Angel Falls Read Free

make himself make any sound at all.
    Finally Daddy ran into the barn.
    Bret popped to his feet and held his arms out, but Daddy ran right past him. Bret stumbled backward so fast, he hit the fence wall. He couldn’t breathe enough to cry. He just stood there, watching the red, red blood slither down his mommy’s face. Jacey came and stood beside him.
    Daddy knelt beside her, dropping his black medical bag into the dirt. “Hang on, Mikaela,” he whispered. Gently he removed her helmet—should Bret have done that?—then Daddy opened her mouth and poked his fingers between her teeth. She coughed and sputtered, and Bret saw blood gush across his daddy’s fingers.
    Daddy’s hands that were always so clean … now Mommy’s blood was everywhere, even on the sleeves of Daddy’s flannel pajamas.
    “Hang on, Mike,” his dad kept saying, over and over again, “hang on. We’re all here … stay with us….”
    Stay with us. That meant don’t die … which meant she
could
die.
    Dad looked up at Jacey. “Call nine-one-one
now
.”
    It felt like hours they all stood there, frozen and silent. Finally red lights cartwheeled through the dim barn, sirens screamed; an ambulance skidded through the loose gravel alongside the horse trailer.
    Blue-uniformed paramedics came running into the barn, dragging a bumping, clanking bed on wheels behind them. Bret’s heart started beating so loud he couldn’t hear.
    He tried to scream
Save her!
but when he opened his mouth, all that came out was a thick black cloud. He watched the smoke turn into a bunch of tiny spiders and float away.
    He clamped his mouth shut and backed away, hitting the fence so hard it knocked him dizzy. He covered his ears and shut his eyes and prayed as hard as he could.
    She is dying
.
    Memories rush through her mind in no particular order, some tinged with the sweet scent of roses after a spring rain, some smelling of the sand at the lake where she tasted the first kiss that mattered. Some—too many—come wrapped in the iridescent, sticky web of regret
.
    They are moving her now, strapping her body to a strange bed. The lights are so bright that she cannot open her eyes. An engine starts and the movement hurts. Oh, God, it hurts …
    She can hear her husband’s voice, the soft, whispering love sounds that have guided her through the
last ten years of her life, and though she can hear nothing from her children, her babies, she knows they are here, watching her. More than anything in the world, she wants a chance to say something to them, even if only a sound, a sigh, something …
    Warm tears leak from the corners of her eyes, slide behind her ears, and dampen the stiff, unpleasantly scented pillow behind her head. She wishes she could hold them back, swallow them, so that her children won’t see, but such control is gone, as distant and impossible as the ability to lift her hand for a final wave
.
    Then again, maybe she isn’t crying at all, maybe it is her soul, leaking from her body in droplets that no one will ever see
.

Chapter Two

    When he was young, Liam Campbell hadn’t been able to get out of Last Bend fast enough. The town had seemed so small and constrained, squeezed as it was inside his famous father’s fist. Everywhere Liam went, he was compared to his larger-than-life dad, and he fell short. Even at home, he felt invisible. His parents were so in love … there simply wasn’t much room left over for a boy who read books and longed to be a concert pianist.
    To his utter astonishment, he had been accepted at Harvard. By the time he’d finished his undergraduate studies, he’d learned that he wasn’t good enough to be a concert pianist. The best player at Last Bend, even the best at Harvard, wasn’t good enough. He could be a music teacher at an expensive private school, maybe, but his talent didn’t include the power or the anger or the desperate passion of the best of the best. So he’d quietly tucked that youthful dream aside and turned