Suddenly (4 page)

Paige returned to Mara’s house, a Victorian with high ceilings, a winding staircase, and a wraparound porch. She wandered from room to room, thinking that Mara had loved lighting the narrow fireplace, putting a Christmas tree in the parlor window, having lemonade on the back porch on a warm summer night. The O’Neills had told Paige to sell the house and give the proceeds to charity, and she planned to do that, but not yet. She couldn’t pack up and dispose of Mara’s life in a day. She needed time to grieve. She needed time to get used to Mara’s absence. She needed time to say good-bye.

She also needed time to find a buyer who would love the place as Mara had. She owed Mara that.

She left the kitchen through a bowed screen door that slapped shut behind her and sank onto the back porch swing, watching the birds dart from tree to tree and feeder to feeder. There were five feeders that she could see. She suspected others were hidden in the trees. Mara had enjoyed nothing more than to sit on that very swing, holding whatever child was in her custody at the moment, whispering tidbits about each bird that flew by.

I’ll feed them for you, Paige promised. I’ll make sure that whoever buys the house feeds them. They won’t be abandoned. It’s the least I can do.

Mara would have taken Paige’s kitty, no doubt about it. She had loved wild things, weak things, little things. And Paige? Paige wasn’t as adventurous. She loved needy things, too, but in a more controlled environment. She thrived on constancy, order, and predictability. Change unsettled her.

Leaving the swing, she wandered into the yard. The birds flew away. She stood very still, held her breath, and waited, but they didn’t return. She was very much alone.

I’ll miss you, Mara, she thought, and started back toward the house, feeling empty and old. The house suddenly seemed it, too. It needed a painting. I’ll have it done. The door needed new screening. Easy enough. A shutter had to be replaced by the upper left bedroom window. No sweat. And by the upper right bedroom—the upper right bedroom—Oh, God…

The doorbell rang, distant but distinct. Grateful for the reprieve, Paige returned to the house. She guessed that a friend might have seen her car and stopped, or that one of the townsfolk who hadn’t made the funeral wanted to offer condolences.

The wavy glass panel of the front door revealed a shape that was bulky but not tall. She opened the door to find that the shape wasn’t a single body at all, but a woman holding a child. Neither were locals; she had never seen them before.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“I’m looking for Mara O’Neill,” the woman said worriedly. “I’ve been trying to reach her. Are you a friend?”

Paige nodded.

“She was supposed to meet me in Boston earlier today,” the woman hurried on, “but we must have crossed signals. I’ve been stopping along the highway at intervals to call, but she doesn’t answer her phone.”

“No,” Paige said, studying the woman. She was middle-aged and Caucasian, clearly not the biological mother of the child, who had skin the color of pecans and the largest, most soulful eyes Paige had ever seen. She assumed the two were part of the adoption network with which Mara had become involved.

“Is Mara here?” the woman asked.

Paige swallowed. “No.”

“Oh, dear. Do you know where she is or how soon she’ll be back? This is dreadful. We had everything arranged. She was so excited.”

The child was looking at Paige, who found she couldn’t look away. It was a little girl. Her size said she wasn’t yet a year old, but the look in her eyes said she was older.

Paige had seen that look before, in a photograph Mara had shown her. Her heart skipped a beat, rendering the hand that touched the child’s cheek unsteady. “How do you know Mara?” she asked the woman.

“I’m with the adoption agency. Among other things, it’s my job to be on hand at the airport when adoptive children arrive from other countries. This little one came from a tiny town a distance from Calcutta. She had an escort from the agency in Bombay. Poor thing has been at it for better than three days. Mara must have mistaken the day or the time. Is the office closed? The answering service is taking her calls.”

“Sameera,” Paige breathed.
Mara’s baby.
“But I thought she wasn’t coming for weeks!” She reached for the child.

“We often advise our parents not to speak of dates. Political unrest can delay things.”

Paige thought of that upper right bedroom with its bright yellow walls and the large, lopsided navy stars that had just now been visible from the yard. Her eyes filled with tears as she cradled the child. “Sami.”

The child didn’t make a sound. Paige was the one who cried softly, mourning for the mother Mara would have been and the happiness she would have known. The child’s arrival made Mara’s death that much more of a mystery. Mara wouldn’t commit suicide with Sami three days away.

Still hugging the child, Paige wiped her eyes on her arm. It was a minute before she was composed enough to look at the woman and say, “Mara died Wednesday. We buried her this morning.”

The woman gasped. “Died?”

“A terrible accident.”

“
Died?
Oh, my.” She paused. “Poor Mara. She waited so long for this child. And Sameera—she’s come so far.”

“That’s all right,” Paige said with an odd calm. “I’ll keep her.” It made sense, the one thing she could do to make up for all she hadn’t done before. “My name is Paige Pfeiffer. I was Mara’s best friend, a pediatrician also. We practiced together. I was interviewed as a character reference during her home study. If you check your files, you’ll see that my name is listed as the one to call in case of emergency, which is pretty much what you’ve done.” She looked down at the child. The little girl’s thin legs straddled her waist, tiny fingers clutched her sweater. Her head lay on Paige’s chest, eyes wide and frightened. She felt light as a feather, but warm in a pleasant sort of way.

I’ll take care of her for you, Mara. I can do that.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way,” the woman said quickly.

“Why not?”

“Because there are rules, procedures, red tape.” The words ran together. The woman was clearly flustered. “International adoptions are complicated. Mara worked her way through it, and even then she was going to have to wait another six months for the adoption to be final. In the meantime, technically, Sameera is in the agency’s care. I can’t leave her here.”

“But where else can she go?”

“I don’t know. Nothing like this has ever happened before. I guess she’ll have to come home with me until we decide what to do.”

“You can’t send her back to India.”

“No. We’ll have to look for another adoptive family.”

“And in the meantime she’ll be put into foster care. Why can’t I be it?”

“Because you haven’t been approved.”

“But I’m a pediatrician. I love kids. I know how to handle them. I own a house and earn good money. I’m a totally reputable person, and if you don’t want to take my word for it, ask anyone in town.”

“Unfortunately, that takes time.” She reached for Sami, but Paige wasn’t giving her up so fast.

“I want her,” she said, “which puts me up at the top of the list. I want to take her home with me now, and keep her until a better home is found, but you won’t find a better home than mine, I can promise you that.” Mara would be
so pleased.
“There has to be a way I can keep her.”

The woman looked pulled in every which direction. “There is, I suppose. Assuming the head of the agency agrees, we could do a quick foster care home study.”

“Do it.” The impulsiveness was pure Mara, and it felt good.

“Now?”

“If that’s what’s necessary for me to keep her tonight. She needs love. I can give her that. I can give her an instant, stable environment. It makes perfect sense.”

The woman from the adoption agency couldn’t argue with that. After making several calls and getting a preliminary okay, she put Paige through an initial battery of questions. They were basic identity ones, just a start in the study the woman promised, and all the while Paige was answering, she was toting Sami up and down the stairs on her hip, transferring baby supplies from the nursery to her car. She stopped only when the car was full.

The agency representative, who had followed her up and down, looked exhausted. After giving her a list of phone numbers and the promise that she would be in touch the next day, she drove off.

Paige shifted Sami so that she could see the child’s face. Large brown eyes met hers. “Not a peep from you through all this? Not hungry or wet?” The child stared up at her silently. “Wouldn’t like supper?” The child didn’t blink. “Maybe a bath?” Paige knew that she couldn’t understand English but was hoping that her tone would inspire some tiny sound. “Yes?” She paused again. When no sound came, she sighed. “I could use both. Let’s go home.”

She rounded the car and was about to open the passenger’s door when sight of Mara’s house gave her pause. Mara hadn’t owned it long; she had spent her first three years in Tucker paying back education loans and her next two saving for a down payment. The house wasn’t showy in any sense of the word, but buying it had been a triumph.

Now it was empty, and Mara was buried on the hillside overlooking town. Paige felt a chill. Mara had been a vital part of her life for twenty years. Now she was gone.

Paige closed her eyes. She held Sami closer, then closer still. The child was warm, silent but alive, and, in that, a comfort—but only until Paige began to think forward rather than back. Then, slowly, with dawning awareness, she opened her eyes and looked at the child, and in that instant, with the house locked, the agency representative gone, and Mara’s baby in her care, the reality of what she had done hit home. On as sorrowful a day as ever there was, it wasn’t sorrow she felt. It was a sheer and profound terror.

P
AIGE WASN’T ONE TO PANIC, BUT SHE CAME
close to it during the drive from Mara’s house to hers. She kept thinking of all the things she didn’t know—like what the child ate, if she had allergies, whether she slept through the night. The answers, along with detailed medical records, were in the pack of papers she had brought from Mara’s, but Mara had had weeks to peruse them. Paige did not.

Anxiously she pictured her house. It had three bedrooms, the one on the first floor that she used herself and two upstairs. The larger of the two was stuffed with furniture that Nonny hadn’t been able to keep when she had sold her house several years before; the smaller of the two was cluttered with sewing goods, knitting goods, and all manner of medical journals that Paige had glanced through and stacked for later reading.

The smaller room would be easier to clear out, but the larger one would be better for a child. Then again, Paige didn’t like the idea of Sami being alone on the second floor. For the time being, she could sleep in Paige’s room.

Between Paige, Sami, and the kitten, the bedroom was filling up fast. What have I done? she wondered, and, gripping the steering wheel, tried to stay calm, which meant absolutely, positively,
not
thinking about what she was going to do come morning, when she had to be at work. She darted quick looks at Sami, who was sitting in the brand-new car seat Mara had bought, sending that long, soulful stare right back at her.

“We’ll work everything out,” she assured the child and herself in what she thought was a very mommy voice. “You’re flexible. All children are flexible.” It was what she had told many a parent on the verge of panic over a new baby. “Well, I’m flexible, too, so we’ll be fine. What you need most is love, and I can give you that, yes I can. Beyond that, you’ll just have to let me know what you like and what you don’t.”

Sami didn’t make a sound, simply stared at her with those huge eyes that had seen too much in too short a time.

It struck Paige that maybe the child
couldn’t
make a sound, that maybe she had been punished for crying or had simply given up when crying had gotten her nowhere, in which case Paige was going to have to teach her that crying was healthy and, indeed, one of the few ways babies had of making their wants and needs known. The teaching would involve lots of cuddling and attention, even some spoiling. It might take time.

Time.
Oh, Lord. She couldn’t think far ahead. Not yet. “I really can do this,” she told the child as she pulled into her driveway and sprang from the car. “I’m level-headed. I’m easygoing. I’m a whiz with children.” She ran to the passenger’s side and tugged at Sami’s seat belt. “Women have instincts,” she quoted her own advice to new mothers, tugging harder when the seat belt wouldn’t come free. “They do things with and for their children that they never imagined they could do.” She put both hands to the task, pushing, tugging, twisting. “It comes from deep inside. A primordial nurturing.” She was about to go for scissors when the buckle came free with a
whoosh
. “See?” she breathed in relief. “We’ll do just fine.”

For the next few minutes, while Sami watched from the safety of her car seat on the front porch, Paige ran back and forth carting baby goods into the house. When she was done, she brought Sami inside, set baby and car seat on the floor, and scooped up the kitten, which had been scampering around underfoot.

“Sami, meet kitty.”

The two stared at one another unblinkingly.

Paige rubbed the kitten’s cheek to hers, then offered the tiny creature to Sami. “Kitty’s even younger than you are. She’s alone, too”—the vet had declared it a female—“so we’ll take care of her until we can find her a home. Isn’t she soft?” She touched the kitten to Sami’s hand. The little girl pulled it back. Her chin began to tremble.

Paige immediately set the kitten down and took Sami in her arms. “It’s okay, sweetie. She won’t hurt you. She’s probably as frightened of you as you are of her.” While she talked, she sorted through the food she had brought from Mara’s. Assuming that Mara had stocked only what Sami could eat, she put a nipple on one of the bottles of formula. Her own hunger had faded. There didn’t seem room for food in her stomach, what with all the nervous jangles there.

Sami drank every drop of the milk, looking up at her all the while. Buoyed by that, Paige mixed up a dish of cereal, sweetened it with peaches, and spooned it up, and again, Sami ate. Given how small and thin she was, Paige might have given her more had she not known the danger of pushing too much food into an untried stomach. So, after changing into a T-shirt and jeans, she bathed her, rubbed Mara’s baby lotion over her, diapered her, and dressed her in a pair of stretchy pink pajamas that Mara had bought. Then she held her up.

“You look so pretty, sweetie.” Pretty and soft and sleepy. “Mara would be loving you to bits.”

But Mara was no more. Paige felt a sharp pang of grief, followed by a sudden fierce fatigue. She drew Sami close and closed her eyes, but she had no sooner tucked her head against the baby’s dark hair when the phone rang.

It was Deirdre Frechette, one of Paige’s Mount Court runners. “We need help,” she said in a broken voice. “We spent the whole of dinner talking about Dr. O’Neill. One of the guys says she OD’d on heroine. Is it true?”

Paige’s fatigue faded. “Definitely not.”

“Another one says she was done in by the Devil Brothers.”

“Not Devil,” Paige corrected. “DeVille.” George and Harold DeVille had been the butt of local tales for years. Huge and menacing, they were mentally slow and harmless. “The DeVilles wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Julie Engel says she killed herself. Julie’s mother did that three years ago, and now she’s going into all the details. She’s getting slightly hysterical. We all are.”

Paige could picture it. Teenage minds were fertile, all the more so in a group. She shuddered to think of where, if unguided, the conversation would lead. Suicide had the potential for being a contagious disease when the proper preventive measures weren’t taken.

If ever there was a time these teenagers needed their parents, it was now. But their parents weren’t around.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“In MacKenzie Lounge.”

“Stay there. I’ll be over in fifteen minutes.”

It wasn’t until she hung up the phone that she remembered Sami, and for a split second she didn’t know what to do. But the second passed. The little girl was curled in her arms, fast asleep. One-handedly she sifted through the piles of baby paraphernalia and retrieved the baby carrier. A short time later she had the sleeping child strapped snugly to her chest.

One of the most important pieces of equipment you can buy,
she heard herself instructing parents at prenatal meetings,
is a car seat. The baby should be secured in the seat and the seat secured in the car.

“This is definitely not smart,” she hummed softly as she slid in behind the wheel with Sami hugging her chest, “but you’re tiny, and I drive safely, and I just think it’s more important that you snuggle up to a body you know than sit in that hard baby seat, which I doubt I could strap back in here again tonight anyway. So I won’t tell anyone if you don’t.’

The baby slept through the drive.

MacKenzie was the largest of the girls’ dorms. Like the others, it was three floors’ worth of red brick, over which ivy had climbed unchecked for so long that large patches of the brick were obscured. Tall, multipaned windows were open in deference to the September warmth; electric fans whirred in many of them.

There were eight girls in the lounge, eight shades of uniformly long hair, eight oversize T-shirts and shorts. Some of the girls were runners, some not, but Paige knew them all. So had Mara.

They were subdued. Several looked as though they had been crying. Paige was glad she’d come.

She sank down on the wide arm of a chair.

“What have you got?” one of the girls asked.

“Duhhh,” another mocked.

“It’s a baby,” someone said.

“Whose is it?”

Paige wasn’t sure how to answer. “Uh, mine for now.”

“Where did it come from?”

“How did you get it?”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“How old is it?”

Several of the girls had come to take a closer look at Sami. Paige eased aside the headrest so they could see.

“Her name is Sameera, Sami for short. She was born in a tiny town on the east coast of India, about a day’s ride from Calcutta.” Mara’s excited words came back clear as a bell. “She was abandoned soon after birth—girls are considered the kiss of death to many in her homeland. She’s fourteen months old, but small for her age and physically delayed. That’s because she’s spent her life being shifted from one orphanage to another. She hasn’t had the encouragement to do much more than lie on a cot waiting for someone to feed her.”

“She doesn’t walk?”

“Not yet.”

“Does she sit?”

“Only with support.” Mara had told her this, too. Paige had seen it herself while she’d been bathing the child, when she’d done a cursory physical exam. She hadn’t seen any sign of illness or physical deformity. “Given proper nourishment and attention, she’ll catch right up. By the time she’s ready for school, she’ll be doing everything she should.”

“So whose
is
she?”

There it was again, that loaded question. “I’m taking care of her for now.”

“Are you adopting her?”

“No, no. She’ll be with me until the agency finds her a proper home.”

“Then you’re her foster mother. She’s lucky. I was sent to live with an aunt when I was eight. She wasn’t
anything
like you.” This, from Alicia Donnelly. She had started Mount Court in the seventh grade and was now miraculously a senior. Along the way, she had had every sort of illness imaginable, from bronchitis to strep throat to mononucleosis. Peter, as the doctor of record for Mount Court, had treated her for those. When she developed a yeast infection in her junior year, Mara had taken over her case.

Alicia had been a behavior problem as a child, so difficult for her socially prominent parents to handle at one point that removal from her immediate family had been the only alternative to hospitalization. Years of therapy had set her on her feet, and although she was far from a model student, she was extremely bright. Mount Court was more of a home to her than her own.

“You’ll be a good foster mother,” she was telling Paige. “You know everything there is to know about kids. You’re patient. You have a sense of humor. That’s important, a sense of humor.” Her voice caught. “Dr. O’Neill had one, too.”

Yes, Paige thought. A subtle one that could be dry or gentle but was always a delightful counter-point to her intensity. Paige would miss both the intensity and the wit.

Sobered, the girls retreated to their places, some on chairs, others on the floor, and were still.

“Dr. O’Neill was a good person,” Paige said quietly. “She was a dedicated doctor and a crusader. We should all take a lesson from her life. She gave of herself in ways that not many people do.”

“She also took of herself,” Julie Engel said in a high-pitched voice.

“You don’t know it was suicide,” Deirdre argued.

Julie turned to Paige. “I heard that she was found in her garage. Is it true?”

Paige nodded.

“And that she died of carbon monoxide poisoning?”

She nodded again.

“Then it was suicide,” Julie told Deirdre. “What else would it be?”

“It could have been an accident,” Paige answered gently. “She was very tired. She was taking medication. She could have passed out at the wheel.”

“Not Dr. O’Neill,” another of the girls, Tia Faraday, insisted. “She was careful about things. When I was sick last year, she wrote out every last instruction of what I was supposed to do. She didn’t leave anything to chance. And then she called the next day to make sure I was doing exactly what she had written down.”

“She would have turned off the engine before she passed out,” Alicia concluded.

Paige sighed. “Unfortunately, passing out isn’t something you can always control.”

A bell sounded. The girls didn’t move.

“Did she leave a note?” Tia asked.

Paige hesitated, then shook her head.

“Neither did my mother,” Julie said, “but we knew it was suicide. She had been threatening to kill herself for a long time. We never thought she’d go through with it, but when a person climbs all the way to the thirty-third floor—”

“Don’t say it again, Julie,” Deirdre begged as girls from the floors above began to pass through the lounge and out the door.

“It was a deliberate act,” Julie insisted.

“It’s depressing.”

“Life is depressing.”

“Life is lonely.”

“Was Dr. O’Neill lonely?” Tia asked.

Paige hadn’t been aware of it. “She was always busy. She was always with people.”

“So are we. Still, there are lots of times I’m lonely.”

“Same here,” came another voice.

And another. “It’s the worst at night.”

“Or after phone calls from home.”

“Or out in the woods after ten.”

“Which,” Paige injected lightly, “is one of the reasons why going out in the woods after ten is against school rules. Everything seems ominous. Every little fear is magnified.” Still, the girls had a point. Mara’s days might have been full, but not her nights. She had more than enough time to think about the distance between herself and her family, the failure of her marriage, the child she had aborted years before. Paige hated to think it—Mara had never
said
anything—but she might well have been lonely.

“I can’t imagine Dr. O’Neill being afraid of anything,” Alicia said. “She was always so strong.”

“But she
killed
herself,” Julie cried, “so
something
was awful in her life.”

“What was it, Dr. Pfeiffer?”

Paige chose her words with care. Although she wasn’t about to betray Mara’s secrets—didn’t know some, she wagered—she wanted the girls to know that suicides, if that was indeed what Mara had committed, weren’t frivolous happenings. There were reasons for them and ways to prevent them.