Suddenly

by Barbara Delinsky

  She thought of coming home that afternoon to Nonny and Sami, and then there were visions of Noah—had he been there or had she simply dreamed him? Months before she had thought her life rewarding—she still thought it so—but these new elements fit into it with frightening ease.

  Fragile. Tenuous. Happiness that could get a firm grip, then tear your flesh away when it left. Was it truly better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? She didn’t know. The pain of wanting things one couldn’t have was devastating. It was sometimes better to push them from mind and pretend that they just didn’t exist.

  So much for dreams. Reality was harder to ignore.

  Reality, just then, was tens of patients for whom Paige was no longer responsible but whom she wanted to visit. Reality was a thriving group practice meant for four, with only three left and working double time. Reality was Nonny, who was seventy-six going on fifty, and Sami, who was sixteen months going on twelve months. Reality was a cross-country team to coach every afternoon, and a baby-sitter to heal, and too few hours in the day.

  The exhaustion of it put Paige back to sleep, but she awoke the next morning knowing that of the four doctors coming to Tucker to interview that week, one of them had better be good.

  One was. Her name was Cynthia Wales. After completing her residency in pediatrics, she had spent four years on the staff at Children’s Hospital in Boston, but she was an outdoorswoman. She wanted to be closer to mountains and rivers, and she wanted the less pressured practice that would grant her time to explore them. Best of all, she had come to interview at the start of a two-week vacation and was willing to postpone that vacation and start working right away.

  Cynthia was an easy sell. Paige, who got glowing reports from colleagues who had worked with her and felt the sheer energy level of the woman, liked her from the start. Likewise Angie, who was looking to spend more time at home. Ironically, after pushing to hire someone, Peter was hesitant.

  “What bothers you?” Paige asked him.

  He was looking everywhere but at her. “I don’t know.”

  “Her credentials are impressive,” Paige coaxed. She didn’t think it was a power play on Peter’s part. He looked legitimately bewildered.

  “There’s something about her,” he tried, sounding pained, then defeated. “No, maybe it has nothing to do with her.”

  “She isn’t Mara.”

  “No.” He cracked his knuckles. “She isn’t.”

  Paige was grateful that he could finally admit it. She didn’t know what he remembered of the night he’d been drunk, but he had been less critical of Mara ever since.

  “She isn’t Mara,” Paige repeated, “but she may be wonderful with our families. Why don’t we give her a try? You said it yourself, Peter. We have to move on.”

  He met her gaze then and sighed. “You’re right. Let’s do it.”

  The relief was immediate. Cynthia was a bundle of enthusiasm, received so well by the patient families she saw that by week’s end the group sent out a letter explaining that she would be taking over Mara’s practice.

  Paige began to breathe more easily. With a fourth doctor to normalize things at the office, she could run back and forth to the hospital, where her services were snapped up. Every bed in the place was taken and then some. Doctors were in demand, hospital services stretched thin. Specialists had been brought in to treat many of the patients Paige had seen, but there was always something for her to do. And then there was Jill, who was lying in her cast listening to the fetal monitor, wondering if the baby would live and whether she wanted it to. With her father still ignoring her, her mother trying to hold her job and visit Jill on the sly without her father finding out, and her best friend still hospitalized in Hanover, she spent much of her time alone.

  For that reason Paige was pleased to walk into her hospital room on the Saturday morning after the collapse and find Sara standing by her bedside. “What a nice surprise,” she said, putting an arm around Sara, then as quickly drawing back. “Don’t you dare tell me you thumbed in this time, Sara Dickinson.”

  “No. I came with my father.”

  “Ahhh. Better.” She felt a flicker of heat at the thought of Noah nearby.

  “You didn’t tell me Jill was pregnant,” Sara said.

  “I felt it was Jill’s decision to make as to whether she told or not.”

  “She asked what the monitor was for,” Jill explained. “But I don’t mind. Everyone knows.”

  Paige smiled her encouragement and asked softly, “Are you okay?” The floor nurse had caught her on her way past and told her that the baby had appeared distressed at one point during the night. For a short time, the doctors had considered doing a section. Then it had stabilized.

  “I’m okay,” Jill said. “Just hurting. They won’t give me much for the pain.”

  “They’re afraid it would affect the baby.”

  “I’d think the baby would like it,” Sara said, and did something with her eyes to give the illusion of their spinning in opposite directions at once.

  “How do you do that?” Paige asked, laughing, but Jill had laughed, too, so the answer was moot, and Sara was barreling on, looking slightly awed now.

  “Jill said that the guys from Henderson Wheel were in to visit.”

  Paige looked at Jill. “Yes?”

  “Last night. After you left. Robbie Howe—he’s the drummer—is so cool. He sat with me for ten minutes. He said he’d have stayed longer but that they had to fly to New Jersey for a gig.”

  “What did you talk about?” Sara asked.

  “Music. The concert. Where else they’re playing. They never had anything happen to them like happened here last week, and this is their hometown. It’s like, too much. They feel awful. They’re going to keep coming back to see people. He said that if I needed anything—like if I had trouble with money for all this—I should let him know. They want to help.”

  “So does my dad,” Sara said. “He’s downstairs talking about it with someone now. He thinks it would be a great if the kids at Mount Court could help some of the people who were hurt. I mean, we can’t do medical things, but we can visit, or help with homework.”

  “How about baby-sit?” Paige asked, thinking of Mary O’Reilly. Her husband had suffered a broken back and would be hospitalized for months. Once he was tranferfed to Tucker, Mary would want to visit, but she had limited mobility herself. For now her in-laws were helping her out, but they both worked.

  “We can baby-sit,” Sara said with confidence.

  Baby-sitting was only the first of the things Paige thought of. The list was endless once she got going, and it included helping both those injured in the movie house and those who had relied on the injured for help. She passed on her ideas to Noah, who was determined to take the opportunity to teach his students a lesson in community cooperation. The time it took for Tucker General’s social services director to organize things allowed for fall sports to wind down.

  Diligently, Paige prepared her team for the last few races of the season. Several were running better than ever—girls who had climbed Noah’s mountain and found a measure of self-confidence at the top. Sara was one; her times continued to improve, along with her comfort level, if telling friends of her relationship to Noah was any measure of that. Then again, it struck Paige that Sara might have felt comfortable telling friends that he was her father because the tide had turned. He wasn’t winning popularity contests yet, but he had earned a modicum of respect on campus.

  As for Paige, when Noah stopped by to watch practice it was all she could do not to shake. She still thought him gorgeous. She had even come to like him. And then there were the dreams that she had all too often.

  So she limited her interaction with him to discussion of the girls, which was, after all, the only business she had at Mount Court. And there was plenty to talk about, particularly where Julie Engel was concerned.

  She was a problem. She skipped class and was put on detention; she left the dorm
after hours and was put on detention; she smoked in her room and was put on detention. While the others had generally responded well to Noah’s tactics, she had not. Rather than being buoyed by the experience of Knife Edge, she felt humiliated.

  “I couldn’t do it,” she complained when Paige raised the issue in an attempt to get to the heart of the problem.

  “You did it. You made it across.”

  “I was a total wimp.”

  “But you got there. That’s what counts, Julie. You have to stop regarding the glass as half-empty. It’s half-full—and you can fill it the rest of the way if you want, but you have to want.”

  Unfortunately the only thing Julie wanted related to the opposite sex. Of all the senior girls, she was the one most aware of herself as a woman, which, given the letter she had written to Peter, made Paige a mite uneasy.

  Peter, fortunately, was aware of the problem and had started sending Cynthia to Mount Court when the infirmary called. What with the return of normalcy to the office, he, like Paige, was spending time each day at the hospital, helping with patients injured in the movie house collapse.

  Given the negative thoughts she had had about him, Paige found his dedication to be redeeming. When she made a casual reference to it, though, he was far from casual. “It’s the least I can do, don’t you think? Okay, so it wasn’t a fire, but Jamie Cox had no business packing people into the movie house. I knew it just as well as Mara did, but I was too cowardly to pick up the fight where she left off. If I had, the collapse might never have happened.”

  Paige felt duly chastised. “I’m as guilty as you. I did nothing either.”

  “Yeah, but look what else you’re doing. You’ve taken Mara’s child. That’s a major obligation.”

  “No obligation,” Paige replied. “An obligation is something negative. Sami isn’t at all.”

  “She’s work and responsibility.”

  “But not negative. And only temporary.”

  Paige kept reminding herself of that. Weekly visits from the adoption agency’s Joan Felix helped, as did biweekly sessions with the agency’s other parents. Those discussions focused on the ups and downs of adoption in general and interracial adoption in particular, and while those ups and downs didn’t faze Paige in the least, the sessions were a touchstone to reality. Without them she might have pretended that Sami would be forever hers.

  The little girl was a treasure, a blossoming little person to wake up to in the mornings, to stop home at noontime to see, and to have supper with at night. As a pediatrician, Paige had known about the miracle of a child’s development, but seeing it in other people’s children was one thing, seeing it in her own another. Each day Sami did something new, something that gave Paige a special pride. The child was thriving, putting on weight, catching up with her age with astonishing speed. Paige was sure that when she hit school she would be the smartest little girl in the class.

  The problem of hiring a baby-sitter haunted her. She knew she should be looking but kept putting it off. As guilty as she felt imposing so deeply on Nonny’s life, the fact was that she didn’t trust anyone else with Sami as she trusted her grandmother—who had, for all practical purposes, moved in with her. She had taken over the second upstairs bedroom and had brought enough things from her house, including a red-and-white rag rug, a huge heart comforter, and a white wicker rocker, to make the room her own.

  They were a family—Nonny, Sami, and Paige. They went out together driving, shopping, and visiting, and Paige loved every novel minute of it. Those times when she felt guilty having such fun, she simply reminded herself that it was temporary and the guilt eased. Likewise when Noah invited the three of them out to dinner. He was passing through Tucker, like Sami and Nonny. The transiency made it safe.

  So different was this makeshift life from the one Paige knew to be permanent, and so shielded did she feel from reality, that when the middle of November arrived, and with it her birthday, she decided to break with tradition. Normally she filled the day with every commitment she could find for the purpose of arriving home at night too tired to do anything but fall into bed—certainly too tired to think—and by the time she awoke the next morning the dreadful day was gone.

  This year she felt braver.

  eighteen

  PAIGE’S BIRTHDAY FELL ON A THURSDAY. SHE arranged to take the day off from work, and since the cross-country season had ended the weekend before, there was no practice to interrupt a lazy day. She planned to spend it at home with Nonny and Sami.

  “I see it in patients sometimes,” Mara had written in a letter that had spoken directly to Paige, “those few lucky families who know the pleasure of being together for no other reason than being together. It takes a meshing. It takes the acceptance of one person by another, differences and all. It takes the kind of love that doesn’t demand, simply is.”

  Paige was regarding Nonny and Sami as her family in many of those same regards. In the wake of the movie house tragedy, she was grateful they were there.

  She wanted to have a big breakfast at home, then read the paper. She wanted to bundle everyone up against the nippy air, take a walk into town, and put Sami in the kiddie swing in the park by the church. She wanted to go back home, listen to music and knit while Sami napped, then take her and Nonny across the state line to Hanover for a birthday dinner at the inn.

  As it happened, she had barely finished devouring the last of Nonny’s Belgian waffles when the first of the year’s snow started to fall. By the time she had read the newspaper cover to cover the flakes were coming more steadily. She took Sami from the playpen and joined Nonny at the picture window that looked out from the kitchen onto the backyard.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Nonny asked.

  “It is. Look, Sami. Snow.” To Nonny she said, “It’s her first one. A milestone.”

  Sami had her little hand flat on the window.

  “Can you say snow?” Paige urged. When no sound was forthcoming, she said, “How about Nonny? Non-ny. Come on, give it a try. Non-ny. No? Then try Ma-ma. Mmma. Mmma.”

  Nonny arched a brow her way.

  “It’s generic,” Paige assured her.

  “It doesn’t have to be. You could adopt her.”

  “Nah. She needs a full-time mother.”

  “Between you and me, she has one, and before you know it she’ll be going off to school, and then you won’t even need me. You could do what Angie has done all these years, work while the child is in school and be done in time to pick her up. What do you think Mara was planning?”

  “Exactly that,” Paige conceded, “but I’m not Mara. She had a thing for being a mother. She was obsessed with that kind of relationship.” The deep connect, she had called it. “I don’t have quite that need.”

  “You’re more independent?”

  “Self-reliant.”

  “Poppycock. You need family just like the rest of us.”

  “Yes, but not as immediately as Mara did. Not as intimately. I was perfectly satisfied with my life as it was before Mara died.”

  “But you love having Sami.”

  “Um-hmmm. It makes me feel good knowing that I can give her love while the agency searches for permanent parents.”

  “What if they don’t find any?”

  “They will. It’s just a matter of time.”

  “And in the meanwhile you’re becoming more attached to her. You can’t fool me, Paige. I see you creeping up to her room every night long after she’s asleep.”

  “I’m checking to make sure she’s all right.”

  “You’re standing over her crib for fifteen, twenty minutes sometimes. Face it, sweetheart, you’re hooked.”

  Paige brought Sami’s hand to her mouth. She kissed it, then shifted the small fingers to her chin. “Mara wrote about being a foster mother in some of her letters. She said that there was always a problem with separation, but that the satisfaction of helping a child made it worth the pain. I’ve helped Sami. I’ve given her a good start here. I fe
el the satisfaction of that.”

  “And the pain? Will you feel that, too?”

  “When the time comes.”

  Nonny didn’t say more, and Paige didn’t invite it. This was her birthday, a difficult enough day on its own. She wanted to keep it as upbeat as possible.

  So she played with Sami, then took her upstairs and bathed and dressed her, but when she would have gone out for a walk, the snow was falling harder than ever.

  Nonny joined her at the front window. “It’s mounting up.”

  “Mmm. What would you say, two inches?”

  “Three. You’re not wheeling a carriage far in that.”

  “No. I wish we had a sled. Maybe I can put her in the Snugli and cover her with my parka.”

  “She won’t be able to see anything.”

  “I’ll turn it around so that she looks out. Better still, why don’t we get in the car and go to Hanover now. The driving can’t be that bad.”

  The look Nonny gave her said that it certainly could be. Then the look turned sad. “I know what you’re doing, Paige. It’s the same thing you’ve been doing for years and years, modified, perhaps, but the basic strategy is the same. If you arrange to be out of the house, you won’t be here when the phone doesn’t ring.” She looked pained. “They won’t call, Paige. They might call in two weeks, or five weeks, but they aren’t attuned to remembering your birthday. It’s as simple as that.”

  Paige stared out at the snow. “I’ve never been able to understand it. If they had eight kids, okay. Dates can be confused. But I’m their only child. My mother gave birth once in her life, just once. Didn’t that day mean anything to her?”

  “It did. Just not the same thing it would have meant to me, or to you, if you’d been the one to give birth.”

  “I’d be anticipating the day for weeks. I’d be planning a party. I’d be thinking of all the things my child most wanted to do, and I’d have them planned without even having to ask her.”