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Matters of Faith

Page 11

by Kristy Kiernan


  His wide-open feeling plummeted for a moment. A test, it was a test. Girls were raped all the time, but sometimes they did lie. He recalled the cases he’d read about in the paper. It did happen. And what about the people’s lives they ruined? Even though they were innocent. It would taint them forever. He took a deep breath. If Ada believed, then he believed.

  The thought of having not just family, but an entire community support them, believe in them, and help them on their journey, compared with his own family’s response, was the most beautifully hopeful feeling. His father was ready to do him physical harm, or at least anxious to cut him out. His mother didn’t know what she thought except she wanted him taken care of, shut away for a while so she didn’t have to think about anything but Meghan.

  Here was another crossroads; they were coming at him fast. He glanced at Ada, then stared straight out the windshield at the winding black length of Route 29 stretching before them.

  “Let’s do it,” he said and hit the gas.

  Ten

  CAL was pulled up next to Meghan’s bed when I returned, curled as close to her as he could get, the bed rail pressed into his side. It looked like it hurt, and it should have touched me. He was talking to her, as I had been, entreating her to open her eyes, stroking her hair away from her forehead as if its weight might be keeping her lids from finally lifting. I should have been filled with enough compassion to want to stand there quietly for a moment and take in this sight of pure, fatherly love and pain.

  But instead I quickly walked over and placed my hand on his shoulder and said: “Be careful, you’re pulling on the sheet.”

  He pulled himself sharply away from me, and I could have eased it then, I could have softened my hold, slid my hand down to rub his back, leaned down to kiss him softly, somewhere, his forehead, his cheek, his lips. But I could not bring myself to do it.

  “What happened?” he said.

  I wanted that chair back. But there was no way to lay claim to it without coming off as completely irrational. He wasn’t sitting in the chair to bother me, I knew that. But I had been there earlier, and had gotten used to the view, used to that particular angle on Meghan’s face, used to being close enough to reach out and touch her when I wanted.

  I put my purse down on the floor next to the chair and remained standing.

  “Well, I met the lawyer, we went to the initial appearance, and then I bailed him out. He’s at home now, he’s got an appointment with the lawyer tomorrow.”

  “How much?”

  “What?”

  “How much was the bail? How much is the lawyer going to be?”

  “Bail was six thousand dollars. Marshall says he can pay for the lawyer.”

  “Oh, really? With what?”

  I shrugged.

  “What happens next?” he asked

  “I told you. He has an appointment with the lawyer tomorrow.”

  “What is going on here, Chloe? Why do I have to drag this out of you? Would you just tell me what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. And maybe if you wanted to find out, you should have been there. I was not privy to their conversation because of attorney-client privilege.”

  “So we’re just supposed to sit back and wait for him to tell us what’s happening?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know what else we’re supposed to do, Cal. I asked; he wouldn’t tell me anything except that he had an appointment.”

  “Did he at least ask about Meghan?”

  I wanted to be able to say yes. “I told him what was happening,” I said carefully.

  “What about Ada? Her parents arrive to bail her out? They’d better not show up here, I’ll tell you that.”

  I wondered what scenario he had worked out in his imagination. I’d worked out a spectacular few myself. I’d seen myself confronting Ada, confronting her parents, interrogating them about what kind of parenting had produced a child who could do this, who could so cavalierly take another child’s life. And about what kind of faith had so little respect for others.

  But it wasn’t just their child, was it? It had been mine too. And what would I say when asked about what kind of parenting could produce a child like Marshall? Would I counter that Ada was a Jezebel, a siren that Marshall couldn’t refuse? What would I say when asked about Marshall’s faith? That he had none, or that he’d had them all and it had still come to this?

  “I didn’t see Ada,” I responded, and finally admitted defeat and sank down into the other chair. “Mingus told me—”

  “Mingus?” Cal asked.

  “Charles Mingus is Marshall’s lawyer.”

  “You mean like the musician?”

  “Yep.” I pulled the lawyer’s card out of my back pocket and handed it to him. He read it and rolled his eyes before tucking it in his wallet and flashing me a grin. I couldn’t help but smile back, but the moment was quickly past.

  “So, he told you what?”

  “He said that she hadn’t called anyone. That’s it. Frankly, I don’t care. I don’t want to know. Let her parents deal with her.”

  “We’ll have to deal with it sooner or later if they go to trial.”

  “You think this will get that far?”

  “They don’t press charges unless they’re serious, Chloe. What do you think will happen? You know we’ll have to testify, don’t you?”

  I stared at him. No. I hadn’t thought about that. And who would we be testifying for? Against? Weren’t there laws against having to testify against family members?

  “And if—if . . . things don’t go well,” he said, gesturing toward Meghan, “the charges could be upgraded.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, unwilling to allow my mind to even approach the possibility of what he was intimating. “What is going on? Are you just making this stuff up or do you actually know something you’re not telling me?”

  “If I tell you—”

  “If you tell me? If you tell—How dare you not tell me anything! How, exactly, do you think not telling me something you know about this situation is an option?”

  “I talked to the doctor.”

  It rang no warning bells in me. The doctor. Which doctor? We’d talked to doctor after doctor. The neurologist had been in several times a day, the specialists, the interns, the therapists. One doctor we’d never seen before had come in the previous day, ordered blood tests, disappeared, and nobody had any idea who he was.

  “And?” I asked impatiently.

  “The doctor from the emergency room.”

  I still wasn’t getting it, and then, just as I was about to lay into him, I realized who he meant. The doctor. The one who called the police to report a crime. The one responsible for our son going to jail. The unnamed emergency room doctor who’d doubled our family emergency with one call, as if he hadn’t even considered what the combination would do to us, as if he didn’t care. First do no harm, right? I sank back down into the chair.

  “When?”

  “When you were gone.”

  Of course he had come when I was gone. I had to wonder if he’d watched, waited until I left before coming to see what he’d wrought, unable to face the hysterical mother.

  “Who is he? What did he say?”

  “She said she was sorry she missed you.”

  It shouldn’t have mattered. But somehow it did. The mental image of a hard-eyed man in scrubs was replaced by one of the woman, in white, hair pulled back, no makeup, single, no children. Straight-ahead career, no place for family, no consideration of others’ families.

  “Why did you let her in here?”

  “I didn’t know it was her. She just came in and started checking Meghan out. She asked if you’d be back soon. I think she wanted to talk to you rather—”

  “Well, what did she have to say? Did you tell her I was off bailing our son out?”

  He nodded. “She said she was sorry. She wanted—”

  “She’s sorry? Really?”

  “If you’ll stop interrupting me
—”

  It wasn’t me that time. Two nurses entered and stood at the door, looking back and forth between us. I wondered how long they’d been outside the door and what they’d heard. They must have thought we were horrible. Talking about this in front of Meghan. It was a common enough theory that patients in a coma might be able to hear what’s going on around them, but we’d been reminded, with varying degrees of certainty, of that by almost every nurse and most of the doctors. Which meant that it was possible that Meghan had heard our entire conversation.

  “Dr. Vaughn found a room on the fourth floor that he’d like Meghan moved to,” Delia said, the nurse who’d written her name on the dry-erase board next to Meghan’s bed. This was the third day in a row she’d been with us through the day shift. It was astonishing how quickly I’d grown attached to her. There was something nearly primal about my need for the nurses to like me. They had so much power here.

  If they liked me, if I treated them well, was patient, then they would make sure Meghan was receiving the care she needed, they would check on her more frequently, would give me tidbits of information the doctors wouldn’t share, would see that our needs were attended to first.

  And it was useless, I knew that. But I couldn’t help ingratiating myself with them. Anything could make a difference. And so I was ashamed of them catching us having words in front of Meghan, as if my stock might go down.

  “Why is he moving her?” Cal asked.

  “She’s stable enough to leave ICU, and it’s a much more private room, away from the elevators. It’s better set up for . . . a longer-term visit.”

  The only noise in the room was from the machines keeping Meghan alive. It sounded like progress until she said “longer-term visit.”

  “Will she be okay?” I asked. “You know, on the move?”

  The other nurse, one I didn’t recognize, nodded. “She’ll be fine. Everything is on a battery backup. If y’all could gather up any personal items and maybe give us a little room, you can meet us up in room four eighteen in about twenty minutes?”

  It took me a second to realize that they wanted us to leave. “Oh, okay,” I said, and awkwardly gathered up my purse and Cal’s duffel bag while he grabbed his newspaper and magazines. Delia held the door open for us and patted my arm when I hesitated.

  “She’ll be okay,” she said. “Promise.”

  Cal and I straggled down the hallway feet away from each other and stood waiting for the elevator, not looking at each other.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked.

  “There’s a little chapel downstairs,” I suggested. “It was empty last time I looked.”

  He looked at me askance. I shrugged, and we got on the elevator. He followed me into the chapel, which was, again, empty, and I sat in the pew in front of the one he chose, piling the empty space beside me with my bags.

  I turned in the pew and eyed him in this new, softer light. He still looked exhausted, the circles under his eyes even more pronounced. I didn’t imagine my own countenance had improved any either.

  “So,” I said. “The doctor.”

  “She wants to talk to you,” he said, digging in his wallet and pulling out a business card. I examined it. Dr. Camille Kimball.

  “Wasn’t Camille a hurricane?” I murmured.

  “Sixty-nine,” Cal replied.

  “Why does she want to talk to me?” I asked.

  “I guess she wants to explain why she did it.”

  “Oh, she has some specific reason?” I asked. “Besides trying to hurt us more than we already were?”

  “Her son died after eating peanut butter her mother-in-law gave him. He was three years old.”

  And all the air disappeared from the room. I could feel my head shaking. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, had had Parkinson’s disease. She died when I was nine, and I didn’t remember much about her, except she had a wonderful laugh and her head shook on the top of her neck as though it were a gyroscope, but with no pattern, and no illusion of control. This was how my head felt.

  I couldn’t cry for my own child, not now, not yet, but cry for another’s I could, and I did. I cried for that three-year-old little boy, and for his mother, and even for the mother-in-law. Cal, to his credit, did not seem to be going through the same detached examination of our marriage as I was, or if he was, he put it on hold long enough to lean over the pew and hold as much of me as he could.

  But he remained dry-eyed, and I had to wonder at it a little. Just the sight of tears in his eyes had been enough to make me cry in the past. How did he hold me, sobbing, and remain steadfast? How did he tell me that our daughter was going to die and our son should be in jail with such belief, his own version of faith, and not explode with the enormity of it?

  I pulled away from him and took some deep breaths, before inspecting Dr. Kimball’s card again, its heavy stock dry as dust against my fingers, and felt a resentment well up in me.

  “So, because her son died we’re supposed to be . . . what? Grateful she pressed charges against our son?”

  “Chloe, just talk to her, okay? She’s the one who saved Meghan’s life. I think she at least deserves a conversation.”

  I couldn’t speak for a moment. I froze in place, certain that I could not have just heard what I just heard. “She deserves a conversation? Since when are you concerned with what someone deserves, Cal? What about what our son deserves? Don’t you think that perhaps your son deserves a conversation? Doesn’t your son deserve some benefit of the doubt? Some support from you? You don’t seem too concerned about what he deserves. But this doctor you’ve never met before, this woman deserves your consideration?”

  Cal’s face darkened and his eyes narrowed. I knew what that meant. What woman, married for more than six months, doesn’t know every expression, every warning eye narrow, every irritated mouth tightening, every drawn down eyebrow?

  It went both ways, of course. In our daily life, I expected him to take note of my head tilt, my raised eyebrow, my crossed arms. I always responded more quickly than he did to these unspoken cues, and I rarely ignored them. But this time I did not acquiesce.

  “No, you don’t get to look at me like that. I’m the one who had to do it all alone today. You didn’t see him there, you didn’t get to learn about bail, and you didn’t have to drive home with him. So don’t act like I’ve somehow gotten off easy on this one.”

  “You spoiled him—”

  “Spoiled him? What the hell are you talking about? The kid never asked for anything. It was your idea to buy him a car, and as soon as he could he got a job.”

  “Not materially. You spoiled him by letting him think he was adult enough to make decisions on his own. You think that if he were afraid of what we, you, thought that he’d have let this happen? If she dies—”

  “Stop that,” I said, surprised at my own vehemence. “You stop saying that right now. She’s not going to die. Do you want her to die? It seems to me like you’ve just decided she’s going to. How can you do that? What is wrong with you?”

  He looked anguished, and I wanted to hit him and wrap my arms around him at the same time, but my overwhelming feeling was exhaustion, and when he finally spoke I listened with my eyes closed.

  “I can’t do this the way you do, Chloe. I can’t just—take it all at the same time. I feel like if I prepare myself, you know, if I let myself touch on the worst, then maybe if it happens I won’t just die. Because I have to tell you something, you should know, right now, that if she does, if she does die, I won’t survive. And if I don’t die on the spot, then I will blame Marshall and that fucking nut-case he brought home and I will hate them both. And if I hate my son, well, that’s going to kill me anyway.”

  “No,” I murmured, shaking my head, unwilling to open my eyes and see his haggard face. When he spoke again, his voice was hoarse and pained.

  “And I will be sorry to leave you with all of it, but I will have to. I won’t make it, Chloe, I just won’t make it. And I’m conv
inced that all of this is going to happen because I should have known. I did know, maybe not this, but I knew that something would happen if you kept letting him just think whatever he wanted, but I didn’t do anything about it. And for that, I hate myself.”

  “Cal—”

  “No. I hate myself, and . . . I hate you a little too.”

  Had he punched me in the face I couldn’t have been more shocked and filled with pain. Marshall and Meghan had both told me that they hated me when they didn’t get their way over some petty thing or another. Childish, whiny little stones thrown to hurt me. And it had stung a little, but just a little, because I had understood that they were children, and they didn’t hate me, and they didn’t yet understand the power of such words.

  But I had always been so sure that Cal would never use that power, not like this, not at a time like now. I turned forward again, and stared at the stained glass set high in the otherwise unadorned wall. A dove on a blue background, wings spread, paused forever in mid-flight, olive branch streaming from its beak. I suppose it was meant to represent peace, God’s promise to mankind.

  But I felt as frozen as it was, and there was no peace in me. Cal touched my shoulder, and I did not move. It was a stranger’s hand, and it meant nothing. I stood and grabbed my purse, leaving Cal’s bag on the pew, and left. I heard him come after me, and we rode up in the elevator in silence.

  Meghan’s move was successful, and she looked exactly the same as she had two floors down. The room was larger, and the nurse showed us how the recliner could turn into a bed, filled the water pitcher for us, and left, and neither of us said a word. I took the chair next to the bed, Cal took the recliner, and that was how Dr. Kimball found us almost an hour later.

  She looked nothing like I had imagined, and yet I knew immediately who she was. She was older, much older, than I had imagined, and her gaze was direct and calm. I had expected her to be nervous, but she trained her bright blue eyes on me and walked over to my chair without hesitation.

  She nodded to Cal once. “Mr. Tobias,” she said.

  “Hello, Doctor,” he replied, maneuvering the recliner upright and straightening his clothing.

 

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