Amulet, p.19
Amulet, page 19
Alex took a few steps in the direction the attendant had pointed, then stopped to look at Val. “I think you should go,” she said softly, almost as though she were afraid she would hurt his feelings. “It’s late, and I know you must be tired. You should go home and get some sleep.”
“You’re tired, too.” Val wasn’t ready to leave her side just yet.
“Yes, but I’ll be okay. I’ll crash on a couch in Billy’s room or something, so I’m there when he wakes up. If they have the surgery tomorrow morning, like they said they would, I’d like to be with him for that. Is it okay if I’m late coming in?”
“You know you don’t have to ask me that,” Val replied gently, resisting the urge to tuck a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
“Thank you, Val, for everything you’ve done for me. You don’t know how much I appreciate it.”
“I’m the one who should be thanking you. I think you might have saved my company.”
He gave her a lopsided grin. He wanted to kiss her again, to the point that he didn’t even care anymore whether it was appropriate or whether it would make her feel guilty. But then her lips turned up in a smile, and it made him feel like he’d won some small victory, even without the kiss.
She stretched her hand out toward him, and, thinking for a moment that Alex was reaching for him, Val’s heart nearly leapt out of his chest. But, instead of his hand, her fingers wrapped around the handle of her suitcase.
“Be careful driving home,” she said softly. Then Alex turned and walked away, the sound of the squeaky wheels on her roller bag echoing down the empty hall and getting fainter as she moved farther away.
****
It was a test of Alex’s will not to turn around and look at Val as she walked toward the ICU—almost as difficult as telling him she felt nothing more than friendship for him that morning when they were leaving the hotel in Israel.
She did the math quickly in her head—it had been around twenty-four hours ago when she had looked Val almost in the eye and told him they should forget about their kiss. He had been gracious about the whole thing. He’d even tried to tell her it was his fault, not hers. But she knew that wasn’t true. She had wanted to kiss him—wanted him to kiss her. It was why she’d hugged him, why she’d reached up and kissed his cheek, even if she hadn’t realized it at the time.
She was not so innocent.
Alex got off the elevator and saw a sign for the ICU down the hall. Hurrying to the double doors under the sign, she pressed a large square button to open them, then almost ran into the nurse on duty.
Despite the woman’s silent glare as Alex explained who she was and who she was there to see, the nurse showed her to Billy’s room without much fuss.
“He was sleeping a few minutes ago when I was doing my rounds,” the nurse whispered as she opened the door. “He’ll be happy to see you when he wakes up.”
Alex looked at her in surprise. “What do you mean?”
The nurse shook her head with a “bless your heart” expression on her face. “Poor boy’s been asking about you since he got here.”
After pulling a pillow and a blanket out of a closet and putting them on the chair near Billy’s bed, the nurse quietly left the room.
“Oh, Billy,” whispered Alex, leaving her bags by the door and slowly approaching the bedside. “What did they do to you?”
Billy’s blond hair looked oily and stuck to his skin around his temples and forehead, and an oxygen mask had been placed over his nose and mouth. An I.V. was stuck in his arm, and the skin near the I.V. was bruised and discolored, evidencing prior attempts to get at one of his blood vessels.
Alex resisted the urge to touch him as tears welled up and began to fall. She didn’t want to wake him. He needed to rest.
Glancing at the outline of Billy’s legs under the blankets, she wondered what his knees looked like. He had suffered so much in just a few days, all while she was in Israel enjoying herself with Val…
Closing her eyes, Alex shook her head. She couldn’t think about that right now. Somehow, thoughts of Val and the kiss they’d shared had to be pushed out of her mind. She had been giddy with the success of their meetings, enchanted with the sights and sounds of an ancient world, and in the company of a very kind, very handsome man. The kiss had been a mistake. It was as simple as that. It hadn’t meant anything.
Alex knew she would have to tell Billy what had happened. Not now, though—she couldn’t tell him while he was going through all of this. He had to get through surgery, begin his rehab, and start getting better. Then she would tell him. Billy would understand. He would forgive her. Maybe they would even be stronger as a result.
For now, though, they had to focus on Billy getting better. She would help him. She would take care of him. And he would be all right.
Everything would be all right.
Chapter Seventeen
For the first time in eleven years, Val did not feel like going to work when his alarm clock woke him up the next morning. He silenced the annoying ringing and rolled over in bed, closing his eyes in an attempt to go back to sleep. After all, he’d only slept for five hours, as it was well after one in the morning by the time he had gotten into bed the night before. Not to mention the jet lag.
He thought about Alex and wondered if she had gotten any sleep in her boyfriend’s hospital room. Even lying in a hospital bed with a bashed-in head and two shattered knees, her boyfriend was one lucky bastard. Billy had won. The guy hadn’t even known there was a competition, but he’d still won.
Val should have admitted defeat at the baggage carousel at Newark Airport. It had been readily apparent from the expression on Alex’s face when she’d heard the message from the hospital which man had her heart. And it wasn’t Val. She had told him to go, dismissed him in as kind a way as possible, but it was a dismissal just the same. She had chosen Billy, and there was simply no place for Val.
Val didn’t belong with Alex. He belonged in his clean, quiet, lonely condo in his clean, quiet, lonely bed. Why had he thought it could be any different?
Just as Val was drifting off to sleep once more, the ringing of his phone woke him again. At first, he thought he’d accidentally snoozed the alarm, but it took only a couple of seconds for Val to realize the phone was actually ringing. Someone was calling him.
The display on the phone was very bright against the darkness of the room, and he squinted to see who was calling. Val didn’t recognize the number, but in the back of his mind, he wondered if it could be the hospital or some other number Alex might use to call him.
He cleared his throat and answered the phone.
“Hello?”
“Val? Is that you?”
Val immediately sat up in bed at the sound of his sister Gabby’s voice.
“Gabby?”
“Yes, it’s me. Are you at work?” His sister’s tone carried a note of disgust, as though the fact that Val got up and went to work every day was offensive.
“No, not yet.”
Val couldn’t remember the last time Gabby had called him. He wondered what could have caused her to do so now. Then he thought of his niece Liza, and a chill ran up his spine.
“Is everything okay?” he finally asked, wishing she would just tell him what was going on.
Gabby laughed unpleasantly in response. “Of course. Everything is great. I lead a charmed life, as you know. I have a shitty job, and I have three kids to take care of with the shitty salary I get from my shitty job because I have a fucking bastard of an ex-husband who won’t pay shit for child support. So yeah, everything is just fucking fantastic. Thanks for asking.”
Val heard the tremor in her voice, and he knew there was more. His sister didn’t cry easily—she was anything but fragile. Something was very wrong.
“Gabby,” he said softly, “tell me what’s happened.”
He heard his sister take a short breath on the other end of the line before it came out.
“It’s Liza, Val. She’s sick, very sick. My baby, my baby girl…”
At this, his sister began to sob uncontrollably, and Val felt as though his heart had just been pierced through with a knife.
“What do you mean?” he asked frantically. “I just saw her last week and she was fine—what’s wrong with her? What is it?”
“It’s cancer, Val. Fucking cancer! She’s so young, she’s just a baby. How can this happen to her?”
Val’s head was spinning. Cancer? Liza?
“What kind of cancer? Has she seen a doctor?”
“Of course, she’s fucking seen a doctor! How do you think we know it’s cancer?”
“Well, tell me what you know then. There has to be more. People don’t just get diagnosed with ‘cancer.’ What kind of cancer is it? Where is it? How bad is it? What’s the treatment?”
“There is no treatment, Val. It’s terminal, and she doesn’t have long. It started with headaches when she first got back to school in August. At first, she thought it was just the stress of starting the new semester, with new classes and all that. But she went to see the doctor on campus, and she sent her to get some tests, and that’s when we found out. It was in her blood, spreading everywhere. My poor baby…”
Again, his sister’s voice trailed off as her words became sobs.
“Gabby, there has to be something we can do. People survive cancer all the time. She’s young, she’s strong. We can get her in to see a good doctor, and I’m sure there’s a clinical study or—”
“She doesn’t need a fucking clinical study! What she needs is a miracle!”
Val was quiet as he thought through all the options. He knew an oncologist at the Mayo Clinic. He could call him up and see if they could get Liza in to—
“Did you hear what I said, Val? She needs a miracle. You know where we can find a miracle, don’t you?”
Gabby’s voice had changed. She had regained control, and she knew exactly what she was doing.
“How do you know about Baba’s amulet?” Val asked after a long pause.
The sound of her condescending laughter was grating on his nerves. “Everybody knows about Grandma’s ‘amulet’! After Dad wrapped his car around a tree driving home from the bar that night, I went to see him at the hospital. He was on a lot of meds, slipping in and out of consciousness. Mom was there, and Eva and Dimitar. You were stuck at school because of that blizzard and never made it to see him before he died, do you remember?”
Val remembered. It was his first semester of college. He had gotten a scholarship to a school three hours away from home in the most rural part of the state, and that freak snowstorm the first week of October had felled trees everywhere because most of them still had their leaves. All the roads were blocked, and by the time they were finally passable, his father was already dead. Val had barely made it to the funeral.
“It was only a few months after Grandma died,” she continued. “You remember, don’t you? And all Dad could talk about every time he woke up was that damned necklace. He said it was magic. He said if only his mother had given it to him before she died, this wouldn’t have happened to him.”
Gabby laughed again, as though she found it amusing that she had Val’s full attention.
“Mom tore the house apart after Dad died, looking for that fucking thing. She said it had to be there somewhere, in Grandma’s room or maybe hidden somewhere else in the house, but she couldn’t find it. Then we wondered if maybe Grandma had given it to somebody before she died. If she hadn’t given it to Dad, then maybe one of her other kids. Uncle Jeko, or Aunt Sophie, maybe. But as the years passed, it became very clear who had all the ‘luck’ in our family. She gave it to you, didn’t she? You got it, you little shit. She always felt sorry for you because you were such a little pussy, and so she gave it to you. And you used it to get everything your little heart desired.”
She was quiet now, no longer rueful, but just sad.
“Mom said she asked Dad how the amulet worked, just before he died, and he told her what his grandmother had told him about it when he was a kid, about how his mother, our grandmother, was pregnant with him when she got sick, about how her mother gave her the amulet and how she wished for her health and the health of the baby. She got better and had Dad. I guess it makes sense—she gave you the amulet, then bit the dust, and so did Dad. That’s how it works, right? You get one wish, but when you give the amulet away, the wish goes away too. Grandma didn’t think about Dad dying when she gave that thing to you, did she? She didn’t realize that he was part of the same wish, that she was killing him to help you.”
“You don’t actually believe that, do you?” Val tried hard not to let his own guilt seep into his words. He had stayed awake many nights after his father’s accident, wondering if he was to blame for his father’s death. His father had driven drunk so many times before—why had his luck run out? How could it have been a coincidence?
“Of course I believe it, just the same as you do. But it doesn’t matter, Val. What matters is that you have something that can help Liza. You can make her better. All you have to do is give me the amulet and—”
“Wait a second,” Val interrupted her. “Why should I give you the amulet? You’re not the one who’s sick. She is.”
“I know, Val,” she replied, as though she were explaining something to a four-year-old, “but Liza doesn’t believe. I do. I will wish for her health. I’m her mother. No matter what you may think of me, you must know I love her more than anything. I’ll make the wish for her. It’s the only way to be sure the wish isn’t wasted.”
Val was silent. He knew that giving the amulet to his sister, to anyone, would mean the end of everything he had accomplished. His company would fold. His money would evaporate. His popularity would disappear. But none of that mattered to him when Liza’s life hung in the balance.
Mistaking his silence for reluctance, Gabby chimed in again: “You’ve had your good luck, Val. Isn’t it about time someone else had a turn?”
Val was annoyed that she would think he could put his own comfort and well-being above the life of his niece, but he told himself that she simply didn’t have the capacity to understand him. She never did.
“I will give it up for her, Gabby. I’ll come today and give it to you.”
He could hear his sister breathe a sigh of relief on the other end of the line. “Oh, thank God. Thank you, Val. Thank you.”
“I’ll be at your house around ten. Will you be there?”
“Yes, Val, I’ll be here. I’ll see you then.”
It took Val only a few minutes to throw on some clothes and prepare for the three-hour drive to his sister’s house. Glancing at his watch, he decided it was too early to call Judy to let her know he was back from Israel but wouldn’t be coming to the office. He would just have to call her from the car.
He grabbed a granola bar from the cupboard and a bottle of water from the fridge, then went over to the suitcase and laptop bag that still stood by the front door, exactly where he had deposited them the night before. Reaching into the side pocket of the laptop bag, Val fished around the bottom until he found the sock that held the black velvet bag with the amulet in it. He pulled the velvet bag out of the sock, then opened it and took out the amulet. Satisfied, he tucked everything back into place and slung the laptop bag over his shoulder. Then he stepped out of the condo, locking the door behind him.
It was New Year’s Eve, and it had been exactly one week since Liza’s visit on Christmas Eve. She had looked so healthy to him, so vibrant. She was bubbly and talkative. There had been no mention of headaches, and she didn’t seem to be in any pain. How could Liza be as sick as her mother said she was?
As Val pulled out of the parking garage, he went over the dinnertime conversation with Liza from that night, trying to recall exactly how his niece’s face had looked as they had talked about school and boyfriends, and even Val’s love life. Val would never have guessed in a million years that there was something not right with her. Never.
He wished he had someone to talk to about this. No, not just “someone.” Val wanted to pick up the phone and call Alex. He wanted to tell her what was happening. He wanted her sympathy, her reassuring smile. He wanted to hear her say that everything would be all right. But he knew he couldn’t call her. Even if Val hadn’t kissed her and put their relationship in the most awkward place possible, Alex had her own stuff to deal with right now and didn’t need Val to pile on.
As Val approached a red light and slowed to a stop, he glanced over at the laptop bag he’d set on the seat next to him. Everything would be all right, he reminded himself. He had the amulet, and the amulet could make Liza better. She was going to be okay.
The light turned green, and Val moved into the right lane, taking the ramp onto the highway, going north. He accelerated to match the flow of traffic, which seemed heavy for the morning before a holiday.
Yes, everything was going to work out. He would give the amulet to his sister, and she would make a wish for Liza’s health. Then Liza would get better. Not only that, she would never again have any health problems. She would remain healthy for the rest of her life.
It was only then that the flaw in their plan occurred to him. The power of the amulet, the wish that it granted, lasted only as long as the person who made the wish held on to it. As soon as the amulet changed hands, as soon as there was another owner, the previous wish went away. It was gone. It had happened to his grandmother and her mother, and it would soon happen to him.
The same would also happen to Liza someday. Sure, she would be fine as long as his sister had the amulet, but once his sister died, the amulet would change hands, and that wish for Liza’s health would evaporate. Liza would get sick again. She would die.
Who knew how many years Val’s sister had left in her life? Gabby was almost forty, which was young by most standards, but she was still older than Liza. And she didn’t live an easy life. She smoked, she drank, she took risks. Gabby lived hard, and once that hard living caught up with her, Liza’s fate would be sealed. The amulet was unforgiving in its adherence to the rules.
