Nick said, “I thought you said she woke up once before.”
“No.” Alex shook his head, drew hard on his cigarette and his lips twisted as if at a private irony. “She whispered your name, but she never regained consciousness that I know of. Her eyelids didn’t so much as flutter. It . . . it was like some kind of weird dream she was having.”
“Dream?”
“Or something. I don’t know. I’m just sick of this.” Alex massaged his forehead with his fingertips. “Hell, I want a drink. You?” He nodded toward his brother and crossed the room to a rosewood cabinet with beveled mirrors across the back. Inside were the finest blends of Scotch, bourbon and rye whiskey that money could buy. Alex dug a ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the antique cabinet.
“Maybe we should wait at the hospital,” Nick suggested.
“Nah. They said they would call.” Alex threw a look over his shoulder, and the first hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his lips. “The nurse kinda threw me out again. I guess I was being . . . a little what did she call it . . . ‘unfeeling and argumentative,’ yeah, that was it. The upshot was that I pissed her off. So what do you want?” he asked Nick.
“Scotch. On the rocks.”
“Mother?”
“Nothing for me,” she said tartly, but then she’d always been a little bit of a teetotaler, never imbibing more than a glass of wine, which, Nick assumed, was a direct response to their father’s deep-seated love affair with gin. She held up her cup. “This’ll do.”
“Did you talk to the doctor?” Nick asked.
“Yeah. I met with Phil Robertson in the hospital room—before I pissed off the nurse. He thinks that Marla’s coming around. It might be hours or days, he couldn’t say, but, and this is important,” he extracted a couple of bottles, “when she does wake up and all her vital signs are normal, Robertson will release her.” With a flick of his wrist, Alex twisted open the cap of a new bottle. “I’ve already got a live-in nurse and a relief nurse waiting.”
“Good news all around,” Nick said, trying to keep the sarcasm from his voice as he stared through the window at the lights of the city. Rain spattered the glass, drizzling in rivulets that inched down the panes and smeared the view.
“It’s not good news, Nick. But it’s the best I can do.” Alex looked older than his forty-two years. Weary. Sick of the whole damned mess. He clinked a couple of ice cubes into the bottom of an old-fashioned glass engraved with the family crest, a ridiculous symbol of Cahill self-indulgence. A hefty splash of Scotch followed and within seconds the drink was deposited into Nick’s hand.
“To better days.” Alex took a long swallow from his glass and some of the strain around his eyes seemed to ease as the liquor hit his stomach.
“Amen,” Eugenia agreed, her eyes shaded with disapproval as Alex finished his drink in one swallow.
“A helluva homecoming, isn’t it?” Alex said. “Marla in the hospital, another woman dead, a trucker burned and hanging on by a thread, a new nephew you haven’t met yet and the family business in trouble.”
His mother offered him a smile that was somewhere between tenderness and crafty calculation. “Whatever the reason, it’s good to have you back, Nicholas.”
He took a sip of his drink. The smoky Scotch slid down his throat as easily as water, an acquired taste he’d been told, but one he seemed to have been born with.
“So tell me about Marla’s accident,” Nick suggested, as Alex turned his attention back to the bar and poured himself another stiff shot.
Nick was edgy. Marla had been awake; he’d seen it with his own eyes. It seemed as if they should be doing something, anything rather than sitting around this stuffy room and sipping drinks. “What exactly happened that night?”
“We assume Marla and Pam Delacroix, a friend she’d met recently, were going to visit Pam’s daughter down at UC Santa Cruz as they were headed that direction. It was just over six weeks ago, right after James was born. The day she was supposed to come home from the hospital. Why she decided to leave then, is beyond me.” Alex frowned into his drink, studying the amber depths as if he were a fortune-teller reading tea leaves. “Anyway, she just met Pam, got behind the wheel for God-only-knows-what reason, and took off. It was a nasty night. Fog and rain. And that stretch of Highway 17 is treacherous. It winds through the mountains. Lots of accidents all the time. Somehow Marla lost control of the car. No one knows why. Maybe because she wasn’t familiar with Pam’s Mercedes. Anyway the road was slick and wet and the car slid along the guardrail, finally broke through at a weak point and hurtled over the cliff. Pam was killed instantly. Wasn’t wearing the seat belt. Marla barely survived. Crashed her head on the side window, fractured her jaw in three places, lacerated the hell out of her face, but the air bag inflated and she didn’t end up with any other broken bones or internal injuries. She even lucked out with her teeth—none broken.”
“I doubt if she’d consider that lucking out,” Nick argued.
Alex finished his cigarette and tossed the butt into the fireplace. “The result was the broken jaw, a concussion, and a broken nose. Bad enough, when you get down to it, especially with the coma. The police identified her from the hospital bracelet that she was still wearing at the time of the accident—she must’ve forgotten to take it off.”
“That doesn’t sound like Marla.” The woman Nick remembered was always fastidious about her looks.
“Maybe she was upset. Who knows?” Alex walked to the bar, poured himself another shot or two. “The left side of her face is pretty mangled, but the surgeons are optimistic. They’ve already done a little reconstruction, to keep her face symmetrical, and she’ll probably want more once the wires are off and she wakes up.” He shook his head at the magnitude of it all.
Nick shifted from one foot to the other. Why the hell didn’t the hospital call? This standing around and doing nothing was driving him nuts. Nick glanced at his mother calmly sipping tea, her eyes cast on the edge of the Oriental rug where Coco was lying, chin resting between her white paws, her wary black eyes fixed steadily on Nick. “I think I should shove off—”
Footsteps sounded on the stairs and Cissy, dressed all in black, burst into the room. “I thought we were going to see Mom,” she said, stopping dead center when she spied Nick.
“Cissy, this is Nicholas. You remember him, don’t you?” Eugenia asked.
All petulant lip and suspicious eyes, Cissy gave him a quick once-over. “Don’t think so.”
“It’s been a long time,” Nick said, giving the kid an out. “Maybe ten years.”
She shrugged. Obviously didn’t care. “Are we going or what?”
“As soon as we hear from the hospital. Nick, here, said she woke up and talked to him. But I stopped by to see her and she’d lapsed back into the coma.”
“What? Can she do that?”
“She did it.”
“No way.” Cissy blinked hard. “I mean, once you wake up, you wake up, right?”
Alex downed his drink and touched her on the shoulder. “Dr. Robertson thinks it’ll be soon now.”
“He’s been saying that ever since the accident.” Cissy looked from one adult to the next, searching their faces, expecting to find lies. “This is nuts!” She dropped onto a camel-backed sofa of pale green velvet. “I just want her to wake up and everything be the way it was.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Alex said with more tenderness than Nick would ever give him credit for.
“Why’d this have to happen?”
“Cissy, we’ve been over this. It just did.” Alex’s nerves were beginning to fray and Nick was surprised. His brother had always been a cold, level-headed bastard; someone who could handle any situation with surprising calm. An old girlfriend, the one before Marla, had once accused him of having ice water rather than blood running through his veins. Alex, at the time, had considered it a compliment.
But tonight he was shaken. Big time.
Maybe he really does ca
re about Marla. Maybe he’d married her because he loved her, not because he was only interested in besting his brother.
“I could be at the ranch right now,” Cissy complained.
Eugenia snorted contemptuously. “You have school tomorrow. And it’s raining.”
Cissy muttered “Big deal” under her breath and stared out the window. The girl reminded Nick of a house cat sitting on a windowsill, tail switching, eyes focused on the birds sitting on a branch just on the other side of the window pane.
The phone rang and Alex jumped, strode around the corner to the foyer and grabbed the receiver before the second ring. “Alex Cahill. Yes . . . good, good . . . wonderful. We’ll be there directly.” He slammed the phone down. “About time,” he growled as he reentered the room.
“Mom?” Cissy asked, and some of her fake snotty teenage attitude melted into the woodwork. Without her sneer and the mistrust in her expression, she was pretty and probably would blossom into a beauty. Like her mother. “Is she okay?”
“Let’s hope so,” Alex said but managed a smile. “That was the hospital. It looks like she’s finally rousing.”
“Thank God,” Eugenia said as she rose to her feet and Nick felt a mixture of relief and trepidation. “Fiona and Carmen are here to look after the baby, but I’d better let them know what’s going on.” She marched quickly to the back of the house.
“We’ll take the Jag,” Alex said, reaching into his pocket for his keys.
“I’ll drive my own rig.” Nick didn’t wait for any further arguments. He needed his own set of wheels, his “out” if things got too intense in the hospital. There just wasn’t any telling what would happen when Marla finally came around.
She opened one eye a crack but the shaft of piercing light forced her to shut it again. Her headache was a low throb, and the pain in her jaw more pronounced. She was vaguely aware of some music, a tune she should remember, floating in the air around her.
“Mrs. Cahill?” a soft female voice said.
That name again. Oh, God, why did it seem wrong? Her eyelids fluttered open and she winced against the blaze of light, then realized the lamps were turned down low, the blinds drawn, the room semidark.
“Do you know where you are?”
Marla nodded. Her mouth tasted terrible, her skin itched from lying in bed and her hair felt stringy, her scalp gritty. Good Lord, she must be a sight. Slowly, the blur that was the nurse’s face came into focus.
“This is Bayview Hospital, and I’m Carol Maloy.” The name tag on her pale blue jacket verified the information with an RN tacked on. Tall and blonde with crystal blue eyes, she offered a smile of straight white teeth. “Glad to have you with us.”
Marla swallowed against a throat as dry as sand.
“So, how do you feel? Are you thirsty?”
With more effort than it should have taken, Marla managed to nod, but Nurse Maloy had already turned away and returned with a glass of water equipped with a straw. “I suspected you’d be waking up today, just had a feeling. We’ll start with this, then move on to juice if you really want to go wild.”
With the nurse’s help, she managed to suck up some water. It tasted like heaven as it slid past lips that felt cracked and dry, through the wires binding her teeth and down her parched throat.
Her stomach clenched. Threatened to upheave.
As if anticipating the action, the nurse said, “Whoa. Slowly. Just sip, okay? You’ve been out for quite a while now. It’s going to take your body a while to adjust to being among the living again.”
Marla took her advice, sipped slowly. Her head began to clear.
“See, you’re getting the hang of this already!” She took Marla’s temperature. “Nasty things, those wires,” she prattled on, “but necessary, I’m afraid. The good news is you won’t have to deal with them too much longer. Maybe a week or two.” She took Marla’s blood pressure and pulse with the quick efficiency of someone who could strap a cuff around someone’s arm in her sleep. “I’ve already called Dr. Robertson and he’ll be down to see you shortly.” She hung the blood pressure cuff on the wall. “He’s called your family.”
Her family. The people without faces. Maybe now she would remember them.
“Would you like to sit up?”
“Yes,” Marla said, glad for a change in position. Any change. The nurse showed her the bedside controls and the head of the bed elevated enough so that she could see the rest of the room. It was small, efficient and would have been sterile had it not been for the profusion of bright, fragrant flowers crammed onto every available surface while boxes of candy and unopened packages were stacked on a shelf near the closet. Cards overflowed from a basket on a bedside table. “Your mother-in-law wanted you to wake up to all this, just so you knew how much you were missed,” Carol explained as she listened to Marla’s heartbeat with her stethoscope. “Normal, I’m afraid. Temperature, blood pressure, pulse . . . all normal.” She pocketed the stethoscope, then picked up a pair of wire cutters that were lying on the table with the water glass, pitcher and a box of tissues. “These probably seem out of place, but if you ever, ever, think you might vomit, page us immediately and start clipping the wires in your mouth as if your life depended on it.” She was instantly sober. “Because it does. We don’t want you to choke or suffocate.”
Marla shuddered, horrified at the mental image that came to mind.
“Not a very pleasant thought, I know,” the nurse said, as if she’d read Marla’s mind. “And in all likelihood, nothing’s going to happen, but I just thought I’d let you know.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Marla guessed.
“You got it.” The nurse jotted some quick notes on her chart. “Okay, everything looks pretty good. I’ll get the juice and have someone give you a bath in bed, okay? As soon as the doctor says it’s okay, we’ll get rid of some of the tubes running in and out of your body and let you clean up.” She winked again, then swung through the door.
Marla couldn’t wait to be free of this prison. She sipped the water and looked around the room. A window offered a view of a parking lot, and farther away stretched an expanse of green water, probably part of the Bay, considering the name of the hospital. She reached over and thumbed through the cards left at the bedside, reading them and wondering who the people were who had signed their names. Bill and Sheryl, Gloria and Bob, Joanna and Ted, Anna, Christian, Mario. Not one rang a bell, but then neither did her own. Marla Amhurst Cahill. Dear God, why did she wear the name like a pair of oversized shoes?
Her head was throbbing and as she set the water glass on the table and leaned back in the bed, she suddenly remembered a face, a man’s face. Rugged and rough-hewn with tanned skin, chiseled features, and thick black eyebrows on a ledge over intense, laser blue eyes.
Her throat tightened at the memory.
There had been something about him that was unnerving and rough; an edge about him that she’d sensed. He’d joked, but hadn’t smiled. He’d been in this room and he’d said he was Nick. The outlaw . . . That’s what he’d called himself. And there was something about him that had been . . . distrustful or sinister; she’d sensed it even in their brief encounter.
Her pulse pounded. He hadn’t been lying. He’d looked like some sort of twenty-first century Jesse James with his leather jacket, tanned complexion and jeans.
But this was crazy. She was a married woman. She had only to look at her left hand to prove it. There, winking under the dimmed lights, wrapped around her third finger was a ring that glimmered with diamonds set deep into a wide gold band. Her wedding ring. Staring at the shiny piece she remembered nothing about the day it was placed on her finger or of the man who had presumably said “I do,” and slipped it over her knuckles.
Think, Marla, think!
Nothing.
Not a clue.
She wanted to scream in frustration.
Looking at the band was not unlike staring into Nick Cahill’s eyes. No quicksilver flashback of another time
and place, not one glimmer of recollection, no reaction other than a keen sense of curiosity. About the man. About her marriage. About her children. About herself.
“So you did wake up.” A tall man wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a white lab coat had pushed open the door and was walking inside. He wore a pencil-thin moustache that set off his thin face. Completely bald with too many teeth crammed into a small mouth, he said, “Do you remember me?” then must’ve read the dismay in her eyes. “Don’t worry about it. Amnesia sometimes follows a coma . . . it should clear up.” His smile was meant to instill confidence. “Just for the record, I’m Dr. Robertson.” He leaned down and shone a penlight into her eyes. “How do you feel?”
“Awful,” she admitted. No reason to sugarcoat it.
“I imagine. Any pain in your jaw?”
“Tons.”
“Your head?” He was eyeing the top of her crown.
“It aches like crazy.”
“We’ll get you something for it. Now, tell me about your memory.”
“What memory?” she asked, trying not to wince as he moved his light from her left eye to the right.
“That bad?”
She thought, and even the act of concentrating increased the pressure in her head. “Pretty bad. Saying I was foggy would be optimistic.” She forced the words out through teeth that felt clamped into cement.
He leaned back, clicked off his light and folded his arms over his thin chest. “Tell me about yourself.”
Wow. She thought. Dig deep. “It’s . . . it’s weird. I know some things, like, oh, I can read, understand, think I’m pretty good at math, but I don’t remember taking it. I think I like horses and dogs and the beach and scary movies . . . but . . .” She swallowed the lump forming in her throat, and forced her lips to move around her immobile teeth. “. . . I don’t remember my family, not my children, not my parents, not even my husband.” Her voice was failing her and tears filled her eyes and she felt absolutely pathetic, a sorry, needy creature without a past. She tried to grit her teeth but they were already locked shut.