Her own father wasn’t going to live six months. But it wasn’t his heart, it was his liver.
If she closed her eyes she could see the chambers of Michael’s heart. She could see things so brilliant and unnameable and complex as to be like modern painting—a sprawl of daring colors and clots and lines and swelling shapes! Ah. He was OK, this man. If she did get him into bed tonight, she wouldn’t kill him.
“You know your problem right now?” she asked. “It’s those bottles of medicine. Throw them in the trash. That much medicine will make anyone sick.”
“You think so?”
“You’re talking to Mona Mayfair, a twentyfold member of the Mayfair family, who knows things that others don’t know. Oncle Julien was my great-great-grandfather three times. You know what that means?”
“Three lines of descent, from Julien?”
“Yep, and then the other tangled lines from everybody else. Without a computer, no one could even put it all together. But I have a computer and I figured it all out. I’ve got more Mayfair blood in me than just about anybody in the whole family. It’s all ’cause my father and mother were too close as cousins to get married, but my father got my mother pregnant, and that was it. And besides, we’re all so intermarried it doesn’t make much difference…”
She stopped, she was doing her chattering number. Too much talk for a man his age who was this sleepy. Play it with more craft. “You’re OK, big boy,” she said. “Throw out the drugs.”
He smiled. “You mean I’m going to live? I will climb ladders and hammer nails once again?”
“You’ll wield your hammer like Thor,” she said. “But you do have to get off all these sedatives. I don’t know why they’re drugging you like this, probably scared if they don’t that you’ll worry yourself to death about Aunt Rowan.”
He laughed softly, and took her hand now with obvious affection. But there was a dark shadow in his face, in his eyes, and for a second it was in his voice. “But you have more faith in me, right, Mona?”
“Absolutely. But then I’m in love with you.”
“Oh no!” He scoffed.
She held fast to his hand as he tried to pull away. No, there was nothing wrong with his heart how. The drugs were doing him in.
“I am in love with you but you don’t have to do anything about it, Uncle Michael. Just be worthy of it.”
“Right. Be worthy of it, just what I was thinking. A nice little Sacred Heart Academy girl like you.”
“Uncle Michael, pa…leeze!” she said. “I began my erotic adventures when I was eight. I didn’t lose my virginity. I eradicated all traces of it. I am a full-grown woman only pretending to be this little girl sitting on the side of your bed. When you are thirteen, and you cannot disprove it, because all your relatives know, being a little girl becomes simply a political decision. Logical. But believe me, I am not what I seem,”
He gave the most knowing laugh, the most ironic laugh.
“And what if my wife, Rowan, comes home and finds you here with me, talking about sex and politics?”
“Your wife, Rowan, isn’t coming home,” she said, and then instantly regretted it. She hadn’t meant to say something so ominous, so depressing. And his face told her that he believed her. “I mean…she’s…”
“She’s what, Mona? Tell me.” He was quietly and deadly serious. “What do you know? Tell me what’s inside your little Mayfair heart? Where is my wife? Give me some witchcraft.”
Mona gave a sigh. She tried to make her voice as hushed and quiet as his voice. “Nobody knows,” she said. “They’re plenty scared, but nobody knows. And the feeling I get is…she’s not dead, but…well, it might not ever be the same again.” She looked at him. “Do you know what I mean?”
“You don’t have a good feeling about her, that she’s coming back? That’s what you’re saying.”
“Yeah, kind of. But then I don’t know what happened here on Christmas Day, not that I’m asking you to tell me. I can tell this, however. I’m holding your wrist, right? We’re talking all about it, and you’re worried about her, and your pulse is just fine. You aren’t that sick. They’ve doped you. They over-reacted. They got illogical. Detox is what you need.”
He sighed, and looked defeated.
She leant forward and kissed him on the mouth. Immediate connection. In fact, it startled her a little, and even startled him. But there wasn’t