Home Again

  “The situation is critical.”

  “Stats?”

  “Thirty-four-year-old male. HIV-negative and cancer-free. End-stage cardiomyopathy. I ran routine bloods yesterday and everything looks good.” Chris leaned forward, slid the thin manila folder across the desk. “But as I’ve said, he’s got a bad attitude. One of those rich, famous Hollywood types who thinks the world owes him something.”

  Madelaine had had this discussion with Chris before. As always, Chris looked to the success rate of the hospital and the long-term viability of a candidate’s chances before allocating the very precious resource of a heart. Madelaine didn’t envy Chris the enormous responsibility of his job. Every time he chose someone to receive a heart, there were other patients who would most likely die because of that choice. One lived, one died; it was as simple as that. They couldn’t afford to put a new heart in someone who wouldn’t take care of it.

  “I’ll talk to him, Chris,” she said.

  He looked up at her, and in a single glance, they communicated perfectly. They both knew that she had just stepped in, shouldered some of his burden. I’ll tell you if he should have this chance.

  It was a choice no human being should ever have to make about another person, yet they did it every day.

  “We’re protecting his anonymity at all costs. Got him checked in under an alias. So tell your staff—I’ll have their jobs if his identity or prognosis is leaked to the press.”

  “Understood.”

  “I’ll contact the team and get them up to speed. Hilda will need to run the rest of the tests and get him educated quickly.” He gave her a swift, meaningful look. “If this one doesn’t get a heart in record time, he’s in big trouble.”

  She nodded in understanding. “You want to meet for coffee this afternoon to discuss the particulars?”

  “Sure. Four o’clock unless something blows up.”

  “Good.” Smiling at him, Madelaine flipped open the folder on her desk and looked at her patient’s name. Angelo Dominick DeMarco.

  She slapped the folder closed, but not quickly enough. Memories surged to the front of her mind, so powerful, it was as if he were standing in front of her. She remembered Angel’s loud, cackling laugh and the slight swagger of his walk, the way he drove his hand through his long, brownish-black hair. But most of all she remembered his eyes, malachite green, sunk beneath dark, slashing black brows that made him look dangerous. Until he smiled.

  Even all these years later, she remembered the power of that smile. It was like the cliché —sunlight bursting through the clouds.

  Francis. She thought of him suddenly, and knew that this would break his heart. His baby brother was sick … maybe dying … God, how would she tell him?

  “Madelaine?” Chris’s voice broke in.

  She looked across the desk at him, trying to find the words, but all she had were memories, images, and a stark, sudden fear. “I can’t take this patient, Chris.”

  “What?”

  “Angel is Father Francis’s brother.”

  “Ah. Your priest. Do you know Angelo?”

  It took Madelaine a second to collect herself. “Yes. No. Not really.” She shrugged. “I knew him a long time ago. When we were kids.”

  Chris’s eyes narrowed. “When you were kids, huh? Have you kept in contact with him?”

  “No.”

  “Hate him?”

  Madelaine swallowed hard, thinking. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t hate him.”

  He smiled. “Love him?”

  The question caught her off guard. In her mind she saw a dozen pictures of Angel as he’d once been, the laughing, dark-haired boy with the big dreams, the boy who’d stolen her heart and kissed her for the very first time. Then came the darker images, the memories that hurt. “No. I don’t love him.”

  “Good.” He pushed to his feet and rested his hands on her desk, giving her a meaningful look. “He needs you, Madelaine.”

  “Don’t do this to me, Chris. Give him to someone else.”

  “No one else is as good as you, damn it, and you know it. This young man is going to die, Madelaine. You’re his best hope. At least meet with him.”

  She stared at Allenford, knowing that she had no choice. She couldn’t just let Angel die. “Okay, Chris.”

  He smiled. “Great.” He turned, heading for the door. Just as he opened it, he turned back around. “I’ll need your report today. If he’s going to get a new heart, he needs to be placed on the UNOS list immediately. And remember, we have to handle his celebrity status with kid gloves. I won’t have this hospital’s reputation compromised.”

  “Right.”

  Allenford left her office, closed the door behind him.

  Madelaine sat, still stunned, her glassy eyes trained on the door.

  Angel DeMarco was back.

  Chapter Six

  She stood outside Angel’s door so long, it became noticeable. Finally footsteps came up behind her, a warm, bony hand pressed against her shoulder.

  “You okay, Madelaine?”

  She stiffened, forced her chin up, and drew her gaze away from the name on the door. “I’m fine, Hilda,” she said, turning slowly to face the small, no-nonsense nurse who ran the transplant team like a drill sergeant.

  Hilda beamed up at her, her birdlike head tilting suddenly to the right. “I was going to see our Mr. Jones. Shall I wait until you’re done?”

  “Yes. I’d like some time alone with him.”

  Hilda gave her a quick wink. “If the staff knew who he was, you’d be stampeded. Only Sarah, Karen, and I will be allowed in here. We’ll handle the security.”

  Madelaine tried to dredge up a smile, she really tried. “Good.”

  “Hollywood types,” Hilda said disapprovingly. “According to the Enquirer—and God knows they’re reputable on such things—he drinks like a fish and screws anything with tits bigger’n his.” With another pat on the shoulder, Hilda turned and scurried down the hallway, vanishing into her office.

  Madelaine took a deep, steadying breath and marched into the lion’s den.

  He was sleeping. Thank God.

  Quietly she closed the door shut behind her. Weak autumn sunlight shone through the small window, giving the room a respite from the cold impersonality of fluorescent lighting. The narrow, metal-framed bed cut the room in half.

  He lay as motionless as death, the washed-out gray sheeting tucked haphazardly across his chest. Dark brown hair lay in a tangled heap against the white cotton of the pillow. His chiseled face looked sunken and too thin; his lips were pale. A stubbly growth of black beard shadowed his triangular jaw and darkened his upper lip.

  Even so, he was so handsome he took her breath away.

  She sank unsteadily to the chair. For a second she couldn’t think about his illness or what was at stake here. All she could think about was the past and how much she’d loved this man.

  He had swept her, laughing, into a whole new world. A world of lights and possibility and hope, a place where rules and responsibility didn’t exist. She’d clung to him, giggling, believing, following wherever he led, so proud that hers was the hand he wanted to hold. She’d fallen in love with him in the wild, abandoned way that only teenagers could. Making excuses during the day to be together, sneaking from her father’s austere house in the middle of the night. It was the first time she’d ever disobeyed her father, and it had made her feel recklessly confident.

  With the distance of so many years, she knew that she’d never really fallen in love with him, not in the way that lasts. She’d been consumed by his brushfire passion, transformed by him.

  There had been that night, under the old oak tree at Carrington Park….

  They’d been lying in the grass, staring up at the night sky, wishing on stars, sharing their dreams, holding each other. But she’d known it was time to go home. Her father would be getting back from his business trip.

  She pulled away from him, staring down the long, darkened stree
t. The thought of leaving him, returning to that cold house and her even colder father, made her feel almost sick with desperation. “I don’t want to go back….” She realized instantly that she’d said too much. She held her breath, waiting for Angel to call her silly or stupid or childish—all the words her father hurled at her with such regularity.

  But he didn’t. He touched her cheek, gently turned her face to his. “Don’t. Stay with me. We could run away … raise a family … be a family….”

  Madelaine had never known what it could feel like to love someone until that moment. The emotion swept through her, filling her soul with heat until, suddenly, she was laughing, and then she was crying. “I love you, Angel.”

  Ah … it had been so painfully sweet….

  He pulled her into his arms, held her so tightly, she couldn’t breathe. Together they dropped to their knees in the spongy grass. She felt his hands on her, stroking her hair, her back, her hips. And then he was kissing her, tasting her tears, claiming her so completely with his mouth that she felt dizzy.

  At last he drew back and stared down at her. There was an intensity in his eyes that stole her breath, made her heart beat wildly. “I love you, Madelaine. I don’t… I mean, I’ve never…” Tears squeezed past his eyelashes and he started to wipe them away.

  She stopped his hand. “Don’t be afraid,” she whispered.

  He gave her a trembling smile. In that instant she understood so much about him, about the way he was. He went about swaggering and blustering and acting like the rebel, but on the inside he was just like her. Scared and confused and lonely. He didn’t believe in himself, didn’t think he was good, but he was—she believed in him enough for both of them. And he loved her like no one had ever loved her before….

  Such powerful, powerful words: I love you….

  After that, she’d told him everything, opened her heart and soul to him and let him become a part of her. Without him, she hadn’t thought she could live.

  What if he could do that to her again?

  She forced herself to remember the other things, the other moments, letting the pain wash through her in a cold, cleansing sweep.

  She’d thought she’d forgiven him for what he’d done to her—for leaving her without so much as a good-bye. Honestly, truly, she thought she had. Time and again she’d replayed the sequence of events in her head. She told herself she didn’t blame Angel for running out on her. She told herself that seventeen was young, so young, and with each advancing year of her life, it felt younger still. She told herself it had been for the best, that they never would have made it, that they would have ruined each other’s lives.

  Yes, she’d told herself a lot of things, but now, in this second, staring down at him, she recognized the truth at last. They were lies, all of them lies. Pretty foil paper on a dark, ugly gift.

  She hadn’t forgiven him. How could she?

  He’d killed a part of her that summer, a part he’d created and nurtured and claimed to love. A part she’d never gotten back.

  * * *

  Angel came awake slowly. For a single blissful second he didn’t know where he was or what had happened to him. Then the muted sucking sound of machines drifted to his ears, the murmur of the heart monitor.

  After his futile jailbreak attempt, Hilda the bird-woman and a marine-sized nurse had hooked his useless heart back up. The machine kept its clicking record, spitting out reams of paper.

  He felt like hell. His chest ached, his head pounded, and the needles in his arms burned like spots of fire. He couldn’t move without hurting somewhere. He could feel the telltale whirring of drugs in his bloodstream; he’d used narcotics too often in his life to be fooled.

  He groaned, letting his head loll to the side. The smell of old cotton, green Jell-O, and boiled turkey filled his nostrils.

  Lunchtime in cardiac hell.

  He winced as the sunlight stabbed deep in his head. Blinking, he tried to wet his parched lips, and reached shakily for the Wedgewood-blue plastic pitcher labeled 264-W.

  “I’ll get that for you.”

  The voice washed over him. At first all he noticed was the soothing huskiness of it, the Debra Winger throatiness. It reminded him of something, some distant night in his past when he’d picked up a waitress in Tulsa, taken her home, and fu—

  Oh, Jesus. That wasn’t the right memory at all.

  His idiotic heart lurched, rammed into his rib cage, and started to knock like an old engine on bad gas. The monitor beside him spat a sudden Gatling-gun clatter into the room. He couldn’t breathe.

  Breathe deeply, you asshole. Calm down. Slowly he tilted his chin. And saw her beside him.

  God, after all these years …

  She sat perfectly erect, her upper body camouflaged by a lab coat, with only the barest hint of a forest-green sweater visible beneath the wide white lapels. Her face was magnificently emotionless, her wide, silver-green eyes utterly blank. No smile lurked at the edges of her full, unpainted lips.

  For a second, an image flashed through his mind of a heartbroken sixteen-year-old girl standing at a barred window, her pale, slim hand pressed to the glass, her cheeks streaked with tears, mouthing his name.

  He’d fallen in love with a candy striper with long brown hair and laughing, mist-green eyes, but there was no remnant of that girl in the woman sitting beside him. She was regal in her bearing, in the well-styled precision of her short, honey-brown hair, in the classical perfection of her face. The perfect physician in complete control.

  Strangely, it pissed him off that she’d done so well for herself. He ought to have been happy—hell, he ought to have been proud of her—but all he felt was cheated and angry. As if all his memories of her were an invention. This woman couldn’t have been broken by his betrayal, couldn’t have cared for long. And obviously Daddy’s money had financed the best possible education.

  “Angel,” she said in that barmaid’s voice he’d never quite been able to forget. “How … interesting to see you again.”

  “You’ve done all right for yourself, Mad,” he said bitterly. More bitterly than he intended.

  “Don’t call me Mad.” She gave him a completely professional smile and flipped open his charts. “They tell me you need a new heart.”

  “It shouldn’t surprise you.”

  “It doesn’t.”

  He could feel the judgment radiating from her. That was all he needed—another pair of accusing eyes, another person judging him by some invisible standard and finding him lacking. “Look, Mad, I think we’d both agree, I should have another doc.”

  “Yes, I do. Unfortunately, Allenford wants you to have the best.”

  “So do I, but—”

  “I’m the best there is, Angel. You’re lucky to have me.” She brightened. “But if you don’t want me, I’ll have you transferred to someone else.”

  He felt a twinge of irritation. “You don’t want me as your patient?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Then I want you,” he said sharply, regretting it the minute he said it. But he’d wanted to rattle her cage, shake up this woman he ought to know intimately and yet didn’t know at all.

  She studied his chart. “Lucky me.”

  The harsh tone of her voice seemed absurdly out of character for the polished, picture-perfect woman beside him. He couldn’t help himself, he laughed. “I guess little Mad has grown up.”

  She looked at him, hard. “Med school will do that to a girl.” She turned her gaze from his face and studied the pile of charts on her lap. “You appear not to have changed at all, Angel.”

  “That’s not true. I have to shave every day now.”

  She didn’t crack a smile. “Your blood work looks good. Despite obvious alcohol abuse, all of your organs are functioning well. Now it’s a waiting game. Hopefully we’ll find a suitable donor in time. As you have probably been told, fewer than one percent of all accidental deaths make suitable donors. Brain death is extremely rare.”

&n
bsp; “So it’s a waiting game,” he said, feeling the anger rising. He told himself that she was his cardiologist—the person who held his life in her hands. But he couldn’t seem to stop the anger. She was the last person on earth who would give him a fair shake.

  “If you improve substantially, you may be able to live outside the hospital—of course, you’re too sick to do that now.”

  He couldn’t believe it. She sat there, talking to him as if he were a child, looking at him as if he were an insect. So damned doctorlike. As if she’d never known him before, never cared about him. He knew it was irrational to suddenly be furious, but he’d never been a real rational guy and he saw no reason to start. “No.”

  That surprised her. She actually looked up from the paperwork and turned to him. “No? No, what?”

  “No, Doctor Hillyard, I’m not going to lie here like a pincushion and wait for what you euphemistically call a ‘donor.’”

  Slowly she set the charts down again. “Angel—”

  “And call me Mr. DeMarco. You don’t know shit about me, lady. I’m not about to sit around hoping some perfectly nice guy gets broadsided by an eighteen-wheeler. That is what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Somebody dies and I get a chance to live?”

  She was slow to answer. “Yes. That’s what we’re talking about, Angel. Donor organs come from a body that has been declared brain-dead.”

  He shivered at the thought. Some guy lying on a slab of metal, doctors greedily harvesting his organs. “Well, no, thanks.”

  She stared at him for another full half minute, saying nothing. Then, finally, she shrugged. “Die, then.”

  It shocked him, that response. At first it made him angry, then fear crept in, leaving a sour taste in his mouth. “So compassionate, Dr. Hillyard.”

  “Look, Angel, I can’t waste time feeling compassion for a person with a death wish. You smoke, you drink, and there were traces of marijuana in your urine. All of this after two heart attacks.” She leaned toward him, drilled him with a steely look. “You’re going to die—and pretty soon if you don’t make some very hard choices.”