In This Small Spot (32 page)

Jennifer shuddered. “That sounds
painful.”

Jamie paced in the solarium. “Why is the
ventilator back in her room?” he asked, pausing to look worriedly
back down the corridor toward Mickey’s room. “She was being taken
off it the last time we were here.”

“They did take her off,” Sister Anselma
said, “but then she got pneumonia and had to be put back on for
several days. She just got off it two days ago.”

A half-hour later, Sister Mary David found
them in the solarium.

“Are you all right?” Jennifer asked when she
saw Sister Mary David’s ashen face.

Sister Mary David sat, raising a trembling
hand to her mouth.

“Sister?” Mother Theodora put a hand on her
shoulder.

“Forgive me, Mother,” Sister Mary David said
in a hushed voice. “I wasn’t prepared… I’ve never seen anything
like that.” She looked up at Mother Theodora, a horrified
expression on her face. “Her entire back, her buttocks, her thighs…
what isn’t burned is raw and bloody from taking skin for the
grafts. The pain of removing the gauze to clean the wounds…” She
squeezed her eyes tightly shut, as if shutting out the image. “I
don’t think I can do that to her two or three times a day…”

“Does she feel it?” Jamie asked, his face
pale also. “Aren’t they giving her pain medication?”

“Yes, but… I don’t think any pain medication
is strong enough to… The only sound she made was one whimper…”
Sister Mary David reached for a tissue to dry her eyes.

“She hasn’t said a thing,” Jennifer
whispered.

Sister Anselma stood abruptly and left the
solarium. Jennifer followed.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Jennifer suggested
when she caught up. Sister Anselma didn’t say anything as Jennifer
slipped an arm through hers and steered her out to the landscaped
grounds.

Outside, they found an empty bench in the
shade of a large oak tree. They sat in silence for a while.
Jennifer watched a bumblebee lazily drifting from flower to flower
in a nearby flower bed before finally asking, “How are you
doing?”

“What possible difference could that make
after what we just heard?” Sister Anselma sat stiffly, staring at
her hands which were clenched in her lap.

“It matters a great deal.” Jennifer watched
Sister Anselma’s face carefully as she continued. “Sister Anselma,
I don’t know if Mickey told you, but I confronted her a while ago
about her feelings for you. She admitted that she’s in love with
you, and… she said you love her, too.”

Sister Anselma’s only reaction was to clench
her hands more tightly.

“I think I have a better understanding now
of how careful and guarded you’ve both been,” Jennifer continued,
choosing her words with care, “so I would imagine you have had no
one you can talk to. We’ve all been worried to death about Mickey,
but what about you?”

Sister Anselma’s stiff, upright posture
crumpled and her head bowed.

“I feel so incredibly guilty,” she admitted
in a voice that was barely a whisper.

“Don’t you think that’s a natural reaction?”
Jennifer asked. “But this is Mickey.”

“What do you mean?”

Jennifer turned to look at her. “I’ve known
Mickey most of my life, and I know how devoted she was to my
sister,” she said. “If she loves you as much as she loved Alice,
she would rather have died trying to get you out than to have left
you in that fire alone.” Jennifer paused for a moment, then said,
“Forgive my prying, but I can’t help but feel a little protective
of her. Do you love her that much in return?”

For the first time, Sister Anselma looked
Jennifer in the eye. “Yes.”

“Enough to leave St. Bridget’s to be with
her?”

“It’s not that simple,” Sister Anselma
struggled to explain. “Both of us felt called to monastic life for
reasons that we would each need to address first. That is bigger
than this – for both of us. I won’t be responsible for pulling her
away from her vocation, and I know she feels the same. And then
there is the issue of my vows – vows I intended to abide by for the
rest of my life. If I can be swayed to ask for dispensation from
those now, after all these years, how can I trust myself to make a
lifetime commitment to Michele?”

Jennifer digested these words. “Is there no
one in the abbey who can help you work through this? Mother
Theodora seems like a very open-minded woman.”

Sister Anselma closed her eyes and sighed.
“Perhaps it is time to be honest with Mother. If she hadn’t guessed
about us before, she certainly has by now.”

Chapter 40

“Dr. Stewart, we’re going to offer a
settlement.”

Mickey stared at the insurance
representative, not sure she had heard correctly. “You can’t be
serious,” she said in disbelief.

“This is not an admission of guilt,” he
protested.

“The hell it isn’t!” she retorted angrily.
She leaned forward and stared at him. “I stayed by that kid’s bed
for five days, operated three times. What did they want – a
miracle?”

For the first time, this balding
fortyish-looking man looked directly at her through his thick
glasses, an empathetic expression on his face. “Probably.”

This had been a horrible trauma case. An
eleven-year-old hit by a car while riding his bicycle. The internal
damage had been extensive: heart, lungs, viscera.

“You’ve got to see how this would look to a
jury. You’ve got a dead child, grieving parents. It’s not likely
they would see you as a bad doctor, but they won’t want to send
these parents away with nothing. It’s just the way these cases
work. They don’t see the money as coming from you, and they sure
don’t care about making an insurance company pay. It’s a matter of
minimizing costs.”

An hour later, Mickey was walking aimlessly.
In nearly a decade of medical practice, this was her first
malpractice case. Rationally, she knew it was just the way the
system worked, but she had poured her heart and soul into that
child’s care. “I don’t care what the damned lawyers say, this is
personal,” she fumed.

Suddenly she stopped. This was it. She had
been going through the necessary steps to apply for entrance into
St. Bridget’s: a detailed physical, copies of her certificates of
birth and baptism, letters from Christopher corroborating Mickey’s
status as a member of his church – he’d been very happy for her
when she finally told him about St. Bridget’s. But still she had
been holding back on making the actual decision, waiting for… what?
God’s whisper? The one Mother had talked about? “Please give me
some kind of sign,” Mickey had prayed so many times over recent
months, “something to let me know where you want me to be.” This
lawsuit definitely felt like the thing she had been waiting for – a
shout more than a whisper. It was time to go.

Chapter 41

After nearly ten weeks in the hospital,
Mickey was considered stable enough to be transferred to a rehab
center to continue her wound care and begin the process of trying
to walk again. Her spinal cord had been compressed by the timber
that fell on her, but it hadn’t been severed. As a result, the
damage to the nerves was intermittent – “Medically, it’s considered
an incomplete spinal cord injury,” she had explained to Jamie.
“Some of the nerves are normal, some are partially firing and some
aren’t working at all. The trick will be to strengthen the muscles
that still receive innervation and see if enough of them are
working to hold me up.”

For Mickey, the process was complicated by
her lungs and her burns. She required daily sessions with a
nebulizer for her respiratory system, but still her ability to
breathe deeply was impaired, which left her gasping during her
strenuous exercise sessions. Her burns and grafts required ongoing
care for application of dressings and creams, and inspections of
any areas that might begin breaking down or become infected. To
control scarring, she had to be helped into a skin-tight garment
that fit like a corset to maintain constant pressure over the
grafts.

The day after Mickey was transferred to the
rehab center, Jennifer brought a collection of sweatpants, t-shirts
and underwear plus a pair of tennis shoes.

“Keep going,” Jennifer smiled as Mickey
pulled the clothes out of the bag in her lap.

In the bottom of the bag was a portable CD
player with earphones and a small collection of CDs. “Gregorian
chants?” Mickey grinned as she leafed through the discs.

“I thought you might be feeling homesick for
St. Bridget’s,” Jennifer said. “And for Sister Anselma?”

“Oh, Jen,” Mickey sighed, slumping back
against her wheelchair, “I miss… everything so much. That’s the
hardest part, harder than any of the physical things.”

Jennifer’s expression became serious.
“Mickey, I’ve always admired you, and even,” her face turned a deep
red, “had a bit of a crush on you, but… everything before pales in
comparison to the awe I feel at how brave you’ve been through all
of this.”

Mickey grimaced and shook her head. “Not so
brave. I have never felt so close to panic in my life as I did in
that fire and again when I first woke up – with the ventilator and
the restraints, unable to move or breathe on my own. It was
terrifying to be so completely helpless when the ventilator would
clog up and the alarm would go off – it was like everyone was
moving in slow motion before I could breathe again. And when the
grafts started,” she shuddered, closing her eyes, “the only thing
that kept me from screaming was reminding myself over and over why
I did it.”

“I told her that,” Jennifer said softly.
“She feels so guilty, Mickey. I told her you would rather have died
with her than to have left her in there.” Jennifer bit her lip. “To
tell you the truth, I feel kind of guilty myself.”

“You? Why?” Mickey asked in surprise.

“None of this would have happened if I
hadn’t interfered. The whole idea of the abbey doing the
restorations was my idea. That prompted the re-wiring, and all my
big talk about how valuable the tapestries were…”

“Jen, that’s crazy. You opened a whole new
world for the community. Nothing that happened is your fault.” A
thought occurred to her. “How are the tapestries anyway?”

“Believe it or not, they didn’t burn,”
Jennifer said in bewilderment. “They’re almost the only things in
there that didn’t. Mostly smoke and water damage. We’re having them
cleaned, and they should be fine.”

“Hey, while you’re here, would you help me
with one more thing?” Mickey reached over to a table and held up a
set of electric clippers. “Shave my head?”

Jennifer looked shocked. “What? No,
Mickey.”

“Look, I haven’t had to worry about anything
as meaningless as my hair for a long time. It’s amazing how
functional a habit is in freeing you from having to even think
about what to wear or what to do with your hair, but I can’t wear a
veil here, and I can’t pay for haircuts. I don’t want to have to
worry about this. Shaving my head is the simplest solution.” Mickey
held out the clippers. “I will if you don’t, but it’ll look a lot
better if you do it.”

A few days later, when Mother Theodora and
Sister Anselma arrived for a visit, neither of them hid her
surprise very well.

“Well, it’s simple, it’s cool and it solves
a problem,” Mickey defended herself with a grin, running her hand
over the soft, red bristles.

“How are you adapting to being here?” Mother
Theodora asked. “It seems a fine facility.”

“It is. The therapy is strenuous and
tiring,” Mickey admitted. “I can’t believe how weak I’ve become.
But the noise: telephones, televisions, visitors – I miss the quiet
of the abbey. Jennifer brought me these,” she said, showing them
the CDs.

“I need to speak with the billing department
about the abbey’s insurance,” Mother Theodora said. “May I suggest
some outdoor air might be good for you? It’s a beautiful day.”

Mickey transferred herself to the wheelchair
next to her bed, and insisted on wheeling herself as she and Sister
Anselma went outside. The rehab center had beautifully landscaped
grounds and gardens with wheelchair paths criss-crossing the
property. They made their way to a remote corner where they could
talk without being overheard. Mickey angled her wheelchair so that
she could face Sister Anselma as she took a seat on a bench.

“How are you really?” Sister Anselma
asked.

“Okay,” Mickey answered vaguely. “I feel
better physically now, but it’s harder being away from St.
Bridget’s, and away from you,” she added. Looking intently at
Sister Anselma, she asked, “What about you?”

Sister Anselma’s grey eyes focused on her
for several seconds before she responded, “Not so well. When you
were in the hospital, when we didn’t know if you were going to
live…” She had to stop for a second, diverting her gaze to a nearby
clump of azaleas. Mickey waited. “Nothing felt the same. Even after
you were past the worst danger, there was no joy, no sense of
purpose in being at the abbey without you.” She looked down at the
ground. “I hope you will understand, but I’ve been talking with
Mother.”

“It was time to be honest with her,” Mickey
admitted. “What was her reaction?”

“She guessed of course,” Sister Anselma said
with a wan smile. “She’s been very supportive, trying to help me
discern what it is that keeps me at St. Bridget’s versus the things
that might prompt me to leave.”

“Have you reached any conclusions?” Mickey
asked, her mouth dry and her heart suddenly hammering.

“The only conclusion I’ve reached is that we
both have to decide independently whether we are still being called
to religious life or not. I’ve decided to go on a retreat to help
me figure that out. I’ll be leaving this week for St. Anne’s near
Buffalo.”

“When will I see you again?” Mickey knew
full well that the fact that she asked that question indicated
where her heart truly was.