Love Gone (6 page)

“Where’s Mac?” he shouted, and started
to pull her towards the house. She wasn’t sure if she was holding
on to his hand or if it was the opposite. She couldn’t let
go.

Stunned she shook her head and started
to run. Now it was she who was pulling him along. He raced to keep
up with her.

Reaching the wide open back door she
stumbled into the hall, Bill close on her heels. Still clinging
tightly to his hand. Scared of what might happen if she dropped it.
At this point it felt like a lifeline. She didn’t know what she’d
find in her once welcoming hallway, but the thread of fear that had
started earlier this evening with a long hard look into Emily’s
face had grown into a full blown blanket of terror. She knew her
life was about to change with what waited for her there.

At first nothing she didn’t see
anything. The hall stretched out, empty before her, the only sign
that something had gone terribly wrong there was Liam’s battered
bedroom door on the right. Across the hall, her and Liam’s bedroom
door was closed, completely unharmed. Farther down the hall, just
before the living room and kitchen, was the basement door. It was
open and ominous. She crept toward it.

“Mac?” She called softly at first and
then louder, “Mac??”

Only silence and the faint crackle of
the fire Liam had lit in the living room answered her. It felt like
a lifetime ago that she had asked him to light a fire. A lifetime
ago that she had been standing, happy, with her husband and son in
the kitchen, making dinner and sipping wine. How had everything
changed in a split second?

Reaching the basement door now she
looked down. The lights were off in the stairway leading down to
the rec room, but she didn’t need the overhead light to show her
Mac’s hand where it lay unmoving on the stair just below the edge
of the hallway where she stood.

With a cry she dropped to her hands
and knees, screaming for Bill to call an ambulance. She saw the
light come on in the stairway, Bill must have hit the switch, and
suddenly her husband’s inert form was bathed with yellow
light.

He lay crumbled on the stairs like a
fallen giant. His head lay on his outstretched arm as if he had
been crawling back up the stairs, trying to reach her and Liam,
when he’d passed out. She reached toward him and grasped his arms
and shoulders to pull him toward her. Bill put a hand on her
shoulder.

“Stop it Faith, don’t move him. The
paramedics are on their way.” He told her roughly, ripping her
hands away from his wrist.

“God dammit Bill, help me!” she
screamed vainly, but he was right. He shouldn’t be moved, she might
hurt him worse.

Instead of bringing his broken body to
her, she went to him. Crawling carefully around him she laid her
hands and head on his back and shoulders and whispered to
him.

“Don’t leave me baby, don’t leave me,
don’t leave me…” she repeated it over and over again like a
mantra.

If she stopped saying it he would slip
away. She knew it was illogical, but it felt that way. She didn’t
know the extent of his injuries, but she was certain that Mac would
only stop protecting her if he was completely gone. Only death
would be able to stop him. Now it was up to her to stop death. If
such a thing was possible.

CHAPTER 7

From the hall behind her she could
hear footsteps running; the sound of labored breathing, a shocked
in and out of breath that she recognized as her child’s. It was
Liam.

Before she could think to stop him he
was on her. Staring down at the sight of his father’s motionless
body and his mother draped across him, in a manner that said only
one thing: death.

Looking up at him she didn’t know if
she could care. She didn’t want her son to see Mac like this or her
so vulnerable. She knew it would hurt him. Scar him, but she
couldn’t leave Mac. Couldn’t bring herself to walk away from him
and protect her son. It seemed in this instant that if a choice had
to be made she was making it in favor of the love of her life and
she would deal with the consequences of that later. It was a choice
that would change her life. She knew it as she made it, but in the
way of desperate choices she didn’t care. Couldn’t make a different
one.

She locked eyes with Liam. In that
moment she saw in his eyes that he knew what choice she had made
and she saw it cut him, deep into his soul. Helplessly she called
for Bill to help once again. Needed him to take Liam away, too late
now, but still she couldn’t handle the accusing stare in her son’s
eyes as she leaned over her husband. She needed to be alone with
Mac right now.

Bill came at a run from his post
outside the open front door where he waited to flag down the
emergency crew when they arrived. He gently took Liam’s shoulders
and turned him away from the tableau. She could feel tears running
down her face. She didn’t even know when she’d started crying.
Slowly they fell onto Mac’s cheek and hair. Even when the
paramedics and police came rushing in in a huge confused crowd of
yelling orders and barking questions she couldn’t move.

“Ma’am, we can take it from here.
We’re here to help ma’am.” Nameless, faceless rescue workers lifted
her off of Mac and passed her from arm to arm to replace her at his
side with a stretcher and IV’s.

She watched helplessly from the edges
of the crowd, her body held tightly by some neighbor, she didn’t
even know who. She couldn’t turn her head to look for her son.
Couldn’t spare a thought to the fate of the child she carried
inside her. All her attention was focused on Mac and the medical
personnel buzzing around him.

A team of concerned looking young men
and women loaded Mac onto a stretcher and secured his head and body
onto the lift with thick, black bands. He looked so strange lying
there unmoving. She’d never seen Mac so still. He was always a blur
of energy. This stillness scared her more than anything.

“Is he okay?” she called, fighting her
way out of her friend’s tight embrace and rushing toward the door,
following them as they carried Mac to the waiting
ambulance.

“Is my husband going to be okay?” She
screamed. Why would no one look at her?

She tried to get into the ambulance
with him, but the attendant gently blocked her path.

“We need you to follow us to St.
John’s in your car ma’am. We’re doing everything we can, but we
need room to move around.”

Her neighbor Lisa, Bill’s wife
appeared at her side.

“C’mon Faith. Bill and I are driving
you and Liam. We’ll be right behind them the whole time. C’mon
honey.”

She let herself be pulled away from
the ambulance toward Lisa’s car. Inside she could see the medical
team hovering over the stretcher. Watched them attaching tubes and
IV’s and starting some kind of pumping action.

She wanted to be inside that car with
him. Mac would never have left her. Would never have let anyone
tell him he couldn’t be with her or Liam if they were in
trouble.

“I’m sorry Mac,” she whispered to the
departing ambulance. “I love you. Don’t leave me.”

CHAPTER 8

At the hospital she sat huddled with
Liam and a distraught Lisa and Bill on the hard, plastic chairs in
the ICU waiting room. It was a depressing place with sick colored
walls and flickering fluorescent lights casting a deathly pall over
everyone.

Why must hospital waiting rooms look
like the most depressing places on earth, Faith thought as she
stared numbly at the same dark, dirty crack in the tiled floor in
front of her. Of all the places where a cheery décor could actually
do some good, she couldn’t think of anyplace more deserving than
the waiting room. The worst thing about the waiting room was the
sheer literal truth of the name. Waiting. Room. All you could do
was wait. It was the most hopeless feeling in all the
world.

“Who were those people?” Bill wondered
out loud…not for the first time since they’d arrived.

The police had been there, asking the
same question, “why?”

In fact, they were probably still
there somewhere, waiting to see if Mac woke up from the coma. Just
waiting, like everyone else.

Faith merely shook her head. Liam
didn’t move a muscle beside her. She had already explained what she
knew when they’d arrived and found out that Mac was in a coma. He
was being tended to in an ICU unit. There was nothing she could do
for him but wait.

The police had questioned her and Liam
extensively about the attack. She told them about the accident. It
was all she knew. Their fender bender seemed like it had happened a
million years ago, but had actually just been hours earlier. She
told them about Emily and how the psycho had called himself “Mr.
Asher” when he’d been terrorizing her behind the closed door of
Liam’s bedroom. She didn’t have anything else to tell them.
Couldn’t believe it herself. Liam just shook his head speechlessly
when they’d turned to him for answers and clung to her hand like he
hadn’t since he’d been a little boy.

“We’ll find them ma’am,” the police
had told her, but the blank look in their eyes told her they
wouldn’t.

Alaska was a big, empty space. It was
a place that criminals and innocent people alike came to hide. It
was a state meant for escaping, and with no other clues to go on
the town’s small police force would never find the father and
daughter. Not a police force that was used to breaking up bar
fights and arresting drunken drivers. They didn’t have much call to
do anything more serious, there wasn’t a lot of serious crime in
Ketchikan. Until there was.

A sharp pain in her womb made her gasp
and clutch her hands to her stomach. Lisa, Bill’s wife, sat up
alert.

“Are you okay Faith? Is the baby
kicking?” She asked, concerned.

“I don’t know,” Faith told her, just
trying to breathe slowly in and out to dull the pain. “Maybe some
water would help?”

Lisa jumped up to go get some water,
while Faith sat still – one hand on her unborn baby and one hand on
her son sitting next to her like a statue.

“Sip this slowly,” Lisa held out the
water.

Faith did as instructed and sipped.
Each swallow had to fight past a lump in her throat. Here she was
sipping cool water while only yards away from them, Mac clung to
life. Yes, ‘clung’ to life. That’s what she’d overheard a nurse say
to her co-worker when she’d paced past earlier. No one wanted to
tell them the truth. Mac might not wake up. She wasn’t sure which
was worse. The fact that they all knew how dire the situation was
and wouldn’t tell her or the fact that she didn’t want to know;
wished she’d never heard the two women talking at all.

“Mrs. Byrne!” A nurse came into the
waiting room, a note of excitement in her voice. “He’s
awake!”

Faith let the cup of water spill out
of her hands onto the tile. She didn’t care and no one else even
blinked as the Styrofoam cup rolled noisily under the chairs and
puddle of water spread across the floor.

They had all leapt up by now and were
crowding around the nurse excitedly asking a million questions at
once.

She held up her hand for quiet. “He’s
awake, but barely. He’s opened his eyes. The doctor said to come
and get Mrs. Byrne. Mrs. Byrne only for now,” she said this last
with a quick pitying glance at Liam. “If he continues to improve
then he can have all the visitors he wants, but for now he needs
complete peace. It’s still a very touch and go time.”

Faith hugged Liam. “Be brave baby. I’m
going to let dad know you’re alright. He’ll want to make sure of
that before he lets himself get better,” she whispered to him in
his ear.

She was practically running ahead of
the nurse all the way down the long hall toward Mac’s
room.

He was awake. He was awake. He was
awake. Her footsteps kept time to the only mantra that would ever
matter as she rushed down the hall to her husband.

Bursting into the room she froze at
the sight of him. Her big, burly husband who resembled the
proverbial bear in a china shop looked small and dwarfed by the
tubes and machines that surrounded him. He had oxygen tubes running
up his nose and at least four tubes snaking from his arms and even
more running to extremities below the blankets that covered him.
His skin was pale and almost purple, but his legendary blue eyes
were open and looking toward her.

“Faith?” His voice was weak. She could
barely hear him above the doctors and nurses barking orders and the
machines whirring around him.

“Mac.” She couldn’t move. She was so
grateful to hear his voice again, to see his eyes open and his lips
moving was something she didn’t want to admit to herself, but she
never thought she’d see again.

He closed his eyes again. The strain
of opening them seemed to be too much for him.

Finally she moved to him. Sinking to
her knees at his bedside she bowed her head over his limp hand in
prayer and gratitude. She kissed the skin that wasn’t pierced by
one of the tubes and held it carefully. She didn’t want to endanger
him by doing what she really wanted to do – hugging him so fiercely
she might never let go.