Promise Me A Rainbow (22 page)

It was still raining when they went outside, and she walked through the rain with him to the truck instead of letting him bring it around. He didn’t argue with her about that, either.

On the way back, the conversation lagged again. He didn’t mind. He was still patting himself on the back for getting her to agree to go out with him.

“Catherine . . .” he said when she was about to get out of the truck in front of her building. “Sunday—it’s a suit and tie thing.”

“I don’t have a suit and tie,” she said, teasing him.

“Borrow one,” he advised her.

He chuckled to himself several times on the way home. He liked this woman. She’d been badly hurt, but she was still funny and sweet and tough. And kind. And pretty. No, she was beautiful. And sexy. Very sexy.

He
liked
this woman.

He liked her well enough not to say anything about their going out together to any of his children.

She lifted her head to hear if the telephone was ringing. For some reason, the previous tenant had never felt the need to have a phone jack in the bedroom, and Catherine had never gotten around to doing it or to buying a cordless. Or, more truthfully, neither she nor the previous tenant could afford it.

The phone was quiet, and she gratefully closed her eyes. A wrong number, she decided, and not Joe calling with another acute attack of cold feet.

The telephone rang again when she was on the brink of going back to sleep, and this time it didn’t stop. She fumbled her way through the still dark apartment, mentally bracing herself to hear Joe’s voice when she answered it.

“Is this Sasha’s teacher?” a woman said.

“Sasha Higgins?”

“Yes. Sasha,” the woman said.

“Yes, I’m her teacher. Who is this?”

“You come over to the hospital now. Sasha’s wanting you.”

“What?” Catherine said. “What’s wrong with her?”

“You come over to the hospital, Teacher.”

“Which hospital?”

But the woman had hung up, and Catherine stood holding the receiver.

“What in the world?” she said under her breath. The largest hospital, New Hanover Memorial, was her first guess, and she quickly looked up the number.

“Do you have a patient named Sasha Higgins?”

“Middle initial, please.”

“I don’t remember her middle initial,” Catherine said, and she advised the woman of the circumstances.

“One moment, please.”

Catherine waited. If she located Sasha, there was still the problem of how she’d get there. The buses didn’t run on Sunday.

“Yes,” the receptionist said. “She’s been admitted to the obstetrical unit.”

“Thank you,” Catherine said.

The obstetrical unit. Sasha hadn’t been feeling well for days, but she had exhibited no significant symptoms, nothing the doctors at the prenatal clinic could treat. There were no treatments for being thirteen years old.

Catherine had no alternative but to call a taxi. She dressed hurriedly, then went downstairs to the foyer to wait. She stood where she could see the glass doors, wondering what Joe D’Amaro would be doing at this time of the morning. Sleeping in? Getting his children ready for church? Working? She sighed and pushed her thoughts of him aside. She had no reason to worry about canceling their plans yet, not until she knew what was wrong with Sasha.

“You’re up early,” Mrs. Donovan said as she came out to get her Sunday paper. She was wearing a red-flowered duster and red fuzzy slippers, and she had her hair wrapped in toilet tissue.

“Yes,” Catherine said, watching a cab drive slowly by. She walked toward the front doors, but it kept going.

“Is something wrong?”

“I hope not,” Catherine said vaguely, for once resenting Mrs. Donovan’s curiosity. She had never gotten over the feeling that Mrs. Donovan saw her work with young girls who were pregnant and unmarried as morally offensive.

She knew that Mrs. Donovan was waiting to find out whether or not anything of interest was happening, but she didn’t go on.

“Well, don’t you worry about anything here,” Mrs. Donovan said finally.

“No, I won’t.”

“If anyone comes to visit you today, I’ll tell them where you are—just where
are
you going, Catherine?”

The cab returned, and the driver had no compunction about blowing the horn at this early hour. Catherine smiled and gave Mrs. Donovan a wave, hurrying out the door without answering.

She had the cabdriver let her out at the front door of the hospital. Whatever was happening with Sasha, she was certain that it wasn’t good. Sasha’s grandmother wouldn’t have called her for anything trivial. She had a sudden mental image of little Sasha, alone and frightened in this place of shiny halls and intercom voices.

The obstetrical floor seemed quiet when she got off the elevator. She could smell coffee brewing somewhere, and no one slept in the waiting area. The nurses’ station, too, was empty. She walked in that direction.

“Catherine!” someone called as she passed an open door, and she leaned back to look in.

“Hello, Clarkson,” she said to the doctor sitting on the countertop next to the sink. “Been up all night?” He was the junior partner in the practice where she had had her infertility testing, and he looked a little ragged around the edges. He’d done some of her tests once, in her regular doctor’s absence. He was as irreverent as they came, but endearing somehow, and she liked him.

“Oh, hell, yes,” he said in disgust. “Who’s on call for the strays this weekend? Good, old Clarkson. There’s nothing I like any better than an unregistered OB with no prenatal care.”

“Those are the breaks,” she said. “Maybe you should have been a dermatologist.”

“And miss
this
?” he asked incredulously, encompassing his makeshift place of repose with a sweep of his hand. Unfortunately, it was the hand holding the cup of coffee. “Ah, crap—you been to the office lately?”

“No, why?”

“I thought you might have met the new doctor in the practice—nice Hindu boy, one of Jackson’s classmates at Duke. Man, I’m glad to get off the bottom of the totem pole. You realize we’ve now got all the holidays in three major religions to worry about? We’re thinking of taking in an atheist just to cover for the rest of us.”

Catherine tried to suppress a grin. “You know anything about Sasha Higgins?”

“I know everything about Sasha Higgins. Don’t you see this furrowed brow? She’s having contractions. She’s borderline hysterical. Her blood pressure’s way up, and her grandmother’s driving me and everybody else nuts. We’re trying to keep a lid on it, but she’ll probably drop her load before the day’s over—Sasha, not the grandmother.”

“I’d better go find her, then.”

“Hey!” he called after her. “How about doing me a favor?”

“What?”

“Do something with Grandmamma, will you? She keeps standing around with her arms folded like she’s going to turn somebody into a frog.”

Catherine smiled. “What do you want me to do, Clarkson?”

“I don’t know—settle her down, take her for a walk, lock her in a closet. I don’t want to have to deliver a baby with Grandmamma breathing down my neck.
Man
, she’s a tough old broad.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thanks, Catherine.”

“No promises. I think Grandmamma does pretty much as she pleases.”

“That’s what I figured,” he said morosely. “Hell, I
should
have been a dermatologist. Probably wouldn’t do any good, though. Any weirdness that stumbles into this hospital has got my name on it. Why do you think that is, Catherine?”

“I have no idea,” she said. “Probably something to do with the indifference of fate and the meaning of life.”

He grinned, and she walked on toward the nurses’ station. She caught a glimpse of an old woman standing off to the side. As she walked closer she recognized the gray felt hat and the big black pocketbook the woman had under her arm.

“You come down here, Teacher,” the old woman called. “Treasure’s coming. They can do all they want, but Treasure’s coming.”

“Where’s Sasha?” Catherine asked, taking Sasha’s grandmother by the hand.

“In that room down there. They doing something else to her. They won’t let me in. You go down there, Teacher. My Sasha’s scared in this place. You go down there and help Sasha.” She held Catherine’s hand for a moment, then let go.

Catherine nodded. The door to the room Mrs. Higgins indicated was slightly ajar, and she could hear Sasha crying inside. She pushed the door open. A very harassed nurse was trying to talk her into being hooked up to a fetal monitor.

“Come on, honey. It’s so we can hear your baby’s heartbeat . . .”

Sasha cried louder, still pushing at the equipment in the nurse’s hands.

Catherine came closer. “Sasha,” she said quietly.

“Ms. Holben!” Sasha wailed, reaching for her with both hands. Catherine put her arms around her, trying to keep her from coming out of the bed.

“What’s all this, Sasha?” Catherine said, stroking her hair. Someone—Grandmamma, probably—had braided it for her and the braids were coming all undone. “I’m surprised at you. You know what this equipment is for. I showed it to all of you. We put it on Beatrice . . .”

“Beatrice—ain’t—s
cared
!”

“Now what did I tell you about when you go to the hospital?”

Sasha cried louder.

“Sasha, are you listening to me? I said it was all right to be a little afraid because this is something you’ve never done before.”

Sasha’s voice went up a few octaves. “Maria said—”

“Are you going to listen to Maria or to me? If you think Maria knows more than I do, then you can just call her to come over here, and I’ll go back home.” Catherine knew her psychology professor would hardly approve of such blatant emotional blackmail, but she wasn’t above doing whatever it took to calm Sasha down.