Angel Falling Softly (22 page)

“Do you want me to come with?”

“That’s okay. I won’t be long. Stay with Laura. Be a dad.” She touched his arm and smiled.

He grinned and nodded. “Give Jenny my love.”

She waited till she was seated in the minivan to sigh mightily in relief.

Rachel thought about the
why
as she drove north. What she was doing—what she’d asked Milada to do—was beyond bizarre. Mormons believed in faith healing. How bizarre was that? They just didn’t believe in the Pentecostal, Bible-thumping brand. But holy books written on golden plates, angels and visions, God appearing to a boy in a grove of trees—nothing wrong with all that, though.

So it was no great shakes for her to believe six impossible things before breakfast.
She
believed them. She looked inside herself and found no doubt at all. And if she’d come to believe as well that the albino lady down the street was four-plus centuries old and could perform a miracle on her dying daughter that no doctor could? Why not exercise that faith?

Yes, this was
peculiar,
a word Mormons had once used to describe themselves, back when different was good.
A lot of the things we do are strange,
she thought. The temple, for starters. Any given fast and testimony meeting. If they were romping around a Brazilian rainforest dressed in coconut palms and surrounded by
National Geographic
photographers speaking into microphones in hushed, reverential tones, they’d be an ethnographic curiosity pored over in anthropology journals.

Was doing strange things a sign of faith? Doing what was out of the ordinary?
Faith without works is dead.
By which Mormons meant: faith without
work
is dead.

She was working as hard as she could.

S
teven dropped Milada off at the main entrance to Deseret Children’s Hospital. “A friend of mine, her child is in the hospital,” she’d explained when she’d given him the directions.

“Do you want me to wait?”

“I have a ride,” she said, and sent him home.

The DCH lobby was a pleasant surprise. None of the grim, bleach-white, sterile spaciousness of the modern general hospital. It had a friendly, almost intimate, air about it, the walls finished in pink and purple and green pastels. The numerous donor plaques were stenciled in the shapes of toy blocks.

In the center of the lobby, a wishing pool, its blue tiles scattered with copper and silver coins, surrounded a wire-and-metal sculpture.
A Child’s World
it was titled, a collection of intricately designed Rube Goldberg contraptions: wheels and gears and engines and paddles and wings and sails, all commanded by their child pilots, small forms cast in patinated bronze.

Etched in gold leaf into the wall opposite were the words, “The Child First and Always.” And next to it a captioned black-and-white photograph of the original Deseret Hospital Board of Directors, dated July 17, 1882. All women, several of them wives of Brigham Young, two of them holding medical degrees from the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia and the University of Michigan.

In the late nineteenth century, Milada understood, the most progressive social and political institutions on the American continent could be found in Utah among the Mormon polygamists.
Go figure.

Milada took the elevator to the third floor. In the waiting room outside the bone marrow transplant unit was a surgical scrub basin. A sign instructed visitors to wash their hands before entering the unit. She stopped at the water fountain. She rinsed her mouth and spit the water into the basin. She stood at the sink and washed her hands and examined herself in the mirror.

You are out of your mind,
said the needling voice in her head.

She shook the thought away.

You are out of your bloody mind.

She’d been out of her mind before. She knew what
that
was like. If there was any justice in this world, she would have hung until dead from the Tyburn gallows. Unlike Rakosi, she wouldn’t have had the courage to kill herself first.

Kammy’s going to catch you.

That brought her to a dead stop. Rachel’s question came back to her.
What would your sister say?
Kammy would be curious, but she would never go along. She had too many principles—where had she gotten
them
from?—and she took too many precautions. She used her connections to get fresh blood from the blood bank instead of picking up men.
How did she end up so normal?

It was Zoë, who had too few principles and took too few precautions—Zoë who’d discovered the relationship between venom and allergies from a girl who was cured of her debilitating allergies after Zoë slept with her and took her blood. One of the odd side benefits of having a sexually adventurous sister.

And Michael? He would disapprove categorically.
Give when you take; never infect; never tell.
Those were the rules of the family.
Never tell.
She had crossed that line and crossed it with a woman bound to her not by money or power or fear but by compassion. Of all things. She’d paid the ferryman, and there was no shoreline in sight.

T
he station nurse, Carol Lindley, greeted Rachel when she arrived on the unit. “Good evening, Carol,” Rachel replied. Rachel was on a first-name basis with all the critical-care nurses. What would they think if they knew what she was about to do? Another Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy nutcase. They’d cluck with sympathy as they pumped her full of antipsychotics and locked her away.

Rachel set a chair at the head of the bed and combed her daughter’s hair with her fingers, brushing the silky strands away from her face. “It’s going to be all right, Jenny. A friend of mine is going to help you get better.” She took her daughter’s hand in hers and saw, as if for the first time, the marks in the skin from the countless needles and IVs.

My daughter the junkie.

Through the large window along the interior wall of the room, Rachel watched Milada approach the nurse’s station. Milada spoke briefly with the nurse. The nurse left and returned a minute later with a set of charts. Milada flipped through the papers, examined one or two of them, nodded, handed them back. Rachel noticed the casual way her fingers touched the nurse’s hand as she thanked her. The nurse did as Milada asked. With no reason to resist, it would not occur to her to question why.

Could she really overpower the will, Rachel wondered, or only make people do what they really wanted to do beneath the ever-present veneer of self-righteous civility—or were eager to do before they calculated the consequences? At what point did temptation trespass into coercion?

“So this is Jennifer.”

Milada stood in the doorway. The sky-blue jamb framed her china-white hair and pale features. Milada’s young face and old eyes looked as an angel’s must. She lacked only a pair of wings folded against her back beneath her gray Armani jacket.

She took in the rest of the room. “I see your point about the dragons,” she said, sitting down across from Rachel. “She is a beautiful child.”

Rachel nodded. She looked at Milada and, for the briefest of moments, saw a depth of emotion she had never seen before in a human being: a longing, a desire, an unearthly connection to a life lost and destroyed at some point in her distant past.

Milada touched Jennifer’s cheek with her fingertips. A look of tenderness passed across her face, then a spasm of guilt that she just as quickly erased. She cradled the child’s left arm against her right arm, her thumb resting at the crook of Jennifer’s elbow. She glanced at Rachel, her eyes asking,
If you wish to say no, now is the time.

Rachel did not say no.

Milada remained still for several long minutes, her gaze focused on a point far beyond Rachel’s left shoulder. Then she raised her chin slightly, tightening the tendons in her neck. Her pupils dilated. She narrowed her eyes against the light—eyes no longer human, filled with an animal curiosity that asked,
What are you to me?

Her lips parted, the slender white tips of her fangs clicked against the back of her incisors. There was an almost delicate beauty to them. She pressed her thumb against the soft tissue at the crook of Jennifer’s elbow, compressing the vein. Her head dipped, and her mouth closed over Jennifer’s wrist. The child’s body jerked once. It hardly took more than a second, and every move she made was so subtle—so
practiced.
This was something she was good at. Something she had done many times before.

Milada raised her head, her expression blank. She craned her neck again, and Rachel observed the ripple of muscles along her jaw as the fangs pulled back and up against the roof of her mouth. Rachel tore her gaze away. The two pinpricks in Jennifer’s wrist closed to a pair of dots. Rachel remembered the punctures in her own neck and that there were no bloodstains on her pillow.

Just another track in her daughter’s veins.

Milada placed Jennifer’s arm gently beneath the sheets, and everything returned to exactly how it was before she came into the room. She pushed the chair back, stood, and left the room.

F
or several minutes Rachel did not and could not move. She stared at her daughter, waiting for the sudden miracle. She blinked and sat back in her chair. She had somehow expected something more: Latin incantations, a ring of burning candles, black-hatted witches. No, she had done it because it
made sense,
her reasoning was so
scientific.
Andy Millington was proof that Milada’s venom—and it seemed so ordinary now to think that a person should have
venom
—could suppress the autoimmune response. Should it not act the same on the chains of proteins working such ruinous carnage in her daughter’s body?

Rationality begot only more rationality, and what was logical ultimately failed to inspire.

She found Milada in the lobby, standing in front of the large windows that looked west across the city. The city lights sparkled in the late twilight, like the reflecting pool of the universe. Milada said, “This will not work. This will not make a difference.”

“Then why did you come?”

“Because you asked.”

The minivan wound down North Campus Drive, headlights glowing in the falling dark, a firefly lost on the face of the broad expanse of the towering mountains. Fifteenth East ran along the East Bench, the narrow streets shrouded with trees, the leafy branches closing out the sky. It was one of those almost-otherworldly parts of the valley. More like Massachusetts than the Rocky Mountains.

The Mormons who first came to this high desert valley had ventured forth from New England, sailed from Great Britain and Scandinavia, trudged through New York, Ohio, and Illinois and across the Great Plains. They came and irrigated with a vengeance until the green memory of their ancestral homes sprouted from the ancient sandy shores of Lake Bonneville.

Rachel said, if only to break the silence, “Getting your driver’s license renewed must be a curious experience.”