Angeles Covenant by Michael Pierce

Author:Michael Pierce [Pierce, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Firelight Stories
Published: 2019-01-10T23:00:00+00:00

21

Susan

2006

I was lying on the small couch by the window when he entered the hospital room. It was dark outside and my parents had already left for the night. I’d left the precarious message hours ago but hadn’t received a reply—nor was I expecting one. However, here he was, standing in the doorway.

“Roland…” I didn’t even know what to say. He’d always had kind, blue eyes and a gentle countenance about him. He was about a decade older than me, but I hadn’t expected his hair to already be going gray. He looked like he had aged much more than the seven years we’d been apart.

“Is what you said in the message true?” he asked, remaining by the door as if afraid to commit to entering the room.

I removed the blanket a nurse had given me and sat up. “Every word,” I said, feeling tremendous guilt in the pit of my stomach, even though he was the one who’d left me. His sorrowful eyes moved from me to Fiona, who was fast asleep on the bed. “Is this her?”

I nodded, unable to utter another word as a lump formed in the back of my throat.

Roland tentatively entered the room and approached Fiona’s bedside. His eyes were wide with a mixture of emotions as he gazed down on her for the first time. “What’s her name?”

“Fiona,” I managed to say.

He stared at her, his eyes beginning to glisten. “She’s so beautiful.”

“She’s an amazing kid. They both are—were…” I swallowed hard.

Roland looked up, his eyes meeting mine as a tear trickled down his left cheek. “What was the other one’s name?”

“Rebecca. But I usually called her Becca, and Fiona liked to call her Becks.” My eyes began to sting just from mentioning her name. I still couldn’t believe she was gone. If only I could go to sleep and wake in my own bed, with the girls arguing over what show to watch in the living room—everything as it should be, not with me camped out beside Fiona’s hospital bed, Becca in the morgue, and their estranged father standing before me after being absent their entire lives.

A part of me wanted to apologize for never telling Roland about the girls. Yet another part of me wanted to blame him—that if he had never left, this wouldn’t have happened. I knew how unfair that was. But there was nothing about today that was fair.

“Fiona and Rebecca,” he said. “Were they like two peas in a pod?”

“They finished each other’s sentences. I’d find them in each other’s beds often enough. They split their Oreos.” As much as they fought and argued, they’d loved each other dearly. I feared for Fiona now that she’d lost her other half—something she still didn’t know. And even once I built up the courage to tell her, she wouldn’t truly understand. Hopefully, she wouldn’t blame me too much for her sister being gone.

“Do you have any pictures of Rebecca?” Roland asked, slowly approaching my side of the room.

“Sure,” I said, taking out my phone and scrolling to the saved pictures, then showing him the screen.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.