Kristin Hannah's Family Matters 4-Book Bundle: Angel Falls, Between Sisters, The Things We Do for Love, Magic Hour (24 page)

The water is now a beautiful aqua blue. She is at the bottom of a swimming pool, staring up. Her limbs feel heavy; the water resists her movements, but she has learned that if she really concentrates, focuses all of her will, she can lift her fingers and wiggle her toes. She knows that at some time, long ago, this would have been next to nothing, something the tiniest newborn can do, but to her, in this pool of endless clear blue water, it is everything
.

She is floating up through the water, rising, rising, her body weightless. The water moves easily aside for her and buoys her
.

As she reaches the surface, the water slides away from her face. She gasps, breathing in the sweet, pine-scented air, then sucking greedily. Her fingers twitch, and she is reaching for something … the shadow in front of her
.

She opens her eyes and immediately cries out. The light is so bright, she cannot stand the brightness
.

“She opened her eyes. Jesus Christ, Mike … we’re here …”

She takes a deep, calming breath and opens her eyes again. At first the world is a confusing, jarring mixture of white-hot light and black, slanting shadows. She can feel something warm against her palm. She tries to grasp hold, but her fingers are weighted down again, unresponsive
.

She blinks; it takes all her concentration to turn her head. Something stops the movement, a swell of cottony fabric
.

The shadows spin in front of her, waving like mirages on a desert highway, then, slowly, slowly, they begin to take shape
.

There are three people around her, men
.

Julian. She sees him, sees those beloved blue eyes staring down at her. She reaches out for him, meaning to touch his face in the gentlest caress, but her control is shot, and she slaps him hard across the cheek. She means to laugh at the surprise on his face, but instead she bursts into tears. More water, sliding down her cheeks now, tasting salty, like the black sea that held her captive, and she is afraid. She can’t stop crying
.

She tries to talk. It hurts, burns. Still, she pushes a sound up her cracked, broken throat, and when the word comes out, mangled and unfamiliar, she weeps even harder. “Ju … li … an.”

“I’m here, baby,” he says in the voice she remembers so well, the voice that seems connected to the tender cords in her heart.

“Kayla, baby, are you there? Squeeze my hand.”

She opens her eyes again, blinking slowly
.

It seemed to take her hours to focus, but when she did, she saw him standing beside her, staring down at her, and she felt a rush of joy. “You came … back.”

Another man leaned toward her. On the front of his white coat, it read
Dr. Liam Campbell
. “Hi, Mike.”

She frowned and tried to turn her head to look for Mike. It tired her and she gave up. She tried to remember how she got here, but there was nothing. She remembered every moment of her life up to when she said good-bye to Julian. After that, there was a complete and utter blankness. It terrified her. “I … don’t … where …”

“You’re in the hospital,” someone says.

“Juliana,” she croaked. “Where’s my baby?”

“Baby?” Julian turned to the other man. “What the hell is going on?”

Something was wrong. She’d been hurt, she realized suddenly. Hurt. And they wouldn’t answer her question about Juliana. Oh, God …

The other man touched her face, and there was a gentleness in him that calmed her. She blinked up at his watery, out-of-focus face. He blotted her tears with a tissue. “Don’t cry, Mike. Your daughter is fine. She’s okay.”

She trusted him.
Juliana’s okay
. “Who …”

“Don’t rush it, sweetheart. Take it slowly.”

“Who … are you?” she asked at last.

Before he answered, she lost interest. Her head felt so heavy, so … broken. All that mattered was that her baby was okay.

She closed her eyes and sank back into the cool, blue water, back to the place where it was calm and warm and she was unafraid.

“Retrograde amnesia.”

Liam and Julian were seated in front of Stephen Penn’s massive oak desk. Stephen looked worn and tired.

Liam leaned forward, rested his arms on his thighs. “In posttraumatic—”

“Goddamn it, wait a sec.” Julian shot to his feet. He prowled the small office like a caged lion, repeatedly running his hand through his hair. “I haven’t had twenty years of college and I don’t know what you two are talking about. What in the hell is retrograde amnesia?”

Stephen removed the small, circular spectacles from his face, carefully setting them down on the cluttered surface of the desk. He didn’t look at Liam as he spoke. “At the moment of serious trauma, the brain stops accumulating memories. That’s why a victim of serious brain injury rarely remembers the actual incident itself. More often than not, the last clear memory is one that happened days or weeks … or even years before. These are often powerful, significant memories—weddings, births, that sort of thing. It appears that Mikaela’s mind is … trapped, if you will, some years ago. She seems to believe that Jacey is still a baby.” He paused. “Clearly she doesn’t remember her life with Liam at all.”

“How long do you think the amnesia will last?” Liam asked, even though he knew the answer.

“There is no way of knowing,” Stephen said slowly. “Although chances are that she
will
remember. Long-term retrograde amnesia is rare.” His voice softened. “But it does happen.”

“How can we help her?” Liam asked quietly.

“Right now she’s afraid and confused. We want to tread very, very carefully. The mind is a fragile thing, much more delicate than the brain. We don’t want to overwhelm her with frightening information.” At last he looked at Liam. “I think it’s best if we let it come back naturally.”

Liam sighed tiredly. “You’re saying that the kids and I should stay away.”

“I’m sorry, Liam. I can only imagine how hard this is for you. But I think she needs some time to let her mind heal. Can you imagine realizing that you’d lost fifteen years of your life?”

“Yes,” Liam said, “I can imagine it.” He leaned forward and hung his head, staring down at the Oriental carpet so long, the colors smeared into one big bruise.

What in God’s name was he going to tell his children?

Julian went to a pay phone and called Val. “She woke up today,” he said when Val answered.

“No shit. How is she?”

“She’s got amnesia. She doesn’t remember anything of the last fifteen years. She thinks we’re still married.”

“Are you saying—”

“She’s still in love with me, Val. With none of the bad memories of our breakup.”

Val made a low, whistling sound. “Jesus Christ, what did you do—script this? It’s a goddamn fairy tale and you’re the prince. The press’ll
love
this.”

Julian sagged against the wall. “You don’t get it. How am I going to tell her that I never came back for her. Val? Val?”

His answer was a dial tone.

With a curse, Julian hung up the phone. For the first time since he’d gotten here, he was afraid.

She was alive. That was the miracle Liam needed to focus on. Over the past weeks, he had asked God to heal her, to help her open her eyes. All the while, he’d prepared himself for the physical impairments that could come with an extended coma. Paralysis, brain damage, even death—these he’d readied himself to handle. He’d never asked God to return her memories.

Now, as he drove home, he reminded himself that retrograde amnesia was a common short-term side effect of severe brain injury.

Short term
. Those words were the ledge he tried to hold on to, but they kept crumbling beneath the weight of his fear.

What if she never remembered him or the kids?

He concentrated on breathing; it didn’t seem like much, but if he didn’t think about it, he stumbled into a place where panic was inches from his face, where he had to draw in great, sucking breaths just to survive.

Who are you?

Would he ever forget those words? Forget the pain that knifed through him in that single, horrifying moment when she’d said Julian’s name … and then asked Liam who he was.

He knew that her condition was purely medical in nature, a lapse in the function of her traumatized brain. But he was a man as well as a doctor, and the man in him felt like any man would feel. As if in twelve years of life together, of moments big and small, of a love that was enacted in errands and dinners and bedtime conversations, Liam had left no mark on her at all.

As if his love were like the waves that shifted and shaped, but never really changed the shore.

He was being foolish. She loved her children with every strand of her soul, and she had forgotten them, too—

No, that wasn’t right. She’d only forgotten Bret; Liam’s son. She remembered Jacey. And Julian.

He couldn’t shake a terrible, rising panic that in the end, his love would count for nothing. And what would he tell his children? They’d been through so much pain already, so much fear. Poor Bret had courageously visited her day after day, singing her favorite songs to her, waiting for a smile. It would crush him to discover that his mom didn’t remember him. One blank look and Bret would crumble.

Jacey would try to handle this like an adult, but inside, where it mattered, she would break like a little girl. She would understand that everything she and
Mike had shared was gone. Every talk, every memory that entwined their lives would be Jacey’s alone now.

Liam couldn’t even think about his own fear right now; it was too overwhelming. “Please, God,” he whispered, “we can’t take this, too. It’s too much …”

The windshield wipers thumped in front of him, punctuating the silence in the car. A light snow began to fall, patterning the glass, piling up on the edges of the wiper’s sweep.

He flipped on the radio. “Memories” by Barbra Streisand blared from the speakers.

He snapped it off. Christ, what was next—“As Time Goes By”?

The snow was coming faster now. He didn’t see his own driveway until he was practically on top of it.

He put the car in four-wheel drive and lowered his speed, maneuvering carefully over the bumpy gravel road and into his own garage.

At the mudroom door, he paused, taking a moment to collect himself, then he pushed into the house. “Hello,” he called out. “I’m home.”

He heard the scurrying sound of slippered feet on the hardwood floor. Rosa appeared, wearing one of Mike’s old saddle club aprons over a black house-dress.
“Buenos noches,”
she said, wiping a hand across her brow, leaving a snowy trail of flour across her skin. “I am making the … biscuits for dinner. You would like a cup of coffee,
sí
? Or a glass of wine?”

“Where are the kids?”

“Jacey will be home any
momento
. Bret is upstairs in the shower. Would you like—”

“Mike woke up today.”

She gasped. Her hand flew to her mouth. “
Dios mio
, it is a miracle. How is she?”

Liam didn’t know how to take all the information of this day and mold it into an ordinary sentence. In the end he simply said it: “She didn’t recognize me, Rosa.” He could hear the terrible ache at the edge of his voice; it didn’t sound like him at all. “Julian … she recognized Julian.”

Rosa’s hand fell slowly, slowly to her side, where her fingers curled into a tight fist. “What does this mean?”

“I could give you a bunch of technical explanations, but the bottom line is that her memory has failed. She seems to think she’s twenty-four and still married to Julian. She thinks Jacey is still a baby.”

Rosa was staring at him with a familiar look; it was the look of a patient who’d just received devastating news. She desperately wanted him to grant her hope. “This will get better, though.
¿Sí?
”

“We
hope
it’s temporary.” He put the tiniest emphasis on the word
hope
. “Usually people get their memories back.”

“So she does not remember you or the children or all the years she’s been away from him.”

Each word was a brick, and when they piled one on top of the other, he broke. It was as simple as that, as anticlimactic. He’d been afraid of this moment for weeks—this time when his heart and his mind said
simply
no more—
and yet now that it was here, it was nothing. No screaming agony, no crying jag that couldn’t be stopped. Just a narcotic weariness, an emptiness that ate through his bones. “No.”

Rosa closed her eyes and let her head drop forward. It was almost as if she were praying. “This pain for you … I can barely imagine it.”

His throat felt tight. “Yes.”

Finally she looked up, and her brown eyes—so like Mike’s—were glazed with tears. “What will you tell the children?”

There it was. Liam sighed. “I can hardly think of it, Rosa.”

“
Sí
. They have been praying for this for so long. It will break their hearts to learn that she does not remember them.”

“I know. But it’s a small town. Not a place where secrets keep.”

Secrets
. Like a famous father a girl knew nothing about.