“My baby,” the not-Mom-voice said softly. “Oh, I thank God. And Saint Anne. And Saint Catherine. I prayed more than I ever prayed in my life.”
“Mor-un…,” she said again, helplessly.
The mom-but-not-Mom-voice coughed and a bell rang. A little-radio-voice said, “I’ll be right there!”
“She’s asking over and over…”
“She’s very confused now, and you have to expect that.” It was a nice voice, a pancake-voice, she thought. Like summer pancakes.
“I…I…mu…Mor…un…,” she said again, louder. Her tongue was moist.
“Ahhhh,” said the sweet-voice.
Impatient, she wiggled her hands and made a fist.
“Well!” the same voice said. “We’ve got a feisty one on our hands.” She clapped and the clapping clanged in her head. She could see the nurse wavering, as if underwater, her hair like a cloud of flame. Why did the nurse applaud? It banged her head like a broken banjo. She cringed away into sleep.
“What do you think she was saying?” Lorelei asked.
“Her best friend, the girl who…”
“Oh. Of course. That was Maureen.”
“Yes. Maureen O’Malley.”
“She was asking about Maureen?”
“Yes. I can’t tell her Maureen is…you know. Not now.” Kitt crawled back into the chair. Lorelei thought Kitt looked as whipped as a wet dog.
“She’s going to sleep for a while now. And I think you should, too, Mrs. Flannery,” Lorelei said. “I promise I’ll watch over her like she was my little sister. Scout’s honor.”
“I can’t.”
“Go ahead. Go home and get a good night’s sleep. She’ll be here in the morning. Call us ten times if you want to. That’s what we’re here for.”
And so Kitt let Mike pick her up on his way home from Bright Wing. He looked in on Bridget and kissed Kitt’s hair. “It’s a miracle.”
Mike had not seen the open doors that morning—the lolling, twisted children. Now the ward looked like a twilight nursery, like the girls’ bedrooms when they were tiny.
“It is,” Kitt sighed and agreed. “I don’t want to leave her.”
“Just for a few hours.”
The next day, at six AM, the dental surgeon showed up on his rounds.
Chris Styles was tall, dark, and oh-so-handsome. He had played basketball at Stanford, and half of the nurses on the floor had a crush on him. Lorelei wasn’t immune. She didn’t know how Dr. Styles stayed single with all those hormones coming at him all day. He must go home exhausted. She usually worked Saturday nights; and Dr. Styles, who was Jewish, made a point of working Sundays. It was always a little pleasure in her morning to see him when their paths crossed.
Gently, after asking her permission, he examined Bridget’s mouth.
Then he sat down in the rocker and studied the open file of Bridget’s dental chart.
Lorelei had one of her odd feelings. Those weird hunches were the thing that made her decide she would become a nurse when her parents both thought she would make a wonderful teacher. And they had served her well. She could tell when a kid was going to go south, the way dogs can sense hurricanes. She flipped through the girl’s chart, one eye on Dr. Styles, as the tech did the routine blood draw, on the prowl for infections—the danger to any body, however young, when there was injury and prolonged inactivity.
Dr. Styles looked up at her. “I’ve seen teeth that were chipped after accidents, but I never saw a chipped tooth get better,” he said.
“What?”
“The kid in the chart has a big chip in her left lower bicuspid. This kid doesn’t. This kid has had four canines removed for alignment. The kid in the chart has her canines.”
“Maybe you got the wrong records.”
“You know I didn’t.”
Dr. Styles and Lorelei exchanged a level look.
“You already thought this,” he said.
“Yeah, I did.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“She just got here a few days ago. I thought I was nuts at first. But I had these funny impressions.”
“Well, I’ll do impressions when she’s a little further along. But the doo-doo is going to hit the fan,” said Dr. Styles. “Call me if you need me.”
I need you, Lorelei thought, and laughed at herself.
She called her sister. They had plans to go shop the sales at the Mall of America. “Let’s just say I won’t be able to come today and watch the news tonight,” she teased Eudora.
“Tell me!” said her sister.
“Can’t!” Lorelei said, and turned off the phone before she did say something. Eudora could convince sea turtles to give up their eggs.
She helped the day nurse, a nice guy named Ben Kipness, hold the girl in a standing position for a moment.
“Look,” Ben said. “She’s reaching for the floor with her toes. Both sides.”
“She’s trying to balance. Well, she was a cheerleader. Glad she wasn’t a little couch potato.”
“Why are you still here?” Ben asked.
“Waiting for some orders. I’ll go soon,” Lorelei said casually. In fact, she would not go home until late that afternoon. They lowered the girl into a chair. Her eyes opened and she felt for the armrests.
When Ben left, Lorelei spoke sharply into the girl’s ear. “Talk to me, honey! Tell me what the deal is!”
There was time. She was uncomfortable. She back her. Her toys, tins, tops tingled.
Light. She said, “Hey!”
They heard her! She lifted her arm and waved it.
A boomy voice shouted, “Look! Her finger moved! Call Dr. Park!”
Her finger? It was her whole left side that moved!
Time.
Time.
Light.
Then a singsong but very teacher-y voice said,
“That’s definitely intentional.”
“Here,” she said clearly.
“Hear what, sweetie?” asked the girl-voice, as gentle as a violin. “Dr. Park, you heard that.”
“Mmmm. She’s coming along very quickly.
Did you, ah, hear what Dr. Styles…?”
“Yes, I was here.”
Time rolled over her like a wave, dragging her down. And then she rose up again.
“Here Mor-uh…”
“I’m here,” said the sweet-violin-voice. “Are you awake, honey?”
Lights came on, big lights. Flashlights in her face.
“It’s not possible,” said the voice-she-remembered-from-what-seemed-like-years-ago.
“Dr. Collins, this girl has had braces. Bridget didn’t. This girl has a different pattern of dentition and an intact tooth where Bridget had a chip.”
“It’s not possible. This is going to be a firestorm. Run through it again.”
“We ran it twice,” said a low, musical man’s voice. She would call his voice the kettledrum.
“Damn,” said the doctor-voice. “Kathy Fahey knows this girl. Kathy did three surgeries on this kid. She’d have noticed something. Traverian came from Chicago and fixed her cheek and scalp because we didn’t have a good enough cosmetic surgeon. He would have noticed something was off. Someone would have. Damn.”
She decided to say clearly, “Damn.”
“She hears you,” said the violin-voice.
They all fell silent.
She opened her eyes and looked around at them. The sweet-voice had a soft cloud of red hair.
Finally, the sweet-voice said, “Well, I’ll stay here while we call…while you call…”
“Fine, good, thank you, Lorelei. Dr. Park. Dr. Daater, do you think you could stay, too? Someone page Dr. Fahey. I guess. And the counsel.”
“Legal counsel?”
“I guess. Ask Whitby.”
She had seen the nurse. She had seen Danny. She had seen the skinny lady in the red sweatshirt, sweeter, sweater. She knew her from someday, someway. She had made her voice say on its own real words. Hey a
nd damn and no and…
She was not dead.
She was not in heaven.
And she was not Bridget.
PART II
maureen
beginning with the end
On Monday, Neely Cavendish came in early. She went up to see the girl before she made the first call. Before that, she started a fresh clipboard with stacks of forms and plain paper, and drank a full cup of black coffee. Although Janie’s cough was better, her daughter hadn’t let her sleep much last night. And Neely needed all her wits about her.
In the wavering March sunlight that leaked in through the closed drapes in the pink room, she asked the girl, “Are you Maureen?”
Oh, thank you, thank you, Maureen thought. She nodded so hard her head began to hammer again with the pain.
“Take it easy,” said the tall, pretty black woman with the clipboard. “We’re going to make this okay. I have to go and call some folks now. Don’t worry.”
She slept. She dreamed of Danny, sitting in the chair, his blond hair falling in a tangle over his forehead, his sleeves rolled up deliberately to reveal his powerful forearms. She dreamed of Danny kissing her every night and saying, “That’s my girl.” His smell, of some peppery shaving junk and the bubble gum he was never without. She felt her stomach lurch in her sleep.
Back in her office, Neely looked at the clock and wrote down “8:20 AM.” A random thought from grade school drifted through her mind. Some dimwit teacher had told them that clocks on display for sale were set at that time not just to show off the hands to best advantage but because, in legend, this was the time of day when Abraham Lincoln died.
It must have seemed bizarre to Dr. Styles. How could he understand that people didn’t examine the dental patterns of someone whose life they were trying to save every minute of every day? Someone who wouldn’t wake up from a coma? They’d barely been able to clean her teeth because of the damage to her mouth.
Now, in addition to Dr. Styles’s report they had some close observation and questioning of the girl by Dr. Park, and the blood tests. It was pretty conclusive.
She knew that the O’Malleys wouldn’t hear a word she said after she told them that there was a very good chance that Maureen was still alive—that she, not Bridget, had survived the crash.
They wouldn’t hear her when she talked about the long road Maureen faced, or the real likelihood that she would never be the girl they had raised. They wouldn’t believe that a brain-injured kid might be rude. She might sexually misbehave. She would probably ask for the same thing ten times in sequence, forgetting that she’d asked five minutes earlier. She might burst out in displays of rage and might require classes for the mentally challenged.
And that was if things went well.
But they wouldn’t hear or accept anything like that for weeks. That burst of absolute, blinding, unexpected elation would carry them through the first shocking moments of disillusionment they would certainly experience. Neely had seen it over and over, although never with this set of circumstances.
She dialed the O’Malleys’ phone number.
Answering machine.
Damn it!
Okay. Mrs. O’Malley worked…where? She worked at the church, at Holy Mother of Sorrows. Part-time. Okay. Neely would call her there. But how would she get her to come to the hospital? How would she…Should she call Mrs. Flannery before the Flannerys got to the hospital? No. The O’Malleys were the principals here. Should she call the coach first?
Neely looked up the number for the rectory.
Jeannie O’Malley answered on the first ring. Neely crashed.
“Hello?” Jeannie said. Neely said nothing. “Hello? Is anyone there?”
“I need to speak to Father Genovese, urgently,” she said.
“Is this the hospital? Aren’t you the social worker?” Jeannie asked.
“Yes, I…just really have to talk to the father. I do.”
“Well, Neely, I can have him call you in…about five minutes. Mass is just ending.”
Of course. Mass was every day, not just Sunday. Neely bit the bullet.
“Mrs. O’Malley, you have to trust me on this. I really need to ask you, the father, and your husband to come to my office now. I know this is unexpected, and I really cannot give you details over the phone. There’s been a misunderstanding regarding your daughter Maureen’s care….”
“Oh, Neely. Is this about the organ donations? We signed off on that. It gave us some measure of peace. We know everything was done that could be done. We never even thought about a lawsuit or any of those terrible things. Of course, we’re still…I don’t think we’ll ever be the same. The parent group has helped me. Bill has gone with me a couple of times. It’s at least something to know you’re not alone, even in a town as small as ours. But no, we’ll never be the same.”
You bet you won’t, Neely thought. She said, “Well, I’m glad. But, well. It’s not that. It’s something more personal.”
“Something we left? Something of Maury’s? Something we forgot to take care of?” Jeannie asked, puzzled. She had only this week cleaned Maury’s room, then let herself lie on her daughter’s bed and cry until she was exhausted and fell asleep.
“Yes, yes. Something we all forgot to take care of. And it’s truly urgent. Please. If you can…”
“The father is here now. Do you still need to talk to him?”
“I’d like to speak to him if I can,” Neely said, sighing with relief.
“Anthony Genovese here.”
“Father, this is Neely Cavendish….”
“Of course. Hello.”
“Father, I really need you to come to my office at Anne Morrow Lindbergh with the O’Malleys as soon as you possibly can.”
“I understand,” the priest said evenly. “Of course I want to know the reason.”
“Father, what I’m going to say is going to either sound to you like a lie or a miracle or a hoax or just plain crazy. But it’s absolutely true. The medical staff here believes that the girl upstairs in the rehab unit is actually Maureen O’Malley. They believe she is not Bridget Flannery. The girl you buried was Bridget Flannery.”
“Well,” said Father Genovese. “Well, and how was this, ah, discovered?”
“Yesterday morning the dental surgeon on call compared her teeth to the records of Bridget’s teeth. And they did not match. The hospital did blood tests. And now she’s doing other things, making a clicking noise with her tongue…. Amber Kresky, a nurse—”
“I know Amber. I married Amber and Mitchell.”
“I gather, from what Amber says, that this is how Maureen called her dog….”
“Yes. That’s true. I’ll go into my office now. Thank you, Jeannie. Yes, you may hang up now. Great.” Neely heard the priest’s voice drop to a harsh whisper. “How could this have happened? How can you be sure? This is so traumatic. Of course, for the O’Malleys it will be the answered prayer. But there are so many complications. The Flannerys will be completely devastated. I don’t know how to minister to them. This is a unique situation. So how can you be sure?”
“We have the proof. We…well, the doctors have already determined that she has type A-negative blood, like Maureen. Bridget was type O. We have Maureen’s dental records. They match this girl’s teeth.”
“Jeannie was in agony when she was pregnant with Maureen, thinking Maureen would die because of the Rh factor,” said Father Genovese. “The danger grows with every pregnancy. Especially seventeen years ago. But she took the shots so that Maury wouldn’t have to be fully transfused at her birth. I was the assistant pastor then.”
Neely went on. “Father, this mistake isn’t as outrageous as it seems. It’s happened before. It shouldn’t have happened, but I have found at least two other cases within the past ten years where it did happen in the United States. There was so much injury to both girls. So much swelling from the injuries and the fluids the doctors administered. And it was Maureen’s car. We assumed she was the girl in the
driver’s seat. But we believe now that Bridget may have been driving, for some reason. They were so similar in every way. Height. Weight. Hair color. Eye color.”
“But how can we determine if she really is Maureen?”
“It’s an easy test. A DNA swab from the inside of Bill O’Malley’s cheek will determine the paternity within twenty-four hours.” Neely paused. “Obviously, the doctors here fought to the greatest extent of their ability to save Maureen and Bridget. And there was never any negligence.”
“No one thinks that. Well, in any case, I’ve seen no evidence of that.”
“In a trauma situation like that, where two kids are so very, very sick, decisions have to be made in seconds. The doctors try everything. It was only a matter of five or six minutes before both of them were in surgery and, from what the paramedics said at the scene, the doctors made the best determination they could of who was who. Neither one had any ID. It was all over the road. They were both given a great deal of blood during surgery, but none of it was A-negative; it was type O in the ER because they can transfuse that for any blood type usually,” Neely explained.
“And no one looked back over the records.”
Neely hesitated. “No.”
Neely heard a rustling sound.
The priest told her, “This is going to have lasting consequences in this parish, and in Bigelow. This town is never going to be the same. Now, I have just been informed that Mr. O’Malley is on his way to pick us up here, so we should be there in less than an hour, Mrs. Cavendish.”
“Thank you. Please come straight to my office on the first floor, right outside the emergency department.”
“And…”
“Father?”
“God bless you, Mrs. Cavendish.”
Red sweater lady in the hall.
Boy-crying in the hall.
I see them hear them hear the violin-voice tell them, “Right now, we have to make you wait justafewminutes….”
“But why?”
“Justafewminutes. We are doing some tests on her.”
“Is something wrong? Did she have an infection? That…care center was a hellhole.”
All We Know of Heaven Page 6