Love Gone (7 page)

She sat there with him for what felt
like an hour. Around the two of them the doctors bustled and
prodded and Mac woke up and fell asleep over and over. Through it
all she sat still and carefully. Not daring to move.

“Can my son come in?” She asked first
one doctor and then another. They all shook their heads no. It was
too soon.

At last she and Mac were alone. Only
for a few minutes, Mrs. Byrne, the nurse had said when she’d
left.

“Mac, I’m so sorry.” Faith said at
once. She knew he wouldn’t want her to feel guilty or responsible,
but she needed him to know that she felt those things
anyway.

She could feel him squeeze her hand,
almost imperceptibly.

“Liam is here with me. He’s okay,
honey. He got help for us.”

Again, her hand twitched with his
barely noticeable squeeze. He knew. He could understand her and he
was grateful.

“Faith,” she heard his voice creak
like it was coming from his own grave.

She looked into his eyes. Her face was
only inches away from him.

“Be happy.”

She looked at him,
confused.

“I can’t be happy without you
Mac.”

He just looked at her and she could
see something in his eyes getting dimmer. A spark that she hadn’t
even known still burned was flickering.

“Live.”

It was the last word he said to her
before the spark in his eyes went out and the machines sent up a
warning alarm to alert the medical staff that the unthinkable had
happened, her world – her reason for living – had just
ended.

CHAPTER 9

She kept breathing. When she thought
about the moment later, all she could remember with clarity was
that when her world died in front of her, her heart hadn’t stopped
beating. She hadn’t died along with him. She had simply sat there
and watched life spin around her without comprehension of what
simple words meant or what had happened.

She remembered the nurse shaking her
and slapping her face to try and bring her back into the present.
She hadn’t been able to move, hadn’t even known what the word meant
or who they meant when the doctors and nurses had screamed her name
into her face. They had hauled her up and out the door so she could
stand at the big glass window and watch as they ripped open Mac’s
hospital gown and tried to jolt him back to life. She watched
without hope because she knew he was gone. Knew it as soon as she’d
seen the light leave his eyes. He had died wanting her to live. She
didn’t even know what that word meant anymore.

“I’m so sorry Mrs. Byrne,” the doctor
said, standing in front of her, his brow glistening with sweat from
the efforts he and his team had made to save her husband’s
life.

“His injuries were too massive. The
hemorrhaging in his brain was too far gone for him to survive. I’m
so so sorry.”

She just stood there. She didn’t cry
or scream. Couldn’t even speak. What language was this man
speaking? She didn’t understand the words he was saying.

“Mrs. Byrne? Do you understand what
I’m telling you?” He asked, concerned.

When she didn’t move or answer, he
turned toward the nurse’s station, but a cry from one of the
nurses’s on duty jerked his attention back toward Faith.

“She’s bleeding!” The nurse said
urgently and pointed at the floor where Faith stood.

Blood flowed down her legs and pooled
viscously on the floor around her feet. She swayed where she stood
in front of him, and he reached out to grasp her
shoulders.

“I need a gurney here,” he shouted to
his staff.

It was too late, Faith sagged in his
arms without a sound.

Hustling behind him, two strapping
male nurses ran up with a metal gurney and stooped to help him
hoist Faith on the rolling bed.

“Oh my god, what’s wrong with
her?”

Behind the doctor, Lisa stood with a
gray-faced Liam watching the latest nightmare unfold.

“Does she know about Mac? Is this
about Mac?”

Her words made no sense and no one
bothered to pay attention as they rushed Lisa down the
hall.

“She’s pregnant,” Lisa shouted after
them, running behind the team down the hall, Liam forgotten and
alone behind her.

“She’s four months
pregnant!”

At that statement, one of the nurses
ran back to Lisa and started asking her questions in quick
succession.

This was his fault too, Liam knew. His
father’s murder. His mom’s baby trauma. All of it was his fault. He
shouldn’t have been driving earlier. It was him who had gotten
confused and ran into that psycho Emily. The accident that started
his whole chain of tragedy in motion was caused by him.

He knew what his mother would say. She
would tell him not to be silly, that it wasn’t his fault. And his
father might say that too, but his eyes would tell him the truth.
It was his fault. His son was a failure and nothing like Big Mac.
His son couldn’t even tell the difference between the brake pedal
and the gas pedal. It was his fault. Somewhere, wherever ghosts
lived, probably Heaven because his dad had been so well liked and
just an all around stand up guy, but where ever he was one thing
was certain – he was blaming him. Well this time Liam didn’t
disagree with his dad, Liam was blaming himself too.

CHAPTER 10

Faith laid in the hospital bed and
tried to think of something positive. That’s what Mac would have
wanted and she knew it would be the best thing for her to do. Liam.
Her son was safe and healthy and sitting here with her. That was
the most positive and the probably the only positive thing in her
life right now.

She kept her eyes closed and laid
still, on her back. She didn’t want to give him any reason to start
apologizing to her again. It seemed that he hadn’t stopped
apologizing since she’d woken up from the anesthesia they’d given
her while they’d operated in an attempt to save the baby and stop
the bleeding. It hadn’t worked. They’d told her that when she’d
opened her eyes. Her and Mac’s other child was gone.

She thought of her small, unborn baby
and wondered if it was with Mac in Heaven now. Before this had
happened she wasn’t entirely sure if she really believed in Heaven
and Hell, and Purgatory and all those other Biblical places and
characters, but now that she had lost almost everyone she loved in
one night, she found herself wanting to believe that it hadn’t all
been for nothing. If Mac had just died and his beautiful spirit had
just been gone or soon to be in a deep, dark hole in the ground for
all eternity and that was just it. Well, that wasn’t a world she
wanted to be a part of.

The only way she could keep drawing
breath was if Mac’s spirit was somewhere watching over her and
Liam. If she could keep talking to him every day like she always
had, she might just be able to get out of bed in the morning. Even
though he wouldn’t be talking back, she wanted to be able to at
least pretend that he was listening.

And she wanted to pretend that he was
holding their baby. The only reason she wasn’t curled into a little
ball at the thought of losing her child and her husband in one
night, was the thought of Mac holding him. It was a him, she’d
learned. Another boy. Mac would be happy about that. He always
secretly wanted another son, she knew. Not because Liam had
disappointed him!

Although that was the first thought
her sensitive son had had, she knew, but because he fancied himself
the biggest kid of all in a brood of boys with her as a sort of
Wendy Darling figure to their Peter Pan Lost Boys. Mac had always
been an overgrown kid with a big imagination, just like his
favorite, Peter Pan.

“Mom?” She heard Liam say
worriedly.

“I’m okay, honey.” She had to reassure
him every so often. He had lost his father and his baby brother—and
his innocence—in one night, she reminded herself. A little paranoia
is going to come with the territory.

It didn’t matter that she was bone
achingly tired and all she wanted to do was lie in this hospital
bed for the rest of her life. She still had a son to take care of,
and she had to be strong for his sake.

To reassure him still more, she opened
her eyes and turned her head to look at him. He was perched on the
edge of his seat and staring at her worried.

She held out her hand to
him.

“Baby, I’m okay. I promise, I’m not
leaving. I’m just tired.”

He tried to hide it, but she could see
that her words were a relief.

“I know mom, I just wanted to make
sure you’re not in pain or anything? I can get a nurse for
you?”

“Everything’s fine. I just need some
rest. Are Lisa or Bill here?”

It would be helpful if he would just
go back to the neighbor’s house to rest. She knew he wouldn’t go
home. And she didn’t want him to be there either, definitely not
alone, and definitely not while those two murderers were still on
the loose.

Just the thought of what happened made
her stomach ache with pain and her eyes swell with tears she
couldn’t afford to shed in front of her fragile son.

“Yeah they’re here mom. They’re in the
cafeteria. Mom? Mom, I’m so sorry.”

“Liam, honey, please don’t apologize
to me. This isn’t your fault. None of this is your
fault.”

She glanced at him again to see if her
words had finally sunk in this time. With one quick look at his
face and slumped posture, she could see that they hadn’t. She
couldn’t deal with his guilt right now.

“Honey, why don’t you go down to the
cafeteria and let Lisa and Bill know that you need to go home with
them now.”

He shook his head wildly, “No way mom,
I’m not leaving you!”

“Thanks baby, I know you’re just
trying to help, but I have to get some sleep.”

“Mom, please…” He looked at her, his
eyes brimming with unshed tears. She wondered if he even knew they
were lurking there, ready to fall like a waterfall at the slightest
provocation.

“Please Liam. Please let me rest
now.”

Without a word he got up and left,
shutting the door quietly behind him the way he never did at home.
Home. What was she going to do about their home?

Faith had never had a very close
relationship with her parents. Her dad wasn’t even in the picture.
He had abandoned her mom and her when Faith was just a little
girl.

She didn’t even remember him very
well. Her only recollection of the man was of a skinny, tall man
with a long ponytail holding a guitar and getting into a pick-up
truck. In her mind’s eye he looked at her, where she stood with her
mom on the front porch of their claptrap house in East Nashville,
and he said, “I’m coming back for you baby when I make it big.” And
with that he threw his guitar into the back and climbed into his
truck and drove off. She had no memory of ever seeing him
again.

Her mom, Myra, had burned all the
pictures of him in a rage and the only thing she would ever say
about her dad was that he was a dreamer, a drunk, and a no talent
excuse for a husband and father. It wasn’t hard for Faith to see
that there was no love lost between Myra and her runaway husband,
Frank.

Even though she’d never abandoned her,
Myra wasn’t all that much better than Frank in Faith’s opinion.
Distant and cold, Myra had looked on her pretty little daughter as
a burden to be born and not a delight or a help. She had never
abused her, mentally or physically, but children can sense it when
they’re loved and no one would ever accuse Myra of being overly
loving, caring, or motherly.

Myra. The truth was that Faith hadn’t
thought deeply about her in years. She sent her the obligatory
Christmas cards and the wedding and baby announcements when she and
Mac had married and when Liam had been born, but nothing deeper
than that. She’d received only the most perfunctory cards from her
mother in return and never had a phone call in all the years she’d
been gone from Nashville. She wasn’t even sure her mother had her
phone number, if she really thought about it.

But now Myra might be her and Liam’s
only option. Mac had been the breadwinner. The one who paid the
bills. Faith’s job at the Tourist Bureau was more of a part time
thing to keep them in little luxuries like movies and new shoes.
Mac’s job with the canneries on the boats was what paid the
mortgage, the car payments, and contributed to the savings and
retirement plans they tried to maintain.

She tried to think clearly. The
painkillers they’d given her were making her thoughts foggy and
rambling. What was their situation? Would she have to bite the
bullet and call her mother?

The truth was that the thought of
staying in Alaska now that Mac was gone was almost terrifying to
her. She couldn’t return to their home, the scene of that
horrifying crime, and ever feel comfortable and safe again like she
had before. It was impossible. No one could expect it of her, could
they?

What if they just left? Sell the
house, pay the bills off with what remained of Mac’s life insurance
after the funeral, and just leave. She could go home
again.