Thorns of Truth (28 page)

Breathing hard, his leg throbbing, he jerked an arm across his forehead, from which greasy beads of sweat had begun to drip. What now?

Drew leaned into the door frame, squeezing his eyes shut. “Iris … for God’s sake,” he panted.

Her silence seemed to mock him. Damn her. Was she doing this to punish him?

His gaze fell on the iron barbell sticking out from under the futon—a relic from the days when he’d had the time to work out. Dragging it out, he hoisted the fifty-pound weight to his shoulder. “
Iris!
” The cry tore from his lungs with a violence that left his throat burning.

No response. There was only the rushing of blood in his ears, and the distant sound of a horn blaring in the street below.

Drew, his sweaty hands gripping the cold iron bar, its weight digging into his shoulder, once again charged the door. This time he felt something give, then heard a loud cracking sound. He stared at the split center panel—a foot-long gash of bare wood showing through the countless layers of ossified paint.

With a savage growl, he charged again, driving the barbell into the crack he’d made. Then, suddenly, the door was flying open, banging against the inner wall hard enough to send the toothbrush glass spinning off the edge of the sink onto the tiles below with a tinkling crash.

He found Iris on the floor, wedged in the corner between the sink and toilet, her legs tucked in tightly against her chest, her arms wrapped about them, her head resting on her knees. No blood. Oh, thank God.

Feeling suddenly weak, his heart pounding, sweat pouring off him, Drew picked his way around the broken shards glinting against the old Pepto-Bismol-pink tiles, and knelt to touch her arm.

“Iris?”

The hand he took hold of was limp and clammy. He squeezed it hard. No response at first: then he felt the quick, faint pressure of her fingers. At last, she dragged her head up with an effort that caused it to wobble on her slender neck.

Drew had to suck in his breath to keep from revealing his shock. She looked awful. Her eyes sunken and bruised in a face pale as chalk. Her hair a tangled mess. The sharp smell of urine stung his nose, and when Drew looked down, he saw with dismay that she’d wet herself.

Jesus. What had happened? Had he pushed her too hard? Or was this merely a sign of something worse to come?

Gently, he pulled her into his arms. His shoulder ached, but he hardly noticed, not with the relief that was sluicing through him like cool water. She was all right. It wasn’t anything … well,
irreversible.
The only casualty was a broken door, and a landlord who would raise bloody hell.

“Baby, are you okay? Please tell me you’re okay,” he choked, pressing a wet cheek into her springy hair. In spite of everything, it still smelled of her apple-scented shampoo. “Oh God, Iris, I was so scared.”

An endless, almost unendurable silence ensued. Finally, when he felt on the verge of losing it himself, Drew felt her stir in his arms.

“Don’t tell,” she breathed in a breathy little voice that sounded eerily childlike. “Promise me you won’t.”

“
Who
don’t you want me to tell? Who is it you’re scared of?” Drew felt an almost frantic need to know; somehow, to pry open the sealed tomb of Iris’ past.

But she only shook her head violently, her eyes squeezed tightly shut, and whimpered, “Matches. She has matches. Something sharp, too—it’s poking her.” Her hold on Drew tightened until he could hardly breathe. She began to sob, a deep, wracking anguish that seemed to threaten to tear her from his arms, like a loose shingle in a strong wind.

“
Who?
” Drew, in his distress, almost shouted it this time.

“My mother,” she said. Not in her little-girl voice this time—and
not,
he sensed at once, referring to Rachel.

Whatever she was struggling to remember. Drew realized, it went much farther back than anything he knew about her … and was clearly more than Iris herself could express. The expression of dawning horror she wore was that of someone uncovering a scrap of memory, like a shard of bone in freshly dug soil, one that might have been better off left buried.

September

“Goodbye,” said the fox. “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry,
The Little Prince

Chapter 10

R
ACHEL GAZED IN
astonishment at the diminutive nun seated before her at a massive oak desk that, by contrast with her almost childlike form, seemed absurdly outsized. Not the fire-breathing monster she’d been expecting—more like a character out of a comic strip. Little Lulu meets Mr. Magoo. She fought an urge to peek underneath the desk to see if Sister Alice’s feet were touching the floor.

Instead she kept her eyes riveted on Holy Angels’ elderly principal. A starched white band framed a round face like bread dough rising in a bowl, in which her small pink mouth, pursed in disapproval, formed a deep dimple. Harmless enough … except for her eyes. A pale, wintry blue, they regarded Rachel with an unblinking calm that was downright creepy. Was it possible Sister Alice didn’t
know
?

She must,
Rachel thought.
Or she wouldn’t have agreed to see me.
With the fall term starting, Sister Alice had to be busy. Under ordinary circumstances, nothing short of the near-death of one of her students would have prompted the old bat into allowing Rachel—her sworn enemy—into the inner sanctum.

“Have a seat, Dr. Rosenthal,” she offered mildly, gesturing toward a pair of sturdy oak chairs facing her desk. “I have a few minutes before the final bell; then I have to be in chapel to lead the afternoon prayer.”

“I won’t keep you.”

Rachel herself had a mountain of work back at the clinic, which she’d put on hold in order to come here, in the hope that—what? Sister Alice would come around to her point of view? That would happen when the Pope declared himself in favor of birth control, she thought. But in light of the desperate call Rachel had received last night—the mother of one of her young patients, a Holy Angels student—was it too much to ask that Sister Alice show at least
some
sense of responsibility for what had happened? That she agree to stop circulating her petition, at least, even if she
didn’t
sanction sex education?

Rachel lowered herself stiffly into the nearest chair, glancing around the gloomy office. It was unadorned except for the carved wooden crucifix on the wall, and a second-rate oil depicting what appeared to be the Resurrection. The walnut bookcase was neatly lined with age-darkened buckram spines—a certain cure for even the most hopeless insomniac, no doubt. And on the desk stood only a clear pitcher of water, which grudgingly reflected back what little sunlight trickled from a pair of high, reinforced windows.

Clearly, when God had said,
Let there be light
, He hadn’t had this cheerless room in mind, she thought. No. Here, Sister Alice ran the show.

Rachel, seeing not even a chink of warmth she might have been able to ply with pleasantries, dove in with her usual headfirst bluntness. “I’m not here to discuss our differences,” she began. “I doubt it would accomplish much, in any case. But this situation … well… it’s serious.”

Sister Alice nodded sagely. “What could be more serious than the Lord’s business?” she agreed in a faintly wheezy voice that suggested asthma, or maybe the onset of emphysema. “We at Holy Angels are committed to instilling our girls with the divine teachings of the faith.”

Rachel stiffened. “Religious education, as I see it, should be about teaching little girls how
not
to become mothers,” she responded tartly.

Sister Alice gently shook her head. “Faith in God is what keeps our girls from straying.
Not
,” she added with emphasis, “filling their heads with a lot of ideas they wouldn’t have had otherwise.”

Suddenly, unbelievably, it was Rachel who was being scolded—an errant schoolgirl hauled up before the principal. Outrage rose in her like a blast of hot dry air from a furnace.

“Tell that to Elvie Rodriguez. When she’s out of Intensive Care, that is.” Rachel was trembling with her effort to keep from shouting,
You sanctimonious old BITCH.

She took hold of herself, shocked by how close she’d come to actually losing control. What was
wrong
with her? Sister Alice was a menace, sure … but…

It’s not Sister Alice, it’s YOU,
a voice in her head piped up, maddeningly. She’d been on edge for weeks, not eating, hardly sleeping, ever since Brian …

No. She wouldn’t think about that. It was too painful. Too frightening. Better to focus on an enemy she could see.

Rachel, taking a breath, raised her eyes to the resurrected Jesus on the wall, a bearded figure in sandals and flowing white robe, who appeared to be hovering several inches above the ground on which the rapturous throng around him stood huddled. But the picture she couldn’t get out of her mind was of Elvie, the shy eighth-grader in pigtails who’d come to the East Side Center weeks ago hoping for some kind of miracle, only to be given the bad—but hardly unexpected—news that she was pregnant. She’d nodded in understanding, dutifully accepting an appointment card. And that was the last they’d seen of her. Until yesterday.

Rachel had been at her desk yesterday evening when the call came—Elvie’s mother, jabbering hysterically in Spanish, something about her daughter being rushed to the hospital. Would the senora doctor please come?

Rachel had dropped everything to race over to St. Bart’s. Something in Mrs. Rodriguez’s voice—a panic that only another mother who’d come close to losing her child would recognize. A remembered fear that had followed Rachel up the elevator and into the ICU, where the petite, dark-haired fourteen-year-old lay half conscious amid a thicket of tubes and blinking monitors.

Rachel had taken the girl’s hand, which felt as limp and flat as a paper doll’s. “
Está bien.
It’s going to be all right, Elvie. You lost a lot of blood … but you’ll be fine.” Mechanically, she’d repeated what she’d been told by me attending resident, hoping it was true.

But Elvie had merely shaken her head, tears slipping down her temples to darken die starched white pillow. “No. I did a bad thing. A mortal sin. I’ll be punished in hell, just like my teacher said.”

Rachel had fought to keep from crying herself. At the meanness of small minds. At the loss of innocence. In her mind, she couldn’t help seeing Iris in the hospital at fourteen: pale from loss of blood, with great bruised-looking smudges under her eyes. The circumstances had been different, but weren’t both girls victims of their own despair? Mere children who’d felt painted into a corner—one by her own private demons, the other by self-proclaimed spokespersons of God—and had seen no other way out.

Iris. Since the party, Rachel had scarcely seen her daughter, except in passing. Iris was almost always either at Drew’s or off looking at apartments. And, truthfully, Rachel had been so preoccupied, she’d hardly noticed. All she’d been able to think about was Brian.

That night, making love to her when any fool could see the one he’d really wanted was Rose. God. It was worse than humiliating. It was …

Exciting. Admit it. You were turned on.

The memory brought a rush of heat to Rachel’s cheeks, which even the funereal gloom of Sister Alice’s office failed to dampen. Had she sunk that low? Was she so frightened of losing her husband? That she’d
enjoyed
it made her feel even more degraded. Not because there’d been anything wrong with what they’d done, but because she’d known, oh yes, from the very first, that it was Rose he was kissing, not her. Rose in his mind’s eye as he’d taken her.

Rose, as a young woman.

How could Rachel possibly compete with a memory that was gilt-edged, like the pages of a storybook? With none of the everyday wear and tear of a marriage. No silly fights over whose turn it was to take out the garbage. No flashes of irritation over someone’s forgetting to enter a check. No shared anxiety over a sick child.

Rachel felt sick herself. Furious, too. She wanted to throw something at the wall, do anything to rid herself of the awful suspicion that she’d compromised herself—not only with her husband, but professionally, too. Marching over here for a showdown with Sister Alice, instead of merely calling, when the person she
really
wanted to confront was Rose.

Rachel blinked hard, forcing herself to focus on Sister Alice, whose smooth white forehead, she saw, was pleated with concern. “Elvie, yes … poor child,” the old nun clucked, her small plump fingers steepled under her chin. “Her mother called this morning to tell us what happened. One of our most devout, Mrs. Rodriguez—she was quite upset.”

Because her daughter nearly died giving herself an abortion
…
or because your church considers it a sin?
It was all Rachel could do to keep from slamming her fist down on the desk.

Instead, she fixed Sister Alice with an icy glare. “Mrs. Rodriguez had every right to be shook up. Elvie confided in her teacher and told her she was pregnant. That woman—
your
staff—called her a sinner, and said she had to confess to the priest or she would go to hell.”

The elderly nun shook her head sadly, as if the effort of explaining God’s ways to someone as unenlightened as Rachel would simply be too taxing. “Salvation lies in seeking God’s forgiveness,” she said, turning up her hands in a gesture of humility. “I’ll ask Father to say a rosary for Elvie and her family at Sunday’s mass.”

Rachel’s anger boiled over. “While you’re at it, ask him to say one for the souls of narrow-minded hypocrites,” she snapped.

Rachel watched Sister Alice’s gaze narrow slightly, and thought of an expression Kay often used:
Always keep your eye out for the zipper in sheep’s clothing.
The zipper in the sheep’s clothing of this particular wolf had shown itself at last—in a glint of something cold and steely in the old nun’s eyes.