“Where did they take you in the ambulance when you were a little girl after your parents died?” he asked with interest, keeping a close watch on her expression, and as he did, he could see something faraway and painful cross her mind. She almost winced at the memories that had come to life again the night before.
“They took me to an orphanage. I lived there for eleven years. At first, they said I would be adopted very quickly, and they sent me to several homes to try out.” Her eyes looked sad as she said it, and although he said nothing to her, his heart ached for her. He could almost feel the pain she had felt as a little girl, suddenly orphaned and alone, in an orphanage among strangers. To him, it seemed like a terrible fate for a child. “Some of them kept me for a while, weeks, I think. A month maybe, it seemed like a long time to me then. Some of them only kept me a few days. I guess things haven’t changed much. People want babies, newborns preferably. They don’t want scrawny five-year-olds with bony knees, freckles, and red hair.”
“That sounds adorable to me,” he said to her, and she smiled ruefully.
“I don’t think I seemed so adorable to them. I cried a lot. I was scared, probably most of the time. Maybe all the time. I missed my parents, and the people they sent me to seemed weird to me. They probably weren’t, or no more than anyone else. I wet my bed, I hid in closets, I hid under my bed once and refused to come out. They sent me back the next day and said I wasn’t friendly. The nuns scolded me and told me I had to make more effort after that. They kept sending me out to audition for the next three years, until I was eight. And by then, I really was too old. And I wasn’t very cute then. One of the families I went to said my braids were too much trouble, so they cut off all my hair. I came back nearly bald, they just took a razor to my head and gave me a crew cut. It was pretty scary stuff for a little kid. And there was always some reason why they didn’t want me and sent me back. Sometimes they were polite and lied about it, and claimed they had decided they couldn’t afford to adopt, or they were leaving town, or the dad lost his job. Stuff like that. Most of the time, they didn’t say anything. They just shook their heads, packed me up, and sent me back. I could always tell the night before, or most of the time anyway. I knew that look. It always gave me a sinking feeling in my stomach. Sometimes they took me by surprise, but mostly not. They gave me five minutes to pack my things, and drove me back. Some of them gave me a present when they did, like a teddy bear or a doll or a toy, kind of a consolation prize for not making the cut. I got used to it eventually, I guess. Except I wonder now if you ever do. I think now, with the perspective of time and age, that every time they didn’t want me and sent me back, it broke my heart again. After a while, every time I went out to try out, I was scared. I knew it would happen again. It always did. How could it not?
“After I was eight, they put me in foster care, which is usually for kids who can’t be adopted for some reason. Most of the time because their parents won’t relinquish them for adoption. Mine were dead, but since no one else wanted me, I wound up in foster care. The theory behind it is excellent, because it’s supposed to keep you from being institutionalized, and there are some wonderful people who foster children. But a lot of bad ones too. Some people see it as an opportunity for child labor and slavery, they cash in on the money they get, starve you, work your fingers to the bone doing things their own kids don’t want to do, and they treat you like dirt. But eventually, I turned the tables on them. I did the worst things I could think of, to see how fast I could be sent back. I liked it better in the orphanage. I was in thirty-six homes in eight years. It became a joke. In the end, they stopped sending me out and left me alone. I didn’t bother anyone, I went to school, I did the chores I was assigned to. I was reasonably polite to the nuns and I walked out the door without looking back when I was sixteen. I got a job as a waitress and worked in several restaurants. I loved to make clothes with left-over bits of fabric in my spare time. I made them for myself, friends, co-workers. Making clothes was like making magic for me. I could transform a scrap of fabric into something beautiful, and make a waitress feel like a queen. In the last coffee shop I worked, my career started and my luck turned. I got a fabulous opportunity, and it’s been a good life ever since, even a great one, most of the time,” she said with wise, sad eyes that had seen too much in one life. “But I’ve noticed all my life, that when I get frightened, or something goes terribly wrong, or if I’m sick or upset, it all comes back to me. Suddenly I’m five years old again, I’m in the orphanage, my parents just died, and I’m being sent to strangers who don’t want me, or maybe even scare me to death. I think that happened to me last night. I was both sick and scared, and by the time I got here in the ambulance, I was so overwhelmed by panic I could hardly breathe. I had asthma as a little kid. Sometimes I’d pretend to have attacks in foster homes, so they’d send me back. They always did. No one wants a funny-looking redheaded kid on their hands with asthma on top of it. In the beginning, the attacks were real. Later they weren’t. By then I didn’t want to try anymore. I didn’t want to put myself on the line. I didn’t care about them, and I didn’t want them to care about me. They didn’t. The best thing that ever happened to me was leaving the orphanage and going to work. Then I was finally in control of my own life, my own destiny. No one could scare me anymore, or send me away. It sounds crazy to say it now,” she said as she looked at Jean-Charles openly.
He was amazed by her honesty as she talked about it, and her air of calm and acceptance about everything that had happened to her. Hers was a story that tore at the heart, and it was even more amazing to know what she had ultimately become. Her success story was even more remarkable than most people knew. She had crawled out of a life that would have killed some people, and had achieved more than anyone could have imagined. She had climbed Everest, and reached the summit, successfully, more than anyone ever knew. Only a handful of her closest friends and associates knew about her past. She had never said it as bluntly or as honestly as she had just said to Jean-Charles. But he was a doctor and she figured he could take it. She assumed he had probably heard worse. Her history had become routine to her but it had shocked him anyway, and touched him deeply. He had even deeper respect for her after hearing what she’d shared. “It probably sounds crazy to you,” she said again, “but I don’t ever want to go back there, in any way. Or feel as though I am. I don’t want to try and charm someone into adopting me, or do a song and dance for them. I don’t want to be a ten-year-old slave in foster care, or even a thirteen-year-old that no one has hugged in years. I never want to be in that position again. Ever. I did enough of it then to last a lifetime. I don’t ever want to be abandoned or go back to the orphanage again. I’d rather be alone.” Or with men she cared little about. Her eyes were so intense, it was easy for him to see that what she had said came straight from the heart, and deeply touched his. And saddest of all, to him, was that she had gotten her wish. From what he could see, she was alone.
“What can you or any of us do to avoid being abandoned, Timmie?” Jean-Charles asked philosophically. “People have a way of leaving us in life, even if we’re not orphans or five years old. People we love die, husbands and wives run away, we get fired from jobs, even if it’s not our fault. And people who love each other sometimes hurt each other, even if it’s the last thing they want or mean to do. Life is painful, and there are no guarantees. If you love someone, they can leave you, or send you back to the orphanage in other ways. We’ve all been there to some degree. But you far more than most. I’m sorry you had to go through all that, particularly as a young child. What a terrible life it must have been for you,” he said sympathetically, and she smiled again. It was a sad, quiet half-smile that told him he was right. It had been eleven years of nightmares for her then. And the memories of it that had haunted her ever since. The ride in the ambulance had brought it all back to her. She could still remember the night her parents died as though it were yesterday. She had felt five years old again in the ambulance the
night before. And when she got to the hospital, she had felt so small and vulnerable while he held her hand.
By the next day, the adult in her had taken over again, and the five-year-old was nowhere to be seen. But Jean-Charles had seen the terrified child clearly the night before, even though Timmie, with all her courage, power, and strength, was very much in evidence today. But when Jean-Charles looked at her, he saw something else as well. He saw the shadow of the child who had held his hand in the operating room, and clung to him as though her life depended on it. And perhaps it did. He had no idea how she had survived the challenges of those frightening years in the orphanage. But somehow she had. Whatever toll those years had taken, she was sane, whole, functional, successful, brilliant, and creative now, and no one looking at her would ever have suspected where she had started or what her life had been like as a child. No one could even begin to guess at the pain of her early years. But Jean-Charles had seen and heard it, and the bond between them was forever changed. He had had a glimpse both into her soul and into her past. He knew now that she had been traumatized for at least eleven years of her life, and maybe more. It gave him tremendous insight into her, she had taken a constant emotional battering and still managed to come out on top in the end. She was successful, powerful, a bright shining example of success, although Timmie doubted herself at times, more than anyone realized. She knew where the scars and the holes were in her soul. And much of what she did was to protect those old wounds from opening again. She couldn’t afford it anymore. Her wounds had been hit too hard in the past. She couldn’t risk reinjuring them again.
The French doctor had sensed all of that the night before, in the way she clung to his hand. It frightened him for her. What he had seen in her then, and even now to some degree, was a tsunami of pain so vast that it would have drowned everything around it, if it was ever unleashed. And it nearly had been the night before. Coming to the hospital had been terrifying for her and had reminded her again of how alone she was. It was like the old demons of her past reawakening and condemning her to the orphanage again. Jean-Charles being there for her had changed the agony of that reality for her. For even a brief moment, he had made her feel she was no longer so alone. She was grateful for it now, as they exchanged a smile and the past became dim again. In the end, however hard it had been, they were only ghosts and could no longer hurt her now. For all these years, Timmie had never allowed the past to haunt her, daunt her, stop her, cripple her. She wouldn’t let it. She was too strong to let it stop her. Now and then it sneaked up on her, as it nearly had before the surgery, and then she consciously put it behind her again, where it belonged. She still honored the child she had once been, and all that had happened to her, but she couldn’t allow a frightened five-year-old to run her life. She never had and wasn’t about to start now. She had to be stronger than that, there was no other choice. Jean-Charles could see it all in the look on her face, and admired her strength and courage.
“You are an absolute hero,” he said admiringly. She thought he was teasing her, so she smiled, but he wasn’t. “I think you’re the bravest woman I ever met.” He understood perfectly now why she had been so upset the previous night. “Did your parents have no relatives that you could go to?” he asked with sadness for her and deep compassion, and she shook her head.
“All I know about my parents is that they were Irish and they died. There’s nothing else to find out. I thought of looking up some relatives once when I was in Ireland. There must be thirty pages of O’Neills in the phone book. That’s all I know. So I’m alone, except for wonderful friends I enjoy a lot.”
But they both knew that when things went wrong, in some way, as they had with her appendix, there was no one to turn to, and she was entirely alone, except for people who worked for her, but they had their own lives. He remembered her giving him Jade’s name to put on the forms as next of kin. That said a lot. There was no one else in her life to rely on, which was harder for him to believe in the case of a woman as beautiful and successful as she was. It was hard to imagine how she had wound up alone, unless it was what she wanted. And perhaps it was. He almost couldn’t blame her, after a beginning like that. It would have been nearly impossible to open up, love, attach, and trust. And more than likely, he realized sadly, she probably never had. Fate was cruel at times, it had been to her, but materially, it had been kind. And she had worked hard to earn what she had. They both knew that material success was not enough for a good life. But it was something at least, and she loved her work. In her opinion, she had a very good life.
She looked peaceful and calm as she lay in bed and talked to him. He was touched by the confidences she had shared. He suddenly felt as though, as a result of her surgery and the powerful effect it had had on her, he had crossed the line from doctor to friend in a matter of hours, and he was deeply honored. He thought she was a remarkable woman. Timmie felt the newly formed bond between them too, and was equally impressed by him, as both a doctor and a human being. He was a deeply caring, warm person. His kindness to her had made her open up as she hadn’t in years. She seldom, if ever, shared the story of her past, and rarely had in her life.
“I’m sorry to bore you with that miserable old stuff. I don’t usually talk about it, but I felt I owed you some explanation after panicking last night,” she said, looking apologetic. It embarrassed her a little to have shared so much with him.
“You were fine,” he reassured her, “and you owe me no explanation. Surgery in a foreign country, when you’re all alone, is a frightening thing. Anyone would be scared. And you have more reason to be than most. You were traumatized as a child. It doesn’t surprise me at all that you don’t have children,” he said gently. “You must have been afraid to inflict the pain you suffered on someone else.” Many of the people he’d met who had had agonizing childhoods had decided not to have children themselves. Timmie seemed fairly typical in that. And then he saw the look in her eyes, and realized he had hit another wound. He wanted to cut out his tongue, as her gaze met his. The pain he saw in her silenced him.
“I had a son who died,” she said softly. Her eyes never left his.
“I’m so sorry,” he said in a choked voice. “How stupid of me to assume … I didn’t think … you told me you didn’t have children when I asked … I imagined that …” She had somehow seemed to him the classic career woman who wouldn’t have wanted kids, particularly with her childhood history of abandonment and loss. It never occurred to him for a minute that she might have had a child. Worse yet, one that died.
“It’s all right. I’ve made my peace with it. It was a long time ago. He was four, and he died of a brain tumor twelve years ago. They couldn’t save him. It would probably be different if it happened today. Chemotherapy and oncology are much more sophisticated now than then. We did our best.” She smiled sadly at Jean-Charles then, and he could see her eyes were brimming with tears. They always were when she talked about him. She rarely did. “His name was Mark.” She said it as though she wanted him to be remembered. He was not just a boy who had died twelve years ago. He was a child named Mark, whom she had loved and carried forever in her heart.
It was after that that her business had become an empire, and had grown to be so vast. A year later, in fact, when her husband left. It had been yet another nightmarish time in her life, and it was also why she no longer wanted marriage, or a serious man in her life. All she wanted now was peace, her work, and occasional men like Zack to keep her company on weekends. She didn’t want to care too much or hurt again. She didn’t want to love any man enough to care when he left her, as Derek had, or feel the agony of losing Mark, who had been the light of her life for four short years. Life was so much simpler now. There were occasional bumps in the road, but nothing she couldn’t handle and no one she cared too much about. There were no great joys, nor major losses either. She didn’t want to wind up down a black hole again, or wishing she were dead, as she had when Mark died and Derek left. She just wanted to go on
now as she was—looking forward, and rarely if ever back, thinking about the collections she designed, worrying about the ready to wear shows, and enjoying her employees and friends. She wanted nothing more or different than she had. Jean-Charles could see that in her eyes.
There were doors in her that were tightly closed. She had given him a glimpse behind those doors, but Timmie wanted them closed. It was the only way to avoid the pain of remembering and reopening old wounds. Her face had seemed luminous when she talked about her son, but when she mentioned her husband, her face grew serious again. It was all behind her now, hopefully for good. She had survived during the hardest years of her life, and gone on, except for Mark, whom she had taken with her, tucked into her heart. He would always be with her. But she no longer wanted a serious man in her life, or even a child. The risk of getting hurt was just too great.
“I’m so sorry about your son,” Jean-Charles said with a genuine look of sorrow and compassion for her. “And your childhood. All of it. You’ve had some truly shocking luck.” He was bowled over by everything she had said. And he was grateful suddenly to have met this remarkable woman, and have her as a patient. He admired her a great deal.
“I guess. But I’ve had some good luck as well. You do the best you can with the hand you get. Sometimes it’s hard, and sometimes it comes out all right. You deal with it as it comes,” she said, looking tired. She had told him so much, she decided to tell him the rest. She could see in his eyes that he was wondering why she had no husband if she’d had a child, and he was too polite to ask. He assumed she had been married when the child was born, although she was brave enough to have had one on her own. Nothing would have surprised him of her now.
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