Pascal's Wager

by Nancy Rue

  Nigel took off his glasses. “I know about your mother, Jill. I’m not one for listening to talk about people’s personal affairs, but I couldn’t help but hear. I’m sorry.”

  I nodded. I didn’t feel angry that a boundary had been violated. It was just that Nigel’s talking about it seemed surreal.

  “You’re a bright young woman,” Nigel said suddenly. “When it comes to math, you border on brilliant. You have a future in mathematics. But no one, not even the rare genius among us, can fix herself on her work when a part of her world has been torn apart.”

  The look in his eyes was almost stern. If I had known what fatherly was, I might have described it that way.

  “I wish you had trusted me enough to tell me, Jill,” he said. “I could have helped. I still can.”

  I didn’t know what to say. That kind of tenderness ached in me, just the way it did with Sam, and I didn’t know what to do with it. I found myself looking at the ceiling.

  “Thank you,” I finally said to Nigel. “But I’m not ready to abandon this now—or even put it aside. I have to finish this, and I have to finish it on time.”

  Slowly and deliberately, Nigel crossed one leg over the other. I waited.

  “May I ask you a personal question?” he said.

  I was surprised, but I nodded.

  “Did—does—I don’t know quite the way to say it…. Did your mother want very much for you to get your doctorate?”

  “It wasn’t a matter of want,” I said. “She expected it. If you’re asking me whether I’m doing this out of guilt or something—”

  Nigel was shaking his head. “No, no, I’m not asking that. I wouldn’t presume to pry.”

  He ought to talk to Sam, I thought. I remembered then that Sam had said he and Nigel were friends—that they prayed together over breakfast or something.

  “But if I may,” Nigel said, “I would just like to share with you the parental point of view.”

  I was even more surprised. “Sure.”

  “I have two sons—grown, of course,” he said. “They’ve both done well, and I’m very proud of them. But should the time ever come when I’m unable to take care of myself, it won’t be their accomplishments I’ll want. I’ll want their love and their support. If that meant making sacrifices for me, I would hope they would make their choices based on love, not on what I expected of them, one way or the other.”

  But your children love you! I wanted to tell him. I don’t love my mother. It’s taking everything I have to act like I do! Good grief, Nigel, I lick the earth, for Pete’s sake!

  He put his glasses back on. “I have discovered by way of a very circuitous route never to give advice, only to share what works best in my own life.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I started to get up, but I couldn’t, not yet.

  “Dr. Frost,” I said. “I understand you may be a praying man.”

  It was Nigel’s turn to look surprised. His glasses, in fact, slid straight down his nose, and he had to catch them before they tumbled to the desktop.

  “I am,” he said. “Though thats not the kind of thing that usually comes down the grapevine.”

  “We have a mutual friend,” I said.

  The corners of his lips twitched. “Would that be God?”

  “That I don’t know yet,” I said. “But until the theory is disproven, would you pray for me? I mean, not here—but, I mean, when you do—pray—whenever that is—”

  I was on the verge of sounding like Porky Pig. Before my stuttering led to a “That’s all, folks!” I stood up. As I did, Nigel smiled.

  “Your request comes a little late, Jill,” he said. “I’ve been praying for you for two years.”

  Prayers notwithstanding, I was stressed that night when I saw Sam. I told him the whole dissertation thing was no longer a goal at the end of a long, straight road, that it was a veritable mammatocumulus hanging over my head.

  “A what?” Sam said.

  “It’s a severe thunderstorm cloud,” I said. “My mother made me learn the proper names for everything. I couldn’t even say I had the flu. It had to be influenza.”

  “Okay, that’s it,” Sam said. “You are suffering from a lifetime fun deficit. I am taking you to the city this Saturday, and we are going to put on the dog.”

  “The dog?”

  “Just wear your walkin’ shoes. We got places to go and things to do.”

  “You left out ‘people to see.’”

  “No people to see. Just me.”

  Saturday was perfect, because Hopewell was taking the assisted-living residents on a field trip to some function on campus. Sam and I drove to San Francisco that Saturday in Sam’s little Jeep-wannabe vehicle with an old Phil Collins CD blasting away on the stereo.

  “Your taste is all in your mouth, Blaze,” I shouted over the din. “Don’t you have any jazz?”

  “No way. I listen to no music that sounds like it’s being made up as it goes along.”

  We did, however, make up the rest of the day as we went along. We hung off the side of a cable car going up Powell Street—something Mother had never let me do, having seen too many mangled bodies in her med school emergency room days. We walked Fisherman’s Wharf, ducked into several of the art galleries that had sprung up here and there between the T-shirt and souvenir shops, and ate crab drowning in cocktail sauce out of paper cups.

  “This makes me want more,” Sam said. “I know a great place where we can get Alaska king crab. It shouldn’t be too crowded this time of day. We can probably get a table by the window.”

  I was already stuffed from our visit to Ghirardelli Square with its chocolate at every turn, plus the several hunks of Boudin’s sourdough bread I’d consumed while standing in line for the cable cars. But I had a club soda while I watched Sam dig into a platter of crab legs like it was some kind of peak experience and finally accepted a couple of butter-dipped fillets from his fingers. With it—with the essence of the whole day—came my first taste of real contentment.

  Perhaps it was good that Sam chose that moment to announce, “I’ve been offered the job at Wheaton.”

  I stopped, midway through licking my fingers.

  “Are you going to accept it?” I said.

  “It depends,” he said. “I have some time to think about it and pray about it.”

  “What does it depend on?” I said.

  He didn’t have a chance to answer. My cell phone rang. I glared at it.

  “I have to answer it,” I said. “I told the staff at Hopewell to call me if there was a problem.”

  “Answer it,” Sam said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “This is Jill McGavock,” I said into the phone.

  The voice on the other end said with barely disguised panic, “Jill, this is Monique. It’s your mother—she’s missing.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  I was halfway out of the car before Sam even pulled it to a stop in front of the campus security building, where Monique had told us to meet her. Mother had wandered away from the group during the field trip, and Monique had assured me she was probably still on campus.

  But I could see Monique through the front window, talking on her cell phone, and the look on her face didn’t foreshadow good news. Even as I marched myself toward the door, the cold fear cut me off at the knees. There was nothing left in me to shout at her when she set down her phone and came to me.

  “Still no sign of her,” she said. “But Jill, she was separated from the group for only ten minutes at the most before they discovered she was missing. She couldn’t have gone far.”

  “How long ago was that, though?” Sam said behind me.

  Monique pressed her lips together and then said, “A good hour.”

  Sam put both hands on my shoulders as if he thought I was going to lunge at her, but I didn’t move. I put my hands in my hair and tried to think.

  “We should call Max,” I said.

  Sam took the phone from me.

  �
�He’ll probably know some places she might have gone,” I said to Monique.

  Her face went soft. “Jill, I don’t think she went anywhere consciously. I think she just drifted off.”

  “That’s okay, “I said. “I just have to look for myself.”

  I went for the door with Sam on my heels.

  “Jill, we have plenty of people on this,” Monique called after me.

  “Now you have more,” I said.

  When we were outside, Sam covered the cell phone with his hand. “Max wants to know what we want him to do,” he said. “He’s pretty upset.”

  I took the phone and tried to calm down. If Max was already having a breakdown, my joining him in one was only going to make matters worse—and they were bad enough as it was.

  “Max,” I said, “do you have any idea where Mother would go if she were free to wander around campus? Do you think she’d go to the Rodin garden? You hung out with her here more than I did.”

  “The music school,” he said. His voice sounded old and frightened.

  “Really?” I said.

  “I can meet you there in five minutes,” he said and hung up.

  I know the look I gave Sam was bordering on panic. “I think he’s losing it. He says she might have gone to the music school. Why would she do that?”

  Sam took my arm and headed east. I scoured every inch with my eyes along the way. No sign of my mother.

  Max was already standing in front of Braun Music Center when we got there. His entire face was trembling. I took hold of him by both bearlike shoulders.

  “We are going to find her,” I said. “We just have to think this through. Why do you think she might be here?”

  He shook his head. “She’s not. I just looked.”

  I glanced up at the three-story building. “You went through the whole place already?”

  “I looked in the rehearsal room where the chamber orchestra practices. That’s the only place she would go. Jill, have we lost her?”

  “Why the heck would she—?” I stopped and forced myself to take a deep breath. “Okay, let’s stay focused. You only looked in that one room?”

  Max gave an agonized nod.

  “Maybe she had the idea of going there but couldn’t find her way. That could be right, huh?” I turned to look at Sam. He was already headed for the front door.

  “Let’s spread out,” he said over his shoulder. “Ask if anybody’s seen her.”

  Looking not much better than Mother herself probably did at that point, Max nodded again and moved toward the door.

  “We’ll find her,” I reassured him again. “Don’t give up on me now.”

  He shook his head and lumbered off to the left. I tore up the stairs to search the third floor.

  Since it was Saturday, the narrow hall was empty and quiet except for a few random pianos and the tangle of notes that seeped out of the sparsely occupied practice rooms.

  I poked my head and my questions into the occupied ones, but nobody had seen Mother. Nor was she in any of the lounges along the way.

  I was standing in one of those lounges, looking around frantically, when I heard Sam calling me from below. I leaned over the stairway railing.

  “Come on down,” Sam said. “Max has a lead.”

  I flew down the stairs, and Sam met me. “Somebody down in the music library told Max she saw a woman that fit your mom’s description wandering through here about forty-five minutes ago. Lady said she asked if she could help her, but the woman just turned around and walked out.”

  “Did she say where she went?” I said.

  “She left the building,” Sam said. “The woman thought it was a little strange so she watched her, and she did go out the front door.”

  I was already half running down the hall with Sam right beside me.

  “At least we know she was here,” he said. “So you were right. She’s going to places that are familiar to her.”

  “I still don’t know why she’d come here. Okay, forget that. Where else?”

  Max was at the front door, his face ashen. “She was here, Jill,” he said. “She was looking for the chamber orchestra, I know it. She used to come in when we were rehearsing and I would let her conduct sometimes. She had a passion for the music. You should have seen her face—”

  I put a hand on Max’s arm. “So where else would she go that was familiar to her? You obviously have all the secrets.”

  Max looked at me helplessly. It was Sam who said, “I don’t think it’s necessarily a secret. What about the lab?”

  “All the way over at the medical center?” Max said. “Could she get that far?”

  “She got this far,” Sam said. “We can at least go rule it out.”

  I dug in my bag and handed Sam the phone. “Call the lab and ask them to watch for her. Tell them not to let her leave if they see her—but not to call security and not to try to restrain her. If they just keep talking to her, she’ll probably stay. The number’s already logged into the phone.”

  “Got it,” Sam said. “Max, let’s take your car.”

  After Sam spoke to the people at the lab, none of us said a word on the way to the hospital. Max was too busy driving like he was going for the Winston Cup. Sam and I had our faces practically pressed to the windows, watching for Mother. The crowd was thinner than it would have been on a weekday. It would have been easy to spot her even in the fading light, but she wasn’t there.

  Please, please, please, I thought. Just let her be at the lab. Let her be all right. Please.

  It was dusk by then and outside lights were winking on even as Max pulled in through the circular drive and let Sam and me out.

  “I’ll be there as soon as I park,” Max said. “Just tell her I love her—just tell her—”

  I was still nodding as I closed the car door, but I couldn’t stop to reassure him yet again. I couldn’t even reassure myself. There was no way she was here. It was a long way from Braun, and she was confused…and frightened.

  Or was that me I was thinking about? As we hung a left inside the front door, the floor in front of me started to roll. Sam locked his arm around my shoulders and stopped me.

  “You okay?” he said.

  “No!” I said.

  “I mean physically—you’re white as a ghost.”

  “It doesn’t matter! We have to get down there.”

  “Hey.” Sam pulled my face up to his with both hands. “I told you, when I called nobody had seen her yet, which probably means somehow we beat her here. I’m going to alert the people at the information desk and then I’m going to wait out front and see if I can spot her. You go ahead to the lab and wait for her there. It’ll give you a chance to get yourself together before you see her.”

  “And I am going to see her,” I said.

  “Of course you are. We’re on the right track.” He looked at me earnestly. “You’re the one who knows her.”

  “Obviously not! Max knows things about her I never would have guessed.”

  “Max knew her then. But you’re the one who knows her now. He knew her self. You know her soul.”

  He kissed me on the forehead and left for the information desk. I went on toward the lab, the words please, please, please pounding in my head.

  Although the lab had a full staff on Saturdays, the halls were almost empty, except for a woman in a green housekeeping uniform who was cleaning the windows on the doors. The sight of her made me stop in my mental tracks. Why hadn’t I called Burl?

  I opened my bag, but I realized Sam still had the phone. I considered heading back to get it from him, but I wanted to check again with the lab staff. Besides, Burl should be around here someplace working. This was about the time he came on duty—if he worked Saturdays.

  I readjusted the bag on my shoulder and headed once more for the hemo lab, but my walk was slower now and heavier. What Sam had said weighed on me. He knew her self. You know her soul.

  It wasn’t the words that slowed me nearly to a crawl. It was th
e fact that I believed them.

  I loved my mother. If anything else happened to hurt her, I would never be the same. I would never be anything at all.

  I threw my head back and looked at the ceiling. “Please, please, please,” I pleaded. “Just—please.”

  “Jill?”

  My head jerked. It was Ted Lyons. “Ted!” I said. “Have you seen my—”

  “She’s here.”

  “Where?”

  He put his finger to his lips. “She’s right around the corner. I think you’re going to want to see this before she sees you.”

  He beckoned me to the corner and peered around the wall, hand still up to keep me quiet. Then he took me by the arm and leaned me forward so that I could see what was happening, just six feet away.

  My mother was standing outside the closed door to what was once her office. She was wearing a white lab coat that was at least ten sizes too big for her, and she was holding a clipboard against her chest. Standing in front of her was Burl.

  “I should have known,” I said.

  Ted put his hand up again. “Listen,” he whispered.

  Burl was talking in his usual sandpaper monotone. “You’re just as good as you ever were, Doc,” he said. “I told you that a dozen times. You’re just good in a different way now, that’s all.”

  “It’s a shame.”

  A shiver went through me. Ted put his hand on my shoulder. My mother had said that. She had said “It’s a shame” in a voice as deep and clear as I remembered it.

  “No, it isn’t any shame,” Burl said. “What do you got to be ashamed of? You gave these people twenty-five years. What more do they want? It’s time for you to rest now—enjoy life.”

  “I have work to do,” she said. “I have work.”

  “Maybe so, but not here. See?” He pointed to the nameplate on the door. “Somebody else is doin’ the work. It’s gettin’ done. I’m keepin’ an eye on it.”

  Mother looked vaguely at the nameplate and then down at the clipboard.

  “Here,” she said, and she handed it to Burl. He stuck it casually under his arm.

  “They’ll appreciate gettin’ this back,” he said.