Wait for Me (23 page)
She found him, with Johanna wrapped tightly in his arms, on the stairs below the second-floor landing. She couldn’t tell if there had been a struggle. Johanna was weeping pitifully, and he was rocking her back and forth, and back and forth, looking dazed, weak, and tired.
He heard her on the stairs above them and looked up. There was a sadness in his eyes that came directly from his soul. A little relief, too, some remorse and some pity. There was blood soaking through the hole in the left sleeve of his jacket, and she could see that his left hand was covered with it—it was dripping off one side.
“Oliver,” she said, whispering and not knowing why as she crouched and crept closer to them. “Your arm...”
He shook his head and closed his eyes without loosening his grip on Johanna. His head jerked upright and he opened his eyes again, as if he’d almost fallen asleep.
“I called,” she said quietly, talking to keep him awake; to keep him from passing out from the shock and the pain and the loss of blood. “They’ll be here soon. Hold on, Oliver. Is she all right? Is she hurt?”
He glanced down at his step-cousin, frowning as if he didn’t know who she was, then shook his head.
“I don’t think so,” he murmured. After a moment, he added, “I never dreamed... I saw her car... down the street... I never thought...”
“No one did.” She heard sirens in the distance, and for the first time in her life, she welcomed the familiar sound, praying they were headed their way. “It’s over. All her pain is out in the open now, and she can begin to heal.”
“Why didn’t I see it?” he asked, his voice low and frail. “I never looked at her. I never saw her.”
“You had to heal your own wounds first, Oliver. It isn’t anyone’s fault.”
His head sort of bobbed on his shoulders, and he tightened his hold on Johanna. She lay in his arms like a loose bag of bones. Powerless. Without purpose. She wept quietly now, her sobbing muffled in his ski jacket.
Wanting to cry, not for Johanna, not for Oliver, not for herself, but for the whole world, Holly closed her eyes and leaned the side of her head against the stairwell. The three of them were safe now. Not from one another, but from their pasts.
Not a cynic by nature, she couldn’t help but wonder who the fool was who had made babies the symbol of new life, of new beginnings. There ought to be someone around to point at, to tell them they were wrong, to show them how children come into the world carrying the baggage of their parents.
Kind, loving baggage from Marie and Roberto Spoleto. Deluded and pathetic, maybe, well-intended baggage from Carolann and whoever her father was. Quiet, misguided baggage from Oliver’s parents. Selfish, greedy, mindless baggage from Max and Elizabeth George.
Good or bad, it was all baggage that children had no control over. All they could do was take it in and react to it. Was it a dice roll, a flip of the coin, a draw of the straw as to whose suitcase they ended up with? Or did it all fit into her theory of reincarnation as to whether you got nice sturdy, dependable luggage or a beat-up knapsack at birth? Either way, it was plain that a baby’s life was never truly fresh and new. It was more an extension of the life it came from, and the life before that, and the one before that...
A child’s life was never his own until he accepted the burden of his parents’ belongings and molded them into something he could carry and live with. And then... he passed to his child, and to his child after that, and to his child after that...
T
HE POLICE TOOK JOHANNA
away.
Holly protested when they handcuffed her; it was like watching them bind up a Raggedy Ann doll. But they insisted it was as much for her own protection as it was for theirs, and they were gentle with her as they passed her into the backseat of the squad car.
She’d stopped crying. She sat mute and staring off into space as if it were happening to someone else. As if she weren’t really there at all.
“Johanna?” Holly said softly, leaning into the car, a policeman standing nearby. “Johanna? If you can hear me, I want you to know this doesn’t change anything. I still want to be your friend.”
The woman’s blue eyes moved slowly toward hers, but when they met, there was no sign of Johanna in them.
“I understand, Johanna. I know and I understand.”
Johanna didn’t care.
She stepped back and closed the door, and as she watched the car drive away she thought of Carolann. How many times had she been taken away in just such a manner? And how many times had she fought her way back, only to find that there was still no one around to tell her they loved her?
It wouldn’t happen to Johanna. Johanna had Holly—and Holly knew about love.
An ambulance had been called for Oliver.
He’d passed into unconsciousness almost the minute the policemen had pried his fingers loose of Johanna. He’d come around momentarily, to protest their prodding fingers near his wound and to insist that an ambulance wouldn’t be necessary if they’d give him a ride to a hospital, and then he was gone again.
Holly held his head in her lap until the paramedics came. She answered the policemen’s questions and told them to contact Oliver’s aunt in regard to both Oliver and Johanna. In the end, she’d made the entire incident sound more like a family dispute with the gun going off by accident—which in truth it had—and not like the intended murder it might have been.
She followed the stretcher they’d put Oliver on into the back of the ambulance and held his hand as they drove away from the apartment building. She wondered briefly if anyone had thought to close her front door, but didn’t think of it again as Oliver began to stir to consciousness once more.
“Holly?”
“Yes, Oliver. I’m here.”
“Don’t go away.”
“I won’t, Oliver. I’ll be right here.”
“Wait for me.”
Aw, wow. There it was again. All the little hairs on her arms and at the back of her neck stood straight up and wiggled with the heebie-geebies.
“You aren’t going anywhere, Oliver. Just to the hospital, and I’ll stay with you the whole time. I promise.”
“Wait for me.”
“I will. Stop saying that. I promise, I will,” she said. She was almost shouting at him. He didn’t seem to be hearing her reassurances. “Oliver?”
He’d lapsed into unconsciousness once more. He was so pale. He was always so strong and confident; it was frightening to see him helpless and weak. What if the paramedics were wrong? What if it was more than what they’d called a simple flesh wound? What if he’d lost more blood than they suspected? What kind of a gunshot wound was ever simple, for crying out loud?
“Oliver?” she called, recognizing the panic in her own voice.
Panic that hadn’t been there the whole time she’d been with Johanna. Panic that hadn’t been there when she’d talked to the police. Panic that wouldn’t be there at all if it hadn’t suddenly occurred to her how close she’d come to losing him, how close to his heart the bullet had come, how close to her heart he’d become.
“Oliver, don’t die,” she said, starting to cry at last. She slid off whatever she was sitting on, elbowed the attendant out of the way, and got closer to him. “Please, Oliver,” she said close to his ear. “We can be rich if you want. You can buy me a car, a big one, a big red one, and I’ll drive it everywhere... And a house, bigger than Carey House, with gold door-knockers and... and bodyguards.” She sniffed and wiped her cheek and nose with the back of her hand. “Big, ugly bodyguards. You can buy me anything you want and I’ll act happy to get it, even if I don’t need it, and... and in the winter we’ll burn the money. I’ll roll ten-dollar bills into little Presto-Logs”—she showed him how she’d do it with her fingers—“and we’ll take turns throwing them into the fireplace, just please, please don’t die.”
“Ma’am?” said the medic beside her. She glanced at him. He was watching her as if he thought she needed the stretcher more than Oliver did. “Ma’am, he isn’t going to die. His vital signs are stable and he’s stopped bleeding. He’s just weak. He’ll be fine.”
“Oh, what do you know?” she said irrationally. “People die all the time when they’re not supposed to. I did and look at me.”
He was. With a great deal of caution.
“Holly?” It was Oliver. His voice was weak; his lips were dry.
“Yes, Oliver? Oh, yes, Oliver, what?”
He opened his eyes, but he had to tip his head a bit to see her.
“Don’t cry anymore. I can’t stand it.”
“Okay. I won’t cry anymore.” She hastily wiped her cheeks dry.
“And will you do me a favor?”
“Anything, Oliver.”
“Don’t ever change who you are, okay? Not for me. Not for anyone.”
“No. I won’t.”
“And Holly? One more thing?”
“What?”
“Will you marry me, before you burn all my money?”
It would be many years yet before Oliver told his wife about the strange dreams he had after he was shot that afternoon. Weird yet pleasing dreams that would return now and again in the night and cause him to wake and ponder life and the universe beyond.
Nimbus sort of dreams, clouded and light, with no faces or entities, but with voices that were as real and familiar to him as hers was as she promised tearfully to love him, honor him, and spend all his money.
Secret sort of dreams, the kind you’re afraid to talk about before breakfast, because they might come true if you do. And it wasn’t that the dreams were so terrible, it was just that they sometimes felt more real to him than certain parts of his life.
Deep-seated dreams. They were rooted firmly in both his conscious and subconscious mind and triggered by external stimuli—usually Holly. The simplest things would call them to mind... Holly with her hands on her hips and a frown on her face, saying, “There you are. I couldn’t find you anywhere.” Or Holly halfway up the stairs to their bedroom, her eyes bright with desire and her lips whispering, “Hurry.” Or Holly coming home two hours late with a child in each hand, her hair standing on end, as she complained, “I got lost. I took the wrong exit. I was completely lost.”
And always, always, it would be on the tip of his tongue to tell her, “Wait for me.”
Mary Kay McComas is an acclaimed romance novelist and the author of twenty-one short contemporary romances, five novellas, and three novels. McComas has received several honors and awards for her work, including the Washington Romance Writers’ Outstanding Achievement Award and two Career Achievement Awards from
Romantic Times
(one for Best New Author and another for Innovative Series Romance).
Born in Spokane, Washington, the third child of six siblings, McComas graduated with a bachelor of science degree in nursing. She worked for ten years as an intensive care nurse. After marrying her husband and having their first child, the family moved to the Shenandoah Valley in northern Virginia, and McComas soon retired from nursing to raise her family, which included three more children.
Throughout her childhood and into college, McComas battled undiagnosed dyslexia. As a result, she was an infrequent reader in her youth and early adulthood. It wasn’t until after the birth of her youngest son that McComas began reading for pleasure—books hand-picked by her older sister for their humor. Gradually, she branched out with her own choices, reading widely, until one book changed her life. “Eventually I bought IT. You know … that one novel that even a dyslexic amateur can tell is poorly written, with no plot and horrible characters,” she explains. “I told my voracious-reader husband, ‘I can do better than this!’ And he said, ‘Then do it.’”
McComas’s first book landed her an agent, who helped sell four of McComas’s stories and secured the author a four-book contract within a year. McComas published her first book,
Devine Design
, in 1988, and followed it with seven more paperback novels.
A favorite of both fans and reviewers, McComas has been nominated for a Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award eight times and has been a Romance Writers of America RITA Award finalist twice, once for Best Short Contemporary Fiction and once for Best Novella. Over the course of her “third career,” as McComas refers to it, she has expanded her scope beyond contemporary romances. She frequently contributes to Nora Robert’s J. D. Robb anthologies and her paranormal novellas have garnered continuous praise.
McComas continues to live in the Shenandoah Valley with her husband, three dogs, and a cat. Her four grown children live nearby. Read more about Mary Kay at marykaymccomas.com.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1994 by Mary Kay McComas
cover design by Julianna Lee
978-1-4532-8621-0
This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media
180 Varick Street
New York, NY 10014
