Out Of The Deep I Cry (8 page)

“I feel like I did when I was a kid and found out we were moving near my grandparents. I was all excited, until I realized I was going to be leaving behind my friends. I guess this defines a mixed blessing.” She looked up at him. “I was surprised at how, um, passionately you felt on the question. You must be a big supporter of the clinic.”

“Not particularly, no.”

“Then why were you so vehement in defending its funding?”

“Jane Mairs Ketchem, that’s why. She’s rolling over in her grave right now, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she kicked her way out of the coffin and marched down here to defend her precious clinic.” He ran his hand over his thick white brush cut. “I’ll tell you something. She was the only woman who could ever scare me. And the fact that she’s dead doesn’t make me any less scared.”

Clare came with Mrs. Marshall to the clinic the next Monday. “You really don’t have to do this, dear,” Mrs. Marshall said, pulling on her black kidskin gloves and setting her hat at an angle on the silver waves of her hair.

Clare brought her attention back from her look-around at the airy foyer of the Marshall house, one of several “executive mansions” outside Millers Kill that had been built for high-level General Electric people in the sixties. It was decorated-tastefully and expensively-at the same time and had never been changed again. Clare hadn’t seen so much Danish modern and smoked glass since her last visit to an Ikea store.

“I know,” she said, fishing into her pocket for her own bulky Polarplus gloves. “You don’t have to tell the clinic director about your decision in person, either. But you are.”

Mrs. Marshall smiled. She had on fuchsia lipstick today, and the effect against her paper white skin was startling. “I suspect we were both raised to do the right thing, whether we want to or not.”

“You should have met my grandmother Fergusson.” Clare opened the front door. “Do you want to take my car or yours?”

Mrs. Marshall paused on the steps to consider the Shelby Cobra, badly in need of a trip to the car wash, parked next to her Lincoln Town Car. “Mine, I think.”

They didn’t talk much on the ride into town. Clare watched the landscape, covered with sodden, tired snow, and tried to shake off the sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. She could handle disagreement, disapproval, even, she supposed, disdain, with equanimity. But she hated disappointing anyone. She dreaded it with the same nauseating plunge she had felt as a child, standing in front of her mother or grandmother and admitting, yes, she had lost her new shoes, yes, she had let the twins out of her sight, yes, she had brought home a report card full of low grades and slack effort.

Mrs. Marshall could evidently read minds. “It’s hard to deliver bad news, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that, exactly,” Clare said. “You can’t be in the army and then the ministry without learning how to say things people don’t want to hear. It’s this feeling that I’m the cause of the bad news. That’s hard to live with.”

Mrs. Marshall slowed the car to turn onto Route 51. “You might be taking a little too much responsibility for this, don’t you think? You’re a wonderful priest; a little rough around the edges, of course, but experience will help with that-” Clare sat up straighter in the crushed velvet seat and surreptitiously checked her black blouse for any traces of breakfast.

“But you aren’t St. Alban’s, dear, and you mustn’t go around confusing yourself with the institution.” The scenery was more crowded now as they neared the center of town. They passed an auto repair shop, a tire store, a barren plant nursery hunkered down for the long, cold spell between Valentine’s and Mother’s Day. “If anyone should feel responsible, I should. It’s my decision, ultimately. But even so, I came to it as part of the group, not as an individual. Neither you nor I can carry the day all by ourselves. We’re part of a democracy.”

“An oligarchy,” Clare said under her breath.

“Perhaps.” Mrs. Marshall sounded amused. “But you’ll concede me my point.”

Clare flipped her hand over. Mrs. Marshall turned onto Barkley Avenue.

“What the devil?” Mrs. Marshall said. From the opposite end of the avenue, two squad cars raced toward them. The elderly woman yanked the steering wheel, plowing them nose first into the nearest parking spot, but instead of racing past them, the black-and-whites skidded to a stop in front of the clinic. Clare popped open her door and jumped out in time to see the chief of police and the department’s youngest officer, Kevin Flynn, pounding up the steps into the building.

Clare started forward across the street, recollected herself, and turned back to see if Mrs. Marshall needed any help. The driver’s side window unrolled smoothly and Mrs. Marshall said, “I’ve got to do a better job of parking. You go ahead, I’ll be right there. Be careful, dear.”

She didn’t need any more permission than that. Clare ran toward the clinic, her boots slapping through slush. One of the wide double doors had been left hanging open, and she slipped through it into a tiny foyer papered over with leaflets on AIDS prevention, domestic violence, immunization schedules, and flu shots. The inner doors-heavy, modern fireproof slabs that had undoubtedly replaced something older and more elegant-had swung firmly shut, but Clare could hear shrieking and bellowing coming from inside.

She pushed into the clinic. She was in a wood-floored hall, with pocket doors opened wide on the right revealing a waiting room. Its orange plastic chairs were knocked over and children’s toys had been kicked everywhere. Immediately in front of her, a mahogany staircase swept up to a landing, where a redheaded woman in a medical jacket clutched a newel post and looked down an unseen hallway. The sounds, much louder now, came from whatever she was watching.

“Oh!” She spotted Clare and hurried down the stairs. She was a tiny thing, a head shorter than Clare, and with her sneakers, jeans, and hair braided down her back, Clare would have thought her some sort of teenage volunteer if not for the fine lines around her sharp, skeptical eyes and her white coat embroidered L. RAYFIELD, N.P.

“I’m afraid we’re having a bit of trouble right now. You can-” L. Rayfield, N.P., glanced around, frowning. “You can wait in the office, back here. I’ll be with you as soon as I can.”

“It’s okay,” Clare said. “I’m a priest.” Without waiting to see what effect that complete irrelevance had on the woman, Clare charged up the stairs.

“You’re a what? Hey-wait! Come back here!”

The hallway off the landing ran the length of the house to a single dull gray elevator, jarringly at odds with the mahogany six-panel doors opened, two to each side, onto the hall. Above the shrieking and shouting coming from the last room on the right, Clare could hear Russ Van Alstyne’s voice, hard with authority, pitched to control.

“Put the stool down! Back away from the cabinet!”

She felt a thud vibrate through her feet and turned to see the nurse headed up the stairs. Clare ran down the hall, skidding to a stop in front of the open door.

Russ and Kevin Flynn, backs to the door, were angling to box in a wild-eyed Debba Clow, who brandished a metal stool like a battering ram against a glass-fronted cabinet filled with medical supplies. “-defend myself against this monster who wants my children taken away from me!” she was saying, her words a high-pitched screech.

“And you’ve proven me right,” roared Dr. Rouse, rearing up from his shelter behind the examination table. “You’re so obsessed with revenge for nonexistent wrongs you can’t even stop to think about your kids!”

Debba shrieked and raised the stool.

“Debba, stop!” Clare stepped forward into view, her hands raised. Officer Flynn twisted around to stare at her, but Russ never took his eyes from Debba.

“We’re handling this, Clare,” he said, his voice tight.

Clare ignored him, fumbling with her parka’s zipper to yank it down like Superman revealing the
S
on his chest. “Remember me? From St. Alban’s? We talked the other day.” Debba stared at her, pulling the stool in tightly against her chest. Clare took another step into the room. “You don’t want to do this.” She could hear the sound of the nurse’s shoes as she reached the doorway and stopped. “I bet you don’t hit your children to discipline them, do you?”

“Of course not!”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if she-”

“Not
now,
Al!” The whispered command from the woman behind Clare cut Dr. Rouse off.

Clare reached one hand out slowly. “Then you already know that violence isn’t the answer.”

“You don’t know what he did,” Debba said. “He wrote my goddamn ex-husband and told him I was endangering the children. Today I was served with papers-he’s suing me for full custody! Except he doesn’t want to keep Skylar, he wants to institutionalize him!” She shifted the stool in her grip as if she might throw it at the doctor. “Did you know that? Did you know that before you wrote him, you bastard?”

Clare took another step forward. She was almost shoulder to shoulder with Russ. “You’re so angry and frustrated you want to hurt Dr. Rouse, don’t you? But I bet you’ve felt that way before, haven’t you? Every mother I’ve ever met has felt like that. Has been pushed so hard she wanted to lash out at her kids. To hit them. To hurt them.”

“Clare…” Russ’s hiss warned her to shut up.

“But you didn’t give in to that feeling, did you? You didn’t hurt anyone. You controlled yourself.” She stepped forward. Almost close enough to touch the stool if she stretched out her arm. “You controlled yourself.
You
are in control.” She deliberately looked away from Debba and laid her hand on Russ’s arm. Under the slick nylon of his parka, his muscles were tensed. “Chief Van Alstyne is a good man. Why don’t you let him help you? Before you get yourself into real trouble.”

Debba’s eyes grew larger. “I’m going to get arrested, aren’t I? Oh, God.” Her lower lip bowed down like a toddler’s caught between anger and anguish.

“Put the stool down, Deborah,” Russ said. “And we’ll talk about it.”

Hands shaking, Debba lowered the stool. As soon as it touched the ground, Russ stepped past Clare and took the trembling woman by her upper arms. “Okay, Deborah, listen to me.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I’m going to have you sit in another room while I talk to Dr. Rouse. Officer Flynn will stay with you.” He flicked a glance toward Clare. “As will Reverend Fergusson.” He reached to the small of his back and unsnapped his handcuffs. “Now. I don’t want you to get alarmed, but I am going to cuff you.”

At the sight of the handcuffs, Debba burst into tears. She shook her head wildly, sending clouds of kinky blond hair flying everywhere. “I’m going to cuff you while you’re with Officer Flynn,” Russ said, his voice steady. “When I come back in to talk with you, I’ll take these off.”

Debba gasped out, “No, no,” but obediently held out her wrists. Russ snapped the metal constraints on her. “Kevin,” he said. Officer Flynn appeared and put his hands on Debba’s shoulders. Russ pivoted. “Laura,” he said to the nurse, “is there a place where Ms. Clow can sit down in private?”

“We’ve got an old-fashioned ladies’ lounge with a sofa and everything.” The nurse beckoned. “Follow me.”

Officer Flynn guided Debba out of the examination room and down the hall, with Clare close on his heels. The nurse-Laura-opened the door closest to the stairs. It was indeed an old-fashioned ladies’ lounge, with the toilets and sinks discreetly behind a second, interior door. “Come here, honey, and sit down.” Laura patted the sofa, an overstuffed red velvet monstrosity that looked as if it had been taken from a whorehouse. Clare recognized it immediately as the soul mate to her own office’s sagging love seat-the one piece of furniture that couldn’t be auctioned off. Debba sat down shakily, still weeping. Officer Flynn perched on the edge next to her, somewhere between guarding and comforting her.

“Don’t feel so bad,” the nurse said. “I’ve been arrested plenty of times. They’ll have the bail bondsman over at the station half an hour after you get there and you’ll be home in time to make supper.”

Clare took a closer look at the tiny redhead. “Wait a minute-haven’t I seen you before? Weren’t you part of the environmental action group protesting the Adirondack Spa development last summer?”

“That was me! Laura Rayfield.” She held out her hand and grinned as Clare shook it. Clare pulled her a little away from the sofa.

“So what happened?” Clare asked.

The nurse sighed. “I think Dr. Rouse overreacted to Deb’s antivaccination crusade. He’s been under tremendous stress lately, and everything seems to set him off. Thank God he didn’t grab his gun when she came charging in here.”

“You have a gun? At the clinic?”

“
Al
has a gun. In his desk.” She made a face. “It makes him feel safer. We’ve had a few break-ins, addicts looking for Oxy, stuff like that. Me, I think you’re more likely to shoot yourself than an intruder.”

“Have you talked to him? About his stress?”

“I told him the best thing to do would be to schedule a couple of evening meetings where he could ease anybody’s fears about vaccinations, but does he listen to me? Not hardly. He’s always practiced by the ‘Me doctor, you patient’ model, and now he’s got women coming in and questioning him about their kids’ immunizations, and about flu shots, and this, that, and the other thing.”

“Is that bad?”

“Hell no. But Al still thinks he’s living in a world where a white coat makes you bulletproof and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.”

Clare reflexively reached back and twisted her hair more tightly into its knot. “Last summer, I saw you hauled off getting the word out about the dangers of PCBs. How come you’re not helping Debba spread the alarm about this vaccination thing?”

“Because, unlike the known link between PCBs and cancer, there’s not a shred of scientific evidence to back up the autism-vaccination connection.” Laura looked over to the sofa, where Debba had subsided into sharp, deep breaths. “Autism can be so cruel to a family. I can’t blame parents for searching for something, anything, to explain how their perfectly normal one-year-old grows into a child trapped inside his own mind. It’s like the changelings in a fairy tale. You know, where the baby starts out healthy and is replaced by a sickly imposter? Except nowadays, instead of saying ‘Fairies stole my son,’ parents are crying that mercury-contaminated vaccines did the deed.” She shook her head, thumping her braid along her back. “If I thought that were true, I’d be breaking into warehouses to destroy any stockpiles myself.”