Act of God (2 page)

“Don’t worry,” she told him. “As I said over the telephone, this kind of case rarely goes to trial. And now that I’ve looked
over the papers, I can assure you that even if it does, we’d be in a very strong position.”

It was the first Tuesday in February, and although the office building’s heating system rarely pushed the temperature
above sixty-eight degrees, Dr. Joseph Heradia was perspiring freely.

“You see, I’ve never been sued before,” he said in distress. “Twenty years of practice, and I’ve never been sued. Some people
would probably say I’ve just been lucky all these years, and never got caught. But I’ve looked into my heart, and I know I
did the best I could for those poor people.”

“I know that,” Dana assured him. “And I can understand their reaction. But I’m sure, once they’ve had time to calm down, they’ll
realize you weren’t to blame.”

“In vitro fertilization doesn’t come with any guarantees, I told them,” he persisted. “I tell everyone that going in. Sometimes
you can fool Mother Nature, sometimes you can’t.”

Dana sighed. “I think the Jensens probably wanted a baby more than anything, and you were their last hope,” she said. “Hope
can be a hard thing to let go of.”

The gynecologist nodded. “I told them they should think about adopting.”

What a world, Dana mused. People wanting babies who couldn’t have them, and people having babies who didn’t want them. She
had told Heradia the truth, as she did with all her clients. It was a bogus case—it had no legs.

“Maybe they’ll think about that now,” she suggested.

The short, pudgy son of Guatemalan immigrants slumped in his seat. “It’s just that I feel so bad for them,” he said.

He was a good man, Dana reflected, not for the first time. “Let me talk to their attorney,” she said, without bothering to
mention that she knew him to be the type who would take on any case for an adequate retainer. “If I can get them to understand
that there is no blame here—not on you for not being able to work a miracle, and not on them for not being able to conceive
a child—I think we can make this all go away.”

“I sure would appreciate it,” he said, confident that he was putting his problem in the right hands. “And thanks for
seeing me on such short notice. I guess we’ve kind of flipped the professional coin here, haven’t we?”

Dana smiled. “That’s what coins are for.”

Heradia rose to leave. “Look, I’d really like to buy you lunch or something,” he said, “but I have to get back to the clinic.
Will you take a rain check?”

“Sure.”

Dana walked him down the hall and through the reception area to the front entrance, giving him one last reassuring nod as
he departed.

As soon as the solid oak door had closed behind him, Angeline Wilder leaned over the edge of her desk. “Isn’t he one of those
abortion doctors from Hill House?” the receptionist for the law firm of Cotter Boland and Grace whispered.

“Is he?” Dana replied with a blank expression. “I thought he was a gynecologist.”

“Well, I suppose he could be both,” Angeline conceded. “But I’m sure he’s one of them.”

“How do you know?” Dana inquired. “Do they wear some sort of a badge, or do you just know them all by sight?”

“No, silly,” Angeline said. “There was a story on the news about them the other night, you know, about how many abortions
they perform up there every year, and he was one of the ones they identified.”

“I see.”

“He isn’t a client, is he?”

“He may be,” Dana told her. “So, given what you’ve heard about him, if he should come in again, be very polite. After all,
you never know when he might whip out a curette.”

“What’s that?” the twenty-one-year-old asked.

“Nothing you’d need to know about, unless you happened to be pregnant,” Dana replied.

The receptionist blushed to the roots of her already red hair. “Well, I most certainly am not. I’m not even married.”

“In that case, don’t give it a second thought.”

The attorney walked back to her office, shaking her head. Joseph Heradia had been her gynecologist for the past twelve years,
and to her knowledge, a kinder, gentler, better man did not exist.

She thought about the couple who wanted a baby. The Jensens were probably good people, too, she decided, just desperate. And
desperate people sometimes got caught up in doing irrational things. She flipped through her Rolodex file for their attorne’s
telephone number, and was reaching for the receiver when her intercom buzzed.

“Yes, Angeline?”

“Ms. Purcell’s here,” the receptionist announced. “She said to tell you it’s one-thirty, and she’s sorry she’s late.”

Dana glanced at her wristwatch in surprise. Heradia had stayed much longer than she realized. Her chat with the Jensens’ attorney
would have to wait until after lunch.

“Tell her I’ll be right out.”

Lunch with Judith Purcell had begun as a daily event when the two were assigned adjoining desks on the first day of second
grade, and continued, if not quite as regularly, right up to this moment. Now that they were both working in Seattle, it had
settled into a more or less weekly routine. They had been best friends for so long, and knew each other so well, that there
were few surprises left between them.

“You didn’t get the commission, did you?” Dana asked as soon as they had been escorted to their customary window table at
Al Boccolino, their lunchtime restaurant of choice.

“No,” Judith confirmed. “They loved my concept, but alas, not my bid. I think they would have gone with me if I’d been willing
to drop my price, but I’d already cut it to the bone.”

Judith was an accomplished, if not yet renowned, sculptor.
The commission in question was for the lobby of the city’s newest waterfront office building, and Judith’ s proposal had been
for a fanciful pod of gray whales done in glass, steel, and ceramic. As bid, the eighteen-month project would have enabled
the artist to cover her costs, with barely any to spare.

When she was married, Judith’s moneymaking ability had not been as important as indulging her creative spirit. But her first
husband had died suddenly of a heart attack, she and her second husband had married and divorced in a very short period of
time, and now she needed to support herself and her twelve-year-old son, Alex. A life in the arts was beginning to seem frivolous.

“I’m sorry,” Dana said. “I really thought you had that one in the bag.”

“Me, too,” Judith admitted with a resolute shrug. “But the truth is, I have only myself to blame. Instead of preparing for
a real career, like you did, I thought I would be able to count on having a man around to support me.”

Aside from their physical dissimilarities, Judith being small and dark to Dana’s above-average height and fair complexion,
the attorney knew there was one basic difference between them. Judith had been raised to define herself by the man at her
side, while Dana had been raised to define herself without anyone at her side.

“I still like the idea of you having your own gallery,” Dana said. She had been trying for almost two years now to move her
friend onto more stable financial ground. Small loans from Judith’s mother kept food on the table, and the half dozen Purcells
that had made their way into Dana’s home paid the artist’s mortgage, but neither was going to be a long-term solution.

Of late, an idea had begun to form in the back of Dana’s mind, of a joint venture, perhaps, where she might front the money
for a gallery, but not be involved with the actual operation, since she admittedly knew next to nothing about art.

“I’d die to have my own gallery,” Judith agreed. “But I just don’t have the capital. And I doubt there’s anyone out there
who would be willing to gamble on me.”

“Well, who knows,” Dana said as their bowls of pasta arrived. “Maybe Providence is getting ready to smile on you.”

“It would be nice,” Judith said with a sigh.

S
ummer was definitely Joshua Clune’s favorite time of year. It was then, when the cold went away and the nights were mild,
that there were plenty of places to sleep. And, too, when the tourists came, there was always more money. It was getting from
October to April that was the problem, when the spaces under the overpasses and in the bus tunnel were taken, and the missions
were full.

It was also in the summer that the scar that ran from his temple to his chin didn’t hurt so much. Joshua hid the scar as best
he could beneath long brown hair and a reddish stubble, but he knew it was there—a painful reminder of the car that had skidded
out of the night years ago, and plowed into the doorway where he slept.

In the winter, Joshua suffered.

He had come from Wisconsin, slowly making his way west, walking, hitching rides when he could, until he reached Seattle and
the end of the continent, and then he stopped. Someone told him he should go south to California, where the weather was even
warmer and the people were rich, and he
could get a suntan and put some meat on his bones. But he was tired of traveling, and besides, Seattle suited him.

He met people like Big Dug, a giant of a man with a full black beard, who showed him the ropes, and helped him settle in.
Big Dug didn’t trust the city shelters. He said there were too many stories about what happened at places like that, where
there was little if any supervision. So, under the older man’s tutelage, Joshua acquired a big cardboard box that had been
used to deliver a desk to somebody’s office, and he rummaged around in Dumpsters until he found a plastic tarpaulin. He cut
the tarp in two, folding one half underneath his box to keep the cardboard dry, and draping the other half over the top to
shut out the wind and rain and cold. Then, for a couple of dollars, a thrift shop provided him with a blanket.

“All the comforts of home,” he told people with a big happy smile.

Big Dug showed him where to go to relieve himself and where he could bathe, when he felt it necessary, and then he introduced
him to Hill House, taking him up Madison to Boren, and pointing out an enormous gray mansion on the corner.

“It’s like a clinic, but it’s a whole lot more than that,” Big Dug told him. “They bring a soup kitchen to the waterfront,
and give you a hot dinner every night, and it’s good food, not slop. If you do drugs, they can help you get clean. If you
want to work, they can help you find a job. And if you’re sick, they take care of you. And it doesn’t cost anything, if you
can’t afford to pay. Only thing is, they don’t want any of us sleeping up there. That’s the rule, and we all know it, and
we don’t break it.”

“Why is that the rule?”

“I think it’s probably got something to do with insurance,” Big Dug said. “You know, in case there was a fire, or something,
and somebody got hurt.”

“Is that why I can’t go there?” Joshua asked, his hazel eyes taking in two well-dressed people as they walked through the
gate. “Because I might cause a fire?”

“Sure you can go there. You can go there first thing in the morning, if you need to, or any time of the day you want to, but
you just can’t sleep there, that’s all, ’cause if they found out, they might get mad, and then it could ruin things for all
of us. Do you understand?”

Joshua kicked at a crack in the cement pavement. “Uhhuh,” he said.

“Okay, then,” Big Dug said.

Doctors in Wisconsin had classified Joshua as retarded when he was six years old, at which point his mother, who had four
other children from three different men to raise, handed him over to the state.

“Life’s tough enough,” she explained. “I don’t have time to do for no dummies.”

The state educated Joshua as best they could, encouraged him to be an upstanding citizen and to embrace true Christian values,
taught him to be as self-sufficient as possible, and turned him loose, according to law, at the age of twenty-one. He was
functional and he could follow simple instructions.

He got jobs washing dishes in restaurants, or mopping floors and cleaning toilets in office buildings. But with no one to
remind him, he sometimes forgot to go to work, and then his employer would get mad and fire him, and Joshua would have to
look for other restaurants and office buildings. When he didn’t have enough money to pay for a place to sleep, he slept on
the streets.

He left Wisconsin one day without even noticing. He just got in a car with a fellow who offered him a lift, and ended up in
Minnesota. He never knew the difference. After all, there were restaurants and office buildings in Minnesota, too.

By the time he reached Seattle, Joshua was thirty-two
years old. In all that time, he had never known a real home-cooked meal, or a night’s sleep in a soft bed, or the warmth of
another human being. But he knew right from wrong, and he knew he was not supposed to sleep at Hill House.