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.
Mikaela raced to the picture window that looked out on Brownlow Street. It was high noon in the first week of July, and the storefronts all wore the crackled, faded look of exhaustion. It was too hot for anyone to be outside.
The sound came closer, grew louder. Out in the deserted street, dust swirled up in a thick brown cloud that grabbed hold of black-tipped leaves and swept them into eddies in the air.
Three silver helicopters hurtled above the rooflines like bullets against the blue sky, then dropped out of sight behind Bennet’s Drug Store. An eerie silence fell, the windows stilled.
A limousine pushed through the dust storm like something out of a dream, sleek and black and impossibly shiny in this dirty heat. No car could get to Sunville that clean, not if it drove on the back roads from Yakima. The blackened windows captured the town’s tired reflection and threw it back.
Mikaela leaned forward, pressing closer to the glass. The orange polyester of her uniform stuck to her skin. Overhead, the wooden fan swirled slowly with a thwop-thwop-thwop that did little more than distribute the smell of burning bacon.
Three limousines pulled up in front of City Hall and parked. No one got out of the cars, and the engines kept running. Gray smoke seeped lazily from the tailpipes.
One by one, people came out of the stores and stood on the sidewalks, drawing together, speculating among themselves, pointing at the cars that in this town were as foreign and unexpected as spaceships.
Rosa and Mikaela crowded into the diner’s narrow doorway.
The click of a lock silenced the crowd, then the doors opened, all of them at once, like huge, enameled beetles unfurling their wings. Strangers in black suits and sunglasses emerged from the cars, one after another. And then he appeared.
A shiver of recognition moved through the crowd.
“Oh, my God, it’s Julian True,” someone whispered.
He stood with the casual, unaffected elegance of one who is used to the stares of strangers. Tall and lean, with long, sunstreaked hair that covered half his face, he looked like a rebellious angel cast down from the heavens. He wore a loose black pocket T-shirt and a pair of ragged Levi’s that were tattered and ripped out at the knees. Whatever blue dye had once been woven into the denim had long ago bleached to a foamy white.
The crowd surged toward him, crying out. One sound, one name rose from the confusion.
Julian True … It’s him … Julian True in Sunville.
Then came the requests: Here! Sign my shirt … my notebook … my napkin.
Rosa turned to whisper something to Mikaela, but the words caught in her throat. Her daughter looked … mesmerized. Mikaela stepped back into the diner and glanced around. Rosa knew that her daughter was noticing the cracked floor, the broken light fixtures, the ever-present film of grease that coated everything. She was seeing the diner through this stranger’s eyes, and she was ashamed.
Rosa moved away from the door and went back to work. Mikaela headed for the lunch counter and began refilling the sugar jars.
Suddenly the bell above the front door jingled, and he was standing there, in Joe’s Get-It-While-It’s-Hot diner, beneath the lazily whirring overhead fan.
Mikaela dropped the half-empty sugar jars on the table. Her cheeks turned bright pink.
He gave Mikaela a smile the likes of which Rosa had never seen. It was the old cliché, sun erupting through the clouds. Eyes the color of shaved turquoise looked at Mikaela as if she were the only woman in the world.
“C-Can I help you?”
His smile held the tattered edge of exhaustion. “Well, darlin’,” he said in that world-famous Texas drawl, as thick and sweet as corn syrup, “we’ve been travelin’ for hours over the shittiest patch of road I’ve seen since I left Lubbock, and any minute that doorway’s gonna fill up with every thirteen-year-old girl between here and Spokane. I was hopin’ a pretty little thing like you could round me up a beer and a sandwich and show me where I could eat it in peace.”
That had been the beginning.
Rosa opened her eyes. She could feel Liam behind her, hear his measured breathing, and she knew she’d been quiet too long.
“Hola, Mikita,” she said softly. “Mama estoy aqui.” She took a deep breath and began. “You remember the first day you met him, querida, your Julian True?”
Mikaela sucked in a sharp breath; her eyelids fluttered.
Rosa felt a rush of hope, as pure and clean and cold as springwater. “We were at the diner, both of us working the lunch shift. There was a noise, one like I had never heard before. Helicopters, in our little town. And then he appeared. Ah, the way he looked at you, as if you were the only woman in the world. Even I could feel the lure of him. He was like no one we had ever seen before … like no one we would ever see again.
“You thought I was too old to understand what you were thinking, my Mikaela, but I could see it in your eyes. You thought you were Cinderella, all covered with soot and dirt, and here … here was a prince.
“He called you a pretty little thing, remember? Dios, I have never seen you smile so brightly. He started calling you Kayla almost from the start. Kayla of the midnight hair, that was his nickname for you, recuerdes? I hated that he would give you a gringa name and that you would take it … but it did not matter what I thought, not once you had met him.
“When he first kissed you, you told me it felt like you’d jumped off a skyscraper. I said that such a fall could kill a girl. Remember your answer? You said, ‘Ah, Mama, but sometimes it is worth it to fly.’”
Rosa leaned down and touched Mikaela’s still, white face. “I watched you fall in love with him, this man with the face of an angel. I knew there would be fireworks at the start of it—how could it be otherwise? I knew, too, that there would be pain at the end of it. Enough to last a lifetime.
“I told you that he was no good for you, but you laughed and told me not to worry. As if a mama could stop worrying so easily.”
She let her fingertips linger on her daughter’s cool, sunken cheek. “You thought I did not understand, but I was the only one who could.”
Rosa gave her daughter a small, sad smile. “You promised that you would not make my mistake. But I knew, querida, I saw it in your eyes. You already had.”
Chapter Ten
The pain of each new sentence was sharp and sudden, a rock thrown through a high glass window. Liam sat very still in his chair, trying to draw meaning out of every pause, trying to hear the story that wasn’t being told as well.
It was no ordinary love that Mikaela had felt for Julian True. That came as no surprise. How could anything about that man be ordinary?
Diamonds and agates, once again.
He wondered why he had let Mikaela hold such secrets. It wasn’t only Julian’s identity; it was a hundred smaller things. The prom she hadn’t gone to, the memories she hadn’t shared. It was her. He’d been content with so damned little. He’d thought what mattered was that he loved her, that he made her smile and laugh again. Why had he never asked himself what fueled her dreams?
Probably, deep down, he’d been afraid of her answer. And so, afraid of the truth, he’d powered along in silence, comforted by the dull softness of words unspoken, questions unasked.
But what about now that he knew? He didn’t know if he could believe in her love. Not now that he’d seen what she was hiding. He didn’t know if the feel of her body next to his would generate any heat.
Rosa turned around suddenly, and Liam realized that she had stopped talking. The room was deathly quiet now; the only noise was the steady drone of the monitors. “She has not blinked again, Dr. Liam.”
He stood and crossed the short distance to the bed. This time, when he looked down at his wife, he saw a stranger. Kayla. He picked up her hand, held it gently. “She never told me any of this, Rosa. Why did I let her keep such secrets?”
Rosa stood beside him, the snow-white cap of her head angled close to his shoulder. “You come from money,” she said simply. “You are a doctor—from Harvard. You cannot understand what life is like for people like us. Mikaela had such big dreams, but no way to make them come true. Even her own papa, he did not show her any love at all.” She turned to him. “I first came to Sunville to pick apples when I was a little girl. Mi padre, he died when I was eleven. Of a cold sore. There was no money to buy medicines, and no doctor to help him. I can still remember the pickers’ camps—especially when the air smells of ripe fruit. I can smell the tin-roofed shack with no indoor plumbing, where we lived, ten people in a room this size. I remember the feel of old mattresses, and the heat. This I remember most of all, the heat.
“I found my way out with a man. He wasn’t my man—that was my great sin—but I didn’t care. I loved him. Madre de Dios, I loved him in the desperate way that women like me always love another woman’s husband.” She leaned over the bed rail and gazed down at Mikaela. “I am afraid I taught my daughter that a woman will wait forever for the man she loves.”
Liam could tell by the sad end note of Rosa’s sentence that she was finished. She turned slightly and looked up at him again.
“Lo siento,” she said awkwardly, smoothing the hair away from her face. “I am sure this is more than you wish to know. Perhaps now you will think badly of me—”
“Ah, Rosa, don’t you think I know how it feels to love someone who belongs to another?”
“She married you.”
“Yes, and she stayed with me, and we built something. Over time I forgot … things that I should have remembered. But I always knew, deep down, I knew. There was a part of Mike’s heart that was off-limits to me. But I loved her so damned much, and Jacey, and then Bret. And she seemed happy. Maybe she even was, in a I-lost-it-all-and-this-is-what-I-have-left sort of way.”
“There was more to her happiness than that. This I know.”
Liam gazed down at his beautiful wife. “I didn’t even know her.”
Rosa didn’t say anything.
“Mike?” He said her name without the usual tenderness. This time he spoke to her as if she were a stranger. “Enough of this. Come back to us. You and I have a lot to talk about.”
“Nada,” Rosa said, wringing her hands together. “Maybe we were wrong about the blinking. Maybe it was wishful thinking.”