Cherished Beginnings (25 page)

* * *

Maura, ensconced in the big bed at Kathleen's, slept fitfully. They'd decided the night before to get up around ten o'clock and go to the eleven o'clock mass at the small and rustic Teoway Island church. After mass, when Scott left for his tennis date, she and Kathleen sat on the long deck overlooking the Teoway Island marshes. A belted kingfisher dived for fish amid the tall reeds, distracting them as they ate the lunch Kathleen had prepared, chicken sandwiches embellished with watercress and accompanied by tall glasses of sweet iced tea. Rather, Kathleen ate. Maura only shoved her sandwich around on her plate and stared into space.

"What am I going to do, Kath?" Maura asked finally.

"Now you're asking me? When it may be too late to do anything?"

"She was pretty, wasn't she?" Maura said in utter discouragement, thinking of the woman who had been with Xan in the restaurant.

"You're way prettier."

"But he's not involved in conflict with
her
," said Maura unhappily. "If we only didn't have the childbirth thing at issue, everything would have been all right between us."

This was supposed to be a light lunch and a sisterly chat. Only it had become more than a chat. This could only be classified under the heading of a full-fledged discussion. Kathleen stood and paced the deck, thinking.

She turned back to Maura. "You're going to have to talk to Xan," she said.

"If he wanted to talk to me, he'd have called," Maura said stonily.

Kathleen knelt at her sister's side, gazing up at her earnestly. "You know how I worried about you when you first started going out with Xan? How I feared that you didn't have the experience to handle him? And how self-assured you were, telling me that you could take care of yourself?"

"Naive, that's what I was," replied Maura with a trace of bitterness. Then she burst out, "Oh, Kathleen, I'm afraid I've ruined everything!" Kathleen was startled to see Maura's brown eyes swimming with tears.

"All right, you were naive. But naive doesn't mean stupid. If you love him, go after him. You have a lot of things to reveal to Xan, and you should have told him long ago. Tell him, Maura. Tell him now."

"You make it sound easy," said Maura.

"Sharing your emotional life with another person never is. You've always experienced heavy emotions vicariously, through your patients. But actually putting yourself on the line emotionally, trusting another person so totally that your whole life is open to him—that's one of the things you never learned to do. If you care about Xan, you're going to have to learn. Do it now, before you lose heart."

Maura rose from her chair with a rueful smile. "Thanks for the sisterly advice," she said.

Kathleen stood up, feeling as though she, not Maura, were the elder sister. "Don't thank me yet," she warned as Maura picked up her cell phone. "Wait and see if it works."

* * *

Xan urged his Harley along the rutted road, getting a kind of grim satisfaction out of the jouncing ride. Keeping the motorcycle from running up the trunk of one of the numerous pine trees in this area was a difficult job, and come to think of it, he wasn't sure he didn't want to. A collision with a tree seemed at this point a prospect a lot less agonizing than the inner pain he was feeling.

He'd watched Mehitabel give birth to four tiny kittens there on Maura's side porch. He offered encouragement to the laboring cat until dawn peeped over the horizon, knowing that Maura wouldn't have wanted the cat to be alone at such a time. All the while he'd expected Maura to arrive home, tired yet exalted in that radiant way of hers, when he would gather her in his arms and tell her how much he loved her.

Finally, after the sun had fully risen, turning the dewdrops on the roses into diamonds, he rose, too. He left his cramped position beside the cat's box and stretched, admitting to himself that Maura wasn't coming home any time soon. He was tired himself and didn't know if he could keep his eyes open all the way back to his villa. But he did, and he'd fallen into bed exhausted to catch a few hours of sleep before he woke and the sadness settled over him again.

The winding road led to one of his favorite places on Teoway Island, a place where he often went to find inner peace. He'd go there now and give himself over to it. He already knew what he'd done wrong with Maura. He hadn't fully accounted for the sadness in her, and he'd asked too much. And in some ways he hadn't asked enough. About her past, for instance. He'd have to clear up the mystery about that before they could pick up and go on. They could still have a satisfying life together. It was up to him to figure out where all the pieces fit, that's all.

* * *

Maura swung along the hard-packed sand, placing one foot in front of the other with great concentration. She had to concentrate on something as simple as walking in order not to think about what she was about to do.

She'd called Xan's cell phone with no result. His office answering service operator—the gabby one, thank goodness—had asked her if she wanted to page him. Xan had, she said, gone for a motorcycle ride to the Vrooman mansion, an old plantation house on Teoway Island.

"No," Maura had told the operator quickly, it wasn't necessary to page Xan. And then she'd borrowed a pair of white jeans and a saffron-colored Teoway Island T-shirt from Kathleen and set out for the Vrooman mansion.

She knew the winding road Xan had ridden to the Vrooman place. It snaked through a palmetto-oak-magnolia maritime forest, and she wouldn't attempt a walk through such wild terrain by herself. The other way to reach the mansion was along the beach. Although it was a longer route, she didn't mind it because she welcomed the chance to think.

But now she didn't want to think at all. Confronting Xan was something she'd do better to handle by instinct, like birthing babies. She was an instinct-oriented person, especially where human relationships were concerned.

Now she could see the tall ruins of the mansion silhouetted against the cloudless blue sky. Her heart leaped to her mouth. What if Xan wasn't there after all and she had wasted the trip?

She climbed to the top of the beach-front dune ridge and from the advantage of this height surveyed the mansion site. No sign of Xan. So she skidded down the side of the dune, her borrowed sneakers filling with sand, which was uncomfortable to say the least. She trudged on, peering ahead through the lush foliage. Was that bright-blue metal glinting there in the sunlight? Yes! It was Xan's motorcycle! She approached slowly, thumbs linked over the edges of her pockets, wondering where he might be.

The Vrooman mansion had been built in the 1780s. The building had withstood a major earthquake, hurricanes, and occupation by enemy troops. It had been the home of Dutch immigrants whose fortune was based on growing valuable long-staple Sea Island Cotton. After the cotton fell prey to the boll weevil, the plantation was abandoned, and although succeeding generations had renovated and lived in it from time to time, the house had been falling apart for years.

"Xan?" she said, climbing up on the brick porch at the rear of the house. Here the fragrance of the forest blended with the richness of the surrounding marshland's scent, which was wafted away by the ocean breeze. It was quiet here, and private.

Maura peered through one of the windows. It had been boarded up once, but vandals had torn away the planks. She rubbed a dusty pane with the side of her hand and looked through the clean spot.

Someone looked back. "Xan!" she exclaimed. Their eyes met and held with a startling intensity. Without a word he whirled and came to the door, where he hesitated. He wanted to rush to her and enfold her in his arms, but something stopped him. The look in her eyes wasn't soft but determined. His heart sank.

"I was looking for you," she said.

"You found me," he replied, and she couldn't detect a welcome in his voice. The words were just words.

"Interesting place," she said, stalling for time, striving for a semblance of normality.

He tried to match her tone. "I didn't know you wanted to see it or I'd have brought you here myself," he said.

She shook her head. "I'm not here because of the Vrooman mansion. I wanted to see you."

"What's the momentous occasion?" He immediately regretted the question and winced inwardly. It sounded much too cynical.

She shrugged. "I just want to talk," she said.

"Sit down here," he said, gesturing toward an area of the great open porch. "Right on the brick. That's it." There, that sounded more friendly. He inhaled deeply.

Maura put off saying anything, appreciating the sun's welcome warmth on her face.

"Now what were we going to talk about?" he asked. It was his eyes she noticed most; the pupils were large and dark, the irises deeply green. He looked upon her with expectancy, waiting.

If only he knew how hard this was for her! "I'm not going to be a labor coach in the birthing rooms," she said.

Despair clutched at Xan's stomach. It didn't bode well that she was leading with bad news. "I wish you were," he said quietly.

"I have to work the way I want to work. I'm going to continue with home births. I want you to know that first, before I tell you anything else."

"You mean there's more?" He stared at her. She looked beautiful, as always. But there was a courage about her, too, and a determination. He had always admired her determination.

Maura nodded. She'd gone too far to stop now. "In California—" she began, but Xan interrupted.

"Look, Maura, I don't expect to hear about unhappy love affairs or—"

"Love affairs? After that night we spent at your house, you think I've had love affairs?" She gaped at him, two red spots staining her cheeks.

"It has me puzzled, all right," he said ruefully. "I know I was the first man you ever slept with, but there must have been someone else, the way you clam up whenever the subject of California creeps into the conversation."

"All this time you've thought I had an ex-lover somewhere?"

"Until that night, yes, I did. Now I think—oh, hell, I don't know what I think."

She couldn't help it. She started to laugh, to laugh so hard that tears began to slide unheeded down her cheeks. Xan viewed her with alarm, wondering if she was hysterical. Should he offer her a handkerchief? He didn't have one.

Finally Xan did what his instincts told him to do. He reached out and pulled her into his arms, where she stopped laughing and sobbed and sobbed against his shirt, dampening it with tears. "Shh," he murmured, "it's all right. Whatever happened in California, it couldn't have been that bad."

She bit her lip and hiccupped, loving how strong his arms felt and how they provided such a safe haven. "It was horrible," she said. "At the time I thought it was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Until lately, when I found out that the worst thing that could happen to me was to lose you. Oh, Xan, I've missed you so!"

He kissed her eyes, and when he looked down it was to admire the delicate tracery of veins on the lids. Maura—how much he loved her!

"Tell me," he said unsteadily. "Tell me everything."

And so she settled down in his arms, his heartbeat steadying her, and she poured out the story. She was all right until she got to the part about the mother superior ordering her to stop her outreach practice. Her voice quavered as she told Xan how she'd pleaded to continue.

She'd sat before the mother superior, hands folded demurely in her lap, but underneath her quiet facade her emotions were seething. Finally she'd lost her cool. "But Rosa Vaccaro is in labor right this very minute, her husband has sent for me, I must go," she'd babbled. With the stern mother superior staring her down, she couldn't really believe that it was all over, the practice she had built from nothing. What would these people do? Rosa had never been in a hospital in her life, was scared of hospitals and couldn't afford one. What would happen to women like Rosa?

The mother superior was steadfast. "You must telephone Mrs. Vaccaro and tell her to call an ambulance to bring her to the hospital. We cannot guarantee your safety on the streets of this neighborhood any longer. We will not allow the same thing that happened to Sister Angela to happen to you."

"Mother, please listen," began Maura, ready to plead, to bargain, to do anything. Her place was with the poor people in their homes and doing the work she had been called to do. She had no fear for her own safety.

"No," said the mother superior. "When you came to us, you took solemn vows of chastity, poverty, and obedience.
Obedience,
Sister Maura. Remember that vow. From now on, your outreach practice of home births is discontinued." She dismissed Maura with a wave of her hand. "Now go."

Maura had gone. She'd prayed, and she knew what she had to do. She could not submit to authority, not in this instance. Her work, the work she loved, was all-important. With deep regret and many a backward glance, she left the convent. And knowing that she couldn't remain in that neighborhood where the looming presence of the hospital and the convent would continue to remind her of that heartbreaking conflict, she had fled to Shuffletown, where the people were also poor and had need of her services.

She could be dedicated to the service of people who needed her, even outside the convent. But in her wildest dreams she had not foreseen the complication of meeting Dr. Alexander Copeland.