Chapter Thirteen

Angel woke suddenly, a cold, crushing band of pain encircling his chest. Clammy sheets twisted around his legs, bunched in the hands that lay fisted at his sides. The pillows were damp, sweaty-smelling balls beneath his head.

The cardiac monitor blipped wildly. He waited in breathless silence for the computerized alarm to sound, but nothing happened. He released his breath slowly, evenly, focusing on nothing but each pain-riddled exhalation. One, two, buckle my shoe … three, four, shut the door … The childhood rhyme came back to him and he seized on it, trying to remember the words, trying to focus on anything except the pain.

His heart thumped and clattered dangerously. He reached tiredly for the button beside his bed and pressed the red dot.

The door to his room whooshed open and Sarah, the night nurse, waddled to his bedside. “You shouldn’t be awake,” she said reproachfully, checking the monitors that clustered around him, the bags of fluid that hung suspended above his head.

“I need more drugs,” he said in a slurred voice.

“You get your next dose at six A.M.” She lifted the thin white strand of paper from the cardiac monitor and studied it, her eyes narrowing. A quiet tsking sound pushed past her fleshy lips.

“How’s your daughter?” he asked quietly.

She paused and looked down at him. Slowly she smiled. “She’s doing better, thank you.”

“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 heard 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 to 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.”

“Let’s leave them here. That way a part of us will always exist under this old tree. When we’re old, we can come back here with our grandchildren.”

Ah, he could still remember it, the overwhelming love he’d felt for her in that moment.

They wrapped the cheap red earrings in one of Madelaine’s expensive, monogrammed handkerchiefs and buried their treasure at the base of the tree.

Afterward, she looked at him, her eyes moist with tears. “I’ve got to get home now,” she whispered.

The next time he saw her, she was sitting on his mother’s ratty old couch, telling him about the baby.

He knew he said the wrong things then, but he didn’t know what to say. He was so damned scared. For a week afterward, he called her house and hung up when her father answered. Finally he rode to her house and saw the iron bars that had been fixed across her bedroom window, and he knew what had happened. Alex had found out about the baby.

He wanted to turn tail and run and run and run. He almost did it, then he saw something—a shadow pass across the bright light in her bedroom—and he thought of that moment on the Ferris wheel. I love you, Angel.

The memory gave him the courage to park his bike. Flipping his collar, up against the pouring rain, he walked up the pathway to the double front doors and knocked hard.

There was a rustling of feet, a click of metal on metal, then the door opened.

And God stood in the doorway, wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and holding a martini glass. Angel had never seen a man so big and overpowering, so intimidating; he had a voice that boomed into the darkness like a bullhorn. So you’re the little wop who screwed my daughter.

The rest of the meeting melted as it always did into a blur of shame and regret. Instead of the actual sequence of events, he remembered bits and pieces of their conversation; words that drove through the heart and soul like razors.

Who do you think you are to come to my house, to knock on my door as if you belong here? You’re nothing. Nothing.

With each word, delivered like a blow, Angel felt himself growing smaller and smaller, until, in the end, there was nothing left of him at all.

What’ll it take, kid, to get you the hell out of her life? One thousand dollars, five thousand, ten thousand? How about if I fire that drunk mother of yours? You didn’t think I knew she worked in my mill, I see. The world’s full of surprises, isn’t it?

It took a minute for the words to register, but finally Angel understood: Alex was offering him a way out.

Ten thousand, kid. Think about it.…

He didn’t want to think about it, tried not to, but the offer seduced him.

You’re no hero, kid. Take the money.

Angel closed his eyes, hearing, seeing, feeling it all over again, the moment that had forever defined him. He shouldn’t have followed Alex into the house, but he had; he shouldn’t have gone into that dark, shadowed office, but he had. He remembered it all suddenly—the sound of the desk drawer sliding open, the ripping hiss of the check as Alex eased it from his book.

Angel thought now of the moments, the seconds, he could have said no. Up until the last heartbeat, when he’d held the check in his hand and seen all those zeroes.

Alex had sensed Angel’s uncertainty, smelled it, and gone in for the kill with a hunter’s precision.

What’ll you give Madelaine? Life in some sleazy trailer, a beer with your TV dinner after work? And how about you—you going to spend the rest of your life tossing toilet paper like your mother? Or are you going to take what I’m offering and get the hell out of this town?

Angel thought of his parents—thirty years spent toiling on the paper line, only to come home and get drunk and knock the shit out of their son. His father, dead of alcohol poisoning before his fortieth birthday.

Alex went on relentlessly, waving the check at Angel. I’ve seen a million guys like you in my life. You’re nothing, going nowhere. You’re not good enough to lick her shit-covered shoes.

Angel tried. God help him, he gathered his shredded courage and tried. I could be a good father. But he knew, even as he said it, he knew it was a lie, and Alex knew it, too.

The old man laughed. To what? She’s having an abortion tomorrow. You didn’t think she’d really have a child of yours, did you? She’s a Hillyard, for Christ’s sake.

Angel was relieved. Even now it sickened him to remember how relieved he’d been by the words.

Take the money, kid. It’s all there is for you.

And Angel did it. He turned and ran, the check clutched in his sweaty fingers. All the way out, he told himself it didn’t matter, that he could cash the check and spend the money and still come back for Madelaine.

But by the time he reached his bike, he knew the truth, and it ripped through him, twisting his insides until he thought he might vomit in the street. He was leaving her because he wanted to leave her, because he wasn’t strong enough to stay and take a job in some crummy factory and be a father to his unborn baby.

There will be no baby. He tried to take comfort from the knowledge, but somehow it only hurt more.

He was scared. God, so scared. He didn’t want to give up his whole future, not yet.

Slowly he turned. He saw her up there, her pale oval face trapped between the iron bars that blocked her window, captured in the rain-smeared glass.

Then he jumped on his brother’s bike and rode away, the check as heavy as pieces of silver in his coat pocket.

Angel released his breath in a heavy sigh. Yeah, he’d ridden away, ridden hard and fast and long, and ended up right where he began.

I call her Lina.

The words slammed him back into the present.

And he felt the first threatening thud inside his chest.

He closed his eyes and lay still, taking shallow breaths. The sweat on his forehead turned cold, slid in streaks down the sides of his face.

He tried to reach for the nurses’ button, but he was too weak. He couldn’t lift his arm.

The cardiac monitor clattered and hummed, then screamed in alarm.

Heart failure.

Angel tried to keep breathing. His body seemed to encase him, bloating bigger and bigger, a seeping darkness that filled everything. And in the center of it all was the pain.

In some distant part of his brain, he heard the commotion—the door banging open, the light spilling in, the voices raised in alarm. He heard them calling his name, but he couldn’t answer. There were layers and layers of darkness between him and the light, and he was tired, so tired. Hours seemed to pass.

Then he felt her touch, heard her voice through the screaming cacophony. “Angel?”

He tried to reach for her, but his body fought him, a limp dead thing without will or ability. He blinked hard, forced his eyes to open.

Madelaine was leaning over him, her hair transformed into a halo by the glaring overhead light. For a second he was back on the Ferris wheel, seeing her draped in starlight. “Mad,” he croaked.

“Don’t you die, Angel DeMarco. Don’t you dare.” She turned her head and gave orders in a composed, controlled voice that calmed him. Then she turned back to him, stroked his damp forehead again. “You’re going to make it through this, Angel. We’ll find you a heart. Just don’t give up.”

Her face kept going in and out of focus.

“Angel? Stay awake.”

His eyelids felt heavy. He thought there was something he needed to say to her, then the thought was gone.

“Pulmonary edema,” Madelaine said under her breath. Then louder, “Get the code cart. God damn it, people, let’s move.…”

He knew the words should frighten him, but he couldn’t feel anything anymore.