clothes, but he couldn’t remember where they’d stashed it last year. Maybe behind the stack of Christmas decorations in the attic.

“Oh. Okay. ”

“Or maybe we could drive down to Turnagain Hill and go sledding. Mr. Robbin told us to come on down anytime for dinner. ”

“Oh. Okay. ”

Liam couldn’t think of anything else to say. They both knew there would be no sledding, no ice-skating, no snowmen, and no hot cocoa. Not now. They would think of such things, perhaps even talk about doing them, but in the end, as they’d done for the past four weeks, they would come together in that big house in the middle of the snowy field and go their separate ways.

They would eat dinner together, each one in turn tossing out some inane, pointless bit of conversation. After dinner they would do the dishes, the four of them. Then they would try to watch

television together, Wild Discovery or maybe a sitcom, but gradually they would drift apart. Jacey would burrow into her room and talk on the phone. Bret would settle in front of his computer and play loud, fast-paced games that required his full attention, and Rosa would knit.

Liam would float from room to room, doing nothing, trying to keep his mind blank. More often than not, he ended up in front of the grand piano in the living room, staring down at the keyboard, wishing the music was still in his heart and in his fingers, but knowing that it was gone.

He downshifted and turned left, passing beneath the rough-hewn arch his dad had constructed years ago, onto the driveway that was lined with snow-dusted four-rail fencing. In some distant part of his mind, he heard the gentle clanking of the iron sign that hung suspended from the cross-beam of the cedar arch, the one that read ANGEL FALLS RANCH. Or maybe it was his imagination, that sound, and all he really heard was the tinny silence between himself and his son.

He pulled into the garage and turned off the engine. Bret immediately unbuckled his seat belt, grabbed his backpack, and hurried into the house.

Liam sat there, hands planted on the wheel. He didn’t look at the album and present he’d tossed in the backseat, but he knew they were there.

Finally he got out of the car and headed into the house, passing through the cluttered mudroom. At the end of the hallway, a light glowed faintly orange.

Thank God for Rosa.

He was still a little awkward around her, uncomfortable. She was so damned quiet, like one of those Cold War spies who’d learned to walk without making a sound. Sometimes he caught her staring at him, and in her dark eyes he saw a sadness that went clear to the bone. Sometimes he wished he were the kind of man who could go to her, smiling, and say, So, Rosa, what happened to you? But that’s not how they were with each other. If Liam had asked the personal question, Rosa wouldn’t have answered. And so, they moved around each other, close but not too close.

Now, as he moved through the house, he flicked on the lights. No matter how often he told Rosa that electricity was cheap, she turned on only the lights she needed.