Suddenly (31 page)

Cynthia was an easy sell. Paige, who got glowing reports from colleagues who had worked with her and felt the sheer energy level of the woman, liked her from the start. Likewise Angie, who was looking to spend more time at home. Ironically, after pushing to hire someone, Peter was hesitant.

“What bothers you?” Paige asked him.

He was looking everywhere but at her. “I don’t know.”

“Her credentials are impressive,” Paige coaxed. She didn’t think it was a power play on Peter’s part. He looked legitimately bewildered.

“There’s something about her,” he tried, sounding pained, then defeated. “No, maybe it has nothing to do with her.”

“She isn’t Mara.”

“No.” He cracked his knuckles. “She isn’t.”

Paige was grateful that he could finally admit it. She didn’t know what he remembered of the night he’d been drunk, but he had been less critical of Mara ever since.

“She isn’t Mara,” Paige repeated, “but she may be wonderful with our families. Why don’t we give her a try? You said it yourself, Peter. We have to move on.”

He met her gaze then and sighed. “You’re right. Let’s do it.”

The relief was immediate. Cynthia was a bundle of enthusiasm, received so well by the patient families she saw that by week’s end the group sent out a letter explaining that she would be taking over Mara’s practice.

Paige began to breathe more easily. With a fourth doctor to normalize things at the office, she could run back and forth to the hospital, where her services were snapped up. Every bed in the place was taken and then some. Doctors were in demand, hospital services stretched thin. Specialists had been brought in to treat many of the patients Paige had seen, but there was always something for her to do. And then there was Jill, who was lying in her cast listening to the fetal monitor, wondering if the baby would live and whether she wanted it to. With her father still ignoring her, her mother trying to hold her job and visit Jill on the sly without her father finding out, and her best friend still hospitalized in Hanover, she spent much of her time alone.

For that reason Paige was pleased to walk into her hospital room on the Saturday morning after the collapse and find Sara standing by her bedside. “What a nice surprise,” she said, putting an arm around Sara, then as quickly drawing back. “Don’t you
dare
tell me you thumbed in this time, Sara Dickinson.”

“No. I came with my father.”

“Ahhh. Better.” She felt a flicker of heat at the thought of Noah nearby.

“You didn’t tell me Jill was pregnant,” Sara said.

“I felt it was Jill’s decision to make as to whether she told or not.”

“She asked what the monitor was for,” Jill explained. “But I don’t mind. Everyone knows.”

Paige smiled her encouragement and asked softly, “Are you okay?” The floor nurse had caught her on her way past and told her that the baby had appeared distressed at one point during the night. For a short time, the doctors had considered doing a section. Then it had stabilized.

“I’m okay,” Jill said. “Just hurting. They won’t give me much for the pain.”

“They’re afraid it would affect the baby.”

“I’d think the baby would like it,” Sara said, and did something with her eyes to give the illusion of their spinning in opposite directions at once.

“How do you do that?” Paige asked, laughing, but Jill had laughed, too, so the answer was moot, and Sara was barreling on, looking slightly awed now.

“Jill said that the guys from Henderson Wheel were in to visit.”

Paige looked at Jill. “Yes?”

“Last night. After you left. Robbie Howe—he’s the drummer—is so cool. He sat with me for ten minutes. He said he’d have stayed longer but that they had to fly to New Jersey for a gig.”

“What did you talk about?” Sara asked.

“Music. The concert. Where else they’re playing. They never had anything happen to them like happened here last week, and this is their hometown. It’s like, too much. They feel awful. They’re going to keep coming back to see people. He said that if I needed anything—like if I had trouble with money for all this—I should let him know. They want to help.”

“So does my dad,” Sara said. “He’s downstairs talking about it with someone now. He thinks it would be a great if the kids at Mount Court could help some of the people who were hurt. I mean, we can’t do medical things, but we can visit, or help with homework.”

“How about baby-sit?” Paige asked, thinking of Mary O’Reilly. Her husband had suffered a broken back and would be hospitalized for months. Once he was tranferfed to Tucker, Mary would want to visit, but she had limited mobility herself. For now her in-laws were helping her out, but they both worked.

“We can baby-sit,” Sara said with confidence.

Baby-sitting was only the first of the things Paige thought of. The list was endless once she got going, and it included helping both those injured in the movie house and those who had relied on the injured for help. She passed on her ideas to Noah, who was determined to take the opportunity to teach his students a lesson in community cooperation. The time it took for Tucker General’s social services director to organize things allowed for fall sports to wind down.

Diligently, Paige prepared her team for the last few races of the season. Several were running better than ever—girls who had climbed Noah’s mountain and found a measure of self-confidence at the top. Sara was one; her times continued to improve, along with her comfort level, if telling friends of her relationship to Noah was any measure of that. Then again, it struck Paige that Sara might have felt comfortable telling friends that he was her father because the tide had turned. He wasn’t winning popularity contests yet, but he had earned a modicum of respect on campus.

As for Paige, when Noah stopped by to watch practice it was all she could do not to shake. She still thought him gorgeous. She had even come to like him. And then there were the dreams that she had all too often.

So she limited her interaction with him to discussion of the girls, which was, after all, the only business she had at Mount Court. And there was plenty to talk about, particularly where Julie Engel was concerned.

She was a problem. She skipped class and was put on detention; she left the dorm after hours and was put on detention; she smoked in her room and was put on detention. While the others had generally responded well to Noah’s tactics, she had not. Rather than being buoyed by the experience of Knife Edge, she felt humiliated.

“I couldn’t do it,” she complained when Paige raised the issue in an attempt to get to the heart of the problem.

“You
did
it. You made it across.”

“I was a total wimp.”

“But you got there. That’s what counts, Julie. You have to stop regarding the glass as half-empty. It’s half-full—and you can fill it the rest of the way if you want, but you have to
want
.”

Unfortunately the only thing Julie wanted related to the opposite sex. Of all the senior girls, she was the one most aware of herself as a woman, which, given the letter she had written to Peter, made Paige a mite uneasy.

Peter, fortunately, was aware of the problem and had started sending Cynthia to Mount Court when the infirmary called. What with the return of normalcy to the office, he, like Paige, was spending time each day at the hospital, helping with patients injured in the movie house collapse.

Given the negative thoughts she had had about him, Paige found his dedication to be redeeming. When she made a casual reference to it, though, he was far from casual. “It’s the least I can do, don’t you think? Okay, so it wasn’t a fire, but Jamie Cox had no business packing people into the movie house. I knew it just as well as Mara did, but I was too cowardly to pick up the fight where she left off. If I had, the collapse might never have happened.”

Paige felt duly chastised. “I’m as guilty as you. I did nothing either.”

“Yeah, but look what else you’re doing. You’ve taken Mara’s child. That’s a major obligation.”

“No obligation,” Paige replied. “An obligation is something negative. Sami isn’t at all.”

“She’s work and responsibility.”

“But not negative. And only temporary.”

Paige kept reminding herself of that. Weekly visits from the adoption agency’s Joan Felix helped, as did biweekly sessions with the agency’s other parents. Those discussions focused on the ups and downs of adoption in general and interracial adoption in particular, and while those ups and downs didn’t faze Paige in the least, the sessions were a touchstone to reality. Without them she might have pretended that Sami would be forever hers.

The little girl was a treasure, a blossoming little person to wake up to in the mornings, to stop home at noontime to see, and to have supper with at night. As a pediatrician, Paige had known about the miracle of a child’s development, but seeing it in other people’s children was one thing, seeing it in her own another. Each day Sami did something new, something that gave Paige a special pride. The child was thriving, putting on weight, catching up with her age with astonishing speed. Paige was sure that when she hit school she would be the smartest little girl in the class.

The problem of hiring a baby-sitter haunted her. She knew she should be looking but kept putting it off. As guilty as she felt imposing so deeply on Nonny’s life, the fact was that she didn’t trust anyone else with Sami as she trusted her grandmother—who had, for all practical purposes, moved in with her. She had taken over the second upstairs bedroom and had brought enough things from her house, including a red-and-white rag rug, a huge heart comforter, and a white wicker rocker, to make the room her own.

They were a family—Nonny, Sami, and Paige. They went out together driving, shopping, and visiting, and Paige loved every novel minute of it. Those times when she felt guilty having such fun, she simply reminded herself that it was temporary and the guilt eased. Likewise when Noah invited the three of them out to dinner. He was passing through Tucker, like Sami and Nonny. The transiency made it safe.

So different was this makeshift life from the one Paige knew to be permanent, and so shielded did she feel from reality, that when the middle of November arrived, and with it her birthday, she decided to break with tradition. Normally she filled the day with every commitment she could find for the purpose of arriving home at night too tired to do anything but fall into bed—certainly too tired to think—and by the time she awoke the next morning the dreadful day was gone.

This year she felt braver.

P
AIGE’S BIRTHDAY FELL ON A THURSDAY. SHE
arranged to take the day off from work, and since the cross-country season had ended the weekend before, there was no practice to interrupt a lazy day. She planned to spend it at home with Nonny and Sami.

“I see it in patients sometimes,” Mara had written in a letter that had spoken directly to Paige, “those few lucky families who know the pleasure of being together for no other reason than being together. It takes a meshing. It takes the acceptance of one person by another, differences and all. It takes the kind of love that doesn’t demand, simply is.”

Paige was regarding Nonny and Sami as her family in many of those same regards. In the wake of the movie house tragedy, she was grateful they were there.

She wanted to have a big breakfast at home, then read the paper. She wanted to bundle everyone up against the nippy air, take a walk into town, and put Sami in the kiddie swing in the park by the church. She wanted to go back home, listen to music and knit while Sami napped, then take her and Nonny across the state line to Hanover for a birthday dinner at the inn.

As it happened, she had barely finished devouring the last of Nonny’s Belgian waffles when the first of the year’s snow started to fall. By the time she had read the newspaper cover to cover the flakes were coming more steadily. She took Sami from the playpen and joined Nonny at the picture window that looked out from the kitchen onto the backyard.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Nonny asked.

“It is. Look, Sami. Snow.” To Nonny she said, “It’s her first one. A milestone.”

Sami had her little hand flat on the window.

“Can you say snow?” Paige urged. When no sound was forthcoming, she said, “How about Nonny? Non-ny. Come on, give it a try. Non-ny. No? Then try Ma-ma. Mmma. Mmma.”

Nonny arched a brow her way.

“It’s generic,” Paige assured her.

“It doesn’t have to be. You could adopt her.”

“Nah. She needs a full-time mother.”

“Between you and me, she has one, and before you know it she’ll be going off to school, and then you won’t even need me. You could do what Angie has done all these years, work while the child is in school and be done in time to pick her up. What do you think Mara was planning?”

“Exactly that,” Paige conceded, “but I’m not Mara. She had a
thing
for being a mother. She was obsessed with that kind of relationship.” The deep connect, she had called it. “I don’t have quite that need.”

“You’re more independent?”

“Self-reliant.”

“Poppycock. You need family just like the rest of us.”

“Yes, but not as
immediately
as Mara did. Not as intimately. I was perfectly satisfied with my life as it was before Mara died.”

“But you love having Sami.”

“Um-hmmm. It makes me feel good knowing that I can give her love while the agency searches for permanent parents.”

“What if they don’t find any?”

“They will. It’s just a matter of time.”

“And in the meanwhile you’re becoming more attached to her. You can’t fool me, Paige. I see you creeping up to her room every night long after she’s asleep.”

“I’m checking to make sure she’s all right.”

“You’re standing over her crib for fifteen, twenty minutes sometimes. Face it, sweetheart, you’re hooked.”

Paige brought Sami’s hand to her mouth. She kissed it, then shifted the small fingers to her chin. “Mara wrote about being a foster mother in some of her letters. She said that there was always a problem with separation, but that the satisfaction of helping a child made it worth the pain. I’ve helped Sami. I’ve given her a good start here. I feel the satisfaction of that.”

“And the pain? Will you feel that, too?”

“When the time comes.”

Nonny didn’t say more, and Paige didn’t invite it. This was her birthday, a difficult enough day on its own. She wanted to keep it as upbeat as possible.

So she played with Sami, then took her upstairs and bathed and dressed her, but when she would have gone out for a walk, the snow was falling harder than ever.

Nonny joined her at the front window. “It’s mounting up.”

“Mmm. What would you say, two inches?”

“Three. You’re not wheeling a carriage far in that.”

“No. I wish we had a sled. Maybe I can put her in the Snugli and cover her with my parka.”

“She won’t be able to see anything.”

“I’ll turn it around so that she looks out. Better still, why don’t we get in the car and go to Hanover now. The driving can’t be that bad.”

The look Nonny gave her said that it certainly could be. Then the look turned sad. “I know what you’re doing, Paige. It’s the same thing you’ve been doing for years and years, modified, perhaps, but the basic strategy is the same. If you arrange to be out of the house, you won’t be here when the phone doesn’t ring.” She looked pained. “They won’t call, Paige. They might call in two weeks, or five weeks, but they aren’t attuned to remembering your birthday. It’s as simple as that.”

Paige stared out at the snow. “I’ve never been able to understand it. If they had eight kids, okay. Dates can be confused. But I’m their only child. My mother gave birth once in her life, just once. Didn’t that day mean anything to her?”

“It did. Just not the same thing it would have meant to me, or to you, if you’d been the one to give birth.”

“I’d be anticipating the day for weeks. I’d be planning a party. I’d be thinking of all the things my child most wanted to do, and I’d have them planned without even having to ask her.”

“That’s because you’re you. But Chloe isn’t you, and she’s not going to change.”

Paige thought about that, then sent Nonny a small smile and a shrug.

“Still you hope?” Nonny said.

Paige’s smile turned self-mocking. “Maybe one year, by some quirk of fate, it’ll just hit them.” She studied the snow. “But you’re right. We shouldn’t go out driving in this. How about I build a fire and we’ll play Scrabble?” That demanded concentration. It would take her mind off the phone.

Nonny scowled. “You always win.”

“I’ll let you make a blank out of one letter per turn.”

Nonny liked that idea. So did Sami, who had great fun poking at the letter tiles. Paige still won the game, but by that time Nonny was thinking about lunch and after lunch Sami went in for a nap and Nonny dozed off on the living room sofa.

Planting herself before the fire and out of sight of the phone, Paige picked up her knitting. She was finishing the afghan Mara had started for Sami. It seemed the perfect thing for Sami to bond with and then take with her to her next life. A gift from Mara. Via Paige.

Kitty wandered into the room. She had spent the morning as she always did, roaming the house, perching on one windowsill or another, clicking her teeth at anything that looked as if it might be a bird. Now she sat at Paige’s feet and stared at the yarn as it came out of the skein. Every few minutes she pounced, took the yarn in her mouth, and shook it. When Paige gave a tug she released her hold, sat back, and stared at the new yarn coming out.

Paige set aside the knitting and scooped her up. She was getting bigger. Her fur was longer now and softer. Paige enjoyed the feel of her at the foot of her bed each night. There was something nice about reaching down to touch her and about the purr that started up when she did it.

“You going to get rid of her, too?” Nonny asked. Her eyes were open, though other than that she hadn’t moved.

Paige felt the blunt edge of the question, particularly the “too.” “It’s not a question of ‘getting rid’ of her. It’s a question of finding her a proper home.”

“Are you still looking?”

“Theoretically. But I keep forgetting to ask. She demands so little.”

“Are you willing to keep her?”

Paige rubbed kitty’s neck. Kitty closed her eyes and raised her chin for more, which Paige promptly gave. “I may do that by default. She’s here. It may be more of an effort to find her a home than to keep her.” Hearing her own words, she looked at Nonny. “I know what you’re thinking, but the same is
not
true about Sami. You don’t keep children by default. Sami is a human being. She’s a responsibility that gets bigger the bigger she gets.”

Nonny didn’t say anything. Nor did she look away.

“I’m a full-time pediatrician,” Paige protested.

“Not full-time, now that you’ve hired a fourth.”

“Then three-quarters time. Plus Jill. Plus helping organize the Mount Court kids to help around Tucker,” which she felt was a wonderfully worthy cause. “Plus being on call once the mountain opens for skiing. Plus reading. Plus knitting. My life is still demanding, Nonny. Children aren’t in my game plan. Not for a while, at least.” When Nonny simply lay there staring at her, she set kitty down. “I know what you’re thinking, but if the biological clock runs out, it runs out. I won’t rush into something that I’m not ready to do.”

Nonny neither moved nor spoke.

Paige sighed. “Look, I know I’m not giving you the answers you want, and I’m sorry to be imposing on you with Sami this way—”

“Don’t use that word!” Nonny hollered, sitting up with a speed Paige wouldn’t have expected from a woman her age.

“But it
is
an imposition.”

“Damn it, Paige, that’s the trouble with you! You’re so smart when it comes to most things, but when it comes to parenthood you’re way off the mark.” She had pushed her small self from the sofa and begun to pace. “Not that it’s your fault. Chloe and Paul made you feel like an unwanted limb. Growing up, you were good as gold for me, because you didn’t want to be a burden, and you’re still apologizing every time you ask me to do something. Still apologizing.”

She stopped in front of Paige with her hands on her hips. “For God’s
sake
, Paige, people who love people want to do things for them. Why haven’t you
learned
that? Have I ever complained? Have I ever said I’d rather be playing bridge? My coming to baby-sit for Sami isn’t a task. It’s a privilege. It’s a joy. Yes, it’s work, but a labor of love. No obligation. No onerous task. No grotesque plague on my time.
I want to baby-sit
. And if you were truthful with yourself, you’d admit that you want to keep Sami. You adore her. She adores you. You have ample resources to raise her in comfort. But you’re frightened of making the commitment, because you think of it as something that will smother. You mother everyone else’s children, but that doesn’t count, because you can leave them all behind at the end of the day. Well, let me tell you,” she scolded as Nonny rarely did, “you leave behind the pleasure, too. No pain, no gain, as they say. You come home to an empty house, which, by the way, will seem twice as empty now that you’re used to having Sami around.”

She started to turn away but turned right back. “And I’ll tell you something else. That empty house will seem
three
times as empty when you’re fifty, and
four
times as empty when you’re sixty, and by then it will be too late. I know.” Turning on her heel, she left the room.

Paige waited for her to come back. After a bit, she went into the kitchen and made a pot of fresh mango tea, thinking that the smell of it steeping might lure Nonny down. When it didn’t, she poured herself a cup.

The snow continued to fall. Paige watched it, sipping her tea, thinking that everything Nonny said made sense but that old habits died hard. It was one thing to tell herself not to feel that she was imposing, quite another not to feel it. She had always tried to be self-sufficient, precisely to avoid that dilemma.

As for Sami, Paige didn’t know. She just didn’t know. She supposed she had the time to be a mother. She supposed she had the intelligence and the resources to be one. And the love. Yes, she had that. She did love Sami. But it was such a responsibility. More than doctoring or foster parenting. Much more. She had always assumed she wasn’t cut out for motherhood, which was one of the reasons why she had become a doctor.

Or had she become a doctor to give her an out when the weight of the responsibility loomed?

The phone hadn’t rung. It would be nighttime in Siena. If it didn’t ring very soon, it wouldn’t ring at all.

She finished her tea, rinsed the cup, and set it on the drainer. Then she looked at the snow again and felt a sudden, dire need to be in it. After putting on her insulated running gear, a Gortex parka, a wool hat, and mittens, she left a note on the kitchen table for Nonny and set off.

The streets had been plowed but were deserted. She had them to herself, running at the side or the middle, as went her whim. It wasn’t until she had reached the center of Tucker, rounded the hospital block, and started back down Main Street that she encountered a moving vehicle. It was Norman Fitch.

“Nasty day to be out,” he called out his window.

“Actually,” she breathed, “it feels great.”

“Snow’s not stopping for a while. We’re expecting up to a foot. You’d best be heading home. Be dark before long.”

But Paige wasn’t heading home yet. She had hit her stride and was feeling too good to stop. If her parents chose to call so late, it would be their loss.

She made a tour of the streets behind the center, running up one and down another. The snow was mounting underfoot and her sneakers were getting wet, yet still she ran on. She headed north out of town, where the road was broad and beautiful, rolling through stands of trees whose arms held the snow in lieu of leaves.

In time she began to feel a chill, but her feet beat a rhythmic tattoo on the snow, and her will wasn’t yielding to either cold, wetness, or encroaching dusk.

By the time she turned in under Mount Court’s wrought-iron arch, she was starting to tremble. That was when she felt a qualm, but it was too late to turn back. She couldn’t make it home. She didn’t want to.

Since the drive had been first cleared, another several inches had mounted up. She plodded through them, tired now and laboring, but determined. She passed the academic buildings, the administration building, the library, and the first of the dorms. She turned onto the path between the second and third and, in the distance, saw the completed frame of the new alumni house, but she ran on to the Head’s house and struggled up the low steps. Stopping at last, panting, she rang the bell.