Chapter Seven

Angel tried not to think about Madelaine. God knew, there were plenty of other things to think about, but she wouldn’t leave his mind.

He squeezed his eyes shut, battling memories with everything inside him. The problem was, there was so damned little inside him. That had always been his problem. Deep, deep inside, in the place where poets and metaphysicians and priests thought there should be a soul, Angel had nothing. Ever since he was a kid, he’d known there was something vital missing in him, a true sense of honor, of right and wrong, of goodness. He was selfish in a cold, ruthless way. For years he’d tried to refashion that insight, telling himself he was simply a product of crappy parents, or the sleazy little house he’d grown up in, or the food that wasn’t on the table.

But Francis had grown up in that trailer, too, hadn’t he? Gone to the same schools, listened to the same drunken lectures from parents who didn’t really care, and everyone knew that Francis had no puncture in his soul. Hell, Francis had more soul than the saint he was named for.

There had only been one time in Angel’s life when he thought maybe he was wrong about himself. Thought maybe he had a chance.

That summer. The memories of that time were set apart in his mind, a brief and shining Camelot amidst the seedy taverns and dark holes he’d lived in since. And like Camelot, it was probably wrought more of myth than fact.

Still, he remembered what it had felt like to have hope, however transitory. When he’d looked into Madelaine’s eyes, felt the warm comfort of her small hand tucked into his, clung to her body in the wet sand beneath the piers, he’d told himself he’d found a sliver of goodness at last, something worth fighting for, worth living for.

But then he’d gone into that silent, sparkling house on the hill, and faced the dark night of his own soul. He’d looked into Alexander Hillyard’s fathomless eyes, and seen the debilitating truth. They were the same, he and Alex. Ruthless, selfish, ugly to the bone.

Francis had known it, of course. Don’t do it, man. Don’t just run away. Whatever it is, we can talk about it. Figure out what to do.

Ah, Angel thought, rubbing his temples, exhaling tiredly. Francis was right. Francis was always right. That was one of the things that stuck in Angel’s craw, one of the things that kept him always running, harder, faster, going nowhere like a gerbil stuck in Habitrail hell. He was constantly trying to outrun the ghost of good old Francis.

He’d thought success would do it, that finally he would come out the winner, but no. He couldn’t even do that right. He was a world-famous actor and richer than God. He was also a boozing, drugging, lying slut of a human being. And he liked being that way. He wasn’t even a good enough person to feel regret at the way he’d wasted his life, and he knew that given the chance, he’d screw it up again.

And Francis loved him—had loved him anyway; he probably didn’t anymore—through it all. Through all Angel’s drunken harangues, the belligerent tauntings, the cruel jokes Angel made at his brother’s expense. Francis had always known that he was the favored child in the family, their mother’s sole ticket to Heaven, and he’d always been ashamed of her unequal affection, apologizing so often. But Angel had never wanted to listen. It hurt too much to be the screw-up, the one brought home by the police, the loser. He’d put up a brave, obnoxious front, hoping no one would notice his inner torment and pain, his sense of worthlessness, but Francis had noticed, of course, noticed and understood and forgiven. Angel had seen the forgiveness time and again, felt its soothing warmth. Still he couldn’t cross the bridge back to brotherhood, could never reach out his hand and smile and say my brother, the way he wanted to. Could never control his temper long enough to apologize.

And so he was alone.

Someone knocked on his door, and before he could answer, it opened.

Madelaine strode into the room, wearing a taut, false smile that made her eyes crinkle in the corners. He realized for the first time that she had no laugh lines around her mouth or eyes, and he wondered why that was.

She stared down at him. “I lied and reported that you were a good psychological risk for the transplant.”

“Great. I’ll just lie here and hope someone gets hit by a bus. Hey, try and get me an athlete’s ticker, will you? I like my sex rough-and-tumble.”

He said it to see if he could get even a second’s worth of human emotion from those eyes, the eyes that once had stared at him as if he’d hung the stars.

She looked at him with disappointment. God, he’d seen that look a thousand times in his life. It was not the emotion he’d wanted, and it pissed him off. “Don’t look at me that way.”

“You’re going to be here awhile, Angel. Francis is going to want to visit you.” She handed him a scrap of paper. “Here’s the phone number.”

“No.” The word shot out, surprising him with its ferocity. He knew instantly that he’d erred. He’d thrown his vulnerability on the floor between them. “I mean, I don’t want any visitors. I’m a celebrity,” he said, realizing too late that he was yelling. “I don’t want anyone to know I’m here.”

“He’s your brother, Angel. Not a reporter.” She moved closer. “Don’t do this to him, Angel. He’s not like you. He hurts easily.”

Not like you, Angel. Christ, she didn’t know him at all. Otherwise, she’d know Angel DeMarco’s dirty little truth that he was the most easily hurt human being alive. “No shit. What are you, married to him or something?”

She sighed. “Get some sleep, Angel.”

It rattled him, that unexpected avoidance. She hadn’t answered his question, and the silence sent doubt flooding into him. What if she had married Francis? Or lived with him, or was his great and true love?

Angel had never even considered it. All these years he’d imagined Francis as the perfect parish priest, and Madelaine pining away for her lost first love. But Mad wasn’t pining—didn’t look as if she’d ever pined. Maybe he was as wrong about Francis as he’d been about her. Maybe his brother had quit the seminary and moved to suburbia, maybe he sold Cadillacs at the corner dealership.…

Not once in all these years had it occurred to Angel that he’d left a door wide open, and that Francis—Francis the good and perfect—might have walked right through it.

He shouldn’t care.

But he did. Suddenly, irrationally, he did. He didn’t want Madelaine to be his brother’s wife, his brother’s love. He wanted her the way she’d always been. A brilliantly colored photograph in the sepia-toned memories of his life. His and his alone.

She stared at him for a long moment, looking disappointed, then, very quietly, she said, “You can get as famous as God, and it doesn’t change the facts.” She leaned close, so close he could smell her perfume. “You’ll always be Francis DeMarco’s kid brother.”

“I forbid you to tell him I’m here.”

“Oh, Angel.”

At that moment, in that tone of voice, she made his name sound like a curse.

Madelaine moved woodenly toward her desk. She sat down, her back ramrod-straight, then, very slowly, she sagged forward, plopped her elbows on the desk, and closed her eyes.

It had taken considerable self-control to appear cold and disinterested. Of course, discipline was the one thing she had in spades. She’d practiced it since her hair was in pigtails—lying, pretending. In that big house on the hill, appearances had been everything.

Yes, Father, of course, Father. Certainly I will.

She was a master of such deception, but she’d never quite been able to overcome the unpleasant side effects—the dry mouth, the clattering heart, the sweaty palms. Any time she had to stand up for herself, she was a wreck afterward.

She’d expected Angel to have changed more. World-famous now, rich and good-looking and successful, he should have been surrounded by friends. But no flowers or cards or phone calls had come for him. There was no woman waiting in the hallway, no friend hovering about his bed. Now, when push came to shove, he was utterly alone.

What did he have now? she wondered. Where did his joy come from? Drug use, free sex, a brawl or two at some seedy tavern, an Oscar nomination? She wondered if all the photographs she’d seen of him over the years were lies—brittle smiles for a flashing camera.

In the old days she’d known his soul—or thought she had. He’d always been all bluster and anger on the outside, but inside, he hurt as badly as she did. She’d known always that he had a hole inside him, a deep secret place from which he bled. She knew it because she had the same hole in her own soul. In her it had been born of loneliness and fed by the hard realization that her father despised her. Over the years she’d covered it with a sheer, thin wall of glass that made her feel fragile and easily bruised, but it was some protection at least.

With Angel, who knew?

The phone on her desk rang, interrupting her thoughts. She reached for it and heard Hilda’s voice. “It’s Tom, Madelaine. He’s coding.”

“Shit!” Madelaine threw the papers down on her desk and ran for the door. As she raced down the hallway, she heard the alarm blaring through the paging system. Code blue, ICU … code blue, ICU.

She skidded into the room. White- and blue-clad people clustered around the bed, yelling at one another, reaching for things. Hilda was already there, hunched over Tom, her hands clasped and pressing on his chest. She saw Madelaine and flashed her a panicked look. “We’re losing him.”

“Get me the cart,” Madelaine barked, shoving through the crowd to the bedside. The cart skidded to a stop beside her. “Intubate him,” she said.

“Lidocaine’s started,” the staff nurse answered.

Madeline’s gaze shot to the monitor. “Shit,” she hissed again. It wasn’t working. “Shit. Defib.”

Someone handed her the defibrillator paddles, ready to go. Hilda wrenched Tom’s gown open, and Madelaine pressed the paddles over the ugly red scar that bisected his chest. “Clear!”

Electricity slammed through Tom’s battered body. His back arched off the table, then collapsed back down. All eyes went to the monitor. Rat line.

“Again,” Madelaine said.

Once more Tom jerked off the table in an inhuman spasm. Madeline’s breath caught; she stared at the black box. A tiny blip-blip-blip came from the monitor; a pink line humped and waved and skidded across.

“We’ve got a pulse.… BP’s eighty over fifty and rising.…”

Madelaine sighed in relief—a sound she heard echoed by everyone in the room.

“Too close for government work,” Hilda said with a tired smile as she extubated Tom.

Madelaine didn’t answer. One by one the staff left the room, talking among themselves. Already the emergency was over and it was back to life as usual.

Hilda remained behind. She put a hand on Madelaine’s shoulder. “He’s been doing well up to this point. Handling meds well. Biopsy came back negative.”

Madelaine nodded. She tried to smile, but it took too much effort. “Thanks, Hilda. I’ll stay with him a minute.”

Hilda bustled out of the room and closed the door behind her.

Madelaine leaned down and whispered in Tom’s ear. “Keep fighting, Tom. Keep working hard. You’re going to be fine.” She knew that most members of the medical community didn’t agree; but Madelaine believed in the power of the mind and spirit to heal the body. At least, she wanted it to be true.

Tom’s eyes fluttered open. “Hiya, Doc,” he said in a scratchy voice. “It feels like someone drove a monster truck over my chest.”

She smiled down at him. “Guilty as charged. I hit a good man when he was down.”

“You women libbers … you’re all the same.”

She laughed quietly. “Women libbers. Now, there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a while. You’re dating yourself, Tom.”

“Believe me …” He coughed and rubbed his throat. “In my position, you’re proud of getting older.” Then he touched her hand, so gently that for a second she didn’t even recognize what he’d done. “Stay for a while.”

She saw the fear in Tom’s eyes, the emotion he was trying so hard to hide beneath a shield of jokes and easy comebacks. “When will Susan be here?”

“After work. Not too much longer.”

Madelaine picked up the phone and dialed the rectory. The housekeeper got Francis on the line.

“Hi, Francis,” she said softly. “Could you pick Lina up from school?”

“You bet. You want me to take her out for dinner?”

“That would be great,” she answered. “I’ll be home in a few hours.”

She hung up the phone, then reached backward and pulled up a chair. Sitting down, she leaned close to the bed. “Last night you were telling me about your daughter’s riding lessons.…”

Francis stood beneath the old oak tree on Pacific Street. Pale sunlight streamed through the yellowing leaves, creating a tangle of gold on the grass.

The bell rang. Within moments kids spilled from the brick building, loping down the wide cement steps. In the center area they split into lines and fanned out, walking toward the row of buses that were parked in the driveway.

As he’d expected, Lina was among the last to exit. She was walking with that hard-core group of hers—they looked like a bunch of refugees from a Red Cross emergency station.

He stepped away from the tree and waved at her. “Lina! Over here.”

He knew the instant she saw him—she smiled instinctively, then copped an attitude. Murmuring her goodbyes to the crowd, she hitched up her oversized jeans and ambled toward him, her chopped hair bouncing with each step, her backpack hanging limply from her left hand. The canvas fabric grated along the cement sidewalk as she headed his way.

He smiled at her. “Still hanging out with the honor roll, I see.”

“Tsk, tsk—that’s not a very Christian comment.” She gave him an arch look. “Besides, some of them are perfect Catholic candidates … They dig the missionary position.”

Francis could feel the heat crawling up his cheeks. He saw Lina’s wicked grin and knew she saw his blush. “I miss the days when I could wash your mouth out with soap.”

“You never did that.”

“No, I missed my chance, and now it’s too late.”

“I’ll rinse with tequila, how’s that?”

He stopped suddenly and turned to her. “That’s not funny.” He knew he should say more, but things were going well—she didn’t seem to be angry at him for siding with Madelaine on her birthday. He didn’t want to rock the boat. Coward, he thought, cringing inwardly, but still he didn’t say more. “What do you say we get something to eat and rent a movie?”

Lina sighed. “Mom tied up in the paperwork of sainthood again?”

He put an arm around her shoulder and drew her close. “You’re acting like a snot-nose teenager.”

“I am a teenager.”

“I know, I know, but allow me my little fantasies. I like to remember you as you were … when you didn’t wear combat boots and your favorite four-letter word was mama.” He was laughing and so was she as they made their way down the sidewalk.

Beside his car, Lina stopped and looked up at him. “What was I like … you know, when I was a kid? Was I so different from her then?”

Francis heard the pain in her voice, the uncertainty. He led her toward a wooden bench at the corner and they sat down. She huddled close to him, and suddenly she didn’t look nearly so cocky. She looked like a thin young girl in big, ugly clothes—a child eagerly wanting to find a way to womanhood.

He drew her close. Together they leaned back into the bench and stared up at the crisp autumn sky. “I remember your first day of school like it was yesterday. You and your mom lived in that gross apartment building in the U District. Those were the days when she was doing her residency at the UW hospital and she was working around the clock. You spent your days in the pediatric wing—hanging with the post-op kids in the recreational therapy room. Your mom never slept. She worked and studied, and every spare second she was with you, reading to you, playing with you, loving you like I’d never seen anyone loved before.”

“Fairy tales,” Lina murmured. “She used to read me fairy tales.”

“Even back then, you were a fiery, independent little thing. On the first day of kindergarten, your mom took the day off from work. She dressed and re-dressed you until you looked like a doll with your shiny black shoes and pink hair ribbons and your Sesame Street lunch box. It was set up that parents could ride the bus in with the kids on the first day—and Maddy was so excited. She’d never ridden a school bus before, and she couldn’t wait.

“But when you got to the bus stop, you turned to her and said you wanted to ride all by yourself.”

Lina frowned. “I don’t remember that.”

“Well, I do. Your mom almost burst into tears, but she wouldn’t let you see how hurt she was. Instead, she let go of your little hand and let you get on that big bus all by yourself. You didn’t even wave good-bye, just marched to an empty seat and sat down. When the doors shut, Maddy raced home, jumped in that junker of a car she had, and followed the bus to school. Crying all the way there and back.” He turned to her, touched her cheek. “She was so proud of you … and so scared.”

“I know she loves me,” Lina said, staring off into the distance. “And I love her. It’s just … hard sometimes. I feel like I don’t really belong with her. It’s like some alien accidentally left me behind.”

He tightened his hold. “That’s part of growing up. None of us know where we belong. We spend a lifetime trying to find out.”

“Easy for you to say. You love Mom and me, but you belong to God.”

He found himself unable to answer her. But he wished—Lord, how he wished—that it seemed as simple to him. “Yes,” he said slowly. “That pretty much sums up my life.”

“Did you know Mom promised to contact my dad?”

For a second, Francis couldn’t draw a decent breath. Finally he answered, “No, I didn’t know that.”

Lina flashed him a grin. “Yeah. I’m sorta nervous, but mostly I’m excited. Pretty soon I’ll get to meet him.”

Francis felt the fear returning, and on the heels of it came the shame. God forgive him, he didn’t want Lina to know her father. “Well,” he said at last. “What do you say we go get some pizza?”

“You’re going to offer pizza to a cardiologist’s kid?”

He laughed and it felt good, as if for a second everything in his world was normal. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Long after she’d left him alone in his room, long after the nurses had finished poking and prodding him, long after Hilda had fired off her litany of rules for the soon-to-be-eviscerated, Angel still couldn’t sleep. He’d asked for more drugs to help him sleep and been denied, so he lay there, wide awake.

Thinking was the last thing he wanted to do in this godforsaken place. But he couldn’t force the images from his mind. Francis and Madelaine humping wildly in a four-poster bed, twelve kids asleep in the bedroom next door. A white picket fence around a sparkling clean jungle gym.

He closed his eyes and knew instantly that it was a mistake. The memory came to him, sharp and clear and in heartbreaking focus.…

It had been daylight, a sunny summer day, and Angel had been confined to a hospital bed. Francis was beside him, talking. But Angel was seventeen and too angry to listen—angry that he was sick, angry at the stupid doctors who told him he’d have to change his life, that he could die if he didn’t take care of himself. He didn’t know what the hell myocarditis was—and he didn’t give a damn. All he knew was that he felt too good to be hospitalized. He didn’t want to be trapped in a bed his mother wasted no time in telling him they couldn’t afford.

The summer stretched out before him, long and boring, and the diagnosis—viral infection affecting the heart—battered him. The stupid doctors kept telling him he could die if he wasn’t careful, that he had to quit smoking and drinking, but he felt perfectly healthy. There was nothing wrong with his heart.

The hospital door opened, but Angel didn’t bother to move. He was too busy feeling sorry for himself. Francis leaned close, whispered an awestruck, “Jeez.”

For a second Angel hadn’t known what his brother was talking about. Then he turned his head and saw her. A thin wisp of a girl—candy striper volunteer—standing in the doorway, her eyes wide and unblinking, her teeth nipping ever so softly at her full bottom lip. She had pale ivory skin and dark eyebrows that looked like they’d been slashed on with a marking pen. She was clutching a pile of Heartbeat and Tiger Beat magazines to her chest.

Angel had thought she was pretty enough, in a bland, private schoolgirl sort of way, but then he’d seen her reflected in his brother’s clear blue eyes, and suddenly she’d become more, so much more. The first girl Francis had ever looked at twice.

“Jeez Louise,” Francis whispered again.

Angel made his move without even thinking about it. He flashed the quiet candy striper his trademark grin, the one he’d used mercilessly on the girls in his low-rent neighborhood. He knew he was good-looking—a tanned, dark-haired Italian-Irish kid with rebellion in his green eyes.

She smiled back, slowly at first, and then more broadly. The smile transformed her features, tilted the corners of her eyes, and made her look exotic and Gypsy-like. Waves of light brown hair, streaked in places to the color of sand, shimmered in the artificial light.

“I wouldn’t mind some company,” Angel said.

Her eyes widened, and he saw for the first time that they were a soft silver-green. “You wouldn’t?”

Francis sighed—a deep, tired sound of defeat, then scooted back in his chair and got to his feet, a tall, awkward blond kid, looking at her like a puppy dog, begging her silently to see him.

Angel felt a stab of regret, but it was too late to remedy what he’d done, and he didn’t want to anyway. It was the first time in his life he’d gotten something Francis wanted, and it felt good.

The girl—he’d learned later that her name was Madelaine Hillyard—looked up at Francis as he left the room, gave him a pretty white smile, and whispered good-bye. She hadn’t looked at Francis again, not then and not in the magical months that followed. Months that changed all their lives.

At first, Angel had wanted Madelaine because Francis wanted her; plain, unvarnished selfishness, made all the more ignoble and painful because of what was to follow.

Quite simply, Angel fell in love with her. Head, heart, body and soul, he fell in love for the first—perhaps the only—time in his life. The quiet, unassuming teenager with the huge, haunting eyes had become his world for a brief, heart-wrenching summer. She saw something in him that no one had ever seen before—she believed in him—and when he held her in his arms he almost learned to believe in himself. But not enough; he hadn’t believed in himself enough.…

And though he’d left her, he’d never been able to exorcise her from his soul. That was the tragedy in all of it. He’d abandoned her, broken all of their hearts, and for what? For a life spent drifting aimlessly from seedy bar to seedier hotel room, telling and retelling the same tired stories to dozens of overly made-up eyes, whispering the same worn lines against a hundred pairs of lips. But never the right lips, never the right words.

And here he was again, back in the hospital.

Only this time, maybe Francis had come out the winner, maybe it was Francis who slept with Madelaine now, Francis who sucked her pale, pink nipples and kissed her full lips.

He winced.

Jealousy sluiced through him, twisting his stomach, making him suddenly angry.

He didn’t want Francis to have Madelaine.

“Christ,” he whispered, wishing that it were a prayer and knowing that it was too late for that. It had always been too late.