The Select (8 page)

"Damn. You said it's usually here by
this time."

"I probably won't hear today
either."

"Maybe. But when it comes, it'll be a
yes. Has to be. How could The Ingraham turn you down when Harvard
and all those others want you? You're in, Quinn. No sweat. So don't
worry. It can't go any other way."

Then why are you calling every day?
she wanted to say.

"If you say so."

She wished she could share Matt's
optimism. Maybe then she wouldn't feel like an overwound spring.
And every day her insides seemed to wind tighter.

Matt had heard last Saturday. Here it
was Friday and she still hadn't. Every passing day had to decrease
her chances.

"I don't..." The words caught in her
throat but she managed to force them out. "...think I made
it."

"No way, Quinn. That's—"

"Look, Matt. You've got to figure all
the acceptances went out in one wave. It's not like they were
mailing two thousand of them. There's only fifty spots. And it's
not like I live in California. I mean, you're in New Haven and I'm
in the boonies, but we're both in Connecticut. So let's face it,
Matt. The acceptances all went out and I wasn't in
there."

"I don't believe that, Quinn. And
neither does Tim."

"Tim?"

"Yeah. He's staying over for some golf
and a sortie to the reservation casino."

The memory of the exam last December,
the answers Tim had marked on her sheet, and how she'd passed them
in still rankled. She'd resented him—and her own weakness—for a
long time. Now it didn't seem to matter.

Unless they'd been wrong
answers.

"Matt...did Tim...make it?"

She was almost afraid to hear his
reply.

"Yeah, Quinn. Tim made it too. That's
why you've got to make it."

Quinn slumped into one of the ladder
back chairs at the rugged, porcelain-topped kitchen table. Her gaze
wandered, unseeing, from the worn linoleum floor to the stark white
cabinets that had been painted and repainted so many times the
edges of the panels were rounded and the type of wood beneath had
long since been forgotten.

Tim had made it. That meant the two
answers he'd given her probably had been correct.

Then why haven't
I
made it? she
thought.

"Listen," Matt said. "Tim wants to
talk to you. He—"

"Can't talk now," she blurted. "I
think I hear the mail truck."

Not really true, but she didn't want
to talk to Tim. Was it because she felt embarrassed?

"Great. Call me right back if you hear
anything."

"Okay. Sure."

Quinn hung up and sat there drumming
her fingers on the table top. This waiting was driving her
nuts.

And then a faint squeak filtered in
from the front of the house. She knew that sound. The mail truck's
brakes. She ran to the front door.

There it was, the white
jeep pausing at the end of the driveway. She waited until it had
rolled on—no sense in appearing
too
anxious—then she stepped out into the bright
afternoon sunshine and, as casually as she could manage, strolled
the one hundred feet to the road.

She flipped down the mailbox door and
withdrew the slim stack of letters and catalogs from the galvanized
gullet. Electric bill...phone bill...bank statement...The Ingraham
College of Medicine...

Quinn's heart stumbled over a beat.
She shoved the rest of the stack back into the box and stared at
the envelope. It was light, no more than a single sheet of paper
folded in there. She wished she'd asked Matt some details about his
acceptance notice. Had it come in a bigger envelope with
instructions on the how, where, and when of
registration?

It's got to be a rejection, she told
herself. It only takes one page to tell you to go pound
salt.

Her mouth was dry and her fingers
trembled as she tore open the envelope.

Dear Ms. Cleary:

Every year, The Ingraham
College of Medicine reviews hundreds of applications and entrance
exam scores. It is a most difficult task to select the fifty
applicants who will attend The Ingraham. The Admissions Office
regrets to inform you that, although you are most highly qualified
and will certainly be a credit to any institution of medical
learning, after careful consideration, your name was not among
those selected for acceptance to next year's class. However, since
your scores were ranked within the top one hundred, your name has
been placed on the waiting list. This office will inform you
immediately of any change in your status as it occurs. If you do
not wish your name placed on the wait list, please inform the
Admissions Office immediately.

There was another paragraph but Quinn
couldn't bring herself to read it. Maybe later. Not now. Her vision
blurred. She blinked to clear it. She fought the urge to ball up
the letter and envelope and shove them back into the mailbox, or
better yet, hurl them into the road. But that wouldn't do. She'd
turned twenty-two last month. She was supposed to be an
adult.

Biting back the sob that swelled in
her chest, Quinn retrieved the rest of the mail from the box and
forced her wobbly legs to walk her back toward the
house.

What am I going to
do?

She felt dizzy,
half-panicked as her rubbery knees threatened to collapse with each
step. All those bleary nights of cramming, the cups of bitter black
coffee at four a.m., the endless sessions in the poisonous air of
the chemistry labs... hours, days, her whole
life
had been about becoming a
doctor. And suddenly it was all gone...in a few seconds—the time it
took to tear open an envelope...gone.

She stumbled but kept her balance,
kept walking. She clenched her teeth.

Get a grip,
Cleary.

She slowed her breathing, cleared her
head, brushed aside the panic.

Okay, she told herself. Bad news. The
worst. An awful setback. But there were other ways. Loans, and
maybe work-study programs. Maybe even the military—sell a piece of
her life to the Army or Navy for medical school tuition. She was
not going to give up. There had to be a way, and dammit, she'd find
it.

And besides, The Ingraham
hadn't slammed the door on her. She was on the waiting list. There
was still a chance. She'd call the Admissions Office and find out
how many were ahead of her. She'd call them every month—no,
every
week
. By
September when registration day rolled around, everyone in that
Admissions Office would know the name Quinn Cleary. And if any name
was going to be moved off the waiting list into acceptance, it was
going to be hers.

She quickened her stride. That was it.
She would not let this get her down. She wasn't beaten yet. One way
or another she was going to medical school.

As she stepped onto the front porch
she glanced up and saw her mother standing there, waiting for her.
Her mother's eyes were moist, her lips were trembling.

"Oh, Quinn."

She knows, Quinn thought. Does it show
that much?

Then her mother held out her arms to
her.

Quinn held back for an instant. She
was an adult, a woman now, she could handle this on her own. She
didn't need her mother cooing over her like a kid with a scraped
knee.

But somewhere inside she
wanted a hug,
needed
one. And the understanding, the shared pain, the sympathy she
saw in her mother's eyes tore something loose in Quinn. Inner walls
cracked and crumbled. Everything she had dammed up, the agony of
the months of waiting, the hurt, the crushing disappointment, the
fear and uncertainty about what was to come, all broke free. She
clung to her mother like a drowning child to a rock in the sea and
began to sob.

"Oh, Mom...what am I going to
go?"

She felt her mother's arms envelope
her and hold her tight and she cried harder, cried like she hadn't
since her dog Sneakers had died when she was ten years
old.

*

"You're secretly glad I was turned
down, aren't you?"

Quinn said it without rancor. She'd
pulled herself together and now she was sitting at the battered
kitchen table while Mom brewed them some tea.

Mom looked at her for a few seconds,
then turned back to the whistling kettle.

"Now why would you be saying such a
thing, Quinn, dear? Glad means I take some pleasure in your hurt. I
don't. Nothing could be farther from the truth. I feel your hurt
like my own. I want to go down to that Ingraham place and wring
somebody's neck. But, well, yes, deep down inside some part of me
is... relieved."

Over the past couple of years Quinn
had sensed in her mother an unspoken resistance to her dream of
becoming a doctor. Now she felt oddly relieved that it was out in
the open.

"Why...why don't you want me to be a
doctor?"

Mom brought the teapot to the table
and set it on a crocheted potholder between them.

"It's not that I don't want you to be
a doctor—I'd love to see you as a doctor. It's just that I..." She
paused, at a loss for words. "Oh, Quinn, I know you're going to be
thinking this sounds crazy, but I'm worried about your going to
medical school."

Quinn was baffled. "Mom, I've been
away at U. Conn for the past four years and—"

"Oh, it's not the going
away that bothers me. It's just this...
feeling
I have."

Uh-oh. One of Mom's
feelings
.

"Sure and I know what you're going to
say, how it makes no sense to let these kind of feelings affect
your life, but I can't help it, Quinn. Especially when the feeling
is this strong."

Quinn shook her head. No use in
arguing. Mom sometimes thought she had premonitions. She called it
"the Sheedy thing." Some turned out true, but plenty of others
didn't. She tended to forget all the ones that didn't, and cling to
the ones that had panned out. Mostly they were just apprehensions,
fears of what might go wrong. She almost never had premonitions of
anything good.

Mom seemed to think this sort of sixth
sense ran in the family. If it did, it clearly was one more useful
gene Quinn had missed out on. She wished she could have seen that
letter coming. She would have prepared herself better.

Watching Mom pour the tea, she decided
to play along, just this once.

"What's it like, this bad feeling
about med school?"

"Nothing specific." Her eyes lost
their focus for a moment. "Just a feeling that you'll never come
back."

Is that it? Quinn thought. She's
afraid of losing me forever to some faraway medical
center?

"Mom, if you think I'll ever forget
you and Dad or turn my back—"

"No, dear. It's not that sort of
thing. I have this feeling you'll be in danger there."

"But what danger could I possibly be
in?"

"I don't know. But you remember what
happened with your Aunt Sandra, don't you?"

Oh, boy. Aunt Sandra. Mom's older
sister. The two of them had been teenagers when the Sheedy family
came over from Ireland. Aunt Sandra was always having run-ins with
"the Sheedy thing."

"Of course." Quinn had heard this
story a thousand times. "But—"

"She awoke one night and saw this
light in the hall outside her bedroom..."

Mom wasn't going to be stopped, so
Quinn leaned back and let her go.

"...The glow got brighter
and brighter, and then she saw it: a glowing hand, and clutched in
that hand was a glowing knife. It glided past her bedroom door and
disappeared down the hall. Three nights in a row she saw it. The
third night she tried to wake your uncle Evan but he was sound
asleep, so she got up alone and followed the glowing arm with the
knife down the hall. It glided past your cousin Kathy's room and
went straight to your cousin Bob's, passed right through the oak
door. She rushed inside and saw it poised over Bob's bed. And as
she watched, it plunged the knife blade into Bob's stomach. She
screamed and that woke everybody up. But the hand was gone as if it
had never been. Your uncle Evan thought she was going crazy, and
even Bob and Kathy were getting worried about her." As she always
did, Mom paused here for effect. "But the next day, your cousin Bob
was rushed to the hospital and taken to surgery where he had to
go
under the surgeon's knife for a
ruptured appendix.
" Another pause, this
time accompanied by a meaningful stare. "Thank the Lord everything
turned out okay, but after that no one ever doubted your Aunt
Sandra when she had one of her premonitions."

Silly, but the story yet again gave
Quinn a chill. The thought of being the only one awake, sitting in
the dark and seeing a glowing, knife-wielding hand float past your
bedroom door...