After the Fog (34 page)

Her head was cluttered with too many thoughts. What if she had lost the clinic? She considered the consequences for herself, for Bonaroti, the town. Acid burned her stomach and pushed up her esophagus. She stumbled from bed, raced down the hall to the bathroom and vomited.

The thick fear was tangible. With her life balancing on poor decisions she wasn’t sure she could recover. Not if she lost the clinic funding. Her hands quivered as she washed her face and brushed her teeth with baking soda.

Anxiety sent Rose to the kitchen where she made coffee and mentally ticked through her To-Do list. But would she have anything to do? What if Mr. Sebastian had already phoned Doc Bonaroti and told him his wife was not funding the clinic and that they might as well fire Rose now? She would know when she got her assignments in a few hours. Whether her termination was imminent or not, she had work to do that morning. She had promised to make Leo a lion costume for Halloween and Sara Clara had left a note saying she had not gotten to finish it the day before so Rose would start with that.

At the kitchen table, Rose sat, sewing, quietly drinking her coffee and two shots of vodka. It soothed her, like it always had since her first drink at twelve. The initial sting was worth the numbing of pain. That was the one useful thing Mr. Reeves from the orphanage had taught her.

She smiled at the thought of Leo. He’d seen the Wizard of Oz six times and could not be swayed to put together a simple cowboy costume or pull an old sheet over his head to be a ghost. Rose couldn’t get used to the idea that Leo choosing to be the lion over any of the other options meant he may identify with the weaker people in the world. She’d already dummied up the costume and fitted him in it twice. All she needed to do was stitch it and attach a ropy tail and it would be ready to go for the parade.

Rose shifted in the chair, ignoring the way her foot stuck to the linoleum. She couldn’t believe she’d jeopardized her nursing career, letting go of a situation, forgetting what her job was, letting her personal problems interfere with her work.

She jabbed the lion’s leg stitching it in a frenzy. She and Bonaroti should have come up with a hard source of funding the minute they got the okay to start the clinic. They shouldn’t have trusted that every single wife of every single superintendent would want to contribute to their cause. She had thought her time was best spent nursing, not finding alternate funding sources. How could they have been so naïve?

She had nearly finished both legs of the costume when she noticed it was half past six and time to prepare for breakfast. She looked up from her sewing and felt dizzy from the coffee and vodka. No matter. Both would have worn off by the time she had to go to work. Screw Sebastian and what he thinks he knew about her. Screw all of them.

* * *

Magdalena couldn’t sleep, and heard her mother shuffling past her room. She turned on her side and curled under her covers, pained that she had disappointed her mother. The disclosure of her pregnancy caused her to understand the term “broken hearted.”

The room grew stuffy and hot as though it took on the misery she felt inside. Magdalena rolled onto her back, drawing the covers up to chin, and stuck a leg out for some cooler air. She had spent her entire life trying to please her mother and now there was no way to ever do that again.

Magdalena couldn’t erase what had transpired. She had felt so alone, then excited by Tony’s desire for her, and the two things together made her agree to let him have her. But she refused to admit it and give credence to her mother’s words. Not that she needed to hear them from her mother to know they applied.

She was a slut. It was more than pleasurable for her—sex. There wasn’t a bit of it, leading up to it, the act itself, and afterward that she hadn’t liked. Nothing had been the way her friends said it would be—horrible, ugly, painful. She not only let it happen. She made it happen.

Magdalena stared at her ceiling as she had millions of times, remembering how Tony’s hands felt on her breasts, thighs, how his mouth moved all over her.

She thought she would go crazy lying here now. She thought she saw blue air swirling above her bed. Had she finally turned the bend? She raised her hand and tried to grab the moving air. Was she really seeing that?

She sat up, staring at the ceiling. Was it a ghost? Of future lifelong regret, probably. She reached over, turned on the bedside light, waiting for the illusion to disappear, but instead, it picked up separate pinpricks of light, swirling them as if in dance. She covered her mouth. Science was her strong suit and she knew that when a person was seeing a smog dance recital on her bedroom ceiling, something was dreadfully wrong.

Magdalena ripped her blanket off, pushed her arms into her worn bathrobe and headed to the kitchen, tying the belt as she went.

She got there in time to see Rose throwing back a shot of booze.

“Mum? Something’s really wrong. The smog’s in my bedroom.” Magdalena looked up at the ceiling to see if the same bluish circus act could be seen in the kitchen. “Look, the ceiling. Doc was right. This is bad.”

Rose would not make eye contact and Magdalena stalked across the kitchen.

“Mum? Listen to me. Please. You have to go to that meeting today, the council meeting. You need to find out what’s happening here”

“I have a job to do. I’d love to have the time to join the town blowhards, but I have patients to see, Leo’s costume to sew, clothes to wash, a daughter…” Rose’s words slid into each other and Magdalena could not believe she never noticed before—the degree to which her mother drank. “Mum? Can you hear me at all?” Rose pushed her sewing needle into the lion’s tail and pulled it back out.

“Mum?” Magdalena said realizing how many times in life she had to ask her mother if she was paying attention. The booze in front of Rose made Magdalena feel as though she’d downed a fifth of it herself.

Magdalena felt as if her body was reaching to her very core to expel her insides and she ran to the sink and threw up. She heard Rose come up behind her. Her mother slipped one arm around her and pulled her hair back from her face. Magdalena cupped her hand, and washed out her mouth with water from the faucet. Rose knotted Magdalena’s hair around itself as Magdalena wiped her mouth, hand shaking.

Magdalena turned to her mother to pull her close. But Rose stiffened. Clearly she had not yet forgiven Magdalena.

Her mother looked away, the scent of whiskey filling the air. Magdalena grimaced. If her mother would not do the talking, spread her truthful, even harsh advice, then Magdalena would do it for her. She would not cower in the face of her big strong mother.

“I guess,” Magdalena said. “I should listen to Cathy at Dr. Bonaroti’s office. I should just see her fella in Pittsburgh. Would that make you happy? Then we could all pretend that things are like they were before. You could go on treating the town like your family and your family like strangers. We could all just pretend we’re happy. That’s how you like it right? Just pretending things are the way you want them to be!” Magdalena’s hands flew above her head, shaking them with every word. Words that came out before they were formed and censored in her mind.

Rose squeezed her eyes shut, “Listen, Magdalena.”

Magdalena pounded on the countertop. “No! You listen. You don’t have to worry about me asking for anything. I don’t—”

Rose gripped Magdalena’s forearm. “I am trying to—”

Magdalena ripped her arm from Rose’s grasp. “I won’t listen, Mum. I. Don’t. Trust. You.”

“What?”

“You don’t have to worry, you don’t have to do anything for me. I’ll be out of your life…you can have your booze and your perfect son Johnny and your work. That’s all you care about!”

“You don’t trust
me
? I’m not the one who’s been living a lie, young lady.” Rose jabbed her own sternum with her forefinger.

Magdalena grasped the belt around her robe and pulled it tight, squeezing her belly with it. “You never trusted me. Or Johnny. Or Dad, or anyone living in this house.” She stopped, looked up at the ceiling as if she would find her courage there. “Admit it, Mum. We’re not good enough. We never will be. Not even if we follow your plans.”

Magdalena turned the faucet on and off then met Rose’s gaze. “I look at you, Mum. I can’t help it.” Magdalena swallowed hard.

Rose shrugged. “Can’t help what?”

Magdalena looked at her feet then back at Rose. “Part of me hates you. So, there, you’re off the hook. You don’t have to fake your concern anymore.”

The nausea kicked back in. Magdalena covered her mouth and ran from the kitchen, knowing she would never treat her child the way Rose had treated her. Her baby would mean something more to her than just the right thing to do.

* * *

Rose staggered back to the kitchen table, and couldn’t stop her hand from trembling as she reached for the vodka and poured herself another shot. She’d stare at the full glass before throwing it back. Then another and another until the downing of the booze freed her emotions, rising and rushing through her body, streaming down her cheeks. Her body quivered with the truth that she had pushed away since her first time getting pregnant and made herself emotionally unavailable.

Her tears felt like poison, cleansing her body as they shuddered out of her. Rose knew the truth about who she was. Now Mr. Sebastian did, too. Would he tell his wife? Rose was overwhelmed with despair. The chance of Sebastian funding the clinic was gone. Rose dropped her face into her hands. Could Magdalena really hate her?

The thought was more agonizing than she could ever have imagined. Rose had spent plenty of time considering the abandonment of children by their parents, but never did she consider it the other way around. After all she’d been through in life, the idea of her children pushing her aside excoriated her, leaving her to feel like she had so many times as a child: empty, alone, and undeserving.

* * *

Nursing had saved Rose. Sitting in the kitchen, she thought back to Sister John Ann who had seen something in her and pushed her toward nursing school where Rose had remade her life. She remembered the first time a patient dying of cancer said Rose made his last days worth living. Rose had brushed his teeth, changed his IV’s, shaved him, and made him presentable for his grieving family. But most of all she talked to him as though he were due for lunch at the Elks the next day. She scolded him for not sitting up straight, for grumbling when she changed his sheets.

And the man had laughed. Rose had filled his lonely moments. The patient got what he needed, but Rose got even more in return. For Rose, being a nurse gave her the chance to be needed, to care for people as though they were family. Nurses were more like family than the relatives who visited their sickly relations. Rose was one of the best at critical care, a master at hospice, whatever nursing a patient needed.

In opening herself up to nursing in that way, Rose closed off the desperate part of her that had allowed Bennett into her life and bed. Still the gap behind the newly erected barrier to her heart needed to be filled. So, before she fully embraced her religion, she sowed a row of sexual partners that would have shamed the most practiced of playboys.

Unlike when her body was forcibly taken or when her affection was stolen, when Rose chose whom to seduce, how and when, she felt power and pain in her own pleasure. She convinced herself those months of angry promiscuity had helped her reclaim a physical sense of self even if she knew it was wrong. She quickly learned it was not how she
wanted
to live and going on that way would cast her into even deeper emptiness than she’d experienced before.

By the time she met Henry, she understood what men needed to see in women they wanted to marry. Rose was only required to pretend a little bit to meet Henry’s expectations. He was different. He didn’t pry like other fellas. He didn’t ask for history and the nauseating retelling of loves gone bad. Still, even though he admired her nursing career, she knew Henry had wanted to see at least a tiny part of her as needing him; he wanted to protect her.

So Rose let him care for her by not telling him anything about her past. Beyond revealing the fact she was orphaned, she left most of the details regarding her childhood and teen years unsaid. She guessed this allowed Henry to invent anything he wanted for her. She supposed it was his kindness and understanding that no orphan would want to retell her awful upbringing that kept him from prodding her. She’d worked to condense the gruesome portions of her early life into a forgotten seed, buried in her soul and hidden behind her nursing persona, tucked away until the last few days.

Even though Rose had managed to squash the pain and ruminations about her own abuse, she could never forget that she abandoned her baby. The birth and adoption of Theresa had haunted Rose. After her self-flagellating, sexual missteps she gathered up some pride and she kept her past from handicapping her future by enacting a well-plotted string of good works and smart choices. All that had served her well, but as the days unfolded Rose was discovering she could not deal with Magdalena or Theresa because she could not deal with herself. She understood Henry’s words, now.

Her delusions of past healing were shattered and she could finally see what he meant. The way she controlled everything. It had been the only way. She nodded at the thought. She wanted the best for them, the life she hadn’t had as a child. She wanted their lives to be happy and full and blessed. That’s all she had tried to do for them. Rose threw back another shot. Henry? He had his secrets, too. Remembering what Mrs. Saltz had said, Rose had come to realize he was no saint either.