Angel Falling Softly (31 page)

Rachel put on her suit of armor and sat at Jennifer’s side in the fragile stillness. She held her daughter’s small, white hand in her gloved mitt.
Remember, Jenny?
Last summer in Maine with Grandpa and Grandma?
Portland Head Light, the cool summer morning just before dawn. A light mist on the steel-gray bay. The long, low growl of the fog horn filling the air with the sound of distant dragons, calling to them across the infinite chasm.
There, look!
A wyvern gliding down the sound, skimming above the lobster buoys, slipping away behind the shrouded isles. The dragons, they knew even then. They had followed her here, had sought her out in the shadow of these towering battlements of stone. They had come to take her away, to take her home.

Rachel didn’t know where her daughter’s home was, except that it was not here. And not knowing hurt like death itself.

The end was nigh, and the family flew in like a flock of starlings, paying their last respects outside the glass of the isolation room, as if attending a wake. Rachel wanted to scream,
It’s a hospital bed, not the bloody zoo!
But there she was as well, standing guard like a terracotta soldier over this life-size china doll.

“Nothing personal, Rachel,” Carl said. “But it kinda creeps me out.”

“Carl!” their mother said, giving him a well-practiced cross look.

But Rachel was with Carl on this one. So she was glad when Laura broke the mood and said, “You should see Mom’s new outfit. It’s so cool.”

“A new outfit?”

“Our neighbor gave it to her. She’s from Romania, and she’s real rich. Andy Millington threw up on her, so she gave it to Mom.”

Laura’s grandmother looked unsure how to react to this information. Rachel said perfunctorily, “I don’t think that’s an appropriate subject for this occasion, Laura.”

Laura almost stamped her feet. “Jenny’s still alive! Quit treating her like she’s dead already!”

Instead of answering, Rachel gave her daughter a heartfelt hug. Laura seemed to know that she was speaking for her mother now and didn’t wriggle out of her embrace.

Later that night, while they were clearing the table, Rachel’s mother brought up the subject Rachel knew had been weighing on her mind and on the mind of David’s parents as well. She said, with a cautious nonchalance, “Are you still trying to have children, Rachel? We could help out, you know.”

It was a tremendously funny way of putting it. She meant money for the fertility treatments. Rachel shook her head. “It’s not like we ever stopped trying, Mom. But we’ve had other priorities. And there comes a point when you’ve just got to stop fighting nature.”

She smiled gamely. Oh, but what a lie
that
was. Give her half a chance, and she’d beat nature senseless with a stick.

T
he M&A team camped out at Loveridge & Associates knew Kim Thesman. Kim belonged to Garrick’s entourage, not DEI’s. She represented the new breed of young executives, cross-training their way to the top. She’d played basketball at UConn and followed that up with a Harvard MBA. She could be one of the boys when she had to and dress to kill when she wanted to. She had a healthy tan. She was everything Milada was not, and Milada strongly suspected the team was just as happy that Kim was taking over.

Back at the office, Kim Thesman popped open her attaché and handed Milada a folder. It was the curriculum vitae for one Curtis Matheson. Milada scanned down the sheet. “BYU Graduate School of Accounting. Very good, Jane,” she murmured to herself. She said to Kim, “I’ll brief him myself before I send him out. He’ll mostly be working with Kammy and Mr. Wylde.”

“How quickly do you want to move on the WMI proffer?”

“Slowly. Let’s get Mr. Matheson on site first. We need to win over the rest of the family before we start exploring the financials. I expect there to be a few skeletons in the closet, and I don’t want any big surprises before we get into the particulars of a hands-on audit.”

Thursday morning Milada introduced Kim to the WMI board. The rest of the day they spent going over the books with the KMPG crew.

Milada ended her participation at four-thirty. Karen helped her collect her things and followed her down to the lobby. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“I’m fine.”

“Will you coming back soon?”

Milada smiled. “I’ll be back and forth over the next couple of months, but you should be seeing much more of my sister Kammy.”

“Your sister? Oh, yes, with the long hair. You can’t miss the family resemblance.”

Milada bowed her head before the glass wall of the isolation room and crossed herself. Nothing could induce her to face the sermons to come in a real house of worship. In each of the three synoptic gospels, Jesus had issued the same warning:
Whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.

The Elizabethan language rang hauntingly in her ears. She knew these King James verses well and stood condemned by them, having surreptitiously attended the funeral of every child that had fallen into her grasp.

I am the resurrection, and the life,
Jesus said to the sisters of Lazarus.
He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: And whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.

“I don’t believe in you,” Milada whispered to herself. And when would she ever die? When would incorruption put on the corruptible? When would her life be swallowed up in a victory for the dead?
A time to prepare to meet God,
the child had explained. How long would that take? Longer than even she would live. She crossed herself again, turned to leave, and found herself face to face with Rachel Forsythe.

“Milada—” Rachel said.

“Rachel,” Milada replied with a nod of her head, suppressing the same shock of surprise she’d felt the first time they’d met. Why did this woman remind her so much of the Mother Superior? Sister Gertrude, who had been right about Rakosi, who had fought to keep them at the orphanage. But Rakosi had money, and the bishop had decided—what with the sale of a profitable indulgence and three fewer mouths to feed—and so that was that.

Milada was glad to leave, glad to leave the insufferable nun behind her forever. Just as she would be glad to put Rachel Forsythe behind her forever. She looked at her again, and Rachel had tears in her eyes. “Thank you, Milada. Thank you for everything.”

Milada nodded again, almost a bow of contrition. “I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Rachel shook her head.

Milada hesitated and then said, “I should have told you earlier—and I know this will sound self-serving—but that night your daughter spoke to me. She knew who I was, and she knew my name. She told me to tell you that God never walks away from an honest wager. I have no idea what that means.” Or anything else the child had said, words Milada would repeat to no one else.

Rachel shook her head again.

At a loss for words, Milada said, “The lasagna was quite good.” Rachel almost laughed at the non sequitur. “I’m leaving tomorrow. A small family emergency came up. Uncle Frank has managed to get himself into more trouble than usual this time.” She sighed. “Hardly the end of the world. But—”

“You love him anyway.”

“Yes,” she said with a crooked smile. “He must be saved from himself.” With that, Milada nodded again and then went to brush past her. But Rachel reached out and caught her and put her arms around her and held her tightly, the same way Sister Gertrude had that last time, knowing that Milada was leading her sisters into hell. For a moment Milada’s composure almost crumbled.

Only for a moment.

When they separated, their eyes did not meet. Milada did not stop. She did not turn around. She did not look back. Some Bible stories she had taken to heart.

R
achel readied herself for the inevitable. She readied herself for the heartfelt sympathy, the trite and meaningless reassurances of faith, and the litany of scriptures surely to come. Her favorite had no deep theological import attached to it other than a simple statement of reality:
Thou shalt live together in love, insomuch that thou shalt weep for the loss of them that die.

Except that Jennifer refused to die. A perverse air of disappointment haunted this growing realization. Like a fireworks display interrupted by a sudden downpour, the big finale turning into an emotional fizzle. At first, in the words of the hospital staff, Jennifer was “holding on.” Then she was “soldiering on.” Then she was “out of the woods.” Then going from “strength to strength.”

“Her FDP is in the basement, and her ANC is through the roof,” said Dr. Ingebretsen. In other words, the blood factors of a
healthy
child.

The flock of her extended family finally figured out that the news of Jennifer’s death was very much exaggerated and with a collective shrug winged their way back to more comfortable climes.

And then Jennifer was “awake and alert.” She opened her eyes and smiled and said, “Hi, Mom. Hi, Dad,” as if she’d just gotten off the bus from day camp. She cast her eyes around the room. “Where’s Milada?” she wondered.

Rachel and David exchanged curious glances. Rachel said, not questioning the thinking behind such an odd question, “She had to go back to New York.”

“Oh,” said Jennifer with a small, pouting frown. She quickly brightened. “How about Laura?”

“She’s at school. We weren’t expecting you to wake up so suddenly.”

“When can I go back to school?”

“Not so quick,” her father cautioned but with a broad smile that said,
Yes! My child’s a trouper!

Two weeks later Jennifer was declared as healthy as could be expected of a leukemia patient who’d camped out at death’s door for the past six months—except for a persistent normocytic anemia revealed in her CBC that responded well to Epogen and blood transfusions. But Dr. Ingebretsen was sure her bone marrow only needed time to recover, and he sent her home.

Lingering concern about opportunistic diseases kept her out of school and wearing a surgical mask whenever she went out, which she treated as a comical disguise. To her mother’s great delight, Jennifer was
Jennifer,
in all her resurrected exuberance, everything she treasured about her.

But a shadow grew on Rachel’s soul. Nothing she had read—and she’d become a walking encyclopedia on the subject—suggested that a child in Jennifer’s condition should recover this fast. When Jennifer’s CBC dropped too low, she plainly declared, “Mom, I need blood.” Watching the phlebotomist feed the line into her daughter’s vein, Rachel restrained herself from blurting out, “Why not let her
drink
it and see what happens?”

Jennifer hated the needle. But after getting a transfusion, she would sit in the passenger’s seat in a kind of rapture, completely blissed out for most of the ride home.

Once Jennifer’s hair began to grow in, Rachel’s fears were confirmed. Dr. Ingebretsen remained unconcerned. The hair of cancer patients, he explained, often grew back in a far different fashion than before. But Jennifer’s silver-white hair—her pale skin—her once sky-blue eyes now the color of cut glass—could mean only one thing.

Laura was the first to state the obvious. “She looks like Milada.”

Rachel could no longer keep the truth at arm’s length. In the end Milada had bowed to her wishes and infected Jennifer. And then she’d left, convinced that she had killed her just as she had killed all those other children. Rachel knew she should contact Milada and explain what had happened. But every day she didn’t was another day Jennifer was hers alone.

Worse, Jennifer somehow knew.
Remind my mother that God never walks away from an honest wager.
Rachel had made the offer, and the bookie had accepted the bet. The only question was when she would be forced to give God or the devil their due.

Jennifer raised the subject again as they were tucking her into bed. “When are we going to go see Milada?” A subtle but demanding tone crept into her voice.