Raina's Story (13 page)

She thought about limbo, the place Holly had told her about. Was it real? And if it was, could other babies be waiting there? Would they welcome Annie? Shun her?

The fear for Annie's well-being made Raina's heart beat faster like a scary movie or bad dream would, and she wished Hunter were there. He would comfort her, tell her again that the universe was a created place, fashioned and overseen by a benevolent Being. How much she longed to believe that this was so, but she could not. What kind of being abandons the Annies of this life? Or stashes them in limbo, out of the way, out of existence?

A thousand unshed tears filled Raina's mouth. She swallowed them down, smoothed Annie's hair and kissed the papery skin beneath the baby's closed eyes. Annie's breathing had grown sporadic, with longer and longer lapses between breaths. Raina held her own breath, attempting to match the baby's breathing with her own and dreading the moment when Annie would cross over from life into death. Her crossing came softly.
One breath. Long wait. No more
.

In desperation, Raina pulled Annie's lips apart, and, planting her mouth on Annie's, she blew hard. Annie lay limp and perfectly still, and Raina's breath of life evaporated into the air.

She lifted the baby to her shoulder, patted her back and waited until Annie's skin grew cool, until the baby was little more than a doll with stiffening limbs. Raina didn't know how long she sat there like that, holding Annie and rocking her, but at some point Betsy came over and said, “You've been here a long time. Are you all right?”

“Annie died,” Raina said.

“Oh, honey, when? Give her to me. She should be pronounced by a doctor.” Betsy lifted Annie from Raina's arms. She felt for a pulse.

“What will happen to her now?” Raina asked.

“Her parents will bury her. Our morgue will call the funeral home they've chosen and it will come and pick up her body for preparation, and her parents will grieve all over again.” Betsy carried Annie to her isolette and called to the attending physician, who came over and placed a stethoscope against Annie's chest.

Without a word, Raina peeled off her hospital gown and left the area. She went down the hall to a bathroom and was relieved when she found it vacant. She cried until she was empty of tears. She raised her gaze and stared into the mirror. Red, swollen eyes looked back at her.

Mascara smudged her cheeks. She'd thought the darn stuff was waterproof. Didn't anything in this world function the way it was supposed to, the way it was advertised? Mascara shouldn't run if it got wet…. Newborns were supposed to live and grow.

She splashed cold water on her face, and patted her skin dry with a scratchy paper towel. She stared at her hands, wiggled her fingers, suddenly grateful and amazed at how well her body functioned. Her heart beat. Her lungs pushed air in and out. The processes were so automatic that she'd rarely noticed them. She turned her hands over, knowing that beneath her skin, millions of blood cells poured through veins and capillaries, carrying oxygen and nutrients to sustain her existence. Her hands held life.
And so did her bones
. She could not have saved Annie. She
could
help save the woman in Virginia with her bone marrow. Raina straightened, tucked strands of her hair behind her ears and headed for the door. She was going to donate her marrow, no matter what her mother said.

Kathleen waited at the end of Carson's street for twilight to engulf the world. This was the problem with driving her mother's huge old wheelchair-adapted van—it was very recognizable and its muffler could wake the dead. She'd wanted to bum Raina's car, something newer
and quieter, but Holly had told her that Raina had jumped school at lunchtime to go to the hospital, so Kathleen was on her own with the big ugly van.

She nibbled her bottom lip. Her palms sweated on the steering wheel. “This is stupid,” she told herself out loud. “Really dumb.” Why couldn't she just pick up the phone and call him and say, “
I'm sorry. I acted like an idiot. Forgive me
”? She lacked the guts. Besides, saying “I'm sorry” over a phone was cowardly. She needed him to see her face and see how sincere she was, and she needed to see his face to gauge how her apology was being received.

“And so why are you waiting?” she asked herself out loud. “Why don't you put your foot on the gas and move this tank of a van down to his house? If you want to apologize, then go do it!” Her stern talk to herself did nothing to quiet her nerves.

She should have brought Holly with her, then remembered why she hadn't. Holly would have
made
her follow through. Holly wouldn't have allowed Kathleen to chicken out.

“Come on,” she reasoned. “What's the big deal? What's the worst that can happen?”

He can slam the door in my face
. “If that happens, you can get right back in the van and drive home and say good riddance.”

Oh, sure. As if I won't be crying like a baby
.

“But I miss him. I lov—” She stopped midsentence and amended, “I
like
him. I miss him. I want him in my life.”

Taking a deep breath, and seeing that it was completely dark by now, Kathleen put the van into gear and slowly drove forward. In the middle of the block, she remembered to turn on her lights. As she approached Carson's house, she saw that the windows spilled soft light onto the hedges beneath—someone was home. She was about to turn into his driveway when her heart seemed to stop and her blood ran cold. Parked far up in the brick driveway, close to the house, she saw Stephanie's small white sports car. Kathleen froze as the implication sank in and Stephanie's words rang in her ears.
“… he finds a new plaything … but he always comes back to me
.”

Kathleen pushed the accelerator to the floor and the van shot forward. She didn't slow down until she had crossed from Davis Island to the mainland. She didn't look back. She didn't allow herself to cry until she was home and in the safety of her room.

Raina let herself into the town house and saw her mother sitting at the counter, poring over work she'd brought home.

Vicki glanced up. “I fixed a plate for you to warm in the microwave—Raina? Are you all right?”

“Annie died this afternoon. I was holding her when she…”

Vicki hopped off the counter stool. “Oh, honey…I'm so sorry.”

Raina fended off her mother's hug. “Everybody said she would. It's not like it came as a surprise. I… just…wish…”

Vicki looked sympathetic. “You never forget the first patient you lose. I can still remember mine. He was an elderly man, and so very nice. His wife was shattered. They'd been married fifty-five years. I felt helpless, like ‘if there was only more we could do.’ But there wasn't. Death is the enemy, Raina. We may keep Death at bay for a time, but he always wins.”

Raina heaved her books onto the coffee table. She wasn't in the mood for Vicki's tour down memory lane laced with platitudes. “I went to see Dr. Portera too.”

At this, Vicki's eyes grew wary. “Alone? Without me? I told you we needed to go together.”

“I thought I'd save you some time tomorrow.” Raina's exhaustion and sense of helplessness began to lift. She continued with dogged persistence. “He told me that I was a great match for the woman in Virginia. I wish I knew her name. Anyway, I can't walk away from this, Mom. My bone marrow can help this woman. It might even reverse her cancer and save her life. How can you
say no just because I'll be sore for a few days? Or because I'll miss some school? Even the part about me going under a general is bogus. I'm young and healthy and if I needed surgery to fix a problem with
me,
you'd never say a word about the general.”

Vicki's expression had turned to stone as she listened to Raina's arguments. “I—I need some time to think.”

“What's to think about? Dying woman. Healthy marrow. Transplant ASAP.”

Then Vicki surprised Raina by saying the oddest thing. “I'm going upstairs to take a warm shower. Sit down here and wait for me.”

“But—”

“Just wait. I'll be down shortly.”

Mystified, Raina watched her mother ascend the stairs. A shower? Now? Right in the middle of their conversation? What was going on? Frustrated, she ripped open her book bag and took out her laptop. She set it on her knees and started an e-mail to Hunter. She poured out her heart, weeping as she wrote about Annie, getting irritated as she wrote about her mother's reluctance to allow her to donate her bone marrow. She had just pushed the Send button when she heard Vicki coming down the stairs. Raina set the laptop aside, mentally prepared for another round of arguing her case.

Vicki sat in the wingback chair catty-corner
to the sofa. She was wrapped in her thick white terry cloth robe, her hair wet and slicked back, her face clean and devoid of makeup. She looked vulnerable, younger than her forty-two years. Her feet were bare, her toes painted a bright shade of pink that appeared out of place with the austerity of her expression. She propped both feet on a footstool and crossed her arms. She cleared her throat and said, “Raina, we need to talk.”

I
F VICKI
hadn't looked so serious, Raina would have said, “Well, duh! Yes, we do.” Instead she nodded agreeably, preparing mentally to challenge anything negative her mother might be about to say. “You start.”

“This isn't going to be easy because it—it's going to change your life.”

Raina's heart beat faster. What could her mother possibly mean? Suddenly, she had a horrific thought. “Are you okay? You… you're not, like,
sick,
are you, Mom?”

“No, I'm not sick.”

Raina breathed easier.

“But I'm not all right.” Vicki picked at a thread on the arm of the chair. “Sometimes it's necessary to make difficult choices in life. Choices that were right at the time we made them, but that can revisit us years later.” Raina bobbed her head, hoping to encourage her mother to get to the point. Vicki sat as still as a rock. “Back in Ohio, when I was sixteen, I was
crazy in love with a boy at school. That's why I've always understood about you and Hunter. I knew that you loved him with all your heart.”

Love. Present tense,
Raina corrected in her mind, not wanting to interrupt but clueless about the point.

“Well, I loved Dustin in the same way—with all my heart. And then—” She glanced at her hands in her lap. “And then just before Christmas of my junior year, I found out I was three months pregnant.”

Raina's mouth dropped open. “Pregnant? You?”

“I was amazingly naive. We were having sex, but I wasn't taking any precautions. Dumb, huh? I was playing with fire but expecting not to get burned. And the idea of STDs never entered my mind. We were in love and we were each other's firsts.”

When her ordeal with Tony had happened, Vicki had never yelled at Raina or bombarded her with recriminations. She'd brought home a prescription for birth control pills, handed it to Raina and said, “If you're going to be sexually active, don't get pregnant.” At the time, Raina had been shocked and relieved, but she had also felt intense shame, knowing she'd disappointed her mother. Suddenly, the way Vicki had handled things back then made perfect sense to her. “Okay, so you got pregnant. What happened?”

“The whole scene got pretty ugly. Dustin's parents went ballistic and refused to let us see each other. My parents freaked out and called me terrible names. Everyone wanted me to have an abortion. But I couldn't. I wanted my baby.”

Vicki plucked out the thread and rolled it into a ball between her thumb and forefinger. “My family disowned me. Haven't you ever wondered why you've never met your grandparents?”

“I used to. When I was younger, you said they lived in California and it was too far for us to visit. I used to wonder why they never sent me presents or anything, though.”

“It's because they don't know about you.”

“They don't know about
me
?”

“They were so ugly and mean to me during my first pregnancy that I decided they didn't deserve to know about my second,” Vicki said matter-of-factly. “We haven't communicated for years.”

Who was this woman in the room with her? Raina wondered. She'd assumed she and her mother had no secrets from each other, but for Vicki to live all her adult life without ever speaking to her own parents… “So you had the baby?” The words sounded foreign to Raina.

“I went to a special home for unwed mothers and yes, I had the baby. A girl. I named her Crystal because she was small and pretty and looked as fragile as glass to me.”

“And—and Dustin?”

“His family had shipped him off to relatives in Michigan. I got word to him when she was born, but there was nothing either of us could do. Besides, I think that secretly he was relieved. He had a garage band and was having a good time. He didn't want to get married and raise a child.” Vicki ran her hand through her hair, now almost dry, and the light from the floor lamp next to the chair highlighted a few strands of gray. “I gave Crystal up for adoption. It was the hardest thing I've ever done, but I was only sixteen. I couldn't raise her alone. I had no support. She deserved better. It was the best thing for all of us.” Her voice caught, and for a moment Raina thought her mother might break down. “I was told she went to a good family. As if they'd tell me she went to a bad family. I told the adoption agency I wanted my records left open. I wanted her to be able to find me if she ever wanted to meet me, get to know me. But she never has.”