Scent

by Kelly, Clint L.

  Something else was bothering him. She could see it crawling through his mind.

  “It was my place to order animal testing,” he said at last.

  “I was too busy being interviewed to give it much thought.

  How could I have been so full of myself and so sloppy? It’s inexcusable.”

  Cassie sighed. “I egged you on. We were living the glamour life, no time for crossing the t’s or dotting the i’s. Beth fell by the wayside; we fell by the wayside.”

  The federal agents handed Nick the cease and desist order and left. Cassie sat close to him on a low bench in an alcove, out of sight of the banqueters, blankly watching the valets scramble for cars. Gown forgotten, she stretched shoeless on the bench and leaned against Nick, whose undone tie hung from his neck, limp as a wind sock. The Crystal Decanter, a little less spectacular in the glare of garage lighting, tilted against a cigarette ash can at their feet.

  Fifteen minutes later Mark found them. He appeared more stricken than when he left.

  “It’s Mags,” Mark said, voice cracking. “She’s been attacked by Gretchen. The doctors at Mercy General say she may not pull through.”

  Instantly alert, Cassie cried, “What? Oh, God! And Beth?

  What about Beth?”

  It was clear Mark was on the verge of collapse. “Beth’s with her at Mercy. Beth’s injuries are minor. Had she not beat the dog off with a baseball bat, we’d be going right now to identify the body. Gretchen sustained a skull fracture and has been impounded. Rabies is all that’s been ruled out.”

  Bile rose in Cassie’s throat and she fought it down. The note on the mirror, the gift of Cassandra — an impulsive favor for a good friend . . .

  A sob escaped her throat.

  God, don’t let my Maggie die!

  Chapter 23

  Fr. Byron wanted a drink more than at any time in three years of sobriety.

  He almost called his AA sponsor, Fr. Richards, who had once talked him down from a relapse after twelve years of sobriety.

  Back then, it had been one of those dark nights of the soul when he questioned if he was making a difference. A single man in Protestant ministry was a lightning rod of innuendo. He realized one night after the third round at the Alcatraz Bar and Grill that despite all the Latin he contained, he was not going to finesse his way by sounding educated. He joined the team at St. John’s “parish of the poor” because there was safety in numbers and a searing honesty inherent in poverty.

  His AA sponsor was a severe man, a put-up-or-shut-up type given to sympathy in small doses. He was good, if what one needed was a hair shirt and a firm hand. At twenty, Fr. B had needed just that.

  The news that made him at thirty-five visualize the inside of a bar and a frosty mug required a measure of clemency and a light touch. There wasn’t time to find an alternate counselor. So alone, hands clasped around a glass tumbler of ice water, he leaned against the bathroom basin in his apartment and kept repeating what he’d been taught and believed so fervently: “We are given a daily reprieve from alcoholism contingent upon the maintenance of our spiritual condition.” It was why he had stuck with seminary and become a clergyman. Selfishly, he had done it to save his own life, and along the way he had learned to love his parishioners. It made him a more forgiving priest because he had been forgiven much.

  He spoke the AA truth again and again and again until after four tumblers of water, the phone finally rang and his friend the taxi dispatcher informed him that the cab was five minutes from his door.

  He felt spared. “Hallowed be thy name.”

  Despite the lateness of the hour, Mercy General blazed with light and rose from the mean streets in a shaft of brilliance completely alien to its surroundings. Inside the automatic double doors of the trauma center sat, slept, and moaned two dozen persons vacuumed from the streets. Another, disgorged from the back of a battered passenger van onto a gurney, rolled past those waiting, one bloody suit-coat-draped arm raised overhead like a flag of privilege. Maximis ad minima, thought Fr. Byron. From the greatest to the least.

  Fr. Byron made his way to intensive care on the sixth floor. Somewhere around the fourth floor he surrendered the judgment of his heart and asked the Holy Spirit to make him the clement one, inclined toward mercy. After all, what he had been thinking might as well have been his own indictment: Behave foolishly and suffer a fool’s fate.

  The elevator doors parted, and his nose wrinkled at a smell that if not of death, was of near death. Not so much an identifiable odor, really, as a heightened sense of mortality. He had been in enough hospitals to pick it out. It gave him a forlorn feeling, what his father used to call “the jimjams.” Some patients claimed they were ready to meet their Maker, but Fr. B doubted that was true of very many. Most people clung to life and fought against death with their last breath, even those who were about to inherit the kingdom of heaven.

  There wasn’t much if any fight left in those who checked onto the sixth floor of Mercy General.

  The Dixons exited the hospital elevator. Cassie almost collided with a teary yet elegant Brenda Gelasse, who rushed from the room where Mags O’Connor lay swathed in bandages, breathing with the aid of a respirator. Brenda, a white lace hankie clutched to her face, said nothing and hastened for the elevators. Cassie was far too stunned at seeing the woman to form a coherent sentence.

  Without thinking, Cassie stormed up to the charge nurse. “What was that woman doing in the room with Ms. O’Connor?”

  The nurse took in Cassie’s expensive gown, Nick’s rumpled tux, and Beth’s jean shorts and with the detached air of one who had seen it all, said, “It is hospital policy in such cases to notify the next of kin immediately. Are you family?” It was obvious she had serious doubts.

  Cassie ignored her. “Whose next of kin — ”

  “No,” Nick said, overriding her half-formed question. “We’re not next of kin. Mags — uh, Ms. O’Connor — rooms with us and has been a family friend for years. We consider her family.”

  This did little to mollify the nurse. “Then, technically, you’re not allowed in here without permission from Ms. Gelasse. But since you say Ms. O’Connor lives with you, and you look like nice people whose evening has just been ruined, I’m going to make an exception. Ten minutes and no more.”

  As they approached the doorway, Cassie noticed Fr. Byron kneeling on the far side of the room, one hand on the bed rail, head bowed in silent prayer. Mags lay between them on her back, covered everywhere in white bandages — some seeping red — except for nose, eyes, and mouth. A plastic hose ran from her mouth to the respirator. The apparatus jerked rhythmically, forcing her chest to rise and fall. Machine-operated lungs, thought Cassie. The parts of Mags that were visible had not much more color than the bandages.

  For the second time in as many minutes, Cassie felt jarred by circumstances not of her making. The priest gave them a weary nod, but she wanted answers.

  “Hello, Fr. B,” she said. “How did you hear the news?”

  He did not reply immediately but looked to be weighing the options. None appeared to bring him any relief. His answer was quiet and noncommittal. “Brenda asked me to come.”

  Before she could process what she’d heard, Fr. Byron rubbed his eyes, stood, and turned to look out the window at the glittering lights of the financial center of the West Coast. After a moment he turned to Cassie again. “Mags is Brenda’s mother,” he said. “Though they all but disowned one another and haven’t spoken in years, thank God blood is sometimes thicker even than our thick skulls. I said nothing before as it was obvious there was little love lost between you and Brenda.”

  Nick was swift with the chair that Cassie, knees of rubber, sank into.

  He thought of that day sixteen years ago in the same hospital, only another floor and another chair, when a very pregnant Cassie plopped heavily to a sitting position in the entrance to the ER. “Time,” she said between breaths. “Oh baby, it’s time!” She held his hand in a vice grip. “Get
this out of me!”

  That “this” was a child, their child, seemed to have momentarily escaped her. “Easy, honey,” he murmured, the way he’d been taught in the birthing class. Calm and reassuring, just like the chief negotiator in a hostage situation. He smoothed her damp brow, the hair limp and plastered together by perspiration into unbecoming strings.

  “That’s my girl . . . You’re doing great . . . You look so pretty in that maternity smock . . .”

  She gave him a dangerous, feral grimace. Her body language said, You moron. I look like a hippo on steroids. Quit that stupid cooing and deliver me before I scream this hospital to the ground!

  He started to match her puffs of air, but it was for his own benefit. Nick Dixon was terrified. Who said he knew how to be a dad? Who said they had enough money in the bank or had the first clue about raising a human being? They couldn’t even keep a bird alive. Their beautiful orange canary — less than a third the age at which such creatures die on average — had expired on their second anniversary and was buried under the mulberry tree. And now they were being promoted to parenting a child?

  The rest was a blur until the doctor held up the product of their love and it let out a wail. Washed and swaddled, it turned out to be a girl, and their little Bethany lost no time in hijacking their hearts and their lives.

  By the grace of God . . .

  After sixteen years Nick was no closer to writing the manual on parenting, and there were days when he preferred the uncharted wilderness to tracking the mood swings of the North American female, but oh that sound! That first wail of life. And what compared with being hugged by someone you helped make?

  He smoothed the hair on Cassie’s bewildered brow. She needed to understand the inexplicable. He hoped she didn’t expect him to translate. How badly had he gotten it wrong when he’d gone to Brenda at a time when his wife and his life were most vulnerable?

  That she had taken him back and they had stuck it out was a miracle.

  By the grace of God . . .

  Now, today, how were they ever going to undo the damage, regain the trust, be of use to anyone again, find forgiveness for the tragedy of their own doing?

  He felt Cassie’s hand warm in his, and Beth’s tight grip around his waist, her sweet head pressed against his side.

  By the grace of God . . .

  They overstayed their welcome by five minutes, but when Mags had not responded and her weary watchers had had all they could stand of the respirator and its robotic rhythm, Fr. B took Cassie’s hand and pulled her to her feet. She reached out and touched a tiny patch of Maggie’s pale cheek. Cassie felt cold inside, shell-shocked.

  “The attending angels are here to look after her. Come to St. John’s,” he said softly. “We hold a late Saturday service for what I like to call the night crew. They’re the people who are invisible by day but come out at night, more comfortable then than they are with the starched Sunday a.m. crowd. You’ll find the midnighters a colorful lot, but accepting.”

  Cassie allowed herself to be led. Nick and Beth followed, Beth silent and clutching both her parents by an arm.

  Cassie breathed the faint fragrance of incense. And remembered. She had been away too long.

  Two stark white spotlights illuminated a glowing ivory altar, on two sides flanked by kneeling rails. A thin wooden cross, perhaps twenty feet tall, hung suspended above the Communion table. Twelve gothic chandeliers burned dimly in the upper atmosphere of the immense sanctuary, and above them the ceiling rose halfway to heaven, as it had when Cassie knelt there as a little girl.

  Around the sides of the great room, dark wooden walls surrounded row upon row of unpadded pews. In those pews stood, sat, and knelt a large gathering of Fr. Byron’s “night crew.”

  A teenaged boy in flip-flops, blue-striped pajama bottoms, a shirt of white thermal underwear, and a spiked Mohawk the color of saffron scooted down to allow the new arrivals a place to sit. The pallid girl next to him, head shaven, wore rings in both nostrils and a plastic crucifix pinned to one ear. Next to her, a boy of about eight lay curled into the corner of the pew, barefoot, knees to chin, gently rocking.

  Around them, the young and the grizzled prayed and slept and listened to the sacred silence. Several lounged on the Persian carpeting that covered the steps leading up to the altar.

  Had the Dixons wandered into an oddly quiet slumber party? Cassie, still cold as if her blood had ceased to circulate, sensed a borrowed warmth from those collected about her. They waited for something.

  It came like warm, fragrant air from a kitchen doorway. Hushed and gentle, the purest male tenor voices, unseen, unaccompanied, bathed the assembly in sacred sound. Cassie was soothed despite her pain. Or because of it.

  My poor Maggie. You don’t deserve this.

  She saw in response to the singers the transformation in the bodies of those around her. Kneeling in contrition, foreheads pressed against the pews ahead of them, or heads thrown back and eyes fixed on the dim recesses above, or eyes shut fast against the knife-edge reality of the street, almost to a person they relaxed. Wary tension fell away. Against all hope, hope seeped in.

  Cassie wept for her friend. “Oh, Mags, how could you keep this secret from me all these years?” she whispered. “What a sad burden. What a weak friend I made, so absorbed in my own ambitions, unheeding of the pain you carried. I tried to pull you into my fight and said such nasty things about your only child. Hauled you up on that trapeze when all the time you were flying through life without a net, heartbroken for the very woman I despised. Yet you told me I was the daughter you always wanted. Forgive me, Maggie; I’m here for you, here to listen and to care. Please don’t leave me. Please.”

  The anger returned. How could Brenda have treated her mother so cruelly? How would my knowing the truth have helped Maggie in the end?

  Poor Maggie. To have a witch for a daughter and be too ashamed to confide the fact even to your closest ally.

  She wished they had brought Mags with them. Bodily loaded her, the bed, and that infernal machine she was tethered to into a U-Haul van and wheeled her right up to the altar, where God could just disconnect the hose, restore her lungs, her looks, her life, and repair the whole sorry mess.

  Is anything too hard for you? She prayed it to the One aloft, taunting him, daring him. But of course, being God, you can heal Mags long-distance, can’t you? Pop in here to one of your prayer stations, say the magic words, and watch the healing take place back at Mercy General. Miracles on demand.

  Cassie blinked. She was a far cry from the innocent little girl who had once knelt beneath this same dome, chubby hands clasped in fervent belief.

  “Thou, O Lord, have mercy upon us.” It was Fr. Byron. Having slipped away, he stood before them now in vestments, arms outstretched, head bowed.

  “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hid.”

  Cassie could not detect the faintest flicker of light left in her. The Fairmont had been awash in light earlier that evening, but God had thrown that switch, smashed her world to smithereens, and left her for dead. For having captured death in a bottle, she’d be lucky if she avoided wearing an orange prison suit the rest of her days.

  Suddenly everyone around her was up and singing, “I stand, I stand, in awe of you!”

  And they were in awe of him. They didn’t know, or care, who she was. God they knew. Enrapt by his presence. Enveloped in some mysterious ancient bond that had no beginning and no end. Why was it so much harder to find fault with God when praising God?

  She felt a hand slip into hers and beheld Beth’s beautiful wet eyes. Cassie stood, thinking she would resist the pull, the emotion, the death-defying absurdity of it all. That was when Beth and Nick both embraced her and half-turned her to the left.

  Cassie glanced across the aisle and gasped. Not ten feet away knelt Brenda Gelasse.

  It’s wrong for that conniving schemer to be in this holy place!

  “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son
, and to the Holy Spirit . . .”

  Staring at Brenda’s back, Cassie was struck by the most unexpected thought. Here was the one she blamed for all the troubles at Azure, the break-in, the leech in the bottle, the attempts to steal Royce Blankenship, all the media woes and bad PR, and the near destruction of her marriage. There was just one problem with that list.

  Except for the infidelity with Nick and the competitive offers made to the Nose, all the rest was circumstantial. Cassie had not one shred of evidence that Brenda was the cause of any of it. A convenient explanation for the Dixon woes, even logical, but unproven. So who do I blame it on? The Evil One? Myself?

  “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and in his Son . . .”

  Cassie felt rooted to the spot, until Brenda’s shoulders began to quiver. The sight was wholly unexpected.

  No, God, I won’t do it. I’ve got nothing to give her. That’s when Cassie saw the bottoms of Brenda’s expensive shoes. Never before had she seen even the slightest hint of common humanity in the woman, but here, now, in the presence of God, everyone’s shoes were the same underneath. Dirty, scuffed, worn — not unlike those who wore them.

  I can’t.

  She was certain she heard in answer to her defiance, You must.

  Cassie’s shoulders fell. She squeezed Nick’s hand and slipped from the pew. She crossed the aisle, hesitated, then slid to her knees beside the weeping Brenda. She breathed in the tiniest memory of Cassandra that yet lingered on the toughest buyer in retail, and did not miss the irony. Cassie and Nick had waited until this night when by now they had planned to indulge in the scent meant to save them, to salvage their future. It was to have been their private celebration under the influence of the very breath of beauty.

  But now the enemy wore the prize. A prize that was poison in disguise.

  Even at reduced strength, the trace of Cassandra entranced, like something from another dimension.