Suddenly Page 4

  Paige shifted Sami so that she could see the child’s face. Large brown eyes met hers. “Not a peep from you through all this? Not hungry or wet?” The child stared up at her silently. “Wouldn’t like supper?” The child didn’t blink. “Maybe a bath?” Paige knew that she couldn’t understand English but was hoping that her tone would inspire some tiny sound. “Yes?” She paused again. When no sound came, she sighed. “I could use both. Let’s go home.”

  She rounded the car and was about to open the passenger’s door when sight of Mara’s house gave her pause. Mara hadn’t owned it long; she had spent her first three years in Tucker paying back education loans and her next two saving for a down payment. The house wasn’t showy in any sense of the word, but buying it had been a triumph.

  Now it was empty, and Mara was buried on the hillside overlooking town. Paige felt a chill. Mara had been a vital part of her life for twenty years. Now she was gone.

  Paige closed her eyes. She held Sami closer, then closer still. The child was warm, silent but alive, and, in that, a comfort—but only until Paige began to think forward rather than back. Then, slowly, with dawning awareness, she opened her eyes and looked at the child, and in that instant, with the house locked, the agency representative gone, and Mara’s baby in her care, the reality of what she had done hit home. On as sorrowful a day as ever there was, it wasn’t sorrow she felt. It was a sheer and profound terror.

  three

  PAIGE WASN’T ONE TO PANIC, BUT SHE CAME close to it during the drive from Mara’s house to hers. She kept thinking of all the things she didn’t know—like what the child ate, if she had allergies, whether she slept through the night. The answers, along with detailed medical records, were in the pack of papers she had brought from Mara’s, but Mara had had weeks to peruse them. Paige did not.

  Anxiously she pictured her house. It had three bedrooms, the one on the first floor that she used herself and two upstairs. The larger of the two was stuffed with furniture that Nonny hadn’t been able to keep when she had sold her house several years before; the smaller of the two was cluttered with sewing goods, knitting goods, and all manner of medical journals that Paige had glanced through and stacked for later reading.

  The smaller room would be easier to clear out, but the larger one would be better for a child. Then again, Paige didn’t like the idea of Sami being alone on the second floor. For the time being, she could sleep in Paige’s room.

  Between Paige, Sami, and the kitten, the bedroom was filling up fast. What have I done? she wondered, and, gripping the steering wheel, tried to stay calm, which meant absolutely, positively, not thinking about what she was going to do come morning, when she had to be at work. She darted quick looks at Sami, who was sitting in the brand-new car seat Mara had bought, sending that long, soulful stare right back at her.

  “We’ll work everything out,” she assured the child and herself in what she thought was a very mommy voice. “You’re flexible. All children are flexible.” It was what she had told many a parent on the verge of panic over a new baby. “Well, I’m flexible, too, so we’ll be fine. What you need most is love, and I can give you that, yes I can. Beyond that, you’ll just have to let me know what you like and what you don’t.”

  Sami didn’t make a sound, simply stared at her with those huge eyes that had seen too much in too short a time.

  It struck Paige that maybe the child couldn’t make a sound, that maybe she had been punished for crying or had simply given up when crying had gotten her nowhere, in which case Paige was going to have to teach her that crying was healthy and, indeed, one of the few ways babies had of making their wants and needs known. The teaching would involve lots of cuddling and attention, even some spoiling. It might take time.

  Time. Oh, Lord. She couldn’t think far ahead. Not yet. “I really can do this,” she told the child as she pulled into her driveway and sprang from the car. “I’m level-headed. I’m easygoing. I’m a whiz with children.” She ran to the passenger’s side and tugged at Sami’s seat belt. “Women have instincts,” she quoted her own advice to new mothers, tugging harder when the seat belt wouldn’t come free. “They do things with and for their children that they never imagined they could do.” She put both hands to the task, pushing, tugging, twisting. “It comes from deep inside. A primordial nurturing.” She was about to go for scissors when the buckle came free with a whoosh. “See?” she breathed in relief. “We’ll do just fine.”

  For the next few minutes, while Sami watched from the safety of her car seat on the front porch, Paige ran back and forth carting baby goods into the house. When she was done, she brought Sami inside, set baby and car seat on the floor, and scooped up the kitten, which had been scampering around underfoot.

  “Sami, meet kitty.”

  The two stared at one another unblinkingly.

  Paige rubbed the kitten’s cheek to hers, then offered the tiny creature to Sami. “Kitty’s even younger than you are. She’s alone, too”—the vet had declared it a female—“so we’ll take care of her until we can find her a home. Isn’t she soft?” She touched the kitten to Sami’s hand. The little girl pulled it back. Her chin began to tremble.

  Paige immediately set the kitten down and took Sami in her arms. “It’s okay, sweetie. She won’t hurt you. She’s probably as frightened of you as you are of her.” While she talked, she sorted through the food she had brought from Mara’s. Assuming that Mara had stocked only what Sami could eat, she put a nipple on one of the bottles of formula. Her own hunger had faded. There didn’t seem room for food in her stomach, what with all the nervous jangles there.

  Sami drank every drop of the milk, looking up at her all the while. Buoyed by that, Paige mixed up a dish of cereal, sweetened it with peaches, and spooned it up, and again, Sami ate. Given how small and thin she was, Paige might have given her more had she not known the danger of pushing too much food into an untried stomach. So, after changing into a T-shirt and jeans, she bathed her, rubbed Mara’s baby lotion over her, diapered her, and dressed her in a pair of stretchy pink pajamas that Mara had bought. Then she held her up.

  “You look so pretty, sweetie.” Pretty and soft and sleepy. “Mara would be loving you to bits.”

  But Mara was no more. Paige felt a sharp pang of grief, followed by a sudden fierce fatigue. She drew Sami close and closed her eyes, but she had no sooner tucked her head against the baby’s dark hair when the phone rang.

  It was Deirdre Frechette, one of Paige’s Mount Court runners. “We need help,” she said in a broken voice. “We spent the whole of dinner talking about Dr. O’Neill. One of the guys says she OD’d on heroine. Is it true?”

  Paige’s fatigue faded. “Definitely not.”

  “Another one says she was done in by the Devil Brothers.”

  “Not Devil,” Paige corrected. “DeVille.” George and Harold DeVille had been the butt of local tales for years. Huge and menacing, they were mentally slow and harmless. “The DeVilles wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

  “Julie Engel says she killed herself. Julie’s mother did that three years ago, and now she’s going into all the details. She’s getting slightly hysterical. We all are.”

  Paige could picture it. Teenage minds were fertile, all the more so in a group. She shuddered to think of where, if unguided, the conversation would lead. Suicide had the potential for being a contagious disease when the proper preventive measures weren’t taken.

  If ever there was a time these teenagers needed their parents, it was now. But their parents weren’t around.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  “In MacKenzie Lounge.”

  “Stay there. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

  It wasn’t until she hung up the phone that she remembered Sami, and for a split second she didn’t know what to do. But the second passed. The little girl was curled in her arms, fast asleep. One-handedly she sifted through the piles of baby paraphernalia and retrieved the baby carrier. A short time later she had the sleeping chi
ld strapped snugly to her chest.

  One of the most important pieces of equipment you can buy, she heard herself instructing parents at prenatal meetings, is a car seat. The baby should be secured in the seat and the seat secured in the car.

  “This is definitely not smart,” she hummed softly as she slid in behind the wheel with Sami hugging her chest, “but you’re tiny, and I drive safely, and I just think it’s more important that you snuggle up to a body you know than sit in that hard baby seat, which I doubt I could strap back in here again tonight anyway. So I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’

  The baby slept through the drive.

  MacKenzie was the largest of the girls’ dorms. Like the others, it was three floors’ worth of red brick, over which ivy had climbed unchecked for so long that large patches of the brick were obscured. Tall, multipaned windows were open in deference to the September warmth; electric fans whirred in many of them.

  There were eight girls in the lounge, eight shades of uniformly long hair, eight oversize T-shirts and shorts. Some of the girls were runners, some not, but Paige knew them all. So had Mara.

  They were subdued. Several looked as though they had been crying. Paige was glad she’d come.

  She sank down on the wide arm of a chair.

  “What have you got?” one of the girls asked.

  “Duhhh,” another mocked.

  “It’s a baby,” someone said.

  “Whose is it?”

  Paige wasn’t sure how to answer. “Uh, mine for now.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “How did you get it?”

  “Is it a boy or a girl?”

  “How old is it?”

  Several of the girls had come to take a closer look at Sami. Paige eased aside the headrest so they could see.

  “Her name is Sameera, Sami for short. She was born in a tiny town on the east coast of India, about a day’s ride from Calcutta.” Mara’s excited words came back clear as a bell. “She was abandoned soon after birth—girls are considered the kiss of death to many in her homeland. She’s fourteen months old, but small for her age and physically delayed. That’s because she’s spent her life being shifted from one orphanage to another. She hasn’t had the encouragement to do much more than lie on a cot waiting for someone to feed her.”

  “She doesn’t walk?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Does she sit?”

  “Only with support.” Mara had told her this, too. Paige had seen it herself while she’d been bathing the child, when she’d done a cursory physical exam. She hadn’t seen any sign of illness or physical deformity. “Given proper nourishment and attention, she’ll catch right up. By the time she’s ready for school, she’ll be doing everything she should.”

  “So whose is she?”

  There it was again, that loaded question. “I’m taking care of her for now.”

  “Are you adopting her?”

  “No, no. She’ll be with me until the agency finds her a proper home.”

  “Then you’re her foster mother. She’s lucky. I was sent to live with an aunt when I was eight. She wasn’t anything like you.” This, from Alicia Donnelly. She had started Mount Court in the seventh grade and was now miraculously a senior. Along the way, she had had every sort of illness imaginable, from bronchitis to strep throat to mononucleosis. Peter, as the doctor of record for Mount Court, had treated her for those. When she developed a yeast infection in her junior year, Mara had taken over her case.

  Alicia had been a behavior problem as a child, so difficult for her socially prominent parents to handle at one point that removal from her immediate family had been the only alternative to hospitalization. Years of therapy had set her on her feet, and although she was far from a model student, she was extremely bright. Mount Court was more of a home to her than her own.

  “You’ll be a good foster mother,” she was telling Paige. “You know everything there is to know about kids. You’re patient. You have a sense of humor. That’s important, a sense of humor.” Her voice caught. “Dr. O’Neill had one, too.”

  Yes, Paige thought. A subtle one that could be dry or gentle but was always a delightful counter-point to her intensity. Paige would miss both the intensity and the wit.

  Sobered, the girls retreated to their places, some on chairs, others on the floor, and were still.

  “Dr. O’Neill was a good person,” Paige said quietly. “She was a dedicated doctor and a crusader. We should all take a lesson from her life. She gave of herself in ways that not many people do.”

  “She also took of herself,” Julie Engel said in a high-pitched voice.

  “You don’t know it was suicide,” Deirdre argued.

  Julie turned to Paige. “I heard that she was found in her garage. Is it true?”

  Paige nodded.

  “And that she died of carbon monoxide poisoning?”

  She nodded again.

  “Then it was suicide,” Julie told Deirdre. “What else would it be?”

  “It could have been an accident,” Paige answered gently. “She was very tired. She was taking medication. She could have passed out at the wheel.”

  “Not Dr. O’Neill,” another of the girls, Tia Faraday, insisted. “She was careful about things. When I was sick last year, she wrote out every last instruction of what I was supposed to do. She didn’t leave anything to chance. And then she called the next day to make sure I was doing exactly what she had written down.”

  “She would have turned off the engine before she passed out,” Alicia concluded.

  Paige sighed. “Unfortunately, passing out isn’t something you can always control.”

  A bell sounded. The girls didn’t move.

  “Did she leave a note?” Tia asked.

  Paige hesitated, then shook her head.

  “Neither did my mother,” Julie said, “but we knew it was suicide. She had been threatening to kill herself for a long time. We never thought she’d go through with it, but when a person climbs all the way to the thirty-third floor—”

  “Don’t say it again, Julie,” Deirdre begged as girls from the floors above began to pass through the lounge and out the door.

  “It was a deliberate act,” Julie insisted.

  “It’s depressing.”

  “Life is depressing.”

  “Life is lonely.”

  “Was Dr. O’Neill lonely?” Tia asked.

  Paige hadn’t been aware of it. “She was always busy. She was always with people.”

  “So are we. Still, there are lots of times I’m lonely.”

  “Same here,” came another voice.

  And another. “It’s the worst at night.”

  “Or after phone calls from home.”

  “Or out in the woods after ten.”

  “Which,” Paige injected lightly, “is one of the reasons why going out in the woods after ten is against school rules. Everything seems ominous. Every little fear is magnified.” Still, the girls had a point. Mara’s days might have been full, but not her nights. She had more than enough time to think about the distance between herself and her family, the failure of her marriage, the child she had aborted years before. Paige hated to think it—Mara had never said anything—but she might well have been lonely.

  “I can’t imagine Dr. O’Neill being afraid of anything,” Alicia said. “She was always so strong.”

  “But she killed herself,” Julie cried, “so something was awful in her life.”

  “What was it, Dr. Pfeiffer?”

  Paige chose her words with care. Although she wasn’t about to betray Mara’s secrets—didn’t know some, she wagered—she wanted the girls to know that suicides, if that was indeed what Mara had committed, weren’t frivolous happenings. There were reasons for them and ways to prevent them.

  “Dr. O’Neill had disappointments. We all do. None of us makes it through life without some. If she did commit suicide, it was because those disappointments got the best of her, such that she lost
her ability to cope.”

  From behind came a quiet, “So what makes one person able to cope and another not?”

  Paige turned to face her runner, Sara Dickinson. She had a backpack slung over a shoulder and was among the last of the girls passing through the lounge. “I can’t give you a definitive answer to that. The person who copes may have an inner strength, or a distinct reason for coping, or a support system that helps her cope when she has trouble doing it herself.”

  “Didn’t Dr. O’Neill have those things?”

  Paige was asking herself that. She struggled to understand and explain. “She may not have put them to use.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She was independent. Too much so, sometimes. She didn’t ask for help.”

  Another girl spoke up, Annie Miller, a junior, sounding frightened. “My brother swallowed a whole handful of aspirin last year.” There were gasps from the group. “They pumped his stomach. He was okay. It wasn’t enough to kill him anyway. My dad said it was a cry for help.”

  “Probably,” Paige said, terrified that one of the girls listening might contemplate a similar stunt, “but that’s a tough way to get it. Overdoses of drugs can cause physical damage that the person who survives then has to live with for the rest of his life. It’s a foolish way to get help. A dangerous way.” She went from face to face. “The thing is that when something like Dr. O’Neill’s death happens, we have to learn from it—the lesson being to speak up when we’re upset.”

  “To who?” Sara asked from behind.

  Paige looked back. “A family member or a friend. A teacher, a coach, a doctor.”

  “That’s the support system you mentioned?”

  “That’s it.”

  “What if you can’t talk to people?”

  “Everyone here can talk to people.”

  “I mean, what if you can’t trust people?”

  “There’s always someone you can trust.” But Sara remained doubtful, so Paige added, “If not the people I mentioned, then a minister. There’s always someone. You just have to open your eyes and look around.”