Born Innocent (30 page)

At the clinic, Joe went to get Ella while Patty led Claire to the examining room.

Patty found that the shoulder wound was a clean one. “Small caliber, thank heavens,” Patty muttered, and noted that the bullet had gone right through and out the other side.

Patty gave Claire a shot to kill the pain before she cleaned and dressed the wound, which she explained she wouldn’t suture. Gunshot wounds were better left to drain. “It makes more of a scar, though,” she admitted, and left the room for a moment.

Claire sat alone and thought of the scar on Joe’s shoulder, and smiled at the idea of having one to match. She was more able to smile by then; the powerful painkiller was beginning to kick in. As a matter of fact, she felt kind of peaceful, kind of ready for a long rest....

Just then Patty returned and finished dressing Claire’s shoulder. Then she began filling another syringe.

In Claire’s foggy mind, a thought surfaced: the baby. What might all these things Patty was shooting into her veins do to the baby?

“
Wait,” Claire instructed as Patty swabbed Claire’s good shoulder. “Just wait a minute. Please.”

Patty paused. “What is it?”

“
Oh, God.”

Patty laid a kind hand on Claire’s arm. “What? Tell me?”

“
What shot did you give me?”

“
Just the painkiller. Why?”

“
What else will you give me?”

“
An antibiotic. To stave off infection. What’s the problem, Claire?”

She managed to force the words out. “What effect ... will those drugs have on the baby, if I’m pregnant?”

“
What are you telling me, Claire?”

Claire sighed. There was nothing to do but admit. “I’m pregnant. About seven weeks.”

Patty looked solemn. “You should have told me.”

“
I... didn’t think of it, until now.”

“
Okay. I can understand that.” Patty gave a wry chuckle. “You
had
been shot twice and bopped on the head with a gun, after all.”

“
Yes, but I should have thought of it, I know. And there’s something else....”

“
Yes?”

“
I don’t want anyone else to know, until I’ve told... the father.”

Patty nodded. “Of course. I’ll keep it strictly confidential.”

Claire knew Patty Severin well enough to be sure she could trust her integrity. She was relieved about that, at least. She asked, “So what about the drugs you gave me, and plan to give me?”

Patty launched into a mini-dissertation on the pros and cons of pregnant women and prescription drugs. “Generally, nowadays, we advise pregnant women to avoid drugs altogether, if possible. But gunshot wounds are... serious. There’s the high possibility of infection, for one thing. Luckily, you’re caught up on your tetanus. You had that shot four years ago, so we don’t have to decide whether to chance giving you that or not. But you’re going to have to suffer a little more discomfort than you would have if you weren’t pregnant.” Claire groaned. Her father had been a doctor, after all. She knew what medical people meant when they said “discomfort.” Claire was going to live through hell on earth before the goose egg on her head went down and her shoulder began to heal. Patty went on, “Painkillers aren’t good for the baby, so you’ll take only what you feel you can’t do without.”

“
I’ll take none.”

“
Claire. Be realistic.”

“
I’ll be okay. What about the antibiotics?”

“
Your records show no allergies to ampicillin.”

“
Right.”

“
That should be safe enough to take. I'll give you a shot of it now, and send some home with you.”

“
Fair enough.”

Patty gave her the last shot. “Your mother’s waiting in the reception area,” she said as soon as that was done. She handed Claire a bottle of ampicillin capsules—and another of the painkiller Claire had already decided she wouldn’t use.

“
I don’t want these,” Claire said.

“
Claire. Take them with you. You don’t have to use them, but keep them just in case...”

Claire decided not to argue. She’d flush them down the toilet as soon as she got home.

Patty went on, “Your mother will take you home and put you to bed. You’re going to be feeling pretty ragged for a few days, so get plenty of rest. I’ll come by your place tomorrow to change that dressing.”

Patty went to the door. Claire jumped down from the examining table, and stumbled a little when she hit the floor.

“
Careful,” Patty cautioned.

“
Yes. Absolutely,” Claire agreed. She could feel the pain in her shoulder and in her head, but they were distant things. Mostly, physically, she felt a sort of numb well-being. That shot of painkiller had really done its work. If only it wouldn’t hurt the baby....

Patty seemed to read her mind. “Claire. Don’t worry about it. The chances that one shot of painkiller did any damage to the baby are slim to none. You just don’t want to make a habit of them, that’s all.”

“
You mean that? It’s probably okay?”

“
Cross my heart.” Patty was gesturing her to walk ahead. Claire, reassured, floated out into the hallway.

Ella was there in the waiting room. Her face was very pale. “Oh, honey, Joe told me everything. Are you all right?”

“
I’m fine, Mother. Really.” Claire was looking around. “Where
is
Joe?”

“
He’ll be back later. He took Eaton Slade and went to Verna’s again to get your car.”

Claire bit her lip. The little balloon of painkiller-induced well-being that enclosed her sprung a small leak.

She was pretty sure she had said something about the baby just before she’d passed out in Verna’s living room. Could this be the beginning of exactly what she’d feared? Was Joe avoiding her now, because he couldn’t forgive her for the way she’d betrayed his trust in her?

But that was ridiculous. What she’d said had been hardly coherent. He might
suspect
the truth now, but he couldn’t know for sure until he talked to her. And Joe wasn’t the type to go jumping to conclusions without doing everything in his power to get the facts.

Unless he didn’t
want
to know the facts—like Claire herself, all those weeks after she first missed her period, when she
knew,
but didn’t want to face the truth.

Ella was watching her. “Claire? What’s the matter?”

“
Nothing. Just... wiped out, I guess.” She couldn’t resist pointing out, “And there was really no need to worry about the car now.”

Ella shrugged. “Joe thought there was.”

Claire had to suppress a surge of irritation at her mother. Ella said “Joe thought there was,” as if that were reason enough to do just about anything.

“
You’ve certainly changed your opinion of what Joe Tally thinks,” she said, and even through the haze of the painkiller, it sounded testy, though she had meant to keep her tone sensible and calm.

Ella nodded. “You’re right. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that, but you put me off earlier. So I’ll just wait until you’re feeling better. And right now, since we’ve taken
up so much of Patricia’s Saturday, let’s not waste any more of it.”

“
Fine. Let’s go home.” Claire sounded whiny and she knew it. She whined some more. “And not to your house. To the motel.”

“
Of course. Now do stop whining, dear.”

“
I’ve been shot twice and whacked on the head with a gun. I’ll whine if I feel like it.”

Ella, ever the genteel Pine Bluff aristocrat, nodded at Patty. “Thank you for all you’ve done, Patricia. Would it be acceptable if we took care of the insurance papers at a later time?”

Patty agreed that would be just fine.

Claire stuck to her resolve not to use the painkillers. As a result, the next few days were about the worst in her life. Her mother stayed right by her side. And Joe was in and out all the time. He was gentle and attentive—but, somehow, he seemed to have retreated from her.

The second day after her battle with Verna, when the acetaminophen Claire allowed herself seemed to do no good and pain was screaming through every nerve of her body, she shared sharp words with Ella, who just couldn’t understand why Claire had developed a sudden aversion to pain medicine. Ella insisted that Patricia must have something she could give Claire. Claire shouted she would have nothing—and that was that.

Joe stood in the background, watching, saying nothing, careful not to get involved in this war of wills between mother and daughter. But Claire felt him watching her; she felt that he
knew.

She longed to talk it over with him, to have it out in the open for good and all. But more than wanting to get it over with, she dreaded facing him at last and watching his trust
in her fade forever at the same time as he agreed to give the baby his name.

At night, she longed for his arms around her. But he never stayed to share her bed. Since Ella slept on the couch in the living room, Claire tried to convince herself he was only thinking of her mother’s sensibilities, as he had always done. But she didn’t really believe that.

The truth was, he was withdrawing from her. And if she had any integrity at all, she was going to have to turn him down when he offered to marry her. She would love him forever—but never, ever, would she trap him into a marriage he didn’t want.

Meanwhile, as Claire wrestled with the pain in her healing body and the deeper agony in her heart, Verna Higgins pled guilty to all the charges against her. Zack Ryder took over the job of defending her, because Claire called him herself and asked him to do it. Zack felt he could get Verna off on an insanity plea; he was also taking a ridiculously small fee, since Verna was penniless. Ella was already working to establish a fund for Verna with the help of the members of the community church.

In the hospital in Grass Valley, Alan Henson slept on. There was doubt now that he would ever wake up. And the rumor was that they would move him soon, to a more permanent nursing-care home in the Bay Area, nearer the home of his wife, Mariah.

Though time seemed to crawl, Claire’s strong body actually healed quickly. She was also relieved to find she experienced no vaginal bleeding, nor any symptoms that the baby was in danger. A week after she was shot, she went to the clinic for a full examination. Patty’s prognosis was that both she and her baby were coming along just fine.

It was a Tuesday, ten days after Claire knocked on Verna Higgins’s back door and found herself looking into the mouth of a gun, that Claire finally decided it was time to
send Ella back to her own house. She was ready to take complete control of her life once more.

She told her mother over breakfast. Ella was surprisingly agreeable—she was not averse, she said, to sleeping in her own bed again.

“
How about if I stay this last night? And tomorrow morning, I’ll move the things I’ve brought over here back to my house.”

“
That will be fine,” Claire allowed.

“
And, dear, now that you feel well enough, I’d like to talk to you about a few things—”

Claire sipped her coffee and sighed in resignation. She’d known this talk was coming. Her mother had been hinting at it for days. Might as well have it over with.

“
Okay, Mother.” Claire got up, refilled their coffee cups, and then sat back down across from Ella. “Tell me all about it.”

Ella smiled—a half-relieved, half-anxious sort of smile— and lightened her coffee with canned milk as she always did. When she set the can down, she plunged right in. “Well, first, I
would
like to know if something’s wrong between you and Joe.”

Claire glanced away, at the locust tree beyond the window over the sink and the shafts of golden morning sun that fell in on the sill. “Mother, I...”

Ella waited a few seconds and then urged, “Speak up, dear. You can tell me. What are you thinking?”

Claire looked her mother in the eye. “What I’m thinking is I’d rather not talk about Joe and me.”

“
Now, dear—”

“
I mean it. I don’t want to discuss it.”

Ella shook her head. “You’re just like your father sometimes, did you know? Always keeping things in, bearing the weight of the world on your shoulders, when there are people who would love to take a little of the burden themselves,
if only you’d let them. Your father had a heart attack, remember? And I’ll always believe it was from keeping everything in and bearing all the burdens by himself.”

Claire spoke gently. “Mother, Patty Severin says I’m in great shape. And I
have
let you take some of the burden. A
lot
of the burden, as a matter of fact. And you’ve been wonderful. I can’t thank you enough. But what’s between me and Joe is something I have to work out alone. Please try to understand.”