by Kate Aeon
If any more of these windows open, don’t go through them, Phoebe had told him, and he remembered that. But he looked out the window, and Chick was on the other side, sitting on a tire swing they’d had in their backyard, spinning in slow, lazy circles. When she saw him, she smiled and called, “Daddy!” and for the first time in so very long, he heard her beautiful voice.
He did not let himself think about what lay behind him, even when he heard Phoebe’s voice say, “I love you. And you promised me.” His little girl was out there in the rain, and he was going to be with her again.
He climbed through the window, and there was no drop. He was simply and easily on the other side, and the wet grass swished around his ankles and the breeze was fresh and pure, and Chick’s smile was so bright and beautiful he would never need to see the sun again.
She clambered out of the tire swing and came running to him, arms held wide, and he dropped to his knees and embraced her. She was taller, but not much taller, older but not much older, time had passed for her, but nowhere near as quickly as it had passed for him.
He pulled her close and hugged her, buried his nose in her hair, smelled her little-girl scent that was shampoo and sunshine and flowers and lovely spring rain rolled all together. “God, I missed you,” he said.
“I was always with you, Daddy,” she told him. “A part of me will always be with you. Always.” She kissed his cheek, and he felt the brush of her eyelashes against his skin, and he felt her arms tighten around him — little thin arms around his neck, little hands patting his back. The same hands that he had held when she was first learning to walk, and later when they were crossing streets or hiking over rough ground. They were hands he’d thought he would hold when she grew up and walked down the aisle to marry some young man who would love her and cherish her.
That hadn’t happened. But now he had won his way back to her. He had his little girl again.
“I missed you more than you could ever know,” he said. And he smiled at her, joyous, triumphant.
But she shook her head. “I do know. I watched. And I waited for you, Daddy, because I was afraid you would come here. But you can’t stay here. And neither can I.”
She seemed taller as she said that, and her voice seemed less a little girl’s voice.
“No,” he said. “I just found you.”
But she was stretching, growing taller, turning into a woman before his eyes, and when she spoke, her voice was a woman’s voice. “You have your whole life ahead of you, and I’m dead, and you have to move on. You have to let go of me now. You have to live; you have so much to live for. You have Phoebe. And babies waiting for you to be their father. A whole future back there.”
She pulled away, a woman with his daughter’s face, tall and beautiful and confident as he had always dreamed she would be. “I love you, Daddy,” she said. “I will always love you. But I’m done now. I did what I came to do. We had as long as we had — as long we were supposed to have. You and I... we chose this before I was born, and before you were born. I had to leave you back when Mamma was so terrible so that I could be with you today. Right here, right now. To give you the secret you’ve been waiting for your whole life. I had to be here when you needed me, to tell you to go back. And this was the only way we could do that.”
“I’ll always need you.” He looked at her, pleading with his eyes for his child suddenly grown to womanhood to tell him what he wanted to hear.
Instead she said, “You have to hurry, Daddy. Phoebe needs you. You were meant for each other. For here, for now, for forever. But if you don’t hurry, it will be too late.”
The pain was there again — the pain that had swallowed him the day Chick died and that had never gone away. He’d left his little girl in a white box on a green hill, and the only thing in the world he’d wanted to do was crawl in there with her and let the earth fall down on top of him. And now he had her back. He was holding her hands and looking into her eyes and she was warm and real and alive, and she was telling him that he had to leave her behind again. He didn’t think he could do it.
She seemed to know what he was thinking, because she wiped the tears from his cheeks and smiled at him — the smile that had wrenched his heart a dozen times a day from the very first time he saw it. “It’ll be okay, Daddy. I promise. I’ll be waiting when you get back. When you’re supposed to be here. Hand me my lucky stone. Let it go, let me go with it. If you let it go, it will free us both.”
She kissed his cheek, and be believed her — that she would be there, that she wasn’t lost. But letting go was so hard.
Still, he dug into his pocket, into his wallet, and pulled out her lucky stone, the stone that had been his solid link to her — that had been with her the day she died and that had been with him every day since.
She had survived. They were eternal, the two of them. Father and daughter, and eternity would still be there when he was supposed to return. He could let go of the stone. He could set her free, and himself as well.
He handed her the stone, and she smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “Go, and live the life you were meant to live.”
She shimmered away into the rain, a rainbow vanishing while its promise lingered.
Alan started back into the darkness and the pain of life, carrying that promise as he had carried the pebble in his wallet — holding it in a safe place in his heart where nothing could take it away.
Chapter Forty-One
A walkie-talkie somewhere in the distance. A voice shouted, “Ten thirty-three at Dock F, Bahia Mar. Out on the finger piers, multiple victims, CPR in progress on one, dispatch extra rescue units and backup.”
Phoebe heard running. Behind the footsteps, sirens in the distance ripped through the gray morning, getting closer, closer — and it should have been the sweetest sound she had ever heard. It should have been.
Believe, Phoebe told herself. But Alan wasn’t breathing, his heart wasn’t beating.
Believe.
Chick’s voice in her memory — the little girl’s sudden confidence. Believe. She’d been sure Phoebe could save her father.
Phoebe stopped CPR again, rested her fingers against Alan’s throat, and almost yanked her hand away at the delicate flutter under her fingertips.
“Alan,” she whispered. The pulse was really there, getting stronger beneath her fingertips. She rested her cheek an inch above his face, but no breath moved. She lifted his jaw and made sure she had a clear airway, and exhaled, willing him to hang on. Her fingertips found the pulse at his throat, and she closed her eyes and just breathed, and let the reassuring presence of his beating heart carry her on.
“I’m with you,” she told him, and breathed. Slow, deep breaths. And between the breaths, “I’m with you. Stay with me. I love you.”
And then strangers were with her. Cops. The good guys had arrived at last.
“Alan has a... pulse again,” she managed to tell them between breaths. “He isn’t breathing. And... I hurt my knee. A little... It was hurting pretty bad... Not so bad now, but... I feel kind of... funny... They have to save him.”
Sirens dopplered louder and then died to silence, and reflected lights in red and blue and white danced across the white ships, the black sea, the gray sky. Phoebe heard clattering metal behind her, stretchers being unfolded.
Feet running. And Brig, beside her, muttering, “Oh, Jesus, look at this.”
And between breaths she whispered to Alan, “I love you... I love you... I love you,” and prayed that he would hear her.
“Hurry up!” Brig yelled, and Phoebe heard answering shouts, but what they said she would never know. She breathed for Alan, and someone put a big box beside her and opened it, and someone else said, “I have a pulse here — thready and fast. Let’s get some Ringer’s started, wide open, two lines, and pressure dressings on those chest wounds, and see if we can find the exit wounds.”
She looked up at them — at the faces of strangers determined to save Alan. And Brig, looking grim and
fierce and scared all at the same time. She turned, thinking that she would tell him what had happened, thinking that it was so funny that everyone seemed to be running towards her through a graying tunnel.
And she tried to get to her feet, and the last thing she heard was, “Grab her, she’s going down!”
Chapter Forty-Two
Alan lay in the darkness for a long time — it seemed like forever. Pain hazed his vision, slammed him with every movement of his chest. Something was breathing for him, and it hurt. He wanted it to stop.
He could remember things. Impossible things. The ghostly dreams of a dying man. They hadn’t meant anything, had they? Had they been real? Had any of it been real?
He’d thought at first that Chick had come back to him. He’d thought that his future held some promise.
But the darkness went on, and on, and on, and with it the pain, and he waited for voices that should have been there — and for one voice in particular that had been the reason he thought he’d come back from death. That voice never came.
Maybe I’m still dead, he thought. Maybe this is hell.
But it was a hell with familiar sounds. Nurses titrating drips, rattling carts, turning off beeping monitors, talking to each other as if they alone existed in this dark little universe of pain.
Sometimes they would talk to him, but it was always in that awful we-don’t-think-you-can-hear-us-but-we’re-doing-this-anyway voice that made him think he was a lost cause.
Then he realized he could see light, and after a while he could make out shapes, and the fact that he had his eyes open generated a lot of excitement. But not from the right people. Only from nurses. And doctors, but not doctors he knew. Not anyone he knew.
Where was he? When was he?
And he remembered with sudden horror his attempt to kill a man on a dock, but in the haze that surrounded him, he couldn’t remember much else. He was a doctor, though. Doctors weren’t supposed to be murdering big men out in the middle of...
Storms.
He tried to focus on the storm, because there was something there that was helping this come back to him — storms and boats and knives.
“Up his morphine — he’s thrashing again and he’s going to rip all those tubes out and if he does he’ll bleed out before we can do a goddamn thing.”
That made sense in a disconnected way. He might have said such a thing once.
He faded back into darkness.
When he woke again, the pain was sharp and focused, and he was breathing on his own.
His throat hurt like hell. His mouth was dry and tasted like weasels had being partying and raising their young in there for a year or two. His chest blazed in agony, accompanied by the symphony of fire that was his back.
“Hey,” he tried to yell, and it came out as a strangled cough.
He was in an ICU. In a bed with side rails. One of those rails would have a nurse call button somewhere on it — but he could hear frantic noises somewhere down the corridor: people crying and being shooed from the room, nurses moving heavy equipment, the whump of defibrillator paddles.
Code going on, he thought, and realized he was going to be by himself until that was over.
He remembered everything, though. The drugged haze they’d been keeping him in had bled away, replaced by the sort of pain that would snap a corpse to attention.
He knew a lot of what had been going on around him; much more than he would have expected to know. He remembered being shot. He remembered Phoebe doing CPR on him, telling him over and over that she loved him, begging him to live, reminding him that he had promised her they would get through the hell of Michael and his evil. He remembered Chick, though he couldn’t be sure that was a real memory. He wanted it to be. It had been so sad, but at the same time so full of hope.
But Phoebe hadn’t been in to see him. Not once. Some part of his mind had been listening for her, had been holding on desperately to the last things he’d heard her say to him. “I love you... I love you... I love you...” Because he had wanted so much to believe it.
She hadn’t been to see him.
Neither had Brig.
Neither had Morrie.
He could vaguely remember his mother’s voice. His father’s. His brothers’.
He was grateful for those memories — but he wanted to know what had happened, and only Brig and Morrie and Phoebe could tell him that.
He wanted to know if Chick had been right. If he had a future.
He wanted to know if that last encounter with Chick had been real — and he knew he could never know, but he was getting the feeling that it had been the wishful thoughts of a dying brain.
He wanted so much.
“Call it,” he heard a doctor say. “Nothing else we can do here.”
Down the hall the code had ended — badly.
People moved into the halls again — heavy steps — some of the nurses, checking down the rooms. The doctor, chart in hand.
One of the nurses poked her head in his room, and he croaked, “Hey!” and still sounded like the voice from the grave in some horror film.
“Hey!” she answered. “You’re awake.”
She came in, started poking and prodding him, checking dressings, making him breathe, swabbing out his mouth, giving him little sips of ice because she said technically he was still NPO but maybe she would be able to get that order changed so that he could have some clear liquids as soon as his doctor had a chance to come in to see him.
He had a hard time getting a word in edgewise, or getting her to understand it when she finally stopped for breath.
“How... long?”
“You’ve been here for four days. You were in surgery once for the...” She paused, looking worried. ”Do you remember what happened?“
“Yes. Gunshot.”
She looked relieved. She was too young — when did they start putting twelve-year-olds in uniform and turning them loose in the ICU on unsuspecting patients? “Yes. That’s right. You were in surgery for fourteen hours for the gunshot wounds. You’ve been on a ventilator for two days following that, on a morphine drip and some other things so that we could keep you in twilight sleep while you stabilized. We weaned you off as quickly as we could — you have done remarkably well, by the way. And here you are.“
“I... hurt.”
“Yeah. You’re going to. You’ve had ribs stretched and cracked and everything put back together. You might as well have had elephants dancing the mambo on your chest with everything your doctors did to get you put back in one piece and working again. I’ll let Dr. Fletcher give you all the details.” She smiled at him, a smile far too cheerful, and said, “But you’re going to pull through.”
“Can you... bring me... my wallet?” he asked her. Because part of the dying dream had been about the wallet. About the stone. Chick’s translucent white lucky stone, which would have been a perfect skipping stone, Chick’s stone, with its faded blue forget-me-not painted on one side.
He’d seen that stone in his last dream of her. He remembered handing it to her. Promising her that he would let it go. Let her go.
But that had been in a dream.
The nurse said, “As soon as I let Dr. Fletcher know that you’re back with us.” She bounced off. He almost expected her to skip.
Alan wanted to hold the stone. He could look at it and try to find the truth of the dream, if there was any truth in the stone’s smooth surfaces. Maybe he should give it up in real life the way he had when Chick had asked him for it.
His mother came in while he was lying there thinking. She looked tired. Worn. He’d never actually seen her look so old. And he thought, That’s my fault. I did this to her.
But she smiled at him. “Your brothers are both in the waiting room, and so is your father. They’ll be in soon, but when the nurse told me you were awake, I claimed first visit by myself.”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“I can say the same thing. I know a lot of what happened, Alan — the
what. The how. But I don’t know why. I have tried to understand how you ended up being on that dock with those two people. I understand that you’re a hero — that you are the reason that woman is alive right now. But... why you?”
He wanted to say, “I don’t know.” He wanted to say that he had done a foolish thing, that he had been in the wrong place at the wrong time, that nothing that had happened meant anything more than just him on a dock in the rain because he was That Kind of Guy. Because That Kind of Guy wouldn’t have his heart broken when, after all the hell was over, the heroine never called him back.
But he clearly wasn’t That Kind of Guy, because he opened his mouth and said, “I was in love with her, Mom. I would have done anything for her. Would have died for her.”
His mother smiled. Actually smiled. “Really? In love? I’d so hoped...”
“Don’t hope. Phoebe hasn’t been here since this happened. I’ve heard everyone’s voices, even when I couldn’t answer. And she hasn’t been here.”
His mother stared at him. “Of course she... Wait. You haven’t heard... Well, no — I don’t suppose anyone has told you.” She took a deep breath, and her face went bleak.
Alan shivered, that goose-on-the-grave feeling that sent his pulse skittering. “Told me what?”
“Phoebe couldn’t have come here. She almost died saving your life. Something happened to one of her legs, and she ignored it, kept doing CPR on you until help arrived, and she nearly bled to death. She’s still in serious condition over at your hospital right now.”
His hospital. “Where am I, then?”
“Mount Sinai. Northridge didn’t have the specialists they had to use to put you back together.”
He digested that for a moment. He was glad there’d been specialists who could do what had to be done — but he wasn’t thrilled to know it had been such a big deal.
