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It felt like a lifetime ago.
Sighing, I grasped the church door and pulled. As the door swung open, I saw her. She stuck out like…well, like a drunk in a church. She sat in the candle lit cathedral with her legs propped up on the pew, and a bottle of vodka in her hand. Not a soul dared to rear their heads. Blessing myself, I walked the aisle, my feet echoing as I hurried to reach her. She didn’t even look up. She just drank.
“I called you,” I whispered to her.
“A lot of people called me. I threw my phone out the window.” Again, she put the bottle to her lips.
That was rational.
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
I was waiting for something…anything. For her to break down like before, maybe even scream, but instead, she sat comfortably in the second row staring up at the cross hanging over the sea of candles.
“Coraline, talk to me. Please.”
“I don’t want to talk. I just want to drink.”
“Coraline…”
“You want to talk? Talk to God. Ask him why he’s such a dick. Why does he give with one hand and then slap you across the face with the other?”
She got up from the bench and stumbled forward. I reached to help, but she simply pushed me away, spilling some of the vodka over her hand and over me. Ignoring it, she continued moving towards the altar.
“Did you know only four percent of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer are my age?” she asked. “Slap one. Thanks, Big Guy!” She laughed, drinking at the foot of the cross. “I have stage two, which means both of my ovaries are shot! Because, why the fuck would I need ovaries, right? Oh, and so is my uterus. It’s not like I haven’t been dying for a child anyway. Dying, funny, Big Guy. You’re just hilarious!”
“Coraline—”
“Stop Coraline-ing me! Damn it! If I live…”
“You will live!” I wanted to grab her, but she kept pacing away from me. Watching her pace like that was driving me crazy.
“Yeah, because you’re an almighty Callahan. You see all, know all, are all, right? Every one of you walks on water! You all can do as you please and God simply looks away! Olivia is right, he’s picking favorites, but what else is new? We thought we caught it early, well we were wrong! I was wrong…so wrong…I thought I was pregnant. What kind of idiot thinks they’re pregnant? How did I not know? I didn’t see the signs until I was too far gone! How did I not notice?”
She tried to drink, but her bottle was empty. Rearing her arm back, she prepared to throw it, but I took it from her before she could. Pulling her into my arms, I just held her. I wasn’t sure what to say, or how I could make her feel any better.
“You want to know the icing on the cake?” she whispered, leaning into me. “This church—the church down the block from the hospital—is named St. Margaret of Antioch. She was the saint of childbirth, pregnant women, and dying people…”
She drew in a sharp breath and it was as though someone had stabbed us both.
“You aren’t in this alone. It’s you and me. You and I have cancer. We have cancer. And I swear to you I will never leave your side, but I need you to fight this. I need you to come back to the hospital,” I whispered, kissing the back of her head.
“I can’t. I can’t do the chemo. I can’t knowingly inject myself with poison, lose all my hair, let my bones become brittle, not to mention…I can’t, Declan. I just…”
“You can, because I can’t live without you. I can live without a kid—I truly can—but you…you are not up for debate. You stay for as long I stay, and I plan to live for a long, long time. So please, for the love of me, come back and let’s fight this bitch so we can get back to our lives.”
She is the most important thing to me. She is everything.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“Defense is our best attack.”
—Jay Weatherill
LIAM
“How much is this one boy costing us?” My father sighed, smoking like a steam engine while leaning against my ‘69 Mustang.
I readjusted my gloves. “$58,378.23. But I paid a flat sixty just to get it over with.”
God, I hate the cold. But what could I expect from a winter in Chicago? The past few months had gone by painfully slow, and now, here we were, standing outside and freezing our nuts off for a kid.
“I could think of ten different things to do with sixty grand, and none of them revolved around smuggling a boy over the border.”
Sixty grand was like a grain of sand on a beach for us. He was just bored, so bored in fact, that the man had even taken up writing.
“You didn’t have to come, Father.”
“You are all out of brothers for the time being. I figured we could use the quality time now that you’re weeks away from becoming a father yourself.”
The biggest shit storm that had fallen upon us in the last couple of months was Coraline, and I could hardly blame her. She’d had a hysterectomy, and each day she looked at an enlarged Mel, she broke down. It was finally too much, and Declan took her back to the castle in Ireland. She still had months of recovery to go through, on top of another round of chemo. I would give them as much time as they needed. Declan wasn’t just my cousin, he was my brother, and Coraline was his heart. Neal and Olivia, on the other hand, were one step behind dropping off the face of the planet. After their exile, he and Olivia only spoke to me when they had to while on the campaign trail. I did have to give them credit, they were finally good at something: being sock-puppets. They smiled for the cameras and made us all look good. In a few weeks, they would be home, and I would need to speak with Neal, but for now, I needed to make sure that all the hatches were locked down.
That reason was exactly why we were currently parked right outside the city, waiting under the bridge for my package.
“Are you nervous?” my father asked, handing me his cigar. I waved him off; it wasn’t worth the hassle Mel would give me if I came home smelling of smoke. She was more than sensitive to it now.
“Nervous about what?”
“About your son. I understood why you and Mel didn’t want to talk about it while there was still a chance she could lose him. Your mother and I have tried to give you both some time to let it sink in, but, we’re both kind of shocked you haven’t had more worries. Neither of you have even mentioned a nursery, nor did Mel want a baby shower…”
“She didn’t want a baby shower because we both knew she would have snapped and killed every last one us.” I could just see her now, a baby rattle in her hand, hammering away at some poor schmuck’s skull. And that poor schmuck would have probably been me.
Mel and I had spoken about the baby; we spent most of our evenings talking about him. What we would name him, how we would handle our work and parenting. Mel didn’t open up well to people. It had taken two years of marriage for her to even truly be open with me. Going to my parents was not something I figured she could do just yet.
“I know you and Mom want to be included more,” I said, “but Mel’s just not good with being personal, you know this. She’s working on it and I can’t push her. We’re thinking of naming him Ethan Antonio Callahan.”
“Ethan?” He grinned, turning to face me.
