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And just that quickly, she saw the anger leave her son-in-law’s eyes. Without it, he looked old and tired and afraid.
“All this time,” he said quietly, “I’ve been talking to her, holding her hand, brushing her hair, and singing her love songs. Why? Because you made me believe that love would reach her. But it wasn’t my love that reached her, Rosa. Or yours, either. It was just a man’s name. ”
“Madre de Dios. ” She clutched the bed rail again and stared down at her sleeping daughter. “Mikita, are you hearing us, querida? Blink if you can. ”
Liam sighed. “She’s hear
ing us. We’ve just been saying the wrong things. ”
Rosa wanted to cover her ears. She didn’t want to hear what Liam was going to say next, and yet she couldn’t stop herself from asking the question. “What is it you think we should be telling her?”
Liam sidled in close beside her, so close she could feel the heat from his body. “Maybe it’s not about our love for her. Maybe it’s about her love … for him. ”
“Don’t—”
“I want you to talk to her about Julian. Tell her everything you know about them. Remind her how much she loved him. Maybe that will help her come back to us. ”
She turned and gazed up at him. She could feel the way her mouth was trembling; it matched the shaking in her fingers, but she couldn’t stop it. “That is very dangerous. ”
“Believe me, if she wakes up because of Julian …” He ran a hand through his shaggy hair and closed his eyes.
Rosa could only imagine how much this was hurting him, this good, good man who loved so deeply. She thought that if she listened closely enough, she would hear the sound of his heart breaking.
“It’s her life,” he said at last. “We have to do everything to reach her. ”
Rosa wished she could disagree. “I will try this, to tell her who she used to be and who she used to love, but only if you remember always that she married you. ”
He looked like he was going to say something; in the end, he turned and walked to the window.
She stared at him. “Y-You are not going to stay in the room for this, Dr. Liam? It will be most hurtful. ”
He didn’t turn around. His voice, when he found it, was low and scratchy, not his sound at all. “I’m staying. I think it’s time I got to know the woman I love. ”
Rosa stood beside the bed, clasping the silver St. Christopher’s medallion at her throat.
Slowly she closed her eyes.
For fifteen years, she had not allowed herself to remember those days. That’s how she thought of them—those days—when he had breezed into their airless life and changed everything.
It was only now that she realized how close the memories had always been. Some things could never be forgotten, some people were the same.
She pulled up an image of Mikaela—twenty-one years old, bright brown eyes, flowing black hair, a vibrant flower in a hot, desolate farming town where migrant workers lived eight to a room in shacks without indoor plumbing. A town where the line between the “good” folks and the Mexicans was drawn in cement. And Mikaela—a bastard half Mexican—wasn’t fully welcomed in either world.
It had been the full heat of summer, that day he came into their lives. Mikaela had just finished her second and final year at the local junior college. She’d received an academic scholarship to Western Washington University in Bellingham, but Rosa had known that her daughter wanted something bigger.
Cambridge. Harvard. The Sorbonne. These were the schools that called to Mikaela, but they both knew that girls like her didn’t make it to schools like that.
It was Rosa’s fault that Mikaela had felt so alone as a young girl. For years, Mikaela waited for her father to acknowledge her in public. Then had come the dark, angry years when she hated him and his perfect, white-bread children. The years when she wrote trash about him in girls’ bathrooms all over town, when she prayed to God that just once his blue-eyed, blond-haired cheerleader daughter would know how it felt to want. In time that phase had passed, too, and left Mikaela with a deeper loneliness.
She dreamed of going someplace where she wouldn’t be the Mexican waitress’s bastard kid anymore. She used to say to Rosa that she was tired of staring through dirty windows at other people’s lives.
They had been working in the diner, she and Mikaela, on the tail end of a slow, hot afternoon shift …
“Mikita, if you wash that table any more, it will disappear. ”
Mikaela tossed the rag down. It landed with a squishy thwack on the speckled yellow Formica. “You know how Mr. Gruber likes his table clean, Mama, and he should be here any second for lunch. I’ll get Joe to start his meatloaf sandwich—”
Mikaela’s words were drowned out by a loud, thundering noise, like the first rumble in an earthquake. Behind the counter, in the diner’s small kitchen, Joe looked up from the grill. “What the hell is that?” he growled, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth.
