Page 145 of Price of Angels

Ava didn’t seem to mind. She leaned back against the wall, staring at the acoustic ceiling tiles, the silver sprinkler heads.

After a moment, she said, “When Mercy was in the hospital in New Orleans, I wanted to be left alone. All I wanted to do was sit. I wanted the doctors to stop asking how I felt; I wanted Aidan to stop insisting that I eat something. All I wanted was for someone to bring me news of Mercy.”

From the corner of his eye, he saw her head roll toward him. “But it was a good thing I didn’t get my way. A person can lose her humanity, waiting like this. So I know you probably want me to leave, but I’m going to sit right here and wait, until she’s out of surgery.”

He nodded.

Why else had he called Mercy, as he hovered over Holly’s lifeless body and waited for the paramedics, if not for this kind of support? It had been for Uncle Wynn, he’d reasoned. Someone had to go out in the woods and find Uncle Wynn. Someone had to round up the dogs and put them in their pens. Someone had to do something about the bodies cooling in the snow. And someone was doing all those things – the rest of his brothers.

But Mercy and Ava had come to the hospital, and the sight of them walking down the hall toward him an hour before had taken his legs right out from under him, and he’d been sitting in this chair ever since.

Mercy came around the corner now; his stride had been a touch uneven, since his accident last fall, and his pattern of footfalls was distinctive. He was sliding his cellphone into his cut pocket.

“No word?” he asked, and Ava shook her head.

He sat down on the other side of his wife, stretching his bad leg before him. “She’ll be alright,” he said. “I’ve seen guys bounce back from a lot worse.”

They’d also all seen Andre die of a belly wound just a few months ago.

Michael lifted the cup to his lips, breathed in the sharp smell of the coffee, let its warmth fan across his face.

Holly was probably cold, he thought. Blood loss made you cold, and she was never dressed warmly enough anyway. This hospital was like a meat locker. And she was naked under harsh lights on an operating table right now; had to be freezing.

He wanted to pull her beneath all the layers of quilts on her bed and tuck her against his chest, slide one of his legs between hers. He wanted to feel her shivering subside, the goosebumps soothing, as their body heat warmed the little cocoon of blankets.

He wanted to take her soft face in his hands and tell her how sorry he was that he’d come too late.

He wanted to lay the heads of her tormenters at her feet.

He wanted to see her smile, listen to her breathe, and know that she was alive.

Oh, God…

The double doors across from them swung open and a doctor emerged, white coat open and billowing over mint scrubs, hair confined by a scrub cap, paper mask dangling around her neck.

“Mrs. Lécuyer?” she said, eyes going to Ava. “Your sister’s out of surgery.” That was the story they’d told the staff, so one of them would be allowed to see her in the ICU afterward. Ava had thought it up, while Michael gaped like a fish at the nurse and couldn’t form words.

Ava had said, “Excuse me, I’m her sister, can you tell me what’s going on?”

“How is she?” Ava asked now, straightening in her chair.

Michael tensed, his stomach knotting.

“She’s stable,” the doctor said. “No major organs were hit…”

It all turned to white noise, after that. Michael sagged back against the wall, the breath going out of his lungs. Exhaustion slammed into him. The struggle, the stabbing, the miles he’d run, alone, and then again with Holly in his arms – he wanted to sleep for a year. Crawl with her under the covers and never come back out.

He felt a touch at his wrist, Ava’s cool fingers squeezing him. “My sister’s husband,” she was saying.

When Michael looked at her, she gave him a little nod.

“Oh, okay,” the doctor said. “You can see her now if you’d like,” she told him. “Follow me.”

He looked back once, as he slipped through the doors, at the picture of Mercy and Ava together in the hard plastic chairs. Mercy slid an arm across Ava’s shoulders and she leaned into his side, deflating, a hand rising to rest on his chest.

The ferocious thirty-five-year-old Cajun extractor, and his twenty-two-year-old wife.

He saw them differently now, through the lens of Holly leaning into him and loving him. He saw the brilliant halo around them for what it was: union. That perfect blending of acceptance, sympathy, empathy, understanding and physical need that coalesced into glue, until there was only the union between them, and both were powerless to describe it.

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