Raina's Story

by Lurlene McDaniel

“You leave a baby with its mother for as long as she wants—some are nursing, and the bonding process is important. Check frequently and see if Mom wants the baby returned to the nursery so that she can sleep or eat.” Betsy grinned. “Some of these new moms won’t get a full night’s sleep again for months.”

  Raina listened closely because she’d never handled a newborn before. The babies looked fragile to her, but Betsy said they weren’t.

  “Let me show you how to swaddle one.” Betsy picked up a crying baby and unfolded the flannel blanket. The baby’s legs looked red and spindly and its newborn-sized diaper too large. She laid the baby down and expertly wrapped the blanket tightly around its body. “Now you try it.” Betsy handed Raina the baby as if she were passing off a football.

  Raina clutched the baby, gingerly laid it down and unwrapped the blanket. She tried to copy Betsy’s moves, but the blanket dropped and fell open when the baby kicked.

  “Newborns like being swaddled—reminds them of the womb, we’re told. Wrap them tight.”

  Raina tried again and got Betsy’s approval. “The hats are cute,” Raina said. Each baby wore a little stocking cap in either pink or blue.

  “Volunteers knit them. Do you knit?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Well, it seems like you’ve gotten the hang of swaddling. Here’s a chart with names and room numbers. Deliver this row.” Betsy pointed to the bassinets holding most of the crying infants.

  Raina gulped, hesitant because of her limited training. “I’m ready?”

  “You’re ready. I’m short-staffed and I need my nurses to do other things. Can you handle it?”

  Raina nodded with more confidence than she felt. She walked to the end of the row with Betsy and was about to wheel out the first cart when she looked over and saw a second viewing window. Beyond it was a room with other bassinets holding babies, but these babies had wires and tubes attached to their impossibly tiny bodies, leading to machines surrounding their beds. “What’s in there?”

  “That’s neonatal ICU,” Betsy said. “Premature babies, and those born with medical problems and issues, are placed in there because they need round-the-clock intensive care.”

  Raina found the sight jolting. “They’re so small.”

  “Yes, and some are very sick. But we do everything we can to save them.”

  “Do you save them?”

  “Sometimes. Not always.”

  Raina cast a long, lingering look at the clear plastic egg-shaped bubbles holding the smallest examples of human life she’d ever seen. “It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair,” Betsy said. “Life just is.”

  In October, the weather turned cooler and Kathleen’s mother came home. Right before Mary Ellen’s arrival, Holly’s mother brought over a group of women from her church and they blitzed the house. While the cleanup was happening, Kathleen and Holly hung WELCOME HOME banners and Raina set out vases of fresh flowers. Soon the house smelled of lemon wax, pine cleaner and floral arrangements, and when Mary Ellen arrived, she wept with joy and hugged everybody. Holly cried too, but mostly because Kathleen was moving out of her house. “You’ll love having your bedroom to yourself again,” Kathleen insisted.

  “But not my father’s undivided attention,” Holly said, sniffing. “You were a real cushion between us. It was like having a sister.”

  Raina handed her a tissue. “Dry up, girl. You can spend the night at my place whenever you want sisterly company.”

  Mary Ellen surprised them all by walking through the rooms of her home instead of using her wheelchair. “The therapy helped in lots of ways,” she told Kathleen. “I’m determined to be less wheelchair-dependent. Who knows? Maybe I can even get a part-time job and feel useful again.”

  Carson came over that first night bearing a casserole sent by his mother.

  “How thoughtful!” Mary Ellen cried, and invited him to stay for supper.

  “Good to see you back in your own space, Mrs. M.,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t be here at all if it hadn’t been for you,” Mary Ellen told him.

  He blushed with pride, making Kathleen love him all the more.

  Raina loved her work in the nursery and was grateful to Sierra for giving her the responsibility. She quickly learned that it was the choicest volunteer spot in the hospital, and that only the most trusted and capable teens were chosen for it. She spent all her free time at the hospital, working far beyond the requirements of the Pink Angels program. And why not? Between Hunter’s school and work, she saw less of him than she’d imagined.

  She was curled up on her sofa with a book on a Saturday night when her doorbell rang. Startled, she glanced at the grandfather clock in the corner and saw that it was after midnight. Vicki was in Orlando at an overnight seminar for nursing supervisors, and Raina was under strict instructions to have no one over. She padded to the door, flipped on the outside light, peeked through the peephole and was shocked to see Hunter.

  In the glare of the harsh light, she saw that his cheek was cut and bleeding and his shirt was ripped. Quickly she unlocked the door and jerked it open. “What happened? Are you all right?”

  He stood staring at her for a moment, his eyes round with anguish.

  “Come inside.” She tugged his arm, hauling him into the foyer. A blast of chilled wind followed him. She saw now that his hand was bleeding across the knuckles and looked swollen. “Hunter, please! What’s wrong?”

  “I’ve been in a fight,” he said.

  “You? A fight?” Impossible! Hunter was the most nonaggressive person in the world.

  “Over you,” he said. “Do you know a guy named Tony Stoddard?”

  six

  A HAND, cold as ice, seemingly squeezed Raina’s heart, and the world stopped spinning.

  “Do you know him?” Hunter repeated his question, this time more insistently.

  “We went to middle school together.”

  Hunter rocked back on his heels. “So he said.”

  “Tell me what happened, Hunter. Start at the beginning.” She didn’t want to hear but knew she had to.

  “This Tony and two of his friends came into the restaurant about half an hour before we were closing. They got some burgers, sat in a corner until the place cleared out. Finally, my manager went over and told them they’d have to leave so we could clean up and lock the place down.” As Hunter talked, he rubbed his raw knuckles. “It was my night to close and after I finished, I went out to the parking lot. Tony and his friends were waiting for me.”

  “Did he jump you?” Fury surged through Raina. “Because if he did—”

  “No. He told me he wanted to talk to me. He said he’d heard you and I were dating and I told him we were. Then he got this look on his face, this disgusting look, and he—he asked me how I liked …” Hunter stopped, clearly unable to repeat Tony’s exact words. “I told him to shut up, but he started saying all this stuff about you. Really rude stuff. So I decked him.”

  She fell silent, the poignancy of the scene stamped in her mind. Hunter, like a knight in shining armor rushing to his girl’s defense, because that was just who he was—her defender, the protector of her honor.

  “He shouldn’t have said those things about you,” Hunter said.

  “Then what happened?”

  “We wrestled. He tore my shirt. I got in a few more hits. His friends grabbed me and held my arms so that he could finish me, but my manager came out. I’d forgotten he was still inside. He yelled at them to let me go and leave or he’d call the police. Tony and his buds split real quick. I told Bill I was all right and I drove straight here.”

  “You’re cut,” she said, reaching to touch his cheek.

  He dodged away. “I’ve got to know if what he said is true. Did he ‘have’ you, Raina? Did he ‘do’ you?”

  Her heart twisted, but she looked him squarely in the eye. “Yes,” she said. Her lips felt like blocks of wood.

  “Did he, you know, attack you?”

/>   “No.”

  His face looked white and pinched like she’d thrown him a body blow and knocked the wind out of him. “In the eighth grade? When you were only thirteen?”

  “He said he loved me. I—I thought he loved me.” She blinked back tears. “Back then being popular meant everything to me. Tony was the most popular guy in our school and he—he asked me to go out with him.”

  “And you just gave yourself away to that jerk?”

  She couldn’t bear to look Hunter in the face anymore. She stared down at the tiled floor. The normally straight lines looked squiggly and smudged. “He told me he loved me more than anything and when I was thirteen, I believed him. I was stupid.”

  The ticking of the nearby grandfather clock sounded like cannonballs thudding against the walls of a fortress. All the memories of that terrible time came flooding back to her, threatening to sweep her away and drown her. “He didn’t love me, of course. In a couple of weeks, he took up with a sixteen-year-old girl from another school. She had a car and she was cool, while I was …” She remembered the words Tony had used as clearly as if he were standing in front of her, slinging them at her again. “I was ‘boring,’ ‘clingy,’ ‘easy’—‘used goods.’ He didn’t want to waste his time on someone who would ‘go down for anyone who asked.’ ” Her gaze flew to Hunter’s. “But there were no others. Just him. I felt humiliated and … and dirty.”

  Hunter sagged visibly. He shook his head. “You were a trophy.”

  “You could say that.”

  The silence between them felt as heavy as a lead blanket. Hunter turned and reached for the doorknob. With his back to Raina, he asked, “Were you ever going to tell me? Or were you going to let me go on believing you were …” He stopped.

  “Pure?” she said, with bitterness. “Well, I’m not. Now you know.” She waited for him to say something, anything, but he didn’t. “What now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. I need some time to think.”

  Wrong answer, she thought.

  He opened the door and stepped out into the cold. The wind scattered a few dry, dead leaves across the floor. He shut the door and Raina stood looking at the wooden barrier while the leaves lay like brittle pieces of her heart around her feet.

  Holly was getting a jump on a history paper and was surfing the Web for information about the Crimean War when she heard Hunter come up the stairs and shut the door of his room. On impulse, she got up and knocked.

  “Go away,” he said.

  She opened the door anyway and stuck her head inside. “That’s not very sociable. What if I’d been Dad …” Her voice trailed off when she saw his cheek and bloodied shirt. “What happened?”

  He began to unbutton his shirt. “I said, disappear.”

  “Kiss my butt.” She came inside and shut the door quietly. “What’s going on? Tell me, or I’ll wake the dead.”

  “I had a run-in with some sleaze named Tony Stoddard.”

  Holly stiffened. “Oh.” She reached backward for the doorknob, but Hunter was across the room before she could get it open.

  He put his hands against the door on either side of her shoulders, trapping her. “Hold on. You know about him and Raina, don’t you?”

  “It happened years ago.”

  “But you knew and you never told me.”

  “You should go talk to Raina about this.”

  “I have talked to Raina.”

  Holly’s knees turned to jelly. “You did? When?”

  “I went to see her after Tony and I mixed it up in a parking lot.”

  “What are you going to tell Dad? He’s going to go nuts when he finds out you’ve been in a fight.”

  “You leave Dad to me. Right now, I want to know why you never told me about Raina and Tony.”

  Holly peered up into her brother’s face. The gash looked superficial, but it was red and swollen. His expression was angry and condemning. “Raina’s my friend. And friends don’t tell each other’s secrets.”

  “But I’m not just anyone. I’m your brother. I suppose Kathleen knows too.”

  “She’s also Raina’s friend.”

  He hit the door hard with his fist, making her jump. He pushed away, paced the floor. “What a cozy little conspiracy! You knew how I felt about Raina! You knew! And you said nothing. Thanks a lot, Holly.”

  She wanted to make him understand. “Listen, Hunter, friends keep secrets for each other. When you two started dating, I was glad for both of you. You don’t know what Tony put her through. Just to be mean, he spread lies and rumors about her. It was awful. She couldn’t wait to get out of middle school and leave that crowd behind. And when we heard that Tony had moved during the summer before high school, we were jumping for joy. But then he came back this year and he’s been lying in wait for Raina ever since. I’m glad you punched him.” She paused. “You did slug him, didn’t you?”

  Hunter stopped pacing. “I slugged him, but this isn’t about Tony. It’s about Raina. And you too, for never telling me about him and her.”

  “Well, excuse me for being loyal.”

  “Your loyalty should have ended at our front door. It’s not right, Holly. You should have told me.”

  “It wasn’t my story to tell. It was between you and Raina, so don’t try to lay a guilt trip on me.” She didn’t understand why Hunter, who was usually so quick to forgive and who prided himself on doing the right thing, wasn’t grasping her explanation. What was so hard? She was glad Hunter had hit Tony—Tony deserved it—although it was totally out of character for Hunter to get into a fistfight.

  Hunter crossed to his bed and jerked the covers to the floor. “Go away, Holly. Leave me alone.”

  “Don’t throw me out. We should talk about this. Raina’s the one who got slammed.”

  He ignored her, went to his desk and jerked open his Bible. “I told Pastor I’d lead the youth service in the morning, and I’ve got stuff to do.”

  “You sure you’re up to such holiness?” He glared at her, and she felt bad about the dig. “You want some concealer cream to help hide your cut?”

  “No. I’ll just say it happened at work. What’s one more lie among friends?”

  “You really shouldn’t be taking this so hard. It’s not the end of the world, you know.”

  “Good night,” he said with a forcefulness that closed the subject.

  She left his room, still wondering why he was so wounded by something that had happened to Raina a year before he had ever met her.

  Holly woke Kathleen the next morning at seven to tell her the news. Kathleen shook the sleep from her brain to listen. “What a creep,” she said.

  “Who? Hunter or Tony?”

  “Tony, of course.”

  “It goes without saying that Tony’s a creep, but I’m mad at my brother for acting like I did something terrible because I kept my mouth shut. You’d think he’d be proud of me for being a good friend.”

  “You’d think,” Kathleen mumbled, sleep still making her groggy.

  “Mom’s calling us to breakfast, then we head off to church, so I can’t call Raina until this afternoon.”

  “I’ll call her a little later.”

  “Call her now. From the sound of it, I’m sure she didn’t sleep a wink after Hunter left.”

  seven

  KATHLEEN REALIZED that Holly was correct the second she heard Raina’s voice, which sounded thick and raspy, like she’d been crying. “You all right?”

  “Not really.”

  “Holly told me what happened. I can come over if you want.”

  “Don’t,” Raina said. “Mom will be home about three and I’ve got to pull it together before I face her.”

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “I don’t know yet. I never told her that Tony has moved back and is in our high school, because she would have freaked.”

  “You’re Queen of Denial.”

  Kathleen felt rewarded when Raina gave a short laugh.

  “You
know what a fuss she raised to the principal back in middle school. I can’t have her fly off the handle like that again. I don’t want it all over school.”

  “Yes, but Tony was out of control and he was smearing you.”

  “But I’m a big girl now.”

  Kathleen fluffed her bedcovers while she thought of something encouraging to say. “This is going to work itself out.”

  “It all depends on what Hunter does.”

  “Hunter loves you.”

  “I’m not sure he loves me quite as much today as he did yesterday.”

  “All because Tony spilled some dirt about you and him? That sounds harsh.”

  Raina knew she could never explain it to either of her two best friends. She hardly understood it herself. Hunter’s assumption had always been that she was waiting for marriage to have sex, just as he was. Now that he knew she wasn’t “pure,” would he even want her around? She said, “How is it that I hooked up with the one guy who’s a morality major?”

  She didn’t expect an answer, but Kathleen said, “Because you’d already been used and abused by a guy who isn’t.”

  After they hung up, Raina showered and put on makeup. She wanted to look less unhappy when her mother arrived. Raina would have to tell Vicki something, because her mother would know something was wrong as soon as she saw her. She kept hoping that Hunter would call after church and ease her pain, but he didn’t. By the time her mother shouted, “I’m home!” from the foot of the stairs, Raina was desperately sad again.

  “Did you have a good time?” Raina called back from her bedroom, putting off the meeting as long as possible.

  “I actually snoozed through two of the lectures, but the head of nursing for the Mayo Clinic was sensational.” Vicki’s voice bounced up the stairs in front of her footsteps. She was still chattering when she opened Raina’s door. “Anyway, I—Raina! What’s wrong?”

  “I—I had a bad night. Does it show that much?”

  Vicki eased into the room. “You look like you’ve been crying.”

  “Good diagnosis.” Raina rose from her bed and crossed to the window. She stared down at the parking lot, at the roofs of cars parked in neat rows like waiting chariots. She wanted to run down, jump into one and drive far away. Maybe not come back.