The Sparrow Sisters (18 page)

“You're going to beat Abigail,” Patience said as she headed for the sink.

When Henry met her at the front door, she put her hand on his chest and smiled. He was elated by the simple gesture and felt, in that moment, that he could do anything. And then he wondered if it was Patience who made him feel that way or the instantly refreshing, briny breeze that followed her in.

“Don't tell Sam I'm on deck,” Sally said.

“He'll find out when he comes to get you,” Henry said, and Sally saw that he'd nearly resigned himself to the deliv
ery. “I am a little concerned that you're sprinting along here.” He looked at his watch. “It's only been twenty minutes since your water broke, and the contractions are right on top of each other.”

“Actually, they've been kind of piddling along since lunch.” Sally looked at Patience and shrugged. A fleeting but profound sense of well-being rolled through her as the injection took the edge off the pain.

“For God's sake, Sally,” Henry said. “Warren's definitely going to miss this. I shouldn't have given you Demerol so close to delivery.”

“Terrific,” Sally said through gritted teeth.

“You don't need drugs, Sally,” Patience whispered in her ear.

“Shut up!” Henry snapped. “You, get her undressed,” Henry ordered Patience with a sharply pointed finger.

“Did you do this on purpose, Sally?” Patience asked with Henry out of the room.

“No, I seriously thought I had more time. Then I couldn't stand the thought of Sam delivering me in the back of his ambulance bouncing down Route 6.” Sally managed a chuckle. “I could never look him in the face again,” she said.

“He'd never look at
just
your face again,” Patience said rather hysterically. “Of course now you've got Henry around all day.”

“Yeah, I didn't think this through completely.” Sally closed her eyes. “And,” she said, “can you guys settle whatever it is and get on with things? The doctor's been a wreck for two days.”

This was oddly pleasing to Patience.

Henry rummaged around in the supply room and found the stirrups. He had always found them vaguely torturous in appearance, but often useful in the event. He pulled his button-down and tie off and mentally waved good-bye to his nice white undershirt. Back with the women he shook his head and muttered the whole time he set up the table and positioned Sally's feet. He was about to launch a little lecture about having a back-up birth plan and taking a longer view of things when he thought he smelled something, a clean yet remarkably soothing scent that felt like cool water and shade. His anger faded, and, as a bonus, his sinuses cleared. He looked at Patience, who was standing by Sally, stroking her face and neck with a damp cloth. Two small bottles were tucked into Patience's shirt pocket.

“Bay laurel,” she said. “And blessed thistle, for her milk.” Henry opened his mouth to remind Patience of her purely supportive role, but he looked at Sally and paused. Her gaze had gone soft and blank, her eyes half closed and for a minute he thought she'd drifted off. She was clearly in as calm a state as was possible given the circumstances. Then the next contraction hit, and she screwed up her face and blew short, harsh breaths into the quiet. Henry waited for the pain to pass and moved to her feet.

“Now hold as still as you can. I'll be quick and then we'll deliver this baby together.” Henry pulled on gloves and lifted Sally's gown. He looked over her knees at Patience and grinned.
He felt positively heroic as he prepared to bring a new life into the world.
Really,
he thought,
how could she resist him?

Seventeen minutes later, Katherine Chapman Tabor was born. Five minutes after Henry cleaned everyone up and gave Sally a pair of his own pajama pants to wear, Sam and his partner arrived. Patience led him back to the exam room, and the look on Sam's face when he saw Sally and her daughter was priceless. Henry laughed so hard, mostly out of relief, that he had to put his head down for a minute.

Sam recovered enough to do his job in the gentle, efficient manner that had attracted Patience to him in the first place. He got mother and baby out and into the ambulance without once asking for his bets to be paid. He had been right after all. It was a girl. Patience and Henry were left standing in the sudden quiet of the waiting room and, to Henry's surprise, Patience was the first to speak.

“I have given a lot of thought to what you said, and I told Matty that you would be taking care of him from now on.”

“Oh, well.” Henry wasn't sure if her conciliatory demeanor was hiding a bit of a seethe or if Patience really had come to some kind of peace with his brand of healing. He pulled her into a fierce hug before she could stop him. “Have you talked to his father?” he asked as he breathed deep into her hair. He wanted to be sure that she was serious about this.

“No, I think a doctor should do it.” Patience pressed against Henry. “It would be better coming from you, a capable, useful professional.”

“Which makes you what?” Henry asked.

“I am a capable, useful, extraordinarily insightful savant,” she said and placed a hand on his hip. His tee shirt was untucked. All manner of fluids had stained the front near his waist. “Really,” said Patience, “this shirt has got to come off.”

“If you think that I can forget you left me for fifty whole hours by distracting me with an artfully placed caress . . .” Henry trailed off, his voice muffled beneath his shirt. “As you so rightly pointed out, I am a professional, and this is my office. I am not a cheap date,” he continued as he pulled Patience's shirttails from her jeans. More than anything Henry wanted to scoop Patience up and thunder, carefully because the pain in his leg had been building for two days, up the stairs to his apartment. But he needed to talk, to dissolve the wall that went up every time he spoke to Patience about her work.

“As lovely as it would be to forget everything but you”—Henry rubbed his thumbs over Patience's collarbones, and she shivered—“we have to figure out how to work without stepping on each other's toes. I couldn't stand another day like the last ones.”

“You're right,” Patience said, and Henry cursed.

“What?” she said.

“I was counting on you to feel so guilty you'd take me to bed again. I find that a most pleasing way to work out our differences.”

They went back to the exam room. Henry pulled his shirt back on and threw his undershirt in the hazardous waste bin. They cleaned up together. As they did, Henry asked Patience
how she treated Matty; they hadn't gotten to the specifics that day in the Nursery. He went through Sally's meticulous filing system and found Matty's records, only to realize that a doctor hadn't seen him since Higgins retired. His prescriptions had run out, and he hadn't been treated by any kind of therapist as far as Henry could tell.

“Matty's probably got no meds at all by now. If Dr. Higgins wasn't attending to him,” Henry said, waving the file folder at Patience, “who was?”

“I guess me,” she said and slumped as she acknowledged how let down Matty had really been. “I just assumed his prescriptions were filled. Mostly I nudge his dad to keep up with his Doxepin, but when he doesn't, if Matty's with me, I use my remedies. I taught him some self-calming exercises.”

“Have you tried those on yourself?” Henry asked.

“No, but I have a few ideas for you,” she said and rolled her stool into Henry's chair.

“Pay attention,” he said. “Tell me the combination again.”

Henry jotted down the names of the ingredients in Patience's prescriptions for Matty.

“You do know it's a fine line you're walking with your work?” Henry asked. “It's not a hobby or a curiosity when a whole town comes to you for help.”

“The whole town doesn't come to me,” Patience said. “In fact, most of the men have always been a little wary of me altogether. And,” she added, “as for a curiosity, that's me all right, but my work didn't start out that way.”

And it hadn't. Patience remembered the day she had found the recipe book. She was only seventeen and, not surprisingly, was awfully tired of her older sisters the year before she started college. Where better to hide out than the attic on a chilly November afternoon? Patience planned to raid her mother's wardrobe, which had for some reason escaped Thaddeus's grief-fueled rage. Everything from silk trousers so fine they felt like water running through her fingers, to bulky sweaters to the sundresses she would wear years later, to dried-out Wellington boots, were stored as if waiting for Honor to come back. Behind both Honor's leftovers and the girls' still-stored winter coats and snow pants was the real Sparrow legacy.

You would think such a treasure as an early nineteenth-century notebook would have been kept safe and sound but, like so much of the Sparrow history, it had been stacked up with other stories: ledgers from the whaling fleet, several—no doubt valuable—pieces of scrimshaw, a straw boater that called out for a punter, and a sailor's valentine that fell to pieces in Patience's hands, scattering shells and sharp shell fragments across the wide plank floor. The book itself was wound round with a faded blue grosgrain ribbon as wide as the boater's hatband. It was at the back of the cedar closet, and Patience might never have even seen it if she hadn't gone looking for her mother's kitten heel satin pumps. She had a mind to wear them with her ripped jeans, a combination that would have been terrific had she found the shoes. In the end, Patience sat on the floor leafing through the recipe book until Sorrel found her.

The Sisters agreed that the book was to be kept secret from Mrs. Bartlet, who was nearly as likely to snoop as Patience, and from the town until they figured out exactly what it said. It was Patience who managed to decipher the faded brown ink, who learned that Clarissa Sparrow had compiled all the remedies she knew in one place. Those remedies were culled from the nearly unreadable notes left by Eliza Howard, the witch of Granite Point. The original Howard book was lost to history and Clarissa's edition was twice as long. Had the Sisters known about the author at the start, they might not have been so eager to make the book their own (or maybe they would). As it was, it took Patience nearly three years to read and copy out Clarissa and Eliza's recipe book after classes. She studied botany at GPC using the book as an extracurricular text. She pored over seed catalogues and arcane websites compiling both the information and eventually the actual seeds to begin to replicate her ancestor's remedies. In all that time Patience kept the book hidden, just as Matty kept his book hidden, just as Clarissa and Eliza had kept their skills hidden until needed. Then, once Patience had finished her work, she took the book to the historical society, along with the scrimshaw, and gave it to the town, where it sat beside glass net buoys, slightly moldy baskets, faded photos of the old duck farm on the post road, and all the other ephemera that drew very few tourists away from the beach. But the essence, the real guts of the book, stayed with Patience. It would become her book as she added to it, rewrote parts, and learned how to gather the past and the present together.

“W
HAT HAPPENED TO
Matty's mother?” Henry asked.

“She died when Matty was nine.” Patience shook her head. “That's not totally true. She killed herself. It was before anyone really knew what was going on with him; he acted out, ran away. Once made it halfway to Hayward. Sam picked him up on the post road in a nearly catatonic state.”

“Do not tell me she committed suicide over Matty,” Henry said.

Patience only tipped her head. “No note, so no answer to that. I think she was heartbroken over her inability to fix her son. Rob sort of shut down, and Matty still pays the price.”

“It's hard to force an unwilling or unable patient to make appointments, let alone keep them. And with a minor . . .” Henry looked at Patience. “Can I just say this? Where was everybody in this precious town?” He was surprised at his anger and then it felt good, hot and muscular and righteous somehow. “I mean, really, all of your ‘we're a village, we're all in this together' shit.” Henry stopped. “Sorry.”

“No, you're not wrong,” Patience said, as ashamed as Henry was angry. “We all enjoyed clucking away at Rob, throwing in some help now and then, but we never made a bit of difference. Here's the thing, Rob was—is—an outsider. He's not from here; his wife was but then she died. It made it all too easy to discount him and Matty in some way.”

“An inlander,” Henry said.

“Yeah—no—what?” Patience asked.

Henry explained about his first night at Doyle's and how it
was made clear to him that he would be an outsider for, well, forever.

“That's probably true,” Patience agreed. “But I suppose I could vouch for you.”

Henry couldn't tell if she was being serious.

“So what are we going to do about Matty?” Henry asked.

“We? I thought you didn't trust me to keep caring for him.”

“I do trust you,” Henry said. “The way you see what's wrong at the heart of someone. I may not understand what you do, but I am certain that your diagnostic skills are as good as mine. Tell me what you see in Matty, beneath the autism.”

“Really, you want my take?”

“You know him best.”

“All right. After you said you thought he was sick, I began to think about it. He's too thin, his skin is so pale, and there are times when he isn't really ‘there' if you know what I mean.” Patience thought a minute. “Lately, when he's with me, he almost always sleeps for a couple hours in the afternoon. It's like he can't stay conscious. He's never hungry, except for sweets, and he complains he's dizzy, though he calls it seasick.”

Henry nodded. “And?”

“And Matty seems to know there's something wrong.”