Until the End of Time (33 page)

“I’m fine.”

“Are you tired?”

“No, I’m fine,” he insisted, and drove on, as Lilli stared out the
window, and thought about the scene at the house when her father had literally flung her out the door and she had landed on her knees. She had flown through the air like a rag doll with his full force. He meant what he had said.

They had been on the road for two hours, and she was still gazing numbly out the window when they swerved again. She turned sharply to look at the driver. He had dozed off, then jerked awake, and at the same moment she realized it, she saw bright lights coming toward them at full speed. He had gone over the divider, and a truck was coming toward them. Lilli saw it and screamed, and the driver noticed too late and turned sharply as the car flipped and rolled, and the truck hit them with its full force. There was the sound of grinding metal as the town car literally flew through the air, and the truck crushed it, and a horn was shrieking in her ear as Lilli passed out, and she smiled as she went to sleep.

It took the highway patrol three hours to pull the tangled mass apart. They closed the highway, and traffic came to a dead stop, but it was after midnight, so there were few cars. There were fire trucks and several ambulances, and they used the jaws of life and a crane to lift the truck and pry the car from under it. The driver of the town car was dead and so was the truck driver and a man in the cab with him. There was one sole survivor, a young woman who had been in the car. She carried no identification, and she was rushed to the hospital in New Brunswick in critical condition. She was listed as a Jane Doe, and no one expected her to live. She had severe head injuries,
and her arms were broken. The nurses made note, when they cut her clothes off, that she was Amish, judging from what she wore.

The police called Jack Williams, the owner of the limo company, the next morning and told him that the car had been totaled and the driver was dead. An autopsy was being performed to check for drugs and alcohol. They mentioned a passenger, but the owner said he had had none, so maybe he had picked up a hitchhiker on the way.

“Great,” Jack Williams said unhappily to his secretary when he hung up, “Grayson died, and they’re checking him for alcohol. Thank God he didn’t have a passenger of ours with him. He picked someone up, I guess, but we didn’t dispatch it.”

“Poor guy,” she said. He had no wife or family, or children that they knew of, and they had no idea who to notify. And the next day, they were told he’d been drunk. There had been 0.10 alcohol in his blood.

The highway patrol called the local police to visit several Amish communities within a radius of a hundred miles to inquire about a missing girl. But no one reported a missing person. She was a mystery, as she lay in a coma. And six days later, the limo company received the contents of the totaled car, what was left. There were tools, a blanket, some paperwork, and a small suitcase, which the police had examined for ID, and there was none. They had nothing to go on. Jack Williams opened the suitcase himself, to go through it. It was filled with women’s clothes in a very small size, and no ID. But as Jack dug through the valise, he found a small envelope with Lilli’s name on it that had escaped the highway patrol’s notice. It had a note from Bob Bellagio in it, and the envelope showed the
address of the dairy. Jack recognized the dairy as the place where they’d picked up the girl for Bob Bellagio, and driven her to New York and then back to Lancaster a week later.

“That’s the girl we were driving for Bob Bellagio last week,” Jack said to his secretary with a troubled expression. “Grayson took her back to Lancaster on Friday.” He looked puzzled. “Maybe she forgot her suitcase in the car.” The police had told him that their driver had a passenger, but their dispatcher had confirmed that he had dropped the girl off at her home. So why did he still have her suitcase in the car? It made no sense, unless she forgot it. Or had the driver picked her up again and not reported it to dispatch? Was she the passenger in the front seat? Maybe she was it. Jack knew their driver had been on his way back to New York when he died, and he had called the dispatcher after he dropped Lilli off and headed back. But Jack had a strange feeling now, and he called the highway patrol to report the suitcase he’d found and the letter, and to inquire about the passenger they had mentioned earlier.

“She’s still alive, in a coma,” the highway patrol reported. “She’s still a Jane Doe, we have no ID on her. The hospital thinks she’s Amish, but none of the communities we were able to reach are missing anybody. We have no clues so far. All we know is that she’s between twenty and twenty-five, five foot one, and weighs roughly ninety pounds, blond, green eyes.” Jack Williams didn’t know what Lilli looked like. He’d never seen her. Only their driver had. But with a strange queasy feeling, he called Bob Bellagio a few minutes later.

“We’ve had kind of an incident,” Jack Williams began cautiously. “The driver who took Miss Petersen back to Lancaster last Friday had an accident on the way back. Head-on collision with an eighteen-wheeler
on the New Jersey Turnpike. Drunk driving, I regret to say. He died in the accident. He had called us after he dropped her off, so he had no passenger that we know of, but the highway patrol reported a passenger in the front seat. We assumed he’d picked up a hitchhiker on the way back. They’re not supposed to, but they do sometimes. The passenger is still unidentified. I just got the contents of the car back, and there’s a suitcase here. I found an envelope with Miss Petersen’s name on it, with a letter from you in it. Either she forgot her suitcase, or he picked her up again and didn’t tell us and was bringing her back to New York.” Jack Williams sounded puzzled.

Bob had been sitting at his desk thinking about her, as he had for the past week, assuming she was back at home with her family. He hadn’t heard from her, and he hadn’t written to her since she left.

“Was she killed?” Bob sounded like he was in shock.

“No, she’s been in a coma since it happened, in critical condition. The hospital says she’s an Amish girl. Blond, green eyes, twenty to twenty-five, five foot one, ninety pounds. Is that her?”

“Oh my God … oh my God …,” Bob said, instantly frantic. His heart was pounding so hard, he could hear it. “Where is she?” Williams told him the name of the hospital in New Brunswick, and Bob hung up and called them immediately, after thanking Jack Williams for the information. The hospital confirmed that she was still in a coma in critical condition, and the description matched. He told them he’d get there as soon as he could to see if it was Lilli. He didn’t want to contact her family until he was sure. He assumed they would be frantic, wondering where she was, but no one had called him.

It was the worst two hours of Bob Bellagio’s life. He drove at full speed and didn’t care if he got picked up by the police, but miraculously he didn’t. He parked outside the hospital and rushed into the emergency room, where they sent him upstairs to Intensive Care. It was a highly efficient state-of-the-art-hospital with an elaborate ICU and trauma unit, and they led him into the cubicle where the young woman was lying, with tubes and monitors everywhere. A nurse was observing her closely, and a doctor was checking her when Bob walked in.

“How is she?” he asked in a choked voice. It was Lilli, almost unrecognizable, with a bruised face, black eyes, two broken arms, and a bandage on her head. But it was Lilli. He was sure. He bent closer and touched her face. She was far, far away. Her face looked peaceful, and they said she still had brain waves, and she had survived for six days, but she was still at risk. The swelling in her brain had come down without surgery, but there had been no sign of her regaining consciousness since she’d been admitted.

Bob walked out of the cubicle with tears running down his cheeks. He thought of going to tell her father, but he didn’t want to leave her. And for six days he had thought she was home, and she was here.

He called Joe Lattimer and told him what had happened, where Lilli was, and in what condition. “I don’t know what happened,” Bob said, sounding shaken, and feeling responsible somehow for what had occurred. The driver had been drunk. “The dispatcher says the driver dropped her off at home. But he must have picked her up again and didn’t tell them.”

“Her father shunned her,” Joe said quietly, stunned by what he’d
just heard from Bob. “He wouldn’t let her come home. He threw her out for going to New York. Her brothers told me a few days ago. They’re heartbroken over it. She must have called the driver back and left with him.” Bob and Joe were piecing it together, the story was heartbreaking, and Bob was irate that her father had shunned her and as a result this had happened. It had been her worst fear. And now his fear was he would lose her forever and never get a chance to tell her how much he loved her. She was within a hair of dying now.

“You need to go and tell her father,” Bob told Joe. “He should come to her here. He’ll never forgive himself if she dies.” Nor would he.

“Do you think she will die?” Joe sounded shocked.

“It’s not looking good,” Bob said honestly. “She’s been in a coma for six days, with a severe head injury. Shunned or not, she’s his child.” Bob gave him the details of the hospital and then thought of something. “Maybe you can drive him. It’s too far to come in a carriage—it’ll take him forever.”

“They move pretty fast,” Joe said. “I don’t know if he’ll ride in a car. I’ll ask him. It’s all I can do.”

“Thanks, Joe,” Bob said, and hung up and went back to see Lilli. She had been alone in the cubicle for a few minutes as he sat down next to her and took her hand in his and talked to her.

“Please, baby, please … come back … I love you so much … I should have told you in New York, but I didn’t want to scare you … please … it’ll be all right.… I love you, Lilli. I love you.” He kept repeating, “I love you!” He didn’t realize he had said it out loud, as a nurse walked by and looked startled, and he kept looking at Lilli.
“I waited my whole life to find you, and you can’t leave me now … I love you until the end of time,” he said clearly, and then realized he had never said that to anyone before. He had no idea where it had come from, or why he had said it, but as he thought about it, he knew it was true.

Chapter 22

Lilli had been wandering in a beautiful garden for many days. It was a peaceful place … she saw people in it once in a while, but she slept most of the time, under a green leafy tree. She was very tired, and she slept for a long time. And when she woke up, her mother was sitting with her, and she said she was happy about the book, and very proud of her.

“I knew you would be, Mama,” Lilli said, feeling lighter than she ever had, and happy that her mother was pleased. And then she slept again, and something woke her up. All she wanted was to sleep.

Someone was calling her, and she wanted to stay in the garden and see her mother again. She had missed her so much. But when she woke up this time, there were two people with her, a man and a woman. The woman was very beautiful and had dark hair. Lilli thought it was her mother at first, but it wasn’t. She was laughing and walking beside a man on a horse, and they stopped to talk to Lilli. She told them she wanted to go with them and find her mother.

“You can’t,” the woman said kindly. “You have to go back.”

“I don’t want to,” Lilli said, feeling tired again. “It’s too far away.”

“You can’t come with us,” the woman said again. “You have to go back, Lilli,” she repeated, “… for us …” She looked straight at Lilli and had beautiful blue eyes.

“Will you come too?” Lilli asked her. The woman only smiled and shook her head.

“Go back, Lilli,” she said again, and Lilli could hear the voice in the distance, calling her, as she watched them go. The man on the horse pulled the woman up behind him. They were laughing, and he kissed her, and then they rode away. They rode into the light Lilli wanted to get to, to be with them, but she couldn’t see them anymore … all she heard was the echo of their words. “Go back, Lilli … go back …” and she heard her mother say it too, and then the voice changed and someone else was saying, “Come back … come back, Lilli,” and she didn’t want to. She was so tired, and it was so much harder walking away from the light than toward it. It was too far to walk. Much too far to walk, and she was so tired.

Bob was sitting next to her, holding her hand and talking to her, when she made a soft moaning sound and stirred. Bob called for the nurse immediately. It was midnight, and he had been there all day and night. Her father was in the room too, and Margarethe. Henryk looked stern but ravaged, and Margarethe was crying softly, as tears rolled down Bob’s cheeks, and he held Lilli’s hand in his own.

“Come back, Lilli,” he said softly again, and she opened her eyes and saw them, and then closed her eyes again, as Bob choked on a
sob of relief. She was waking up. She had come back, just as he had begged her to.

The doctor came in, and they checked her, and she opened her eyes again and looked straight at Bob, with a puzzled expression. She didn’t understand why he was there, and her father. She had just seen her mother, and the couple on horseback. It was all so confusing.

“I have to go to the hospital,” she said in a soft voice. “… Lucy is having a baby.…” She looked at Bob, as he smiled at her and stroked her cheek.

“Who’s Lucy, sweetheart?”

“I don’t know.” A tear slid down her cheek, but she was so happy to see him.

“It’s okay, you’re okay. We’re all here. We’ve been waiting for you.”

“I know,” she said, feeling confused, and drifted off again. She wanted to tell him about her mother and the couple on horseback, but she was too tired. She dozed for a while then, and opened her eyes again and looked at her father. “I’m sorry, Papa,” she said.

He spoke to her in German and told her it was all right. His lip was trembling as he did, and Margarethe and Bob looked at each other, as tears rolled down their cheeks.

“We missed you,” Bob said after her father spoke to her. “Thank you for coming back.” She smiled again and squeezed his hand.