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?”

The masked nurse gave her a wry look. “He’s not very happy about all this. Physically his new heart is a winner. His body is reacting as well as can be expected to the meds.”

“I’ll sit with him for a while. Go ahead and take a break.”

When the nurse was gone, Madelaine pulled up a chair and sat beside his bed. Reaching out, she gently took hold of his hand. “So, Angel, you’re not playing well with others.”

He lay there, unresponsive, his breathing slow and steady and unaided by machine.

She couldn’t help but think of the other day, when he’d gone ballistic after surgery. She’d seen the fear in his eyes, the dawning horror as he felt the rhythmic beating of the new heart. The realization that someone had died to give him the chance at life.

Not someone, she thought. Francis.

What would Angel say if he knew the truth?

She frowned. She hadn’t known Angel in years—maybe she never really had—but she knew him well enough to know that he would throw the mother of all tantrums if he knew what she had done. What she had authorized.

He wouldn’t know how to grieve for something like this. In fairness, she knew that no one would. He would be plagued with regret and self-loathing. He would wonder if Francis was really dead before the surgery, or if Madelaine and her team had done the unforgivable.

She knew she could make the argument to anyone that Angel shouldn’t know the truth—that it would hinder his recovery, that donor confidentiality could only be breached after massive discussion with the bereavement counselor, that it was best all the way around to keep Angel in the dark. It was standard policy to keep the donor’s identity confidential.

But there was so much more here than just standard hospital procedure.

She was afraid to tell him the truth, afraid of the look that would cross his eyes, afraid of the words he would say to her. Words that, once said, could never be unsaid.

Because she also knew another truth. She didn’t know when it had come to her, when it had become a part of her, but sometime in the last few weeks, Angel had crept under her skin again. It was his spirit—that great, larger-than-life spirit that dared the world to take him on. She’d fallen in love with it as a young girl, and she found that even as an adult, there was something almost magical about his strength of personality, his defiant will to forge his own path.

So unlike her own watered-down, Milquetoast will.

When she looked at him, even now, when he lay at death’s door, she saw a shooting star of a man.

Behind her, the door opened. She turned just as Chris walked into the room. His eyes squinted in a smile above the mask. “How’s our patient?”

Madelaine smiled. “Better than most. He’s reacting well to the meds.”

Chris pulled up a chair and sat down. He took a second to flip through the charts, then dropped them back into the sleeve at the foot of the bed. He looked up at Madelaine. “What are you going to do?”

She didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “I’m going to remove myself as his cardiologist. After the … decision to donate, I don’t have much choice.”

“You could bring it up before the ethics committee—it’s kind of a gray area.”

She shook her head. “I’ll bring Marcus Sarandon in. He’ll do a great job”

Chris looked at Angel. “What will you tell him?”

She sighed. “I don’t know.”

Like all funerals, it was unbearable.

The funeral home was a palatial white brick building, complete with pillars and manicured lawns and young trees that would someday age into hundred-year-old oaks and give the new construction an air of old-fashioned elegance. It was, like so many of its kind, an edifice carefully contrived to evoke a common American fiction—the perfect family home, a sprawling southern mansion that harkened back to another time, when one generation turned into another and then another, when the circle of life was accepted and understood. You could almost imagine a small, well-tended family graveyard out back, its perimeter hemmed by white picket fence lines.

But of course, that was the greatest fiction of all. Behind the building lay acres and acres of green lawn, lawn that dipped and swelled and evened out in places like a golf course. Maple and alder trees dotted the various hillsides, spilling their multicolored leaves across the grassy quilt.

Madelaine and Lina stood side by side among the throng of grieving strangers. One by one the cars arrived, parking in an endless row along the driveway and down on the side of the road. People dressed in somber black clothing spilled from the cars, gathering together, murmuring among themselves. Women dabbed at their eyes and told stories of Father Francis. Men shook their heads and stared at the ground, patting their wives’ and mothers’ shoulders.

The mourners walked in a steady black line up the walkway toward the grave-site portion of the service. She recognized several faces—friends of Francis’s from the nursing home.

She watched them file past her, seeing her own grief reflected in many eyes. Each face reminded her of Francis, made her realize how many lives he had touched, how much difference he had made in this world. He’d been gone for two days, and already it felt like a lifetime.

She looked at the sky above her, clutching the slim white memorial album in her cold hands. Did you know that, Francis, did we tell you?

“I don’t want to go up there,” Lina said quietly beside her.

Madelaine looked at her daughter, noticed the pallor of her cheeks, the haunted darkness in her blue eyes. She wondered suddenly what to say to this girl who wasn’t a girl and wasn’t a woman, either. She didn’t know whether to force a bright smile and pretend that everything would be okay, or to be honest and show her own pain. She didn’t know what would help Lina right now. If anything could.

Tentatively she reached out and caressed her daughter’s moist cheek. “There’s this place I go sometimes.…”

Lina sniffed hard and looked up at her. “Yeah?”

“Maybe we could go there and sort of … say goodbye to Francis in our own way.”

Lina’s lower lip started to quiver. Tears filled her eyes. “That’s just it,” she said softly. “I don’t want to say good-bye.”

Madelaine didn’t know what to say to that, so instead of speaking, she slipped her hand around her daughter’s waist and drew her close. Lina resisted for a heartbeat, maybe not even that long, then slid in close to Madelaine’s side. Together, silently, they walked down the long black driveway, ignoring the cars that prowled past them in clouds of carbon-scented smoke and the headlights that shone in their eyes.

They climbed into the Volvo and slammed the doors shut, and for a split second Madelaine felt as if they were shutting the funeral away. But on the long drive out to her old neighborhood, she felt it coming back, flashing across her mind in bits and pieces—the sniffling sound that filled the church, the smell of hothouse lilies and smoke from a thousand votive candles. The archbishop’s low, droning voice talking about a man Madelaine barely knew—Father Francis. Pious, serious, always ready to lend a hand, the archbishop said.

The whole time, all she could think about was that eighteen-year-old boy who’d come to her rescue. Who’d heard her small, pathetic Help me, and answered softly, Forever, Maddy-girl Forever.

Shutting off the engine, she sat there for a minute, watching the first splashing raindrops hit the windshield. Through the blurred glass she saw her father’s house, sitting there against the gray clouds, amidst the bare trees, its windows as dark as they’d been in the long years since his death. The lawn was too long and brown and covered with dying leaves.

Finally she sighed. “Let’s go.”

Madelaine led the way past her father’s empty house—now her house, though she could never think of it that way. Her father had disinherited her in life and left her everything in death. The last grasping move of a sick man—leaving her saddled with the house and money that represented everything she despised about her childhood.

She strode up the brick steps, down the walkway, around the dead rose garden that once had been her mother’s pride and joy, and onto the brown carpet of the backyard.

The lawn led to a low-banked waterfront, where the sea spit across the gray rocks in gentle spurts. Madelaine’s high heels sank into the dead grass as she walked to the end of the creaking old dock and sat down.

Lina sat beside her, letting her bare legs swing over the edge.

They stayed that way for an eternity, both staring out at the clouds collecting above the tree line on the opposite shore. The rain picked up, splattered on the surface of the water.

“This is where my dad took me after my mom passed away,” Madelaine said at last.

“That’s your house, isn’t it, the one where you grew up?”

Madelaine shivered and drew her coat more tightly around her body. “Yes, it is.”

“There are bars on the upstairs window.”

The urge came swiftly to lie, to cover up. She forced it away and nodded. “That was my bedroom.”

“He locked you in?”

Madelaine gave a small laugh. “See? You don’t have the worst parent in the history of the world.”

Lina fell silent and turned to stare out at the sound. After a while she said quietly, “I keep … reaching for the phone to call him and then I have to stop myself.”

Madelaine slipped an arm around Lina’s shoulder and pulled her close. Rain fell all around them, slashed across their faces and pattered their clothing. “I talk to him every day, just like he was still beside me. Sometimes I think he’s going to answer.…”

Lina nodded. “I want it to mean something, but …” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just miss him so much.”

Madelaine stared at her daughter’s profile, so pale and fragile-looking. She ached for Lina, and wanted to help her through the pain, to give her something to believe in that would make it all a little easier to bear.

Angel.

The word came to her so suddenly, she straightened and looked around. She thought, crazily, she’d heard Francis’s voice. Then she realized it was only her own subconscious and she slumped again, staring down at the sea foaming beneath them.

The thought came again, Give her a father. That was what Francis would have said.

She turned to Lina, stared at her so long and so hard that Lina finally turned.

“What, Mom?”

Madelaine wet her lips and tasted rainwater. She felt a fluttering in her chest and knew it was fear. The easy thing to do right now was to turn away, laugh, and say it was nothing. But since Francis’s death, she’d seen how fragile life was, how the wrong choices were sometimes permanent. How all you regretted was the words you didn’t say …

It was time for her to stop being the doormat her father had raised her to be. She needed to stand up for herself, for Lina, for all of them. Maybe Lina would run away with Angel, maybe Angel would break her daughter’s heart—The possibilities were endless and everything could go wrong.

But for years she’d done nothing, and things had gone wrong anyway.

She tried to think of how best to say it, but in the end there was no softness, no blurring, no lead-in for something like this. There was only the truth, and she knew it would hit Lina like a blow. “I spoke with your father.”

“Yeah, right.”

Madelaine swallowed hard. “I did.”

Very slowly Lina lifted her head and looked dully at her mother.

Madelaine waited for Lina to say something, but the silence between them lengthened. Finally Madelaine said, “He’s very sick right now, and he can’t see you, but soon—”

“You mean he won’t see me.” Lina lurched backward and shot to her feet. “Yeah, I’ll bet he’s sick as a dog to find out he’s got a daughter. I can’t believe you,” she hissed, shaking her head.

Madelaine scrambled to get to her feet and reached for her daughter. “Lina—”

Lina smacked her hand away. “Don’t touch me. I can’t believe you, Mom. I’m sitting out here in the rain, after Francis’s funeral, and you tell me—finally—that you’ve talked to my father.…” She laughed, and it was a shrill, hysterical sound. “So today—today—I get to find out that I have a father, but he doesn’t care about me and doesn’t want to see me. Perfect timing, Mom.”

“Baby, please—”

Lina’s eyes filled with tears. “I can’t believe you thought this would make me feel better.”

“Lina, please …”

“Just do me a favor, Mom. Don’t try to cheer me up anymore, okay?” She gave Madelaine one last hurting look and spun away, running down the planked dock.

Madelaine stood there, watching helplessly. Defeated, she bent down and picked up her purse, then walked slowly down the dock, up the hillside, and to the car.

When she got inside, she looked at Lina, who sat pressed against the window, her arms crossed mutinously, her eyes slammed shut. She thought of a dozen things she could say right now, but they all sounded trite and stupid in light of her obvious error in judgment. Finally she said the only thing that made sense. “I’m sorry, Lina. I guess I shouldn’t have told you. I wasn’t thinking clearly.…” Her words faded into the silence and went unanswered. She couldn’t think of anything to add, so she started the car’s engine.

In silence they drove home.

I’m sorry, she’d said.

She should have known after this weekend how meaningless those little words were, how they dropped into an ocean of pain and didn’t even leave a ripple behind.

Angel came awake slowly, listening to the sound of her voice. It took him a second to focus. She was reading to him—Anne Rice’s Tale of the Body Thief, if he wasn’t mistaken.

He forced his eyes open. “A rather macabre choice,” he said, grinning weakly. “I hope it’s not your way of telling me I need to drink blood from now on.”

He could tell that beneath the mask, she was smiling. “Sorry, it’s my personal reading. I thought you might like to hear …” She shrugged, gave a sharp little laugh. “I didn’t think about the subject. Fairly sick, you’re right. I just thought maybe you’d feel less alone if you heard someone’s voice.”

“You’re babbling, Mad.”

She laughed again and shut the book. “I am.”

“You don’t usually babble unless you’re nervous. What happened—did the amazing dead person’s heart quit while I was sleeping?”

“No,” she said quietly, and he could see that all the humor had gone from her eyes. She looked at him now with a dawning sadness. “It’s your heart now, Angel.”

He felt a surge of bitterness. He thought of his heart, the donor’s heart, and he felt it beating in there, in his chest, beating and beating and beating. He wondered sickly if it would keep beating after his body died. He flashed on a sick image of himself in a coffin, his body stone-dead and paper-white, and that heart just thumping away. The thing had been inside him for three days now, and it felt more alien every second. “Yeah, tell that to the dead guy. He thought it was his.”

He lifted his head from the pillow, and it took an incredible, sickening amount of effort to do. “How could you let them do this to me, Mad?”

“We saved your life,” she said softly.

“Don’t look at me that way,” he hissed, hating her in that moment, hating everything and everyone from God on down. “You didn’t save my life, you prolonged my death. Look at me, for Christ’s sake. I look like a fucking pumpkin head on a stick body—or didn’t you notice that I’ve lost ten pounds and my head is the size of a watermelon? And what about the poor sucker who donated his heart to me? Donated.” He laughed acidly at the irony. “You make it sound like he gave a can of soup to the hungry. But it was his heart, damn it, his heart. You think he liked having your grimy hands inside his chest, hacking away, yanking out his heart like you yanked out mine?”

She sat very still, as if she were controlling her own anger with a great force of will. “You have a second chance at life. That’s what you should be focusing on right now.”

“What if I don’t want it?”

“How dare you? Someone died to give you this chance. If you throw it away, Angel DeMarco, I swear to God—” She shut up suddenly, as if she’d said too much. Breathing heavily, she wrenched her gaze from his face and stared at the wall.

Suddenly he felt tired, so tired. All the fight bled out of his body and collected in that damned canister at the foot of the bed. He reached up to push the hair from his eyes and felt the puffiness of his cheeks again. He was glad as hell he didn’t have a mirror. “Jesus, you’ve turned me into the Pillsbury Dough Boy.”

“It’s the prednisone. The swelling will go down.”

He looked at her. “I’m sorry, Mad.” He tried to think of something else to say. “I had a dream about Francis last night.”

She sank slowly back onto the seat. He noticed that her hands were shaking before she drew them into her lap. “Really?” she whispered. “What happened?”

“In the dream?” He tried to remember. “I dreamt I was cold. It was one of those dreams where you think you’re awake. I thought I woke up and found the blankets all bunched at my ankles. I reached down to pull them up, and when I had them drawn back up, I glanced at the observation doors, and there was Franco, just standing there, smiling.”

“What did he look like?”

“That was the weird part. He was soaking wet, like he’d been standing in a rainstorm. He touched the glass, as if he maybe wanted to go through but couldn’t. I heard his voice inside my head. ‘Heya, Angel,’ he said. Then he smiled—you know the one I mean, where his whole face crinkles and his eyes almost disappear into slits.” He shrugged. “Then he was gone.”

Madelaine’s eyes filled with tears.

“What is it, Mad?”

She stared at her own hands, clasped tightly in her lap. She looked incredibly fragile, pale. “Francis went to Portland last week.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Her head snapped up. “You do?”

“He came by here before he left.”

Madelaine gave him an odd look. “He didn’t tell me he saw you.” She paused, and he thought she was frowning beneath the mask.

“I’m sure he doesn’t tell you everything.”

She swallowed hard. “I didn’t want to tell you this quite yet because of your heart.…” Her eyes filled with tears again. “Your precious heart.”

He got a cold, sick feeling in his gut. “What is it?”

“Francis was in a car accident outside of Portland.”

The chill moved, spread through him. “Yeah?”

She met his gaze, and he saw the answer in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Angel. He didn’t make it. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt.” She looked as if she wanted to say more, but she didn’t She just sat there, staring at him, slow tears spilling down her cheeks, collecting on the pale green of her mask.

No.

Francis couldn’t be dead, not Francis, with the laughing eyes and the awesome faith, who’d never hurt anyone in his life.

“You’re lying,” he hissed, shaking his head. “It’s not true.”

But he saw in her eyes that it was true.

“Oh, Christ,” he whispered, waiting for his secondhand heart to stop beating. The grief was a great, crunching pain on his chest, filling his throat, stinging his eyes. “God damn it, who doesn’t wear a seat belt in the nineties?” He latched on to anger instead of the grief that grew with each indrawn breath. “And what the hell was he doing in Portland, anyway? He’s a priest, not a traveling salesman. He never could drive for shit. I remember when we were kids—”

No, he thought desperately, don’t think about that now. Oh, Jesus, don’t think about anything. But he couldn’t help himself. He remembered it all in sudden clarity, the day Francis had taught him to drive. How they’d driven around and around the school parking lot, that old Impala of their mom’s jerking and spitting and dying every time one of them tried to switch gears … how they’d laughed and cursed and then laughed again.…

“Not Franco,” he whispered, looking to Mad. “It should have been me instead.”

The sadness in her eyes made his own tears fall. “I wish I could change it, Angel.”

“Did … did he suffer?” He hated the question the minute he asked it—it was so ordinary and useless—but he needed an answer.

Her gaze skittered away from his. “The doctors on the scene said he was killed instantly. There was nothing they could do.”

They sat there, crying side by side for what felt like hours. Angel cried for so many things—all the times he hadn’t called Francis, all the Christmas cards he’d never sent. What had he thought, that they would all live forever?

“Jesus, Mad,” he said brokenly, “I didn’t say …” His words trailed off. There was so much he didn’t say. So many mistakes and lost chances and selfishness. Christ, so much selfishness.

“He knew you loved him, Angel. He always knew that.”

The knowledge sank through him, weighing him down. He wanted it to help—wished it helped—but it didn’t. It only made it hurt more, knowing that Francis had always loved him. “He died on the way to Portland.” He tried to make sense of it. “That must have been hours after I saw him. Jesus, how could I not have known that he was gone all this time?”

Madelaine looked away again, stared at the clock on the wall, then slowly met his gaze. “On the way to Portland,” she said slowly. “Yes. Yes.”

“Why did you wait all this time to tell me?”

“Your heart was too fragile.”

He wanted to say something mean and bitter to that, something about the dead man’s heart in his chest, but he couldn’t. “God, he’s been dead over a week and I didn’t know. Did you have a funeral without telling me, too?”

“His parishioners wanted a big Catholic funeral. I didn’t tell you because you couldn’t get out of isolation, and they couldn’t wait any longer. We can do a quiet family memorial service when you feel better.”

He closed his eyes, imagining some church filled with flowers, and a long wooden aisle that led up to the glossy coffin on the altar. Just like Pop’s funeral, only this time it wouldn’t be an old man’s body lying on all that puffy white satin. It would be Francis—Francis lying dead in a wooden box.…

Draped in flowers—they always draped the coffins in flowers, as if the prettiness on the outside could change what lay within. The place would reek with the sickly sweet scent of the lilies, and they’d play that god-awful music, designed to make you cry.

“No,” he said, feeling the tears creep back into his throat. “I don’t want to remember Francis that way. I’ll say good-bye to him in my own way when I get out of this place.”

They fell silent again, staring at each other. Angel tried not to think about Francis, but he couldn’t stop. “It’s funny, Mad.…” He surprised himself by speaking aloud; he hadn’t meant to. But she was the only person in the world whom he could talk to, the only person who knew Angel and Francis and the old days. “Even all those years I was gone, I always knew Francis was out there. Every time I got my picture on the cover of a magazine or a movie poster, I thought of Francis. I knew he’d pick it up and smile and shake his head. I knew he was waiting for my call, and I kept picking up the phone, but somehow I never dialed. And when he came to see me the other day, there were so many things I meant to say, but we fell into that old routine of Saint Francis and Angel the Screw-up, and the words never got said.” He looked at her, wishing she could grant him absolution for his sins. But it was his brother he should have asked for that, and now it was too late. “I guess I thought we were both immortal.”

The smile that reached her eyes was sad. “I know what you mean. I … hurt Francis’s feelings just before he left. I did it so easily, so thoughtlessly, and when I realized what I’d done, I thought I could make up for it with the same ease.…”

He saw her pain and it gave him an unexpected strength. “He loved you, Mad. From the first moment he saw you in the hospital room, he loved you.”

“You remember that day?”

He didn’t answer, didn’t know what to say. She had every reason to believe he’d forgotten. Once, he thought he had, but now he knew the memories of her were still inside him, protected and cared for through all these years. He gazed at her so long, he felt his tears return. He wanted to open his arms to her, to draw her close so they could take from and give to each other, so that neither of them felt alone.

But he was afraid that if he touched her right now, if he curled his arms around her and felt her tears spill on his throat, he’d be lost.

“What are we going to do, Mad?” he whispered.

She crossed her arms and stared at him, her cheeks glossy with tears. “We’re going to try to live without him.”

Madelaine stood in front of the rectory, carrying a huge, empty box. To the left the big brick church sparkled with reflected light, but the small, nut-brown house was dark and deserted-looking. Bright orange and gold Thanksgiving decorations—made by the Sunday school class, no doubt—dotted the windows. Pilgrims and cornucopias and turkeys.

She thought of the dozens of children who’d hunched over tiny desks, cutting and pasting and coloring. Francis had been so proud to tape their creations on his bedroom window.…

Grief rippled through her, one wave after another after another, leaving her shaken and cold. She couldn’t seem to make herself move. She just stood there, seeing a hundred moments pass before her eyes, a dozen times she’d loped up this path, her arms full of pizza or flowers or champagne. Like the time she’d passed her first biochemistry exam … or the day Francis had heard his first confession … Lina’s baptism … Madelaine’s last birthday …

She shuddered and forced herself to think about other things—Lina and Angel and the days that lay ahead.

Madelaine couldn’t go on as she had been. It had been a week since Francis’s death, and she’d been stumbling in a fog ever since, speaking only when spoken to, and not always even then. She knew that Lina needed her, needed her desperately, but Madelaine felt as if she had nothing inside her, just a gaping hole where Francis had once been. He’d been her rock, her lifeline, for more than half of her life. Without him, she felt lost.

She took a deep breath and tilted her chin up. She knew there was no point in putting this off, in pretending she didn’t need to walk up this path, open that door, and pack up his things. His housekeeper had taken care of the household goods, but Madelaine had asked to pack up his personal possessions. She would have put it off forever, but a new priest would be moving in soon.

She went to the door and opened it wide, letting a swath of sunlight cut through the gloom. Gripping the empty box, she moved woodenly through the common room toward his bedroom.

When she opened his door and flicked on the light switch, memories hit her so hard that she staggered backward. The cardboard box slid from her fingers and hit the floor with a thud.

Tears blinded her. With a tiny, gulping sound of grief, she moved numbly around the tiny bedroom, touching things—photographs, books, the favorite baseball cap he wore on Saturdays. The rosary wound neatly on his Bible.

She saw a picture on the dresser and picked it up, letting her fingers trace the cool surface of the glass. It was her and Francis on the day they’d brought Lina home from the hospital. They were smiling, but there was such worry in their eyes, such grown-up fears on those adolescent faces.…

Heya, Maddy-girl, you’re on the wrong side of town.

“Oh, Francis …” She pulled his pillow from the bed and smoothed her hands over its rumpled cotton. The Star Wars sheets she’d given him as a joke last Christmas.

She’d told Angel that they had to learn to live without Francis—but how could she do that? How could you learn to live without the sunshine on your face?

The tears came again, stinging and hot, and she gave in to them. She sank slowly to her knees, sobbing into the pillow that smelled of her best friend in the world.