“Seems to me your parents have left it up to you whether or not you want to see him again,” Rosanne said.
“Oh, yeah, like he’s going to want to see me when he knows I’ve got a lunatic for a father!”
“Sammy, listen, you said your father got him to sign the papers needed to legally sever him from the baby. So all your father did was make sure the way’s clear if you want to see your, um, friend, again.” It took all of Rosanne’s self-control not to shake Samantha by the shoulders and scream at her to wake up and grow up. She’d always known there was going to be trouble with this one. Samantha was too beautiful and too willful and too spoiled. It wouldn’t surprise Rosanne in the least if Samantha had deliberately gotten pregnant in the belief her boyfriend would leave his family to be with her. She had always gotten what she wanted in the end, so why not the piece of crap she thought she was in love with?
Who did you blame for this situation? The W’s, for allowing Samantha to get away with murder for all these years when, at the same time, they had always come down on Althea like a ton of bricks? Or do you blame Samantha for being so self-centered? Or blame the guy Rosanne would like to blame it all on, that fortysomething married piece of crap who had seduced a sheltered eighteen-year-old when she was a freshman.
“So what are you saying?” Samantha asked, drawing herself up to full height, which was considerably taller than Rosanne. Sammy was huge now, her condition obvious, even under the cascading winter cape her parents had bought her. Part of her size was hereditary but some of it, Mrs. W wailed, was inactivity and ordering junk food to be delivered while she and Mr. W were at work.
“I’m sayin’ stick it out for a couple of weeks and then go back to school and do whatever you want to do. But understand, this guy’s not leavin’ his family. And if you want to be his mistress, then your parents are sayin’ fine, go on, that’s your affair.”
“They’re trying to buy me off, that’s what they’re doing!” Samantha said, stamping her foot again. Some of the snow had melted in the sun but now a thin layer of ice was starting to form over the paving stones. “They’re going to pay me to stay away so Althea can have my baby!”
“Are you saying maybe you want to keep the baby?”
“No!” she shouted. “But I don’t see why Althea should have it. How am I supposed to come home now?”
Her hormones were all out of whack and who knew what Sammy’s tears really meant at this point.
“You just come home,” Rosanne said. “And be an aunt.”
“I can’t believe she’s doing this to me!” Samantha wailed, looking up at the sky.
If Samantha did not get away from her soon Rosanne knew she was going to lose her temper. And that wasn’t her place. Her place was to make sure the kid got to the doctor.
“She’s not doing it to you, Samantha. Your sister is doing it to start her own family and she is bending over backward to let you be as involved as you want to be. Because she loves you and will always want to be a part of your life.”
Samantha sniffed. She seemed to be listening.
“And your parents are going to be grandparents to this child. But they will always be your mother and father, they’ll always be your parents first, and they will always be there for you—if you’ll let them. Eventually you’ll see that what they’re doing is giving you back your freedom but also honoring Althea’s desire to be a mother and honoring the baby as a new member of your family.” She moved closer, touching Samantha’s arm. “You’re going to be an aunt, Samantha, and how much or how little you want to be in this kid’s life is up to you.”
“How am I going to look at it after it knows I gave it away?”
“I think it will be up to Althea to handle that when the time comes. But, Samantha, listen, who can you trust more to do the right thing than your sister?”
“Yeah, she’s pretty good,” Samantha admitted.
Rosanne looked at her watch. “We’ve got to get you a cab. It’s getting near your appointment.” They started walking toward Riverside Drive.
“All I know is if this baby doesn’t come soon I’m going to go crazy,” Samantha said, unconsciously placing her hands on her abdomen as she walked. “I can’t sleep on my back.”
“Oh, no,” Rosanne said under breath.
“What?” Samantha said.
“The last person I want to see,” Rosanne grumbled. It was the bartender, Celia, carrying a box and trying to hail a cab. She had seen Rosanne and was just standing there.
Samantha raised her arm to signal for a cab. The bartender chick called, “I’ll get you one!” and moved out into the Drive to more aggressively hail one. An empty cab did a U-turn and pulled up on their side of the road. Rosanne walked Samantha over and opened the door for her.
“Thanks, Rosanne,” Samantha said, kissing her on the cheek and then carefully climbing in. Rosanne shut the door and waved.
“Mrs. DiSantos?”
Reluctantly Rosanne turned around to face the bartender, wanting to claw her pretty eyes out.
“I’ve been trying to write you, but I keep ripping the letters up.” She shrugged. “I guess it’s stupid to think I can apologize.”
“For what? For trying to screw up my son’s whole life?” If Jason had not come back with a clean bill of health from the doctor Rosanne didn’t know what she would have done.
The bartender chick lowered her eyes, toeing the large granules of salt on the sidewalk. “I thought maybe I should show you the letter Jason wrote me.”
Rosanne got a chill. Is that what he was doing over at Mrs. C’s place? Writing this slut?
“Because he sounds good. I mean, he says he’s interested in a girl at school—”
There was a thud and crunch of colliding metal, followed by the tinkling sound of broken glass. For a moment all was quiet on the Drive, the traffic stopped, the birds and people hushed. The bartender chick had dropped her box and was already calling 911 while she and Rosanne hurried across the street toward the accident. It looked as though a cab coming up Riverside had clipped the back end of a cab turning onto 88th, sending it careening sideways into a parked car.
“Oh, my God,” Celia said, “I think it’s your friend.”
Rosanne was already pushing through people. “I’m a nurse, I’m a nurse,” she kept saying. The back door of the cab couldn’t be opened and Rosanne could see Samantha lying on her side across the backseat. The cab driver was pinned between the wheel and the parked car. A man was shouting at him to unlock the doors but he was having trouble understanding or even hearing.
“I’m right here, Samantha!” Rosanne yelled through the shattered window. “Everything’s going to be okay!”
Finally the driver managed to hit the button to unlock the doors and the man forced the front passenger door open. “Don’t touch him until the ambulance gets here,” Rosanne instructed.
“Smell the gas, lady.”
“The engine’s off, don’t panic,” Rosanne said, squeezing past him to climb into the front seat. “You’re fine, Mister, don’t sweat, you’ll be out in a second,” she said to the driver. She rose on her knees to peer back through the bulletproof glass into the backseat. “Sammy? Sammy? Can you hear me?
Samantha was lying on her side in Rosanne’s direction and her eyes were open but she was clearly in shock. She was covered with safety glass but Rosanne couldn’t see any blood. There was a police siren and Rosanne prayed an emergency unit was not far behind with tools to get Samantha out. Somebody was trying to drape an overcoat over Samantha through the twisted window frame but she did not move or respond. A police officer asked Rosanne to get out, which she did, aware that Celia was telling the cops about Samantha’s pregnancy and the urgency of getting her out. A fire engine arrived with the ambulance and Rosanne refused to be pushed back into the crowd, continuing to talk to Samantha. They pulled the driver out through the passenger-side door and put him in an ambulance while the firemen started cutting the mangled rear door to get to
Samantha.
Suddenly Samantha let out a bloodcurdling scream. “Sammy, I’m here, Sammy, I’m here!” Rosanne shouted as they gingerly tried to slide Samantha out the backseat, but she kept screaming that awful scream, her eyes wide with terror. They lowered her on a stretcher. She couldn’t talk; she could only scream and scream.
Rosanne climbed into the ambulance with the medics. On the way to the hospital she helped them cut off Samantha’s coat and clothes and kept telling Samantha everything was going to be okay. Samantha fainted, which gave them a minute to examine her. She had a broken arm and broken ribs and was in full labor, the child’s head appearing. This was not going to be easy.
They reached St. Luke’s at 113th Street and Amsterdam, by which time Samantha had resumed screaming, but they couldn’t give her anything for the pain because of the baby. By the time Samantha was in an E.R. cubicle the baby’s shoulders were appearing and Rosanne kept thinking no one could keep up this kind of screaming for this long. Please, God, don’t let her die. An obstetrician was there to meet them and in minutes the baby was out, the umbilical cord cut and they mercifully injected Samantha with a painkiller. Her screams subsided, and moments later she was out.
Had the baby cried? Rosanne couldn’t remember. She turned to a nurse. “Is the baby—?”
“I’ll check.”
While they cleaned Samantha up Rosanne stepped outside the cubicle. A few minutes later a doctor appeared who told Rosanne the baby was fine, he had a little trouble getting started, but was breathing fine on his own. Samantha was wheeled past then to go into X-ray. She was still out.
“It’s a boy?” Rosanne asked the doctor, her eyes filling with tears.
“Nine pounds ten ounces worth,” he reported. “He’s going to be a big boy.”
Someone asked Rosanne if she would go up front to fill out the admittance forms. While she was struggling to come up with answers Mrs. W came barreling around the corner. Her eyes were as wide and terrified as her daughter’s had been. She clutched Rosanne’s arm.
“She’s stable, Mrs. W,” Rosanne said evenly. “She broke some ribs and her arm. She should be okay, though.”
Harriet wept on her shoulder. “Thank you, God, thank you, God.”
“And you’re a grandmother,” Rosanne told her. “You have a grandson. Nine pounds ten ounces.” It was only when Mrs. W stepped back to look at her that Rosanne realized she had blood on her clothes, because now it was on Mrs. W’s, too.
Harriet trembled from head to toe while she answered the admission questions and Rosanne had to get the insurance card out of her wallet for her. Finally the forms seemed to be done, by which time the doctor had learned the patient’s mother had arrived and came down to talk to Harriet. The break in Samantha’s arm was clean. They could only tape the two ribs that had been fractured.
“What about her face?” Mrs. W asked.
“Not a mark on it,” the doctor said kindly.
The E.R. doctor who had tended to Samantha came around and asked Mrs. W if she would like to see her grandson and Rosanne told her to go ahead, she wanted to wash up. She went into the bathroom off the E.R., took one look in the mirror and knew it was hopeless. There wasn’t a thing she had on that wasn’t stained with blood. She washed her hands and face, patted her hair, and wondered what crook in New York had her purse now. She had no memory of what had happened to it.
When she came out she saw Mr. W wandering the halls with a nurse chasing him, telling him he couldn’t go where he was going. “Rosanne!” he cried, dodging a gurney with a groaning guy on it. Rosanne quickly brought him up to speed and a nurse’s aide agreed to take him to find his wife. “Watch for Althea, will you, Ro?” he called. “She’s on her way.”
Rosanne wandered in the direction of the waiting room and slapped the button to open the double doors. She was in a kind of protective shock still, she knew, the kind where her body and training took over and left her emotions safely locked away. She walked over to the soda machine and checked to see if she had any money in her pockets.
“Here’s your purse, Mrs. DiSantos,” Celia Cavanaugh said, handing it to her. “How is your friend?”
“She broke her arm and a couple of ribs. She should be okay.” Rosanne had taken out her wallet and pulled out a one-dollar bill. She put it in the machine. “She had a little boy. Nine pounds ten ounces. He had a little trouble in the beginning but he’s breathing fine now on his own.” She pressed the button for a bottle of water. It came thunking down the chute.
“Did her mom get here?”
Rosanne nodded, unscrewing the water and taking a swig.
“Here’s your friend’s cell phone. I think her purse is at the desk. The cops brought it.”
Rosanne nodded, taking Samantha’s phone and flipping it open.
“I had to turn it off when I came in because the nurse said—”
“The equipment, I know,” Rosanne told her.
“I saw Mom in her directory so I called the number,” Celia said. “I figured I should let somebody know what was happening.”
Rosanne brought the bottle down from her mouth. “You called Mrs. W? That’s how she got here?”
“If that’s your friend’s mom, yeah. I guess.”
Rosanne nodded, sliding the strap of her purse over her shoulder. “Yeah, well,” she said after a moment, “you did good, kid. Thanks.”
The girl’s face instantly brightened. “You’re welcome. Well,” she said, starting to back away, “I guess I’ll go now, then. Unless you need me to do anything.”
Rosanne shook her head. The girl turned around and headed for the E.R. exit doors. “Celia!” Rosanne suddenly called. The girl turned around. “I’ll let you know how she’s doing.”
Then Althea Wyatt came flying in through the doors and Rosanne had to move on to think about other things.
39
More Surprises for Celia
WHEN HOWARD STEWART’S wife greeted Celia by name in the lobby, Celia knew something other in the neighborhood must have changed besides the state of her own depression.
“Hello, Celia,” Amanda Stewart said, leaving a large, thin cardboard box leaning against the concierge desk. She held her hand out to Celia.
Celia put down her bag of groceries. “Hi,” Celia said, shaking her hand.
“I hear you were almost the first person to see Althea’s little boy.”
Celia hesitated. “Althea?”
“Oh.” Amanda grimaced slightly. “Well, it’s—Let me phrase it this way. Althea Wyatt is the little boy’s mother. The—the young woman you assisted is her sister.”
“I see,” Celia said although she didn’t. But it wasn’t any of her business.
“Rosanne told us how wonderful you were, that you called 911, got Rosanne’s purse, called Harriet, Samantha’s mother—”
Celia shrugged. “Really, I didn’t do much.” Pause. “That’s right, you’re friends with Jason’s mom and gran, right?”
“Yes. His gran is dying right now, it’s a tough time.”
“Yes, I know,” Celia said. Jason had stopped by Captain Cook’s the other day to say hi to everyone. He liked his new job and had a girlfriend, so life was much better, except that his grandmother was dying. Celia was unsure how to proceed with this conversation or if she was supposed to. “Um, I saw your husband. He told me you guys are moving back into the city.”
“Yes, yes we are, as soon as the school year’s over,” Amanda said. “And I am delighted. I’ve missed Manhattan terribly.”
“He’s really happy. He’s missed you guys a lot.”
Amanda smiled. “That’s nice to know.”
Celia banished the thought of Howard kissing her in the elevator.
“So you cannot imagine the task that lies ahead of me, Celia,” Amanda said, walking back to her big box. “Somehow I must reduce twenty rooms of furniture to eight.”
Celia’s ears pricked up. “You’re getting rid of your house?”
Amanda n
odded, sliding the box over to lean against her hip. “We might buy a smaller house in the country sometime later, but something low maintenance, that we can use for weekends and vacations.” The cardboard box slipped and almost fell over but Celia moved quickly to catch it. “Thank you,” Amanda said. “I’m supposed to be taking this over to storage.”
They compared notes on storage units and Amanda said she should look into Celia’s place, it sounded like a much better deal. “I’ll drop the rate information for you at the desk,” Celia promised, picking up her groceries. “They have some climate controlled areas that would be good for your paintings.”
“I think my children are hoping this particular painting will rot somewhere so they don’t have to inherit it,” Amanda said, nudging the box. “It took us years to figure out that the vulture in it was giving Emily nightmares. It’s been under our bed for I don’t know how long.”
Celia laughed. “Where did you get it?”
“My grandparents. I think my grandfather must have liked it because—Well, here, I’ll show you.”
Celia put her groceries on the concierge desk this time and helped Amanda take the painting out of the box. It wasn’t wrapped in anything. Celia caught her breath when she saw the quality of the oil painting. But the subject was very strange, an Arab kneeling behind a camel in a desert, aiming a long rifle at a vulture circling in the sky.
“Rather ghastly, is it not?” Amanda said. “But in my family, when you inherit something you’re supposed to keep it forever and ever, even if everyone hates it.”
Celia laughed, carefully bringing the painting over to rest on the couch. “I’ve got some stuff upstairs to wrap this properly for storage,” she told Amanda while she took a closer look. Celia kneeled, squinting.
“Don’t tell me you like it,” Amanda said.
“Not the subject, particularly, but as a well-executed painting, absolutely,” Celia said, standing and tilting the painting to look at the back of the frame. “And if I were to guess, I would say someone would pay a bit of money to own this painting.”
Riverside Park Page 27
