Suddenly (3 page)

“This has to be about Tanya John. She was depressed about that.”

“Clinically depressed? Enough to do herself harm?” Paige couldn’t imagine it. “Besides, her baby was coming. She had so much to look forward to.” Paige was going to have to call the adoption agency with the news, but she figured it could wait until the funeral was done.

“Maybe the adoption fell through.”

“No. She would have told me if it had, and she didn’t say a word.” Certainly not the morning before, which was the last time Paige had seen her. “When did you see her last?” she asked Peter.

“Yesterday afternoon around, say, four-thirty. We were on the last batch of appointments. She asked me to cover so she could leave early.”

“Did she say where she was going?”

“No.”

“Was she upset?”

“She was distracted. Very distracted, come to think of it. But nicely so. She’s usually so
strident.
”

Paige had to smile at the helpless way he said it. But he was right. If Mara wasn’t fighting one war, she was fighting another. She was an advocate for those who couldn’t speak for themselves. Now, suddenly, the advocate was silent.

Paige bowed her head. “I have to make calls, Peter. How soon can you be here?”

“Give me an hour.”

She swept a handful of hair from her face and looked up. “An hour’s too long. Angie needs help, and you’re five minutes away. Look, I know that I’ve interrupted something”—the mumbling in the background had been female, no doubt Lacey, Peter’s latest love—“but we need you. The group works because we all care about the practice, and the practice is at stake. Our patients depend on us. We owe it to them to minimize the trauma of Mara’s death.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” he snapped, and hung up before Paige could press further.

P
AIGE PLANNED THE FUNERAL FOR FRIDAY, TWO
days after Mara’s body was found, time enough to allow for the O’Neills’ journey east and her own acceptance of Mara’s death. But the latter didn’t even begin to happen. Not only did Paige feel guilty making funeral plans, as though she were rushing Mara into her grave, but she continued to resist the idea that the woman she had known to be a fighter had taken her own life.

She was haunted by the possibility that Mara’s death had been a rash and impulsive thing. Tanya John’s defection was only the latest of the little disappointments Mara seemed always to be suffering. In a single weak moment, a combination of them may have overwhelmed her until sanity was lost.

Paige couldn’t begin to imagine Mara’s pain, if that were true. All she could think was that the tragedy might have been prevented if she had been more attentive, more understanding, or more perceptive a friend.

Her doubts were echoed, it seemed, by every adult passing through the office. They wanted to know whether anyone had seen Mara’s death coming, and while Paige knew that their questions reflected their own fears regarding the mental health of their children, spouses, or friends, she wallowed in guilt.

It didn’t help when the coroner’s report came through. “She was full of Valium,” Paige related, stunned.

“Valium,” Angie repeated dumbly.

“She
overdosed?
” Peter asked.

Paige was thinking the same word, but that wasn’t one the coroner had used. “He said that the carbon monoxide did the killing, but that there was easily enough Valium in her body to have clouded her thought.”

“Which means,” Angie concluded in the concise way she had of going straight to the heart of the matter, “that we’ll never know for sure whether she accidentally passed out at the wheel or deliberately sat there until she lost consciousness.”

Paige was bewildered. “I didn’t even know she took the stuff. And I was supposed to be her closest friend.”

“
None
of us knew she took it,” Angie argued. “She was vehemently against drug taking. Of the four of us, she issued the fewest prescriptions. I can’t begin to count the number of discussions we’ve had on the subject, right here in this room.”

From the start of their association ten years before, Paige’s office had been the site of the weekly meetings at which they discussed new or problem patients, developments in the field, and office policy. Hers was no different from any of the other three offices, with the same light oak furniture, mauve-and-moss decor, and soft artwork on the walls, but Paige had been the one to put the group together and was their anchor. The others simply and naturally gravitated to her office.

She was feeling like a pretty poor anchor just then. Valium. She still couldn’t believe it. “People take Valium when they are extremely nervous or upset. I had no idea Mara was either. She has always been passionate about things, but passionate doesn’t mean nervous or upset. When I saw her last, she was racing off to fight the lab for having messed up the tests on the Fiske boy.” She tried to remember the details of that encounter, but they had seemed insignificant at the time. “I could have stopped her. I could have talked with her, maybe calmed her down some, but I didn’t try. I saw how tired she was—” She looked quickly up at the others. “That could have been the Valium. It didn’t occur to me that it was anything but too much work and a lack of sleep. At the time, I didn’t want to say anything that might get her going more than she already was. Cowardly of me, huh?”

“That was early in the morning,” Angie consoled. “She may have been fine then.”

“And reached overload in a matter of hours?” Paige shook her head. “If she was popping pills, things must have been wrong for a while. Why didn’t I see it? Where was my mind?”

“It was on your own practice,” Peter said, “where it had to be.”

“But she was in need.”

“Mara was always in need,” he argued. “She was always going on about one thing or another. You weren’t her keeper.”

“I was her friend. So were you.” Paige recalled dozens of times he and Mara had been together. Not only were they avid cross-country skiers, but they shared a fascination with photography. “Aren’t you asking yourself these same questions?” If so, he was remarkably calm. “You said that you saw her late in the day and that she was distracted. Was she tired then, too?”

“She looked like hell. I told her so.”

“Peter.”

“That was the kind of relationship we had, and she
did
look like hell, like she couldn’t be bothered putting on makeup or anything. But what I said didn’t bother her. I told you, her mind was somewhere else. I didn’t know where.”

“Did you ask?” Angie prodded.

He grew defensive. “It wasn’t my business. She was in a hurry. When did
you
see her last?”

“Midday.” She turned to Paige. “I stopped her in the hall to ask about the Barnes case. She’s been fighting to clear coverage of an MRI with the insurance company, and they’ve been giving her a hard time. How was she? Tired, but not necessarily distracted. She knew just what I was talking about and gave me a perfectly good answer, and there was spirit in it, just not as much as usual. It was like she was running on fumes.”

“Great analogy, Angie,” Peter said.

Paige pictured Mara’s garage, willed down the sick feeling that came with the image, and forced her mind on. She had a desperate need to reconstruct Mara’s last day on the chance that might offer a clue. “Okay. Each of us saw her at different times. When I saw her in the morning she was fired up; when Angie saw her midday she was tired; when Peter saw her late in the afternoon she was distracted.” She paused. “Did either of you sense depression?”

“Not me,” said Peter.

Angie grappled with that one. “No. Not depression. I’m sure it was fatigue.” She looked at Paige sadly. “When she turned away and went into her office, I let her go. There were patients to see. We were booked solid for the afternoon.”

She was rationalizing. Paige knew they were all doing it, making excuses for their lack of insight, and it was fine up to a point. If Mara’s death was accidental, they were in the clear. If not, well, that was something else.

The bitch of it was they would never know.

While Peter and Angie picked up the slack at the office, Paige worked out the details of the funeral. She gave intent thought to every choice, desperate to do the things Mara would have wanted for reasons that went beyond love and respect. The extra effort she gave was by way of apology for not having been a better friend.

She talked with the priest about what he would say. She arranged for a local a cappella group to sing. She picked out a simple casket. She wrote an eloquent obituary.

She also chose the clothes in which Mara would be buried. In that this entailed going through Mara’s things, it was a more painful task than the others. Mara’s house was Mara through and through. Being there was to feel her presence and doubt once again that she was gone. Paige found herself searching for clues—a farewell note Mara might have left on the mantel, a cry for help tacked to the cluttered kitchen chalk board, a plea for salvation scrawled on the bathroom mirror—but the only things that could be remotely interpreted to reflect undue upset were the Valium in the medicine chest and the messiness of the house. And it was messy. If Paige had been the paranoid type, she might have suspected that someone had rifled the place. Then again, of Mara’s strengths, housekeeping had never been one. Paige neatened as she went, on the chance—in the hope—that Mara’s family might want to see her home.

The O’Neills arrived on Thursday. Paige had met them only once before, in their home in Eugene, at the tail end of a trip that had taken Paige and Mara so close to Eugene that Mara hadn’t been able to find a good reason not to stop—not that she hadn’t tried. Her family was unpleasant, she said. Her family was parochial, she said. Her family was large and opinionated and xenophobic, she said.

Paige hadn’t found them to be half-bad, though, granted, her perspective was different from Mara’s. Having been an only child, she liked the idea of having six brothers, their wives, and a slew of nieces and nephews, and compared with her own parents, who never stayed put for long, the fierce rootedness of the O’Neills was rather nice. Paige decided that they were simply old-fashioned, hardworking, devoutly religious people who couldn’t for the life of them, understand what Mara was doing.

That had been true when Mara was a child with an insatiable curiosity, a soft spot for the wounded, and a fascination with social causes. It was true when she decided to go to college and, faced with her parents’ refusal to pay, raised every cent herself, and it was true again with medical school.

It was still true. The O’Neills never understood why Mara had settled in Vermont. Even now, viewing their surroundings from the security of Paige’s car during the drive from the airport, one would have thought they were in a foreign country, and a hostile one at that.

Only five of them had come, Mara’s parents and three of her brothers. Paige told herself that financial constraints kept the others at home. She hoped Mara believed it.

They pulled up to the funeral home in the same silence with which they’d made most of the drive. After guiding them inside, Paige left them alone to say their good-byes. Back on the front steps, she tried to remember the last time Mara had mentioned her family, but she couldn’t. It was painfully sad. True, Paige didn’t see her own parents often, but she regularly saw her grandmother, who lived in West Winter, a mere forty minutes away. Nonny was spritely and independent. She had been mother and father rolled into one when Paige had been young and was more than enough family for Paige now. Paige adored her.

“She looks pretty,” came the tight voice of Mara’s father. A tall, stocky man, he stood with his hands in the pockets of tired suit pants, and iron-hard eyes on the street. “Whoever set her out did a fine job.”

“She always looked pretty,” Paige said in defense of Mara. “Pale, sometimes. Hassled, sometimes. But pretty.” Unable to leave it at that, she spoke with a certain urgency. “She was happy, Mr. O’Neill. She had a full life here.”

“That why she killed herself?”

“We don’t know she did. It may as well have been an accident as suicide.”

He grunted. “Same difference.” He stared straight ahead. “Not that it matters. She was lost to us long time ago. This never would’ve happened if she’d done what we said. She’d be alive if she’d stayed back home.”

“But then she wouldn’t have been a doctor,” Paige said, because much as she realized that the man was in pain, she couldn’t let his declaration stand. “She was a wonderful pediatrician. She loved children, and they loved her. She fought for them. She fought for their parents. They’ll all be here tomorrow. You’ll see.”

He looked at her for the first time. “Were you the one told her to go to medical school?”

“Oh, no. She wanted that long before I did.”

“But you got her up here.”

“She got herself up here. All I did was tell her about the opportunity.”

He grunted and stared at the street again. After a minute he said, “You look like her, y’know. Maybe that was why she liked you. Same dark hair, same size, you could be sisters. Are you married?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been?”

“No.”

“Have you ever had children?”

“No.”

“Then you’re missing as much in life as she was. She tried with that fellow Daniel, but he couldn’t take his wife being gone all the time, don’t know what man could, and then when she didn’t get pregnant, well, what good’s woman like that?”

Paige was beginning to get a drift of what had driven Mara from Eugene. “Mara wasn’t to blame for Daniel’s problems. He had a drug habit well before she met him. She thought she could help, but it just didn’t work. Same with getting pregnant. Maybe if they’d had more time—”

“Time wouldn’t have mattered. It was the abortion that did it.”

“Abortion?” Paige knew nothing about an abortion.

“She didn’t tell you? I can understand why. It isn’t every girl who gets pregnant when she’s sixteen and then runs off to get rid of the child before her parents have a say in the matter. What she did was murder. Her punishment was not being able to get pregnant again.” He made a sputtering sound. “Sad thing is, having babies would have been her salvation. If she’d stayed back home and got married and had kids, she’d have been alive today and we wouldn’t have had to spend half our savings flying to her funeral.”

At that moment Paige wished they hadn’t come. She wished she had never spoken with Thomas O’Neill. Mostly she wished she had never learned about the abortion. It wasn’t that she condemned Mara for it—she could understand the fear a sixteen-year-old must have felt in as intolerant a house as hers—but she wished Mara had told her, herself.

Paige had thought they were best of friends, yet in all the talks they had had about Mara’s marriage and its lack of children, about the foster children she had taken in over the years, and the child she would have adopted had she lived, never once had she mentioned an abortion. Nor had she mentioned it in any one of the many,
many
discussions they had had on the issue as it related to the teenage girls in their care.

Paige was heartbroken to think that there were important things she didn’t know about someone she had called a close friend.

Friday morning dawned warm and gray, the air heavy as though with Mara’s secrets. Paige found some solace in the fact that the church was packed to overflowing. If ever there was proof of the number of lives Mara had touched and the esteem in which she was held, this was it. Particularly in light of the presence of the family that had never recognized her achievements, Paige felt vindicated on Mara’s behalf.

But that small, victorious kernel came and went quickly, buried as deeply in the grief of the day as Mara in the dark hole in the ground on the hillside overlooking town, and before Paige could quite catch her breath, the cemetery was left behind, the lunch at the Tucker Inn for all who cared to come was consumed, and the O’Neills of Eugene, Oregon, were delivered to the airport.