“Someone’s knocking, Miss Santaniello.” Jenny Altman, sitting in the first seat, first row, pointed toward the door.
The next moment, the principal’s secretary, Shirley, opened the door and beckoned to her. “There’s a call for you in the office, Claire.”
Claire glanced over her shoulder. Ordinarily, if she stepped out, she’d leave one of the students in charge of the class. But they were all still busy taking the exam. “Take a message, Shirley,” she requested. “I’ll call whoever it is back right after my class is finished with their exam.”
But Shirley looked a little hesitant. “She said it was urgent.”
Something instantly tightened in her stomach. Urgent. She’d never liked that word, Claire thought. “Who?”
“Your cousin.” Shirley paused, thinking. “Nancy I believe she said her name was.”
The knot grew tighter. If she didn’t take this call, her imagination was going to run away with her before she ever returned it. “Shirley, could you watch them for me? They’re almost done.”
Assuming the secretary’s answer would be in the affirmative, Claire left before the woman had a chance to respond.
The hallway leading from her classroom to the main office felt longer than usual. It was hard to keep from running.
She was working herself up for no reason, Claire silently lectured. She knew Nancy’s “urgent” calls. It was probably to ask about a recipe or to find out when they were all getting together again and at whose house. Normal things. No reason to feel as if her heart had lodged itself in her throat. Her mother had looked better this morning when she’d left than she had in the last week. This was probably nothing.
Claire still made it to the office in record time. Someone called out a “hello” and she barely acknowledged it. She couldn’t have even said who it was. Heading straight for Shirley’s desk, she picked up the receiver and released the hold button.
“Hello?” The word sounded shaky. There was a huge lump in her throat.
“Claire?” the voice on the other end asked.
Please, please, please ask me about a recipe, Nancy. Her hands felt damp as she held the receiver with both hands. “Yes?”
“Thank God.” Nancy sounded breathless. “Claire, I’ve been trying to reach you on your cell phone, but it kept going to voice mail.”
“I shut my phone off when I’m in the classroom.” She was having an inane conversation while trying not to throw up. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” But even as she asked, Claire had a sinking sensation. Despite what she was trying to convince herself of, she knew that Nancy wouldn’t have gone through the principal’s office just to ask about something trivial. “It’s Mother, isn’t it?” She thought she heard Nancy stifle a sob before answering.
“Aunt Margaret called me a little while ago. I got to your house as quickly as I could.” She drew in a ragged breath. “The ambulance just took her away.”
Claire’s hands went icy. “Ambulance? What ambulance?”
“The one I called. Oh, Claire, Aunt Margaret could hardly move. She didn’t even seem like the person I saw yesterday. I thought she was dead when I got here.” There was another sob and it was obvious that Nancy struggled to regain control. “She told me that it took her half an hour to get to the phone to call me.”
The room was tilting. She could see Mr. Selkirk, one of the counselors, watching her as if she was going to faint. Claire turned away so he couldn’t see her expression.
“But she was all right this morning,” Claire insisted, as if that would change something. “Not great, but all right.”
Her mother had been a little pale, perhaps, but she’d attributed that to her mother being up later than normal because of the Christmas tree excursion. Tears sprang to her eyes, blurring her vision. She angrily wiped them away with the back of her hand. She couldn’t break down now, she had to be strong. There was no one to turn to.
“I’ll be right there.”
“Claire, I’m at home,” Nancy told her quickly, afraid that Claire would break the connection before she knew. “Ethan’s sick,” she said, mentioning her youngest, “and I couldn’t leave him for long. Call me as soon as you know anything.”
“Okay.” Shaking inside, Claire hung up. The moment she did, she dashed out into the hallway and ran back to her room.
“No running in the halls, Miss Santaniello,” a tiny voice, belonging to a hall monitor, piped up.
Ordinarily, she would have stopped. But not this time. The sense of urgency refused to abate.
Shirley seemed relieved to see her. But then, the next moment, uncertainty entered the dark brown eyes.
“I’ve got to leave,” Claire told her, taking her purse out of the bottom drawer where she kept it. “It’s an emergency. They’ve just taken my mother to the hospital. Please tell Principal Walcott I’m very sorry.”
“Is she all right, Miss Santaniello?” one of the little girls in the back of the room asked.
“Is your mom going to die?” another chimed in bluntly.
Trust a child to voice the thought she couldn’t bring herself to entertain.
“I really hope not, Kyle,” she tossed back as she made her exit.
Claire prayed all the way to the hospital. It had been a while since she’d prayed with this intense feeling of urgency. In the past, praying had always made her feel better. It didn’t this time. She couldn’t shake the feeling of dread.
“I know I can’t tell You what to do and I have no right to ask. A lot of people think I walked out on You. But You know better, don’t You? You understand that it just wasn’t working out and that I could do better for both of us out here in the secular world than where I was.
“Or at least, I thought I could. But it’s gotten all mixed up, hasn’t it?” Her head was hurting. She had trouble keeping her eyes on the road. “Are You doing this to punish me for sleeping with Caleb? If I stop, will she be all right?”
She was babbling now and she knew it, but she was trying her best to collect herself. She needed to be calm when she went to see her mother. Her mother would take her cue from her.
“Please, don’t take her away.” Her voice cracked. She swallowed, trying to get rid of the dusty sensation in her throat. “Not yet. Let me have her for a little while longer. We’re just getting to know each other again after all these years. I gave those years to You. Couldn’t You please give me a few more months with her?” She blinked several times to clear the haze from her eyes again. Approaching the hospital parking lot, she made her way to the first lot she could find.
“I don’t mean to sound as if I’m making demands,” she murmured. “But if You could find it in Your heart to spare her for a while, I would really take it as a personal favor.”
When she’d been younger, before she ever entered the order, she would make deals with God, offering to give up something if only she could have what she was praying for. She desperately wanted to do that again, but she had nothing to offer anymore.
Nothing except one thing.
Claire took a deep breath. “If You spare her, if You let my mother live, I’ll go back to the order. If she goes into remission, I’ll take it as a sign that I made a mistake and that You want me to go back. All right?”
Her words echoed back to her. She felt empty inside. Empty and scared.
“I’ll assume You said yes.”
Fighting back tears, Claire hurried to the back entrance of the hospital’s emergency room.
Chapter Fifteen
Claire thought she was braced when she entered her mother’s small room on the fifth floor.
She was wrong.
Never a large woman, Margaret Santaniello looked positively tiny and oh-so-lost against the white sheets of the hospital bed.
Tubes and wires ran up and down the length of her frail body, monitoring functions, deadening her pain, helping her breathe and warding off any stray infections.
A wave of weakness washed over Claire and she held
on to the doorknob for a moment to steady herself, afraid that she was going to collapse.
It wasn’t that she’d never seen frail, sick people before. She had. On almost a regular basis. Women old before their time, before they’d even reached their twenties; skinny, malnourished babies with distended bellies; scrawny, skeletonlike men who were taken down by the ravages of diseases before they’d even had a chance to live.
But this was different.
This twisted her heart so that she could hardly stand it.
This was her mother.
She supposed, in a way, she’d expected her mother to live forever, to continue, as she had always done. Even when she hadn’t been able to see her mother for long spans of time, in the back of her mind, her mother was always there. Would always be there.
Except now, she might not be.
Claire couldn’t bring herself to remove the words might not and substitute wouldn’t. She wasn’t strong enough for that yet.
Her knees solidified, she took a deep breath and slowly approached the narrow hospital bed, taking care not to bump against any of the machines that seemed to have taken up most of the available space.
Her mother opened her eyes. “You…came.” The two-word sentence was uttered breathlessly, as if it took a great deal of strength and will just to make it materialize.
How could her mother have expected anything else? “Of course I came. The second that Nancy called me.” She picked up her mother’s hand and laced her fingers through her mother’s. They felt cold, Claire thought, struggling against a huge wave of despair that threatened to engulf her. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Margaret struggled to smile. It was an effort only half-completed. Each word emerged after a breathless pause. “No, I knew…you’d come…. I just didn’t know…if…I…would still be…here.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Claire cried. She lowered her tone. “Mother, you’ve got to stop this negative attitude. It’s weighing you down. You’re not going anywhere,” Claire told her fiercely. She realized that she’d tightened her hold on her mother’s hand and loosened her grip. She needed to restrain the mounting panic she felt. “You’re going to stay here for a little while,” she said in a softer voice, “get better and then I’ll take you home.”
This time, her mother managed to curve her lips in a small smile. “I’m not…leaving here and we both…know that.”
“No, we don’t,” Claire insisted. “No, we don’t,” she repeated with more feeling.
“And when…I go…home,” her mother continued, as if she hadn’t said anything, “it won’t be to…the house on…Hamilton…Street. It’ll be home…to…God and your…father.” Her breathing grew more and more labored.
Claire held on to her mother’s hand harder, as if the very act would anchor her mother’s spirit to the bed. To her.
“Dad’s just going to have to wait a while longer. Don’t rush things, Mother.” She was blinking hard now, trying to keep the tears from flowing. They fell anyway. “Christmas is coming. How am I going to be able to decorate the tree if you’re not there, telling me where to hang everything?”
“I never…did…that.”
“Yes, you did,” Claire reminded her fondly. “And it drove me crazy at the time, but I promise…” Tears were choking her. “I promise it won’t this time.”
Margaret paused, gathering her strength and her breath. There was one more thing she needed to say. “You can go back now,” she told her daughter.
Was she sending her away? Claire didn’t understand. “Go back?”
“To the order. Once…I’m gone…you won’t need…to stay. You…can…go…back.” Margaret’s eyes looked cloudy as they searched for her face. Her voice was hardly a whisper now. “You will go back…won’t…you?”
Claire didn’t want to waste her mother’s breath talking about that. She wanted her to save her strength. “We’ll talk about it once you’re home.”
Margaret appeared to grow agitated. She moved her head from side to side. “Claire, it was all I…could do to hang…on…until you got here. I’m…tired, but I…want to go…without you on…my…conscience. Tell me…you’ll go back.”
This was important to her mother. And this wasn’t the time to argue. “I’ll go back.”
“Good.” Margaret’s eyes began to drift shut, her face growing peaceful. “I love you. It’ll…be nice…to see…your…father…again. I don’t know…what he’s been…doing all these…years without…me.”
“Waiting,” Claire told her quietly. The lump in her throat grew and she all but choked on her tears.
And then she felt the hand that was in hers go lax.
Panic and sorrow overwhelmed her. “Mother? Mom? Mom! Please don’t go. Please.”
But even as she begged, she knew she was only talking to the shell that had once contained the spirit that had been her mother.
Margaret Santaniello was gone.
And she was alone.
This time, Claire didn’t bother trying to control the tears that flooded her eyes. Sobbing, she put her arms around the frail body lying in the hospital bed and embraced her mother one last time.
There would be no team of doctors and nurses bursting through the door, pushing a crash cart before them, utilizing heroic methods to try to bring Margaret Santaniello back from the dead. Her mother had told her that she had a DNR in place. A document that ordered the hospital staff: do not resuscitate. More than anything, Claire wanted to rescind it, wanted that team in here, fighting to save her mother. But she knew that would be imposing her will on her mother and she hadn’t the right.
This was what her mother wanted. To be let go when the time came.
But she wasn’t ready. And it would be oh, so terrible without her mother.
She heard the door behind her being opened. Probably someone from the nurses’ station coming in to check if her mother was indeed gone.
Claire couldn’t even raise her head to look. She couldn’t stop crying. It was as if once she’d begun, that was all there was. Just tears and sorrow.
She couldn’t even draw in a full breath.
And then, through a haze of pain and heartbreak, Claire felt strong arms lift her up from the bed and then turn her around. Felt a strong chest give her a place to bury her face and go on sobbing.
She did, for several long minutes. And then, drawing in a deep, ragged breath, she raised her head and found herself looking up at Caleb.
Was she hallucinating?
“What are you doing here?” She could hardly talk. Her throat was completely raw.
“Your cousin, Nancy, called the dispatch officer and dispatch got in contact with me.”
He and Ski were checking out rumors of yet another underage pornography ring in the area, this one said to also pimp out their “starlets.” They’d been in the middle of posing as two pedophiles, something they both found particularly vile, when he’d gotten the call from dispatch. He’d thought something had happened to Danny again until he heard Nancy’s voice.
“She said she thought that you were going to need me. I left Ski holding the fort.” His partner had been far from happy, but the man had rallied when Ski realized that he was coming to the aid of a woman. He’d left his partner bursting at the seams with unanswered questions. “I came as soon as I could.”
He looked over Claire’s head at Margaret. It was wrong what they said. People didn’t look like they were asleep when they died. They just looked as if they’d died, as if some unknown “something”—a soul?—had disappeared, leaving them behind.
His arms tightened protectively around Claire. “I’m sorry, Claire. She was a really nice woman.”
Claire tried to answer him, to say something, anything, in return. But the words wouldn’t come. The tears wouldn’t let them. All she could do was cry her heart out.
Very gently, Caleb pushed her head back down against his chest and let her cry. He held her to him until she finished.
He held her fo
r a very long time.
Caleb waited in the wings while she made all the arrangements she could at the hospital. Waited as she called her cousin to tell her what had happened. When her voice broke and she couldn’t go on, he took the phone from her and told Nancy the rest of it.
Hanging up, he said, “You’re coming home with me.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s all right, thank you.”
“You don’t understand,” he told her, taking her arm. “This isn’t negotiable. You’re coming home with me. I don’t want you to be alone.”
“My car—” she began to protest.
He wasn’t about to get sidetracked. “I’ll have someone from the squad get it and bring it to your house. Any other arguments?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Good.” Letting go of her arm, he slipped his arm protectively around her shoulders, gently but firmly guiding her out.
When Danny came home from school, he seemed surprised to find both his father and the woman he considered his best friend at home instead of Mrs. Collins.
The boy was about to call out a greeting to her and launch himself around her waist as was his custom away from school when he abruptly stopped.
Cocking his head, he looked at her more closely. “You look sad, Miss Santaniello.”
“Her mother died today,” Caleb told his son frankly. He expected the boy to back away.
Instead, Danny came closer and took Claire’s hand. “It’s okay, Miss Santaniello. She’s with my mom. Mom’ll take care of her.”
Up until that moment, she was succeeding in her effort to put on a brave face in front of Caleb’s son. But that bit of simple, tender philosophy, rendered by an eight-year-old, completely undid her. Fresh tears welled up in her eyes. She didn’t bother to wipe them away as they slid down her cheeks.
When he seemed upset at her reaction, she did her best to smile at him. “Thank you, Danny. I think my mother would like that.”
“Would you like something to eat?” Caleb asked his son.
The 39-Year-Old Virgin Page 16
