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Tips are welcome, he’d say, just as he’d said a thousand times on a thousand nights.
Here’s a tip for you, piano man: Get your wife to bed or miss your chance.
When he opened his eyes, the room was empty and silent.
He’d never thought much about silence, but now he knew its every shape and contour. It was a cheap glass jar that trapped old voices and kept them fresh.
He went to the piano and sat on the antique bench with its needlepoint seat. With one finger, he plunked at a single key. It made a dull, thudding sound.
Mrs. Julian True.
“Dr. Liam?”
He jumped, and his hand crashed on the keys in a blast of discordant sound.
Rosa stood in the archway that separated the great room from the dining room.
Liam didn’t want to talk to his mother-in-law right now. If she opened the door to intimacy, he might ask the question that was killing him: Did she ever love me, Rosa?
And God help him, he wasn’t ready for the answer.
“Lo siento, I do not mean to bother you. ”
He studied her, saw the nervous trembling in her hands, the almost invisible tapping of her right foot, and he was seized by a sudden fear that she knew what he’d found, that she’d talk about Mikaela’s past now, tell him more than he wanted to know. He got slowly to his feet and moved toward her. In the pale, overhead light, she looked incredibly fragile, her wrinkled skin almost translucent. A tiny network of blue blood vessels crisscrossed her smooth cheeks. “Yes, Rosa?”
She gazed up at him, her dark eyes steeped in sorrow, and he knew that she understood the pain of a broken heart. “The anniversary … it must be very hard on you. I thought … maybe, if you do not think I am sticking my old woman’s nose where it does not belong, that we could watch a movie together. Bret has loaned me his favorite: Dumb and Dumber. He says it will make me laugh. ”
The idea of Rosa watching Dumb and Dumber brought a smile. “Thank you, Rosa,” he answered, touched by her thoughtfulness. “But not tonight. ”
“There is something else wrong,” she said slowly, eyeing him.
He tried to smile again. “What else could be wrong? Love will reach my wife, won’t it, Rosa? Isn’t that what you’re always telling me, that love will wake her up? But it’s been four weeks and still she’s asleep. ”
“Do not give up, please. ”
He looked at her for a long, desperate minute, then he said softly, “I’m falling apart. ”
It was true. His wife was hanging on to life by a strand as thin as a spider’s web, and now suddenly it felt as if his whole life was hanging alongside her.
“No, Dr. Liam. You are the strongest man I have ever known. ”
He didn’t feel strong. In fact, he’d never felt so close to breaking. He knew that if he stood here a moment longer, feeling Rosa’s sympathy like a warm fire on a cold, cold night, he’d ask the question: Did she ever love me, Rosa?
“I can’t do this now. ” He shoved past a chair, heard it squeaking and crashing across the floor. When he spun around, he found himself staring into the silvered plane of an antique mirror. The network of lines around his eyes had the ridged, shadowy look of felt-tipped etchings.
Laugh lines.
That’s what Mike had called them. Only Liam couldn’t now recall the last time he’d laughed.
The image blurred and twisted before his eyes, until for a flashing second, it wasn’t himself he saw. It was a younger man, blindingly handsome, with a smile that could sell a million movie tickets. “I need to go to the hospital. ”
“But—”
He pushed past her. “Now,” he said again, grabbing his coat off the hook on the wall. “I need to see to my wife. ”
The emergency room was bustling with people tonight; the bright hallways echoed with voices and footsteps. Liam hurried to Mike’s room.
She lay there like a broken princess in someone else’s bed, her chest steadily rising and falling.
